Enoch Powell speech to come under the spotlight in TV special

Mar 7 2008 By Graham Young, TV Editor

SURVIVING footage of Enoch Powell's controversial "rivers of blood" speech is to be broadcast again in a major BBC documentary tonight.

The speech was made almost 40 years ago in The Midland Hotel - now the McDonald Burlington Hotel - in New Street, Birmingham.

It was April 20, 1968 - just two weeks after Martin Luther King had been assassinated in the US - when Powell, then Tory MP for Wolverhampton South West, declared: "As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding.

"Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

In Rivers of Blood, to be screened at 9pm on BBC2, the archive footage also shows Stechford-born Powell saying: "In this country, in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

Predicting "a total transformation to which there is no parallel in English history", Powell adds: "It's like watching a nation busily heaping up its own funeral pyre."

Denys Blakeway's film claims that Powell's speech was one of the "best known, but least understood of modern times".

Blakeway reveals how Powell formed his views after observing violent divisions in India. His real target was not immigration but the bill which led to the 1968 Race Relations Act.

Powell's career floundered after the speech embarrassed Tory leader and future Prime Minister Ted Heath.

The adverse reaction to it also enabled Birmingham Labour MP Roy Jenkins to back multiculturalism as the way forward - a policy now thriving in Birmingham.

Former Tory minister Michael Heseltine says Powell "ignited an explosion of bigotry and prejudice and alarm and fear and tension. He put a match to a tinderbox."

Former Birmingham Labour MP Roy Hattersley tells the programme the speech "frightened" him.

Baroness Young argues that the use of words like "piccaninnies" to describe black children had undermined Powell's argument - and the film also shows how Powell had to correct his spelling of the word.

Prof Roger Scruton, founder of The Salisbury Review, said: "Powell was somebody who took a point, would elaborate on it and how was led by it to its own implied conclusion.

"As a philosopher, I admire that and that's the way one should think if one's interested in truth.

"But, if one's interested in persuading people, then, of course, that might be a mistake. People are often frightened by logic and they're frightened by the truth, also."