It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas." The man finished by saying to Powell: "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man". I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. Powell said that the man told him: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country. In the speech Powell recounted a conversation with one of his constituents, a middle-aged working man, a few weeks earlier. This tactic could ensure coverage of the speech over three days through Saturday evening bulletins, then Sunday newspapers, so that the coverage would be picked up in Monday newspapers. In preparing his speech, Powell had applied Clem Jones's advice that to make hard-hitting political speeches and short-circuit interference from his party organisation, his best timing was on Saturday afternoons, after delivering embargoed copies the previous Thursday or Friday to selected editors and political journalists of Sunday newspapers. Earlier in the week, Powell had said to his friend Clement "Clem" Jones, a journalist and then editor at the Wolverhampton Express & Star, "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."
The Birmingham-based television company ATV saw an advance copy of the speech on the Saturday morning, and its news editor ordered a television crew to go to the venue, where they filmed sections of the speech. The bill was a successor to the Race Relations Act 1965. The Labour government's 1968 Race Relations Bill was to have its second reading three days later, and the Conservative Opposition had tabled an amendment significantly weakening its provisions.
Powell, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West and Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, was addressing the general meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. 4 Identity of the woman mentioned in the speech.According to most accounts, the popularity of Powell's perspective on immigration may have been a decisive factor in the Conservatives' surprise victory in the 1970 general election, and he became one of the most persistent opponents of the subsequent Heath government.
The speech caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most talked about and divisive politicians in the country, and leading to his controversial dismissal from the Shadow cabinet by Conservative Party leader Edward Heath. The expression "rivers of blood" did not appear in the speech but is an allusion to a line from Virgil's Aeneid which he quoted: "as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'." It became known as the "Rivers of Blood" speech, although Powell always referred to it as "the Birmingham speech".
His speech strongly criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the United Kingdom and the proposed Race Relations Bill. The " Rivers of Blood" speech was made by British Member of Parliament (MP) Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, United Kingdom.
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