Enoch Powell giving “Rivers of Blood” speech, 1968

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’— Enoch Powell

I: Enoch Powell’s “Racism”

The archconservative Enoch Powell remained, for many years, at the forefront of Tory opposition to Third World immigration and anti-discrimination legislation, at least until his death in 1998. His stance was neither shaped by physical anthropology nor by questions of race differences in intelligence; on this latter subject, he professed himself agnostic. Powell’s wish to “Keep Britain White!” was based on his long experience dealing with the non-whites of the British Raj, where he had once aspired to becoming Indian Viceroy. In 1947, after the Raj had been dissolved, he stared in horror as the Punjab was engulfed in large-scale communal violence. The Indian was incapable of democracy because he was not a rational individual; he had not learned to overcome his communalism, the “curse of India” as Powell would later call it. For this reason, Powell fiercely opposed Indian immigration to Great Britain.

Powell’s much maligned “Rivers of Blood,” delivered before a Conservative audience in 1968, made him, the MP of Wolverhampton South West, an instant white working-class hero. The British policy making establishment despised him; they denounced his famous speech as incendiary and “racist.” The accusation of racism was particularly ironic. First, Powell was never interested in questions of race from a scientific perspective. A trained classicist by profession, he had more interest in the Ionic Greek vocabulary and syntax of Herodotus than the myriad technical aspects of IQ; second, he harbored no irrational xenophobic prejudice toward the other races, such as the West Indian negro and subcontinental Indian, the two groups with whom he was most familiar.

When asked if he was a “racialist” in 1969, Powell responded:

It depends on how you define the word ‘racialist.’ If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatically ‘No.’

As Powell declared in 1993, “communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible.” The fundamental basis of all democratic political institutions was racial homogeneity. This means that everyone must not only share the same values, culture and language, but also race. In pointing this out, Powell was not being a “racist,” at least not as traditionally or commonly defined. Powell’s belief that a working democracy was impossible without racial homogeneity had its basis in the classical liberal tradition of the 19th century. Within this tradition, English political economist and utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) opined:

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.

Powell deplored non-white immigration because of his deep, almost romantic attachment to his English identity. He was devoted to Britain and her Anglo-Saxon and Celtic peoples, with whom he felt a deep and long-lasting kinship based on ties of blood and common descent. His vigorous denunciation of the Westminster elite’s policy of non-white immigration resulted from his personal loathing of the chaos and instability that always followed the introduction of racially unassimilable elements. As an English patriot, he stood up for his working-class constituents. “Rivers of Blood” was a clarion call for immigration reform, while also directly challenging the hegemonic status of the British policymaking elite. For his efforts, he was promptly sacked from “Ted” Heath’s Shadow Cabinet, but not without leaving a substantial mark on both electorate and government. In 1971, the automatic right of Commonwealth workers to settle in Britain was ended by Conservatives, who had been ushered into power the year before on a wave of public enthusiasm for Powell’s “Rivers of Blood.” This was done in response to grassroots Conservative electoral pressure; many wanted West Indian and South Asian immigration significantly reduced or even stopped.

II: In The Land of the Blind

Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” is among the most extraordinarily prescient orations ever given. Widely deplored by Britain’s policymaking elite, who dismissed it as “racialist” and “disgraceful,” a 1968 Gallup Poll revealed that 74% of Britons supported Powell’s call for repatriation of all non-whites. In terms of prophetic accuracy, it must be ranked with Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints and George Orwell’s 1984. Powell predicted that “in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” He spoke:

[…] of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.

Dismissed as one of Powell’s more exaggerated rhetorical flourishes by critics, non-white influence in British political life has increased significantly over the last few decades. In 2019, 8% of British MPs are non-white; this figure will certainly become larger as the non-white share of the population increases. Powell was only wrong about the time-frame.

On Britain’s demographic future, Powell said:

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

The 2011 census reveals that approximately 10% of Britain’s 63 million inhabitants were visible minorities, unevenly distributed in ethnic ghettos all across the country. Although the predicted time-frame was off by a decade, Powell was again correct about Britain’s changing demographics. This had been historically unparalleled; no European nation had undergone such radical alteration in its indigenous population structure in so short a period of time.

“British” students

Powell said Britons would find “themselves made strangers in their own country” as they were pushed out of their own hospitals, schools and neighborhoods. Immigrant pressure on the NHS has led to longer wait times and higher costs, forcing many whites to seek privatized alternatives. Significant overcrowding in schools and neighborhoods has triggered massive white flight in towns and cities across the UK. London’s white British population declined from 58% to 45% within a single decade; this means the capital had lost 620,000 white inhabitants between 2001 and 2011. In contrast, ethnic minorities have increased to 40% of the population in 2011, from just 28% in 2001. Headlines in British tabloids reveal that whites would flee entire neighborhoods when blacks and South Asians began moving in.

There are limits to the ethnic absorptive capacity of all Western societies. This should be a truism, but one seldom understood or acknowledged by the neo-liberal “Church of GDP.” The immigrant “numbers and physical concentration,” observed Powell, meant that “pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority” have virtually ceased. In 2016, levels of residential segregation among ethno-racial groups had significantly increased, at least since the 1990s. This was most pronounced among South Asian Muslims, who had reached maximum concentrations of 70% to 85% at ward level. Income polarization was partly to blame; non-EEA migrants are typically a net fiscal drain on the UK Exchequer, costing billions of pounds sterling per year. Because their negative fiscal impact entails higher poverty and unemployment rates, non-whites are involuntarily pressured into segregating themselves into their own impoverished and crime-ridden ethnic ghettos.

British police showing no discrimination against a criminal immigrant

In 1968, Parliament passed the Race Relations Act, which outlawed all discrimination on grounds of race and ethnicity in Great Britain. The Community Relations Commission was then established for settlement of discrimination suits and promotion of interracial harmony. As Powell had predicted, the new act had politicized race; in so doing, the act turned “anti-racism” into a major cottage industry, encouraging newcomers to retain their communal tendencies by segregating themselves from the mainstream. His justly famous — and notorious — sense of terrible foreboding, so clearly and eloquently expressed in “Rivers of Blood” would also be prophetic:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’

Here, Powell was alluding to a passage in Virgil’s Aeneid about the Sybil of Cumae, a female soothsayer who had prophesied to Aeneas that, based on a vision of the Tiber turned red with blood, misfortune awaited him in the near future. Contrary to popular mythology, Powell was not predicting indiscriminate bloodshed on Britain’s streets; his use of Virgil was meant to convey to his audience a sense of unease and deep apprehension as mass immigration threatened to replace Britain’s traditional demographics with one drawn from the Third World. Through classical metaphor, he aimed to show that mass immigration, already under way in the Britain of the 1960s, would have terrible, but entirely preventable consequences.

However, in a BBC radio interview conducted some months after “Rivers of Blood,” Powell openly predicted that mass immigration, if allowed to continue, would lead to violence:

The danger that if there is a large and increasing concentration of unassimilated immigrants in certain areas of the country, tolerance will break down and there will be violence, that is the danger which I foresee, unless we take steps to ensure that the numbers do not increase, as is foreseeable, and the concentrations do not continue.

In “Rivers of Blood,” Powell predicted that the:

[…] tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Since 1968, serious race riots have occurred in many of England’s major cities; these have mostly involved black and South Asian youth. In the past, terrorist attacks in the UK were related to Northern Ireland’s Troubles or the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine; since 2000, Islam has been the reason for almost every single terrorist attack carried out on UK soil. In 2017, there were more deadly Muslim terrorist attacks on British soil than anywhere else in continental Europe. Lest we forget, the “7/7” London bombing of 2005 was one of England’s worst terrorist attacks, leaving 56 dead and 784 injured. This atrocity was carried out by homegrown jihadists, whose parents had been imported by Britain’s hostile elite. In another worrying development, the Muslim prison population of England and Wales had increased from 8% in 2002 to 15% in 2018, almost four times their number in the general population.

Since Powell’s famous speech, violent crime has exploded in London; this is disproportionately committed by blacks. Although about 10% of London’s population, blacks are responsible for 58% of all robberies and 67% of all gun crimes. As mass immigration continues, violent black crime in London and Islamist terror attacks will only increase until the entire UK is reduced to a dysfunctional, racially segregated and impoverished Third World society.

If “Londonistan” is already here, then the specter of “Great Britainistan” looms menacingly over the horizon. The immigrants will bide their time until they are able to replace Britain’s rulers with someone who shares their own religious values and racial phenotype. When that terrible day comes, they will turn their knives, guns and bombs on the white man. What began as an open spigot that slowly trickled blood, will become a fast-moving torrent if whites continue to stand by and do nothing.

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad,” said Enoch Powell. Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat was what Enoch Powell had written after witnessing India descend into widespread communal violence in 1947. The “curse of India” is alive and well in Great Britain.