Shropshire Enoch Powell display investigated as hate incident
Powell's anti-immigration speech, delivered by the then Wolverhampton South West MP, caused a national controversy, prompting his sacking from Edward Heath's shadow cabinet. West Mercia Police said enquiries were ongoing after they had received a report of "offensive content displayed in a shop window on Church Street".The complaint had "obviously" come from "political enemies" after she had financed a campaign for two successful Reform candidates at the recent local elections, Ms Griffiths claimed. "Rest assured, since then, I've had knives in my back from left right and centre," she said. Earlier in the week she added an image of Sir Keir Starmer next to Powell's picture linking the prime minister's recent language around immigration to the Powell speech.
The text of the 1968 speech, delivered at a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham, he said, included observations on immigrants taken from his Wolverhampton constituents."If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country," the MP claimed he had been told."In this country in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."Powell added: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding: like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
The then Conservative Party leader Heath sacked him from the front bench, and he was widely denounced. Ms Griffiths said she had received support from her community, saying many thought it applied to the "present day". A spokesman for West Mercia Police said: "On 16 May, we received a report of offensive content displayed in a shop window on Church Street in Cleobury Mortimer."This is being treated as a hate incident, and inquiries are ongoing."
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'I just don't think we will be able to retire at the age baby boomers have, and nor will many of us have the same level of wealth when we are no longer working. The boomers are the aberrant generation – and I'm not confident that the concept of a wild retirement will endure much beyond them.'
