Latest news with #RiversOfBlood
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Shropshire Enoch Powell display investigated as hate incident
A shop display showing an image of Enoch Powell next to a copy of his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech is being investigated by police. The framed picture of the former Conservative MP was displayed in the window of ironmongers Mumfords in Cleobury Mortimer, owner Elizabeth Griffiths has defended her actions, saying it was one small part of a larger collection of images, including Sir Winston Churchill, depicting "a need for strong leadership"."I have had it in there for three and a half months, and the response has been always positive - no negativity at all until this week," said the Reform campaigner, who has now removed it. 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." Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Immigration is the albatross around UK politics
Figures released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics are expected to reveal a fall in net migration to the UK. Politicians have long struggled to assuage public concerns over immigration and even with Thursday's expected fall, the issue is still likely to dog the Labour retrospect, 1968 looks like the decisive year. Until then, social class had been what determined the political allegiance of most voters: Labour drew its support from the still strong industrialised working class, while the Conservatives enjoyed the support of middle class and rural in 1968, two events launched a realignment, after which point Britons increasingly started to vote based on another, previously obscure, factor: attitudes to immigration and first was the 1968 Race Relations Act, steered through Parliament by the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan. It strengthened legal protections for Britain's immigrant communities, banning racial discrimination, and sought to ensure that second generation immigrants "who have been born here" and were "going through our schools" would have access to quality education to ensure that they would get "the jobs for which they are qualified and the houses they can afford". Discrimination against anyone on the basis of racial identity - in housing, in hospitality, in the workplace - was now second is the now notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which he quoted a constituent, "a decent ordinary fellow Englishman", who told him that he wanted his three children to emigrate because "in this country in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."The white British population, he said, "found themselves strangers in their own country".Powell had touched a nerve in a Britain which had brought hundreds of thousands of people from the West Indies, India and Pakistan in the years after the war. The Conservative Party leader Edward Heath sacked him from the front bench. The leaders of all the main parties denounced him. The Times called the speech "evil"; it was, the paper said, "the first time a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way".But the editor of a local paper in Wolverhampton, where Powell had made his speech, said Heath had "made a martyr" of Powell. In the days after the speech his paper received nearly 50,000 letters from readers: "95% of them," he said, "were pro-Enoch". For a time, the phrase "Enoch was right" entered the political had exposed a gap between elite opinion and a growing sense of alienation and resentment in large sections of the population. What was emerging was a sense, among some, that elites of both right and left, out of touch with ordinary voters' experience, were opening the borders of Britain and allowing large numbers of people into the became part of a cultural fault line that went on to divide British politics. Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right. Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes. In the 20th century it had drawn much of its support from workers in the factories, coal mines, steel works and shipyards of industrial Britain. By the 21st century, its support base was more middle class, university-educated, and younger than ever has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year on a manifesto promising to reduce migration, is the latest to have a go, with an overhaul of visa rules announced earlier this month. On Thursday, the annual net migration figures are very likely to show a fall in the number of people moving to the UK - something Sir Keir will likely hail as an early success for Labour's attempts to reduce migration numbers (although the Conservatives say their own policies should be credited).Can Sir Keir succeed where other prime ministers have arguably failed? And is it possible to reach something resembling a settlement with voters on an issue as fraught as migration? Softening attitudes? Dig into the nuances of public opinion, and you find a complicated number of Britons naming immigration as one of the most important issues - what political scientists call "salience" - shot up from about 2000 onwards, as the number of fresh arrivals to Britain ticked up and up. In the 1990s, annual net migration was normally in the tens of thousands; after the Millennium, it was reliably in the hundreds of Webb, a former Home Officer civil servant who is now head of home affairs at the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank, thinks concern over migration has been driven by the real, tangible impact it has had on communities."The public have been ahead of the political, media class on this," he says, "particularly poorer, working-class people. It was their areas that saw the most dramatic change, far sooner than the rest of us really realised what was happening. That's where the migrants went. That's where the sudden competition for labour [emerged]. You talk to cabbies in the early 2000s and they were already fuming about this."That fear of migrants "taking jobs" became particularly pressing in 2004, when the European Union (of which Britain was a member) took in ten new members, most of them former the communist states of Eastern Europe. Because of the EU's free movement rules, it gave any citizen of those countries the right to move here - and the UK was one of just three member nations to open its doors to unrestricted and immediate freedom of government, led by Tony Blair, estimated that perhaps 13,000 people per year would come seeking work. In fact, more than a million arrived, and stayed, by the end of the decade - one of the biggest influxes of people in British history. Most were people of working age. They paid taxes. They were net contributors to the public purse. Indeed, the totemic figure in this period was the hard-working "Polish plumber" who, in the popular imagination, was willing to work for lower wages than his British counterpart. Gordon Brown famously called for "British jobs for British workers", without explaining how that could be achieved in a Europe of free perception that Britain had lost control of its own borders gained popular traction. The imperative to "take back control" would be the mainstay of the campaign to leave the European Union.A decade on from that Brexit vote, "attitudes to immigration are warming and softening," says Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future. "Concern about immigration was at a very high peak in 2016, and it crashed down in 2020. Brexit had the paradoxical softening impact on attitudes… people who voted for Brexit felt reassured because they made a point and 'got control'. And people who regretted voting to leave became more pro-migration".Attitudes to immigration are, says Katwala, "very closely correlated to the distribution of meaningful contact with ethnic diversity and migration - especially from a young age. So places of high migration, high diversity, are more confident about migration than areas of low migration and low diversity, because although they might be dealing with the real-world challenges and pressures of change, they've also got contact between people." 'Island of strangers'? Why, then, did Sir Keir feel the need to say with such vehemence that unrestrained immigration had caused "incalculable damage" to the country, and that he wants to "close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country"? Why did he say we risked becoming an "island of strangers" - leaving himself open to accusations from his own backbenchers that he was echoing the language of Powell in 1968? The answer lies in how attitudes are distributed through the population. Hostility to immigration is now much more concentrated in certain groups, and concentrated in a way that can sway elections."At the general election, a quarter of people thought immigration was the number one issue and they were very, very likely to vote for Nigel Farage," Katwala country as a whole may be becoming more liberal on immigration, but the sceptical base is also becoming firmer in its resolve and is turning that resolve into electoral fuelling that hostility is a lingering sense among some that migrants put pressure on public services, with extra competition for GP appointments, hospital beds, and school places. Stephen Webb of Policy Exchange thinks it is a perfectly fair concern. Data in the UK is not strong enough to make a conclusion, he says, but he points to studies from the Netherlands and Denmark suggesting that many recent migrants to those countries are a "fiscal drain" - meaning they receive more money via public services than they contribute in adds: "If you assume that the position is probably the same in the UK, and it's hard to see why it will be different, and you look at the kind of migration we've been getting, it seems likely that we've been importing people who are indeed going to be a very, very major net cost." Labour's plan So will Sir Keir's plan work? And how radical is it?Legislation to reduce immigration has, historically, been strikingly first sustained attempt to reduce immigration was the 1971 Immigration Act, introduced by Prime Minister Edward Heath. In 1948, the former troopship Empire Windrush had docked at Essex carrying 492 migrants from the West Indies, attracted by the jobs boom created by postwar reconstruction. Almost a million more followed in the years ahead, from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Africa. They all arrived as citizens of the UK and Commonwealth (CUKC) with an automatic and legal entitlement to enter and stay. The 1971 Act removed this right for new Act was sold to the public as the means by which immigration would be reduced to zero. But from 1964 to 1994, immigrants continued to arrive legally in their 1978 Mrs Thatcher, then in opposition, told a television interviewer that "people are rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture", and she promised "to hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration."Not a reduction; an today, almost 17% of the population of the UK was born abroad, up from 13% in 2014. Sir Keir's plan does not promise to end immigration. It is much less radical. It promises to reduce legal immigration by toughening visa rules. As part of the changes, more arrivals - as well as their dependents - will have to pass an English test in order to get a visa. Migrants will also have to wait 10 years to apply for the right to stay in the UK indefinitely, up from five years."It will bring down [net immigration] for sure," says Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. "If you restrict eligibility for visas, you will have lower migration. The Home Office calculation is that it will issue 98,000 fewer visas. That's in the order of 10%. It's not radical but it is a change."The White Paper also proposes to end visas for care workers. "This has been a visa that has been incredibly difficult for the government to manage," says Sumption. "It's been riddled with problems. There has been widespread fraud and abuse and so it's not surprising that they want to close it. The care sector will face challenges continuing to recruit. But I think closing the care route may be helpful for reducing exploitation of people in the country."Just a week after publishing the White Paper, the government was accused of undermining its own immigration strategy by agreeing in principle to a "youth experience scheme" with the EU - which may allow thousands of young Europeans to move to Britain for a time-limited period. Champions of the policy say it will boost economic growth by filling gaps in the labour market. But ministers will be cautious about any potential inflation to migration figures. It's another example of the narrow tightrope prime ministers have historically been forced to walk on this issue. Tensions on the Left There's another sense in which the Powell speech reaches into our own day. It created a conviction among many on the left that to raise concerns about immigration - often even to mention it - was, by definition, racist. Labour prime ministers have felt the sting of this criticism from their own Blair, who opened the doors in 2004, recognised this in his autobiography A Journey. The "tendency for those on the left was to equate concern about immigration with underlying racism. This was a mistake. The truth is that immigration, unless properly controlled, can cause genuine tensions… and provide a sense in the areas into which migrants come in large numbers that the community has lost control of its own future… Across Europe, right wing parties would propose tough controls on immigration. Left-wing parties would cry: Racist. The people would say: You don't get it."Sir Keir has felt some of that heat from his own side since launching the White Paper. In response to his warning about Britain becoming an "island of strangers", the left-wing Labour MP Nadia Whittome accused the prime minister of "mimic[king] the scaremongering of the far-right". The Economist, too, declared that Britain's decades of liberal immigration had been an economic success - but a political is a world of difference between Keir Starmer and Enoch Powell. Powell believed Britain was "literally mad, piling up its own funeral pyre" and that the country was bound to descend into civil war. Sir Keir says he celebrates the diversity of modern even if his plan to cut migration works, net migration will continue to flow at the rate of around 300,000 a year. Sir Keir's plan runs the risk of being neither fish nor fowl: too unambitious to win back Reform voters; but illiberal enough to alienate some on the reporting: Florence Freeman, Luke Mintz. BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Scotland's former first minister Humza Yousaf hits out at Starmer's 'dog whistle' stance on immigration
Former Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf has attacked Sir Keir Starmer for his "dog whistle" stance on immigration after the prime minister said the UK risked becoming an "island of strangers". penned by Mr Yousaf for LBC, the former leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) repeated claims the prime minister's recent remarks on immigration were a "modern echo" of Enoch Powell's infamous 1968 Rivers Of Blood speech. The prime minister stirred controversy earlier this week when he argued Britain "risked becoming an island of strangers" if immigration levels were not cut. After , Sir Keir , with his official spokesperson saying migrants have made a "massive contribution" to society but his point was that the Tories "lost control of the system". In the LBC piece published on Saturday, Mr Yousaf said: "Powell's 1968 speech warned of immigration as an existential threat to 'our blood and our culture', stoking racial panic that led directly to decades of hostile migration policies. "Starmer's invocation of 'strangers' is a modern echo - a dog-whistle to voters who blame migrants for every social ill, from stretched public services to the cost-of-living crisis. "It betrays a failure to understand, or deliberately mask the fact that Britain's prosperity depends on migration, on openness not building walls." Read more:Farage on how Reform UK would deal with migration Sir Keir made the comments at a news conference in which , including banning care homes from recruiting overseas, new English language requirements for visa holders and stricter rules on gaining British citizenship. The package is aimed at reducing the number of people coming to the UK by up to 100,000 per year, though the government has not officially set a target. The government is under pressure to tackle legal migration, as well as illegal immigration, amid . Mr Yousaf concluded his article saying the UK was "on the brink of possibly handing the keys of No 10 to Nigel Farage".
Daily Mail
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
QUENTIN LETTS: Multiculturalism has done far more to fan racial tensions than Enoch Powell ever did
Who was Enoch Powell? With his evocative name again electrifying headlines, this basic question needs examining. Why was Powell – why is Powell – so controversial? And what does his lasting infamy say about today's politics? Raw facts first. Enoch Powell (1912-1998) was a member of Edward Heath's shadow cabinet in 1968 when he made a speech about immigration. It became known as the 'Rivers of Blood' speech because it concluded with Powell comparing himself to a figure in Latin poetry who saw 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Who PM was really trying to echo with 'island of strangers' speech
Sir Keir Starmer is getting used to falling out with some of his MPs over policy decisions - be it on the winter fuel allowance, his approach to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza or welfare cuts. But on Tuesday the prime minister found himself embroiled in a row with MPs over something entirely different - his language over immigration. The prime minister's argument that Britain "risked becoming an island of strangers" if immigration levels are not cut has sparked a backlash from some of his MPs, and the London mayor Sadiq Khan is alarmed that his own leader is using language similar to that of Enoch Powell. Politics latest: In his infamous 1968 Rivers Of Blood speech, Powell warned of a future where white people "found themselves made strangers in their own country". It was a speech that cost him his shadow cabinet job and made Powell one of the most divisive and controversial politicians in Britain. It is also a speech that the prime minister's team is now frantically trying to distance itself against, with one insider telling me on Tuesday the PM's team hadn't realised the similarity and hadn't intended the comparison. The politician the prime minister was trying to channel was about as far away from Powell as you could get in the 1960s, when the debate of immigration and race relations raged. Sir Keir had wanted to echo former Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins who had always argued that immigration was good for Britain, but needed to be done at a speed the country could absorb. Take this from Jenkins in the House of Commons in 1966: "Let there be no suggestion that immigration, in reasonable numbers, is a cross that we have to bear, and no pretence that if only those who have come could find jobs back at home our problems would be at an end. "But it does not follow that we can absorb them without limit. We have to strike a balance. That is what we are trying to do and I feel that we have been reasonably successful in recent months. We cannot lay down absolute numerical quantities, but I think that we have struck a reasonable balance and also that in the past year we have made substantial progress towards producing a healthier atmosphere, in terms of integration, on both sides - amongst both the indigenous and the immigrant community." One person familiar with No 10's approach told me: "We want a more cohesive society, we are not trying to pick fights. "But the last Conservative government let in 2.3 million immigrants [in the three years to June 2024] and during that time built about 600,000 homes. That creates competition between people and that is typically at the lower end of the market. Just issuing visas and creating a sense of an unfair system is not a way to build cohesiveness." If you look at polling from YouGov, it seems the prime minister is more in step with public mood than those in his party criticising him, with 41% of all voters polled on Tuesday about his "island of strangers" remarks agreeing with the sentiment and having no issue with the language. But it is true too that Labour's approach lands particularly well with Reform voters, with 61% of them supportive of the PM's words. Beyond the battle of language, there will be battles ahead too over whether the prime minister's policies will help or hinder the economy. Read more: There has long been an assumption that higher net migration is positive of the economy and public finances, but there is growing concern in Number 10 that the benefits are being overstated, as it fails to take into account the additional resources needed for public services and the effect of lowering wages, which affects productivity growth - none of which is factored into the economic forecasts of the Office of Budget Responsibility. There will be those in business that don't like the cuts to visas. There will be those in government that will worry about the economic impact of cuts to visas - although the chancellor was on the front row for the prime minister's speech on Monday. There will be those on the Labour left that will be uncomfortable about it. I suspect the prime minister will be uncomfortable about the row over his language that has seen him attacked on both sides, as the left accuse him of trying to ape the far right and his opponents accuse him of being a "chameleon" for making the opposite argument on immigration when he was running for the Labour leadership in 2020. But where his team think they are right is on the policy, and early polling suggests that voters from across the political divide broadly agree.
