Margaret Thatcher Interview on Iain Macleod, Alec Douglas-Home, Enoch Powell & 1960's Conservatism

Oct 5, 2021 | The Prime Minister, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, delivers her personal thoughts on the turbulent fortunes of the Conservative Party throughout the 1960's, primarily through intimate character analyses of three of the party's leading politicians who also happened to be her personal idols and friends, these being:

- The late Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Iain Macleod.
- The former Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Lord Hirsel.
- The former Health Secretary and Conservative exile, Mr. Enoch Powell.

Originally recorded by Rob Shephard in preparation for his authorised biography of Iain Macleod. | Date of recording: 14th April, 1989.


This is from a time when we were governed by sound politicians of stature, character and intellect. Very different from the chancers of today. – © Mark Alexander

Enoch Powell on… | #shorts

…being a ”racialist” (racist).

Lord Heseltine on Brexit: Leave Campaign Was "Shameful" and Stirred Up Race Like Enoch Powell

Sep 22, 2023

Vince Cable Compares David Cameron to Enoch Powell

THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: No 10 hits back after minister accuses Tories of racist panic on immigration

David Cameron’s rhetoric on immigration was compared to Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech by one of his own Cabinet ministers on Sunday.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, said the Prime Minister had made British voters “schizophrenic” about the issue.

Mr Cable accused Mr Cameron and members of the Conservative Party of “doing harm” with their “populist” immigration policies.

The Liberal Democrat Cabinet minister suggested that Conservative rhetoric over immigration was similar to anti-Semitic “panics over Jewish immigrants” in the early 20th century.

His comments, just over a week before Britain opens its borders to migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, will inflame tensions in the Coalition.

Conservative MPs on Sunday night described Mr Cable’s comments as “unacceptable” and “offensive”.

Government sources also questioned how a senior minister can remain a member of the Cabinet when he “compares people in it to Enoch Powell”. » | Peter Dominiczak, Assistant Political Editor | Sunday, Decemebr 22, 2013

Simon Heffer on Enoch Powell
THE TELEGRAPH: Sunday is the 40th anniversary of perhaps the most significant speech made in British politics since the Second World War: Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech.

It is also, therefore, near to the 40th anniversary of one of the greatest lies in British politics since the Second World War: that this remarkably accurate prediction of the dangers of enforced multiculturalism has "prevented" a rational debate on immigration, since anyone who seeks to engage in it will be branded as a "racist".

It would be a comfort if this position were merely ignorant. It isn't. Powell is used by the Left - and that includes many people in the Conservative Party - as a cynical excuse to conceal their own failures in imposing proper immigration controls and maintaining social cohesion.

They start by saying Powell was a racist, which is also a deliberate lie. They then say that anyone who mentions immigration will now be tarred with that brush, which must therefore be a lie as well. This is convenient for those who have betrayed the people of this country by imposing an immigrant community so large upon it that it struggles to integrate - and, indeed, who have betrayed many of those immigrants too. Yet it won't wash.

Long before Powell made his speech - which ought to be issued to every home in the land, since I rarely hear it quoted anything other than completely inaccurately - there was a code of silence about immigration. Long before we knew the term "political correctness", it was viewed as simply impolite to raise the subject. Enoch Powell: The Great Lie Survives >>> By Simon Heffer | April 19, 2008

THE TELEGRAPH:
’Rivers of Blood’: Enoch Powell’s Speech in Full

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)

Enoch Powell: “Rivers of Blood”
Watch video HERE
Produced by CommonSenseAnon

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)

Tory Branch Refuses to Ditch Nigel Hastilow
THE DAILY MAIL: Tory leader David Cameron faced fresh embarrassment after rebel Tory activists snubbed calls to ditch a Parliamentary candidate who said Enoch Powell "was right" on immigration.

The Halesowen and Rowley Regis constituency association refused to accept the resignation of would-be MP Nigel Hastilow and instead demanded crisis talks with the Conservative Party Board, the organisation's top decision-making body.

Senior Tories had hoped the local party would drop Hastilow, 51, who quit on November 4 after refusing to apologise for comments he made in a newspaper column in support of Powell's 1968 "rivers of blood" speech.

Officials have been lobbying the local association in a desperate bid to limit the bad publicity, asking them to move on and choose another candidate.

But local members remain furious at the way Hastilow was treated by the party HQ and refused to accept his resignation, saying his views on immigration have widespread support. Tory branch refuse to ditch Enoch 'was right' candidate in snub to Cameron (more)

Mark Alexander

Simon Heffer on Enoch Powell
Photo of Enoch Powell courtesy of The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH: I wanted to be shocked by the removal of Nigel Hastilow from his parliamentary candidacy for having said that Enoch Powell was right about immigration, but it was impossible.

One Tory MP, Bernard Jenkin, has already been removed from his position in the party simply for warning an Asian candidate that she might encounter racism.

Another, Patrick Mercer, was booted off the front bench for retailing the fact that some NCOs in our Armed Forces have racist attitudes towards black people.

We are inches away from anyone who admits to having read Noddy Goes To Toyland, or to having collected Robertson's jam golliwog badges as a child, being barred from the party. Just as we thought we had grown up on the issue of immigration, the Conservative Party proves the contrary is true. More of that later.

I am, in the first instance, genuinely outraged at the insult the Hastilow affair throws at the memory and reputation of Enoch Powell.

Powell was, quite simply, the most influential politician of the post-war period. He predicted the need for the monetarist policies now followed by Gordon Brown as long ago as 1958. He predicted the British people's irreconcilability to the EU as long ago as 1969. He predicted the destruction of the United Kingdom if devolution was allowed to happen as long ago as 1974.

Oh, and he foresaw correctly that there would be terrible tensions if immigration were allowed to carry on unchecked in that famous speech - called, by a phrase he never uttered, the "Rivers of Blood" speech - in April 1968. It is for reminding the public that what Powell predicted has come to pass that Mr Hastilow is now an ex-candidate.

The insult to Powell consists in this unsustainable idea that the Birmingham speech was "racist".

There is a long tradition in the party of not reading the speech. Heath, who sacked Powell as defence spokesman, certainly had not. Nor had the two close colleagues who urged him on, his chief whip, Willie Whitelaw, and the hysterical Quintin Hogg.

Oddly enough, Powell did not use the word "race" in the speech at all (this often surprises people who are convinced it is an order to the masses to vilify black people for the sole reason that they happen to be black).

He did talk about areas being changed beyond recognition and without any consultation. He did talk about inevitable tensions arising from mass immigration. He did say that immigration would work if the immigrants could be integrated into existing social mechanisms, but warned that the numbers coming were so large that integration would be impossible.

Quoting Virgil, he said that if this situation were not rectified there would be trouble: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." When will Tories admit that Enoch was right? (more) By Simon Heffer

THE TELEGRAPH:
Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech: This is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968


Mark Alexander

Enoch Powell’s "Rivers of Blood" Speech
Enoch Powell is very much in the news again because Mr Nigel Hastilow, who was, until the weekend, a prospective Conservative candidate. He made, it seems, the grave mistake that Enoch Powell, back in 1968, got it right on mass immigration in his "rivers of blood" speech, made on April 20th that same year.

Regardless of one’s political leanings, we are witnessing the effects of mass immigration into the United Kingdom today. Enoch Powell’s speech is as pertinent now as it was then. Indeed, Mr Powell showed his foresight, vision and insights to be spot-on. Unfortunately, because of the doctrines of political correctness and multiculturalism, nobody engaged in politics is allowed to say these things, still less mention the name of Enoch Powell, probably one of the best and most intelligent politicians this country has ever seen.

Mentioning Enoch Powell and stating that he got it right way back then has cost Nigel Hastilow his candidacy!

Here follows Enoch Powell’s "Rivers of Blood" speech:

Powell claimed to have spoken to a constituent of his, a middle-aged working man, a few weeks earlier who had said to him in conversation: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country...I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. 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". Powell went on:

"I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. 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 simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. 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".

"Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen".

"This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to an inquisition as to his reasons and motives for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another".

"For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions".

"She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist", they chant. When the new Race Relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder".

"For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow-citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'. That 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. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal".

The title given to the speech arose from its allusion to Virgil's line from the Aeneid 6, 1.86, in which the Sibyl prophesies "wars, terrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with blood" (Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno). Powell was a classical scholar. [Source: Wikipedia]

Mark Alexander

Nigel Hastilow: Britain ‘Seen as a Soft Touch’
EXPRESSANDSTAR.COM: The full transcript of Nigel Hastilow’s column which appeared in Friday’s Express & Star. After the column was picked up by the national media Mr Hastilow was forced to resign as Prospective Conservative Candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis but has refused to apologise. Read the article and then tell us your views and don’t miss Monday’s Express & Star to find out why he resigned.

The woman on the doorstep speaks in sorrow, not anger. Her daughter has split up from her husband and is now a single parent with two young children.

They all live with granny because the daughter and her kids have been refused a council house.

And, according to granny, that’s because all the available accommodation has gone to immigrants.

The house is full. Granny looks a bit worn down by her new lodgers. The novelty of having the little ones to stay is clearly wearing off.

The family seems resigned to the fact that nobody will do anything to help. They have more or less given up complaining about the way we roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves.

When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: "Enoch Powell was right".

Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 "rivers of blood" speech warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. Britain ‘seen as a soft touch’ (more)

Mark Alexander

Cameron in Race Row as Conservative Candidate States Enoch Powell Got It Right
It's so strange that so many years after the death of Enoch Powell, one of the most brilliant politicians this country has ever known, it is still unacceptable in political circles to praise his sage words! People can deny it as much as they want to, but the fact is that Enoch Powell prophesied the difficulties we are now facing with great precision and accuracy. The man was a genius, and a man of great courage and vision! That's far more than can be said of the politicians that 'lead' us today!

THE GUARDIAN: David Cameron was drawn into a row over race last night after a candidate in a high-profile Parliamentary seat praised Enoch Powell for his notorious 'rivers of blood' speech, which warned that Britain was 'literally mad' to allow widespread immigration.

Days after Cameron was praised by the head of the Equality Commission for tackling the issue of immigration in a non-racial way, Labour called on the Tory leader to remove Nigel Hastilow as a prospective Conservative candidate for declaring that Powell was 'right'.

Communities Secretary Hazel Blears told The Observer: 'It's not unreasonable to be concerned about the impact of immigration, but it is unacceptable to say Enoch Powell was right. David Cameron should reconsider his support for this candidate.'

Hastilow has been summoned to a meeting today with Caroline Spelman, the Tory chairman, to explain his column in the Wolverhampton Express and Star newspaper in which he complained about how immigration has changed Britain and placed great strains on housing and public services.

A Conservative party spokesman said: 'Candidates of all parties should take great care when discussing what can be a sensitive and even inflammatory issue. Politicians and those seeking to be politicians have a responsibility in this area that they must observe. Mr Hastilow has been required to see the party chairman tomorrow, where he will be told this in clear terms.'

The row broke out after Hastilow, who last year accused Muslims of using terror attacks to 'issue demands' for their own bank holidays and schools, wrote of special treatment offered to immigrants. He wrote that 'we [Britain] roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves'. Hastilow, a former editor of the Birmingham Post, added: 'When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration. Many insist: "Enoch Powell was right".

'Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 "rivers of blood" speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically.' Cameron in race row as Tory claims that Enoch was right (more) By Nicholas Watt

Mark Alexander