Powell’s point was about culture, not race. He himself despised racism.
So the UK left was utterly wrong to decry him as a racist, whilst the extreme racist right in the UK was and are wrong to see him as a hero.
You’re wrong that Powell’s objections were solely about culture and not about race, and you’re wrong that Powell shouldn’t be viewed as a hero.
Powell was keenly aware of the races, the differences between the races, and how this often made them incompatible. Powell also noted, correctly, that to truly be English you must be of English stock. While you’re correct that Powell said that importing a multitude of Germans and Russians would also be problematic because of their cultural differences, he was aware that cultural identity is often tied in with racial identity.
Here are some quotes from Powell...
http://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enoch_Powell
“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.”
“Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as ‘controversial, ‘extremist’, ‘explosive’, ‘disgraceful’, and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.
The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, ‘race’. The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are ‘prejudiced’, ‘racialist’... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as ‘spouting the fantasies of racial purity’ to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of ‘racialist’ and ‘unChristian’ and applying them to lifelong political colleagues.”
Powell should be considered a hero because he was principled and intelligent enough to buck against incorrect group think. Powell is a hero because he put his nation before his career. He knew full well that the truth of his speeches could end his possible ascendancy to the Prime Minister position, but he stood by truth anyway.