Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech destroyed his career, but was there a message in it for our time? Forty years ago today, in a Birmingham hotel, a leading British politician made a speech which continues to echo down the years. It was Enoch Powell’s famous address on immigration, subsequently labelled the ‘rivers of blood’ speech. The relationship of British - or, indeed, wider European - politics with the question of immigration has never been the same. At the time, Britain was one generation into principally Afro-Caribbean immigration. Powell used unacceptable language and expressions to attack the then unrestricted immigration...