RE: JMO21 Sep 2018 22:17
Gordon you are right, I am wrong. But only partly wrong, reason being any meaningful political career was effectively over. I had read it in the book "The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray" and got my wires crossed. I just checked the book again and it said the following after he made his speech...
"Powell was immediately relieved of his position in the shadow cabinet by his party’s leader, Edward Heath, and any mainstream political support Powell might have garnered – not to mention his own political future – was over. Yet public support for his views was high – with opinion polls showing around three-quarters of the general public agreeing with his sentiments and 69 per cent believing that Heath had been wrong to sack him.8 Many years later, one of Powell’s Conservative Party opponents, Michael Heseltine, said that if Powell had stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party in the aftermath of that speech he would have won by a landslide and that if he had stood to be Prime Minister he would have won by a ‘national landslide’.9 But politically there was no way through for Powell, and his career did not merely falter but remained in the political wilderness for the remaining decades of his life.
Ever since the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, common wisdom in Britain has had it that Powell’s intervention not only wrecked his own career but wrecked any possibility of a full or frank immigration debate in Britain for at least a generation. So lurid were Powell’s terms and so dire his warnings that anybody concerned about immigration for evermore risked being tarred as a ‘Powell-ite’. Certainly parts of Powell’s speech made it too easy for his political opponents to attack him and gave far too much cover for people way to his political right. But among the things most striking when reading his speech – and the reactions to it – today are the portions for which he was lambasted that now seem almost understated: for instance, Powell’s insistence that there was a street in Britain on which only one white woman was living. In subsequent interviews and discussions the case of this woman was widely dismissed as a fabrication because it was believed that no such street could exist. However, if anyone had suggested to Powell in 1968 that he should use his Birmingham speech to predict that within the lifespan of most people listening those who identified as ‘white British’ would be in a minority in their capital city, he would have dismissed such an advisor as a maniac."
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