On Saturday the 20th April 1968, Enoch Powell addressed a meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. He was then Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, and he had no business, so far as his colleagues were concerned, talking about immigration at all. He had sent the text to the newspapers in advance, by-passing Conservative Central Office. By the Sunday evening Edward Heath had dismissed him by telephone, telling the public that the speech was “racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions”. Powell never held office again, and he and Heath are said never again to have spoken. Within a week, about a thousand London dockers had stopped work and marched to Westminster in his support, and a Gallup poll found that 74 per cent of those asked agreed with what he had said, while 69 per cent thought Heath had been wrong to sack him. The Times called it “an evil speech”. In half a century of practice, I have seen many documents misdescribed by those who had an interest in their not being read, but I have seen few treated as this one has been. It is invoked far more often than it is read, and when it is read, it is generally read for the purpose of being denounced.

I propose to do something different. I will say what Powell actually argued and what kind of politician he was, and then set out what the Conservative Party did with the problem he described. At the end I shall bring a charge against its leaders. The charge is treason, and I do not use the word loosely. I will explain, as a lawyer should, in what sense I use it and why I think it is made out.

What Powell said

The speech is remembered by a phrase it does not contain. Powell never spoke of “rivers of blood”. Towards the end, he said: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” The Roman was Virgil, and the words are those of the Sibyl of Cumae in the sixth book of the Aeneid, where she foretells the wars that await Aeneas in Italy: bella, horrida bella, / et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno (6.86–7). Powell had been a professor of Greek at Sydney at the age of twenty-five, and he expected an audience of provincial Conservatives to catch the allusion. Most of the newspapers did not, or chose not to, and the speech was given a title that turned a classical prophecy of war into what sounded like an incitement to it.

The substance of the speech was mostly arithmetic and policy. Powell’s complaint was that the flow of immigrants from the New Commonwealth, and above all of their dependants, was being allowed to continue at a rate that would transform whole districts of the country within a generation, and that nobody in authority was prepared to say so. “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants,” he said, and added: “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He cited an official estimate that by the end of the century the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be somewhere between five and seven million, or about a tenth of the whole. This was the part of the speech most ridiculed at the time. The census of 2001 recorded about 4.6 million people in the United Kingdom who described themselves as belonging to a non-white ethnic group, or 7.9 per cent of the population. By 2011, the equivalent share in England and Wales was about 14 per cent. Powell was a few years early, and he was otherwise right.

His remedies were three in number only because I am obliged to report them accurately, and they were modest. The inflow for settlement should be “reduced at once to negligible proportions”. Those already here should be encouraged to return to their countries of origin by “generous grants and assistance”, and he was explicit that this should be voluntary. All citizens should be equal before the law, but this did not mean, as he put it, “that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class”. This last point was aimed at the Race Relations Bill, then before Parliament, which would make it unlawful to refuse a man housing or employment on grounds of race. Powell said that to pass it was to throw “a match on to gunpowder”. He insisted afterwards that none of these proposals went beyond the declared policy of his party, and on the first two he was correct.

I must concede the weaknesses. Powell filled out his argument with anecdotes from constituents, among them a man who told him that “in this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”, and an elderly widow in Wolverhampton who was said to have had excrement pushed through her letterbox and to have been followed by children who mocked her. The identity of the widow was disputed for years. As evidence, these stories were hearsay, and I should not have led them in any court. As rhetoric, they gave his enemies what they needed, which was a way of discussing his tone instead of his numbers. Powell understood rhetoric better than any man in the Commons, and it is fair to say that he chose to use it in a manner that ensured he would be heard and also ensured that he would be expelled. Yet a speech is to be judged in the end by whether it was true, and the main burden of this one has proved truer than anything his critics said in reply.

The man and his principles

Powell called himself a High Tory, and said that he had been born one and would die one. He meant something precise by this. The nation was for him the ultimate political fact, the community within which law and loyalty were possible. Its institutions were the Crown and Parliament, and its sovereignty lay in the Crown in Parliament and nowhere else. Almost everything in his career follows from that conviction. In 1950, as a new member, he refused to support the Schuman Plan. In 1953 he abstained on the Royal Titles Bill, on the ground that it divided the Crown and dropped the word “British” from its description. He opposed entry into the Common Market because it would subject Parliament to an authority outside the kingdom, and in February 1974 he told the electors to vote Labour, since only Labour offered them a chance to leave. Iain Macleod, who admired him, called him the finest mind in the House of Commons, and said that he was a fellow traveller of Powell’s but preferred to get out a few stations before the train reached, and sometimes crashed into, the terminal buffers.

In economics, Powell was a free-market man long before it was safe to be one. In January 1958, he resigned from the Treasury with Peter Thorneycroft and Nigel Birch, because the Cabinet would not hold public spending to the estimates of the previous year. The difference was about fifty million pounds, and Macmillan dismissed the affair as a “little local difficulty”. Powell’s point was that inflation was not caused by greedy trade unions or wicked speculators, but by governments that spent more than they raised and covered the gap by creating money. He argued this through the 1960s, when the orthodoxy of both parties was demand management and prices and incomes policy, and when to speak of the money supply was to be thought a crank. He wanted exchange rates to float and the nationalised industries returned to private ownership. When Heath reversed his own policies in 1972 and introduced statutory control of wages and prices, Powell asked him in the Commons whether he had taken leave of his senses. Much of what was called Thatcherism after 1979 had been said by Powell twenty years before, and said better.

He was not a libertarian, and I shall not pretend that he was. His regard for the nation sometimes made him indifferent to the claims of the individual against it, and his devotion to Ulster led him into positions on security that I find hard to defend. But he was a strange figure of the right. He supported the decriminalisation of homosexual acts, and he spoke against the death penalty. In 1959, he denounced the Hola Camp killings in Kenya in a speech that embarrassed Macmillan more than anything the Opposition said, and the burden of that speech was that a British Government could not maintain one standard of conduct at home and a lower standard for subject peoples abroad. Whatever else this was, it was not the outlook of a man who regarded other races with contempt. His case on immigration rested on the nation as a community of shared allegiance and memory, and on the practical judgment that such a community could absorb newcomers only at a pace and in numbers that left it recognisably itself.

A libertarian objection, and its answer

Some of our readers will object that a libertarian should have no quarrel with immigration. If a man in Lahore wishes to work in Bradford, and a mill-owner in Bradford wishes to employ him, by what right does the State forbid the contract? I accept the force of the question, and in a world of private property and free association I should give it much weight. But that was not the world of 1968, and it is still less the world of today. The immigrant of the 1960s arrived in a country with a large welfare state, which gave him claims on the property of others that no free market would have given him, and with council housing allocated by officials. The Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, and their successors down to the Equality Act 2010, then took away from the native population much of the right to decide with whom they would deal. Where the State pays for the newcomer and forbids the native to refuse him, migration is not a free contract. It is a political decision imposed on one party by another, and the party on whom it is imposed is entitled to a voice in it.

That was Powell’s real complaint, and it was a complaint about consent. Nobody had ever asked the British people whether they wished to admit millions of settlers from other continents. The British Nationality Act 1948, passed by Attlee’s Government for imperial reasons, had confirmed some hundreds of millions of people throughout the Empire and Commonwealth in the status of British subjects, with the right to enter the United Kingdom. No minister of any party appears to have expected them to use it in large numbers. When they did, every Government for the next half century assured the electors that the numbers were under control, and every one of them was mistaken or lying. A libertarian who prefers the decisions of free individuals to those of the State has no reason to defend a policy that was never decided by anybody, and that has been kept in being by persistent official deceit.

What the Conservatives did

The first Conservative failure came before Powell spoke. The Churchill and Eden Governments considered immigration controls in the middle 1950s, when Commonwealth immigration was still measured in tens of thousands. A draft Bill was prepared, and the matter was shelved for reasons of imperial sentiment and administrative timidity. Control came only with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which limited the entry of workers by a system of vouchers but left the entry of their dependants almost untouched. It was this hole that Powell described in 1968, and it was the Conservatives who had made it.

The response of the Conservative leadership to the speech itself is instructive. Quintin Hogg and other members of the Shadow Cabinet let it be known that they would resign if Powell were not removed. Heath removed him, and for the remainder of his leadership treated the subject as though Powell’s name were a contaminant. But he could not ignore the members of his own party. Some eighty resolutions on immigration were sent to the party conference in October 1968, and in 1969 the platform carried its motion on immigration by only 1,349 votes to 954. Heath therefore did what the leadership of the Conservative Party has done on this subject ever since. He took Powell’s language, softened it, put it into a manifesto, and won an election with it. The manifesto of 1970 promised that there would be no further large-scale permanent immigration, and that help would be given to immigrants who wished to return home.

The Immigration Act 1971 was the result. It introduced the concept of patriality, so that the right of abode now depended largely on descent from a person born in the United Kingdom, and section 29 empowered the Secretary of State to meet the expenses of those who wished to leave. That section was used so seldom that hardly anyone now remembers it existed. The voluntary resettlement that Powell had proposed, and that the party had promised, was never seriously attempted. Then, in 1972, Heath admitted some twenty-eight thousand Asians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. I will make the concession here that fairness requires. These people held British passports, and there was a respectable argument that the country was bound in law and honour to receive them. I do not think the decision itself was a crime. What tells against Heath is the manner in which it was received at the party conference that year, where Powell moved a motion against it and was defeated by 1,721 votes to 730, after a Young Conservative amendment congratulating the Government. The leadership had learned to win these votes, and it had learned nothing else.

Mrs Thatcher was a more interesting case. She had disliked the sacking of Powell, and in January 1978 she told an interviewer on World in Action that people were “really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. The Conservatives at once took a large lead in the opinion polls. She refused Callaghan’s invitation to all-party talks on the subject, since she had no wish to share the credit for a policy that was winning her votes. In office, she passed the British Nationality Act 1981, which tidied up the law of citizenship and abolished the automatic right of a child born here to citizenship. Immigration was lower in her years than before or since, and I give her credit for that. But nothing was done about the settled population, or about the machinery of race relations law that was steadily expanding around it. On the contrary, it was her Government that passed the Public Order Act 1986, whose provisions on stirring up racial hatred are now the instrument by which men are sent to prison for what they write on the internet. She used Powell’s anxiety to win elections, and she left Powell’s problem where she found it.

John Major brought Britain into the Treaty of Maastricht, with its citizenship of the European Union, and the free movement that followed from it. The Labour Governments of 1997 to 2010 then opened the doors in a manner that dwarfed anything that had gone before, and I do not excuse them. But Labour had never claimed to be the party of the nation. The Conservatives had, and in 2010 David Cameron promised to bring net migration down to “tens of thousands”. In the year to June 2015, after five years of his Government, it was 336,000. Theresa May was Home Secretary throughout those years and missed the target every one of them, and when she became Prime Minister she kept it as a promise while failing to keep it in practice.

Then came the referendum of 2016. Whatever else it meant, the vote to leave the European Union was understood by everyone who cast it, and by everyone who fought it, as a vote to take back control of the borders. Boris Johnson won a majority of eighty in 2019 by promising to get Brexit done and to bring the numbers down. His Government then used its freedom from the rules of the European Union to introduce a points-based system that admitted more people from outside Europe than had ever come from within it. Overseas students were encouraged to bring their families and to stay on after their courses, and a new visa for health and care workers was opened to dependants as well. On the latest revision I have seen from the Office for National Statistics, net migration in the year to March 2023 was 944,000. Those were the figures of a Conservative Government with a large majority and no European court to blame. It was not until 2023 and 2024, under Rishi Sunak, that the dependant routes were closed, and by then the arrivals of those years were here and entitled to stay.

The cost of delay

I come now to the heart of my argument. In 1968, the problem Powell described could have been dealt with briskly and humanely. On the estimates then current, the New Commonwealth population and its children numbered perhaps a million and a half, or something under three per cent of the people of the country. Most had arrived within the previous ten years, and many still had homes and families in the countries they had left. An immediate end to further settlement, combined with resettlement grants generous enough to be worth taking, would have been well within the means of the State, and it would have been voluntary. Nobody need have been expelled, and those who chose to stay could have been treated as what Powell said they must be, which was equal citizens with neither privilege nor disability. The country would have been left with communities small enough to assimilate in a generation, as the Huguenots and the Jews of the nineteenth century had assimilated.

None of this is possible now. The census of 2021 recorded that 74.4 per cent of the population of England and Wales identified as White British, a fall from 80.5 per cent ten years before. In London, the figure was 36.8 per cent. A report published last year by the Centre for Heterodox Social Science projected that the White British would become a minority in the United Kingdom by about 2063. I must say plainly that this is a projection and not a prediction. It depends on assumptions about future migration and fertility that may not hold, and some careful critics have argued that its assumptions are too pessimistic. I will grant that the date may be wrong by a decade or more. What I do not see anyone seriously disputing is the direction of travel. A people that was nine-tenths of its own country within living memory now looks forward, on the present trends, to being one minority among several, and it has been brought to this point without at any stage being asked whether it consented.

The State that diversity built

I said that the result has been a catastrophe, and I mean more than a change in numbers. A society made up of many peoples who have little in common, and who do not trust one another, cannot be governed as the England of my youth was governed, by consent and by a policeman who knew everyone in his street. It must be governed by rules, and by a class of managers whose authority rests on the claim that only they can keep the peace between the communities. That is what has happened. Each new wave of arrivals has been followed by a new extension of the law of equality and of hatred, and each extension has given more power to the officials who administer it and less freedom to the subject who must obey it.

The Conservatives cannot shelter here behind Labour. They passed the Public Order Act 1986. In fourteen years of government after 2010 they left the Equality Act 2010 in full force, allowed the police to record “non-crime hate incidents” against the names of people who had broken no law, and passed the Online Safety Act 2023, which compels the private companies that carry our speech to police it on behalf of the State. When Lucy Connolly was sent to prison in October 2024 for thirty-one months, for a post that she deleted within hours, she was convicted under the law of 1986 and sentenced by a system that the Conservatives had built and never thought to dismantle. I have written in these pages about the slow conversion of England into a managed society, in which elections change the personnel of government but never its direction. The importation of a population that has to be managed is not the only cause of that conversion, but it has been the most powerful of its justifications. A country remodelled in this way is no longer a parliamentary democracy in any sense that Powell would have recognised. It is an oligarchy of officials and lawyers, which permits elections on condition that their results are not acted on.

The charge

I come then to the charge. In the law of England, treason is defined by the Statute of Treasons 1351, as amended over the centuries, and it consists in compassing the death of the King, levying war against him in his realm, or adhering to his enemies. No Conservative Prime Minister has done any of these things, and any lawyer who said otherwise would be laughed out of court, and rightly. I use the word in an older and wider sense, which was known to the common law before the lawyers narrowed it. In 1641, the House of Commons proceeded against the Earl of Strafford for having endeavoured to subvert the fundamental laws of the kingdom. The case against him was that a minister who betrays the trust on which he holds his power, and uses it against the people whom he is supposed to serve, commits a crime against the realm as grave as any against the person of the King. The procedure was irregular and the outcome was savage, and I do not commend either. But the principle that the Commons asserted was that the nation itself can be betrayed, and that those entrusted with its government can be the ones who betray it.

That is the charge, and I lay it against the leaders of the Conservative Party from Heath to Sunak. It is not that they admitted immigrants. It is that they knew from 1968, and with increasing certainty after it, what their own supporters and the nation at large wanted, that they promised it again and again at elections, and that they then did the opposite whenever they were given the power to do otherwise. Heath took Powell’s policy to win in 1970 and abandoned it once he had won. Mrs Thatcher spoke of being swamped and passed the law that now punishes those who say the same thing in plainer words. Cameron promised tens of thousands and delivered hundreds of thousands. Johnson was given the clearest instruction any British electorate has given in my lifetime, and the largest majority his party had won since 1987, and he used them to bring in more people than any Prime Minister before him. These are not errors of judgment. An error of judgment is made once and corrected. A deception repeated for half a century by the same institution, against the same people and with the same result, is a policy, and a policy of governing a nation against its own declared will, to the point of making its people a minority in their own country, is what I mean by treason.

Some will say that the voters should have voted for someone else. Until very recently, there was nobody else to vote for. The electoral system gave the Conservatives a near monopoly of the vote of those who cared about the nation, and they spent that monopoly as an heir spends an inheritance he has done nothing to earn. They have been punished, in 2024, by their worst defeat in their history, and by the rise of a rival that may yet replace them. That is a political judgment. It is not a historical one, and it does not discharge the account.

Powell’s speech is remembered for its vision of blood, and I am glad to say that most of that vision has not come true. What has come instead is quieter. Virgil, whose Sibyl Powell quoted, ends the Aeneid with a bargain. Juno agrees to cease her persecution of the Trojans on condition that the native Latins keep their ancient name and their own speech, so that the newcomers are absorbed into the old people and not the old people into them. Jupiter agrees, and promises that the Trojans commixti corpore tantum / subsident (12.835–6), that they will merge with the Latins in blood and sink their own identity in theirs. The Romans thought that a nation could receive strangers and survive, but only on its own terms. Powell thought the same. The leaders of the Conservative Party had half a century to secure those terms and never tried, and the people whose name and country they were entrusted with may yet find, on the trends their governments set, that they are the ones who are absorbed.

Sources

The text of the Birmingham speech of 20 April 1968, reproduced in many places; for its circumstances and reception, including the Gallup figures and Heath’s statement: “Rivers of Blood speech”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech

Virgil, Aeneid 6.86–7 and 12.819–40.

Iain Macleod, “Enoch Powell”, The Spectator, 16 July 1965.

Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London, 1998).

Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain: The Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford, 2000).

Zig Layton-Henry, The Politics of Immigration (Oxford, 1992).

The Times, reports of the Conservative party conferences of October 1968, 1969 and 1972.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, vol. 1 (London, 2013).

Office for National Statistics, “Ethnic group, England and Wales: Census 2021”: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/bulletins/ethnicgroupenglandandwales/census2021

Office for National Statistics, revised long-term international migration estimates, November 2025, as reported in “Net migration to the UK: what numbers have changed and why”, Irish News: https://www.irishnews.com/news/uk/net-migration-to-the-uk-what-numbers-have-changed-and-why-SPWC6QYBTBI2HMZ5FJJVTBWVK4

Office for National Statistics, Migration Statistics Quarterly Report, November 2015 (net migration of 336,000 in the year to June 2015).

Centre for Heterodox Social Science report on demographic projections (2025), as reported in “White Britons will be MINORITY in UK within next 40 years, new report suggests”, GB News: https://www.gbnews.com/news/white-british-people-minority-uk-report-migration-latest; and for a critique, Georgina Sturge, “Will ‘White British’ really be a minority in 40 years time?”: https://georginasturge.substack.com/p/will-white-british-really-be-a-minority