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Enoch Powell - Rivers of Blood

 
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Enoch Powell's Rivers Of Blood Speech
20th April 1968
The Prophecies of Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell's famous Rivers of Blood speech, as delivered in Birmingham on 20th April 1968.

Workers came out and marched in support of Powell, but he was sacked from the shadow Cabinet position by Edward Heath for speaking truth.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: 'If only,' they love to think, "if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen." Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.


At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 1 of 8

 
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Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 2 of 8

 
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Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 3 of 8

 
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Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 4 of 8

 
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Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 5 of 8

 
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Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 6 of 8

 
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Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 7 of 8

 
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Rivers of Blood - BBC - The White Season Part 8 of 8

 
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