thumb|upright=0.9|Enoch Powell (1912–1998). Portrait by [[Allan Warren.]]

The "Rivers of Blood" speech was made by the British politician Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968 to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. In it Powell, who was then Shadow Secretary of State for Defence in the Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath, strongly criticised the rates of immigration from the Commonwealth of Nations (mostly former colonies of the British Empire) to the United Kingdom since the Second World War. He also opposed the Race Relations Bill, an anti-discrimination bill which upon receiving royal assent as the Race Relations Act 1968 criminalised the refusal of housing, employment, or public services to persons on the grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origin. Powell himself called it "the Birmingham speech"; "Rivers of Blood" alludes to a prophecy from Virgil's Aeneid that Powell (a classical scholar) quoted:

The speech was a national controversy, and it made Powell one of the most talked-about and divisive politicians in Britain. Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party at the time, dismissed him from the Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech. According to most accounts the popularity of Powell's views on immigration might have been a decisive factor in the Conservative Party's unexpected victory at the 1970 general election, although he became one of the most persistent opponents of the subsequent Heath ministry.

Background

Powell, the member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West and Shadow Secretary of State for Defence for the Conservative Party, was addressing the general meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. The Labour government's 1968 Race Relations Bill was to have its second reading three days later, and the Conservative Opposition had tabled an amendment significantly weakening its provisions. The bill was a successor to the Race Relations Act 1965.

The Birmingham-based television company ATV saw an advance copy of the speech on the Saturday morning, and its news editor ordered a television crew to go to the venue, where they filmed sections of the speech. Earlier in the week, Powell had said to his friend Clem Jones, a journalist and then editor at the Wolverhampton Express & Star, "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."

In preparing his speech, Powell had applied Jones's advice that to make hard-hitting political speeches and short-circuit interference from his party organisation, his best timing was on Saturday afternoons, after delivering embargoed copies the previous Thursday or Friday to selected editors and political journalists of Sunday newspapers. This tactic could ensure coverage of the speech over three days through Saturday evening bulletins, then Sunday newspapers, thus the coverage would be picked up in Monday newspapers.

Powell said:

Powell quoted a letter he received from a woman in Northumberland, about an elderly woman living on a Wolverhampton street where she was the only white resident. The woman's husband and two sons had died in the Second World War and she had rented out the rooms in her house. Once immigrants had moved into the street in which she lived, her white lodgers left. Two black men had knocked on her door at 7:00 am to use her telephone to call their employers, but she refused, as she would have done to any other stranger knocking at her door at such an hour, and was subsequently verbally abused. The woman had asked her local authority for a rates reduction, but was told by a council officer to let out the rooms of her house. When the woman said the only tenants would be black, the council officer replied: "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country."

Powell advocated voluntary re-emigration by "generous grants and assistance" and he mentioned that immigrants had asked him whether it was possible. He said that all citizens should be equal before the law, and that:

He argued that journalists who urged the government to pass anti-discrimination laws were "of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it". Powell described what he perceived to be the evolving position of the White British population:

Powell warned that if the legislation proposed for the then–Race Relations Bill were to be passed it would bring about discrimination against the native population:

Powell was concerned about the current level of immigration and argued that it must be controlled: