The Soros-funded British Future “think tank” has publishing a new report claiming the former Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West and for South Down in Northern Ireland was “wrong” in his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech because the British public do not object to interracial marriage.
The report entitled Many Rivers Crossed uses intermarriage and polling on the matter as its key cudgel against Powell, stating from the outset:
Half a century on, Enoch Powell’s arguments belong to the history books. 80% of us are comfortable with someone of a different race becoming their neighbour, their son or daughter-in-law
or their Prime Minister. The ‘Rivers of Blood’ anniversary may be overshadowed by a country preparing to hang out the bunting for the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Britain’s first mixed-race princess. It seems fitting that the stories of social change, reflected in the many marriages and friendships across ethnic lines that we heard about throughout the West Midlands, should reach the top of society too.Three-quarters (75%) of Britons would be comfortable if their child or grandchild married or had a serious relationship with someone from a different race or ethnicity to their own. 70% would look similarly positively on a marriage or relationship to someone of a different faith. Ethnic minority Britons feel the same, with 82% comfortable with mixed-race relationships and 68% happy for their child or grandchild to marry or have a serious relationship with someone of another faith.
The entire premise of the organisation’s report and polling is predicated on the flawed and inherently, obviously contradictory notion that Powell opposed race-mixing and intermarriage. In fact, this was what Powell wanted to happen, coupled with lower numbers of immigration, to encourage integration.
British Future’s report in fact proves the adage repeated during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s… Enoch was right.
It also proves that British Future are either willing to openly lie about Powell’s legacy, or have not researched it at all.
Powell was clear on such matters, as he said in his article for the Daily Telegraph in 1967:
Long before the coloured population reaches 5 per cent of the total, a proportion will have filtered into the general population, mingled with it in occupation, residence, habits and intermarriage. On the other hand, the rest, numerically perhaps much the greater part, will be in larger or smaller colonies, in certain areas and cities, more separated than now in habits, occupation and way of life.
Here, just 14 months before the infamous Birmingham speech, Powell speaks positively of mixing (or “mingling” as he calls it) in work, communities, habits, and indeed marriage. His problem, as is quite clear, and which he made agonisingly clear over decades, is the sheer numbers by which people were coming to Britain.
Furthermore, in an interview for Enoch at 100 (2012) his widow (now deceased) Pamela Powell recalled: “I heard him say that one day perhaps – and it will be a long time after we are dead and gone – there will be a lot of intermarriage which would help to reduce the risks [of segregation]. He thought that might happen.”
Finally, he was asked several times as to whether or not he would accept his daughter marrying a black man, to which he responded that “he would be far less worried about the future of the country if there were intermarriage”, and, from a separate interview in 1969 said: “I have made a resolution. I shall not endeavour to influence my daughters’ choice of husbands”.
The Mirror newspaper headline on the matter read: “Powell: My Girls Can Wed Who They Like”.
The report is the latest unchallenged lie about the life and beliefs of Enoch Powell, who was the youngest brigadier in the British Army, one of the youngest professors in history (25), and who often repeated: “I have set and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on the grounds of his origin.”
Raheem Kassam is the editor in chief of Breitbart London
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