A People’s History of the Anti Nazi League by Geoff Brown

Notes Chapter 1

Rivers of Blood

  • Notes Chapter 1, ‘Rivers of Blood’
  • 1. The full text of the speech is available here Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.  Powell believed that, even as its colonies won independence, some form of British imperial power remained possible. It was in this paternalist spirit that, as minister of health in 1960, he actively recruited nurses from the Caribbean to work in the NHS.
  • 2. See Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech
  • 3. Powell claimed he had received 65,000 letters of support within days with only thirty against. Olivier Esteves found 20 percent of these letters were critical of the speech. See Olivier Esteves, ‘Wrathful rememberers: Harnessing the memory of World War II in letters of support to Powell’, in The Lives and Afterlives of Enoch Powell: The Undying Political Animal, Olivier Esteves & Stéphane Porion, eds. (Routledge, 2019).
  • 4. ‘74 pc back Powell on immigrants’, Daily Telegraph 7 May 1968. A Gallup Poll between 26 and 29 April asked ‘In general, do you agree or disagree with what Mr Powell said in his speech on coloured immigrants?’ 74 percent agreed, 15 percent disagreed, 11 percent didn’t know.
  • 5. ‘Coloured family attacked’, Times 1 May 1968, p.1.
  • 6. Hanif Kureishi, ‘Knock knock, it’s Enoch’, Guardian 12 December 2014. See also Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette; The Rainbow Sign (Faber, 1986).
  • 7. Times 25 April 1968. Danny Harmston, one of London’s best-known fascists, a supporter of Oswald Mosley, worked as a supervisor in Smithfield meat market.
  • 8. Ian Birchall remembers that Jack Dash, the leading dock worker militant, member of the Communist party, was ‘ill’ and didn’t turn up. Birchall, private communication 11 December 2023.
  • 9. Jim Nichol, private communication 16 October 2021. ‘Social security’ was the name of the welfare benefits system in this period.
  • 10. Ian Birchall, The smallest mass party in the world, Socialist Workers Party, 1951–1979 (Socialists Unlimited, 1981), p.15; Ian Birchall, Tony Cliff, A Marxist for His Time (Bookmarks, 2011), p.284–5; Jim Nichol private communication, 16 October 2021. The International Socialists (IS), which became the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in January 1977, responded to Powell’s speech by proposing a single organisation of revolutionary socialists to meet ‘The urgent challenge of fascism’, Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Routledge, 2016), p.112; David Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956–68 (Penguin 1976), pp.411–12. Ian Birchall thinks one of Barrett’s leaflets was written by Paul Foot. For a full description of Powell’s anti-immigrant politics, see Shirin Hirsch, In the Shadow of Enoch Powell (Manchester, 2018). Barrett joined the picket line with his own placard and leaflet headed, ‘Strike Against the Employers – not your Fellow Workers’. Some weeks later, ‘Terry was at a mass meeting moving an overtime ban only to be heckled by a few racists who shouted that he had scabbed
  • on the strike. The cry went up that he had not. He had been on the picket line armed with his own views’, Jim Nichol, private communication 16 October 2021.
  • 11. Times 11 March 1964, cited in Paul Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Penguin, 1965), p.44.
  • 12. The BNP led by John Bean merged into the National Front in 1967. See Chapter 2 below.
  • 13. Rick Blackman, Babylon’s Burning (Bookmarks, 2021), p.82. When visiting Jamaica as prime minister in the 1950s, Churchill made his opposition to immigration clear, saying to his host, the governor of Jamaica, ‘We don’t want to become a magpie nation, do we?’, in Margaret Renn, 2024, Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, (Verso, 2024), p.292.
  • 14. Martin Walker, ‘The National Front’, in H. M. Drucker, ed., Multi-Party Britain (Macmillan, 1979), p.55.
  • 15. Walker, p.56.
  • 16. Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol.1 (Cape, 1975), p.149–50.
  • 17. Shortly before the speech, Powell told a journalist ‘I deliberately include at least one startling assertion in every speech in order to attract enough attention to give me a power base within the Conservative party’, Sunday Times 29 December 1968. Quoted in Hirsch, 2018, p.21. The new Race Relations bill, strengthening the provisions of the 1965 act over housing and employment, was to be debated the following week in parliament, Race Relations bill, Hansard 23 April 1968, Race Relations Bill – Hansard
  • 18. Guardian 26 February 1968; ‘A racialist law for Britain’, Tribune 1 March 1968. The demonstration was supported by the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) and the Society of Friends, the Quakers.
  • 19. Brockway had a long record of opposing racism. See John Newsinger, In the middle of the road: Fenner Brockway, the Independent Labour Party and the class struggle • International Socialism 179, Summer 2023. I have taken the phrase ‘reducing their social and cultural visibility’ from Fred Lindop, 2001, ‘Racism and the working class: Strikes in support of Enoch Powell in 1968’, Labour History Review vol.66, no.12.
  • 20. Parliament and the 1965 Race Relations Act
  • 21. Hansard, 23 November 1965. Private members’ clubs were excluded. In February 1973 the House of Lords rejected a case brought by the Race Relations Board, deciding that the East Ham Conservative Club could legally refuse to admit an Indian as a member as the club was ‘simply a collection of private persons and that there was no public element’. Dockers’ Labour Club and Institute Limited v. Race Relations Board, Race Relations Bill – Hansard
  • 22. Lindop, 2001, p.80.
  • 23. ‘Often when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost, for the gift of capitalism’: Enoch Powell speech to a luncheon of lobby correspondents (c.early 1968), quoted in T E Utley, Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking (William Kimber, 1968), p.114; Paul Foot, ‘Obituary of Enoch Powell’, Socialist Review March 1998.
  • 24. ‘Churchill once contacted the Conservative Party research department where Powell worked, to ask, “Who was that young madman who has been telling me how many divisions I will need to reconquer India?”’, Utley p.60, cited in Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (Penguin, 1969), p.19.
  • 25 The slave trade was abolished in 1808 and slavery in British colonies ended in 1838. The Slavery Abolition Act1833 targeted plantation slavery, paying generous compensation to the slave owners. Debt bondage was unaffected. See What is bonded labour? | Anti-Slavery International (accessed 22 May 2025)
  • 26. A much longer list could be added. For example, the naval mutiny in Bombay, February 1946. See ‘Our last war of independence: The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946’, https://indianhistorycollective.com/our-last-war-of-independence-the-royal-indian-navy-mutiny-of-1946/ (accessed 22 May 2025)
  • 27. Letters: Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt 9 April 1870. Marx also argued that
  • slavery in the US had to be destroyed if workers were to make any progress: ‘In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded.’ Karl Marx, Capital, vol.1 (Penguin, 1976), ch.10.
  • 28. Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983). The Royal Titles Bill, 1876, declared Victoria Empress of India.
  • 29. Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Palgrave, 2014), p.40.
  • 30. The quote comes from ‘The New World: A Democratic Poem’ by the leading Chartist, Ernest Jones, 1851, in Simon Rennie, The Poetry of Ernest Jones (Routledge, 2016).
  • 31. The White Man’s Burden – The Kipling Society Edward Said put the view that Kipling was not a racist. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1994).
  • 32. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, (Penguin, 1971), p.142–3.
  • 33. Empire Day, renamed Empire and Commonwealth Day, was held in May every year until 1958.
  • 34. UNESCO published a ‘Statement on Race’ declaring that there was no scientific basis or justification for racial bias, New York Times 18 July 1950.
  • 35. David Harewood on Blackface, BBC2 27 July 2023, David Harewood on Blackface – BBC Two The show ran till 1978.
  • 36. Walter Fletcher, Conservative MP for Bury, Lancashire, House of Commons, 8 July 1948, quoted in Tribune 16 July 1948. Italics added by Tribune.
  • 37. ‘Suddenly the florid rhetoric about the “open door” turns to equally florid rhetoric about the desecration of “England’s green and pleasant land”. In 1950, Powell’s “ultimate conception” was that “His Majesty’s Dominions throughout the world are in reality a whole”, but by 1964, the “natives” had taken control of the Dominions and the “whole” had to be replaced by a narrow nationalism. Citizenship laws, Queen’s Titles and all the other ideological cards in the game of British supremacy could be shuffled and discarded at will, and noone shuffled them more cynically than J. Enoch Powell.” Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell, p.42.
  • 38. Hirsch, 2018, p.21.
  • 39. Trevor Phillips & Mike Phillips Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (HarperCollins, 1998), pp.82–3, The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal: independent research report (accessible) – GOV.UK  published by the Home Office, September 2024, found that ‘during the period 1950–1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK’.
  • 40. Darcus Howe, 1980, ‘From Bobby to Babylon’, Race Today vol.12, no.1
  • 41. See Larry Bartels, ‘The Populist Phantom: Threats to Democracy Start at the Top’, Foreign Affairs
  • November/December 2024, The Populist Phantom: Threats to Democracy Start at the Top
  • 42. The ‘Sus law’ was the Vagrancy Act, passed in 1824. It declared that ‘every suspected person or reputed thief, frequenting…any highway or any place adjacent to a street or highway; with intent to commit an arrestable offence…shall be deemed a rogue and vagabond’. The Vagrancy Act was repealed in August 1981, as recommended by the 1979 Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure.
  • 43. ‘No quick fix’, Economist 20 September 2008.

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