The sinister power of Enoch Powell’s speech

The BBC’s decision to re-broadcast Enoch Powell’s so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech in its entirety this week has excited just the shouting match that was to be expected. On the one hand, there has been liberal fury at the honour supposedly paid to a speech that endorsed and encouraged racial hatred. On the other, the standard defence of Powell’s line of argument: that he was not encouraging a race war, but predicting one and seeking to head it off. 

What’s striking on revisiting the speech is that, for better or for worse, Powell predicted and encompassed both those points of view in the speech. It’s customary, in the scheme of classical rhetoric, to put refutatio – anticipating and heading off your opponents’ arguments – somewhere in the second half of the speech. Powell begins with refutatio. This is a strikingly defensive performance.

Right at the very top of the speech, he announces that it’s the job of the conscientious politician (his ethos appeal is that he is such a one, as contrasted with the cowards who succumb to “temptation” and “knowingly shirk” the challenges of the future) to anticipate and see off “preventable evils”, and that “by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred”.