In The Shadow Of Enoch Powell

Fifty years ago Enoch Powell made national headlines with his 'Rivers of Blood' speech, warning of an immigrant invasion in the once respectable streets of Wolverhampton. This local fixation brought the Black Country town into the national spotlight, yet Powell's unstable relationship with Wolverhampton has since been overlooked. Drawing from interviews and archival material, this book offers a rich local history through which to investigate the speech, bringing to life the racialised dynamics of space during a critical moment in British history. What was going on beneath the surface in Wolverhampton and how did Powell's constituents respond to this dramatic moment? The research traces the ways in which Powell's words reinvented the town and uncovers highly contested local responses. While Powell left Wolverhampton in 1974, the book returns to the city to explore the collective memories of the speech which continue to reverberate. In a contemporary period of new crisis and national divisions, revisiting the shadow of Powell allows us to reflect on racism and resistance from 1968 to today.

This book contributes to race and ethnicity studies through a focus on the small scale, racialised dynamics of locality during a sharpening climate of crisis in British society.

Best known for his notorious 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 and his outspoken opposition to immigration, Enoch Powell was one of the most controversial figures in British political life in the second half of the twentieth century and a formative influence on what came to be known as Thatcherism. Telling the story of Powell's political life from the 1950s onwards, Paul Corthorn's intellectual biography goes beyond a fixation on the 'Rivers of Blood' speech to bring us a man who thought deeply about - and often took highly unusual (and sometimes apparently contradictory) positions on - the central political debates of the post-1945 era: denying the existence of the Cold War (at one stage going so far as to advocate the idea of an alliance with the Soviet Union); advocating free-market economics long before it was fashionable, while remaining a staunch defender of the idea of a National Health Service; vehemently opposing British membership of the European Economic Community; arguing for the closer integration of Northern Ireland with the rest of the UK; and in the 1980s supporting the campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament. In the process, Powell emerges as more than just a deeply divisive figure but as a seminal political intellectual of his time. Paying particular attention to the revealing inconsistencies in Powell's thought and the significant ways in which his thinking changed over time, Corthorn argues that Powell's diverse campaigns can nonetheless still be understood as a coherent whole, if viewed as part of a long-running, and wide-ranging, debate set against the backdrop of the long-term decline in Britain's international, military, and economic position in the decades after 1945.

Enoch Powell's explosive rhetoric against black immigration and anti-discrimination law transformed the terrain of British race politics and cast a long shadow over British society. Using extensive archival research, Camilla Schofield offers a radical reappraisal of Powell's political career and insists that his historical significance is inseparable from the political generation he sought to represent. Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain follows Powell's trajectory from an officer in the British Raj to the centre of British politics and, finally, to his turn to Ulster Unionism. She argues that Powell and the mass movement against 'New Commonwealth' immigration that he inspired shed light on Britain's war generation, popular understandings of the welfare state and the significance of memories of war and empire in the making of postcolonial Britain. Through Powell, Schofield illuminates the complex relationship between British social democracy, racism and the politics of imperial decline in Britain.

Enoch at 100 is a critical reassessment of Enoch Powell's legacy by some of the leading political figures, writers and commentators of the current age. The book covers the role of government and the state of the economy, the European Union, constitutional reform, immigration and social cohesion, climate change, energy policy and the environment, defence and foreign policy.

In this biography, Robert Shepherd puts the life and work of Enoch Powell in a new political, philosophical and emotional perspective. The book draws on interviews with Powell and on a wealth of new research.

"Fifty years on from the most dramatic post-war speech in Britain, this updated view is a VERY important part of the continuing debate. Enoch never goes away." -- Nigel Farage MEP Enoch Was Right is an explosive new take on a speech that changed the nature of the debate surrounding immigration into the Western world for decades to come. Written by British author Raheem Kassam, himself of Indian-Muslim extraction, the book accuses the political establishment of being complicit in misrepresenting Enoch Powell, or too intellectually lacking to understand and convey the nuances of Powell's speech, instead rejecting it as a "racist" or "fascist" turn.With an exclusive interview on the subject with Brexit leader Nigel Farage, Kassam analyses in depth the changing nature of UK demographics, crime statistics, integration, the race relations industry, and more. More often than not, Kassam finds that "Enoch was right" in his predictions for the future of the United Kingdom.Kassam is the author of the bestselling No Go Zones: How Shariah Law is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You.