‘An issue people are concerned about’ Liz Truss says Enoch Powell had ‘a point’ about immigration

Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech on the dangers of immigration was later called the “Rivers of Blood” speech because of its reference to a classic poem, Virgil’s Aeneid.

Powell famously said, “When I look ahead, I am filled with forebodings; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’.”

The former Conservative MP caused a political stir for his heightened rhetoric.

Powell quoted a voter concerned about the increase in the immigrant population in Britain.

The voter told Powell, who repeated the phrase in his speech, “In this country, 15 or 20 years from now, the black man will have the whipping hand over the white man.”

Powell continued: “Here is a decent, ordinary countryman, in broad daylight in my own city, telling me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children.”

“I simply don’t have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about anything else.”

Powell said Britain must be “literally crazy” to “allow the annual influx of some 50,000 dependents” and warned: “It’s like watching a nation busy piling up its own pyre”.

A net of 745,000 people came to Britain in 2022; net migration was higher in that year than in the years between 1964 and 2000 combined.

More than 100,000 people have also entered Britain illegally through Channel crossings since 2018.

Preliminary numbers of canal migrants show a 24% increase in small boat crossings between January and April 21 this year compared to the same period in 2023.

During that period, 6,265 people arrived in small boats, dealing a blow to Rishi Sunak, who repeatedly promised to “stop the boats”.

In his 1968 speech, Enoch Powell warned that by 2000, “about one-tenth of the entire population” will be immigrants and their descendants.

Powell continued: “Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant population.”

Official census data shows that in 2001, 87.5% of residents in England and Wales were white British.

In 2021, the white British population fell to 74.4%.

Liz Truss said she was not concerned about this demographic change, telling GB News: “I don’t care about the color of people’s skin, I support Martin Luther King, I care about the content of people’s character and their talents and qualities. ”

“What I worry about is that it is now too difficult to start a family, especially in Britain.”

“So is housing, child care is too expensive, we haven’t deregulated, we haven’t done things to the housing system that we should have done to make it easier to build houses and make it easier for people to live cheaply,” the spokesperson said. said former Prime Minister.

“What I care about is that the people who live in Britain, and the people we let into Britain, share our values.”

“And that is what is so worrying about the protests that we have seen in the streets, that there are people who are promoting an ideology that is completely contrary to the values ​​that have founded Western civilization; freedom of speech, democracy, a belief in individual freedom.”

She continued: “I think we need to reduce the level of legal migration and ensure that proper integration takes place.”