John Enoch Powell was a British politician, scholar, and writer. He served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West for the Conservative Party from 1950 to February 1974 and as MP for South Down for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) from October 1974 to 1987. He was Minister of Health from 1960 to 1963 in the second Macmillan ministry and was Shadow Secretary of State for Defence from 1965 to 1968 in the Shadow Cabinet of Ted Heath. Before entering politics he was a classical scholar. He served in both staff and intelligence positions during the Second World War, reaching the rank of brigadier. Powell also wrote poetry, and several books on classical and political subjects.
Thatcherism is a form of British conservative ideology named after Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher that relates to not just her political platform and particular policies but also her personal character and style of management while in office. Proponents of Thatcherism are referred to as Thatcherites. The term has been used to describe the principles of the British government under Thatcher from the 1979 general election to her resignation in 1990. In international terms, Thatcherites have been described as a part of the general socio-economic movement known as neoliberalism, with different countries besides the United Kingdom sharing similar policies around expansionary capitalism.
The "Rivers of Blood" speech was made by the British politician Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968 to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. In it Powell, who was then Shadow Secretary of State for Defence in the Shadow Cabinet of Ted Heath, strongly criticised the rates of immigration from the New Commonwealth to the United Kingdom since the Second World War. He also opposed the Race Relations Bill, an anti-discrimination bill which upon receiving royal assent as the Race Relations Act 1968 criminalised the refusal of housing, employment, or public services to persons on the grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origin. Powell himself called it "the Birmingham speech"; "Rivers of Blood" alludes to a prophecy from Virgil's Aeneid which Powell quoted:
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.
Iain Norman Macleod was a British Conservative Party politician, government minister and journalist.
Nicholas William Budgen, often called Nick Budgen, was a British Conservative Party politician.
Jonathan William Patrick Aitken is a British author, Church of England priest and former Conservative Party politician. Beginning his career in journalism, he was elected to Parliament in 1974, and was a member of the cabinet during John Major's premiership from 1994 to 1995. That same year, he was accused by The Guardian of misdeeds conducted under his official government capacity. He sued the newspaper for libel in response, but the case collapsed, and he was subsequently found to have committed perjury during his trial. In 1999, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which he served seven months.
William John Biffen, Baron Biffen,, was a British Conservative Party politician. He was a member of parliament from 1961 to 1997, and served in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet; he then served in the House of Lords.
Andrew Matthew William Faulds was a British actor and Labour Party politician. After a successful acting career on stage, on radio and in films, he was a Member of Parliament from 1966 to 1997.
Daniel John Hannan, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere is a British writer, journalist and politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 to 2020. He is currently a sitting member of the House of Lords where he takes the Conservative whip, and has since 2020 served as an adviser to the Board of Trade. He is the founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade.
Simon James Heffer is an English historian, journalist, author and political commentator. He has published several biographies and a series of books on the social history of Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the First World War. He was appointed professorial research fellow at the University of Buckingham in 2017.
Powellism is the name given to the political views of Conservative and Ulster Unionist politician Enoch Powell. They derive from his High Tory and libertarian outlook.
Wolverhampton South West was a constituency in the West Midlands created in 1950 and was represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament.
The Pyrates is a comic novel by George MacDonald Fraser, published in 1983. Fraser called it "a burlesque fantasy on every swashbuckler I ever read or saw".
The West Bromwich by-election of 24 May 1973 was held after the appointment of Labour Member of Parliament (MP) Maurice Foley to the European Commission. The constituency, held continuously by Labour since 1935, was retained in this by-election.
Andrew Roth was a biographer and journalist known for his compilation of Parliamentary Profiles, a directory of biographies of British Members of Parliament, a small sample of which is available online in The Guardian. Active amongst the politicians and journalists in Westminster for sixty years, he also made appearances on British television. He first gained prominence when arrested in 1945 as one of six suspects in the Amerasia spy case.
Morecambe is a seaside town and civil parish in the City of Lancaster district of Lancashire, England, on Morecambe Bay, part of the Irish Sea. In 2011 the parish had a population of 34,768.
Thomas Edwin Utley, known as Peter Utley, was a British High Tory journalist and writer.
Sathnam Sanghera FRSL is a British journalist and best-selling author.
George Eaton is a British writer and journalist. He is Senior Online Editor of the New Statesman, a position he was appointed to in February 2020. He was previously political editor from 2014 to 2018 and joint deputy editor from 2018 to 2019, when he was moved to Assistant Editor after his controversial Roger Scruton interview, where he framed Scruton for racism and mocked him on social media in the aftermath.
There have been incidents of racism in the Conservative Party since at least 1964. Conservative shadow defence minister Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968 was both influential and widely regarded as anti-immigrant with racist overtones; the party's leader at the time, Edward Heath, condemned it, although some Conservative MPs defended Powell's speech. Since then, accusations have been made about several leading members of the party and its policies; these have related to prejudice against non-white people.
