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.
The Spectator is a weekly British political and cultural news magazine. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving magazine in the world. The Spectator is politically conservative, and its principal subject areas are politics and culture. Alongside columns and features on current affairs, the magazine also contains arts pages on books, music, opera, film, and TV reviews. It had an average circulation of 107,812 as of December 2023, excluding Australia.
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'.
Alan Gordon Barraclough Haselhurst, Baron Haselhurst,, is a British Conservative Party politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Saffron Walden from 1977 to 2017, having previously represented Middleton and Prestwich from 1970 to February 1974. Haselhurst was Chairman of Ways and Means from 14 May 1997 to 8 June 2010, and later Chairman of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association between 2011 and 2014. The oldest Conservative MP to stand down at the 2017 general election, he was created a life peer on 22 June 2018, sitting in the House of Lords as Baron Haselhurst.
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.
Kenneth John Bigley was a British civil engineer who was kidnapped by Islamic extremists in the al-Mansour district of Baghdad, Iraq, on 16 September 2004, along with his colleagues, U.S. citizens Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong. Following the murders of Hensley and Armstrong by beheading over the course of three days, Bigley was killed in the same manner two weeks later, despite the attempted intervention of the Muslim Council of Britain and the indirect intervention of the British government. Videos of the killings were posted on websites and blogs.
David Goodhart is a British journalist, commentator and author. He is the founder and a former editor of Prospect magazine.
Maurice John Cowling was a British historian. A fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, for most of his career, Cowling was a leading conservative exponent of the 'high politics' approach to political history.
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.
James Mark Court Delingpole is an English writer, journalist, and columnist who has written for a number of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. He is a former executive editor for Breitbart London, and has published several novels and four political books. He describes himself as a libertarian conservative. He has frequently published articles promoting climate change denial and expressing opposition to wind power.
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.
Douglas Murray is a British author and neoconservative political commentator, cultural critic, and journalist. He founded the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2007, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where he was associate director from 2011 to 2018.
Patrick John Francis Cosgrave was a British-Irish journalist and writer. A staunch supporter of the Conservative Party, he was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher whilst she was Leader of the Opposition.
The Daily Telegraph, known online and elsewhere as The Telegraph, is a British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in 1855 as The Daily Telegraph and Courier. The Telegraph is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The paper's motto, "Was, is, and will be", was included in its emblem which was used for over a century starting in 1858.
Thomas Edwin Utley, known as Peter Utley, was a British High Tory journalist and writer.
Daniel Pearce Jackson Hodges is a British newspaper columnist. Since March 2016, he has written a weekly column for The Mail on Sunday. Prior to this, he was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and in 2013 was described by James Forsyth in The Spectator as David Cameron's "new favourite columnist".
Andrew Clive Alexander was an English journalist and columnist for The Yorkshire Post, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Between 1984 and 2000 , he was the City editor for the Daily Mail
Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell is a 1998 book by the English writer Simon Heffer. It is a biography of the politician Enoch Powell. The title is taken from Powell's 1968 Rivers of Blood speech when Powell quoted Virgil's Aeneid: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood".
Edward Anthony Thompson, known as Anthony Lejeune, was an English writer, editor, and broadcaster. He was known for his weekly radio talk London Letter that was broadcast in South Africa for nearly 30 years and for his crime novels and writing about the history of London's gentleman's clubs. He also produced a number of political books written from a conservative point of view. He was described by The Times as "always out of period, a misfit in the modern world for whom the term 'young fogey' might have been invented".
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.
