We need to talk about Enoch
How many times have you heard some sad little racist twat on social media saying that Enoch Powell was right. Quoting a speech they’ve probably not even fucking read. Most recently after the horrific murders in Southport last year, industrial grade twat Elon Musk waded in to the fray, paraphrasing Powell, only with less Latin and more deranged algorithmic race hate. The far-right seem to have a box of tissues by the bed for this cunt.
Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered 57 years ago today on 20th April 1968, which ironically would have been Adolf Hitlers 79th birthday, is one of the most notorious racist tirades in modern British political history: a deranged outburst cloaked in classical references, warning that immigration would lead to civil war, bloodshed, and the collapse of British society. Though universally condemned at the time, it has been clung to ever since by a bitter strain of the British right: from pinstriped Tory relics to the knuckle-dragging gammon foot soldiers of the far-right. For these people, Powell is a martyr, a ‘truth-teller’ who dared to say what others wouldn’t. In reality, he was a racist demagogue and suspected paedophile, projecting his own paranoia onto the changing face of Britain. The far-right keep his speech alive not because it was right, but because they desperately want it to come true: they crave a society fractured by race, because it justifies their white victim complex and the fantasy that they're under siege for being British.
Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech is often held up by the far right like some holy relic, a clairvoyant moment of truth-telling. But the truth is, it wasn’t a prophecy. It was a racist tantrum by a disgraced imperialist fantasist who couldn’t stomach the fact that Britain was evolving beyond his whitewashed, Latin-quoting fever dreams. It was a racist rant from a bitter old Empire nostalgist terrified of losing the privileges that white British men like him took for granted. His speech didn’t predict anything. It projected, I say projected but more like projectile vomited out the paranoid insecurities of a man who saw people of colour not as neighbours, citizens, or workers, but as a threat to his imagined racial order. What it really was, and what it remains, is a paranoid fantasy peddled by reactionary white men afraid of a world where they’re no longer the unchallenged centre of gravity.
The idea that immigration would lead to race war, blood in the streets, and the breakdown of civil society was always bollocks, dressed up in classical references to give it a veneer of intellectual legitimacy.
Well it hasn’t come true, and it won’t, because people, immigrants included, are too busy living real lives to act out the wet dreams of these twisted right-wing fucks who have a masochistic desire to be oppressed so they can justify their own hatred. The far-right can't stand that Black and Asian Brits, Muslims, Eastern Europeans, and refugees didn't burn Britain to the ground, they got jobs, built families, started businesses, paid taxes, became nurses, teachers, delivery drivers, and bloody MPs. They became part of the country, despite being told to go home at every turn by chinless, pinstripe-wearing ghosts like Powell and his modern-day imitators in the Reform Party and the Tory hard right.
And let's talk about who Powell really was, beyond the sanitised right-wing fairy tale.
This is a man who, as later exposed, had his name repeatedly connected to child abuse inquiries: including the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal, one of the most horrific and politically-suppressed paedophile rings in UK history. Former intelligence officers and journalists raised his name in connection with allegations that he attended parties where boys were trafficked and abused, often under the protection or surveillance of the security services. And what did the state do? Covered it up. Sealed files. Protected reputations. That’s the man the hard right still idolises, not just a racist, but a suspected predator of the most grotesque kind.
The official gagging around the Kincora Boys' Home scandal, has lasted for decades, with classified files still withheld under extended closure orders. Some government files related to Kincora were marked for closure of up to 100 years, far beyond the standard 30-year rule under the Public Records Act. This means many of the most sensitive documents may not be fully accessible until well into the 2080s. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why this is.
Despite repeated calls for transparency, including from survivors, journalists, and MPs, successive governments have stonewalled investigations. The 2017 Hart Inquiry, conducted in Northern Ireland, explicitly ruled out examining the role of MI5 and British intelligence, making it effectively toothless from the start, and leading to widespread criticism that the state was still protecting its own.
So, while there was no single ‘gagging order’ as in a courtroom injunction, the use of classified status, selective inquiry terms, and state secrecy has operated as a de facto gag order for over 40 years, and counting. It’s not just a cover-up. It’s an institutional strategy of silence, and Enoch Powell’s name, which is all over these allegations like a fucking rash, remains buried in that silence.
And you won't hear those wankspanners in Reform UK or GB News mention that, of course. They’ll praise him as a ‘truth-teller’ or a ‘patriot’, while conveniently forgetting he was a paranoid, bigoted crank who liked power and Latin more than he liked people, unless they were young, vulnerable boys in state care.
Pound Shop Powell Nigel Farage - the far-right do like their sexual predators
His so-called “prophecy” still echoes in the sick, sweaty corners of Telegram groups and right-wing podcasts, repeated by desperate white men who mistake losing unearned privilege for persecution. They can’t admit that the Black nurse, the Pakistani shopkeeper, the Afghan refugee, or the Polish carer are not the problem. Because if they did, they’d have to admit the real enemy wears a suit, dodges tax, and bullshits them with manufactured hate. So, the only people still clutching Powell’s speech like it’s scripture are embittered, small-minded ghouls. These are the sort who think being told "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is a hate crime, and who can’t go a day without whinging about “woke mobs” while crying into their Greggs sausage rolls because their local is now a halal chicken joint. They don't want fairness, they want supremacy, and when they can’t have it, they cry about oppression with the same performative self-pity as a toddler who’s been told no more CBeebies.
There are no rivers of blood. What there is are rivers of tea, of community, of shared language, of struggle and solidarity between people who’ve been shafted by capitalism, white, brown, Black, and who are smart enough to know their enemies aren’t the family next door who speaks Punjabi, but the slum landlord, the tax-dodging CEO and the politician who scapegoats migrants while flogging off the NHS to his brother-in-law. Instead of the rivers of blood they craved, there are rivers of bitterness pouring from sad little men who want to cosplay as victims so they can punch down with a clean conscience. Enoch Powell didn’t predict the future. He tried to poison it. And anyone still venerating him in 2025 isn’t just a racist, they’re a pathetic, brainwashed little shitbag mourning the loss of a Britain that never actually existed outside the head of a paedophile imperialist bastard.
So no, Powell’s speech hasn't come true. It’s stayed exactly where it belongs, in the dusty crypt of racist delusion, occasionally dug up and paraded by right-wing cunts who can’t handle a world where being white doesn’t get you a lifetime supply of unearned respect. When warm buckets of lumpy arse gravy like Musk say Britain is heading for civil war, they aren’t warning, they are fantasising. Just like Powell, he wants the chaos, because it justifies his reactionary vision of the world: a place ruled by tech elites, dominated by Western militarism, and purified of anything that threatens their god complex. It’s not a forecast. It’s a fetish.
Enoch Powell died in 1998, not in a blaze of vindication, but in lonely, bitter irrelevance: a relic of a Britain that had outgrown him. By the end, he was politically exiled, despised by both main parties, and reduced to ranting from the margins like a discredited prophet no one wanted to read anymore. His once-thunderous warnings had faded into the mutterings of a crank, his paranoia curdling into solitude. No rivers of blood, no civil war, just a tired old man watching the multicultural Britain he feared take root and thrive around him. And beneath it all, buried and unresolved, were the persistent allegations tying him to the horrors of the Kincora Boys’ Home, files sealed, questions unanswered, reputations protected. Powell didn’t die misunderstood, he died exposed: as a racist, a suspected predator, and a man whose legacy only survives in the dark corners of British nationalism, clung to by bitter little angry tossers who mistake his poison for truth.
