England, of which Powell was a member, took a different view. Upon Powell's death, black Barbados-born Wilfred Wood, then Bishop of Croydon, said "Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge". Conservative commentator Bruce Anderson has claimed that the Rivers of Blood speech would have come as a complete surprise to anyone who had studied Powell's record: he had been a West Midlands MP for 18 years but had said hardly anything about immigration. On this view, the speech was merely part of a badly miscalculated strategy to become party leader if Heath fell. Anderson adds that the speech had no effect on immigration, except to make it more difficult for the subject to be discussed rationally in polite society. Powell's opponents claimed he was far-right, fascist and racist. His supporters claim that the first two charges clash with his voting record on most social issues, such as homosexual law reform (he was actually a co-sponsor of a bill on this issue in May 1965 and opposed the death penalty, both reforms unpopular among Conservatives at the time; however, he kept a low profile to his stance on these non-party "issues of conscience"). Powell voted against the reinstitution of the death penalty several times between 1969 and 1987. By the early 1960s, Powell was in support of the campaign for immigration controls. The earliest and only statement from then by Powell on immigration was in August 1956, when, in Wolverhampton, Powell said that "a fundamental change in the law is necessary" in the UK's citizenship law. However, he explained that a change was not needed at that time, but did not rule out the possibility of a future change. In the late 1950s, when other Conservatives were advocating a campaign for immigration control following race riots, Powell declined to join them, remarking that it was no good discussing the details when the "real issue" of the citizenship laws had remained unchanged. In November 1960, Powell became one of nine members of the ministerial committee which wanted to introduce controls of Commonwealth immigration; he submitted a letter in April 1961 which said "if we desire to limitations or conditions on the entry of coloured British subjects into this country" a change in the existing legal definition of a "British subject" was needed, since the British Nationality Act of 1948 considered