When Enoch Powell made his Rivers of Blood speech on April 20 1968 he was 56 years old. No one was willing to take a stand as principled as his against immigration at the time. In the week of his Birmingham address he confided to Glen Jones, a local newspaper editor: “When the rocket goes up in the sky the stars are going to stay up in the firmament.” Powell believed immigration would change neighbourhoods forever, that children would be unable to attain school places. In many ways he correctly predicted the dispossession white Britons would face – though Rivers of Blood failed to point out where white Britons would get on positively with ethnic minorities.

Powell saw racial strife in America. Rivers of Blood was orated two weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and on Powell’s travels in India he viewed the enmity that existed between Hindu and Muslim. In fearing such trouble in England he has been proved part right as there were riots motivated by race and culture in Brixton and Bradford in the 1980s, in Oldham in 2001 and in South London in 2011. In the latter instance the feral white underclass created by mass immigration and multiculturalism merged with their fellow nihilistic BME (anyone but a native Briton) cohort and looted as part of a so-called protest – because it’s the government’s fault, innit.

However, as someone who has lived with the consequences of post-war immigration I have developed many friendships that I otherwise would never have had. In terms of the disintegration of British society into disparate interest groups the ‘funeral pyre’ of this once unified nation is crackling, but perhaps not exactly in the way Powell predicted.

If we take Rivers of Blood as allegorical of the death of Britain, the nation that existed at the time of his speech, then in many ways he is spot on. A nation is defined as a large body of people united by a common descent, culture or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory. Due to mass immigration Britain is laden with myriad cultures that meet this definition independently of the host culture. Resultantly, the nation to which Powell belonged is dying, or more accurately, it is being murdered.

By describing some black people as “piccaninnies” Powell made a huge mistake, and the insight provided in his speech has lost a lot of its edifying power due to this poor turn of phrase. The far-left charge of ‘scaremongering’ was already in full effect at this time, but Powell offered a fair rebuttal by saying:

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘If only’, they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.’

Powell relayed a conversation he had with a constituent, which is as poignant now as it was then. Quoting the constituent Powell said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” This highlights the trauma of dispossession suffered by BritonsÂ as a result of the unwanted apportioning of their territory and resources.

Since Tony Blair launched his cynical programme of population replacement, sustained under David Cameron, at least eight million immigrants have come into Britain and two million indigenous Brits have responded by moving out.

There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

The truth of this has been buried under platitudes of ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’, elements of relentless state propaganda at a scale that perhaps even Goebbels could not have pulled off. Here Powell simply points out that a lot of immigrants did want to integrate but also that a lot had no intention of doing so. One only has to walk down the street today and hear the cacophony of every language save English to realise this; or see the countless people dressed in failed state attire.

Powell affirmed that minorities should be equal under the law. He opposed the Race Relations Bill as he believed the state had no business in choosing who to employ. Today the state agrees to this as long as the employers are not white Brits.

Enoch wanted what the majority of white Britain still wants: the preservation of their culture and heritage. For making a stand for his country, his culture and his people Powell was branded a “racialist” – the obtuse epithet of the age which presaged contemporary terms like “racist” and “Islamophobe”, terms that preclude discussion of ideas or beliefs.

After Rivers of Blood Powell received 100,000 letters and 700 telegrams: less than 1% challenged his views. Two days after ITN aired the speech thousands of dock workers went to Parliament chanting, “We want Enoch Powell.” One protester said at the time the principle issue was not immigration but the loss of freedom of speech for the Englishman inside his own land due to immigration policy.

This was prescient in many ways. In 2014 Liberty GB’s own leader Paul Weston was arrested outside Winchester Guildhall for reading from Sir Winston Churchill’s book, The River War. For criticising Islam – about whose entry into Britain no one was ever asked – Paul was thrown into a police cell for a supposed “racially aggravated” offence. The case was later dropped,

When asked in an interview on the BBC whether he was a “racialist”, Powell said that he was not, “if a racialist is a man who despises one for belonging to one race”.

After being ousted from the Conservative Party by Ted Heath, Powell became an Ulster Unionist – and multiculturalism became state policy.

Roy Jenkins, a liberal MP who treasonously undermined Britain’s culture by promoting multiculturalism and non-assimilation after Powell’s fall later recanted. In reference to the presence of Muslims in Britain he said he did not see mass immigration as leading to a “struggle for human rights” (BBC, Rivers of Blood, 2008). The Salman Rushdie affair would have been a good time to stop importing Muslims en masse; but this would have disrupted the Left’s plan and so was always going to encounter opposition.

It is a travesty that our political class and media pay deference to Muhammad by punishing ‘blasphemy’, whilst contrarily demonising Powell. I know which one’s my prophet, do you?