[TheHitman]

My dad lived in Liverpool 8 at the time which is one of the oldest migrant populations in the UK due to the docks, I'm a 7th generation immigrant basically most of my family were in the merchant navy going back 150 years.

It really did raise tension because the message although coming from a Conservative was felt most by a lot of the working classes think the dockers people working in car plants etc. These were the people who saw new faces who they thought were intrinsically different to them who were moving into their houses taking their jobs and hospital beds and god forbid messing about with their women from time to time.

I think the Enoch Powell story has taken a mythical twist he was a scholar a real wordsmith but a politician whose motives were maybe more to cause trouble within his own party. Didn’t he have a vendetta against his own leader having stood a couple of years earlier...

His department were responsible for recruiting nurses from the Caribbean and he had been a Wolverhampton mp for about twenty years(highly mixed area) when he made his speech and he didn’t vote in any bills against racial matters. So it seems unlikely that he felt that partisan as has been made out.

He knew what he was doing that doesn’t necessarily make him a racist in fact he supported Mau Mau detainees in Kenya who received shocking treatment.

To quote Tony Benn "Enoch Powell wasn’t a racialist but an inspirational figure for the racialists".

Sadly one thing that has come out of it is that people cant really talk about the issue of immigration without being labelled...