By Geoff Russ, June 19, 2026
In an ideal world, the name Enoch Powell would be a footnote in history, and the apocalyptic predictions about the future of Britain made in his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech would not matter there or anywhere else.
Powell was born in England in 1912. He was an accomplished scholar in classics before enlisting in the British Army during the Second World War, later becoming the Conservative MP for the West Midlands seat of Wolverhampton South West, and then the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down in Northern Ireland.
On April 20, 1968, Powell delivered his famous, or notorious, speech, beginning with the words, “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
In his polemic, Powell argued that British politicians had to confront those “preventable evils,” and that growing immigration from the Commonwealth, when concentrated in particular towns and neighbourhoods, would make integration harder and create profound social conflict.
Powell called for immigration “for settlement” to be reduced to negligible levels, supported voluntary re-emigration, and opposed the Race Relations Bill then before Parliament, arguing that it dangerously privileged the grievances of one group over those of another.
The speech’s most famous line was, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”
Powell closed with a warning: “All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.”
Just a day after delivering the speech, Powell was dismissed from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, and he would leave the party altogether in 1974. For years, Powell was treated as a pariah and political bogeyman in Westminster.
One user on X recently suggested that Powell may have attacked the immigration file with undue alarm than was warranted at the time: “Enoch Powell was a lunatic who did more damage to the cause of limited immigration than any other anglosphere politician – his vile crashout over a few thousand West Indians and Kenyan Asians (most of whom adapted well, especially the latter) made it impossible to have a reasonable conversation on the subject for decades, by which point the damage was done.”
Powell need not be martyred or lionized as a sort of Cassandra for people to start loudly pointing out that social cohesion in the Anglosphere is declining to the point of becoming dangerous. Canadian authorities will still ignore Powell, but they can ill-afford to ignore the trends – like foreign influence in politics, transnational violence, and anti-racism policies that have contributed to the deaths of British citizens – that are breathing new life into Powellism in the United Kingdom today.
For instance, on the night of June 8 in Belfast, a man was filmed pinning someone down on the street and attacking him with a blade before locals and police stopped the assault. The scene is too grim to merit further description here, but the footage soon went viral. Fortunately, the victim survived the attack, and the assailant was taken into police custody.
The suspect is reportedly a 30-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan who was charged with attempted murder, among other crimes. By morning, the British governing class was already clutching at its well-worn rosary of platitudes, calling for “calm” and “due process.”
On December 3 of last year, 18-year-old Henry Nowak was returning home in Southampton when he was murdered by Vickrum Singh Digwa, a Sikh man with a history of violent tendencies.
After stabbing Nowak multiple times, Digwa called the police and falsely claimed that Nowak had attacked and racially abused him. The officers treated Nowak as the suspect and placed him in handcuffs as the teenager lay dying and begging for aid. When Nowak told them he had been stabbed, the response from one officer was, “I don’t think you have, mate.”
It has become a major scandal, with calls to revise or abolish the anti-racism doctrines that British police have been increasingly subjected to since the 1990s.
Digwa is one of a number of convicted, British-born murderers whose crimes are cracking the image of the modern United Kingdom as a country that celebrates its official global, multicultural identity, in which asylum seekers are sacred, and differences allegedly make the country stronger.
Homegrown British terrorists, often born to immigrant parents, were responsible for the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing that killed 22 people, the 2013 killing of British soldier Lee Rigby, and the July 7, 2005, London bombings, which killed 52. All of these crimes were motivated by Islamic terrorism.
Certainly, not every person of immigrant descent in Britain is a terrorist, or the country would have collapsed into civil war long ago. However, there is a clear pattern of non-integration and radicalization in the ever-more-diverse country.
In addition to terrorism, there is Britain’s grooming-gang epidemic. For years, men of mostly Pakistani descent led organized networks that manipulated and sexually abused mainly white British girls. When convicted, many of them were reported to have had racial motivations for targeting them.
When the government finally produced a national audit on the grooming gangs, it found that institutions, including police and other public bodies, did not address the ethnic and cultural aspects of the grooming gangs, “for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems.”
The British state’s first loyalty should have been to those girls, but those public bodies were too fearful of being labelled as bigots to protect them.
A day after the recent attack in Belfast, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated that “the horrific attack in Belfast last night is sickening. I have absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.”
On the level of words, Keir Starmer was correct. However, the problem is that the form of progressive ideology that has taken hold across the West does, in fact, depend on tolerance for the conditions that make such violence more likely.
Porous border controls, indulgent rules for asylum seekers, and institutional squeamishness about naming criminal patterns all converge and can lead to the loss of innocent life.
More importantly, mainstream progressives and even conservatives have embraced the idea that international immigration and labour mobility are paramount, despite clear evidence that integration and assimilation are increasingly lacking. In fact, there are strong indicators that people of second- and third–generation backgrounds in Western countries are more susceptible to extremist foreign ideologies.
While condemning Canada’s rapid rise in antisemitic hate crimes in recent years, often committed by “New Canadians,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said, “When you come to Canada, you bring your faith, your tradition, your language, your story … you leave behind your wars and your animosities.”
That is all well and good, but what if those wars and animosities are part of a diaspora’s story and traditions? The fact that Carney’s words were treated as newsworthy shows just how far Ottawa has to go when it comes to reassessing its own attitudes towards diversity.
The impacts of unfettered and uncontrolled immigration are also impacting electoral politics. Consider Canada’s Industry Minister, Mélanie Joly, who reportedly said that the shifting demographics of her increasingly Arab riding have influenced her foreign policy positions.
In the Ontario Liberal nomination race for the riding of Scarborough Southwest last month, veteran federal Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith lost to Ahsanul Hafiz, the latter of whom was born in Bangladesh. The riding is heavily Bangladeshi, and neither Erskine-Smith nor Hafiz had a meaningful history of residing there.
Erskine-Smith alleged that the nomination had voter-identification problems and said scrutineers had “never seen anything like it.” Canadian political parties have long treated diaspora blocs as vote banks to be harvested. Now, many of those vote banks are harvesting the parties themselves, and ethnic in-group preference over merit is a critical factor.
This, more so than the murder of Henry Nowak, is the grim future that Powell referred to in the “Rivers of Blood” speech. One writer in The Telegraph argued that, “aspects of Powell’s prophecies have been translated into reality, and perhaps never so clearly as in the use of local government elections to create a class of elected representatives whose principal concern is with their specific culture, not with the business of governing localities.”
When multicultural politics are treated so opportunistically and so cynically, it is no surprise that what begins as flattery ends in capture. That is the mildest consequence of a politics that pretends tribalism will magically disappear when newcomers pass customs at Canadian airports.
The Canadian immigration system has been so lenient in recent years that it has allowed the full-scale infiltration of criminal networks, such as the Indian-origin Bishnoi gang, which is also listed as a terrorist entity by the federal government. Its members have been linked to murder, shootings, arson, extortion, and intimidation in diaspora communities. Canadian police even received a letter boasting of “upwards of 1,000” people willing to carry out shootings for the group.
Our immigration policy, like those of Britain and other countries, has been allowed to devolve into a repository for overseas conflicts, gangsters, and ethnic patronage that make a liberal society impossible.
Canada works in spite of the many differences in its population, not because of them. But we can only manage such a multitude of different patriotisms, motivations, and impulses for so long, and hiding behind words like “diversity” and “multiculturalism” will not suffice.
For instance, Canada should emulate recent developments in Europe to reign in uncontrolled immigration: In Sweden, the country’s progressive government has just passed new immigration laws that make residency conditional upon good behaviour, including, but not restricted to, fulfilling tax obligations, obeying the law, and maintaining distance from extremist organizations. Furthermore, the laws obligate specific public agencies to report when they discover that migrants have no legal right to be in Sweden.
In British Columbia, provincial Conservative Party leadership candidate Caroline Elliott has advocated for a Canadian values test similar to the controversial values test proposed in 2017 by Kellie Leitch, a former federal Conservative Party leadership candidate. Though such tests would need to be fairly minimalistic and well-crafted to gain necessary assent, as Elliott noted, the need for such a values test has only become more salient in the past few years.
With so much documented open praise for terrorism in Canada and a dangerous level of infiltration by foreign militants and ideologies, taking cues from Sweden and Canadian thinkers and figures like Elliott and Leitch are critical.
Canada cannot copy every provision of Sweden’s new laws, but we certainly can begin the discussion on how to end the chaos caused by unfettered immigration. Since our politicians seem to be too afraid to speak up, everyday citizens must lead the discussion. We must demand that police enforce the laws already on the books to maintain basic societal standards and expectations. We must push our politicians to do a better job of screening who we let into the country and explore measures such as the retroactive revocation of citizenship for newcomers who engage in extremist or criminal activities.
None of this should be controversial, and all of it is urgently needed.
For the past two years, the annual intake of immigrants into Canada has been modestly reduced for economic reasons, but these cuts will not be permanent. Will crime, culture, and integration be considered in future immigration policy? Failing to do so would be a dereliction of duty, in the face of obvious and preventable evils.
Geoff Russ is the editor-at-large of Without Diminishment. He is also a contributor to the National Post, Modern Age, and the Spectator Australia. He can be reached on X.com at @GeoffRuss3.
