Thanks to Ic1male80 and BritishAvtivism for digging out these interviews. Enoch Powell is interviewed about the response to his famous and often vilified speech "Rivers of Blood".
Interviewer: What do you see as the likely prospect now? Still the "River Tiber foaming with blood"?
Enoch Powell: The likely prospect is that politicians of all parties will say: "Well, Enoch Powell was right, but we don´t say that in public but we know it in private... Enoch Powell is right and it will no doubt develop as he says.
But perhaps its better for us to do nothing now, and let it happen, perhaps after our time, than to seize the many poisonous nettles, which we would have to seize if we at this this stage were to attempt to revert the outcome.
So let it go on until a third of central London, a third of Birmingham and Wolverhampton are covered, until the civil war comes. Let it go on, we won´t be blamed. We will either be gone or slip out from underneath somewhere"
The interesting BBC documentary about this speech is available here, along with the full transcript... including the crucial first paragraphs which was carefully omitted from the BBC documentary for whatever reason :-)
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: At each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.
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'. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical. At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it, deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.
Read on All Enoch Powell material collected here
