Braverman speech is no Enoch Powell situation

Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s rhetoric is not comparable to that of Enoch Powell, Grant Shapps has said.

The defence secretary defended his colleague’s claim that a “hurricane” of mass migration is coming to the UK, saying her point was “correct”.

Her Conservative conference speech has been compared by some to Mr Powell’s infamous anti-immigrant 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech.

Enoch Powell, a Tory MP, was ejected from the shadow cabinet as a result.

In her speech, Ms Braverman said politicians have been “too squeamish” to take action on immigration.

“The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th Century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming,” she said.

The speech has been criticised by some.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accused Ms Braverman of sounding “like Enoch Powell”, while Andrew Boff, a Conservative member of the London Assembly, was escorted from the conference hall after protesting that she was “transphobic and homophobic”.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas called it an “utterly repulsive speech”. UN Human Rights Commissioner Volker Türk said “stoking fears, devaluing others, and dividing society” are the “politics of distraction”.

Following the speech, Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch told a Spectator conference event that politicians should be careful about how immigration policies are discussed “so that people aren’t getting echoes of things that were less palatable”.

Fellow cabinet minister Michelle Donelan later declined to repeat the rhetoric used by the home secretary, telling BBC Newsnight: “I would say it’s a problem, my language is different to her language.”

But Mr Shapps said Ms Braverman’s speech was “certainly no Enoch Powell situation”.

He pointed out that the home secretary’s parents moved to the UK in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius.

“She makes the absolutely correct point we’ve already seen a lot of movement,” he told Times Radio. “We could see a lot more, a hurricane, as she describes it, of people moving.”

Delivered to local Conservative Party members in Birmingham, days before the second reading of the 1968 Race Relations Bill, then-MP Enoch Powell referenced observations made by his Wolverhampton constituents, including “in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.

Mr Powell, who died in 1998, ended with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, when civil war in Italy is predicted with “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.

The anti-immigration speech ended his career in Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet.

The Race Relations Act made it illegal to refuse housing, employment or public services to people because of their ethnic background.

— Reports /TrainViral/