Wolverhampton became a byword for hostility towards inhabitants who were not white and British when in 1968 Enoch Powell, a local MP, made a speech to his fellow Conservatives in which he called for people like my parents to be repatriated. As warning of what could happen should immigrants continue to be allowed into Britain he referenced a prophecy made in ancient Rome that predicted civil war with the River Tiber ‘foaming with much blood’. He also likened the anti-discriminatory Race Relations Bill, which was about to be enacted by a Labour government, to ‘throwing a match on gunpowder’. What Powell did in reality was to ignite a campaign of racist violence and the town’s black people continued to be attacked by thugs patrolling the streets in their cars. During my teenage years my friends and I went through that sort of frightening experience on so many occasions that it is hard to put a number on it – but what does remain is the distinct memory of the fear I felt while being chased by a gang of grown men. For the far-right Powell ‘Enoch was right’ became a rallying cry and in 1976, according to reports in the press, in a drunken rant on stage in Birmingham, ‘rock legend’ Eric Clapton shouted that Powell was a politician that would stop Britain from becoming a ‘black colony’ and that ‘black wogs and coons and fucking Jamaicans don’t belong here’. Powell left the Conservatives for the Ulster Unionist Party in 1974 and although I wasn’t aware then of how much Enoch Powell and his followers had affected my young mind’s view of the world, I can look back now and see the impact they had on my life choices. Powell’s decision to take up a parliamentary seat in the South Down constituency would be something which helped me to later feel a connection with some of the people in that part of Ireland; and despite the many good and decent British people I worked and shared friendships with, from very early on, I decided that Britain was not a place I would rear my children. Powell and his ilk did not deserve them.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/14/enoch-powell-rivers-blood-legacy-wolverhampton