Brexit Where It Comes From: Reading Caryl Phillips’ Foreigners: Three English Lives; Its Historical Reality Replaced with Brexit Focused on Britain in 1969s and 2016 with Enoch Powell’s 1968 Speech, ‘Rivers of Blood’

Abstract

This paper looks back at some aspects of where Brexit comes from. In so doing, this essay analyses Caryl Phillips reportage, Foreigners: Three English Lives and investigates Britain in the 1960s, focusing on Leeds over the years. Taking different provocations of Brexit, this paper views Enoch Powell’s 1969 Rivers of Blood speech in Birmingham as a backdrop to Brexit since the speech’s implications and its percussions regard an instigation of racial issues politicised and police hostility to coloured races more often than British political issues. Along with Powellian views on immigration, this essay examines David Oluwale’s death and the involved events, prompted by the boldfaced racism that proliferated the 1960s. This essay looks at various immigration-control related Acts in 1962, 1968 and 1971, revised and repealed to restrict the number of Common Wealth immigrants flooding in. Accompanied by the Acts, Joseph Hunte’s Nigger Hunting in England in 1966 was published, and the Monday Club concerned about immigration was founded in 1968. Powell’s catalytic statement came across as gunpower amongst these resentments. This essay thus argues that ‘Rivers of Blood’ is well reflected on Oluwale’s being drowned in River Aire Leeds, and offers a rather lengthy reading of the story and moves on to establishing the influence of Powell’s in late 1960’ on wards and its spasmodic and powerful impact on British politics that led to Brexit in the midst of controversial debate that Powell was right. The EU referendum was offered in order to soften immigration issues, and ensure David Cameron’s security in his premiership in the boiling Tory Party. This paper thus proffers that the results of the referendum was partly a soft-core hate crime, since sharply rising from the June 2016 EU referendum.