Background
Powell made the speech at 2.30 p.m. in the Midland Hotel (now The Burlington Hotel), on New Street in Birmingham, to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre. The Labour government's Race Relations Bill 1968 was to have its second reading the following Tuesday, and the Conservative Opposition had tabled an amendment significantly weakening its provisions. The Bill was a successor to the Race Relations Act 1965.
The Birmingham-based television company ATV saw an advance copy of the speech on the Saturday morning, and its news editor ordered a television crew to go to the venue, where they filmed sections of the speech. Earlier in the week, Powell said to his friend Clement Jones, who was a journalist at the Wolverhampton Express & Star, "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."
Read more about this topic: Rivers Of Blood Speech
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