内容摘要：They reassure her they are police officers but reveal nothing beyond that.

They reassure her they are police officers but reveal nothing beyond that.

The second is the now notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech given by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in which he quoted a constituent, "a decent ordinary fellow Englishman", who told him that he wanted his three children to emigrate because "in this country in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man".The white British population, he said, "found themselves strangers in their own country".

Powell had touched a nerve in a Britain which had brought hundreds of thousands of people from the West Indies, India and Pakistan in the years after the war.The Conservative Party leader Edward Heath sacked him from the front bench. The leaders of all the main parties denounced him. The Times called the speech "evil"; it was, the paper said, "the first time a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way".But the editor of a local paper in Wolverhampton, where Powell had made his speech, said Heath had "made a martyr" of Powell. In the days after the speech his paper received nearly 50,000 letters from readers: "95% of them", he said, "were pro-Enoch". For a time, the phrase "Enoch was right" entered the political discourse.

Powell had exposed a gap between elite opinion and a growing sense of alienation and resentment in large sections of the population. What was emerging was a sense, among some, that elites of both right and left, out of touch with ordinary voters' experience, were opening the borders of Britain and allowing large numbers of people into the country.It became part of a cultural fault line that went on to divide British politics. Many white working-class voters would, in time, abandon Labour and move to parties of the right. Labour would become aligned with the pursuit of progressive causes. In the 20th century it had drawn much of its support from workers in the factories, coal mines, steel works and shipyards of industrial Britain. By the 21st century, its support base was more middle class, university-educated, and younger than ever before.

It has been a slow tectonic shift in which class-based party allegiances gradually gave way to what we now recognise as identity politics and the rise of populist anti-elite sentiment.

And at the heart of this shift lay attitudes to immigration and race. Prime ministers have repeatedly tried to soothe public concern; to draw a line under the issue. But worries have remained. After that pivotal year 1968, for the rest of the 20th Century the number of people who thought there were "too many immigrants" in the country remained well above 50%, according to data analysed by the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory.Almost everyone who arrives by small boat claims asylum - they made up a third of all asylum applications over the past 12 months. Another large group of claimants were people already in the UK who had overstayed their visas.

The asylum process determines whether a person can remain in the UK because they have a "well-founded fear of persecution" in their home country.Since 2020, the government has been increasingly reliant on hotels, partly because the supply of other types of asylum accommodation has not kept up with the numbers arriving in small boats.

But using asylum hotels is expensive -As of 20 May, 12,748 people had arrived in the UK in small boats - up by nearly a third compared with this time last year.