Newsnight interview with Nick Griffin after the Burnley race riots, 2001

In 1968, English politician Enoch Powell delivered a controversial speech known as Rivers of Blood, in which he predicted that the UK’s immigration policy would result in violence on the streets of Britain. It is among the best-known speeches in the British political history. However, what dominated the discussion most was the incendiary nature of his language. This documentary examines the effect of this speech on the country’s immigration policy. Rivers of Blood examines Powell’s character and the notions of his speech. It shows how it bitterly divided the entire nation at a time when Powell was a member of Prime Minister Edward Heath’s cabinet. Due to its inflammatory nature, Powell was dismissed by the political establishment who considered it racist and divisive, and his sacking sparked furious debate. The documentary traces the effects of Powell’s address on immigration law in Britain. On its 40th anniversary, it digs deeper into the controversial claims and counter-claims surrounding Enoch Powell.

Last November, celebrations to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall were overshadowed by a palpable sense of unease in parts of Europe. To be sure, the events of those weeks through late 1989 and beyond were hugely significant - iconic moments in history that came to symbolise the end of the Cold War and the decades of nuclear-tipped standoff between West and East. Many Europeans felt that things could never be the same again, that their continent had seen the back of communist totalitarianism and repression and that a new age of peace and prosperity and democracy beckoned. But in the years since, some of those dreams have turned sour amid rising xenophobia and nationalism in nations that once lay behind the Iron Curtain. Heady enthusiasm has been replaced by growing uncertainty, the world has somehow become darker and more menacing than many ever believed it would be. Things, in other words, didn't quite turn out as the optimists expected. There are myriad reasons for this - and of course, many of them are linked to the wider global political and economic concerns that have emerged over the last 30 years - but at least some of what troubles the continent now can be traced back to the scars left by the Cold War and the way countries handled the transition away from the authoritarianism that suffocated parts of Eastern Europe for so long.

This documentary followed the lives of women who married into and work for the British National Party, including the party’s South East regional secretary Lynne Mozar, and Marlene Guest, an anti-Pakistani grooming activist in Rotherham, who described herself as a believer in the Holocaust - “just not sure about the numbers”.