For the last few weeks, the British media have been full of Enoch Powell, who seemingly still exerts a powerful presence from the astral plane. It is of course 40 years since his famous “rivers of blood” speech which got him sacked by Ted Heath, which gave him a cult status amongst disenfranchised-feeling working class white voters, and gave him a unique historical opportunity to build his own movement that just might have been able to turn the tide - which opportunity, sadly, he fumbled, preferring instead the backwater of Northern Irish politics. In retrospect, Powell seems paradoxically to have been too impractical, too un-political, and too loyal to the structures and institutions of society to be able to see the wider picture.
The 40 year symbolism has not been lost on immigration enthusiasts, who have commissioned a series of TV and radio programmes and stunts, such as Trevor Phillips making a speech on race in the same room that Powell used for his speech. They wish to put their own post-facto spin on events whilst wishing to be seen to be addressing an issue that is of the greatest concern to many people in
But even the BBC, Channel 4, etc have had to admit that he got some things right. If anything, Powell understated the numbers involved, and he was absolutely right to foresee that mass immigration would cause considerable social tension and disharmony – not to mention the race riots of the 1980s, or 2004, or the bomb attacks on
A new fond illusion has been born in the last few weeks – that had it not been for Powell’s “intemperate” language in that speech, the powers-that-be would have come to a sensible and statesmanlike arrangement. But of course the reason he spoke out in the first place was precisely because the powers-that-be had until then chosen to do nothing (despite the private misgivings of many Conservative and Labour MPs and peers), and were even then already coming down hard on people who stepped out of line on immigration. They have maintained this policy of decidedly unmasterly inactivity ever since – Labour because it had a sincere horror of anything that smacked of racial discrimination and also because it wanted more voters, the Tories because they were too shortsighted and complacent - the “That’ll never happen here!” approach.
Whatever his practical shortcomings, Powell had the courage to throw away his career for his convictions, and his formidable reputation gave intellectual credibility to the cause of immigration restriction – to the extent that we cannot discuss this subject even now without invoking his ghost. When Tony Benn, Roy Hattersley and all the other apologists for English extinction have been mercifully forgotten, there will probably always be people in
* A gloomy survey in April reported that two-thirds of Britons fear that race relations are so poor that they could at any time boil over into violence, while 60% believed there were too many immigrants in the country, and 49% wanted foreigners to be encouraged to leave.