Rivers of Blood
Just because Enoch Powell was intelligent does not make him any less objectionable; just because he spoke in clipped, educated tones does not make him any less racist; just because he was well-educated does not make him any less wrong.
Enoch Powell made his infamous speech in 1968; early in the speech, he quoted a constituent as saying that
[i]n this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.That would have been, at latest, 1988; in 1987, there were four black MPs returned to Parliament (Bernie Grant, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz). There had only been one previously, Shapurjee Saklatvala in 1922.
I will not recite the figures that suggest that non-whites have it, on average, rather harder than whites in the UK. The figures given by Powell for the number of immigrant and immigrant-descended Britons at the turn of the millennium is remarkably accurate; he suggested that ‘between five and seven million’ was accurate. National Statistics Online tells us that, at the 2001 census, there were 4,635,296 people from a non-white ethnic group. Unfortunately, he then went on to say that
Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
which will come as a surprise to the good burghers of Leicester, which will (I’m told) be the first majority non-white town in the UK in 2020. It is worth remembering that Powell (who, we are told in some quarters, was not a racist) saw not just immigrants, but also their descendants, as a threat to British society. Integration he saw as impossible and multiculturalism undesirable.
There is a very good article on Powell’s speech at Pickled Politics, and it links to a good article by Danny Finkelstein of The Times.
Looking at Nigel Hastilow’s post about his comments on Powell:
[...]Whatever happened to freedom of speech? The question keeps cropping up in the hundreds of the e-mails I’ve received in the past few days.
Nothing, as it happens. No legal sanction is being taken against him and no-one prevented him, nor would prevent him in the future, from having his peace. However, membership in an organisation requires adherence to its rules; if the rules for the Tory Party include ‘not praising racists’ or ‘not shooting your mouth off when you have a bit of profile’, sanctions against him from the Party don’t seem that unreasonable.
[...]My mistake was to invoke the name of Enoch Powell which, despite what I actually wrote, immediately branded me a racist. It also defined the media’s reaction to my article.
Yet to the Great British Voter, I struck a chord by saying the unsayable.
Hastilow essentially said ‘Enoch was right’. I believe that Powell was a racist. I have never met Mr Hastilow, but I believe that his understanding of Powell’s position is inaccurate and his understanding of the totemic nature of his name, lacking. It was not unsayable - Hastilow said it - it just didn’t need to be said.
This is an extraordinary position to be in. All I have done is express in plain English what I believe the vast majority of people now think, which is that we must call a halt to unlimited immigration.
That is an assertion, disproved by the non-existence of unlimited immigration and, if other parties (including the Conservatives, as they disciplined Hastilow) are not agreeing with his line, the lack of votes for virulently anti-immigration parties.
November 16th, 2007 at 7:10 am
[...] Blog Team wrote an interesting post today on Rivers of BloodHere’s a quick [...]
November 16th, 2007 at 8:52 am
Powell has to be understood in the context of his times. To call a black child a piccaninny is outrageous to us but it was par for the course in those days.
He was wrong in the context of the “black man” but right in the context of Islam.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
James,
I absolutely disagree with you.
Powell was not a man of his time or of any other time. Few were so learned as Powell, so he well knew the implications of what he was saying; people around him may have been less aware, but it does not excuse Powell.
If we are to understand Powell in the context of his times, it must be as the mouthpiece of unfounded fears of the new, the strange and the different. It was pandering to those who would march and riot, claiming that ‘Enoch was right’ and who didn’t make the subtle (but meaningless) distinctions that Powell did.
Even if it was ‘par for the course’, the invocation of his name by Hastilow, particularly given that Hastilow knew how people understood Powell, is unacceptable for someone who aspires to Parliament.
Then you talk about Islam, which has become the shibboleth for immigration today. Firstly, you blanket all ‘black men’ as one, and all ‘Muslims’ as one, despite being very heterogeneous groups. Secondly, you provide no evidence. Certainly, there has been conflict around the increasing visibility of Islam in Britain, but that conflict has been whipped up by modern-day versions of Powell. This follows, I’m afraid, in a long line of realising that past immigration was good but complaining against the modern version of it on the basis that ‘it’s gone too far’. First Jews, the Huguenots, then Irish, Caribbeans, gypsies, asylum seekers and now Muslims. I reject it wholeheartedly.
xD.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:41 am
[...] old chestnut that is MP’s pay has come around again. As I have said before, I find the Enoch Powell brand of politics somewhat distasteful, but there is at least one area where he may have been onto [...]