What Enoch was really saying
Simon Heffer says that angry demonstrations by British
Muslims against the war on terror suggest that the ‘Rivers
of Blood’ speech should have been heeded: Powell’s chief
concern was culture, not race
Reading reports of a church in Bradford being set fire to by Islamic extremists a fortnight ago, and wondering only half in jest whether these people should be asked to sign a pledge of toleration towards Christians, my thoughts turned again to Enoch Powell. The recent exposure of cracks in our so-called ‘multicultural’ society, as a result of the war against terrorism, has brought his Birmingham speech of April 1968 back to several people’s minds. Lord Deedes has claimed that Powell’s remarks — known to posterity, somewhat inaccurately, as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech — were to blame for our current problems with multiculturalism. The line is that Powell created a climate in which it became impossible for politicians to address matters of immigration policy in a fashion that would have avoided today’s difficulties. The notion is, it seems, that integration and a better establishment of a brotherhood of man would have been far easier but for Enoch stirring things up. It was an argument taken up, too, by the editor of this magazine; and yet for all the eminence of those who advance it, it is nonsense.
Anyone who has studied immigration policy in the 1950s and 1960s — and Lord Deedes was a Cabinet minister for part of that time — knows that sensible and rational treatment of the issue was off the agenda long before Powell raised the subject. Powell himself, as a housing minister in 1956, sat on a cross-departmental committee that considered aspects of the effects of mass immigration. Even then he was aware of problems growing in his own Wolverhampton constituency because of the concentration of immigrants in small urban areas. The decision by the committee to ignore his representations on the subject was not unusual. As Andrew Roberts has pointed out in his excellent analysis of Tory policy on immigration in the 1950s, the options ranged from turning a blind eye at one extreme to sheer cowardice at the other. Often, these issues are seen in the narrow context of controlling the sheer numbers of immigrants. Powell, however, saw early on that the cultural clash which such large numbers caused was by far the more explosive problem, and required even more urgent treatment.
It was not so much the colour of people’s skins that Powell was alerting us to in his speech; it was the problem of allowing their cultures to supplant the indigenous one. The word ‘multiculturalism’ was not in his vocabulary, but the speech was a warning against it. It was a warning to politicians of the mess they were storing up for the future by their refusal to act on this problem when it was ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’. The angry demonstrations by British Muslims against the native civilisation that we have seen in recent weeks, and which have helped drive the Home Secretary to propose some draconian laws to keep the peace in multicultural Britain, are symbols of the extreme behaviour that has been made inevitable by the failure to heed what Powell said.
In 1958, after the Notting Hill riots, the Tory backbencher Cyril Osborne — a veteran of the Great War and no weakling — was reduced to tears by the humiliation he received at the hands of his colleagues at a meeting of the 1922 committee, when he urged action on the government. Powell was present at the meeting, and told me 35 years later that his remaining silent during the attack on Osborne by bien-pensant Tory MPs was something he had felt ashamed of ever after. Very few of them had any experience of sitting for areas where large-scale immigration was a problem; indeed, Osborne himself sat for rural Lincolnshire. Only with great reluctance, and to little discernible effect, did the Macmillan government push through the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, to try to control numbers. It failed utterly to have any effect on the main social problem caused by immigration: that people sometimes of a culture at great variance to that of their host country settled in communities and adopted a communal outlook, rather than settling across the whole country in a way that would allow them to integrate most successfully into the predominant culture. No one took any steps to deal with this problem before 20 April 1968, so to argue that Powell’s speech made any odds in the matter is entirely spurious. Indeed, had any attempts been made to discourage the growth of what has come to be known as multiculturalism, Powell would probably never have felt the need to speak as he did.
In fact, recent events such as the burning of that church, and the open allegiance that some British subjects of Muslim origin feel towards the enemies of their country, cast Powell’s speech in a wholly different light. It can, and should, be seen as the first blast of the trumpet against the dangers of multiculturalism, but what Powell called communalism. The generation of politicians of all parties who failed to deal with this problem is now mostly dead. It will not do for the few who survive, or for their successors, to attack Powell for the crime of being right, and for speaking up after over ten years of watching the political class of which he was a member doing less than nothing about a problem that was even then already painfully apparent to millions from all ethnic backgrounds.
Powell well knew the extent of the cowardice he was up against. ‘The supreme function of statesmanship,’ he began when he rose to speak on that Saturday morning nearly 34 years ago, ‘is to provide against preventable evils.’ He identified the main impediment to the required act of statesmanship, one apparently still in place today: ‘If only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.’ He defended himself for breaking the taboo. ‘Those who knowingly shirk [the responsibility to discuss problems connected with immigration] deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.’ Repeating the first of two incendiary anecdotes, about the constituent who told him that within 15 or 20 years ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ (the other was the one about the little old lady who had shit put through her letter-box), Powell predicted what would happen to him. ‘I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so.’ With parts of Britain, including his own constituency, undergoing a cultural transformation ‘to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history’, Powell asserted that, as an MP confronted with such concerns, ‘I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else.’ His party, however, happily did, then and for many years afterwards, which perhaps explains the sensitivities of some of its luminaries on the subject even today.
Much of the speech, as is well known, was about instituting a system of voluntary repatriation. For all the revulsion this caused at the time, that particular idea was Tory party policy and was enshrined in law in 1971. Yet this plea was given force by Powell’s warnings of what would happen if multiculturalism were to grow unchecked. He wanted everyone to be equal before the law. ‘This does not mean,’ he argued, ‘that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class.’ Those who have wondered why the inflammatory statements of certain Muslim extremists in this country, including calls for the murder of the President of Pakistan, have not caused those extremists to be prosecuted would do well to think about Powell’s warning.
Until a few years before he made the speech, Powell had thought it would be possible to integrate the immigrant population into the indigenous society. Now the sheer numbers and their concentration on certain areas made such a hope impossible. Now he gave his starkest warning about what we call multiculturalism: ‘There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last 15 years or so many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one to boot.’
Powell knew that economic circumstances, such as the availability of cheap rented accommodation, had hitherto acted to force immigrants to settle in small areas. ‘Now,’ however, he warned, ‘we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.’ It was then ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’; but he quoted a Labour minister, and fellow West Midlands MP, John Stonehouse, who had warned of the dangers of Sikhs campaigning to maintain customs ‘inappropriate to Britain’. Stonehouse had said that ‘to claim special communal rights ...leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another, it is to be strongly condemned.’ Yet nobody listened, either to Powell or to Stonehouse.
Everybody knows the peroration of the speech, or thinks he does. What immediately preceded it, however, was the definition of the evils of multiculturalism when allowed to flourish in a monocultural society unwilling and unprepared for it. It is worth quoting in full:
Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members to agitate and campaign against their fellow-citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.
He concluded that ‘to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal’. The hatred poured down on him was as much in resentment of his drawing attention to this destructive force as in an ignorant belief — for the text does not bear such an assumption out — that Powell was being ‘racist’.
I have often wondered, since 11 September, what Powell would have made of current events. He would not, I suspect, have approved of our support for America, because he regarded America in terms not very far removed from the Guardian’s or Osama bin Laden’s, though in the second of those cases for very different reasons. Yet he would have been more diverted by the spectacle of those who owe allegiance to the Crown declaring, instead, that they would rather fight for the Taleban. He would have reacted with dismay, but not surprise, at stories of mosques being hijacked from their congregations of decent, moderate Muslims and manipulated into breeding grounds of extremism. He would have watched the reporting of the church being burned and seen it as utterly symbolic of what happens when you encourage an alien culture not to co-exist with, but to confront, another. He would have been in no doubt that he had been proved right.
His speech did not prevent remedial action being taken to prevent the growth of multiculturalism. There was never any will to do it. Because of the damage done even by the accusation of racism, no politician would have attempted to prevent it, even if Powell had not spoken. Even in the last election campaign Mr Hague, then the Tory leader, made some half-witted comments in support of multiculturalism, a phenomenon he plainly did not understand. And, when Lady Thatcher quite sensibly denounced the whole concept as divisive, Michael Portillo tried to have her bundled into a cupboard and not let out again. We have taken a long time to learn, but, had we only had eyes to see and ears to hear, Enoch tried to teach us. Rather than make him into the most inappropriate scapegoat for the failings of his whole political generation, and others since, we should instead offer him the most contrite of posthumous apologies.
Simon Heffer is a columnist for the Daily Mail. His life of Enoch Powell,
Like the Roman, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Phoenix
Paperbacks.
-- Anonymous, November 27, 2001