Tonight, to mark the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s notorious Rivers of Blood speech, the BBC’s broadcasting it in full for the first time. And (predictably!) the Left and social media are in uproar
When enoch Powell died in 1998, he was mourned across the political spectrum.
Tony Blair hailed him as ‘one of the great figures of 20th-century British politics’. Lady Thatcher remarked that ‘there will never be another enoch’. And Old Labour’s Tony Benn, a friend throughout his 36 years in Parliament, attended his funeral at St Margaret’s Church, in the grounds of Westminster Abbey.
Whatever one thought of Powell’s often highly divisive views — in particular the notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech about immigration, for which he was rightly accused of stirring up racial hatred — friend and foe agreed he was a gifted and influential man whose five-decade-long career had left an indelible mark on public life.
his obituary in the Guardian, where he was a columnist for many years, described him as ‘ a man of the hard Right who could be a sensitive social reformer’. It added that his life took in ‘glittering’ stints as ‘ a soldier, scholar, statesman, arch-rebel [and] poet’.
As these tributes suggest, Powell had been a major figure in postwar politics.
What, then, should we make of this week’s kerfuffle over a decision by the BBC to mark the 50th anniversary of the ‘ Rivers of Blood’ speech by broadcasting Powell’s remarks in full for the first time?
Radio 4’s Archive On 4 tonight will have actor Ian McDiarmid voicing the words Powell delivered at a Conservative Party meeting in Birmingham on April 20, 1968.
The reading will be interspersed with commentary from academics, politicians and race-relations campaigners seeking to explore the contents of the speech and assess its historical impact.
In keeping with the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, there will be a range of views — some voices will be critical and others supportive.
It is hard, on the face of things, to see why anyone might be particularly outraged by this journalistic exercise.
It is, after all, being broadcast in an offpeak slot on a radio station with a small and relatively highbrow demographic of listeners.
Yet in today’s febrile public arena, we are never more than one attention-seeking tweet away from an outbreak of online hysteria. And, inevitably, this has happened after the BBC announced details of tonight’s broadcast. Labour peer Lord Adonis called for the programme to be pulled because he said it represents ‘ an incitement to racial hatred’.
Adonis, an arch- Remainer Blairite, has spent recent weeks at war with the BBC, largely over its coverage of Brexit.
On Thursday, he fired off the first of several dozen furious tweets, arguing that broadcasting an actor’s rendition of the Powell speech (no contemporary recording of the 3,000- word original exists) is nothing less than a ‘hate crime’.
Adonis also wrote to Sharon White, head of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, asking for the programme to be removed from the schedules. he said it was ‘ the most incendiary racist speech of modern Britain’.
In the echo chamber of social media, his comments triggered depressingly predictable howls of outrage. Within a few hours, Dr Shirin hirsch, a researcher at Wolverhampton University who had contributed to the programme, said she had been driven ‘sick with worry’ and asked for her contribution to be removed.
Last night, the BBC agreed, saying it would re-edit the hourlong programme to remove Ms hirsch, effectively censoring its own content. earlier, Radio 4’s factual commissioning editor, Mohit Bakaya, had defended the programme, saying listeners expect it to ‘ tackle difficult subjects at times when they are relevant’.
This decision to edit the programme lays bare the corrosive manner in which agenda- driven lobby groups hijack social media to advance their own censorious ends.
however offensive it was in parts, the speech signified an important moment in postwar British history. Yet the BBC felt unable to broadcast a
We’re now never more than a tweet away from hysteria
serious programme about it in full — even though the show included rigorous and critical textual analysis of Powell.
At the time of the ‘ Rivers of Blood’ speech, 20 years had passed since the arrival of the first of the ‘Windrush generation’ — of immigrants from Britain’s Caribbean colonies.
Harold Wilson’ s Labour government was planning to introduce legislation on race relations which would, among other things, make it illegal to refuse either housing or employment to someone because of their ethnic background.
In today’s Britain, it seems unthinkable that such a law might be regarded as even remotely controversial. But in that lessenlightened era, the arrival of large numbers of immigrants had led to social tension in some of the mostly working-class urban areas where they had concentrated.
Unlike many of his more privileged parliamentary contemporaries, Powell’s background gave him an instinctive understanding of their fears.
The upwardly mobile son of teachers whose academic brilliance won him a scholarship to Cambridge University, he became a Tory MP in 1950 and had risen to become Shadow Defence Secretary at the time of his speech.
Feeling distressed at what he felt was his party’s weak opposition to the Labour government’ s immigration policy, he resolved to speak out, in the strongest possible terms, about what he felt had to be done. Powell’s 25-minute speech contained high rhetoric and vivid language.
It warned, in the starkest possible terms, that unless immigration was stopped — and immigrants already in the UK were given financial incentives to return home — there would be racial strife of a seriousness never before seen in Britain.
Though he never uttered the phrase ‘Rivers of Blood’, he quoted the poet Virgil when he said: ‘Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’
In his speech, Powell also quoted extensively from two of his own constituents.
One was ‘a middle-aged working man’ who, he claimed, had told him: ‘I have three children; all of them been through grammar school and two of them are married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas.
‘In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’
The other constituent was an elderly woman who was the last remaining white British person on her Wolverhampton street.
‘She is becoming afraid to go out,’ said Powell. ‘Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops she is followed by children — charming, widegrinning piccaninnies.’
Such slurs peppered the speech. Indeed, much of it was laden with language nowadays rightly considered racist ( he repeatedly, for example, refers to ‘negroes’).
Other passages contained incitement to hatred, ugly generalisations and ethnic stereotypes.
To a modern ear, his rhetoric seems archaic, dense and profoundly offensive. Yet it also had an immediate impact.
The following day, Powell was condemned as racist in many quarters of the Press and dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet by Tory leader Edward Heath.
The two men never spoke again. Indeed, Powell ended up quitting the Tories in 1974 in protest at Heath’s decision to take Britain into the Common Market, serving out his remaining years in Parliament as an Ulster Unionist. Yet for all the opprobrium, the speech also struck a chord with many Britons.
Powell received nearly 200,000 letters, almost all supporting what he had said, and became a hero to a portion of the white working classes.
Dockers, who had previously been tribal Labourites, began to march in support of him. At the 1970 general election, Heath’s Conservatives triumphed, in part, it was believed, thanks to the electoral support that Powell’s remarks had gathered.
To minority communities, these developments understandably had more sinister overtones.
His speech broke the political consensus that immigration was to be universally welcomed, and gave licence to racists who felt that it legitimised discrimination and violence.
‘ It was a very dark time for immigrants in this country,” recalled the novelist Hanif Kureshi, the son of Pakistani immigrants, in a Radio 4 interview this week.
‘ The atmosphere was quite dark. Powell seemed to me to be a paranoid, fervent, nationalistic figure who was predicting terrible doom, and I remember being at school and people saying “knock knock, we’re with Enoch” — and I remember going to the house of a girlfriend and her dad throwing me out of the house, literally, because he said he was with Enoch.’
The passage of time has shown most of Powell’s dire predictions to be incorrect.
Today, many of the remarks he made seem to smack of paranoia. Britain’s rivers did not, of course, ‘foam with blood’ as he predicted and the country has, by and large, become a remarkably tolerant, multiracial society.
His crass contention that ‘in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white’ was nonsense.
When he died, non- whites amounted to a mere six per cent of the population (and today’s figure is 14 per cent, according to data from the Office for National Statistics).
Interestingly, however, Kureshi believes that despite the speech’s impact on his life and others’ lives, the BBC should be praised for its decision to broadcast it in full.
He explains that he is ‘ not a fan of censorship in any shape or form’ and argues that it will help modern listeners to understand racism.
‘My kids, who are in their 20s, have no idea who Enoch Powell was or what he meant or what he said, so the idea that they would be able to hear this speech and debate it, and think about racism in this country in the postwar period, is really important,’ he added.
But others, it would seem, think they know better. And in a country increasingly run by a social media mob, it is they who, too often, hold the censorious whip hand. Archive on 4 is on Radio 4 tonight at 8pm.
Powell received 200,000 letters, mostly in support