The BBC was right to air the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech
‘Iconsider that this speech should be buried. It shouldn’t fade into history, it should just be buried.” So declared ska singer Pauline Black at the start of this week’s Archive on 4, 50 Years On: Rivers of Blood (Radio 4, Saturday). Plenty of others felt, and still feel, the same way.
Before the programme aired, Lord Adonis wrote to Ofcom to demand that it stop the BBC from broadcasting “the most incendiary racist speech of modern Britain”. The programme went out nonetheless. Adonis now claims that by airing Enoch Powell’s words, the BBC has given succour to the hard right.
He may have a point. Twitter – always fetid with bigotry – is a cess pit right now. You’ll need a hazmat suit and a very long pair of tongs if you want to see for yourself what horrors are lurking under the hashtags #Enochwasright or #riversofblood. I never thought I would see such racism expressed in a public forum in modern Britain, and it turns my stomach.
And yet – this was a good programme. Not brilliant, which it needed to be to silence its critics. But it served the purpose of archival history: opening a window onto the past, the better to illuminate the present.
Strictly speaking, it didn’t actually use archive material. When Powell delivered his infamous speech, 50 years ago this month, only a short section was recorded. So the actor Ian Mcdiarmid was drafted in to read the whole thing. It was broken up into segments, with commentators from all over the political spectrum opining in between. There wasn’t enough context or analysis to be really useful, but presenter Amol Rajan coolly dismantled some of Powell’s rhetoric. He noted, for example, how Powell cast himself as a “far-sighted but reluctant tribune”: one of the few politicians brave enough to speak out when he saw disaster approaching.
This still persists today: the idea of Powell as a truth-teller, a prophet silenced by cowards. But the most striking thing about his speech, in retrospect, is how much he got wrong. He massively underestimated the number of immigrants that would settle in Britain, while overestimating public hostility towards them. He seemed to have been unable, or unwilling, to discern the border between reasonable concern and bigotry. The examples he gave of “decent, ordinary” Britons suffering because of immigration (an elderly landlady left out of pocket because she refused to rent to “Negroes”; a constituent grumbling that soon “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”) could hardly have been less sympathetic.
On this, if not much else, I find myself agreeing with Jacob Reesmogg. “His speech was terrible,” declared the Tory MP on Monday, during the first of his new fortnightly phone-ins on Nick Ferrari’s LBC Breakfast Show. “It’s why I think the BBC broadcasting it was a good thing. Because lots of people say ‘Enoch was right,’ without ever having bothered to read or listen to the speech.”
This was not, I suspect, the response the caller had hoped for. There are many, on both Right and Left, who see Rees-mogg as a populist in the Powell mould. But just because a man dresses like a cartoon and has Catholic views about abortion, doesn’t make him a proto-fascist.
Mogg took a determinedly moderate line on almost every question. He deplored the Home Office’s treatment of the Windrush generation, declined to savage Jeremy Corbyn over his opposition to air strikes on Syria (“It’s quite brave to be a pacifist”), and resisted the idea that stop-and-search laws should be toughened up. Revealing that he had once been stopped and searched himself, he said the experience had left him “in PG Wodehouse terms, far from gruntled”. He could hardly have made himself more likeable – or more of a bitter disappointment to his fans on the far right.
After a week dense with political radio, one feels the need for a spiritual tonic. This I found in the unlikely form of Mrs Sparkle: The Trauma Cleaner (World Service, Monday). Mrs Sparkle, aka Sandra Pankhurst, runs a company in Melbourne that specialises in clearing up grisly death scenes and hoarders’ homes. But her most impressive clean-up job has been on herself. Formerly an abused, adopted boy called Peter, Pankhurst had a sex change, became a prostitute and survived a brutal assault before finding her vocation. Her cleaning work, she explained, makes her feel lucky. She sees into the lives of people who couldn’t get past their own traumas. “It makes me thank God I’m not in that situation,” she said, with a compassion and humility that gladdened the heart.