Rivers of blood and the need to face ideas we abhor
AN extra glass of wine a day ‘will shorten your life by 30 minutes’. Which means I died in 1936.
IF we’ve learnt one thing this week, it’s that BBC presenters should not be allowed to puff their own programmes. In particular, it may be a long time before the BBC’s hapless media editor Amol Rajan is allowed to announce anything with the potential to alarm in case he blunders in with ‘does that airplane engine sound funny to you?’, or ‘can anyone remember the symptoms for Ebola?’
Last week on Twitter, the social medium most likely to decide that Jeremy Corbyn has been Photoshopped into wearing a Stalinesque hat, Mr Rajan announced that he would be presenting Archive on 4, where ‘for the first time EVER, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full’.
At this point, his producer may have screamed into their laptop because, as everyone else knows, spending weeks crafting an analysis of a notorious speech from history is one thing, but promoting it as if it is a remastered deluxe edition CD from your favourite band is something different.
EVEn so, what followed was a troubling lack of faith in people’s common sense. ‘Let’s not hear the Enoch Powell speech,’ implored some, ‘it will normalise bigoted discourse and bring comfort to racists.’
A heated debate ensued, with Lord Adonis joining in to demand that Ofcom should have the show pulled from broadcast.
Ofcom has no power to pull anything, which speaks volumes about Lord Adonis’ media expertise of late. However, the clamour and celebratory tone of Mr Rajan’s off-key self-promotion alarmed one academic to the point that she did pull her contributions from the programme the following day.
At this point, it’s important to remember, no one had actually heard the show. I had not expected to hear the Rivers of Blood speech in my lifetime, let alone twice in the space of few months, but I saw Ian MacDiarmid dramatise the speech when he portrayed Enoch Powell in What Shadows at the Edinburgh Lyceum last year.
On Saturday night he read it once again, because no complete recording by Powell himself exists. Even that was deemed controversial, although all sorts of dreadful history becomes drama for the purpose of critique and understanding. Where would The History Channel be without nazis and Stalin?
The ideas expressed by Powell are still unsettling and dangerous. It is a Hiroshima of oratory, an outpouring of extremity that deterred any Establishment discussion of immigration for 40 years. But this was a deconstruction, not a celebration. As Matthew Parris nutshelled on Archive on 4 Powell was a stupid man, posing as an intellectual.
And what strikes you, quite forcefully, is how wrong Powell was: not just morally, but in his assertions. not just his infamous, unspeakable remarks about widemouthed grins, which telegraph exactly where he was coming from, but also that the country he foretold is not the country we have – nor even nearly.
Also, however much we may bridle, it is the job of the BBC to confront us, sometimes, with ideas and arguments we dislike – because ignoring these views doesn’t make them go away. And the BBC does not create racism. It just acknowledges that it exists.