Enoch Powell still haunts my family over how things might have been

My white mother is the daughter of a Wolverhampton steel worker. My black father is an immigrant from Nigeria. So when – over at my parents’ house last Sunday – the conversation turned to Enoch Powell, it did feel slightly awkward.

This April marks the 50th anniversary of the most controversial speech in British history, and Powell’s home city is divided over plans to commemorate him with a blue plaque. Yesterday the Bishop of Wolverhampton added his voice to the opposition.

My parents were also in disagreement. “He was a principled, scholarly man who cared about those he represented,” was my mum’s sympathetic position. “What he said wasn’t good for our society,” my dad riposted.

So how do I, the mixedrace child, unpick this polemical topic?

With a great deal of trouble. Powell’s words particularly resonated with my grandfather, Ken, who at the time was working at the Bilston steelworks, and felt “unease” at an influx of South Asian labourers whom he believed were driving down wages and gobbling up jobs.

This is the same man who later lavished his “half-caste” grandchildren with love, blackberry picking outings, and Werther’s Originals. He was not a racist man. But Britain’s industries were taking their final wheezing gasps and Ken knew one day he’d go into work and it would all be over. On April 12 1979 it was.

Afterwards, my grandad was committed to hospital with depression. He spent his final years staring into space with an unattempted crossword on his lap.

Many associate “Rivers of Blood” with a red, racist anger pulsating through the working class. The truth is more melancholic, tinged with grey. Resentment towards job-nicking immigrants was often peripheral in larger life stories weighed down by all manner of torments and disappointments.

The startling thing about the 100,000 letters that Powell received in the month following his speech is that although they fixated on immigrants, white liberals “who think they are broad minded” were often the real target of the vitriol. Still, the words wound me. One states: “As an Englishman, I would like to think that my son and grandchildren will also be Englishmen, and what’s more, look like Englishmen.”

“Rivers of Blood” is not a positive moment in British history. Powell preyed on people’s fear of darkness – partly in others, mostly in their own lives. But I take exception to the idea that the Establishment who destroyed him were morally superior. If righteous, liberal Britain was above a workingclass tendency to define itself against the Other with strange curry smells seeping through their kitchen panes, this was only because it already had a long-standing Other – the “pig-ignorant” masses – against which to elevate itself.

I sometimes wonder what the two most important men in my life really made of each other. Did my white grandad, who failed his grammar school exam by a whisker and hence buried all fantasies of university, look at my black, Durhamdegree-toting father and see something of the man that – had England’s circumstances been kinder – he could have been? I do not know the answer. I can only accept that my grandad would have joined the calls for the plaque – and offer my honest, troubled view of multiculturalism through a mixed-race prism. “All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal,” was how Powell ended his speech. On this I do agree with him.