606. Enoch Powell: Rivers of Blood

27:17Don't worry about it. You're overthinking it. But he's a massive overthinker. I mean, he really, you know, he will spend ages obsessing about these kinds of details. the details of citizenship and stuff. Yeah, if there's a rabbit hole, he'll go down it. Well, he does that later on, doesn't he? Is it the New Testament or something? He writes all this biblical scholarship that other people, biblical scholars, think is a bit bonkers. Anyway, by the late 50s, it's very clear that most people in Britain hate immigration on this scale. I mean, there's no other way of putting it. Polls show that about three out of four people strongly dislike it.

27:48They want the government to shut the doors. So in 1962, Harold Macmillan did shut the doors. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act brings in controls for Commonwealth citizens who haven't been born in Britain. The unanticipated consequence is that in the months before the act becomes law, there's a huge rush of people to get into Britain. 150 ,000 people arrive from the Caribbean, India, and Pakistan to beat the deadline. And then another unanticipated consequence, I think Trevor Phillips talked about this in the episode we did with him, the people who've arrived have been predominantly young men. and they've now settled down.

28:25They haven't gone home as many of them expected to. They decide they quite like it and they want to bring their family dependents with them, wives, children, aged parents, and so on and so forth. And so you get a continued influx in the 1960s. And so by the late 1960s, the Caribbean and South Asian born population has risen 10 times in 20 years. It's now, what is it, about 700 ,000 and it'll be around about a million by the beginning of the 1970s. Now, you might expect a populist reaction to all this. That's what we see today, right? The higher the immigration figures go, the more that populist parties thrive.

29:04But at the time, I think the remarkable thing, having written about this, is how muted the reaction is. Most MPs, I think, recognize that they think immigration is a regrettable necessity because the economy needs this cheap, unskilled labour. I think also a lot of labour MPs are committed to a kind of slightly woolly, you know, citizens of the world kind of internationalism. You know, that's why Harold Wilson loves the Commonwealth, for example. Well, it's interesting that you allied the two because I wonder whether that is, you know, the kind of the woolly internationalism is a kind of slightly distorted form of the imperial impulse that inspired so many generations of upper class and middle class Britons to go abroad.

29:52I think it absolutely is. And so that is something that Powell would despise. Exactly. I think he has no time for any of this kind of stuff because once he realises he can't become viceroy of India, why are you still persisting in this ridiculous charade? Yeah. And of course, Tory MPs, most Tory MPs, or at least a lot of Tory MPs, are still stirred by, you know, the Raj and General Gordon and all this kind of thing. And for that reason, they don't want to turn their backs on relics and memories of empire. The idea, you know, Quivus Britannicus Sum, actually, you hear that phrase in the 1950s and 1960s.

30:28And Powell, precisely perhaps because he can still feel the tug of that, is all the more contemptuous of it. He's kind of guarding against his own romantic impulses, perhaps. I think that's very astute. I think that there is a bit of him, I always think, that probably nostalgic for all that, and he's fighting against it. I think you're absolutely right. So immigration isn't really a massive national issue until 1964. And it happens literally on the road between Birmingham, where Powell was born, and Wolverhampton, the town he represents just up the road, in a place called Smethwick in the West Midlands manufacturing heartland, which had been known since Victorian times as the black country.

31:09So Smethwick was a town of about 70 ,000 people, run down, manufacturing town, very limited housing. One in 10 of its population are immigrants. And in 1964, the Tories picked as their candidate a local councillor called Peter Griffiths, who had already made a stir in the constituency by saying, and I quote, Labour are the immigrants' friends. and during the campaign posters and stickers go up across the constituency with the incredibly inflammatory slogan if you want a neighbor vote liberal or labor i think the listeners can probably forgive me for not using the word and the result is a swing to the tories of more than seven percent in an election that nationally the tories lose and griffiths wins the seat and this is a big shock to people you know he when he arrived in the house of commons a lot of people turned their backs on him wouldn't shake his hand all of this kind of thing harold wilson said he was a parliamentary leper but at the time some of the papers for example the time says this has been coming you know on the time says on this subject immigration there is a great gulf between the ordinary man in the street and the leaders of public opinion in parliament the churches the intelligentsia of the press and so on.

32:23And some people in the Labour Party, like Richard Crossman, who's one of Wilson's ministers, say, you know, we should be careful about this. Because if we don't, you know, if we're not seen as being on the right side of public opinion, we could be swept away on this issue. I mean, definite echoes with the present, I think, Tom. But, you know, the months go by, the issue seems to calm down. Griffiths ultimately is a nobody, you know, he's a mediocrity. He's not remotely capable of leading a national campaign. But then a much more serious politician decides that he is going to embrace the issue.

32:56And this man, of course, is Enoch Powell. Well, Dominic, you have set up the context for Powell's most notorious speech. And after the break, we will come to the rivers of blood.

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33:54Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Rest is History. And we are in mid-60s Britain. Everything's groovy, or is it? Because Enoch Powell, who I think is definitely not groovy, he's a brilliant classicist, as we've heard. At one point, he wanted to be the viceroy of India. He's also a blistering critic of imperial atrocities committed by Britain. He is preparing to give the speech that will make him a hero to the far right in Britain. And Dominic, how do we get there? How does Powell get there? Right. Well, first of all, Powell in the 50s and early 60s had never seemed very interested in race, in the politics of immigration.

34:37But his constituency, Wolverhampton, is right at the heart of the immigration issue. You know, it's a kind of Midlands industrial metal bashing town. It had boomed in the 50s. There was a massive demand for labor. And in had come thousands of young men from the Caribbean, from India, from Pakistan, working in their local factories and the foundries. So by the mid-1960s, Wolverhampton had a higher concentration of immigrants than any other town or city apart from London. And at first, there was remarkably little pushback, I would say, from the sort of town's opinion formers. So the local Express and Star still exists.

35:18It was the biggest regional paper, and I think it still is by far in Britain. And it was a conservative supporting paper, as I think it still is. The Express and Star said, these people are British citizens. This is going back to your Kivis Britannicus stuff, Tom. British citizens with a perfect right to come here and try and earn a living. Many of them are better behaved than some of their white cousins in this country. You know, it's like patronizing language, but... It could be worse. It could be a lot worse. But over time, you start to see some tensions growing. What's happening in towns across Britain and cities is older working class residents are moving out to the suburbs, to the counties.

35:58Immigrants move in. The house prices start to fall. And those residents who haven't moved out start to feel jittery that their house price is going to fall and they're surrounded by people they don't know and so on and so forth. White flight is the phrase, isn't it? White flight. I mean, it's a very, very familiar story. Now, most of the newcomers are young single men. We've already made that point. Inevitably, they want to play their music. They want to have a good time. They have parties. So you start to get all these stories. Oh, they don't behave. Oh, they play their music. Oh, they drink and all this kind of thing.

36:33And you get local residence associations complaining. but what does Enoch Powell do at first he does absolutely nothing at all as one of the town's MPs so in 1959 his beaten Labour opponent in the general election actually went out of his way to say I respect Mr Powell for not exploiting the immigration issue in 1961 a group of anti-immigration residents went to ask for his support and one of them a welder said afterwards he was all for the immigrants we had a lot of examples of their dirty filthy habits and we asked him to make a fuss about them but we didn't get any satisfaction from him like Mick Jagger yes like Mick Jagger then in 1964 you get the first sign of him making a change he says it is essential to have strict controls if we are to avoid the evils of a color question in this country so it's sort of it's for the immigrants own good that we start to bring in controls and by the color question by that is he thinking the united states i think you cannot um understand this issue without realizing that in an age when for the first time i think about 1964 when he makes the speech is the point at which tv ownership has reached saturation point everybody who's ever going to get a tv has got one and they're watching the news from selma alabama you know from montgomery from all these kinds of places, this is on their mind the whole time because it's making the headlines.

38:02Martin Luther King's campaigns, the racist backlash in the formerly Confederate South, all of that stuff, that's in the ether. It's absolutely there. Now, at the same time, when he writes that in 1964, he also writes a piece for the local paper that's often quoted later. I always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on the grounds of his origin. Now, that's a phrase that I think he backs away from that position later on. I think because I think he comes to think that where people have come from is tremendously important, but the implication here is that he doesn't think it's important at all.

38:44Anyway, I'll just leave that hanging. In the next few years, as he is falling out with his new leader, Ted Heath, he's sharpening his tone he starts to say there's a taboo on this issue and to talk about immigration you know it's not color prejudiced or racially intolerant to ask for strict controls now at first i think people don't really notice because he's saying all kinds of eccentric things you know let's not help the americans in vietnam let's cut all the spending on the welfare states all of this kind of stuff but if you track what he's actually saying month by month it's clearly becoming more and more aggressive.

39:20So by 1965, in the spring of 1965, he starts saying two things. One, we should stop allowing people's wives and children to join them in Britain. And two, it's time for some people to go home. We should start encouraging them to go back home, basically not forcing them, but with systems of subsidism and whatnot. Why is he doing this? Why has he adopted this issue? And why is his tone becoming harder. Powell always said, I'm simply reflecting the views of my Wolverhampton constituents. And I think there is, to be fair to him, an element of truth in this. A lot of manufacturing towns in mid-60s Britain, if you forget about immigration, just look at what's happening in these towns.

40:01They're quite run down. The Victorian fabric of these places is visibly fraying. Their industries are running into foreign competition. British productivity is atrocious. People are becoming increasingly anxious about rising prices and losing their jobs. The sort of, yes, the swinging 60s is going on in Carnaby Street, but actually a lot of people feel very shut out and left behind as they do today, actually. So basically hard times breed hardening opinions i think so and i think this is where i think i would have i would argue in flattering myself a more nuanced attitude to how people think about immigration than they're all just racists or they're anti-racists i think it's not necessarily that people blame immigrants personally for these things but i think they see immigration and the presence of immigrants as yet another symptom of a more generalized kind of decline and a symptom that you know maybe means an awful lot to them.

41:03But I think they would say a lot of people, you see it again and again in interviews, actually, people, especially older people will say, everything is changing. You know, the street feels different. The town feels different. No one cares about us. And so they care about immigration both in and of itself, but also as a symbol of something deeper and more kind of inchoate. And does Powell share these opinions? Because he's a very romantic, conservative, adores Parliament and the great conservative romantic opinion of Parliament expressed by Edmund Burke is that the duty of a member of Parliament is to speak his own opinions and not just to serve as a kind of loudspeaker for opinions of constituents.

41:47Well, this is one of the issues, right? That he owes his electors, he owes them his judgment. He's not, as you say, he's not just a sort of a loudspeaker for them. And the thing is, Powell doesn't live in Wolverhampton. Powell lives in Belgravia, in the swankiest part of London. He has never really shown that much interest in what, you know, the men who stand on the Molyneux Terraces on a Saturday cheering the finest team in the Midlands. They actually are the finest team in the Midlands, by the way, at this point, Tom. They're not merely the finest team in the Midlands. They became champions of the world in the mid-1950s.

42:20So, yeah, you can suck on that just for a second. Well, we're running out of time, so we don't have, we need to move on. But I mean, that is an outrageous and ludicrous statement. He's not really interested in what they think, I would say, up to this point. You know, he's never been the tribune of the plebs. He's always been a man apart. So why is he doing it? I think it's complicated. I think Powell has always been obsessively interested in English identity. And he has this idea, to use his own words, he says, our national identity is based on, and I quote, the continuous life of a united people and its island home.

42:58And this idea of the united people and the island home, he comes to think that the advent of so many newcomers is diluting and undermining that. And I think what happens is once he's first articulated the idea, it clearly chimes with a lot of people and he almost self-radicalizes. It's like the process that you see on social media. He makes the speech, he gets a better reaction than for any other speech he's ever made. made. And then he thinks, well, I'll give people more. People clearly want this. And I like doing this. And he goes further and further. And the point about Powell is he will always pursue an idea to its absolute kind of logical extreme.

43:35Driven mad by his own remorse, that's logic. Exactly. And then the other element, and an element I think that is often missing from a lot of accounts, this is personal for him and it's political. It's a way for him to distinguish himself from Mr. Boring, Ted Heath, the Keir Starmer of Tory politics in the 60s and 70s. So a committee man, a pragmatist, somebody who loves a bit of a fudge and a compromise. This is a brilliant way for Powell to tell the world, I'm not Ted Heath, and to appeal to Tory grassroots people who are not really interested in his views on Herodotus or Nietzsche or a houseman, but they really respond to all this kind of stuff.

44:19And at this point, he still wants to be prime minister? Oh yeah. I think he's very ambitious, his pal. Very ambitious. So by 1967, he's now making comparisons with America all the time. And he says, look at the riots in American cities. This is what is coming to Britain if we're not careful. And he actually uses some phrases that I think even his defenders will say, oh, hold on. So he says to Heath at one point, he says, in wolverhampton i've seen yes i've seen white racism and that is terrible but he also says i have seen insolence by colored against white and corresponding fearfulness on the part of white and i have to say when i came across that word i mean i wrote about this 20 years ago and then when i was preparing this episode i was rereading the stuff and that word insolence just jumped out that is a word that you use in the american south when you're saying the the black bloke hasn't hasn't doffed his hat to the white woman or whatever it is so loaded i mean what's interesting is i mean i always remember the episode we did on the um the king of hawaii who was very struck crossing britain by rail that um there was no sense of that he was being insolent by sitting in a british railway carriage if he'd bought his ticket and then he goes across america and gets chucked out because as someone who is taken for black he's not allowed to be in it so it is kind quite alien to the British sense of themselves.

45:43I mean, British people are often proud that they don't treat black people in the way that people in the American South do. But what Powell is doing there, ironically, considering his anti-Americanism, is to adopt an American tone. I think so. I think so. And I think this starts to make much more sense, this whole furore, when you view it in the context of what's going on in America. Also, actually, what's going on in Africa. because at the end of 1967, events in Africa come into play because Jomo Kenyatta, the president of Kenya, decides to kick out the 200 ,000 Kenyan Asians, originally Indian merchants and laborers who've come to Kenya during the British Empire.

46:21Where are they going to go? Many of them got British passports. The obvious place to go is Britain, the old imperial motherland. There's a massive furore. Powell speaks out. He says it's mad to let these people into Britain. They should return to the country where they belong. And where is that? The implication of that is what, India, maybe? Although, of course, many of them have never set foot in India. Powell is not a lone voice at this point. Late 1967, so we've just been through what's called the long, hot summer of 1967 in America. Hundreds of cities consumed by rioting and arson and so on.

46:57So Labour, the Harold Wilson government, are kind of very alarmed by this. They rushed through an emergency bill to basically stop the Kenyan Asians coming to Britain, to strip many of them of their right to come to Britain with strict quotas. A lot of the Tory press at the time, actually the Tory press, not just the Labour press, said this was unbelievably, this was unconscionable. The spectator said it was one of the most immoral pieces of legislation ever to go through Parliament, but it went through all the same. Why is Labour doing this? are they responding to grass roots pressure in their constituencies yes right so there's a very famous um everyone on this you listened to this podcast for a long time i know i'm a big fan of james callaghan this is not callaghan's finest hour by any means he's home secretary uh there's a point at which i think one of his colleagues richard crossman writes in his diary and he says jim's making a big name for himself in the labor party you know because he is determined the message that Jim is sending to our supporters is, and I quote, no more bloody immigrants, whatever happens.

48:01And the thinking is, Labour will do very well with this message. Lots of working class people will like it. Right. So again, not unknown in current politics. But of course, they see themselves as the good guys, right? The Labour Party. So they want to counterbalance this with a bit more progressive legislation, which is a race relations bill to stamp out discrimination in housing and employment. that this is important because this is going to be the trigger for Powell's rivers of blood speech. They want to introduce this sort of kindly, cuddly race relations bill. Ted Heath says to his colleagues, okay, well, we're not racists, so we don't want to come out madly against this.

48:40What we'll do is we will quibble about the details of it because that's what oppositions do, but we'll agree with the principle. And all the other Tories say, brilliant, They have a last meeting before Easter 1968. They say, brilliant, what a great plan that is. Have a great Easter. See you after the break. And Powell sits in that meeting. He's the shadow defense spokesman. He sits there steaming with rage because he thinks we should be fighting labor on this issue. He doesn't believe in a race relations bill. And he says it's time to start encouraging people to go home. This is our chance to make a stand.

49:12So this is the context for the speech. He goes to Birmingham on the 20th of April to the Midland Hotel to speak to local conservative activists. He knows this is going to be really controversial. He said to the editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star beforehand, the speech would, and they quote, fizz like a rocket, but whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one is going to stay up. and he's actually sent out copies of the speech to the media and that is why ATV, the local television company, have sent a TV crew to film extracts, which you can see online. So let's get into the speech. He begins with the story that you read, Tom.

49:52A working class constituent has written to him, he says he wants to get out of Britain because, and I quote, in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. What an unbelievably amazing, loaded thing to say, the whip hand, you know, that's the image that you choose to kick off with. And again, redolent of the American South. Exactly. Powell then says that line that you had, I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I stir up trouble by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Now you can quibble about that, I think, because as you said, Tom, you know, Edmund Burke's famous argument, you know, every time an MP gets a mad letter, they don't have to read it out in the House of Commons.

50:33I mean, if they did, they'd never stop. Anyway, Powell says, this point I think you ended with when you did that introductory reading, it's a transformation unprecedented in a thousand years of English history. He goes on to say, by 2000, there could be seven million children of immigrants in this country, one-tenth of the whole population. Now, at the time, every critic of the speech said, this is disgraceful scaremongering to inflate the numbers in this way i have to say he was dead right and when you look at the 2001 census seven million people non-white in britain 11 of the entire population i mean in his speech he says that as the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the registrar general's office so he is actually quoting official yes figures with that but people were like oh no no that can't be right that's not right at all his tone then gets harder he says these people are and i quote an alien element and we should be encouraging them to go home then a very famous line those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad we must be mad literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50 000 dependents that's the wives and children and grandparents and whatnot it is like watching a nation busily engaged and heaping up its own funeral pyre.

51:52Now that sort of language, I think, definitely reflects the fact that he's been watching the riots in America, the funeral pyre, the sense of impending dissolution, all of this. Then he turns to the race relations bill. He says, I'm dead against this. Ordinary people can rent their rooms, sell their houses to whoever they like. If they want to discriminate, it's not the government's right to stop them. And then he goes on to say, this is a good example, he says, of how ordinary English people are now a persecuted minority. The politics of grievance, we're very familiar with that. Now the really, really, really inflammatory bit of the speech.

52:30He reads out a letter. He says, a woman in Northumberland has written to me, telling me about an elderly landlady in Wolverhampton. She's the only white woman left in her street. It has been, and I quote, taken over by immigrants. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shop she's followed by children charming wide grinning piccaninnis they cannot speak english but one word they know racialist they chant when the new race relations bill is passed this woman is convinced she will go to prison and is she so wrong i begin to wonder now these are not enoch powell's words he is reading a letter of course now listeners can decide for themselves i think whether or not he was right to read the letter yeah i mean just to say, on the one hand in his speech, he claims that it's one of hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received on the subject.

53:24So he says he's picking it out. On the other, I mean, it is, as you said, well, inflammatory, but I mean, I would go so far as to say wicked, you know, and I use the word advisedly because Powell is a man steeped in biblical prophecy. He knows the value of words and of stories and of anecdotes. And I think that judging him by his own moral standards, those are wicked things to say. Well, do you know what? Let's just go into this story a little bit. The idea of the old woman, and she's sitting in her house surrounded by immigrants and people are pushing excreta through her letterbox and kids are chanting at her in the street.

54:03Some of Powell's critics said, this is a textbook far-right image. This is the kind of folk tale that is being spread by the kind of national front and by the little far-right racist groups in Britain. His defenders said, no, the woman is a real person. He's got every right to read this story. It's a terrible story. At the time, the newspapers went to enormous efforts to try and find out if this woman existed. And they decided that there was no such woman. Now, in 2007, seems a long time afterwards, frankly, but anyway, the BBC did their own investigation, a radio documentary, and they came up with a woman called Drusilla Cottrell, Brighton Place, Wolverhampton, age 61 at the time.

54:45However, as you say, well, again, I think it's up to the listener. Is it right to read out a story that you know is perhaps exceptional or misleading or is bound to bring out the worst in some of your listeners? Let's look at what he then goes on to say, because this is the famous climax, isn't it? Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic, but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the states itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect.

55:24He is warning, essentially, of a kind of race war. Yes, exactly. That's the phrase that people used at the time. The language that he is using is calculated to make that likelier not to diminish it. I would say. Well, that's what the Times editorial said on the Monday. An evil speech calculated to inflame hatred between the races. And that is what his conservative colleagues thought. So this is the thing. He'd been great pals with this guy. Ian McLeod mentioned him already. One of his oldest friends. They'd been friends since they'd met in the conservative research department. McLeod said to his colleague, rang his colleagues up that night and he said to them, Enoch has gone mad and hates the blacks.

56:05And Heath sacked him as defence spokesman that evening. I think Powell probably knew that he might get sacked, possibly wanted it to happen because it would make him a martyr and would increase his appeal to the Tory grassroots. And an awful lot of people, including people on the right, including people who've been Powell's friends, Tom, completely agreed with you. The editor of the local paper, the guy he had said, it will fizz like a rocket, Clem Jones, the father of the future BBC political correspondent Nick Jones from the sort of 80s and 90s. Clem Jones had been a really close friend of Powell and his family and he basically broke off their relationship after this speech because he like you he said you knew exactly what you were doing it is so inflammatory to choose that language and those examples you know it's utterly irresponsible but he was a newspaper editor he asked his readers send in you know tell us what you think he said we got 35 000 postcards in favor of powell we got none virtually none against same story nationally three out of four people said they supported him the post office had to give him a special van because he had so many letters of support tens and tens of thousands of letters and most famously hundreds of dockers from the east end marched on westminster with placards don't knock Enoch or indeed back Britain not black Britain and what they were calling for was for Heath to bring him back to the shadow cabinet as a shadow defense spokesman can you imagine any other point in British history where dockers have given a damn about who was in the shadow cabinet they're not even the real cabinet I mean it's mind-boggling and we can talk in a few minutes about where this leads politically.

57:53So Powell himself, this makes him, of course, a pariah to liberals, but this really does make him the tribune of the plebs to people who agree with him. Polls again and again in the next few years find that he's one of the most admired politicians, if not the most admired politician in the country. There's a brilliant book, actually, if people are interested in kind of grassroots opinion by a journalist called Jeremy Seabrook called City Close Up. And he went to Blackburn at the end of the 60s, early 70s, and interviewed loads and loads of people, hung around working men's clubs and stuff. And these are people who don't follow Westminster politics, very, very sort of small O, ordinary people.

58:32And Powell's name came up again and again. He's the finest man in the country. He should be prime minister. He speaks the mind of all the white, well, three quarters of the white people in this country. You see this again and again. He wins polls. He won a BBC poll twice in the 1970s, man of the year. I mean, this is BBC listeners. And he is a wintry and ascetic lover of dead languages. But in a weird way, I think that contributes to the appeal, right? That this guy has descended from an ivory tower on top of Mount Olympus to come down to speak for the masses. The flip side is he destroys his political career forever with this speech.

59:11So a lot of MPs shun him, actually not his mate Michael Foote in particular, in the future leader of the Labour Party, who actually makes a point after the speech of going and shaking his hand and being friendly to him, showing other MPs that he still is going to be Enoch's friend. Isn't that interesting? Anyway, two things that actually get lost in the talk about immigration, we mentioned at the beginning. In the next few years, Powell establishes what becomes the sort of economic gospel of Thatcherism, criticising Ted Heath, for example, in the early 70s for spending too much and whatnot. And then when Britain joins Europe in 1973, Powell is the chief critic.

59:54He's the guy who basically invents Euroscepticism. so you know as his biographer simon heffer says if you judge a politician by his intellectual legacy then he kind of stands alone in his generation because he basically bequeaths two things that are massively important in changing britain but he does it from the wilderness indeed he ends up becoming an ulster unionist mp not a tory mp and i suppose this idea of um a politician being massively influential on british history despite not holding high office or becoming prime minister or whatever. That is also what a lot of people say about Nigel Farage.

1:00:29And I suppose the contrast with Farage and Powell is precisely that Powell is a massive intellectual, as well as someone who is capable of serving as a lightning rod for opinions that otherwise are not being articulated. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's true. Now, I think some people listening to this would say, look, it's very unfair to just do this all about immigration. You're distorting Powell's record because he has so much more to offer. I have to say, I don't think it's unfair because the point about the rivers of blood speech is not that it's just one speech. Powell returns to the issue again and again in the next few years.

1:01:05A good example, really good example, 1972, Idi Amin kicked out Ugandan Asians from Uganda and Powell led the campaign to stop them coming to Britain. And he said, many white people in Britain feel as if they are tied to a stake in the face of an advancing tide. The advancing tide image, really, that's the one you go for. Now, we're talking about 27 ,000 people, middle-class people by and large, who became one of the most successful of all immigrant communities. So the Tory politician Priti Patel, her parents were Ugandan Asians. And actually, some listeners, even listeners sympathetic to Powell, I would say, might well ask themselves, was he right to say that none of these people should have been allowed in because actually the ugandan asian community proved you know enormously successful assimilated very smoothly and why did he you know he talks about the white people frightened and powerless but he doesn't really talk about the ugandan asians who've been kicked out of their country have nowhere to go are frightened and powerless refugees i think that would be one of my main criticisms of powell the sort of the the lack of empathy if you like anyway he keeps beating this drum throughout the 1970s.

1:02:25I mean, he uses some pretty striking language. When he looks into the eyes of Asia, the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land. Again, you could hardly choose a more emotive and incendiary image, right? Struggling for possession of land with these people? Again, I mean, presumably he's saying this because he fears well rivers of blood but the the language he is using is making that more likely isn't it i mean it's yeah i mean i would say so actually to give i put my cards on the table i always slightly sigh and roll my eyes when people just say in a very sort of blanket condemnatory way oh in a power terrible racist end of story because i always think no it's never the end of the story there's always more nuance and there's always an interesting history behind this.

1:03:17But when you read those words, I think it's very, very hard to defend these choices. And actually, to go to this question of, is Enoch Powell a racist? The word racist is so loaded and so complicated. It depends what you mean, of course. Its meaning has evolved quite drastically over the past decades. It's become a far more capacious, hasn't it? Yeah, it's capacious. Does he hate all foreigners? Clearly no, he was hardly going to be teaching himself or these languages if he hates foreigners. Is he prejudiced against individual people based on their skin color? There's actually no evidence of that.

1:03:51He seems to have treated his foreign-born constituents exactly the same as his native-born constituents. So again, and you'll be able to tell that the focus of my research for this episode has very much been desert island discs. But Sue Lawley puts that question to him and he says, no, he'd feel just the same about a load of French people coming over. So maybe that's expressive of his views on the Norman conquest. I don't know. Does he believe in racial hierarchy? He says very clearly, no, I do not. I do not believe that one race is superior to another. Does he believe there are such things as races?

1:04:24Yes, he absolutely does. Racial difference is an undeniable truth. Now, here's something I would absolutely disagree with him about. He says, I think it is impossible that black and Asian people can become English. He says that they have no investment in England and his history. They can't be English. They'll never be English. Their children will not be English. They are, you would often use the words, an alien element. Now, in other words, he would say that Rishi Sunak or the current conservative leader, Kemi Badenok, cannot be English. Now, listeners, I think, can decide for themselves whether they agree with him or whether they think that's racist and it's not for me to tell them what to think.

1:05:04I mean, I don't agree with him. I think Camille Baden-Ock or Rishi Sunak, I think they are English. I mean, it's an interesting question. And there's another dimension to this that personally I find impossible to ignore. He always talked about the feelings of his white constituents, but almost never those of his black and Asian ones. And he never really seemed to consider the impact of his words. So there are lots of stories about incidents after his speech. Just one. There was a christening party in Wolverhampton 10 days afterwards, so at the end of April 1968, for a black family. And the christening party was attacked by white youths with knives who were chanting Enoch Powell's name.

1:05:45The grandfather was a guy called Wade Crooks, and he had to be taken for treatment because he needed eight stitches after being slashed over his eye. And he said he'd lived in Wolverhampton since 1955. Nothing like this has ever happened before. And there were lots of incidents like this. Now on television, David Frost, big interview of the day, asked, do you not power to condemn these incidents? And Powell said, no, I'm not going to start condemning the behavior of people who are condemned by their own actions. It is not for a politician to be a preacher. I would say, is it so difficult really to condemn these actions?

1:06:20Clearly it's incumbent on you at this point, if you have some responsibility, to say, if people are chanting your name, Tom, I mean, come on, would you not feel, of course you'd feel terrible about that. But it's interesting also that essentially the implication of that is that a politician should not have a moral perspective and promote it. I mean, that's basically what being a preacher is. And he is, I mean, he does all the time. I mean, his speech about Kenya was an example of preaching. The reason he doesn't want to do it, it's obvious and it's so familiar. He doesn't want to condemn it because he doesn't want to give an inch to his critics.

1:06:57I think it's pride and stubbornness. And that, I would argue, leads him to take positions that would cause me concern if I was taking them. If I knew that people on the far right, gangs of skinheads, were chanting my name as they attacked immigrants, or if I knew, to quote a Times editorial, that people had the impression that I hated Black and Asian people, that they were right to be afraid of me, I would be really troubled by that. And I would be desperate to show people that I wasn't racist, that I was a kindly person. I mean, even if I'm not a terribly kindly person, I'm definitely not a racist person.

1:07:41Anyway, I wouldn't want people to come to that conclusion. But Powell never seems to give their anxieties any thought. And I think that is a massive failure of empathy, personally. Anyway, what about his legacy? I think an obvious, unanticipated consequence of this speech and the furore is that his exile, as it were, is so complete that it deters other politicians from even mentioning immigration. So I think in the 70s and 80s, the potential for populist anti-immigration politics was always there. But it's really remarkable how nobody exploits it. Margaret Thatcher, who in many ways is a kind of Powell disciple, does it just once.

1:08:21in 1978 in the Ilford by-election. She gave an interview and she said, people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture. There's a massive furore, backlash among her senior colleagues. She never does it again. That is surely the overwhelming impact of his speech. It completely contradicts what I assume was his aim, which was to get the issue of immigration on the political agenda. the way that he frames it and the language that he uses ensures that politicians view it as toxic and they may be reluctant to talk about it out of political self-interest you know they they don't want to damage their own names or reputations but i think it's much more likely that they they are genuinely afraid of kind of pandering to the worst instincts in people.

1:09:20And the fact that it is remembered as the rivers of blood speech, what Powell does is to give a very resonant phrase, which dramatizes, I think, for politicians across the parties for decades to come it dramatizes what has been the great moral anxiety ever since the second world war and the discovery of what had happened in nazi germany the anxiety that distinctive ethnic or religious minorities will be targeted in pogroms or worse and that is the great shadow that hangs over the whole of Europe, really, after the war. But what Powell does is to give a distinctively British and poetic formulation to what politicians are then anxious to avoid.

1:10:17And the corollary of that, in turn, is that when there are obviously genuine issues around cultural differences that arise, mainstream politicians are reluctant to engage with it and to criticize them yeah i think he's an example that people don't want to follow right i mean so people they just say well steer clear don't talk about this i mean the irony is of course it feels to me like we've talked about nothing else for about the last 15 years or so but i'll tell you one thing one thing that people don't often say about his speech that people talk about it in terms of do you agree with it or not is he a racist or isn't he?

1:10:56I mean, one obvious point it seems to me is that he's just wrong. That he said he was convinced that there would be American style, you know, and we're talking about 150 cities in 1967, you know, dozens of deaths. He thinks there will be unending racial conflict because, and don't forget, he's talking about this partly based on skin color. he's talking about he's not talking about religious groups he's talking about people from the caribbean in other words fellow christians who just happen to be from jamaica or barbados or whatever and that they will fight with the indigenous people of england for possession of their native land and and i would say that's clearly not happened power has a long legacy right and these issues have never gone away and let's just end with one aspect in which I think Powell was ahead of the game.

1:11:52I mean, I think he really is a prophet. The Guardian had a brilliant columnist in the late 60s called Peter Jenkins, and he wrote a really good piece on this after the speech. He said, Powell has discovered something that we have not seen in British politics for a long time. He says, what Powell exploits is, and I quote, a sense that the politicians are conspiring against the people, that the country is led by men who have no idea about what interests or frightens the ordinary people in the back streets of Wolverhampton. And this is coming, I think, after a period in which politics has been quite decorous and deferential, and the populist element has been very much downplayed.

1:12:35But I think that's, you know, Powell's real legacy. It's a kind of politics that was completely unfamiliar in late 60s Britain that is very familiar today. It's the politics of identity. You know, what is it to be English or to be British? And it's so charged the politics of grievance, of feeling yourself part of a persecuted group, and above all the politics of populism, the idea of the masses against the elite. And in that sense, Tom, I don't know if you agree, I think we are still living in Enoch Powell's Britain today. Well, thanks, Dominic. Yes. And this has been a very long episode, maybe the longest episode we've ever done.

1:13:12And I think that reflects both the inherent fascination of the topic and the sensitivities of the issues that it provokes um so thank you everyone who has made it this far um thank you dominic and we will be back very soon with something completely different namely nelson's mistress the scandalous life of lady hamilton bye-bye