Why Simon Heffer is wrong about Enoch Powell

This morning Simon Heffer defends Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech and says that Powell's memory has been insulted:

The insult to Powell consists in this unsustainable idea that the Birmingham speech was "racist".

There is a long tradition in the party of not reading the speech. Heath, who sacked Powell as defence spokesman, certainly had not. Nor had the two close colleagues who urged him on, his chief whip, Willie Whitelaw, and the hysterical Quintin Hogg.

He invites his readers to study the speech itself. I have taken him up on this invitation.

When Ted Heath sacked Powell he gave this as his reason:

I dismissed Mr. Powell because I believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations. I am determined to do everything I can to prevent racial problems developing into civil strife...I don't believe the great majority of the British people share Mr. Powell's way of putting his views in his speech.

In other words, right from the beginning the issue with Powell's speech was the terms he used to make his argument. One can agree with his contention that it is important to control immigration while deprecating the way he put his arguments.

The problem with Powell is very similar to the problem with Nigel Hastilow.

Is it fair to accuse Powell of being inflammatory and using racist language in his speech? Absolutely.

First, he talked in alarmist terms of matches being thrown onto gunpowder and rivers foaming with blood. This was hardly a sober or responsible way of talking of a sensitive issue. It was also wrong. The rivers are not foaming with blood.

Second, he quoted at length extraordinarily offensive, racist comments made to him and never attempts to suggest that these are unpleasant or unacceptable.

Indeed he introduces one part of his speech, the reading of a letter about the experience of a woman with these words:

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me.

Now read the letter itself, so introduced by Powell. It is noticeable that Heffer does not quote from it:

Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week.

She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country. So she went home.

The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months.

She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. 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.

Charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. From a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Described as speaking for me and delivered without a word of dissent. One simply can't acquit Powell of the charge against him.

Or Nigel Hastilow for speaking fondly of the Rivers of Blood address. 

Comments

[Alan Black]

Spot on.

Much better than my advance of "He's wrong because it's just another hyperbolic rant in his near obsessive railings against David Cameron" or the alternative of "he's wrong because he's Simon Heffer and if there's one thing in this uncertain modern world that can be relied upon beyond night following day, it's that Simon Heffer will be wrong".

[Simon Stephenson]

I'm not sure it is intellectually valid to condemn Powell for using emotive and overstated language to make his point unless you are willing generally to condemn the use of such language in all political oratory.

Can one be selective about these things without opening oneself up to charges of double-standards?

Of course, if one feels Powell was justifiably demoted because of a perceived disservice to the Conservative Party then say so. Don't try to dress it up as being to do with a wider moral wrong.

[mark]

No time has Bore him out I’m afraid Enoch was correct then is correct now and to that end there can be no denial
We have not enhanced this country in the long run, more created a greater fragmented resentful society from both sides of the Fence .
Old Britain will and never could accept what has gone on In the name of racism political correctness etc
It would however be interesting to know which particular set of morons decided to do this to destroy this once great country

[Brian J Deller]

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell.

True then as it is now. Enoch Powell was correct in as much as the British were and still are not being protected enough by the government with its chaotic immigration non-administration. It is an undeniable fact what ever the "rent a mob" shout out about racism and so on.

[Marcus Cotswell]

Spot on, Danny. This is what I posted as a comment to Heffer's piece:

"Mr Heffer, really. Your assertion that the Powell speech isn't about race doesn't hold water at all.

Powell isn't merely quoting his constituents as any sensible reading of the speech reveals - he is using their words to make his own points. Uncharitably, you could say he was hiding behind them.

The constituent who predicted that "the black man will have the whip hand", for example - Powell referred to him as a "decent, ordinary fellow Englishman". That comes as near as dammit to endorsing that view - which has manifestly not turned out to be true. For all your protestations, by including that anecdote, Powell conflates the issues of immigration and race.

And what about the constituent whose letter he says "I am going to allow ... to speak for me" and who proceeds to relate the tale of "Negroes" pushing excreta through the letter box of an old woman? (At this point it might be worthwhile to observe that similar abuse and worse is routinely handed out to immigrants and their families right up to the present day).

And that letter - which let us remember Powell said "speaks for him" - explicitly mentions race and the Race Relations Act.

I am afraid that for all Powell's undoubted qualities, this speech was a grotesque misjudgement and has tarnished his reputation irreparably."

Heffer shouldn't be allowed to get away with this rubbish.

[John V Bell]

I cannot see what is wrong with the letter that Powell quoted about a lady driven out of her house by immigrants. Immigration has brought this type of problem and shouting 'racism' is not going to change the facts. I wonder if Finkelstein would welcome a mosque next door to his own house? I can tell you that I wouldn't.

[William]

A brilliant analysis, Daniel! Simon Heffer feebly and falsely cites the 7/7 bombings as evidence that Powell's "rivers foaming with blood" prediction has come true. But Powell's over-rated intellect would have been incapable of predicting the real threat we face today, that of jihadist ideology. To Powell, colour-blinded by a racist world view, the respectable corner-shop and curry-house entrepreneur would have been as much of a threat as the potential suicide bomber.

[Alan Black]

I agree a bit with Heffer - Enoch Powell wasn't directly saying that all people without white skin ought not to come into British society. He was just heavily implying it.

Before the various Race Relations Acts (against which this speech was railing) were passed, it was perfectly acceptable for a cafe to have a sign saying "No dogs, no blacks, no Irish".

Powell's speech was almost 40 years ago. I see no proverbial river Tibers flowing red with the equally proverbial blood. What we have today is a concern of numbers. It's a legitimate concern, because it forces us to ask questions over the very notion of our welfare state (which is pretty flawed as it goes) but it ought not to impinge on the economic fact that the immigrant population (no longer the "charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies" of Powell's days) are harder working than the "true Brits".

There will be a veritable sea of cynical posturing and headline grabbing idiocy. There will be "British Jobs For British Workers".

But this brings me back to Heffer's assertion that Powell was right.

Well... he just wasn't. There's no greater witness than recent historical fact. Four decades of gradually accepted race relations and economic progress means that we haven't been made mad, per his analysis. In fact, we've functioned pretty well.

[T. A. Cheek]

Well like most people I think Immigration is all good but I wonder 'now we've got the recipes, Can't we send them back?'

[J. S. Quinn]

Daniel Finkelstein's comments and laying out of the letter opens a lot of questions. As a son of imigrant parents (Irish) it was the comment that one of the respondants made that caught my eye. I remember my mother telling me that when she first came here in the 50's and reading the sign "No dogs, no blacks, no Irish".
So here I am an English man by birth with an anglo Irish heritage. I am white but does that make me any different to anybody else who is in the same position or does colour really make its mark. People come to this country because it is 'greener' than their home. They come to succeed to build, to lay down roots. I am an Englishman and proud of it. There has not been any rivers of blood. It is the diversity of our society that is our strength.

[james c]

Powell quoted a pensioner who found her life changed totally by mass immigration. Did she vote or ask for it. No. But she was poor and working class and thus not important.

[W Boylein]

If a more prophetic speech was ever made, I've never heard it. It's difficult to believe it was written 40 years ago. Shame we didn't heed his warning.

[Pedro Tam]

However one feels, one thing is clear, it is too late to do anything about it now!

[Rima Swannell]

In what way can you say Mr. Powell was a racist? Is it right to come to a secular country that respects human rights and the equality of men and women for example, and have no cultural affinity to the country and/or to have views that differ fundamentally from these basic principles? As a person of mixed race and from India, I entirely agree with Mr. Powell. You can not have people coming to this country for enitrely economic reasons and who have very little liking or respect for its values. Enoch Powell was and is called a 'racist' because it's an easy tag to apply to the uncomfortable truths that he had the courage to voice and the vision to foresee.

[funkg]

Ok I must admit im no statistician nor a historian, but the idea of a mass of ‘negroes’ taking over a whole district of Wolverhampton 40 years ago is not only demographically incorrect but also downright farcical. My father came to Britain in 1951 from the Caribbean and even in 1967 the numbers of Caribbean’s in Britain was tiny, compared to the numbers of immigrants from across the world we now have. This story by Enoch Powell was never substantiated, so why quote it?

[IRJMilne]

I sometimes wonder if the BBC news should be hijacked by Powell supporters for ten minutes, whilst the "rivers of blood" allusion is spelt out in clear and simple language.

As for the rest, it may have been an inflammatory speech, but how else to get things done? Politicians don't listen to the concerns of ordinary people except when they're terrified that an angry mob will throw them out of office. I have wondered if that was Powell's thought process.