Today is the fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell's infamous "rivers of blood" speech. There's been such a lot of coverage in the media - so much so that I'm a little tired of it all. I thought for a while about not writing on the subject but given my connections with Wolverhampton, our family situation and the currency of the issues in a place like Oadby, I decided to offer some personal thoughts.
Powell's Wolverhampton constituency had seen a rapid increase in immigration, first from Jamaica and then from the Punjab in north India. I was almost five years old when he gave his speech in the Midland Hotel in Birmingham and though I obviously can't remember the details, I do know that the topics of immigration and 'race relations' were often discussed as I grew up.
The speech (full text here) still makes for a shocking read. There's no doubt that Powell knew that his words would cause a storm and in the speech itself he anticipated that he would be judged to be inflammatory and stirring up trouble. He was certainly right in this one respect - the speech provoked widespread condemnation.
But while many objected, there were also large numbers of people who claimed that Powell spoke up for them. Dockworkers and meat porters marched to show their support and in pubs, factories, offices and shops it wasn't unusual to hear people agree with him. I grew up in a town that was partly ashamed of Powell, but in which very often I would regrettably hear, "Enoch had it right."
In the 1990s, Nick Budgen (MP for Powell's Wolverhampton constituency) was interviewed on an early morning programme on Radio Four. He backed a colleague who had said that Powell had been right to highlight the problems of immigration. Specifically, the claim was that it had been a mistake to allow immigration to happen on the scale that it did. By this time I was married to Jennifer, the eldest daughter of two Jamaican immigrants who had moved to Wolverhampton five years before Powell spoke. I contacted the Wolverhampton Express and Star to alert them to the fact that Budgen had spoken out like this. Within a couple of hours the paper sent a reporter and photographer to our home to interview us about my concerns. I explained that I wanted to know from Mr Budgen exactly how I should tell my children that it "had been a mistake" to let their grandparents into the country. The paper ran it as the lead story on the front page and so, much to our surprise, we found ourselves as a family entering into the potent public debate on immigration. We had abusive letters from people we didn't know but on the whole we received an overwhelming amount of support for taking a stand.
In 2008 something is happening in relation to the debates about immigration. We seem to be losing our confidence in ourselves. The project of multicultural Britain' has been called into question and, for the first time in a long time, people are asking if Enoch Powell was right. The very question is saddening to me.
I believe he was wrong. Wrong, not only for his vile rhetoric, which irresponsibly fuelled the fires of prejudice and racism, but wrong in his logic as well. The main thesis of his speech was that immigration had imperilled the very life of the nation and that down the line, we would inevitably face violence and destruction. "It is", he said, "like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre."
The truth is that, despite some notable setbacks, Powell's apocalyptic vision has not come about. In a remarkable way and with not a little difficulty, people from different cultures, religions, ethnic backgrounds and faiths have found it possible to live together. I am proud that our churches have been leading agents of reconciliation and a force for good, alongside many others. Contrary to Powell's sniping about "archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads", our church leaders have worked hard to rectify the failings of the past and to build a sense of a shared future. The Diocese of Leicester's track record is excellent in this regard. Forty years on, I live in Oadby, a multi-cultural neighbourhood where community relations are very good. Our own church has many members who were not born in this country and we are richer for their presence.
My deepest disagreement with Powell is not that members of the "settled" community have found it hard to accept mass immigration. Plainly, some have. It's the way he described the inevitability of racial conflict that is simply wrong. Thanks to daily investments by millions of ordinary people, as well as by governments of differing parties, we have learned to live together. Britain today (and Oadby too) is thriving, diverse, culturally rich and a good place to live.
True, there are imperfections with the 'multi-cultural project' and it is the case that some people and some neighbourhoods live in a worrying degree of isolation from others. But we have found that given enough goodwill and the willingness both to accept the stranger and to integrate, we can live in cohesive communities. There are warning signs that we shouldn't presume that this cohesion is automatic. But these signs should induce us to further commitment to mutual purpose and shared values. Now is not the time to risk losing all the good we have achieved.
The future of neighbourhoods like ours in Oadby is certainly not to hark back to the offensive and erroneous theories of Powell, or to wonder what if immigration hadn't happened. It's to heed the potential for trends of separation and isolation and to work actively against them. It's to engage across apparent differences. It's to listen and to talk and to understand. That's why, in a small way, those members of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds who use our buildings and encounter each other in a precious community facility like St Paul's are part of the constructive resistance to all that Enoch Powell promised.
