Enoch Powell’s explosive “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 effectively closed
down public debate about immigration for several decades. His inflammatory
language made the topic radioactive, while at a stroke destroying his
political career.
Forty years on, immigration is being discussed up and down the country and
occupies centre-stage in parliament. It’s a topic that presses emotional
buttons in everyone – white, black or Asian – as I found during a journey
across Britain to discover whether Powell’s apocalyptic visions have any
basis in today’s reality.
It has been a fascinating experience for me – a Briton born in Somalia barely
a year before Powell’s speech – to listen to these concerns. As an overseas
reporter I have been more used to hearing villagers’ grievances against
another tribe of a different ethnicity. Yet in a sense these were familiar
scenarios – whether I was talking to a white family who felt under siege in
picture-postcard Lichfield or a second-generation black worker in Brixton
who was complaining about Polish workers undercutting his business.
It was striking how ill-informed we are about immigration. There are so many
half-truths bandied around that none of us feels we have been given the full
picture. What became clear to me is that the issue is less about colour and
cultural differences – in the way Powell portrayed – and more about the
sense that people’s jobs and livelihoods are being threatened.
My point of departure was the room in the Midland hotel in Birmingham where
Powell made his fateful speech. First I talked to people who had been there
at the time. A friend of Powell, a policeman from Wolver-hampton, told me
that he thought the speech was one of Powell’s worst: the MP, he said, had
looked self-conscious and worried as he delivered it.
Even today it still has the power to shock with its bleak vision and Powell’s
warning – in messianic, racist tones – that Britain was about to change for
ever. However, stripped of its poisonous rhetoric, it is impossible to deny
that some of his predictions have been borne out by events. In effect,
Powell was articulating a critique of multiculturalism – before
multiculturalism became official policy. At the time he called it
communalism, a “canker” that would isolate communities and which the
majority, native British population would struggle to understand.
Most people now believe that multiculturalism – the celebration of ethnic
diversity without the need to integrate – is imploding. Powell’s spectre of
“the River Tiber foaming with much blood” was in fact a reference to the
racial ferment in America, which many people at the time – including Richard
Nixon – thought might be on the verge of civil war. In Britain people
pointed to the race riots of 1981 as a fulfilment of Powell’s prophecy.
In some ways we are still stuck with the parameters of his speech, with its
emphasis on people coming to live here permanently.
By combining the issues of race and cultural identity, it continues to divide
people and evoke anger.
However, I think we have moved far beyond the kind of world that Powell
predicted. To me the real revelation is the way in which second and
third-generation immigrants feel embedded in Britain – and now talk about
east Europeans with the same sense of fear, foreboding and anger that white
people expressed about Asians 30 or 40 years ago.
According to a YouGov survey commissioned by Channel 4, 58% of settled British
migrants feel there is an immigration “crisis”. Among the total population
this view is echoed by 83% – with 84% in favour of halting immigration
altogether.
The poll also found that 66% feel that their jobs are being undercut by
migrant workers and 69% believe the latter are given special treatment.
One of the most striking interviews I conducted was with Ricky Scott, a carpet
cleaner from south London whose grandparents had emigrated to Britain from
Jamaica in the 1950s. Concerned that east Europeans were undercutting his
charges with rates of £30 a day, he also complained about the number of
newcomers on the streets who were speaking foreign languages.
In an uncanny echo of Powell – who spoke of the majority British becoming
“strangers in their own country” – the carpet cleaner said: “I can’t be
understood in my own country.”
It is not just second and third-generation immigrants who are directing their
ire at east Europeans. In Lichfield a white working-class family told me
that it was only a matter of time before “rivers of blood” became a reality.
Dave James, who had experienced difficulty in finding work, recalled going
to a job-seeking agency and finding himself at the end of a queue of east
Europeans who were receiving priority treatment. He walked out. “It makes me
feel like a second-class citizen,” he said.
I met many others from the so-called white working class who feel they can no
longer compete for the jobs that are now taken by Polish electricians and
other skilled workers. They feel utterly marginalised and ignored by
everybody – which makes their stories compelling and sad.
Because Poles are white and Christian, attracting little racist sentiment,
they are to some extent seen as fair game. They represent the lightning rod
of immigration: the focus for people’s fears about their livelihoods being
threatened by the sheer numbers arriving from abroad.
This is very like the scenario that Powell described – people unable to find
jobs, changed neighbourhoods and different languages spoken at schools. But
immigration these days is a matter of constant churning change. I
interviewed many Polish people who said they would definitely be going back
home. They do not see themselves as immigrants but as part of the global
workforce. Our economy – Europe’s most open, wealthy and diverse – beckons
them to a place where they can use their skills and then move on.
This is perhaps the crucial distinction from Powell’s frame of reference. The
new transient immigration is all about the needs of our economy. Meanwhile,
a huge number of indigenous British people have been failed by the education
system and are not prepared for such a dynamic globalised workplace.
Last week a House of Lords committee declared that immigration had brought
“little or no” economic benefit to the majority population. But after
speaking to a range of employers – from City bankers to people who employ
immigrants on building sites – I am convinced that they are wrong. Our
economy has outshone that of every other European country: immigration
certainly has not held it back.
In rejecting the committee’s conclusion, Gordon Brown ruled out an annual
limit on immigration, favouring a new points-based system that will allow
only highly skilled workers into the UK. Immigration, it seems, is now part
of our economic policy and therefore extremely difficult to control.
This will be of no comfort to indigenous Britons such as Richard, a
middle-class writer who told me that his area of Wibsey is the last bastion
of British civilisation in Brad-ford. Feeling outnumbered by Pakistanis in
areas of the town where he says “whitey is not welcome”, he dreams of going
down to Whitehall and seeing it “lined with politicians and civil servants
hanging from the lampposts” – a fitting punishment, he feels, for having
destabilised this country.
Pakistanis, of course, have worries of their own. Indeed, I spoke to many
Asians in the Midlands who felt they were suffering from discrimination. One
said: “I’m British and if I want to bring my wife and uncle from Pakistan,
why do I have a harder time than a Polish guy who can just walk in?”
For me the most positive aspect of the immigration issue is that it is no
longer a no-go area. Today it is being discussed openly by people of all
colours, from many points of view.
And it is surely better to debate the pros and cons of immigration than to
close the argument down – as Enoch Powell did all those years ago.
Rageh Omaar presents Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth, the first of a
three-part Dispatches series, at 8pm tomorrow on Channel 4. He was talking
to Stuart Wavell
