Rivers of Blood

 

The current season of the British series “Call the Midwife” brings us up to 1968, and Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech. Of course, all the sympathetic characters we have come to know and love on the series are immediately opposed to this supposedly racist and anti-immigrant sentiment.

I have a problem with this. A Gallup poll at the time showed 74% of Britons agreed with Powell—that is an overwhelming consensus in polling terms. Even 47% of immigrants agreed there needed to be more restrictions on immigration, against 30% who disagreed. 

Apparently it was the press and the politicians who decided the speech was a problem. Do we believe them without looking for ourselves?

Powell himself predicted this reaction in his speech: “people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: ‘If only,’ they love to think, ‘if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen.’"

Are we to believe that all good people would see the speech as reprehensible? And so that that almost all Britons living at the time were not good people? 

This seems racist. 

It is necessary to hear their side; to hear what Powell said.

Powell was not saying there was anything wrong with immigrants, or even that British culture was superior. A racist would have said at least this much. His objection was to mass immigration from a distinctly different culture; because this meant the immigrants would not assimilate. “Their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.”

This can be misrepresented by quotation out of context; and he does use language that was not then, but is now, considered offensive, like “piccaninnies.” But these are pickled red herrings.

“Now,” Powell concludes, “we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination.”

We have indeed seen exactly that since, with the growth of the doctrine of “multiculturalism.” Cynical politicians are manipulating ethnic communities to elicit block votes. 

This, Powell warns, was only likely to lead to strife among distinct ethnic ghettoes living in close proximity, seeing themselves as having competing interests. Hence his image of “rivers of blood” in the streets.

Which we seem to be witnessing now.