The Unhelpful Cipher that is Enoch Powell
A guest post from Alka Seghal Cuthbert of Don't Divide Us (DDU)
From the latest ONS report to the ‘where are you from?’ scandal in the palace, the issues of race and immigration continue to dominate the headlines. I was confronted with just how one-sided and disingenuous this debate can be first hand, when the Archbishop of Canterbury led a debate in the House of Lords on the issue of asylum. So often, even the mere hint of a concern about immigration is simply dismissed high-handedly by the elite. As the Archbishop put it in in a typically dismissive fashion: “much of the public and political debate on migration is driven by fear”. I was delighted that my fellow Peer Baroness Stowell criticised the House for taking this kind of dismissive tone. You should read her short speech here.
We need a much better debate on immigration. For this reason, we are delighted to publish below a unique and thoughtful reflection on the issue by Alka Seghal Cuthbert, the director of Don’t Divide Us. In her essay, she reflects on the return of talk about Enoch Powell, and suggests that for both sides, he serves as a way of avoiding the real truths about immigration.
We’ve also included below her essay a few of my favourite Substack pieces on the race debate over the last few weeks.
The unhelpful Cipher of Enoch Powell: how to talk about immigration
Alka Seghal Cuthbert
When Suella Braverman used the word ‘invasion’ to describe the issue of illegal immigration and small boat crossings, the Independent’s associate editor Sean O’Grady gleefully described her as the new Enoch Powell. This comparison is not just politically and historically illiterate, but also sadly reflective of the trend on both sides of the culture war to reduce everything to the question of skin colour. If we want a civil and constructive discussion about race and immigration today, we need to understand what really happened in the Sixties, why racism is far less of a problem now and criticise the baleful impact of identity politics today.
If O’Grady, presumably fuelled by today’s identity politics that can only see issues in terms of skin colour, wants to pretend that nothing has changed since the 1960s, his critics are equally obsessed with race. The reaction by many to the recent ONS report of census data – which showed that some cities are “minority white”[1] – was barely concealed racism. Suggesting that there is anything like a perfect proportion of white to non-white people, or thinking that there is some kind of tipping point where tolerance becomes impossible and division sets in, is a sign of an ugly return of racial thinking. In fact, it looks like many on the right have imbibed the identarian ethos of Critical Race Theorists (CRT) on the left.
Whilst CRT certainly does encourage a new kind of prejudice against white people – and the equation of whiteness with sin is not just limited to schools or university campuses – you cannot counter this pernicious ideology by agreeing that skin colour does indeed reign supreme! Racism is ugly and wrong from whichever side it emanates.
Why historical context matters
Sadly, Enoch Powell has become a cipher for both sides of the race debate. O’Grady invokes his memory to encourage us to believe we are on the verge of right-wing violence against immigrants, and some commentators leap, like circus animals, to Powell’s defence – insisting his infamous speech ‘made a lot of sense’.
Instead, we should see that Powell has little insight to offer us today. In fact, Powell had little to offer his own era. Even if Powell’s speech caused great concern to many – not just ‘immigrants’ but plenty of people who felt themselves as British as anyone else– he failed to understand the context of what was happening in British society. His key prophesy – the ‘rivers of blood’ – not only failed to come to pass, but missed what was happening in the Britain he thought he knew so well.
Let us look back to the 1960s – what had immigration really been like? Of course, the generation of immigrants arriving then were by no means a unified block. They will have had different experiences depending on local and personal factors. But all were arriving into a nation that was attempting to re-negotiate its position in the world in the face of economic decline. Politically and culturally, Britain could still, at that point, punch above its weight. The Commonwealth was one expression of Britain’s renegotiation in the complex context of both great-power decline but continuing cultural power.
Talking with my parents and their friends - all first-generation immigrants from India in the early 1960s - it is clear that, overall, life was good for them in their first decade in Britain. Arriving in Britain with little money, they often had to take work for which they were overqualified and make do with few creature comforts. And of course, they faced varying levels and types of racism. Along with listening to The Beatles on TV, they also listened to Powell’s speech. Yet life remained, in their retrospective judgment, good. Powell was relatively insignificant for them, even if his unpleasant scaremongering did more broadly stir up racial tensions.
A personal anecdote illustrates the complexity of people’s views about different ethnic groups, and also how they can change. When my parents bought their first house in an all-white suburb, the neighbours had protested to the vendors, asking them not to sell to ‘the Pakis’, it would lower the value etc. The vendors, being independent minded individuals, ignored them. Within a month or two of moving in, one of the neighbours, shocked to see mum hanging out hand-washed nappies so soon after having given birth to my sister, insisted she gave our laundry to her because she had a washing machine. Turns out, the neighbours realised they had more in common with the immigrants than they originally thought.
Indeed, Britain and Britons navigated this period at least as well, and probably better, than their European neighbours. As Spectator columnist Dominic Green writes,
‘The French shunned their Arab immigrants, and the Germans dehumanized their Gastarbeiter as second-class citizens, but the British married their immigrants, especially Caribbeans. The Enoch-was-right parties of the 1970s never won a parliamentary seat.’
If Powell’s vision, despite the racism it undoubtedly encouraged, left many immigrants on the whole unperturbed, it had a very different effect on the ruling class. So at odds was Powell with Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath that he was removed from his post. No doubt Powell’s Euroscepticism (something he and Tony Benn had in common) contributed to the rupture. But so too did Powell’s apocalyptic prophesies of the damage to British national identity that would inevitably follow if immigration continued, as he argued, to allow ‘the black man’ to ‘have the whip hand over the white man’.
Heath was on a mission to modernise Britain’s economy through joining the European Community and modernise society through legislation such as the 1968 Race Relations Act that outlawed discrimination based on colour, ethnic or national origins in housing, employment and public services. This reflected, in part, genuine progress and shifting social attitudes. It also reflected a degree of self-confidence in the British idea and the belief that Britain could not just benefit Commonwealth immigrants but also integrate them.
But the cultural confidence among the ruling political class at the time was not easily translated into a strong, coherent national identity. This was true as well for Powell. As has been argued, Powell, for all his concern with the preservation of the nation state and British identity, was unable to find any reliable basis for Britishness. He looked at times to Empire, or to Ulster, and sometimes to mythical Englishness. Indeed, it is perhaps a fool’s errand to seek a single source for identity - national or personal.
Powell, in sum, gave voice to a variety of anxieties gripping, in different ways, the elite. But, to be blunt, most British people were simply muddling through. Immigration, although a fact of life, did not have the epochal salience that both Powell, his fellow travellers, and his critics assumed – nor assume today. At the risk of rose-tinting the past, Britain dealt with immigration more through the traditions of good-neighbourliness and working-class solidarity than Powellite racism.
Then and now
If the unassailable rejoinder to Powell’s prophesy was that, for its faults, Britain as a nation-state became a home for, and made Britons of, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, our era is dominated by a much less confident outlook. Indeed, for many of our elites the very idea of the nation-state has become morally delegitimised.
Powell, with an unfortunate irony, played a role here: in mistaking him for the authentic voice of the people, our elites cemented an association between patriotism and anti-immigration sentiment. Patriotism came to be thought of as one step away from rivers of blood. Today, to talk positively of the nation state is to run the risk of being labelled a racist - a phenomenon most aptly exampled by the backlash to the Brexit vote in 2016. Leave voters’ enthusiasm for national sovereignty, one key aspect of which was taking back control of national borders, has been interpreted politicians of a technocratic bent, from the Left and Right, in the most malign way as hostility to foreigners. Brexit critics wanted to delegitimise the vote by associating it with racism, and opportunistic right-wingers have tried to use the populist demand for political change to warm-over outdated racial ideas.
But the British people defy these lazy, prejudiced political labels. We may be hostile to established parties, but certainly not to immigrants. There is simply no evidence that the overwhelming majority of British people are anything less than tolerant of immigrants. Indeed, in practical terms, and despite the admonishing of race-obsessives on both sides, British people have proven remarkably successful at building a post-racial society where skin colour does not matter. The ONS notes that alongside the high proportion of marriages across racial lines, one-in-10 homes now contains people of two or more ethnicities.
What’s more, ethnic minorities, although facing racism in pockets – although less than they would elsewhere – find Britain a hospitable place. According to Professor Yaojun Li, one of the contributing academics to The Commission of Racial Disparities Report, “ethnic minority children from families of unskilled workers much more likely to achieve long-range upward mobility and much less likely to follow in their fathers’ footsteps compared with their White peers”. Britain is not a racist country.
The return of racism?
However, it is the case that there are increasing tensions over new waves of immigration. Again, Powell’s legacy here has been perverse: all questions or concerns about immigration have been met with the same charge of racism. Immigration has become a socially taboo topic. Legitimate questions about immigration have been difficult to express – especially with a growing cadre of people within institutions whose job it is to police our thoughts and speech via equity, diversity and inclusion teams.
But when someone says they are concerned about uncontrolled immigration, or even just immigration without the qualifier, they do not necessarily mean the same thing as Powell. Today, such sentiments are just as likely to mean a concern at the lack of any control on the part of our politicians. Who would not be concerned at the sight of people arriving in less than sea-worthy boats? Or that the number of undocumented people in the UK is estimated to be between 800,000 and 1.2million (larger than other comparable nations in Europe)?
The Left would have us believe that when white majority citizens voice their concerns, they are voicing fear of ‘the other’, or being selfish for wanting to maintain living standards. They refuse to take concerns at face value, wanting to read racism into anything and hear dogwhistles everywhere. The phantom of Enoch Powell is always conjured up.
Likewise, many on the right refuse to take immigrants at face value: those determined to seek a new life in a prosperous, welcoming country are imagined to be desperate to live off state benefits in ‘luxury’ hotels, or here to conspiratorially undermine British values.
Both ignore the possibility of other reasons and motivations among both British citizens at home and newcomers from abroad. Both are depressingly misanthropic. As a result, the most important question – that of what kind of society, and what kind of culture, immigrants are arriving into – disappears from view.
It is harder to have the reasoned, clear-headed discussion about immigration, refugees and asylum seekers that we need to have as a society when both sides draw on the poisoned well of identity politics. A better starting point for defeating this pernicious ideology of ideas of white privilege and so on is more likely to be found within common sense public opinion. Seventy-seven per cent of respondents in one survey disagreed with the view that you have to be white to be English, and while many are generally positive about immigration, they are also committed to fairness. The problem of people arriving in small boats can cause consternation not because foreigners are arriving, but because the circumventing of normal processes of application seems to trump fairness.
There are no easy answers to the challenges raised both by immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment. Going back to Powell is certainly not an answer. For both sides, he has become a cipher, a replacement for confronting the genuine challenges of our time.
How should we go about having a better discussion? We could do worse than ditching identity politics and starting to think about engaging in democratic politics as opposed to the politics of identity. Instead of posing British identity in purely reactive terms, we need to think about how to make the values of freedom, tolerance and equality meaningful for most people – as they largely were for my parent’s generation. Then the question that Powell never could answer – where the source of British identity lies – will become more resolvable.
[1] More accurately, that they have less than 50% identifying as “white British”
Alka Seghal Cuthbert is the director of Don't Divide Us and the author of What should schools teach? Disciplines, subjects and the pursuit of truth
More reading
Battle of Ideas festival regular Frank Furedi goes deep into the history of how moral entrepreneurs and race advocates made the ‘where do you come from’ question a taboo. Read on for a unique history of the rise of the idea of micro-aggressions
Amber Muhinyi’s brand new Substack takes up the question that caused so much controversy, worrying where this all ends.
Doug Stokes - who I often find an interesting commentator on a variety of topics - has a deep-dive on the rise of CRT and its inculcation right across society
Yes, I think perhaps rose tinted glasses here. The 80’s book Under Siege painted a bleak picture of racism being a fundamental part of British society... I think it even went as far to say racism was as British as bacon and eggs! That book was a call to arms to the working class to turn away from racism (aimed at the Labour movement if I recall) and see class rather than colour but still recognised that racism was a real and dangerous force in society. To reduce the experience of black and Asian Britons in the 50’s to 90’s as minimal and insignificant erases the role of the state to that of an observer rather than the driver of racist policies and ideas. Sure, things are so much better now, and the CRT proponents are a valid and worthy target but we need to get away from the ‘stop seeing colour’ narrative as if racism is just a part of distant history that can be brushed aside. I agree that generally white British people don’t ‘see colour’ (as such) but the reality remains that black people remain over represented in poorer areas and under achievers academically. There has to be a reason which means there has to be a solution.