by A. N. Wilson
The incident which most endeared him to the Foreign Office, however, occurred during an official visit to Brazil during a diplomatic reception at the Brazilian President’s Palace of the Dawn. A witness recalled, ‘It was really beautiful–I think only the Latin Americans still do it that way: all the military officers were in full dress uniform, and the ambassadors were in court dress. Sumptuous is the word, and sparkling. As we entered, George made a bee-line for this gorgeously crimson-clad figure, and said, “Excuse me, but may I have the pleasure of this dance?” There was a terrible silence for a moment before the guest, who knew who he was, replied, “There are three reasons, Mr Brown, why I will not dance with you. The first, I fear, is that you’ve had a little too much to drink. The second is that this is not, as you seem to suppose, a waltz the orchestra is playing, but the Peruvian national anthem, for which you should be standing to attention. And the third reason why we may not dance, Mr Brown, is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.’31
Ever since Kenya became independent in 1963, Jomo Kenyatta had committed his country to a racialist policy of ‘Americanisation’, putting the position of some 80,000 Kenyan Asians in question. The Conservative Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, said in that year that it would be ‘out of the question’ to deny these Kenyan Asians entry to Britain if they wished it. ‘It would be tantamount to a denial of one of the basic rights of a citizen, namely to enter the country of which he is a citizen.’32 By 1967, Kenyatta was making it clear to his Asian fellow Kenyans that they must leave. In the first two months of 1968,13,000 arrived in Britain. The Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan, reacted with panic and hastily introduced a bill to the House of Commons to restrict the entry of any more. Only 1,500 ‘non-patrial’ (that is non-white Asians) from Kenya could be admitted per year, though it was permissible for as many white Kenyans as so desired to enter Britain.
These white Kenyans were referred to as British subjects, and their entry into Britain was referred to as ‘welcome home’, whereas Richard Crossman, for example, could refer to ‘Kenyan Asians with British passports’, as if there was something strange about these particular Kenyans possessing such documents. The reason for the government’s panic, however, was clear enough. Britain, in common with other European countries, depended for their expanding economy on more and more cheap labour, particularly since the indigenous members of the white working class who had grown up since the war found menial work unattractive. The ineluctable growth of free trade, about which the socialist parties of Europe were sceptical, but the so-called right-wingers were optimistic, carried with it the natural consequence that many people, from all over the globe, would gravitate towards the expanding Western economies for work.
The paradox, politically, here was that those who most fervently embraced market economics, and the ideas of what came to be called monetarism, were likely, in social policy, to be conservatives who instinctively disliked the changes to national life which mass immigration inescapably brought with it. And many such monetarist conservatives were, like a good number of Little Englander socialists, and indeed human beings generally, racialist by instinct. By October 1961,300,000 new immigrants had arrived in a decade: a fact which prompted the Commonwealth Immigration Act. But in that year alone, a further 130,000 migrants entered Britain. As the 1960s progressed, the proportion of dependants to active workers also went up. Whereas a high proportion of the early immigrants were adults who worked in the National Health Service and in public transport, by 1971 women and children made up three-quarters of the immigrant population.
Harold Macmillan had asked a special group of his Cabinet to form the Commonwealth Immigration Committee, and this group, which included Reginald Maudling and J. Enoch Powell, recommended that the annual migration should be limited to 45,000–still a huge number if it were repeated year on year for decades.
Since that time, Macmillan and Home had gone, and the Conservative Party had elected as its leader a former Church Times journalist and organ scholar by the name of Edward Heath as its leader. Heath, who was to develop in rancorous old age into a sort of Social Democrat, had been the right-wing candidate in the leadership contest against Reginald Maudling. His right-wingery manifested itself in a deep commitment to Europe, a profound desire to sign Britain up to the European experiment, and hence to promote free trade. This led to his having a confrontational attitude to industrial relations–much more so than a man such as R. A. Butler. In the area of race relations, however, he was modern, and he did not wish to appease the racialist wings of his party. This attitude probably had the inevitable effect of making the wilder extremists break rank, as would occur memorably in Birmingham in April 1968.
J. Enoch Powell was an even more fervent free marketeer and monetarist than Heath ever was, and so the logic of his position would surely have led him to wanting as much immigration as possible. As the Secretary of State for Health in Macmillan’s government and an astringent economiser, he had been only too happy to fill 34 percent of junior hospital posts with immigrant doctors and nurses.33
But Powell’s desire to be on a limb, to cut a dash, went hand in hand with a wish shared with almost all politicians–the wish to be popular. In April 1968, as the controversy about the Kenyan Asians gathered pace, and the towns of the West Midlands, such as Wolverhampton (which Powell represented in Parliament), filled up with immigrants from Pakistan and India and the West Indies, Powell was very well aware of how passionately the indigenous population felt betrayed in this matter by the governing classes. Powell, ever since the Labour governments had taken office, had attacked the ‘New Model Army of gentlemen who know best’–a New Model Army which grew apace in England, with the addition of many female members. And one of the things which the New Model Army most deplored was racial prejudice of any kind. It was when addressing the Birmingham Conservatives in April 1968 that Powell managed to deliver a speech which was calculated to cock a snook at the New Model Army, both within Labour’s ranks and among the Shadow Cabinet–for Edward Heath was a gentleman who knew best if ever there was one.
‘We must be mad,’ Powell said, in his Brummy voice to his Brummy friends, ‘literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some fifty thousand dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation building its own funeral pyre.’ It was a speech which drew upon the anecdotal evidence of his correspondents, including a somewhat mysterious lady in Northumberland who claimed that a woman in his own constituency in Wolverhampton was afraid to go out. ‘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’…Powell did not make it clear why this woman could go to prison, or even whether she existed. When he was asked to identify the street in his constituency where the excreta had been posted through the door, he was unable to do so, and on a televised interview broadcast to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the speech he rather unimpressively claimed that he did not believe the world ‘piccaninny’ had any racial connotation. (If it hadn’t, why were the piccaninnies chanting ‘racialist’?)
Powell certainly did not emerge well from the episode of the speech, for which he was instantly sacked by Edward Heath from the Shadow Cabinet. And it would perhaps not be worth dwelling at such length upon this speech were it not for two remarkable things: one was the sibylline prophecy which it contained, and the other was the degree of popular response which it elicited.
The prophecy was drawn from Virgil, who was seen by the Middle Ages not just as a poet but also as a wizard. ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’34
In 1987, Powell made the remark on television tha
t ‘If I had a regret, it was that I didn’t quote Virgil in Latin, but then I didn’t want to appear pedantic, so I took the Latin out and put in a translation. I probably ought to have stuck to the Latin… Nobody would have troubled to translate it.’
Like many of his remarks on the subject of the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, as it came to be known, this cluster of half-truths is puzzling. It surely was not just the quotation from Virgil which excited so much controversy. What about the assertion that ‘in this country in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’? Powell’s belief that an allusion to one of the best-known passages in the whole of European literature would have baffled every listener in the land, including newspaper editors and commentators who, like himself, had degrees in classics, also suggests arrogant solipsism on a titanic scale, as if Latin were a private language known only to himself. Others would have perhaps been less careless in their quotation. In Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid (at that time a set text for Latin ‘O’ level and probably read by tens of thousands of boys and girls in Britain), the Cumaean sibyl, about to escort Aeneas to the underworld, foresees
bella, horrida bella
Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno.
(I see Wars, horrid wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood–Aeneid vi. 86).
A few days later in his house in South Eaton Place, Powell was found by his friend John Biffen MP ‘preoccupied among his classical reference books’. ‘I can’t find the Roman,’ Enoch remarked. He had realised that it was not ‘the Roman’ (which Roman? Virgil?) who had the vision of the Tiber foaming with blood, but the Sybil. Anyone can make a slip, but how strange for the classical professor to make such a very elementary howler, or for it to take him more than ten seconds to find the quotation to verify.
More important than the origin of a Latin quotation were two questions: whether the Wolverhampton seer’s own prophecy came true–whether there were rivers of blood flowing through England as a result of huge numbers of immigrants; and, secondly, what the speech showed about the feelings of the indigenous population towards the immigrants.
If Powell had foretold that Islam was an uncompromising faith, and that the arrival of tens of thousands of Muslims into a Christian or post-Christian country would store up problems for the future, then there might be some justification for the assertion, often made to this day by bar-room experts, that ‘Enoch got it right’. But Powell’s speech was simply racist. He predicted that there would be a ‘civil war’ on racial lines. ‘What’s wrong with racism?’ he candidly asked on television in 1995. ‘Racism is the basis of a nationality.’35
Powell’s intellectual and spiritual journey went forward in a series of strange leapfrog hops, in which, after a long spell of believing one thing, he suddenly believed the opposite. He had been a passionate imperialist. Then he had ‘discovered’ the doctrine that no sovereign parliament could have an Empire whose members were not represented in that assembly. (The Bostonians had discovered that during their Tea Party in 1773.) He was an atheist, and then, on a misty evening in autumn in Wolverhampton, he stepped back inside the Church. He had been a keen European–even advocating a shared European army; and then the most eloquent exponent of the independence of the nation state. Had he lived longer, it is conceivable that he would have seen what a very great number of people have seen over the last fifty years: yes, the immigrations changed England forever, but part of this change was a growing ability, among those of different ethnic backgrounds, to live alongside one another without conflict on anything like the scale Powell predicted. (The case of radical Islam, which comes later in our story, is not unrelated to the prophecy of the Wolverhampton Prophet, but it is different.)
This was not how it seemed at the time of Powell’s speech in 1968. In the ten days after he had made the speech, Powell received more than 100,000 letters, only 800 expressing disagreement with him. Diana Spearman, editor of New Society, analysed the letters. Relatively few were blatantly racist or unpleasant in tone. The huge proportion ‘feared that continued immigration was a threat to British culture and traditions’. Spearman noted how many of the letters reflected a sense of ‘alienation’, a feeling of distrust of the Establishment. ‘The letters reflect the feeling that they by their actions have produced problems for us, which do not in any way affect them and which they are not doing anything to help us solve. Their idea is to tell us what we must and must not do.’36
This feeling remains. It was the issue of immigration which exacerbated it. That of the European question (Common Market, European Union) carried it on. During the next fifty years there would be a growing sense that the New Model Army of gentlemen who know best, the New Establishment, had detached itself from the general will of the electorate. Up to this point, many voters felt common cause with the broad, amorphous coalitions of interest represented by one of the three chief political parties. In the Harold Wilson era this began to change. The left would begin its bid for dominance of the Labour Party, a struggle which took up most of the next decade and ended in its defeat. Conservatives–those who were truly conservative, and wanted England to stay as it was, or to go back to the demographic, architectural or gastronomic conditions of pre-war Britain–no longer had a voice in Heath’s Conservative Party.
If your ordinary, instinctive Tory found no representation of his life-view in the Conservative Party, there was an equal sense of betrayal among those socialists who had been simple-hearted enough to hope that Harold Wilson, once the candidate of Labour’s left and torch-bearer for Bevanism, would bring to pass a Socialist Britain. Paul Foot wrote, ‘The two years of Labour government from March 1966 to March 1968 have seen the death of Harold Wilson, Yorkshire socialist and Moral Crusader. Every one of his priorities have been reversed or abandoned. Racialist minorities in Southern Africa have been appeased. The American Government, with his support, have trebled their fire power in Vietnam. Programmes for overseas aid, housing, hospital building, school building, a minimum incomes guarantee have been abandoned or slashed…’ And so on. His catalogue is a long one.37
This sense of impotence, of political parties ‘knowing best’, but not representing the aspirations of their natural supporters, was to be a characteristic of Britain for the next forty years, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher’s first two terms of office. Those of naturally Conservative instincts were simply turned off politics altogether.
12
Ireland
In June 1966 Harold Wilson was still basking in his electoral triumph of three months earlier. True, he had his money worries–to devalue, or not to devalue the pound. True, the problems of Rhodesia still haunted him. And the possibility of a seamen’s strike, inspired as the Prime Minister believed by communists, would scupper his prices and incomes policy.1 Little could he have believed, however, that in this secular, modern, white-hot technology year of 1966 Britain was on the edge of a very different set of problems from across the Irish Channel–problems which would haunt all Wilson’s successors to the close of the century. True, Wilson was aware of injustices towards the Catholic population of Northern Ireland and had expressed vague hopes that something would be done about them. The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Captain Terence O’Neill, had gone some way to trying to bring in moderate reforms, which had met with adamant resistance from the Protestant working classes.
Harold Wilson did not know Ireland and did not understand it. He would probably have reacted with something like indifference when informed that a body called the Free Presbyterian Church, led by its young founder, the Revd Ian Paisley (born 1926), intended to picket the Irish Presbyterians General Assembly in Belfast. With his tall, bulky gait, his brilliantined hair, his thick lips which seemed in their liquid sibilance positively to savour the anti-papalist insults which fell from them, with his strong Ulster brogue and his alarmingly powerful lungs, larynx and vocal chords, Paisley was an easy object of metropolitan mockery. Only imagine him at dinner wi
th Roy Jenkins, or at a concert with Denis Healey. The Labour Cabinet, with their careers behind them as Oxford dons, could mock his educational background (the Ballymena Technical High School boy received his doctorate from the dubious source of Bob Jones University)–in marked contrast to Roy Jenkins’s priding himself on his ‘double’–honorary degrees from both Yale and Harvard.