State of Emergency: the Way We Were
Page 35
As the crisis wore on, so Powell’s rhetoric became more strident. ‘In order to govern a people and to lead them, you must enter into their feelings and their fears, and they must know you enter into them,’ he told a Round Table audience a few weeks later. And yet ‘at this moment hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens here in Britain are living in perpetual dread: they dread for themselves, or they fear for the future, or they dread for both’. He singled out the elderly, ‘who live in actual physical fear’, as well as those who feared for their children, ‘who feel as if they are trapped or tied to a stake in the face of an advancing tide’. But ‘beyond all these, and including all these’, Powell said, ‘are those who watch an alteration, profound and irrevocable, which they feel powerless to arrest or to protect against, engulfing the places, the towns, the cities which they knew and which they thought were theirs’. And if Heath’s government would not address their fears, then ‘another must’.8
By 1972, Powell was comfortably the most popular politician in the country, voted ‘Man of the Year’ in a BBC poll two years running. Once the youngest professor in the British Empire and the youngest brigadier in the British Army, the MP for Wolverhampton South West now cut a brooding, isolated figure, a prophet to his admirers, a pariah to his enemies. In full flow in the House of Commons he often seemed icily logical, pressing his argument to its conclusion without regard for the sensibilities of his audience. In fact, he was a man of smouldering passions, from Housman and Nietzsche to High Anglicanism and hunting. As a newspaper profile had put it when he ran against Heath and Maudling for the Tory leadership back in 1965, he had ‘the taut, pale face of a missionary, and the zealous energy of a man who is not afraid of the stake’. Ever since his extraordinarily divisive ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (a phrase he never actually used) in 1968, he had been in the political wilderness, and had not even spoken to Heath since his dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet. Yet while his doom-laden predictions ensured him the hatred of students and the liberal left, they had also made him enormously popular with the general public; indeed, three out of four people told pollsters they agreed with him. His appeal crossed regional and party boundaries: he was regarded as a courageous, independent man, the tribune of the voiceless masses. And the more that student demonstrators tried to drown him out, the more his support seemed to grow. During the general election campaign of 1970, Tony Benn had histrionically claimed that ‘the flag hoisted at Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered over Dachau and Belsen’. Two weeks later Powell almost doubled his majority, and afterwards some analysts suggested that he had attracted as many as 2 million working-class voters to the Conservative Party. He had tapped into a widespread feeling, wrote the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, that ‘the politicians are conspiring against the people, that the country is led by men who had no idea about what interests or frightens the ordinary people in the backstreets of Wolverhampton’.9
Then as now, Powell’s views and career were widely misunderstood. Often caricatured as a fire-breathing reactionary, he actually held remarkably liberal views on many social issues. Not only did he vote for the legalization of homosexuality and the abolition of hanging, but his most celebrated parliamentary speech was a withering attack on British atrocities in the Hola detention camp in Kenya, which even Labour observers thought was one of the most moving Commons speeches they had ever heard. And although he loathed the project of European union and regarded the United States with deep distaste, it is hard to see a man who taught himself French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Urdu as a xenophobic Little Englander. Set against all that, however, is the fact that in April 1968 Powell gave a speech that thousands of immigrants found deeply unsettling, even terrifying; a speech that repeated some of the racist urban myths of the day in terms that were bound to prove inflammatory; a speech that horrified even some of his oldest and closest friends. And whatever the nuances of Powell’s own position, which was often much more complicated than his critics allowed, there is little doubt that genuine racists drew comfort from his stand. From Wolverhampton, which had virtually no history of racial antagonism before the speech, there came reports of white youths attacking immigrants and chanting ‘Powell, Powell’. And according to the National Front’s organizer in Huddersfield, his speeches ‘gave our membership and morale a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke, we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speeches we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of the Tory organizations.’10
With his trademark moustache and blazing eyes, Enoch Powell was a gift to the cartoonists, and in this image for the Daily Express (10 April 1972) Cummings links him with immigration, the EEC and Northern Ireland. It is easy to be shocked by the racial caricatures, but it has to be said that Bernadette Devlin makes a fine mermaid.
The irony, though, is that even as Powell’s speech effectively destroyed his political career, it made his name as a national icon. As far as the general public were concerned, all the complexities of Powell’s career, from his liberal attitudes to homosexuality and hanging to his radical free-market economic ideas, were reduced to just one issue: race. To those frightened by immigration or alienated from the political system, he became an overnight hero. ‘He’s the finest man in the country,’ one elderly Blackburn woman told Jeremy Seabrook, prompting a chorus of approval: ‘He should be Prime Minister.’ ‘He started too late with all this black business. He should have started sooner.’ ‘He speaks the mind of all the white – well, three quarters of the white people in this country.’ ‘I think Enoch is a marvellous man, and I hope that some day he’s Prime Minister.’ ‘He’s whiter than white is Enoch. Whiter than white.’ In popular culture, meanwhile, support for Powell was used everywhere from episodes of Coronation Street to spin-off novels from The Sweeney to identify resentful, racist or reactionary working-class characters. ‘Enoch’s Dreaming of a White Christmas’, sings Albert Steptoe in one Steptoe and Son Christmas special, while Alf Garnett is never slow to invoke the sage of Wolverhampton. ‘It’s a pity old Enoch ain’t in charge,’ he mutters in an episode of Till Death Us Do Part from January 1974, while behind him, to the hilarity of the audience, a black electrician arrives to fix his broken television. ‘He’d sort them out. He’d put the coons down the pits, he would.’11
As opinion rallied against the Ugandan Asians, it was Powell’s name that protesters invoked to justify their opposition. When 400 Smithfield meat porters, joined by groups of dockers and porters from Covent Garden, marched on Westminster on 24 August, they carried placards reading ‘ENOCH WAS RIGHT’. Two weeks later they organized a second march, this time to the headquarters of the TGWU, again carrying banners proclaiming their determination to keep ‘BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH’. But while the Smithfield porters had seized national attention four years before, marching on the House of Commons in an unsuccessful attempt to have Powell restored to the Shadow Cabinet, there was an unexpected twist this time. Just days after the second march, Granada’s World in Action team recruited one of the more vehement anti-immigration porters, Wally Murrell, to travel to Uganda and interview people on all sides of the crisis. Murrell was in Kampala for only three days before Amin kicked him out, yet on his return he confessed that he had changed his mind. ‘I must admit that when I saw what one Asian family had to give up to leave the country it influenced me,’ he said. ‘What impressed me while I was there was the violence that was only just beneath the surface. I was convinced that there would be a bloodbath if they stayed.’ Many of his fellow porters were horrified by his apostasy: when he appeared on World in Action to retract his opposition, he was bombarded with obscene phone calls. ‘He does not speak for us,’ one porter angrily told the press. But others were more supportive. ‘All morning blokes came up to me individually,’ Wally said after his first day back at Smithfield, ‘and said they respected what I had done and admired me for speaking out.’12
Wally Murrell was not, of course, the
only person whose compassion for the Ugandan Asians trumped his concern that Britain was becoming overcrowded. In Leicester, leaders of the Asian community raised £10,000 to provide for the expected influx of refugees, took over 200 houses due for demolition and even prepared to set up temporary classrooms for the refugees’ children, staffed by teachers who had previously run schools in Uganda. ‘We must not put all the burden on the British Government or people,’ explained H. S. Ratoo, chairman of the British Asian Welfare Committee. ‘We must take the responsibility and make preparations to help the people.’ But it was not only Asians who went out of their way to welcome the exiles. By the middle of September, the government’s Ugandan Resettlement Board was reporting that 2,000 people had written to offer rooms in their own homes, and by the end of the month a further 3,000 had followed suit. In the Isle of Wight, stereotypically a conservative part of the country with virtually no black or Asian residents, a Ventnor hotelier offered to put 90 Asians up at his hotel, while Fred Sage offered to house 500 refugees at his Bay View Holiday Park in Gurnard. Another proprietor, Bertram Wrate, even offered to put up 100 refugees in his nudist camp at Blackgang. And all the time, despite the torrent of criticism in the tabloid press, clothes, blankets and supplies poured in. ‘We know many of you didn’t really want to leave your homes and jobs in Uganda,’ The Economist assured the refugees.
You know we didn’t really want you to come here, because we have problems with homes and jobs here. But most of us believe that this is a country that can use your skills and energies … You will find that we, like other countries, have our bullies and misfits. We are particularly sorry about those of our politicians who are trying to use your troubles for their own ends. And we’re glad your British passport means something again.13
In an ideal world, Heath and his ministers would have liked the Ugandan Asians to disappear somewhere else: to India, perhaps, or to Canada, which agreed to take several thousand. There was clearly no chance that Idi Amin would change his mind: he was ‘fundamentally irrational and unreliable’, Robert Carr, the Home Secretary, wrote in early August. As an emollient and strikingly liberal man, popular on both sides of the House, Carr had not been an obvious Tory candidate to run the Home Office; indeed, in a period of high public anxiety about law and order, it might have been better for Heath if he had chosen a more authoritarian figure. But from the refugees’ point of view, Carr was the perfect Home Secretary, persuading his Cabinet colleagues to approve £750 per family towards their travel expenses as well as subsidies for local authorities faced with mass arrivals. He was no fool: whenever the Cabinet discussed the issue, the threat of a popular anti-Asian backlash was never far from their minds, and Carr conceded that they should not give the refugees so many benefits that they lost all public sympathy. By and large, however, his handling of the crisis was a rare model of compassion and competence, although it was also made a lot easier by the fact that fewer Asians arrived than had been predicted.14
By the middle of September, it was clear that only about 25,000 refugees were coming to Britain, with others going to Canada, Australia or elsewhere in Africa. The Resettlement Board was working well, Carr reported on 21 September; local authorities were dealing smoothly with the inflow; and above all ‘the public now seemed disposed to accept the [Asians] as genuine refugees’. At the party conference a few weeks later, Carr even recorded a notable rhetorical triumph, swatting aside Enoch Powell’s attempt to humiliate the leadership over immigration and securing a two-to-one mandate for the government’s approach. If they had abandoned the Ugandan Asians, Heath reminded a Tory audience at the end of November, ‘they would be rotting in concentration camps prepared by President Amin, and they would be there simply because of the colour of their skin and the fact that they held British passports. That would have been the sight presented to us on our television screens night after night this Christmas. I cannot believe that anyone in this country would have regarded such an outcome as acceptable.’15
All in all, the Ugandan crisis brought the best out of Edward Heath. A few years earlier, Harold Wilson had rushed through an emergency bill to stop the mass influx of Kenyan Asian refugees. But even though Heath’s government was under even greater pressure over immigration, he never wavered in his view that Britain had a moral obligation to its passport holders in their hour of need. For once his mulish obstinacy shone through as courageous commitment: the more that right-wing critics slammed his refusal to follow public opinion, the more he seemed determined to honour Britain’s moral and legal obligations. Not surprisingly, representatives of Britain’s Asian community were full of admiration. Heath’s policy, said Praful Patel of the All-Party Committee on United Kingdom Citizenship, was ‘in the highest traditions of justice and fair play so often shown by the British people. The decision to accept responsibility for these people is a tremendous credit for the Government. It vindicates our trust in them.’ And there were moving words from a group of Indian students who wrote to The Times at the beginning of September:
Some of us have been in your country and as young Indians we have come to love and respect Britain. We have experienced the welcome and hospitality in your homes. We have been struck by the concern your people have for other nations … We have been inspired by the British Government’s readiness to accept the Uganda Asians with British passports at a time when the country faces unemployment, crisis in industry and in Northern Ireland.
Your Government has shown true statesmanship in honouring past promises and in fighting for humane treatment to be given to these men, women and children. This adherence to moral responsibility by British leaders is encouraging when expediency and national interest decide policies the world over.
For a group of foreigners – especially from a former imperial possession – to write of their admiration for British politics in the early 1970s was rare indeed. On this occasion, though, Heath deserved it.16
At the beginning of the 1970s, perhaps a million Caribbean, Indian and Pakistani immigrants and their children lived in Britain.* Although there were pockets of black and brown life right across the nation, immigrant communities tended to be concentrated in heavily urbanized areas, especially where there had once been plenty of low-paid jobs and cheap housing. More than half of the immigrant population lived in London and the South-east, and a further 16 per cent lived in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and the industrial towns of the West Midlands, with smaller clusters in Lancashire, West Yorkshire and the East Midlands. The biggest group were the Indians, who accounted for about 30 per cent of the total, and who had already made a deep impression on British cultural life through their restaurants, of which there were perhaps 2,000 in 1970, serving cheap, anglicized curries to young couples and late-night revellers. Then came the West Indians, who accounted for 25 per cent and were overwhelmingly concentrated in London and Birmingham. In 1971, the official census recorded a Caribbean population of 170,000 in the capital alone, which was surely an underestimate. The third biggest group, at 13 per cent of the total, consisted of Pakistani families, often from poor rural village backgrounds. Many settled further north in the textile towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, which in the 1950s and 1960s had a thirsty demand for cheap unskilled labour: in Bradford, there were about 50,000 Pakistani residents by the early 1980s.17
These were not, of course, the only immigrant communities in Edward Heath’s Britain. By the late 1960s, there were already around 75,000 Greek and Turkish Cypriots in London alone, having fled the political unrest in their native land. After the Turkish invasion in 1974, about 10,000 more followed, most of them Turks settling in the north-east of the capital, where they opened innumerable restaurants, bars and community centres. And then there were the Hong Kong Chinese, easily Britain’s quietest and least assimilated major immigrant group – so quiet, in fact, that even racist campaigners sometimes forgot they were there. The 1971 census put the Chinese population at 96,000, almost all of them working in the catering trade. By this point, Chinese res
taurants were even more popular and numerous than Indian ones. In many areas, their willingness to work long hours meant that they virtually supplanted (and often physically took over) the old fish-and-chip shops, and by the early 1970s virtually every sizeable town had developed a taste for chow mein and sweet and sour sauce. Yet even though the Chinese population almost doubled during the 1970s, there was no repeat of the racist panics of the Edwardian era, and no talk of the yellow peril. For one thing, they were widely dispersed across the country; for another, they worked such long hours and were so discreet that they were rarely even noticed. Ironically, although critics often complained that immigrants did not even try to fit in, the ones who provoked least hostility were those who made least effort to do so.18