A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  62

  Rivers of Blood

  Harold Wilson was always a sincere anti-racialist. He had felt strongly enough about the racialist behaviour of the Tory campaign at Smethwick in the Midlands in 1964 to publicly denounce its victor Peter Griffiths as a ‘parliamentary leper’. For Wilson, this was rare vehemence. But he did not try to repeal the 1962 Commonwealth and Immigrants Act, with its controversial quota system and in 1965, he and his Home Secretary, Frank Soskice, tightened it, cutting down the dependants allowed in, and giving the Government the power to deport illegal entrants, offering the first Race Relations Act as a sweetener. This outlawed the ‘colour bar’ in public places and discrimination in public services and banned incitement to race hatred. It was widely seen at the time as toothless. Yet the combination of restrictions on immigration and measures to better integrate the migrants already in Britain would form the basis for all subsequent policy. There would be a tougher anti-discrimination bill in 1968, and tougher anti-immigration measures to go with it. Never again would the idea of free access to Britain be seriously entertained by mainstream politicians.

  One of the new migrations that arrived to beat the 1962 quota system just before Wilson came to power came from a rural area of Pakistan threatened with flooding by a huge dam project. The poor farming villages from the Muslim north, particularly around Kashmir, were not an entrepreneurial environment. They began sending their men to earn money in the labour-short textile mills of Bradford and surrounding towns. Unlike the West Indians, the Pakistanis and Indians were likelier to send for their families. Soon there would be large, inward-looking Muslim communities clustered in areas of Bradford, Leicester and other manufacturing towns. Unlike the Caribbean migrants, these were religiously divided from the whites around them and cut off from the main form of male white working-class entertainment, the consumption of alcohol. Muslim women were kept inside the house and the ancient habits of brides being chosen to cement family connections at home meant there was almost no sexual mixing, either. To many whites, the ‘Pakis’ were less threatening than the self-confident young Caribbean men, but also more alien.

  Had this been all, then perhaps Enoch Powell’s simmering unease would have continued to simmer and his notorious ‘River of Blood’ speech would never have been made in the apocalyptic terms it was. Whatever the eventual problems thrown up by this mutual sense of alienation Britain’s fragile new consensus of 1962-5 was about to be broken by another form of racial discrimination, this time exercised by Africans, mainly of the Kikuyu people of Kenya. After the divisive terror and counter-terror of the Mau Mau campaign, Kenya had won independence under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta in 1963 and initially thrived as a relatively tolerant market economy. Alongside the majority of Africans, however, and the 40,000-odd whites who stayed after independence, there were some 185,000 Asians in Kenya. They had mostly arrived during British rule and were mostly better-off than the local Kikuyu, well established as doctors, civil servants, traders, business people and police. They also had full British and colonies passports and therefore an absolute right of entry to Britain, which had been confirmed by meetings of Tory ministers before independence. These people have been called the Jews of Africa and the parallels between their position and that of European Jewry in the thirties are striking. Like the Jews they were an abnormally go-ahead, vigorous and prosperous group. Like the Jews they were the object of nationalist and racial suspicion, from black Africans rather than white Germans. They too were often accused of disloyalty. When Kenyatta gave them the choice of surrendering their British passports and taking full Kenyan nationality, or becoming in effect foreigners, dependent on work permits, most of them chose to keep their British nationality. In the unfriendly and increasingly menacing atmosphere of Kenya in the mid-sixties, it seemed sensible. Certainly there was no indication from London that their rights to entry would be taken away.

  The pressure on them grew, in ways that also mimicked Nazi treatment of the Jews, at least before the industrial genocide of the Holocaust. The Asians were deprived of their jobs in the civil service. They found they were unable to work or trade in the better-off parts of the country. They faced increasingly unpleasant propaganda. The minority who had opted for Kenyan citizenship found it mysteriously difficult to obtain. And so, inevitably, they began to make for Britain, their obvious refuge. Through 1967 they were coming in by plane at the rate of about a thousand a month. The newspapers began to put the influx onto the front pages and the now-popular television news showed great queues waiting for British passports and for flights. Enoch Powell, in an early warning shot, said that half a million East African Asians could eventually enter which was ‘quite monstrous’. He called for an end to work permits and a complete ban on dependants coming to Britain. Other Tories, notably the former Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, felt the party was entirely bound by the promises it had made when Kenya became independent; the Asians could not be left stateless. This division was echoed in the Labour government too, whose liberals, led by Roy Jenkins, believed the Asian migration could only be halted by pleading with Kenyatta for better treatment at home. The new Home Secretary Jim Callaghan, however, was determined to respond to the apparent mood of worry and anger about the migration. This would mean revoking or cancelling the right of Kenyan Asians to enter. It would be a betrayal of a promise.

  Shamefully the same Conservative politician who had made the promise originally, Duncan Sandys, was now leading calls to cancel it. By the turn of the year around 2,000 Kenyan Asians a month were arriving: almost every aircraft seat from East Africa to London, direct or indirect, was booked. Callaghan decided to act. As his colleague Crossman recorded of a crucial cabinet committee meeting in February 1968, ‘Jim arrived with the air of a man whose mind was made up. He wasn’t going to tolerate this bloody liberalism. He was going to stop this nonsense, as the public was demanding and as the Party was demanding. He would do it come what may and anybody who opposed him was a sentimental jackass.’ The Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which effectively slammed the door, while leaving a catflap open for a very small annual quota, was rushed through Parliament that spring. Yet this not only broke the word of the British Government at the time of Kenyan independence, it also left 20,000 people adrift and stateless in a part of Africa that no longer wanted them. The bill has been described as ‘among the most divisive and controversial decisions taken by any British government. For some the legislation was the most shameful piece of legislation ever enacted by Parliament, the ultimate appeasement of racist hysteria’ while for others it was the moment when the political elite, in the shape of Jim Callaghan, finally listened to their working-class voters. Polls of the public showed that 72 per cent supported the act.

  This was the background to Powell’s famous speech in Birmingham, at a small room in the city’s Midland Hotel, on 20 April 1968, three weeks after Callaghan’s bill had become law and the planes carrying would-be Kenyan Asian migrants had been turned round. Powell had argued before that the passport guarantee was never valid originally. He was contemptuous of the Commonwealth by now, seeing it as a high-minded constitutional myth, which stopped Britain from pursuing her self-interest freely. Most of his political fire was directed at the absurdities, as he saw them, of trying to control the level of the currency and direct the economy. Despite Heath’s growing despair about his stiff-necked determination to challenge orthodoxy, Powell was still a member of the shadow cabinet. It had just agreed to cautious backing for Labour’s tougher Race Relations Bill (the flip side of the Callaghan restrictions). Powell had gone uncharacteristically quiet. He was however quite aware of the size of the political explosion he was about to detonate, telling a local friend ‘I’m going to make a speech at the weekend and it’s going to go up “fizz” like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one is going to stay up.’ The friend, Clem Jones, the editor of Powell’s local newspaper, the Wolverhampton Express and Star, had advised him to time the speech for the e
arly evening television bulletins, and not to distribute it generally beforehand. He would regret the advice.

  Here is some of what Enoch Powell said. He quoted a Wolverhampton constituent, a middle-aged working man, who told him that if he had the money, he would leave the country because ‘in fifteen or twenty years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. Powell continued by asking rhetorically how he dared say such a horrible thing, stirring up trouble and inflaming feelings. ‘The answer is I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking…’ Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, he reminded his audience, they first make mad. ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping its own funeral pyre.’ The race relations legislation was merely throwing a match on gunpowder. Powell then quoted another constituent, this time an elderly woman whom he said was persecuted by ‘Negroes’. She had excrement stuffed through her letter-box and was followed to the shops ‘by children, charming wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist”, they chant.’ He concluded with the peroration which gave the speech its slightly inaccurate popular title: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the Tiber foaming with much blood”.’ If Britain did not begin a policy of voluntary repatriation, she would soon face the kind of race riots that were disfiguring America.

  The speech was claimed by Powell to be merely a restatement of Tory policy. But its language and Powell’s own careful preparation suggest it was both a call to arms by a politician who believed he was fighting for white English nationhood, and a deliberate provocation aimed at Powell’s enemy Heath. At any rate, after horrified consultations when he and other leading Tories had seen extracts of the speech on the television news, Heath promptly ordered Powell to phone him, and summarily sacked him. Heath announced that he found the speech ‘racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions’. As Parliament returned three days after the speech, a thousand London dockers marched to Westminster in Powell’s support; by the following day he had received 20,000 letters, almost all in support of his speech, with tens of thousands more still to come. Smithfield meat porters and Heathrow airport workers also demonstrated in his support. Powell also received death threats and needed full-time police protection for a while; numerous marches were held against him and he found it difficult to make speeches at or near university campuses. Asked whether he was a racialist by the Daily Mail, he replied: ‘We are all racialists. Do I object to one coloured person in this country? No. To 100? No. To a million? A query. To five million? Definitely.’

  There can be no serious doubt that most people in 1968 agreed with him.

  63

  Plot! Lord Louis and the King Thing

  Forty years on, the paranoid atmosphere after only a few years of Wilson’s first administration is hard to credit, but there was a rising conviction among some in business and the media that democracy itself had failed. Cecil King, the tall and megalomaniac nephew of those original press barons, Lords Rothermere and Harmsworth, and the effective proprietor of IPC, which owned the Daily Mirror, was at the centre of the flapping. He had originally supported Wilson, both in Opposition and in the period immediately after the 1964 election, but was deeply offended when Wilson, who had egalitarian convictions, then offered King only the modish life peerage. King was outraged. He wanted a hereditary title, as befitted the boss of a popular socialist newspaper, preferably an Earldom. Wilson, to his credit, refused to budge. To the Prime Minister’s discredit, though, he desperately flattered King, courted him and gave him a string of other baubles, including a damehood for his wife and positions for himself – director of the Bank of England, a seat on the National Coal Board and another on the National Parks Commission, plus repeated offers of junior government jobs and a life peerage. None of it made the slightest impression on the sulking press tycoon, who went round London telling anyone who would listen that Wilson was a dud, a liar and an incompetent who was ruining the country and who should be removed as soon as possible.

  King’s theme, not uncommon in business circles, was that Britain needed professional administrators and managers in charge, not dodgy politicians. He insisted that ‘We are coming near to the failure of parliamentary government.’ The politicians had made ‘such a hash of our affairs that people must be brought into government from outside the rank of professional politicians’. His private views came close to a call for insurrection or a coup, to be fronted by himself and other business leaders. This culminated in a clumsily attempted plot. On 8 May 1968, according to King’s brilliant editor-in-chief Hugh Cudlipp, the two of them had a meeting with Lord Louis Mountbatten, whom we have met in his role negotiating India’s independence. As a war hero, former Chief of the Defence Staff and close member of the Royal Family, Mountbatten had a unique role in public life. He stood above politics, though many believed he liked the notion of being thought a man of destiny, and he was much discussed by those who dreamed of an anti-Wilson putsch. He had made his worries about the country known to Cudlipp, though denying he wanted ‘to appear to be advocating or supporting any notion of a Right Wing dictatorship – or any nonsense of that sort.’ Indeed, Mountbatten’s idea of the possible leader of some kind of emergency government supplanting Wilson was…Barbara Castle.

  Nevertheless, when King, Cudlipp and Mountbatten met, with the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, the talk was wild. King told the Queen’s uncle-in-law that in the coming crisis, ‘the government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets, the armed forces would be involved’ and asked Mountbatten whether he would agree to be titular head of a new administration. According to Cudlipp, Mountbatten then asked Zuckerman what he made of it. The scientist rose, walked to the door and replied: ‘This is rank treachery. All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling. I am a public servant and will have nothing to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.’ Mountbatten agreed. Later, he recorded that it was he who had told King the idea was ‘rank treason’ and booted him out. King’s account of the meeting is different, though hardly less alarming. He claimed Mountbatten had said morale in the armed forces was low, the Queen was worried and asked for advice. To which the newspaperman replied: ‘There might be a stage in the future when the Crown would have to intervene: there might be a stage when the armed forces were important. Dickie should keep himself out of public view so as to have clean hands…’ Whichever account is more accurate, the meeting certainly took place and Mountbatten then seems to have reported the conversation to the Queen. King, unabashed, unleashed a front page attack in the Daily Mirror on Wilson, headlined ‘Enough is Enough’, and calling for a new leader. He was himself putsched by a board which realized he had become a serious embarrassment, shortly afterwards.

  Does any of this matter? There is no evidence that the talk of a coup was truly serious, or that the security services were involved, as has been publicly asserted since. Yet the Cecil King story counts in two ways. First, it gives some indication of the fevered and at times almost hysterical mood about Wilson and the condition of the country that had built up by the late sixties – a time now more generally remembered as golden, chic and successful. A heady cocktail of rising crime, student rioting, inflation, civil rights protests in Northern Ireland and embarrassments abroad had convinced some that the country was ungovernable. Because British democracy has survived unscathed through the post-war period, to suggest it was ever threatened now seems outlandish. Perhap
s it never was. There is a lurid little saloon bar of the mind where conspiracy theorists, mainly on the left, and self-important fantasists, mainly on the right, gather and talk. The rest of us should be wary of joining them for a tipple. Yet the transition from the discredited old guard of Macmillan-era Britain to the unwelcomed new cliques of Wilson-era Britain was a hard time.

  Wilson was a genuine outsider so far as the old Establishment was concerned, and he ran a court of outsiders. The old Tory style of government by clique and clubmen gave way to government by faction and feud, a weakness in Labour politics throughout the party’s history. Wilson had emerged by hopping from group to group, with no settled philosophical view or strong body of personal support in the party. Instead of a ‘Wilson party’, represented in the Commons and country, he relied on a small gang of personal supporters – Marcia Williams most famously, but also the Number Ten insiders Peter Shore, Gerald Kaufman, George Wigg and for, a while in these earlier years, Tony Benn too. Then there were the outside advisers. Some were brought in from academic life, such as the Hungarian-born economists Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor (popularly known as Buddha and Pest). Some came from business, such as the notorious Gannex raincoat manufacturer Joseph Kagan, or from the law, such as the arch-fixer of the sixties Lord Goodman. Suspicious of the Whitehall Establishment, with some justification, and cut off from both the right-wing group of former Gaitskellites, and the old Bevanites, Wilson felt forced to create his own gang. A Tory in that position might have automatically turned to old school tie connections, or family ones, as Macmillan did. Wilson turned to an eclectic group of one-offs and oddballs, producing a peculiarly neurotic little court, riven by jealousy and misunderstanding.