The Wardman Wire

[Editors note: I've reformatted the column due to a glitch in Wordpress. Any problems are down to me not the Dragon].

Issue of the Week: Was Enoch Right?

A week is a long time in politics.

This is a new section on the Wardman Wire. Each week, hopefully to be usually posted on every Friday morning, there will be a post on the biggest political issue of the past week. We hope to provide a background summary of the issue, links to opinion both from the media and blogs, and some measure of examination on what effect this has had on the wider political situation.

Background

This issue began with Nigel Hastilow writing a column in the Wolverhampton Express and Star in which he said:

When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most people say immigration. Many insist: “Enoch Powell was right”. Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 “rivers of blood” speech warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically.

He was swiftly rebuked by his party, and attacked by Peter Hain as “expos[ing] the racist underbelly of the Tory party”, and illustrating that “in the undergrowth of the Tory Party…there are all these backwards reactionary sentiments”.

Then, after a discussion with party chairman Caroline Spelman, Hastilow resigned, having refused to apologise for saying that Powell was “right”, followed by criticisms from Hazel Blears for Cameron having “dithered” for 24 hours, and not having condemned Hastilow’s words.

This has also been followed by a defection offer to Hastilow from UKIP.

What’s been said?

This issue has certainly been big all over the media this week, and has gained plenty of commentary in both newspapers and on blogs. Comments tend to fit into one of the following categories. Either they seem to agree entirely with Hastilow’s statements, or they think he was mistaken to invoke Powell’s words but generally right, and those who consider it either racist or just wrong to talk about the subject – especially if you invoke Enoch Powell at all.

In the Telegraph, Simon Heffer writes in support of Hastilow and Powell, saying:

I wanted to be shocked by the removal of Nigel Hastilow from his parliamentary candidacy for having said that Enoch Powell was right about immigration, but it was impossible…

I am, in the first instance, genuinely outraged at the insult the Hastilow affair throws at the memory and reputation of Enoch Powell.

Powell was, quite simply, the most influential politician of the post-war period.

The insult to Powell consists in this unsustainable idea that the Birmingham speech was “racist”.

This is opposed by Daniel Finkelstein on his Times Comment Central blog, who instead thinks that:

Is it fair to accuse Powell of being inflammatory and using racist language in his speech? Absolutely.

In the Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown uses the issue as an excuse for a rather odd column that really defies explanation. The most common-sense MSM opinion pieces on this issue come from the Thunderer in the Times and, rather surprisingly, Michael White on Comment is Free:

Colleagues who knew him insist Enoch wasn’t a racist. He wasn’t right, either. But he did have a point and we should discuss it like grown-ups, not throw our hands up in horror and sweep it under the carpet.

And now in the blogosphere:

‘Enoch’ appears to be a dirty word to some. However, some blogs wrote their article under the title “Enoch was right”, including myself, though all qualify their statements through pointing at Enoch’s own words, rather than those that he quoted from members of the public – such as the word “piccaninnies” and the phrase “ the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. Like the Union Flag, it is not owned by extremists. Contrast these with Neil Harding’s claim that “Enoch was wrong”.

Some look at the numbers quoted by Powell in his speech which compare in Powell’s favour with the reality – his predictions were too low. And others lament the political correctness which has led to the “cul de sac of fear”:

There was, let’s face it, no possible way that the modern Tory party or our lame, pathetic media, steeped as they are in the fear of political correctness, could tolerate this reawakening of such an embarrassing skeleton in their collective cupboard.

Those such as Tony Sharp and Dizzy point out the hypocrisy in the accusation of racism at the Tories by Labour ministers because just one PPC dares to mention the name Enoch Powell in the same sentence as the topic of immigration and correctness, whilst the Labour Prime Minister talks of ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ - a calling card of the white supremest [sic] BNP for the past 30 years.”

Those on the left wrote about this issue as well, with Mike Ion being “magnanimous” and saying:

Does this make him a racist? No. Does it make him look like an idiot? Yes.

PoliticalHack has a good point about being careful what you write about – after all “if you keeping blowing dog whistles, you can’t complain if the hounds pursue you.” This issue also brought out the claim that “The Tories still don’t get racism” from Sunny of Pickled Politics. Unfortunately it seems that he hasn’t actually read – or at least understood - Powell’s April 1968 speech, since he says:

Powell’s point was that brown / black people coming here would wreck this country because they only wished to subjugate white people. He saw no likelihood that Britain could ever be a multi-racial society at ease with itself. White and black could not mix at all.

Which is incorrect, since Powell made no such claims – instead he was worried about the likelihood of integration. He wasn’t opposed to it, but sceptical about whether it would happen. That was the point of his most famous speech. Sunny also seems willing to claim that Powell was a racist – again having done what research? I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on that very topic – and I had no choice but to conclude that Powell certainly wasn’t a racist [or even racialist]. This lack of having read, or at the very least understood, the speech is also unfortunately demonstrated by Oliver Kamm.

And finally, Mary Beard has a look at Powell’s speech through the perspective of a classicist, and Iain Dale looks at the side effects of this issue – will it mean that all politicians become as good as factory produced? Answers on a postcard to that one.

Analysis

The curse of Enoch Powell and of uttering the three words most likely to condemn any politician’s career: Enoch was right. But this is less down to what Enoch Powell actually said, but more down to how it has been interpreted by the media and how his “Rivers of Blood” speech has become known as a “racist” speech – despite it not being so. Inflammatory, certainly, but not racist in itself.

What this has meant is an almost certain end to Nigel Hastilow’s political career, just as his April 1968 speech effectively ended Powell’s. But I think that in the end this will pretty much blow over, with the sole casualty being Hastilow himself – a relatively unimportant PPC and few other real effects on the party or Cameron himself.

Like with Powell himself, the criticisms come far more from the media and politicians than from the people themselves, who tend to be far more pragmatic over this issue. Short-term damage may exist, but in the long-term? Bugger all, really.

Especially at this stage of the electoral cycle.

ThunderDragon

[tags]thunderdragon, enoch powell, rivers of blood, nigel hastilow[/tags]