Only by recalling Enoch Powell’s words will we realise how wrong he was

So far as can be judged the BBC's treatment is ideally suited to Powell’s speech. For every paragraph contained assumptions, delusions, sly elisions and, more than likely, partial or complete fabrications

Politicians at the time feared that Powell would spark violence, even a civil war (Getty)

If nothing else, the current furore over the BBC’s coverage of Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech proves the potency of his words, a full 50 years after they were delivered on a quiet Saturday afternoon at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham. For reasons unknown – possibly because of its sheer length, at 3,000 words, or perhaps because film footage was relatively expensive – no news crew recorded the entire oration, though the text itself is readily available online or in various books about Powell. Some of the explosive passages have already been voiced by an Enoch impersonator for television programmes about Powell. In any case, the BBC have taken it upon themselves to rehearse the whole thing again, using an actor.

Cue the outrage about “filth” on the airwaves. Lord (Andrew) Adonis has complained to Ofcom about it. He compares the Rivers of Blood speech to Oswald Mosley’s memoirs or “Genghis Khan’s advice on peacemaking”.

Well, Lord Adonis and the rest of the critics are, on this occasion, wrong. No one is trying to glamourise it, still less corroborate its dire predictions. Powell’s speech transformed the political debate about immigration overnight. It has lasting historical significance. Politicians at the time feared that Powell would spark violence, even a civil war. He was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet for it (only a young Margaret Thatcher querying the decision).

When Powell made his speech – with the full knowledge and expectation that it would cause a storm – the London dockers and Smithfield porters marched in his support. Soon there was a slogan around, a kind of catchphrase for casual racism – “Enoch is Right”. For decades after, every time there was a riot or an Islamist terrorist attack, it was often “Enoch Was Right”, though less commonly heard after Powell’s death two decades ago. Today, it is more likely to be a case of “Enoch Who?”

For that we should be grateful, and is that not also a reason to bury Powell’s words, rather than to resurrect them? No, because every nation has a duty to face up to its past, as the BBC will also be doing in a landmark documentary series next week on Stephen Lawrence. Powell’s views also need attention because, whether consciously or not, there are still many who hold the view that what Powell was saying was right: specifically that someone of black or brown skin – or, nowadays, of Eastern European heritage – cannot be “British”, or at least would find it difficult to be so.

That, in essence, was the base of Powellism, and, as we see all around us every day, why Enoch has in due course been proved wrong. For black, Asian and other ethnic minority communities made and are making still an outstanding contribution to British life. They are British, the same as anyone else, and proud of it.

So far as can be judged the BBC’s treatment, presented by a former editor of The Independent, is ideally suited to the actual structure and nature of Powell’s speech. For every paragraph is in its own way powerful, but also contained assumptions, delusions, sly elisions and, more than likely, partial or complete fabrications.

Powell’s speech is not about to be re-enacted uninterrupted and unscrutinised, in one go, with a drum roll at the start and “God Save the Queen” to be played at the conclusion, but taken apart, chunk by chunk, and analysed properly. Take, for example, Powell’s story – a secondhand one sent in by an anonymous source – of an old lady in his constituency. She was, supposedly, the last white resident on one street, and had had “excreta” pushed through her letter box. Allegedly, she found herself surrounded by “smiling piccaninnies”.

For a long period after, and despite the immediate attendance of Fleet Street’s finest to that district of Wolverhampton, which Powell served as MP, the old lady was never found. More recently there have been suggestions as to her identity. Powell refused to show the letter that, supposedly, he received detailing her plight. The identity of the “working-class man” who remarked to Powell that “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” was never discovered.

A paragraph-by-paragraph approach to this most intriguing and significant of speeches should also discuss why Powell, a distinguished classical scholar, chose to quote Virgil’s phrase about the River Tiber “foaming with much blood” (“rivers of blood” being a misquotation of Powell) in English rather than the original, and indeed why he chose that phrase at all.

Similarly, we may have Powell’s plea that he could do nothing other than to repeat and publicise his constituents’ concerns: plausible, dutiful even, but wrong. A great parliamentarian, Powell knew full well that he did not simply have to do that, to just repeat everything he was told; but had a duty to check the facts, identify the sources, and use his conscience and to reason with his constituents rather than stoke their fears and inflame the passions of others. Strange to say, this man, who worshipped the House of Commons, served its best traditions ill on that day.

The proximate cause of Powell’s intervention was a second round of “race relations” legislation, laws that gradually changed the moral as well as the legal climate, and were to culminate in today’s prohibitions on hate speech and incitements to terrorism. The broader cause Powell served, which he cheerfully acknowledged, was his own ambition. He wished to wrest the leadership of his party from Edward Heath, a social liberal who cordially loathed Powell (the feeling was reciprocated).

Powell gambled that this issue – race and immigration – would propel him into his party’s leadership and then into No 10. A sort of proto-Trump, with the same exploitation of populism and contempt for the media and the “establishment”, Powell’s attempt almost succeeded (and perhaps in a US presidential system might have worked).

Powell’s attempted coup did fail, but he was influential enough (ironically) to swing more West Midlands marginal seats the Conservatives way at the 1970 election, and therefore make Heath prime minister. By 1974, when the Heath government went to the country in a panicked election during a coal strike, Powell advised people to vote Labour, because Labour was more likely to take Britain out of Europe.

He may have got his way on Europe, eventually, but the experience now of black and Asian British cabinet ministers sitting at the very table in No 10 that Powell once perched at is a powerful enough rebuke to his basic assumptions.

Despite everything, Britain is a peaceful, successful multicultural society. We have not been overwhelmed by a race war, by rivers foaming with much blood, and, as we shall soon learn, the economy cannot function without some immigration. Powell, in other words, was undeniably a hugely significant figure, and he deserves to be recalled – because he was also hugely wrong.