Yesterday evening, Radio 4 broadcast a reconstruction of what has become known as the "rivers of blood" speech. As on previous occasions, BBC's publicity machine seems to have been hyping the programme. The result was an exaggerated response even before the programme was aired, which may have been what the PR people were after.
I should state at the outset that I feel that the BBC were right to commemorate the speech in the way they did, just as the PM programme recalled Martin Luther King's final speech and as (again in the Archive Hour) the release of Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: a space odyssey was marked. All were key events 50 years ago. The Archive Hour is a serious programme series and almost always provides detailed and contextual analysis. Amol Rajan did not disappoint yesterday and there were telling contributions from people, some contemporary, who were affected directly or indirectly by the speech. It was necessary to examine the speech because it is part of our history and this was done soberly and with insight.
The speech had to be reconstructed for the radio programme because the only recording made at the time was by Midlands ITV who retained only part of the opening and the peroration, which contained perhaps the most emotive lines. Hence BBC Radio hired an actor to read the missing sections using Powell's original script. If I have a complaint about the programme, it is that, though the actor nailed the Black Country accent, he lacked Powell's incisive delivery and even slurred occasionally.
It was interesting that many who objected on-line in advance of the broadcast were either not born or were very young when Powell spoke. I cite especially Peter Black and Jonathan Fryer. It was as if they feared a hypnotic effect from beyond the grave, rather like a relic in a Japanese horror film. (Perhaps those staring eyes in photographs of Powell have something to do with it.) Those of us who were there at the time remember how excessively emotive and offensive Powell's language was and trusted that this in itself would have revolted a twenty-first century audience. Indeed, I had forgotten that he used the words "negro" (definitely passé on both sides of the Atlantic) and "piccaninnies". This last term was at best patronising in the 1950s, and was already objectionable in the 1960s. I thought I had heard the last of it until Boris Johnson used it in a Telegraph article in 2002.
There are similarities in where both men were in their careers. Like Boris Johnson, Powell was an ambitious man who felt he was intellectually superior to his party leaders. Both had failed to make progress and felt the need to make inflammatory statements in order to keep themselves in the public eye, Powell humourlessly, Johnson buffoonishly.
The power of the speech in 1968 derived from Powell's status as a shadow minister, something which is meaningless fifty years on, yet another reason not to fear a public dissection of it now. Indeed, it was a major step in Powell's decline. After it, Heath sacked him from the shadow cabinet. Later, Powell campaigned against our membership of the European common market, going so far as to resign from the Conservatives and to recommend a vote for Labour in the 1974 general election. Having burned his bridges with his former colleagues, he had one final spell in the limelight as an Ulster Unionist MP but it was clearly all over for him by then.
In the Archive Hour programme, Matthew Parris (former aide to Margaret Thatcher) having met Powell, opined that he was not as clever as he thought he was. That does not chime with his record - youngest professor in the Commonwealth when first appointed and youngest brigadier in the British Army in the final years of World War 2 - but suggests that his intellectual capacity was declining by the late 1960s. He had prided himself on being a logical man. He had come out against capital punishment because he had looked at the comparative statistics and concluded that it was ineffective and had led to fatal miscarriages. He was not a typical racist, having come to love India and learned Urdu, mixing with Indian army officers, when he saw service on the sub-continent. He was always careful to distinguish himself from white supremacists, like the Nazis, who maintain that other races are inferior. Yet this classical scholar, poet, economic liberal and logical thinker had an irrational prejudice against the mixing of peoples which overrode his intellectual convictions.
In the 1968 speech, he called for restriction of immigration and highlighted the then Conservative policy of subsidised repatriation. I would concede his point that large-scale immigration over a short period of time, especially to address temporary labour shortages, has led to unrest down the line - think Tamils in the Sri Lankan tea plantations or Indian labourers in Fiji, not to mention African slavery in North America. However, he seemed oblivious of the hypocrisy that, as Minister of Health, he had presided over the recruitment of nurses from all parts of the Commonwealth, including the West Indies and Africa, in order to keep NHS hospitals running. He repeated the claim that is still with us today in relation to mobility of labour within the EU, that immigrants were blocking paediatric beds and education places, ignoring the fact that those same paediatric departments and schools would not be viable without staff from abroad.
Just as Sir Tim Bell was not afraid to admit that he had studied the techniques of Goebbels, Hitler and Speer and the Nuremberg Rallies in devising the Conservative Party showcases which led to Margaret Thatcher's successes, so we can admire and apply the technique of the Powell speech while rejecting its message. Biblical and classical references are always impressive. Powell used both in his peroration. Before the line from Virgil which gave the speech its handle, he quoted the phrase “a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand” derived from Kings 18 & 19 thus clearly equating himself with the prophet Elijah. To bring this essay to a neat close, I shall avail myself of an ancient maxim of which Powell himself was fond: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
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