The Windrush deportation scandal is just one sign it's time to banish the shadow of Enoch Powell for good.

Pic: Enoch Powell (centre) in Channel 4’s ‘After Dark’ show, 1987

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech – one of the most divisive pieces of oratory of the modern era.

At the time, an opinion poll showed that 78% of the population agreed with the basic premise that underpinned his speech – namely, that there was a danger of racial violence unless immigration inflows were reduced. Others rightly decried him as a racist.

Just four years prior, during the 1964 election campaign, Conservative MP for Smethwick Peter Griffiths used the campaign slogan “if you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour”. He won. The sixties were a period of overt racism, discrimination and bitter racial division.

Today, incidents of overt racism have declined (but still occur far too regularly) and we are a nation much more comfortable with our multicultural society. However, racial inequality persists and this is, no doubt, in part driven by covert racism.

Indeed, Runnymede Trust and NatCen research shows that self-reporting of racial prejudice has remained more or less unchanged over the past thirty years. This prejudice, in turn, permeates our education and judicial systems and places of employment.

Is ‘progress’ enough? 

In an age in which liberals feel under threat – by Brexit, Trump and the polarisation of politics all across Europe – Stephen Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, an impassioned polemic in defence of ‘progress’ and liberalism, points to the many ways in which our lives, in aggregate, have got better throughout the arc of history.

Where this book has come up against robust criticism is in its reluctance to accept that ‘progress’ can have both liberating and threatening repercussions, and to recognise that these advances have impacted people in unequal ways.

It might be more useful to consider social progress in the same way we think of wages and inflation. Yes, things have got better, but do people feel that their lives are improving in real terms and above levels of inflation? Many feel they are not.

A new approach to ‘integration’ 

There are many groups who have been excluded from the benefits of progress over the past fifty years: ethnic minorities who see racial inequality improving at a snail’s pace and those for whom the many advances of globalisation seem distant and intangible, to name but two. And there are many who fall into both these categories.

Britain is divided in complex and interconnected ways – these conditions demand political leadership and policy solutions. For example, the government’s Race Disparity Audit must lead to concrete action – legislation with real teeth that aims to redress the inequalities exposed by this groundbreaking assessment of the state of modern Britain.

There must also be reaffirmation of the power of shared experience, in tandem with recognition of the decline of institutions that traditionally bridged divides. Brexit shone a light on many divisions. A marker of a well-functioning society is the extent to which people trust those from different social and cultural backgrounds to themselves and levels of intergenerational solidarity.

All are waning. We must urgently establish new community institutions which bring people together across difference.

The government’s Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper, while showing some signs of progress in terms of rhetoric, still places the burden to integrate on those from minority backgrounds. Integration must be an ‘everyone issue’ or else it risks entrenching the divides it seeks to tackle.

Moreover, an integration strategy without a serious attempt at reversing racial inequality will struggle. If Theresa May wants to tackle the ‘burning injustices’ present in modern Britain, restitch our fraying social fabric and banish the shadow of Enoch Powell for good, this would be a good place to start.

Nick Plumb is taking part in the Young Fabian’s research project, A Nation Divided: Building a United Kingdom.

Comments are closed.