Integrating rivers of blood

On the occasion of the anniversary of the infamous “rivers of blood” speech by Britain’s arch-xenophobe Enoch Powell, Trevor Phillips has called for an open debate on immigration policy.

Forty years after Powell predicted disastrous social consequences if immigration levels were not reduced, the reformed multiculturalist and chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission took to the floor at the same hotel in Birmingham to call for renewed debate and tell his audience that a managed migration policy was the answer.

Speaking to representatives from local authorities, police and equality groups at the MacDonald Burlington Hotel, Phillips said: “The problem is that though the inequality may actually be caused by a lack of public investment, it may be attributed to the presence of immigrants.” The full speech text – Not A River of Blood, But A Tide of Hope – Managed Immigration, Active Integration is on the EHRC website.

Of course, the anniversary of the rivers of blood speech has received a lot of media attention, with television programmes and newspaper articles asking was Powell right? Of course not, answers Darcus Howe in the New Statesman, who also point out that Powell was originally a strong proponent of immigration – as Minister of Health, he canvassed Caribbean women to serve as nurses in British hospitals, and was signed up to the idea that West Indians should be recruited to drive British buses, and Punjabis to produce parts for the engineering industry in British factories and foundries. His change of heart came with the realisation that these were not the servile workers he expected. Instead, in common with downtrodden people all over the world in 1968, they had the temerity to expect equal rights and justice.

Paul Gilroy, Professor of Social Theory at the LSE and the author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, writes of a land of tea drinking, hokey cokey and rivers of blood, and the current “chorus of racial realists, neo-patriots, clash of civilisation-ists and practitioners of joined-up thinking who thrill at being able to use expurgated Enoch as a sock puppet with which to enact their own anxieties about swamping, security, failed multiculture, social cohesion and home-grown terrorism”.

Gilroy asks of Powell’s apologists, translators and updaters – just when are these rivers of blood to start foaming, and whose blood was he actually talking about in his vile speech anyway? “This fondness for Powell must be finally extinguished. 20 years have elapsed since the point when, according to Powell’s prediction, the black man would gain “the whip hand over the white”. We need to understand what makes his fantasies of a racial war in our country such an enduring touchstone for xenophobia and hatred. Why can’t his vexed memory be left alone?”

Phillips’ address follows two recent myth-busting reports revealing that migrants in the UK do not commit more crime than Britons, and that, contrary to claims from Government ministers, migrants do not have biased access social rented housing either.

As Jack Dromey, Deputy Gen Sec of Britain’s largest trade union, Unite, put it: “It has been a bad week for the myth-makers who demonise the migrants who come to our shores for a better life and to build Britain”. But, in a letter to the Guardian, he also expresses doubt that these facts will put an end to the tabloid lies.