Rose tinted Rivers of Blood

‘Rivers of Blood’ was a deplorable attempt to inflame hostility to outsiders for political gain. Its author deserves condemnation not exaltation.

I am sorry to comment twice on the same speech in as many days but I am really angry. I have just read Simon Heffer’s latest rant in the Telegraph and it has left me with smoke billowing from my ears. Heffer's attempts to paint Enoch Powell as a visionary hero trying to save Britain from being destroyed by immigrant hordes is by turns laughable, infuriating and outrageous. He angrily instructs us to ‘Read the speech. Make up your own mind.’ Well I have and I am at a loss to see how anyone else, who has could be in any doubt that it is a truly shameful speech.

Heffer starts off with familiar claim that ‘Enoch was right’ not only about immigration but also about ‘the British peoples irreconcilability to the EU’ and ‘the destruction of the United Kingdom if devolution was allowed.’ Well last time I checked the UK was still united and still a member of the EU, so I am not quite clear why Mr Heffer thinks this demonstrates insight on Powell’s part. When it comes to immigration, Powell’s apparent Clairvoyance is not much more convincing. ‘We have 52 dead in attacks by Islamist fanatics in 2005 to prove how integration has failed’ exclaims Heffer. 7/7 was a horrendous event but we must bear in mind that it was carried out by just four people. There appalling actions should not and must not overshadow the fact that millions of people from ethnic minorities live peacefully in Britain, following the law and paying taxes. We are still very far from Powell’s predictions of the death of our nation.

Heffer goes on to claim Powell ‘had merely been highlighting the danger of the racism of others’ and to deny that Powell was a racist. For what it is worth I agree that it is unlikely that Powell was himself a racist for the reasons that Heffer presents. What he did do was deliver a speech that set out quite deliberately to associate him with racist sentiments for political gain. It is striking that at no point does Powell condemn racism and in many places he seems to actually condone it. A man who says that ‘in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ is described by Powell as ‘decent.’ The most powerful section of the speech deals with the persecution of an elderly woman by her black neighbours. It is a very emotive story and Powell lingers on it for a while. Yet when he adds in the little detail that she had refused to have black tenants, he does not pause for a second to suggest that this is anyway wrong. Such tricks inevitably left Powell open to charges of racism and justifiably so. Powell must have known this yet he left them in. The only conceivable reason to do so was that he hoped to be associated with racist sentiments and to derive some kind of political gain from that fact.

Probably the most bizarre claim in the entire article comes in a short paragraph towards the end. Heffer writes that: ‘In a smug observation last week, the equality tsar Trevor Phillips congratulated David Cameron on "de-racialising" the immigration question. But who racialised it in the first place? It wasn't Powell. It was the Left, whose aim of destroying our nation state not least by destroying our culture was furthered by attacks on Powell for telling the unpalatable truth.’ This comment moves Heffer from being simply misguided into the realms of the tin foil wearing nut jobs. The left is not on a mission to obliterate Britain or its culture. While you can quite legitimately oppose left wing ideas and policies, doing so on the basis that your political adversaries are the servants of some sinister plot is to lower yourself to Naomi Kleinesque levels of absurdity.

To compound the error he includes no evidence to support the notion that the left are to blame for the connection between race and immigration and he fails to mention that Powell most certainly did contribute to the blurring of the debates about race and immigration. He devotes as much of the speech to talking about racial discrimination laws as to immigration. Heffer tries to bolster his case by pointing out that Powell never says the word race in the speech, when in fact he does. For example, in the section about the harassed pensioner he says that: “When the new Race Relations Bill is passed...” He also talks about skin colour and ‘Negroes’. So to claim that the speech is not about race is bizarre.

It is entirely possible to talk about immigration with talking about race. If you want to see examples then look no further than David Cameron’s speech on immigration last week. The contrast between this and the hateful, provocative rhetoric of ‘rivers of blood’ could not be clearer. The Conservative leader certainly deserves the praise he has received for tackling the immigration debate in such a responsible way.

Heffer suggests that Cameron has ‘wilfully misunderstood Powell’ when in reality it is Heffer with his desire to exonerate his hero, who his mistaken. As Enoch Powell knew all too all well, words are weapons. And on April 20 1968 he unleashed a verbal arsenal against Britain’s vulnerable immigrant communities and the consequences of that callous decision are still with us today.

Anyway must be off, I’ve got nation states and cultures to be destroying....

The Evanomics of immigration

The BBC's ever informative economics correspondant, Evan Davis has written an interesting post on his blog about the economic impacts of immigration. While being careful not to take sides, he does a good job of slicing and dicing, the more ridiculous arguments of both sides of the debate. This is something that really needs to be done because the debate on immigration too often gets stuck on nonsensical arguments such as 'immigrants taking our jobs' that simply waste everybodies time.

Enoch was right

What Enoch Powell got right does as much to undermine the arguments of his imitators as his mistakes.

This summer, like much of the rest of Britain’s political class; I spent an awful lot of time pounding the pavements of Southall. The by-election that followed the tragic death of Piara Khabra could not have happened in a more interesting place. It did not take me long to realise that this corner of West London was far from ordinary. The local McDonalds sells Halal burgers, while the cinema appeared to show only Bollywood films and the pub by the station proudly declares that it was the first pub in Britain to accept Rupees. The most striking thing though was not the shops but the people. They were with a striking degree of uniformity, well, not white. It became a running joke amongst campaigners that you could spot other activists because they were the only Caucasians you would ever see.

A short visit to Southall should be enough to make anyone greet the statement, ‘immigration has changed Britain dramatically,’ with a dismissive exclamation of: WELL DUHHH! That the inflow of millions of people into Britain has had a big impact on this country is really beyond dispute, yet this is one of the comments that has got Conservative parliamentary candidate, Nigel Hastilow into a spot of bother.

I raise this because Mr Hastilow’s sin was to suggest that what Enoch Powell said in his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was correct. This provides as good an opportunity as any other to test Powell’s predictions against what actually took place.

So was Powell right? In many important respects he was. But rather than vindicating his argument, that Powell got right a lot of things right serves only to demonstrate how fundamentally wrongheaded the case against immigration is.

An article in the Economist on racial conflict in Britain noted that: ‘In 1985, the MP Enoch Powell issued a prognostication of doom. By the end of the 20th century, he claimed, fully 8% of Britain's population would be black or brown-skinned, and a third of the residents of some cities would be non-white... Few took Powell's forecast seriously. He had been a familiar anti-immigrant bugbear since 1968, when he was exiled from the Conservative front bench for fulminating against “wide-grinning piccaninnies” and seeming to anticipate race war between blacks and whites. Powell's later prediction was almost spot on, though. At the time of the 2001 census, the ethnic minority population of Britain was, indeed, 8.1%. White Britons made up less than two-thirds of the populations of Leicester and Birmingham (and accounted for barely half of all children in those cities).’

What has not materialised are the rivers foaming with blood, the nations on funeral pyres and the other images of doom that Powell conjured up to support his case. Ever the sceptical conservative, he underestimated the basic decency of the British people. Rather than engaging in racial warfare, we have come not only to tolerate but to value these new Britains. While racial violence does exist, it is without a doubt the exception rather than the rule.

To boil this all down to a sentence, Powell was right that vast numbers of people would come to this small island but he wrong that this would lead to disaster. In other words, high levels of immigration have not and will not end in catastrophe.

This should put into perspective recent projected population figures that Powell's present day heirs have predicatably tried to use to portray us as on the road to ruin. Yes, we may see lots of inward migration but if immigration benefits Britain this is something to celebrate rather than fear.

Doomsayers, like Enoch Powell, will always be with us but when it comes to the questions that really matter, they are seldom right.

When will they learn?

Journalists love to make things simple. They have usually have not got much time to get a point across to their viewers or readers, so nice straightforward ideas appeal. Which is probably why they like to talk about the leadership election in terms of left and right. The problem with useing this as a way to describe the race is that it is not just a simplification but a complete misrepresentation.

Take these comments from the supposedly 'left' wing candidate, Chris Huhne: “I have always been in the private sector and I started a business and built it up. I understand all the difficulties self-employed business people have, because I have been there and done that.”

A Liberal Democrat party under his leadership, he said, would stress the importance of “cutting red tape and keeping the tax burden on people striving for success as low as possible”.

Hardly Bennite is it?

I am not trying to suggest that there is no difference between Chris and Nick because there is. What I would say about them is that there is no ideological gulf between them. This is no Healey vs Benn or even Brown vs McDonnell contest. Rather what seperates Cleggites and Huhnies is more like the difference between Blairites and Brownities (though with less personal animosity). They disagree less on policy and far more on style and emphasis.

Liberal Democrats are not tottally united but neither are we irrevocably divided, in the way that talking about left and right implies.

Hat tip: Lib dems for Chris

In Defence of Oxbridge (part I)

Oxford and Cambridge are no British ENA
I have just started a degree at Oxford University and so it feels appropriate to blog a bit about the institution where I now live and learn. Don't worry, these posts are not going to be about JCRs, unions and fellowships but instead about the political questions raised by the existence of 'elite' universities. In another, post I will look at the often discussed issue of the small number of state school pupils being admitted to Oxbridge but for now I would like to examine the other side of the universities. We hear a lot about people trying to get in but very little about what people do after they leave. This is surprising when you consider how much influence these graduates wield. Since 1920 all bar three prime ministers have been Oxbridge educated. So are a huge number of CEOs, civic leaders and senior civil servants.

All this brings to mind the École nationale d'administration in France; which has educated seven of the last nine prime ministers, two of the last four presidents and the vast bulk of ‘category A’ civil servants. The ENA is one of the most criticised institutions in France. It is seen as the creator of a clique of graduates who monopolise positions of power within the French state. Having a ruling class, largely educated in one place has produced a situation where the people who govern France share the same set of basic assumptions about what government does, which has in turn produced a stifling corporatist consensus. It is only with the rise of Nicholas Sarkozy and a government largely devoid of’ Enarques’ for real change to come about. So it is perhaps unsurprising that there has been serious discussion of the ENA being closed. This is something, I would whole heartedly endorse.

Which begs the question if the ENA then why not Oxbridge? Put simply the answer that is that Oxford and Cambridge are very different institutions operating in a very different context and as a result have a far more benign influence. They are larger, more academic and do not hold the ENAs monopoly over access to the civil service. As a consequence they do not produce the kind of governmental group think and systematic discrimination that the ENA does.

At any time there are around thirty-five thousand students studying at Oxford and Cambridge, by contrast only a hundred people graduate from the ENA every year. In this case size matters. The ENAs size means that it is entirely possible for a student to know everyone in their year in a way that is totally impossible at Oxford or Cambridge. So, while there are undoubtedly cliques of Oxford graduates, the universities graduates cannot form a single clique a la the Enarques. The size of the universities also means there is far more diversity within them since they are made up of numerous colleges and faculties each with a different culture and worldview.

The kind of education that the Oxbridge universities provide is also very different from what students at the ENA receive. While Oxford and Cambridge were founded in the Middle Ages to educate monks, the ENA came in to being in 1945 to train civil servants. The impact of this is that students at Oxford get an academic education that is meant to equip them to grapple with intellectual questions. The ENA, by contrast, is much more vocationally orientated aiming to tell its students how to make the trains run on time. It is telling that the ENA does not describe itself as a University but as a school of administration. What this means in practice is that when Oxbridge graduates end up running a government department they will not approach it the way that there Alma Matter taught them to but in a way that is as individual as they are.

It needs to be born in mind that while it is possible to ascribe to ENA a particular political outlook, a sort of soft corporatism, it is impossible to do so for Oxbridge graduates. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Tony Benn all went to Oxford and can hardly be described as sharing a single world view.

Finally, we need to bear in mind that there is a big difference in what life is actually like for graduates of the different institutions. ENA alumni enjoy a quasi-legal monopoly over ‘category A’ placements in the civil service. While many civil service fast streamers are Oxbridge graduates, it would not be unusual to find people from other universities in the program as well. Naturally around 75% of ENA graduates go into the French civil service. The situation at Oxford and Cambridge is very different with graduates going into a vast range of different professions and do not monopolising any single one.

Oxford and Cambridge make a positive contribution to public life in a way that sadly the ENA simply doesn’t. Oxbridge has a long history and with luck will survive long into the future. The ENA has a much shorter history that should not be allowed to get any longer.

My Dreadful Confession

While I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I did nothing interesting enough to be scandalous

Both Nick and Chris are in a spot of bother over dum things they did as teenagers. In Chris’ case it was (probably) writing an article arguing for tolerance of hard drugs and (probably not) taking said drugs. This is the case that is attracting more attention, which is perhaps surprising because the skeleton that has fallen out of Nick’s closet is far more unusual. To quote BBC news, “As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he was given community service after setting fire to a rare collection of cacti in a "drunken prank". In addition to his community service, he narrowly avoided being expelled from Westminster. The presumptive future Lib Dem leader says that: “I did some damage to some plants. I am not proud of it. I think we all have blemishes in our past."

Not me. I am ashamed to admit that but I have been such a goody two shoes throughout my life that there is nothing scandalous in my past I can think of. It is early days, I am only in my fourth week of University. But given that I don’t drink, smoke, take drugs, break the law in any serious way and that my love life has never been terribly exciting, this is a state of affairs I can’t see changing.

Let this be a warning to you all. If politicians are hounded for silly mistakes they made a long time ago then no good will come of it. If people with blemished pasts are put off going into politics then the people left will be a lot like me: dull, puritanical and self-righteous. So, If you don’t want to wake up one morning and discover that I have my finger on the nuclear trigger lay off Nick, Chris, Dave, George, Boris and the rest.

'The Better you get to know him....'

In todays Observer, Jasper Gerard writes a lengthy interview/endorsment of Nick Clegg. He describes him as the messiah who is 'holding the only map out of the vast wilderness.' This again goes to show that Clegg is a formidable individual who deserves to be prime minister.

The problem that comes up again is the fear that Clegg will be percieved as 'too like a Tory.' Gerard tries to argue against this point by saying: 'The better you know Clegg, the odder it seems to dismiss him as a Cameron manque.' This is very true, I know that Clegg is no Tory and I suspect that a Tory as familiar with his record as most Lib Dem activists are, would be horrified by the idea that this internationalist, champion of social justice is one of them. The problem is that Joe Voter will not get to know Clegg as well as Gerard does. They will not know about his grandparents, his commitment to progressive politics and interest in liberal history. All most will know of him is his face and the odd sound bite and on the basis of that, they may well conclude that he is awfully like Cameron.