Ghost of Enoch Powell still haunts the Tories
Aparadox sits at the heart of British politics. We have the most racially diverse Cabinet in history. With Vaughan Gething’s election as Welsh Labour leader, no UK nation will be led by a white man.
And yet last week we saw senior Conservatives trying to tell us that when a party donor reportedly said that one black woman made him dislike all black women, it wasn’t racist. As Britain has become more racially heterogenous, and actually more at ease with itself, the top of politics appears to have started to entertain ideas which a decade or more ago would have been instantly ostracised.
How to account for it? It isn’t the sole factor, but a major force has been the nervous breakdown on the right of politics, its slow radicalisation over the past decade and pull away from a politics anchored in liberalism.
Both the Labour and Conservative parties in recent years have been engulfed by their own tawdry racism crises. Though Labour’s episode was shameful, they at least eventually recognised the problem, and have sought to remedy it.
But the Conservatives don’t recognise they have a problem yet. Signs of the Tories’ tin-eared approach to integration abound. Before the Frank Hester row had exploded, newly minted Reform MP Lee Anderson said he “wanted my country back”. This one phrase says much about the disposition of the new British radical right.
It’s a line with pedigree in British politics. It was deployed most recently by Nigel Farage and other Brexiteers in the run-up to the EU referendum. It adverts to the fact that the trajectory of modern conservatism is a politics of constant offence. Someone or something has always taken what you had away, they say to voters.
The darkest day in race relations in British postwar history is of course Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell (inset) argued that the British national character could not survive with the rates of immigration as they then were. He argued that Britain faced an existential problem for its survival as a result. Sound familiar? The hallmarks of Powellism are to be found in current Conservative thinking, albeit in a different context. The endless talk of Islamism, of state capture, of Britain’s national life being altered are the instinctive reflexes of some ministers, senior backbenchers and newspaper proprietors. They amplify a threat which either does not exist or is minimal.
If Powell were alive today, he would not be shunned and ostracised, he’d probably be a keynote speaker at the rapidly germinating sub-groups of Conservative thinking despite the fact that he was proven wrong. Waves of immigration have in no way diminished or fundamentally altered British national characteristics. There are plenty of Conservatives who disagree with this reductionism. It’s their job to fight it. If not, the paradox I mentioned will only become more acute, to their party’s cost and to ours.