Rivers of blood – 40 years on

David Green, 21 April 2008

Yesterday, on the anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Trevor Phillips urged us to hold a calm and measured debate about immigration. Despite his good intentions he still managed to malign the British people. On ‘the right’ he said that the issue became taboo because conservatives feared being branded racist. And ‘the left’ thought that a free and open debate would stir up reactionary sentiment among their working-class voters.
Public debate was suppressed, it seems, for purely self-serving political reasons. My recollection of the period since the 1960s is different. The bond that unites British people has never been based on race. It has long been an allegiance rooted in support for shared beliefs and institutions. It is a civic allegiance, symbolised by the Crown, and one of the core beliefs is moral equality. Everyone is not only equal under the law, but also entitled to fair play in any face-to-face dealings.

One incident captures the attitude that was dominant when I was growing up in the early 1960s. I was brought up in a village in Norfolk and one day a black man knocked on our door and asked if he could have a bath. He was working at a building site just outside the village and there was no bath or shower. My mother answered the door and hesitated. Here was a total stranger who wanted to come into the house and use the bath. They talked a bit and he seemed nice enough so she let him in. He had a bath, came downstairs and offered to pay. She refused to take any money and agreed that he could come next weekend if he wanted. She later explained that it had been her Christian duty to show hospitality and that many people from the West Indies had fought on our side in the war.
Would he have got the same response from every house in the village? Probably not, but many would have felt the same way. It’s just the way we are as a people. What Trevor Phillips has called the fear of being branded a racist derives from our deep-felt hostility to judging people by their outward appearance. Our entrenched attachment to the moral and legal equality of individuals, regardless of ‘race, colour or creed’ has from time to time been put to the test in our courts. The strongest challenge was made by those who wanted to keep slaves. Across the centuries courts upheld the ideal of equality. In 1569 under Queen Elizabeth I, a court ruled that, ‘England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.’ Two centuries later in 1762 a Chancery judge said that, ‘As soon as a man puts foot on English ground, he is free.’ And soon afterwards in 1772 Lord Mansfield confirmed that ‘there neither then was, nor ever had been, any legal slavery in England.’
This sentiment of equality and common humanity runs deep in British hearts and it is the main reason we have put up with mass immigration, despite the harmful effects on lower-paid jobs, the mixed impact on prosperity and the harmful effects on social infrastructure such as schools, transport and hospitals. Fear of being branded a racist was not a political calculation, but a visceral rejection of a false accusation because – allowing for the beleaguered handful of extremists you would find in any large country – we are not racist and never have been.