DeGroot - The Seventies Unplugged

Merrie England: Rivers of Blood

The supreme function of statesmanship, argued Conservative MP Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, is to provide against preventable evils. On this occasion, the evil was immigration from non-white areas of the Commonwealth. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents... It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. There followed the most inflammatory statement made by a British politician in the twentieth century. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.

The flood of immigrants, argued Powell, was making white people strangers in their own country. He told of a constituent who had been repeatedly threatened because she refused to accept black tenants in her boarding house. She is... afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. Racialist, they chant. To Powell, the issue was freedom, not prejudice. The private citizen was being denied his right to discriminate.

Labours view was not altogether different. The party had officially opposed the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, which limited the intake from Asian, African and Caribbean countries, but breathed a sigh of relief when it passed. A short time later, the Labour leader Harold Wilson admitted that his party did not contest the need for the control of Commonwealth immigration. The official Labour strategy was to complain about the problem, while blaming it on the Tories. Thus, at the 1964 election, the Labour candidate in Wandsworth argued that, Large-scale immigration has occurred only under this Tory government. The Tory Immigration Act has failed to control it immigrants of all colours and races continue to arrive here.

At that election, the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths, campaigning on the slogan If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour, took the safe Labour seat of Smethwick. Afterwards, the Tories calculated that the race issue made around twenty Labour constituencies winnable. Shaken by Smethwick, a Labour Cabinet committee concluded that immigration can be the greatest potential vote-loser... if we are seen to be permitting a flood of immigrants to come in and blight... our cities. Warming to the theme, Frank Soskice, the Labour Home Secretary, warned that, If we do not have strict immigration rules our people will soon all be coffee-coloured.

Powell had, in other words, touched a raw nerve. In the wake of his sacking, he received more than 100,000 letters of support. Over 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster chanting Enoch is right, and 400 meat-packers presented Heath with a 92-page petition protesting his dismissal. A Gallup Poll at the end of April 1968 found 72 per cent of Britons in sympathy. Sacking Powell nevertheless allowed the Conservatives to have their cake while eating it too. He had trumpeted his partys immigration policies, albeit rather too enthusiastically. By sacking him, Heath could claim that his party opposed racism, while at the same time benefiting from the exposure given to the issue.

Powell did not aspire to be a racist demagogue, but that is what he became. By voicing what he thought were consistent, logical principles, he provided validation to those inclined to hate. He had little in common with the workers who enthusiastically applauded his Birmingham speech, but that did not stop him from playing to their prejudices. While he saw complex problems of assimilation, they saw an alien invasion which threatened their neighbourhoods, jobs and culture. In Powell, they found a champion, an articulate man who put eloquent voice to raw emotion. As late as 1972, a Daily Express poll found him the most popular politician in Britain.

Meanwhile, on the fringes, an openly racist political party tried to capitalize on the furore. The National Front was founded on 7 February 1967, by A.K. Chesterton, cousin of the famous author. The NF was racist, anti-communist and isolationist, but not openly fascist. Affiliation with neo-Nazi groups was forbidden, though that did not stop prominent Nazis like John Tyndall from joining. Calculated avoidance of the fascist label allowed the NF to promote itself as ultra-nationalist and thus to broaden its appeal in a way that Oswald Mosleys British Union of Fascists had never managed. At first dismissed as a lunatic fringe group, the NF gained credibility because of Powells speech. The NF cast itself as the party willing to act upon Powells warnings.

NF leaders assumed they would attract Tories disillusioned with Heaths immigration policy, particularly after Powells sacking. While

Marshall feels that the tendency to dismiss NF supporters as fascist reveals how ignorant most people were about what was really happening. He insists that, for the urban working class, the NFs appeal had little to do with fascism, since most supporters never read the party literature. They were instead

kids looking to play the hard man, wanting to hit out at society. Lifes a bastard, and kids will always cover up their own insecurities by hitting out at soft targets, whether thats a fat boy, the school smellies, the new girl, or the kid in the corner with a turban on his head. Chants of National Front! echoed around playgrounds because it gave you a sense of belonging, a sense of power, a sense of defiance, and not because you had read the NFs manifesto and agreed with every word.

While NF sympathizers fought Asians and blacks, the leaders fought one another. The partys effectiveness was severely limited by its fondness for coups and conspiracies. Chesterton was ousted in 1970 by John OBrien, a former Conservative and supporter of Powell, who in turn left when Tyndall and his deputy Martin Webster took control. For most of the 1970s, formal NF membership hovered around 20,000. The best it could manage was third place at three parliamentary by-elections, and some 200,000 votes gained at the 1977 local elections. On only one occasion did it manage to save its deposit. Its only electoral victory came in a 1975 Carrickfergus Town Council by-election when the other candidate dropped out.

Nevertheless, the NF was important not for votes won, but for the fear it inspired. Its strength lay in what it could do on the streets the graffiti daubed on walls, the loathsome posters plastered on hoardings, the menace suggested by jackbooted thugs with crude NF tattoos scratched on biceps or foreheads. Its success can be measured by the fear felt within black and Asian communities, fear made worse because the largely white police force too often failed to provide protection. Between 1976 and 1981, thirty-one black people were killed in racist attacks in Britain. While not all these murders were the work of NF supporters, it is fair to say that the perpetrators sympathized with what the NF represented.

On 5 August 1976, in Birmingham, the guitarist Eric Clapton interrupted his concert to shout I think Enochs right... we should send them all back. Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white! He

Meanwhile, David Bowie told German journalists that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. On his return to Britain, he apparently thought it funny to greet his fans with a Nazi salute. I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler, he told Rolling Stone. Id be an excellent dictator... I do want to rule the world. The sudden prominence of reactionary rock deeply annoyed those who assumed that rocks rhythms were virtuously leftist. Shortly after the Birmingham incident, the rock photographer Red Saunders published an open letter in