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Oliver Kamm has a post on the legacy of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech that so exactly reflects my own views that it's almost uncanny. Oliver's premise is surely right: Powell was the most destructive British political figure of my lifetime. His speech was a nice instance of incitement masquerading as prophecy.I heard Powell in the flesh only once, when I was an undergraduate. He gave a talk to the Oxford University Conservative Association. I was eager to hear him, being an OUCA member at the time. So many people spoke and wrote of him and his intellect in revered tones that I relished hearing him.
It was, however, a deeply depressing experience. I vividly recall my two reactions. First, it soon became clear to me that there was no penetrating logic and no great intellect at work, merely prejudices and gut instincts dressed up in severe syntax to give the appearance of deep thought.
That was bad enough. What really got to me was an experiment I tried at the meeting. I wondered how I would react if it was not Powell but John Tyndall (the then leader of the National Front) speaking. And the shocking conclusion I drew was that Powell's words would have been what I would expect to hear from Tyndall.
Oliver makes this especially important point (referring to an excellent documentary on BBC2 on Saturday which I also saw):
Not all of Powell's critics grasped the point of what was wrong with his interventions. Powell maintained in his speech that "to imagine that such a thing [integration] enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one". Yet (to take the obvious example, which last night's documentary dwelt on) the suicide terrorists of 7/7 were turned to their horrific acts. They killed because they had adopted a fanatical ideology remote from their own upbringing and family traditions. The proper response to racial demagoguery ought not to have been, and isn't now, a version of multiculturalism that "confuses political equality with cultural identity". (That apt formulation comes from the writer Kenan Malik, who took part in last night's documentary.) It is rather to stress that, while we may belong to ethnic or religious groups, our only civic identity is a shared and equal citizenship under the rule of law.
One of the most interesting features of last night's programme was a comment by the leading human rights lawyer Lord Lester....Lord Lester said this about his old friend [Roy Jenkins]. Towards the end of his life, Jenkins had said to Lester that in the charged debates about integration and assimilation, he (Jenkins) had not perceived the necessity of volubly defending the principle of a secular society. This seems to me exactly right. The problem we have now is not the one predicted by Powellite demagoguery. It is that liberals have taken their own principles for granted, rather than asserting them as a common set of civic values that supersede every other attachment. This, of course, is the crux of the problems we face today. The divide that matters in Britain today is between an ideology of religious fascism and the rule of secular law.