Appealing to the worst in people — their hate — is a guaranteed way to get attention, but it is also fatal. Partly because he liked to talk in whole sentences, Powell was called clever, and he was forever translating Herodotus. But he wasn’t smart enough to resist the temptation of instant populism, for which he traded in his reputation. Racism is the fool’s gold, or, rather, the crack cocaine of politics. The seventies were a dangerous time for people of colour — the National Front was active and violent, particularly in South London, and it was an ignoble sacrifice for Powell to attack the most vulnerable and unprotected, those workers who had left their homes to come to Britain. He elevated his phobia to a political position, and there was no going back. He had convinced himself he had a message for mankind, and it was this unblinking certainty and sadism, rather than its content, which points to his madness.
Like many racists, Powell was nostalgic in his fantasies: before all this mixing, there was a time of clarity and plenitude, when Britishness was fixed and people knew who they were. Powell refused to allow his certainties to come into contact with reality. He had wanted to know India, but barely troubled himself with Britain and, apart from some weekends in Wolverhampton, lived for most of his life in Belgravia.
In contrast to the crude caricatures of people of colour perpetrated by Powell, the Guyanese-born, Cambridge-educated writer E. R. Braithwaite — who served in the RAF before becoming a teacher in the East End because he couldn’t get a job as an engineer — writes in detail about race between the late forties and the mid-sixties. Three important works in particular, To Sir, With Love, Reluctant Neighbours and Choice of Straws, deal with this period. If being a person involves recognition from others, here we see the negative. From a clear-eyed, brave novelist we learn about the everyday humiliations, abuse and remarks that people of colour had to face after being invited to help run the NHS and the transport system. To make the future it wanted, Britain needed the best doctors, engineers, architects, artists and workers of all kinds, and it imported them, before insulting them.
Enoch Powell liked to complain about the vile ‘imputation and innuendo’ made about him. He was keen to be a martyr and victim. Braithwaite, for his part, really suffered. He catalogues the systemic and degrading exclusion from jobs and housing that so disillusioned immigrants with the British and their babble about fairness, liberty and the mother country. Braithwaite describes the rage and hate that relentless humiliation inevitably engenders, as colonialism did, in its time. Powell probably intuited the simple idea that tyranny creates resistance, and grasped that future conflicts would be caused by the tyranny he supported, hence his apocalypticism. Nevertheless, this was not something he had the human ability to understand, even as he had little sense of other people. Denial is the political trope par excellence.
Powell developed his own schoolmasterish look. Always in black, sometimes in a long overcoat and occasionally in a little homburg, he was punky and subversive, and came to enjoy making everyone furious with his perfectly judged provocations delivered at the wrong/ right time. And he had the cheek to call us ‘a roomful of gunpowder’. He didn’t fit in, but he certainly liked to disorientate and traumatise us. After he spoke, we were in freefall; we didn’t know where or who we were. Powell wanted to confirm us as outsiders, as unintelligible and unwanted, but this helped us clarify things and created resistance. Out of Eric Clapton’s provocative statements, for instance, came Rock Against Racism, created by artists, musicians and activists to combat fascism. Then there was identity politics. We were not nothing; we had histories and, unlike him, we had futures.
Powell was creating the conflict he claimed to be the solution to. In the process he alienated and split his own party. This man who couldn’t conceive of, nor bear, the idea of equality soon found himself supported by the National Front. Powell had called himself a Nietzschean as a young man, but Nietzsche would have hated the wretched appeal to the mob or ‘herd’. Powell was merely addressing the bitter rabble, and, for so fastidious a man, this would have been distasteful, and he must have considered how incapable our intelligence can be when it comes to protecting us from the temptations of self-destruction.
He cheated his followers, because all he gave them was the brief thrill of superiority and hatred. Nothing substantial altered in the world, and the wild, conscience-less capitalism which developed out of the economic vision he adapted from Hayek created wealth for some, but otherwise had no respect for Powell’s followers’ homes or jobs, nor for the other things he cared about — tradition, national borders, patriotism or religion. In Enoch’s world it would be everyone for themselves; selfishness would benefit everyone.
Although Powell was attacked and condemned by students wherever he went, he didn’t trouble himself to think about the profound social changes sweeping the country as young people attempted to liberate themselves from the assumptions of the past. Britain wasn’t decaying, it was remaking itself, even as it didn’t know how the story would end.
In London now, if you stroll through the crowds on a bright autumn Sunday afternoon near the museums and highly decorated shop fronts, even for those of us who have been here for years, this multiracial metropolis — less frantic than New York, and with more purpose than Paris, and with its scores of languages — seems like nothing which has ever been made before. And it grows ever more busy, bustling and compelling in its beauty, multiplicity and promise, particularly for those of us who remember how dull and eventless London could seem in the seventies, especially on Sundays.
Britain survived Powell and became something he couldn’t possibly have envisioned. When it came to human creativity, Powell was without imagination. He really was a pessimist and lacked faith in the ability of people to co-operate with one another, to collaborate and make alliances. The cultural collisions he was afraid of are the affirmative side of globalisation. People do not love one another because they are ‘the same’, and they don’t always kill one another because they are different. Where, indeed, does difference begin? Why would it begin with race or colour?
Racism is the lowest form of snobbery. Its language mutates: not long ago the word ‘immigrant’ became an insult, a stand-in for ‘Paki’ or ‘nigger’. We remain an obstruction to ‘unity’, and people like Powell, men of ressentiment, with their omens and desire to humiliate, will return repeatedly to divide and create difference. The neo-liberal experiment that began in the eighties uses racism as a vicious entertainment, as a sideshow, while the wealthy continue to accumulate. But we are all migrants from somewhere, and if we remember that, we could all go somewhere — together.
The Land of the Old
What a hubbub! Hush! — I whisper animatedly to the male and female voices in the other room. I cannot hear, and I do not need to be made cantankerous!
In this room where I sit leaning forward on a hard chair, as alert as I’ll ever be, it is silent. In there, where my master Raymond lies on his bed, it is busy at the moment. He is working, giving a million instructions to his chattering staff. Meanwhile, I wait, straining to hear his voice. In a moment, when he tires, and it will suddenly occur to him that he could relax, he will blurt out my name and I will hurry to him. The others will leave. Today, perhaps, he will deliver his verdict. I need to hear it. At that moment my future will be decided. The world is complicated, but this question couldn’t be simpler.