Nerve 12 - Rivers of Drivel

‘Good old Enoch!’ So says fourteen-year-old Tony from London’s East End in the documentary ‘Seven Plus Seven’, the child’s naive recitation of the ambient racism frozen for all time in 1970, two years after Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. History and British culture have not congealed, stuck in the sixties, and poor Tony has doubtless winced at those bald words in the intervening forty years. (The same age as Tony, I am embarrassed in explaining to my students the ‘White Australia policy’, which ended some time between ‘Seven Up’ and Seven Plus Seven’).

Rivers of Drivel

What, then, is this newfound respectability for Powell’s racist dystopia, to be found even on the BBC and in the Guardian? The far right proclaim ‘Enoch was right’, and liberals fret about the purported suppression of such views over the four decades since, the ‘political correctness’ - as it is now slated - having supposedly prevented a proper rational debate in Britain about the level and mix of immigration.

All the talk about the ‘mix’ in the national stew, as it were - more or less of that national ingredient - casts the ‘cook’ of the dominant national culture as making the culinary decisions. The reality is that that imagined ‘true’ culture is no longer ‘the’ national culture, and is losing its vestigial dominance. The nostalgia for poor old maligned Enoch is a lament for that loss.

All this chatter about whether immigration has really been economically beneficial after all, as dressed up in the House of Lords ‘Economic Impact of Immigration’ report this April and the surrounding discussion, is little more than the fretting of the national cooks. The employers who demanded it in the sixties knew they needed the extra labour power. Those who employ immigrant labour now know it also - especially those who prefer it insecure and consequently cheap. Yes, immigrants live in houses - a fact which troubled Powell. They also pay rent and they pay taxes, like everyone else. They buy other commodities, like anyone else; they have a significant expansive effect on the economy. Yes, they have children, and just as well for the national birth rate. They still do work that the self-appointed national cooks won’t: packing, plucking, packing. Yes, and cooking - including the ‘national dish’. They do highly skilled work, too, and come with their education and economically ‘unproductive’ childhood paid for by other countries.

To dig up Enoch up and dignify him now is to deny history, and to countermand, King Cnut-like, the tide of an increasingly globalised economic and cultural reality. A turd through the letterbox is all they deserve.

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