- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Admin Super
The MP in Enoch Powell’s old seat of Wolverhampton South West is currently Labour’s Eleanor Smith – who became the West Midlands’ first female black MP at the last election – and between 2010 and 2015 it was held for the Conservatives by Paul Uppal, a Sikh.
It was this community that was held up as an example by Powell of why immigration wouldn’t work.
But it’s that same community that has become “so integrated and conservative”, according to Mr Sanghera.
“The Asian community have been in Wolverhampton for 50, 60, 70 years. They are a conservative community – they believe in education, they believe in family.
“I [also] think the West Indian community are quite conservative.”
The way the city voted in 2016’s EU referendum – 19 of its 20 wards backed Leave – was not surprising to Mr Sanghera.
“It’s human nature to worry about immigration, to worry resources are going to be taken by outsiders,” he says.
“Every phase of immigrants is worried by the next phase of immigrants – that’s human nature.”
Five decades on from his speech, some of Powell’s ideas have taken hold in mainstream politics, according to Dr Hirsch.
“The idea of ‘immigration numbers’ that simply need to be ‘controlled’ was once seen as an attack on people’s rights,” she says.
“It is now accepted within mainstream politics, and support for these immigration controls pushes ideas of nationalism and hierarchies of who is and isn’t allowed into the country that are often connected with race.”
For Dr David Wearing, an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, Powell’s speech was a very early example of a modern phenomenon, what he describes as “a racist member of the elite hiding behind the white working class”.
“Read the full text of Rivers of Blood and what strikes you is the sheer familiarity of it.
“Among other things, it falsely associates hostility to immigrants with the working classes alone, contrasting their supposedly legitimate concerns with those of an out-of-touch liberal elite.”
Dr Wearing adds: “Obviously Powell’s speech was severely detrimental to the physical safety and wider well-being of people of colour in the UK, both immediately and for decades after he made it.
“It legitimised every racist beating, stabbing, arson attack, every denial of a job or housing, all the thousands of instances of these things that people endured up and down the country through the 70s, 80s and beyond.”
