On 20 April 1968, J. Enoch Powell, the Conservative MP of Wolverhampton (South-West), delivered his infamous invective against continuing Commonwealth immigration to Britain. He argued that the postwar influx of immigrants from the former colonies in the West Indies, Southeast Asia, and Africa made the native English “strangers in their own land.” They could not get hospital beds and school places, they suffered discrimination at the hands of race relations legislation designed to protect the immigrant, and they had to watch foreign cultures overtake their own communities, he contended. Powell predicted that violence would explode if the number of immigrants continued rising. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding,” he warned with his now notorious allusion to Virgil: “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber’ foaming with much blood.”Footnote 1
The “Rivers of Blood” speech, as politicians and the press soon deemed it, elicited both acclaim and criticism across Britain, and Powell became both hero and villain to the nation overnight. The Labour Party attacked him for legitimizing racist sentiment, and the leader of his own party, Edward Heath, dismissed him from the Shadow Cabinet for making such an incendiary statement without prior party approval. Such criticism only fueled a mass outpouring of popular support for his message, however, and elevated Powell in many eyes from the status of champion to martyr. London dockers began a strike in his honor, and “Don’t Knock Enoch” signs appeared as a public statement of approval. Gallup and National Opinion Polls calculated the percentage in agreement with Powell at, respectively, 74 percent and 67 percent of the nation.Footnote 2
Contemporary critics and subsequent scholars alike have tried to assess the meaning and significance of this popular reaction. In one of the first serious studies of the controversy, Paul Foot condemned the politician for opportunistically appealing to existing anti-immigration sentiment and, as a result, increasing such sentiment by both confirming the “ugliest fears of people who knew nothing of immigration problems” and making those fears politically respectable.Footnote 3 This understanding of the speech as both a manifestation of frustration and prejudice and a catalyst for further hostility and bigotry has remained strong over the years.Footnote 4 In the 1970s, political scientists directed much quantitative analysis toward understanding the extent to which Powell affected voting patterns after 1968, as well as his specific appeal among working-class voters.Footnote 5 From the early 1980s onward, cultural critics and historians have emphasized the language and imagery of the speech as significant in the postwar construction of “race” and nation.Footnote 6
This article examines the popular response to the “Rivers of Blood” speech from a new angle: the written reaction of Powell's supporters themselves. Over 100,000 letters arrived in Powell's mailbox from across Great Britain in the month that followed the Birmingham speech—the majority expressing gratitude and encouragement for his stance on immigration. While Powell did grant a Conservative Party researcher, Diana Spearman, some immediate access to these letters, they have only been opened to scholars in general in recent years.Footnote 7 They serve as an invaluable window onto the mindset of supporters in the spring of 1968 and allow historians to move beyond public statements and debate in their assessment of the popular response. Scholars can now ask new questions about the “Rivers of Blood” moment by exploring the ways in which average Britons privately understood both the speech and the subsequent controversy.
First, I ask to whom—and for whom—these letter writers believed Powell was speaking. Powell's own construction of his audience as “white” and “English” is well established. No one has asked, however, to what extent his supporters mirrored this perception. Did they, in fact, envision themselves and their fellow supporters as exclusively “white” and “English?” Was “whiteness” and “Englishness,” in fact, all that people heard when Powell spoke of “ordinary” people? Second, I also explore the ways in which the letter writers interpreted Powell's overall message at Birmingham. A letter of encouragement did not mean, after all, that the supporter merely regurgitated Powell's own anxieties and arguments. Indeed, for many, writing to Powell proved a clearly emotional outlet—an opportunity to express at length many personal concerns and frustrations without fear of judgment. This article therefore focuses on the articulation of the controversy by supporters themselves: the ways in which they interpreted the issues surrounding Commonwealth immigration, made connections among those issues, and related to Powell as a political leader.
This article is based on a sample of 2,000 letters, but the analysis is decidedly qualitative and pushes well beyond the more narrow quantitative study of the letters by Spearman.Footnote 8 Writing in the context of the immediate debates about the speech, Spearman focused her analysis on the assumed racism of Powell's supporters. Her exoneration of the majority of letter writers of this charge rested on a limited conception of “racialist.” She first defined the term as exhibiting “contempt or dislike of coloured people connected with some theory … of their inherent inferiority,” but she decided that the number of people conforming to this definition—seventeen out 5,570 signatures—was statistically insignificant. She therefore expanded her definition to include “general accusations” (as opposed to specific complaints) against immigrants or the use of “offensive” terms. This addition brought her total of “racialist” people signing letters sent to Powell to seventy-one.Footnote 9 For most scholars today, of course, such analysis would seem more of an intellectual artifact of the period than useful scholarship. In categorizing letters by a narrow standard of racism, Spearman in effect missed how supporters understood and articulated “race” for themselves. Relatively few may have condemned the black immigrant as biologically inferior, but many feared the erosion of British peace and decency by “black” noise, violence, and filth.
In contrast, this article analyzes recurring patterns in the written responses to the speech and, in so doing, reveals the complex interplay of nation, race, and class in postwar Britain.Footnote 10 For many supporters, for instance, “Britishness” and “whiteness” remained inextricably connected, even for those who tried arguing that the latter had nothing to do with the former. In some cases, a shared sense of “whiteness” within the British Isles may have even bolstered an otherwise flagging British identity. Class identities were also tightly interwoven into individual conceptions of race and nation. Numerous working-class supporters articulated their frustration at being “whites” who lived and worked among “blacks” as evidence of their socioeconomic subordination and powerlessness. Commonwealth immigration was, from their perspective, a “problem” dumped in their laps by a wealthy and distant governing elite. As is so often the case with claims of political victimization, of course, these accusations of neglect and indifference were also the avenue by which such supporters could claim their own superiority. They were the real nation, they insisted—the ordinary people who spoke commonsense truths about the immigrants and their negative effects on the country.
The correspondence also reveals a profound sense of national decline among the supporters of Powell. As they put pen to paper in that iconic spring of 1968, people from across Britain integrated the immigration issue into broader critiques of the nation in the late 1960s: they were frustrated with the British political system and disgusted by the so-called permissive society, and they were in despair regarding the international reputation of Britain. From these perspectives, immigration was as much a symptom as a cause of social ills and national weakness. Moreover, Powell became more in their eyes than a mere opponent to race relations and relaxed immigration policies. He was a new leader who promised to remedy national follies and ills—to give voice to “ordinary people” and make Great Britain great once again.
Powell no doubt saw himself as that leader as well, but his diagnosis of Britain did not necessarily accord with that of his supporters. Indeed, perhaps the most striking element of the popular reception of the “Rivers of Blood” speech is the extent to which supporters envisioned Powell as the politician they wanted, not the politician that he was. Many seemed unaware of his broader political career and thinking, particularly with regard to his postimperial transformation into a “Little Englander,” as well as his support for the liberal social legislation of the late 1960s. Supporters also pushed his speech in directions that he may not have opposed but that ultimately reflected their beliefs and concerns more than his. In the end, Powell became something of a blank screen on which individual supporters could project the image of the leader they wanted, the man they believed that Britain needed.
“St. George for England—Enoch for Britain”
With surprising frequency, supporters writing to Powell on 23 April noted in their letters that it was St. George's Day and/or Shakespeare's birthday. Some just noted this fact above the date, some commented on it in the body of the letter itself, and one person made a simple but bold notation below his signature: “St. George for England—Enoch for Britain.”Footnote 11 However it was included in the letters, the reference was always a straightforward declaration of the perceived matter at hand: the preservation of national culture amid growing immigrant communities. It was likely, from the perspective of these letter writers, also a bit of pithy irony. Here they were, on this day of great symbolic value to their nation, taking pen in hand to defend and support a man who was himself a national hero.
The message of national preservation famously lay at the core of the speech, as Powell emphasized that the “ordinary, decent fellow Englishman” could not help but fear the erosion of his traditional culture as more immigrants arrived and communalism strengthened. Sympathizers rested their exoneration of Powell from accusations of racism on this point. He was not, they contended, claiming the biological inferiority of other races but merely seeking to protect the cultural integrity of the nation. Not surprisingly, this argument surfaced repeatedly in the letters as well, though less as a defense of Powell and more as a defense of the letter writers themselves. For anyone who chafed under the epithet of “racist,” the preservation of culture served as a seemingly respectable, inoffensive justification of anti-immigrant sentiments. As one individual explained, “There is no colour bar in this country, it is a culture bar. Only by letting in small numbers who can be absorbed by our culture can we keep the England we know, the institutions we respect and the way of life which we have fought to preserve.”Footnote 12
These arguments helped spur the scholarly reevaluation of “race” in the 1980s as a historically contingent cultural construct. Martin Barker posited that Powell (and other Conservatives) had in fact constructed a “new racism” that posited that humans naturally form “exclusive groups” and will instinctively defend the shared traditions of these groups against outsiders. They had reconstructed “race,” in other words, from being a category of biological difference into a category of instinctive cultural difference.Footnote 13 The result, as Paul Gilroy explained, was an increasing correlation between the imagined boundaries of race and nation in contemporary Britain. More than skin color, the conceptualization of “blackness” involved a host of negative attributes—such as filthiness, licentiousness, and criminality—that threatened the supposed decency and respectability of British culture.Footnote 14
The Birmingham speech exemplified the “new racism.” In the most infamous of his anecdotes, for instance, Powell recalled a constituent's letter that described an “old-age pensioner” unwilling to rent rooms in her home to “coloureds.” Immigrants had transformed her once “respectable street in Wolverhampton” into a “place of noise and confusion,” the letter explained, and she did not want to accept these disruptive newcomers into her home. In retaliation, immigrants had mocked her on the street, broken windows, and pushed excreta through her letterbox. This single story, often questioned for its authenticity, revolved around the white/British and black/un-British binary at the core of the new racism. The “white” woman wants only a quiet life in her private home on her respectable street, while the “black” immigrant threatens such tranquility with noise, dirtiness, and violence.Footnote 15
This construction of Britishness resonated with Powell's audience, as many supporters established being “white” as part and parcel of being “British.” A grandmother wrote, for instance, that many years of living abroad had made her and her husband “fully realize” the “completely different ‘make up’ and outlook of life” that characterized the former colonies. This distinction by “way of life” quickly collapsed into differentiation by skin color, however, as she proceeded to criticize those who “think they are being broad-minded in admitting the possibility of a coffee-colored British people.”Footnote 16 Another supporter utilized a football analogy to justify concern for the preservation of “the English character, tradition, and personality” by asking whether “a Manchester United football club supporter [is] ungodly because he is prejudiced in favor of his own team.” As he extended the analogy further, he made clear his assumptions about the essential “whiteness” of his nation: “If an Englishman selects a white wife in preference to a black one is he unchristianly prejudiced?”Footnote 17 A man thinking of future generations put it even more bluntly: “As an Englishman, I would like to think that my son and grandchildren will also be Englishmen, and what's more, look like English men and women.”Footnote 18
One of the most interesting letters in this regard came from a self-described person of “mixed descent”—the only letter in my sample in which a person declared themselves to be something other than “white.” Having arrived in Britain ten years earlier, the letter writer recalled being able, despite some initial prejudice, to acquire within six weeks an accountant position at which he or she was treated well by coworkers. The individual attributed his or her acceptance in British society, however, less to the broad tolerance of Britons than his or her own acceptance of British culture: “Of course I must here say that by every fundamental which constitutes nationality I am British—that is my upbringing, and way of life.” Britons, he or she continued, will accept someone acting as “one of us.” This self-identification with Britain and Britons disappeared, however, in the continuation of the argument: “But certainly no rational person should expect the British people to accept without a murmur hordes of Pakistanis and Asians who are practically illiterate, cannot speak English and have customs, habits and way of life entirely alien to their own, with no desire to integrate.”Footnote 19 One does not want to overstretch the significance of a shift in pronouns, of course, but the letter does move strangely from a confident assertion of the writer's own Britishness (i.e., “one of us”) to an analysis of the British as a separate group (i.e., “habits and way of life entirely alien to their own”). There is, at the very least, a suggestion that embracing the British “way of life” had not made this person of “mixed descent” feel as much a part of the national community as he or she claimed. For someone who was not fully “white,” feeling fully “British” in 1968 may have been more difficult than he or she, for whatever reason, could admit.
Englishness and Britishness
As much as Powell's supporters echoed the “new racism” echoed in the popular response to the speech, they did not necessarily recognize, much less share, Powell's broader ideas about postimperial British identity. For Powell, reconciling himself to the end of empire involved a return to Englishness as the essential core of Britishness. Since Britain could no longer derive greatness from global power, English history and culture became in his eyes the true bedrock of national preeminence.Footnote 20 But no one has yet considered to what extent his supporters actually mirrored this thinking. The letters offer little evidence to suggest that Powell's supporters appreciated his focus on Englishness. Indeed, some supporters missed the emphasis on Englishness altogether as they imagined an audience far broader than the one that Powell in fact addressed.
Powell had entered politics after World War II as an ardent advocate of the empire, but he had become an equally ardent opponent of the Commonwealth by the early 1960s. On separate occasions, he condemned the Commonwealth as a “farce” and a “sham”—a meaningless confederation in which countries exhibited no allegiance to each other and over which Britain lacked any actual authority.Footnote 21 The glory of imperial power had, in other words, become a hollow ruse to which Britain was desperately and embarrassingly clinging. The man who had once dedicated himself to the preservation of the British Raj therefore demanded that Britain accept not only the end of empire but also the “accidental irrelevance” of the empire to her history.Footnote 22 Britain needed to jettison imperial power as the core of her identity and instead realize that her rich culture and heritage was, and always had been, her true source of pride and prestige. Britain possessed an innate glory and splendor; she need not believe they were dependant on the external trappings of empire.
In this way, Stuart Ward explains, Powell became a “convert to a Britain happily shorn of its ‘greater-ness.’” The result of this inward gaze, though, was an “alternative British destiny” that was not “particularly British.”Footnote 23 It was England, and Englishness, that Powell embraced and promulgated in the 1960s. As Simon Heffer writes, Powell remained “wedded to the British nation” but “saw England and the English as the overwhelming force within that nation.”Footnote 24 In good Tory form, at the London branch of the Royal Society of St. George in 1961, Powell identified English institutions and laws as the source from which Britain had organically grown. “The stock that received all these grafts is English,” he explained in reference to the Stuart and Hanoverian monarchs, as well as the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish peoples. “The sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.”Footnote 25
Powell did not articulate these ideas in full at Birmingham, but they did underlie his emphasis on England that day. Within the first few minutes of the speech, he established England as the particular target of Commonwealth immigration and the English as the sufferers of this supposed blight.Footnote 26 It is difficult to determine, of course, the extent to which this specificity registered with his audience. As excerpted above, some individuals did refer to immigration as a threat to “English” culture, and the references to St. George and Shakespeare could very well be acknowledgments of English heritage as the true foundation of Britain. Ultimately, though, the English tendency to regard England and Britain as synonymous obscures the intended meaning of such comments.Footnote 27 Indeed, the frequent elision of “England/English” and “Britain/Britons” in the letters testifies to the fact that many supporters saw no distinction themselves—and were therefore likely to miss the particularity of the speech.
It is clear, however, that no one responded with an explicit awareness of Powell's belief in Englishness as the antidote to postimperial despair. It is also clear that his identification with England in the speech itself did not prevent his supporters from imagining his audience in broader terms. As one individual wrote in praise of Powell's stance, “I cease to wonder whether we English, Irish, Scots and Welsh should have any say in what we would like done in our country.”Footnote 28 Another supporter made a similar assertion by first implicitly criticizing the legal inclusiveness of British citizenship: “I have told Mr Heath—‘Without a doubt you were right when saying the great majority of “british” people do not agree with Mr Powell’, but reminding him that he overlooked the english irish—the scots and the welsh!! the (50,000,000) whose opinion really matters—they are the ‘country’!”Footnote 29 The immigrants may have had British passports, in other words, but the English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh were the real Britons. Such statements did not really contradict Powell's beliefs, of course, but they do indicate the mutability of the speech's content in the ears of its audience. What Powell said and what his supporters heard were not necessarily the same thing.
This is particularly evident in the correspondence received from Wales and Scotland. Given Welsh and Scottish nationalism during the 1960s, one would think that Powell's emphasis on England would have limited the popular response from these areas—and maybe even ruffled some feathers. A significant amount of approving correspondence did arrive from Scotland and Wales, however, and all but one supporter overlooked the seeming specificity of the Birmingham speech by assuming that Powell had in fact spoken for them as well as the English. Even a self-described Scottish nationalist sent Powell congratulations on his speech.Footnote 30 Another supporter perceived him as the answer to the troubling “narrow nationalism among the younger section of the population” and urged him to respond to their “fervent desire for change” by forming a “British National Party.”Footnote 31
Such letters also reveal that Commonwealth immigration could actually help forge a greater sense of unity among the component nations of the United Kingdom. This is no small point given the number of scholars who have posited, as Ward observes, a “connection between the loss of empire abroad and the demise of Britishness at home.” Certainly, the unity aroused by the imperial “other” on native territory may not have been “an overwhelming resurgence of Britishness throughout the Isles,” but that does not mean that such sentiment did not exist at all.Footnote 32 Indeed, the letters suggest that the relationship between the end of empire and the “breakup of Britain” was not as straightforward and simple as scholars have assumed. For some supporters, the arrival of Commonwealth immigrants sparked an appreciation for all the peoples of the United Kingdom as the real Britons.
“In Every Home and Pub in the Land”
Many letters directed an even greater anger and resentment toward the government than the immigrant, as they complained that the wishes of the ordinary voter held no significance in the eyes of the nation's leaders. In this sense, a political binary of power/powerlessness was as fundamental to the popular conceptualization of Powell's audience as the binaries of white/black and British/non-British. The “ordinary Englishman” was, in the eyes of many, also an average citizen dependent upon elected but out-of-touch officials to run the country.
This perception drew upon the populist strains in the speech itself. Powell had styled himself as a hero/martyr of political despair from the first moment at Birmingham. He anticipated the “chorus of execration” that would follow the speech, but he insisted that a politician needed to address problems—however taboo—that plagued ordinary English citizens. He admitted it was shocking to recount the story of the constituent who predicted that “in 15 or 20 years time the black man” would “have the whip hand over the white man,” but he also insisted that it was his duty as the political representative of that “ordinary” Englishman to address such fears and anxieties. “To see, and not to speak,” he closed the speech, “would be the great betrayal.”
As Alice Marie Ritscherle shows in her analysis of the 1964 general election campaign of Conservative Peter Griffiths in Smethwick, Powell was not the first public figure to use democratic responsibility as a defense for the representation of anti-immigration sentiment, but his Birmingham speech became the first truly national platform for this argument.Footnote 33 The letters indicate that he struck a popular chord by portraying himself as the brave and selfless politician who would confront realities even when they transgressed polite political discourse. One individual wrote: “Your Statements must give the British people some hope that some M.P.'s put in by the votes of the ordinary people are really concerned about the plight of the ordinary `white folk,’ who have to contend with working and living next door to Indians, Jamaicans, and God knows what other coloured people.”Footnote 34 Demonstrating the conceptualization of “ordinariness” in both political and racial terms, the letter was typical in praising Powell as a politician unlike any other in his attentiveness to the voters. One writer echoed such sentiment with even greater resentment toward the government: “The people of this Country are sick and tired of being lectured by politicians on what they consider best for us, and it is high time some of them put ear to ground, and found out what the average voter thinks. It seems to me that as soon as someone becomes an M.P. he gets his head so full of so called `liberal ideas' that he is no longer one of us and is incapable of straight thinking.”Footnote 35
With the exception of one sly reference to “archbishops faring delicately with the sheets pulled over their heads,” Powell accused his fellow politicians of disregarding popular attitudes toward immigration.Footnote 36 Some supporters, however, perceived such neglect as extending beyond politicians to the public leaders of the country as a whole. A few mirrored his criticism of the clergy as removed from the problems of real people, while others castigated the media for foisting the liberal ideal of racial harmony on the nation. Assuring Powell that he had “only said what is being said in every home and pub in the land,” for instance, a writer from central England proceeded to complain that the “two T.V. channels have been pushing the racial tolerance proposition down our throats for ten years.”Footnote 37 Someone even warned that “the BBC with its insidious propaganda will try to ‘kill’ you.”Footnote 38
In these instances, the perceived antagonism between the powers-that-be and the people, that is, those who controlled major national institutions and those who did not, was fairly general. For many self-identified working-class supporters, however, this antagonism represented a socioeconomic divide in Britain. Numerous letters cast the working class as the citizens most neglected by their public leaders, and many made clear that working-class status was the true signifier of “ordinariness.” They were the people actually living and working alongside the immigrants, and they were the people whose views the government overlooked and ignored. “I dare say that the majority of working class people, the real native population of this country, are in complete agreement with you,” asserted one such supporter.Footnote 39 Another offered similar assurance: “My point of view is shared by many people at my place of work. Ordinary people doing ordinary work for an ordinary wage.”Footnote 40
It is not surprising, of course, to discover a strong reception to the speech by working-class Britons. Powell had himself referred to the constituent concerned about blacks wielding the “whip hand” over the white man as an “ordinary working man,” and many immediately identified the popular response to the speech as evidence of a specifically working-class hostility to immigrants. The fact that unions struck on Powell's behalf contributed to this conclusion, obviously, but there was a broader political context as well. Labour MPs of high-immigrant constituencies had long been aware of the tensions between representing the working class and maintaining open immigration policies, and some members, such as Marcus Lipton (Brixton), eventually pressed for immigration controls by the party in the late 1950s. The recent success of Griffiths in Smethwick had also highlighted the extent to which an anti-immigrant political message could attract working-class supporters. Opinion polls added further support to this interpretation of events. Even though working-class support for Powell as party leader or prime minister was proportionately no greater than support from other classes in the immediate aftermath of Birmingham, Powell did make absolute gains among the working class. The speech, in effect, corrected a previous disproportion in his support, which had been heavily tipped toward the middle class in the mid-1960s, even by Conservative Party standards.Footnote 41
These trends sparked anxiety within the Labour Party about its hold on traditional party supporters, as well as numerous studies in subsequent years about the effect of Powell, immigration, and/or the “race issue” on voting patterns. The rise of the so-called affluent worker had already raised concerns about the fate of traditional Labour support, and the class alignment of the two-party system was indeed starting to fade by the mid-1960s.Footnote 42 The speech exacerbated problems for Labour by convincing the electorate that the Conservative Party would in fact assume a tougher stance against immigration. While 53 percent of those polled in 1966 saw no difference in the parties’ stance on immigration, only 36 percent were unable to differentiate between the parties on this matter in 1969. Of those who perceived a difference in 1969, 50 percent believed that the Conservatives were more likely to restrict immigration; only 6 percent believed Labour would adopt more restrictive policies.Footnote 43 More significant than mere perceptions, of course, was the electoral impact of these perceptions. Analysis of the 1970 general election results indicates that Conservatives actually gained an estimated 6.7 percent of the vote because of this shift in perceptions.Footnote 44 Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that some of this gain stemmed from traditionally Labour-voting members of the working class.Footnote 45
The letters provide qualitative evidence of these shifts in political perceptions in the late 1960s, as well as of the effect Powell could have on such perceptions and subsequent voting patterns. Numerous people complained to Powell that the Conservative Party and the Labour Party had become too much alike and either implied or explicitly stated their gratitude for his stepping outside party lines. A working-class family that typically voted Tory admitted, for instance, that they had come to see the party as nothing more than “the lesser evil.” “Today, we are loathe to admit,” the letter continued, “that we cannot identify the Conservative Party from the Labour Party.”Footnote 46 In contrast, other working-class supporters expressed a strong sense of neglect by the Labour Party. They believed that the party leaders had failed their traditional supporters by committing themselves to protecting the immigrant at the expense of the working class. One supporter wrote: “Although it will be a big thing in my life to vote Conservative after all these years in which I have felt angry at my wife because her vote cancelled my vote I feel that the Labour government has let the working man down.”Footnote 47 Another individual just left his uncertainties dangling, as he self-questioningly signed the letter “a labour member?”Footnote 48
The letters reveal much more than simple working-class identification with Powell, however. They also show the extent to which the racial and social identities of working-class Britons were mutually constitutive in the postwar years. One might assume that a decline in working-class allegiance to the Labour Party after 1968 was either a decline in class consciousness or evidence that “race” challenged class as the basis of political party support. Ritscherle, however, argues, with regard to the period from 1945 to 1968: “Anxieties about immigration and race did not subsume the social frustrations and anxieties articulated by working-class whites. … Rather, in the two decades following World War II, the social, racial and political subjectivities of working-class whites assumed shape in direct relation to anxieties about immigration and colonization.”Footnote 49 Frustration over immigration did not signify, in other words, that working-class Britons were in some way prioritizing their racial identity and fears over their social identity and concerns. Instead, the two developed in conjunction with one another—meaning that someone who decided to vote Conservative instead of Labour could have been voting for the working class as much as against immigration.
The anxiety about the settlement of immigrants in working-class neighborhoods demonstrates this interplay of racial and social identities among Powell's supporters. Many expressed their sense of political neglect by arguing that they actually lived and worked with the immigrants, while their MPs lived and worked in areas far removed from the realities of multiracial, multicultural Britain. “At last someone speaks for the working day man who has to live with these people,” wrote one individual.Footnote 50 Another supporter suggested that some politicians even benefited from immigration: “I have just read the news of the world this morning about what others think of your speech,” she wrote. “It is alright for them … a lot of them have good jobs looking after immigration and don’t care about the years to come. … It is the working man who is going to suffer as he has to live with them on his door step and his children have to mix with them at school.” Powell, of course, had proved himself different from his peers. “You have the working man behind you,” she assured.Footnote 51
Less common but equally angry were perceptions of “race-mixing” as a threat particularly suffered by working-class communities and, again, indicative of the ruling elite's callous neglect of working-class concerns. “Would they allow blacks to marry into Royalty or Nobility?” asked one supporter suggestively. “They don’t care what they lumber the thick working class with, we will take anything that is thrown at us.”Footnote 52 “Please keep it up,” encouraged another woman, “what can we ordinary folk do but depend on you in the House of Commons to air our views? Nobody will listen to ordinary working folk, so we just talk amongst ourselves and watch miserably as our so called leaders force racial suicide on us.”Footnote 53 Interestingly, such comments also smacked more of the “old racism”—that is, the “scientific” language of Social Darwinism and eugenics—than the “new racism” and thereby hearkened back to late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century constructions of the working class as racial inferiors.Footnote 54 The writers of these letters seemed to believe that the British upper classes regarded the working class as less worthy of protection from racial contamination than themselves.
Ultimately, when working-class supporters heard Powell attacking immigration and race relations policy, they also heard him championing the “ordinary working man.” Given the confluence of racial and social identity among the working class in the postwar years, many working-class Britons saw immigration as their problem and accordingly saw Powell as their hero. From their perspective, Powell was not speaking for all “whites” so much as for those to whom no one bothered to listen.
“Liberalism Gone Berserk”
While some supporters articulated their frustrations with immigration in terms of working-class suffering, others situated their anxieties in a broader despair at the moral decline of postwar Britain. In their eyes, immigration was just one more indication, and failing, of the “Permissive Society.” “At last the ordinary folk in our Country appear to have a Champion, in your goodself,” praised one individual who perceived Britain as spinning out of control: “Our situation is liberalism gone berserk. We have the Bill to stop Hanging and the one on Homosexuality. Now the legislation on immigration.”Footnote 55 From this perspective, “liberalism” referred to the social and cultural changes of the 1960s—the relaxation of traditional sexual mores, the mitigation of criminal punishment, the experimentation and rebellion of youth culture. While many Britons hailed such changes as “civilized” or “progressive,” others perceived them as nothing more than chaos. They pointed to rising divorce rates, increased criminality, and growing illegitimacy as indicators of moral collapse and social disorder.
Some of the most angry and articulate letters did in fact connect immigration with the perceived sins of permissiveness, and they portrayed both as having been imposed on an unwilling population. “If this idea of a multi-racial society was the only dream … one could have a certain sympathy with it,” admitted one supporter. But “if considered with many other changes taking place in our modern society, the pattern of life is not being deliberately altered for the good of mankind, but is a cold calculating attempt to reduce us to the lowest level.”Footnote 56 The “other changes” he cited were the recent and impending relaxation of laws against abortion, divorce, and homosexual relations. A supporter from Scotland similarly regretted the repeal of the death penalty. “The great majority of the long suffering and overtaxed inhabitants of this country,” he argued, were not only “tired of political double talk and evasion” but also “of the activities of a tiny minority of progressive `do-gooders’ who have inflicted the racial problem on us, who have abolished corporal punishment, and who have wrecked the prestige of Britain throughout the world.”Footnote 57 An English supporter described his or her collection of “nearly 4,500 signatures” to have the death penalty restored as “an exercise in futility.” The “top brass seem to pay no heed to what electors really want. … I just received the usual letter of smooth, suave poppycock that Ministers dole out ad lib when anyone questions their policies.”Footnote 58
This association of immigration with permissiveness was not merely a by-product of the “swinging sixties” backlash. Immigration and criminal violence had been connected in popular discourse since the 1940s, and many accordingly saw the immigrant as nothing more than a threat to law and order.Footnote 59 One individual insisted that “this country will eventually finish up as an Asian dominated country, with ne’er do wells, drop outs, drug addicts etc., all the decent living people, that the country needs are leaving.”Footnote 60 Another woman went so far as to list recent incidents “warning” of the madness on the national horizon. She included tales of students “knock[ing] a woman to the ground and scream[ing] insults at her,” as well as school boys “openly hold[ing] the staff [of their school] in complete contempt.”Footnote 61 Such examples also demonstrate, of course, the aforementioned interconnection of racial and national identities. The “black” immigrant emerges from these letters as so fundamentally anti-British in his violence and lawlessness that he contaminates the nation from within—contributing to an erosion of respectable behavior and even driving the “decent” people to flee.
Powell did encourage these associations with his speech at Birmingham, particularly through the story of the “old-age pensioner” living in fear of immigrants in her neighborhood. On one level, this story expressed the popular association of immigrants with violence and disorder. Immigrants, according to this belief, shattered the tranquility of traditional English neighborhoods, and they even attacked the most helpless members of society. On another level, the story also tapped into anxieties about the potential injustice of impending antidiscriminatory laws. It was a shocking notion that a woman would be legally bound to rent to anyone with whom she did not wish to live—or, more pointedly, to those whom she distrusted and feared. As Paul Gilroy explains, the story suggested “the transformation of English legality”: one could no longer be certain that the innocent would go free and that the guilty would be punished.Footnote 62
Many supporters fearfully imagined this situation, particularly publicans. One articulated his frustration clearly: “What is my particular interest in this controversial Bill? As a publican, I am required by law to eject anyone who misbehaves, be he Cockney, Welsh, Geordie, Jack, or Paddy. And I do it. Under this new Bill, if I eject a colored man, I can be prosecuted for racial prejudice! Racial prejudice it is, against us!”Footnote 63 Landlords were frightened as well. “My husband and I run a Flatlet house,” wrote one woman, “and are horrified at the prospect of not being able to discriminate against the coloured applicants for Flats in the same way that we discriminate against white people whom we consider unsuitable tenants.”Footnote 64
Ironically, Powell had not, in fact, objected to most of the “permissive legislation” of the 1960s—and he even actively supported some measures.Footnote 65 He had voted in favor of the legalization of homosexuality between adult males in 1965, and he voted for the suspension of the death penalty that year as well. But for those unfamiliar with his career prior to April 1968, none of this showed through at Birmingham. His portrait of immigrant neighborhoods and his objections to further antidiscriminatory laws resonated with those fearing a descent into chaos. In their minds, he spoke not only against immigration but also “liberalism gone beserk” destroying the traditional law and order of their society.
“What's Happened to Great Britain?”
Whatever the specific anxiety—racial degeneration, cultural dilution, urban violence—supporters often expressed a general sense of national decline. For some, this was in fact the central point, and they railed against immigration as a sign of Britain's postwar descent from global, or even European, preeminence. Indeed, the letters offer solid support for Bill Schwarz's argument that popular racism and postimperial despair were in fact two sides of the same coin.Footnote 66 His supporters recognized Powell as much more than a spokesperson for anti-immigration sentiment. His self-lauded boldness and realism seemed a necessary antidote to a national crisis of confidence, and they marked him as a savior of failing British prestige. Once again, however, the leader they imagined did not always correlate with the beliefs that Powell actually espoused.
Numerous supporters characterized the unwillingness of the government to halt immigration from former colonies as indicative of an increasingly weak and ineffectual country. A nation that could not stand up and say who belonged to its community and who did not belong lacked both resolve and dignity. “No other European Country would have allowed this situation to have arisen,” complained one individual. Another supporter expressed the point with greater acrimony: “Germany, France, and Italy have in the past had vast territories in Africa and Asia, but do they have this problem—would they put up with it? What country in the whole world hands over its authority to an inefficient gang of thugs and then subsidizes it to the tune of many millions of pounds, and even then invites the dissatisfied people to come to England?”Footnote 67 Often, the sense that “inferior” nations were taking advantage of the British caused particular frustration. “This country has needed a leader … with guts who's stubborn enough and British enough not to be shoved by lesser nations like Spain and Zambia into the humiliating position we have frequently ended up in,” lamented one supporter. Ruefully recalling tensions between Spain and Britain over Gibraltar, this individual asked: “What's happened to Great Britain? We have our back to the wall and are being bent over it. Isn’t it high time we lashed out instead of being so damned soft and weak-minded about it?”Footnote 68 A Scottish supporter expressed similar indignation: “It is time we stopped allowing other people to push us around, to grovel to Spaniards, Argentinians, and Guatemalans, and giving money away to those who neither love nor respect us.”Footnote 69
From the point of view of supporters, Britain continued to shoulder responsibilities toward the former colonies but received neither respect nor gratitude in return. The ongoing influx of immigrants from these ungrateful nations was just one more indication of Britain's shift from imperial leader to Commonwealth doormat. Unlike Powell, however, supporters did not seem mentally prepared to let go of “Great Britain” and retreat to a “Little England” of quiet insularity. Some letter writers, for instance, expressed sheer nostalgia for the empire, as well as anger at the denigration of the supposedly beneficial leadership of Britain. “At 81 years of age,” wrote one individual, “I am old enough to remember the glory that was England some of which was spent under the British Raj in India, how I writhe at the distorted history of India under British Rule which is fed to our schoolchildren today.”Footnote 70 Others directed their anger outward, toward the former colonies themselves. “As I see it,” explained another supporter, “with the run down of the once great British Empire which owes nothing to the coloured People after all we have done for them in the Past, we are now being kicked in the teeth by one and all.”Footnote 71 The fact that those very people who had rejected British leadership now claimed British citizenship was what some found particularly appalling. As one writer explained, “These people screamed for independence and when they found they were worse off than under british rule they exercised their so called rights, which should never have been given and flooded into our country.”Footnote 72
Others writing to Powell questioned the whole notion of mutual allegiance and support on which the Commonwealth supposedly rested. They criticized the treatment received by Britons themselves in former colonies and asked why Britain should feel any obligation to treat Commonwealth nations better than they treated her people. “I find in all my contacts,” wrote one man, “people are angry, bitter and resentful whereby on the one hand they are being called to house, feed and educate immigrants, thereby adding to their already crushing burdens, on the other hand, in the black countries we are being abused, kicked around and suffer denigration in every conceivable form.”Footnote 73 A woman writing made similar complaints about the treatment of Britons in Kenya, although she seems to have been somewhat confused about the actual status of Kenya itself: “My daughter and son-in-law have resided in Kenya and have been almost forced to come back to England owing to the conditions existing in this so called british colony. These coloured people in these parts of the worlds called themselves british and demand the rights to come here as British citizens but will not tolerate the British people as citizens in their Country, where is the justice there?”Footnote 74 The supporter who unfavorably compared Britain to other European countries denounced the postimperial relationship with former colonies in a single, if wordy, phrase: “this one-sided, nonsensical, meaningless, nebulous farce of a Commonwealth.”Footnote 75
While Powell would have certainly agreed with this condemnation, there was a significant difference between his attitudes toward the Commonwealth and those of his supporters. As Ward explains, Powell's “contempt for the Commonwealth applied equally” to the “Old Dominions,” such as Canada, Australia, and South Africa.Footnote 76 He had no more patience for the illusion of British authority over these sovereign nations than he did with any of the other former colonies more recently granted their independence. In other words, Powell no longer believed in a “Greater Britain,” that is, a “world-wide community of the ‘British race.’” This was part of the myth of empire, from his perspective—an illusion to be jettisoned as Britons turned their gaze inward to Englishness as the source of national greatness and prestige. In contrast, supporters clearly differentiated between the Old Commonwealth and the New Commonwealth. The New Commonwealth countries emerge from the letters as problematic ingrates, while the Old Commonwealth countries appear as safe havens for those disgusted by the supposedly decrepit state of contemporary Britain. The racial divide reflected in this distinction was frequently explicit, as evidenced by the letters above that specifically cite the “black” and “coloured” countries as the troublemakers. Supporters who were leaving Britain, or had already left, to live in the Old Dominions could also raise this issue. A carpenter and joiner who anticipated moving to South Africa with his family, for instance, admitted that race problems existed there as well. “But,” he explained, “I’m sure the S.A. government will be on mine and other white famillys [sic] side.”Footnote 77
The respect and fondness with which numerous supporters wrote about Canada, Australia, and South Africa in fact suggest that the notion of a “Greater Britain” had not died among the British populace by the late 1960s. Indeed, while Powell retreated to his Little England, many of his supporters seemed to see the former “white settler” colonies as the best option for themselves and their families. Only “when a man like” Powell was “at the helm of poor old Britain again,” explained one supporter from Canada, would he and his family return “to live in our native land again.”Footnote 78
Conclusion
In the 1970s, Daniel Lawrence observed a central flaw in the existing research on “race” and voting patterns: pollsters and researchers always expected race to exist as a distinct and salient issue in their subjects’ minds. “But, for most people,” Lawrence explained, “it is probably intimately related, whether consciously or unconsciously, to other issues” in “complex” ways that may not even be “understood by electors themselves.”Footnote 79 His point, of course, was that many Britons were likely unaware of the ways in which the “race issue” had affected their political attitudes and behavior. The presence of “black” immigrants may have covertly influenced their stance on matters ranging from welfare to foreign policy. Ultimately, a simple question about political parties and race could never measure the potentially manifold effects of Commonwealth immigration on British voting patterns.
The letters written to Powell in the spring of 1968 testify to the complexity that Lawrence intuited about British attitudes toward “black” immigrants. They are also, in this light, an invaluable resource because they represent a relatively private and anonymous space in which individuals could reflect at length on their feelings about immigration. Freed from the fear of judgment, they could express their conscious anxieties and hostilities and, in so doing, even stumble into their unconscious resentments and fears. In this way, the letters reveal more than anti-immigrant sentiment—they are windows onto class tensions and frustrations, uncertainty and anger over relaxed social mores and behavior, and despair over Britain's declining global significance. These concerns were all intimately connected to the fear of the “black” immigrant, and they accordingly tumbled onto the pages of support for Powell.
The letters also demonstrate the complexity of “whiteness” in postwar Britain. On the one hand, many supporters clearly equated being “white” with being “British” and thereby demonstrated a postwar correspondence between the imagined boundaries of “race” and “nation.” This sense of “whiteness” possibly helped prop up an otherwise suffering British identity in the postimperial period by offering a point of commonality among the English, Welsh, and Scottish. For some, this commonality even seemed to extend to “Greater Britain.” Canada, Australia, and South Africa all seemed like places where “whiteness” was less threatened and therefore better places for the British to live. The experience of “whiteness” could also be, however, a source of division and antagonism within the nation. For many working-class supporters, being “white” in immigrant neighborhoods and workplaces reinforced their sense of social inequality and political neglect. Their sense of embattled “whiteness” involved as much antagonism toward the “white” elites of Britain as the “black” Commonwealth immigrant.
In the short term, Powell benefited from the sheer complexity of these attitudes toward race and immigration in postwar Britain. Britons could interpret his speech in light of their own anxieties and frustrations and therefore imagine Powell as whatever kind of leader they desired—be it a working-class hero, antipermissiveness crusader, or nostalgic imperialist. Such benefits were, however, short-lived. His imperious hostility toward the European Economic Community and Keynesian economic policy only exacerbated his relationship with Heath and further marginalized him within the Conservative Party. His opposition to party policy culminated in the ultimate demonstration of dissent: publicly stating his support for Labour and its anti-EEC campaign in the February 1974 election. Having thus ended his career as a Tory, and having definitively killed the already meager possibility of holding a ministry position again, Powell spent the rest of his political life as an Ulster Unionist MP for Down South.
Remarkably, then, the man on whom so many seemed to pin their political hopes in the spring of 1968 became something of a political pariah. The “Rivers of Blood” speech ended up defining his political career and became a reference point for all future debates on a multiracial, multicultural Britain. The recent BBC Two series, White, focused an entire episode on Powell and the speech as part of its investigation into whether the “white working class” was becoming “invisible” in contemporary Britain.Footnote 80 The debate spurred by this series revealed the ongoing complexities of “whiteness” among modern Britons as issues of race, class, nation, gender, and sexuality spilled onto the pages of the BBC-sponsored online discussion.Footnote 81 Moreover, the debate showed that the political marginalization of Powell is an issue every bit as divisive in twenty-first-century Britain as the speech was in 1968. While some see his “political ostracism” as “one of the glories of recent British politics,” the BBC discussion boards reveal others who still condemn the government for silencing unpalatable truths with political correctness.Footnote 82 The debate over Powell as villain or hero has, in other words, remained strangely static forty years on.
