History of England 1-6

The poet John Betjeman showed himself the true heir of Chesterton in his fulminations against soulless modernity. He was to save St Pancras station and countless other examples of Victorian architecture from demolition. But it was the proposed abolition of nature that angered him most. We will never know the extent to which Betjeman and others saved the English landscape from being ‘improved’ beyond recognition, but it is unlikely that the mass supplanting of families from their homes could have long continued. The tower block and the new town were both going the way of all fashions by the end of the Sixties, although the latter was to have a brief and undistinguished revival in the Eighties. The compound failures of the brutalist experiment had led by the late Sixties to a resurgence in softer, older traditions. After a long enchanted sleep, art nouveau had begun to stir, in housing as much as in fashion. Wallpaper in the William Morris style was pasted on walls; the beams on Tudor houses were uncovered.

In October 1967, a private member’s bill by the Liberal MP David Steel became law. Although it concerned the contentious matter of abortion, it was proposed in the same spirit as the Sexual Offences Act as a compassionate means of ending distress. The bill enjoyed broad cross-party support, allowing trained doctors to perform what had hitherto been the preserve of unscrupulous and often unqualified backstreet practitioners. In the Sixties film Alfie, the eponymous workingclass lothario, played by Michael Caine, gives a girl he has seduced some ‘help’, as it was termed, in the form of a shifty doctor. When Alfie later goes into the room where the abortion has taken place, his face contorts in a daze of horror. Many such films dealt with the question, few so powerfully; the image must have swayed many to the belief that no woman should have to suffer such conditions or such shame.

On 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell, the honourable member for Wolverhampton, gave a speech in the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. His audience was the West Midlands Conservative Political Centre and his subject was immigration. The audience was expecting edification and even entertainment; what they witnessed was an eruption of lava from a suburban lawn. With his jaw clenched, his voice caught between a bark and a snarl, and eyes which, in the words of Kingsley Amis, suggested someone ‘about to go for your throat’, Enoch Powell was never biddable and seldom diplomatic. Ever willing to hector, to argue, he could not steel himself to woo or placate. This quality brought him to high office but rendered negligible any chance of his retaining it.

Powell had been a brilliant classicist at university, a superb organizer during the war, a fiercely meticulous minister, and a conscientious MP, his ear ever open to the concerns of his constituents – whatever their origins. He had a command of fourteen languages and was able to canvass in six of them. If he had shown concern over the rate of Commonwealth immigration in the early Sixties, he was scarcely alone. And it should be noted that when the more extreme elements of the anti-immigration lobby asked for his support in the late Fifties, they were met by cold reproof or icy silence. He was thus a plausible demagogue, but an improbable racist. As the speech gathered in pace and hyperbole, the moustachioed, methodical public servant became a bearded John Knox. ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily heaping up its own funeral pyre … Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

The so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech earned Powell immediate dismissal from Heath, lasting opprobrium in the House of Commons and the warm endorsement of 74 per cent of the electorate. He was to be remembered as the man who had deliberately stirred a sleeping dragon, but Powell had only himself to thank for this. His speech was not just inflammatory, but mendacious. He had cited unnamed constituents feeling afraid in their own homes. He had spoken of ‘excreta’ being shoved through the letter box of an elderly white woman. A man was quoted saying that ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. It is probable that these mysterious constituents never existed. All the tokens of a mind warped by passion were in place. His friend Michael Foot, as far from Powell in political outlook as he was close to him in patriotism and intellect, reflected that ‘It was a tragedy for Enoch … a tragedy for all of us.’