The great John O’Sullivan has a story about Enoch Powell which he keeps promising to put into print. Since he still hasn’t done so, I will risk repeating it here. It occurred during a conversation some years after the Rivers of Blood speech. A group of conservatives were talking, and Powell was among them. At some point one of those present referred to the 1968 speech and asked Powell: ‘Why did you do it?’
Powell’s reply started something like this: ‘When the lark sings in the morning they do not say – “Oh lark why dost thou sing?” When the nightingale gives forth her song…’ and so on. After Powell had gone through an array of the bird kingdom metaphors, he came to his clincher: ‘And so it was with me that day in Birmingham.’
I was thinking about Birmingham and Powell this week for a number of reasons. Firstly, because he was the MP for nearby Wolverhampton; secondly, because it is where he gave his famous speech; and finally because it is where the latest outbreak of sectarian politicking in our country has occurred.
The bad news on immigration and integration in this country floods in so fast these days that it is hard to keep up with. But even in the mêlée that is modern Britain, the news that Israeli football fans have been told not to go to Birmingham because they will not be safe there is striking.
Nowadays the area has local politicians of a lesser intellectual calibre than Powell. Ayoub Khan was last year elected as the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. Khan is one of a number of MPs voted in at the last election solely because of their appeal to the sectarian Muslim vote and specifically its obsession with Israel and Gaza. So of course Khan applauded the idea of Israeli football fans being kept out of the city he represents. Indeed he issued a statement ‘welcoming’ the news and thanking the police for listening to ‘our community’s concerns’. And what ‘community’ might that be?
Elsewhere, there has been some outrage at the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans turning up in Birmingham. Even Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed concern at the idea that a British city should be deemed literally unsafe for visible Jews to be in. But I can’t see why he or any other MP should be surprised. Birmingham is one of those places where ‘multiculturalism’ is approaching its natural endpoint.
Birmingham is one of those places where ‘multiculturalism’ is approaching its natural endpoint
Robert Jenrick was recently raked over the media coals for comments he made about the lack of white faces in Birmingham. As has been the British way for almost 60 years now, opportunistic MPs and others rallied around, to attack not the vast demographic change that has got us here but the person who committed the crime of noticing. Because the only thing anyone is meant to say when going to a city like Birmingham today is how wonderfully diverse it is.
Yet many of us do not think this is a blessing, and cannot help noticing that parts of the city are not diverse at all. They are simply ethnically homogenous in a different way – in the same manner as it would be if a city the size of Birmingham had moved to Mirpur in the past few decades, rather than the other way around.
Today, Birmingham is one of a number of British cities in which people who identify on the census as ‘white British’ are in a minority. To which we are again meant to say only ‘Hooray – our country was built on diversity’. That is the sort of mantra still spilling out of the empty heads of people like the leader of the Green party, Zack Polanski. This week Polanski spewed this far-past-its-sell-by-date cliché in a debate with the admirable Conservative MP Katie Lam. A visibly disdainful Robert Peston joined Polanski in pouring scorn on Lam’s point that our country wasn’t actually built on diversity. Of course it is, was Polanski and Peston’s message, and surely only a racist, backwards Powellite would dare to claim otherwise.
This, for the time being, remains where the debate is. Which is roughly where it was in 1968: don’t say what you see with your eyes or we will tell you that your eyes are racist and lying.
The problem is that this argument is even harder to defend in 2025 than in any previous year, as the results of legal and illegal migration are felt across the country. In the past I have summarised the ‘diversity is our greatest strength’ argument as going something like this: the immigration isn’t happening; it is happening but it is good for you; it may not be good for you but you deserve it; it’s happened and there’s nothing you can do about it.
If you want to find one of the principal causes of the enervation of British society, it can be found there. And yet what people would put up with a process like this forever? And what are we going to do about it?
To understand just how bad things are, it is worth going back to 1968. Pretend that Powell used his speech not to say what he said, but to say what is now true. Pretend for a moment that he had used his speech to say that within the lifespan of many of his constituents, white British people would be a minority in the whole of Birmingham. Pretend he had predicted that by the 2020s, significant numbers of Birmingham voters would vote in a Pakistani-born Muslim on specifically sectarian, racial, religious lines. And pretend he had predicted that as a result of this change, visibly Jewish people would be barred from attending a football match because the local Muslim community would not tolerate it. If Powell had said even a portion of this, he would have been derided even more than he was. In fact he would most likely have been deemed certifiable.
The question today is not why the lark sang, nor why his song was ignored. The question is why the facts now prove that he understated our current problems so much.
Comments