Powell well knew the extent of the cowardice he was up against.

The supreme function of statesmanship,’ he began when he rose to speak on that Saturday morning nearly 34 years ago, ‘is to provide against preventable evils.’ He identified the main impediment to the required act of statesmanship, one apparently still in place today: ‘If only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.’ He defended himself for breaking the taboo. ‘Those who knowingly shirk [the responsibility to discuss problems connected with immigration] deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.’ Repeating the first of two incendiary anecdotes, about the constituent who told him that within 15 or 20 years ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ (the other was the one about the little old lady who had shit put through her letter-box), Powell predicted what would happen to him. ‘I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so.’ With parts of Britain, including his own constituency, undergoing a cultural transformation ‘to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history’, Powell asserted that, as an MP confronted with such concerns, ‘I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else.’ His party, however, happily did, then and for many years afterwards, which perhaps explains the sensitivities of some of its luminaries on the subject even today.

Much of the speech, as is well known, was about instituting a system of voluntary repatriation. For all the revulsion this caused at the time, that particular idea was Tory party policy and was enshrined in law in 1971. Yet this plea was given force by Powell’s warnings of what would happen if multiculturalism were to grow unchecked. He wanted everyone to be equal before the law. ‘This does not mean,’ he argued, ‘that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class.’ Those who have wondered why the inflammatory statements of certain Muslim extremists in this country, including calls for the murder of the President of Pakistan, have not caused those extremists to be prosecuted would do well to think about Powell’s warning.

Until a few years before he made the speech, Powell had thought it would be possible to integrate the immigrant population into the indigenous society. Now the sheer numbers and their concentration on certain areas made such a hope impossible. Now he gave his starkest warning about what we call multiculturalism: ‘There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last 15 years or so many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one to boot.’

Powell knew that economic circumstances, such as the availability of cheap rented accommodation, had hitherto acted to force immigrants to settle in small areas. ‘Now,’ however, he warned, ‘we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.’ It was then ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’; but he quoted a Labour minister, and fellow West Midlands MP, John Stonehouse, who had warned of the dangers of Sikhs campaigning to maintain customs ‘inappropriate to Britain’. Stonehouse had said that ‘to claim special communal rights ...leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another, it is to be strongly condemned.’ Yet nobody listened, either to Powell or to Stonehouse.

Everybody knows the peroration of the speech, or thinks he does. What immediately preceded it, however, was the definition of the evils of multiculturalism when allowed to flourish in a monocultural society unwilling and unprepared for it. It is worth quoting in full:

Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members to agitate and campaign against their fellow-citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

He concluded that ‘to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal’. The hatred poured down on him was as much in resentment of his drawing attention to this destructive force as in an ignorant belief — for the text does not bear such an assumption out — that Powell was being ‘racist’.

I have often wondered, since 11 September, what Powell would have made of current events. He would not, I suspect, have approved of our support for America, because he regarded America in terms not very far removed from the Guardian’s or Osama bin Laden’s, though in the second of those cases for very different reasons. Yet he would have been more diverted by the spectacle of those who owe allegiance to the Crown declaring, instead, that they would rather fight for the Taleban. He would have reacted with dismay, but not surprise, at stories of mosques being hijacked from their congregations of decent, moderate Muslims and manipulated into breeding grounds of extremism. He would have watched the reporting of the church being burned and seen it as utterly symbolic of what happens when you encourage an alien culture not to co-exist with, but to confront, another. He would have been in no doubt that he had been proved right.

His speech did not prevent remedial action being taken to prevent the growth of multiculturalism. There was never any will to do it. Because of the damage done even by the accusation of racism, no politician would have attempted to prevent it, even if Powell had not spoken. Even in the last election campaign Mr Hague, then the Tory leader, made some half-witted comments in support of multiculturalism, a phenomenon he plainly did not understand. And, when Lady Thatcher quite sensibly denounced the whole concept as divisive, Michael Portillo tried to have her bundled into a cupboard and not let out again. We have taken a long time to learn, but, had we only had eyes to see and ears to hear, Enoch tried to teach us. Rather than make him into the most inappropriate scapegoat for the failings of his whole political generation, and others since, we should instead offer him the most contrite of posthumous apologies.

2001 The Spectator.co.uk