In 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered probably the most inflammatory address ever given by a senior British politician. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding,” he declared. “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” The bloodletting, he anticipated, would be taking place because of a race war. Seeing migrants arrive from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia was, Powell said, “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. Britain in the half century since has repudiated Powell’s racist prophecy. Non-white immigrants and their children are not an existential threat to this country, but rather the source of some its most celebrated achievements.
Birmingham, the city in which Powell gave his “rivers of blood” speech, has quietly become among the country’s most diverse places. Along with London, Leicester, Manchester and Luton, it is part of an urban England that is fast becoming more black and brown than white. About four in 10 people in Milton Keynes, Nottingham and Peterborough are non-white. The figure, according to the 2021 census published on Tuesday, is roughly one in four in Bristol and Leeds. Despite the best efforts of politicians like Powell and his ilk to turn people against each other on the basis of race and ethnicity, a more multiracial, multicultural country has become a feature of modern life. It is progress that the public have overwhelmingly accepted that Britain is not just populated by white people – and have stopped imagining that it could ever be otherwise.
Racism continues to blot the landscape. British Bangladeshis are doing well at school, yet they fare worse in the job market than they should, given their qualifications. The shameful Windrush scandal, a result of the Conservatives’ hostile environment policy, saw British citizens of African-Caribbean descent wrongly deported, dismissed from their jobs and deprived of services such as NHS care. Inequalities remain baked into the system: Covid mortality rates among some black and Asian groups were between 2.5 and 4.3 times higher than among white groups, when all other factors were accounted for. Minorities were not more susceptible because they were black or brown, but because they were more likely to be poor.
Human coexistence is not easy. The recent disturbances in Leicester, between groups of Hindus and Muslims, show how difficult things can get. But preserving Britain’s diversity requires hard work as well as good intentions. Racial differences need managing to bridge divides, not widen them. The trouble is that rightwing politicians have for too long profited by scapegoating outsiders and stoking a belief of superiority in those they have nothing material to offer. Pound-shop Powellites also flourished after Brexit, which yoked together Europe and migration. For all the talk about how Rishi Sunak’s elevation to prime minister should be celebrated as evidence of a government broadening its talent base, the truth is that, were it up to the policies of this government, there would be no Mr Sunak. Britain’s racial model is far from perfect. But race, culture and ethnicity is lived in a far more convivial way than how it is often evoked politically.
