Racism is still a factor in British political life

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/16/racism-still-factor-in-british-political-life

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Anne McElvoy writes (13 December) that Enoch Powell was many things. The one thing she doesn’t mention is that he was a racist. Nor, apparently, were his followers, many of whom “were neither racist nor wholly opposed to immigration”. It didn’t feel like that at the time. My mixed-race English father took for a while to double-barrelling his name to make it look more Anglo-Saxon. To her credit, my white English mother would have none of this. Powell, as Hanif Kureishi rightly points out in a piece on the same day, instilled real fear in many immigrant communities, and played a major role in instigating the wave of popular white racism from which the National Front and other fascist organisations profited in the 1970s. No one should attempt to rehabilitate either Powell or his vile ideas, and his kind of overt racism is, fortunately, now absent from mainstream politics. But the British right are emulating their US counterparts, for whom to be called a racist is worse than to hold racist views (which, in their surrealist world, like Magritte’s pipe, are not racist). Time, to use a good Anglo-Saxon expression, to call a spade a spade. Racism, albeit more subtly manifested than Powellism, is poisoning the sphere of public discourse, and politicians of all the main parties are shamefully pandering to it. Professor Chris SinhaNorwich

• Ian Jack’s review of Boris Johnson’s encomium on Winston Churchill (13 December) refers sceptically to the Goveian view which reduces history to the achievements of individuals. But a few pages on, Hanif Kureishi appears to do just that in his lucid but rather simplistic piece on Enoch Powell. Demonising Powell doesn’t help to deepen our understanding. If, as Kureishi argues, Britain was being remade into a multicultural haven, evident in today’s cosmopolitan London (which is not Britain), then it was also being unmade, and many natives, especially some members of the white working and lower-middle classes – historically, the foundation of fascist movements – felt threatened by the changes happening around them. Their British identity was, in part, predicated on a notion of whiteness – the origins of which predated Powell – that was being threatened by post-second world war changes, domestic and international, economic and ideological. By articulating their fears, Powell’s notorious speech may have given them a mainstream voice, thereby averting a greater conflagration. A decade after Powell’s infamous speech, Margaret Thatcher also reached out to the corners of benighted Britain with a reference to fears that the country would be “swamped by people with a different culture”. However distasteful the racist and anti-immigration voices, they must be included in the national debate. Ferdinand DennisLondon