Should Radio 4 have broadcast Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech? Only parts of the speech were recorded at the time. So, spoken by an actor, this was the first time it had been heard in full since 1968. Few would dispute its historical significance, so why the controversy?
Labour peer Lord Adonis, one of the most vocal critics, called it “an incitement to racial hatred” and suggested that the BBC had become a “custodian of [Powell’s] racism”. To claim that it is racist to broadcast Powell’s speech in full, rather than provide snippets, to place it in context and question its assumptions is seemingly not to understand what it means to put something in context.
When, in 2016, the German government permitted the publication of Adolf Hitler’s banned Mein Kampf, no one suggested that it had become the “custodian” of nazism. Why is it different for the BBC? Should we never be able properly to discuss Powell’s speech? And how to do so without listening in full?
Is this a book “you would wish your wife or your servants to read?” the prosecuting counsel asked during the 1960 obscenity trial of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There is an element of this in the response to the Powell broadcast: “Do you really want the masses to listen to this?” Others argue that the BBC was “triggering trauma” in black and Asian Britons who lived through the period. I grew up in the shadow of Powell. Seventies Britain was viciously racist in a way difficult to imagine now. Powell played his role in fomenting that. His words might make me angry, but I’m not “traumatised” by them, and I know few who would be.
The real question is not: “Should it have been broadcast?” but: “Why are we still so obsessed by Powell rather than fighting today’s battles over racism?” That could be asked both of the BBC and of its critics.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
