Debating the E-Word
Last week Nigel Hastilow was the Conservative Party's Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis. Then he was forced to after refusing to take back comments he'd made in a newspaper about Enoch Powell. As he explains on his :
Amazing how powerful some names can be. Last Friday I mentioned Enoch Powell and suddenly all hell broke loose.
In an article supporting Tory leader David Cameron's remarks on how uncontrolled immigration would change the country, I mentioned that many people say "Enoch was right".
I have discovered that this is enough, still, 39 years after the controversial speech which undid him politically, to cause outrage.
The resignation sparked a great deal of debate, much of it focussing on whether David Cameron was right to have taken the tough line he did. But as the story rumbled on, a at the man whose name caused all the trouble. Peter Simmons emailed iPM to ask:
What exactly did Enoch Powell say? Lots of people seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone who quotes him favourably, interpreting it as racist, but is this down to Johnny Speight making Alf Garnett a fan of Enoch, rather than an assessment of what he actually said?
As I remember it, Mr Powell warned against uncontrolled immigration because it would alter this country irrevocably and lead eventually to violence between separate communities. The country is certainly changed from 40 years ago, and what are we seeing now? Inter-community strife.
You can read the full text of the 'Rivers of Blood' speech . We asked Sunder Katwala, who about Powell's legacy on Comment is Free this week, to take part in a discussion with his biographer Simon Heffer, who put up a vigorous defence of Enoch in his
You can hear a shorter version of this on the programme tomorrow. This is the full, unedited discussion (12 minutes) but we'll probably run it on air at around four minutes or less.
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