1. How curious it is that what was supposed to be a brief chit-chat about Brexit with my Taiwanese neighbour, Mr Peter Chen, in 2017 would by degrees translate into a perplexing debate on how English officialism unwittingly played right into the hands of Enoch Powell and his infamous Rivers of Blood speech. Here I am, writing yet another blogpost almost certain that once published, it will excite more questions than it will answer.
Rivers of Blood or English Officialism!
2. Only the other month I bumped into Mr Chen. He and I were riding on a community bus on our way to Jingan MRT station, in Zhonghe District, New Taipei City; I was on my way to the big city to undertake a number of errands in my capacity as Taiwan’s RSA Connector. Mr Chen leaned across and demanded to know: “How about Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech..? Did I tell you I was a student at Edinburgh University when Enoch Powell made his infamous speech! Ah, how I remember it well! The speech caused quite a stir at the time…! And reading your Charlie the Honey Badger interview brought memories flooding back. The memory is as fresh to me today as it was then…it was as if…the speech were made yesterday. I have met many a Charlie the Honey Badger in my long life…I have to say, that particular blog resonated with me. I still meet them today each time I visit England on business. But seriously, do you think the ‘Rivers of Blood speech had anything to do with the Brexit referendum result?”
3. “Oh please, don’t be preposterous!” I retorted. However, I think the stupidity of the English Officialism, it may well be urged, had a great deal to do with it; it probably reawakened fond feelings some people had for Enoch Powell and his Rivers of Blood speech; and, to devastating effect! My many years in England, though on balance a good experience, were nevertheless laced with many instances of official gigantic blunders; which, as I think on them now, compelled many ordinary members of the public to contrive to work their way out of them with a heroism almost approaching the sublime. This heroism is rarely acknowledged by officialdom. I had first-hand experience of officialism: first as a stateless refugee, and second, during the major financial crisis of 2008. There were many disasters before the financial crisis however, the sort that could have been avoided; it is probable they could have even saved Her Majesty’s Exchequer a pretty penny had they been better managed.
Brexit a done deal
4. The twenty sixteen Brexit referendum is probably the most eloquent example of officialism gone horribly wrong; the referendum was an ill-thought-out idea from start to finish; the campaign was shot through with deceit, fear mongering, false statistics and damned lies; it’s still fresh more than a year on, and vivid in all our minds that it is not worth my while to dwell upon it unduly. It has been well ventilated the length and breadth of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, surpassing any other subject in the media in the whole of 2017! To continue to debating it would be tantamount to flogging a dead horse; you may flog it a long while before it will stir: you need to put life into it, for else all your flogging will fail. I consider it a done deal: Britain is leaving the European Union for better or worse. It is of course a matter of conjecture as to what sort of Brexit deal the UK ends up settling for; my guess is that some form of fudge will emerge, it’s what the English are good at. Accordingly, I do not propose to deal with the substance of Brexit in this blogpost.
Mustn’t grumble or make a fuss
5. But I will however, attempt to address one of the most annoying British characteristics I have experienced at close quarters; which is the willingness to turn a blind eye, in order to avoid grumbling or making a fuss, and hope that somehow things will work out in the end. This attribute may have exacerbated the impact of officialism on ordinary people that a stranger such as my friend Peter Chen looking in from the outside, may be forgiven for believing that Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech has had a great deal of influence in modern Britain. The first time I saw this attribute at work was during my time working as a legal advisor, in the magistrates’ court, in the Thames Valley; and that experience, I think, has helped me gain an unusually deeper understanding of some of the most pressing issues in British society today.
Immigration – a stinging nettle
6. It sometimes happens that relatively small matters, with no obvious connection between them, combine to create a political atmosphere in which no British Government, regardless of its political colour, seems capable of doing anything right. And one such small matter is something to do with the management of immigration generally. Immigration in of itself is not a bad thing for any country; Britain, alike with many old democracies across the European continent, is facing an ageing population whose number is likely to increase exponentially in the coming decades; there is no immediately visible means of replenishing the population, thus making immigration a more realistic and practical means of infusing new blood to support an otherwise ageing population. It is an absolute necessity. Indeed, many economists of various political stripes are in agreement that immigration is probably the only feasible solution on the table. It is good for a viable and robust economy. But this view has been, and still is, in direct conflict with British political discourse since the beginning of the formal dissolution of the British Empire: that no British Government has had the courage to craft a coherent and meaningful immigration policy.
7. With regard to the economic ‘immigration’ argument beloved of economists, I think you will find that most British people are in agreement with most economists, albeit for very conflicting reasons. Here’s the thing: on the whole, British public opinion is dead set against immigration. But for all the supposed outrage on public display, Britain, being a nation of shop keepers as Adam Smith is reputed to have said in his ‘Wealth of Nations’, loves foreigners’ money, and employers, middle classes and those above in the social structure, love foreigner’s labour as long as it is cheap and as long as the workers do as they are told and do not make a fuss.
An old running sore!
8. And, writing as I am in 2018, the year in which the Brexit negotiations are daily meat and drink for the majority of Britons, it is worth noticing that the Brexit referendum result was probably the first time the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain has had to reckon with people’s deepest existential fears concerning immigration. If you take a quick survey of press archives in the 20th century Britain, you will come across characters such as Cosmo Lang, Bishop of Stepney, East London; who in 1902 accused immigrants of swamping whole areas once populated by English people.
9. A little earlier, in 1901, Cosmo Lang, together with Major William Evans-Gordon MP, Samuel Forde-Ridley MP, and Captain Shaw of Middlesex Regiment had formed a populist anti-immigrant movement called the British Brothers’ League (BBL). And the immigrants they were afraid of, well, aught we know it, the immigrants they were afraid of were not your typical black Africans. Rather, they were afraid of the pauperised East European Jews fleeing economic discrimination and religious persecution. These immigrants were fleeing from pogroms enacted by the mob, but encouraged by the Tsarist Russian authorities, with the connivance of the Russian Orthodox Church. Other immigrants included non-Jewish Russians and Poles, Italians, Germans and Chinese. This, I think, is proof if proof were needed, that historically speaking, Britain has always had an ambivalent relationship with all immigrants regardless of colour. This ambivalence manifested itself in strange ways; often breaking out onto the front pages of the press as working class radicalism, class conflicts, ignorance, and perhaps deep seated fascist inclinations within a large section of the British elite.
Ghosts of an Imperial past
10. Press archives also show that immigration is a social-economic and political wound, whether real or perceived, which must be probed all the way to the very bottom; and not skimmed over, and one about which policy makers must not make more haste out of their findings than good speed. It is therefore remarkable that for a people who have long seen themselves, and still continue to see themselves, as members of a proud and independent imperial race; and this, incidentally is no idol boast, for the British ran probably the most illustrious empire on which it was once said, the sun never set; but for reasons which are difficult to fathom, are incapable of crafting an immigration policy that answers well to the demands of a rapidly changing society, even to the demands of a 21st century Britain.
11. It will always be a matter of speculation that Britain’s failure to fashion a coherent immigration policy may be, perhaps due to a deep sense of shame or embarrassment – for the sins of their ancestors who presided over so vast a colonial empire, whose chequered history now looms large like the ghost of Christmas past. Modern Britons though they can barely remember the glory days of empire, and yet, are to this day carrying in their collective psyche, the marks of empire – warts and all. The public reaction to the recent Oxfam sexual abuse scandal, is a classic instance, and it probably speaks volumes. This is reflected in much of the modern thinking and intellectual discourse; it emerged out of the cauldron of the Second Great War, only to be exacerbated by the reality of the dissolution of the British Empire.
Cradle to the grave…!
12. These marks of empire are, I think, further aggravated by the shattering failure to create a new Jerusalem in the green and pleasant land of England, which was promised in the Beveridge Report: a report which proposed for a comprehensive system of social security, based upon subsistence-level benefits from ‘the cradle to the grave’ – a sort of ‘blueprint’ for the ‘brave new world’ which Britain could become after the Second Great War. It promised a free education; a National Health Service, free at the point of delivery; free housing fit for heroes; and, full employment. The spirit of the Beveridge Report fed and reflected the hopes of a war scarred population for a better tomorrow in Britain; but, alas, the failure of the vision has instead put bitterness into the soul of many a people in England.
13. Fast forward to the 21st century, and, if you were to run your eye the full length and breadth of England, you will see an England in the grip of many social problems; these social problems are in part due to unemployment, inequality in part due to social housing; they all speak eloquently to the fact that the five evils which the Beveridge’s Report promised to cure 75 years ago, are back with a certain vengeance that can be compared to the seven wicked spirits. These five evils have for long existed in the abstract as it were, to most well-to-do people in Britain, especially to members of the ruling elite; that a mention of any of the five evils, by way of a pressing concern crying out for urgent redress, and one is simply fobbed off by an easy explanation supported with one statistical data or two. For these evils are plain to see – they are visible in broad daylight. Only as recently as February 2018, a rough sleeper died on the ‘doorsteps’ of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. And, the common thread uniting all these evils is, a perception among many ordinary people that the unprecedented rise in immigration in England, may have something to do with it.
A strange finishing school
14. When I was a boy, I often heard it said that there were instances during the course of a person’s life when all means failed; and that when such an event occurred, it was surprising to see how a once self-assured person may be reduced to jelly owing to an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. That event happened to me when I was on the cusp of completing my MBA programme at BPP Business School, and finalising my plans to relocate to Taipei, Taiwan. It is a long story and I hope you will forgive me if I do not go into sundry details on this particular occasion. Sufficient to say, however, that I too came to experience first-hand the overwhelming sense of powerlessness, as I contemplated the prospect of roughing it on the streets of Milton Keynes albeit for a brief season. I came to appreciate how a Christian life is full of many paradoxes experientially. For that limited period of my life, my whole world seemed to hang by a thread; the centre appeared to give way. Looking back on that experience now, I can’t help but wonder at God’s strange providence which led me into that particular situation; for I came face-to-face with a world, which I had hitherto got to know about only on a second hand basis. Homelessness was, strange as it may seem, an appropriate finishing school before embarking upon a venture I am presently working on. For I received an object lesson in things which are truly stranger than fiction. Homelessness is, incidentally, a significant element in the mind-boggling debate on immigration.
Homelessness
15. Homelessness in Milton Keynes, as I’m sure is the case in many towns or cities across England, is slap-bang in your face. It is in plain sight. The paradox of it, as I remember those cold nights on the concrete floor, was that Milton Keynes in those days had one of the fastest growing economies in England, and this was reflected in the numerous building projects within the city’s campus. Indeed, the homeless crisis in England is a painful contradiction, because if the media is to be taken at its word, there are hundreds of thousands of affordable houses, a fact, which on the face of it, is very reassuring until, that is, you work out the true meaning of the official definition of ‘affordable home.’ By ‘affordable home’ the government means “social rented, affordable rented and intermediate housing provided to specified eligible households whose needs are not met by the market.” There is data which shows that a number of small apartments in London by way of example, answer well the ‘affordable home’ criteria despite the fact that they cost a small fortune, at least £500,000.00, and requiring at least £80,000.00 by way of a deposit. Fair enough, or so it would seem!
16. But speaking to my rough-sleeping comrades in arms as it were, most of whom, and much to my astonishment, were not your usual suspects; that is, they were not the usual drug addicts, drunkards, and the whatnots of society’s losers. But on the contrary, my rough-sleeping companions included school teachers, one or two university or higher education college lecturer(s) (this is not unique in England, it also happens in other countries such as the USA), an engineer, a number of foreign economic immigrants – some of whom had risked life and limb and survived crossing the treacherous Mediterranean Sea from sub-Saharan Africa. I shall write a more full account in a separate blogpost, as part of the ‘Stepping Stones‘ series, retelling my experience with the African immigrants, who had survived the Mediterranean Sea in the near future. But for now, I can report that the rough sleepers I saw were all united by their experience of the bewildering processes involved in accessing government support, especially Housing Benefit.
In the footsteps of Eric Blair
17. Some of the rough sleepers I met were in some form of employment or other – ranging from full time employment to zero hour contracts. The experience was an eye-opener. Evidently, they could tell I was not the usual rough-sleeper they were accustomed to seeing; it was at that point that I decided to look on the bright-side of this experience, painful as it was, and turn it into some form of meaningful research, after the fashion of Eric Blair, whose pen name is George Orwell. As a young adult, I well remember reading his two very powerful books exploring poverty and inequality: Down and Out on the Streets of London and Paris, and The Road to Wigan Pier. I highly recommend both of them. They are worth reading. And, moreover, I believe as a Christian that all things work together for good to them that love God; I knew this experience would turn to good account some day in the future. It is!
Housing policy and homelessness
18. The common consensus among my interlocutors on the streets of Milton Keynes was that there was something amiss, something very wrong with the way the housing crisis is managed in Britain. The well-educated among my new friends thought that what was wrong was owing to Margaret Thatcher’s controversial “Right to Buy” policy. Margaret Thatcher, as many will remember, superintended two major Housing Acts – in 1980 and 1988 – which fundamentally changed the housing system in the UK. Although this is a topic beyond the scope of this blogpost, it is sufficient to say that the policy opened up home ownership in England; that is, the policy unwittingly transferred the management of social housing to private landlords, most notably Housing Associations. It was a form of democratisation of home ownership. It should have been an empowering policy towards making a more equal and fair society.
19. But conversing with my new friends, it soon occurred to me that homeless (rough sleepers to you and me) and housing were somehow inter-connected; and that the issue was more to do with housing policy and its management. I discovered that there were many people in England who were officially employed, but their take home pay was reduced to a heap of nothing due to the rising cost of living. They could not afford the cost of a decent home; it further emerged that more and more people were renting, a considerable number of whom renting privately. It finally emerged that rents kept rising year upon year, but the ‘Housing Benefit’, which was supposed to act as a safety net, was not rising commensurate with the sky-rocketing rent.
20. The austerity measures such as Housing Benefit cut, which were implemented by the government with a view of stemming the devastating impact of the financial crisis, succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. There is a basket of data from several organisations such as The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and The RSA, which show that home ownership fell from 72% in 1994/5 to 61% by say, the close of 2017; and if this statistic is to be believed, it suggests that almost half of the people in the poorest families, some 3.2 million people, spend more than 1/3 of their income on paying the rent or mortgage.
Homelessness – a case study
21. However, statistical data without a real life case study are nothing but a mere sweeping survey. During my rough sleeping days, I met a middle aged design-engineer, formerly an employee at a leading car manufacturer in the midlands, England. He had lost his job at the height of the financial crisis. He was an only child, and it had fallen to him to care for his aging mother, who subsequently died from an aggressive hematologic cancer. His mother, formerly a junior civil servant, had taken early retirement in her mid-fifties two decades earlier, to run a traditional English tea house in the village in Buckinghamshire, selling cream tea and scones to passing tourists. It was supposed to be her retirement plan, which she financed after she had remortgaged the family home under an equity release scheme without telling anyone. The first her son knew about it was when he visited the family solicitor to deal with probate, after she had died. He was shocked to discover his dead mother had left him with a mountain of financial woes; the long and the short of the story is that, he subsequently lost the family home and thus became homeless. Much of his income had gone towards beautifying the family home, it had been once a council house, and his dead mother had been one of the very first beneficiaries of Margaret Thatcher’s controversial ‘Right to Buy’ policy.
Impact of officialism
22. Keeping to the track of how the stupidity of English officialism has unwittingly played into Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the housing crisis has started an unseemly new kind of debate, the like of which has not been seen before in England. It is pitting young against old, indigenous Britons against naturalised Britons; many Britons are dividing along the lines of the once discredited social class system, race, gender, and along regions. Inequality is now a hot subject in England, and it was against this background that I came across an interesting article by Stephen Moss, a feature writer at The Guardian, ‘Older people have pulled up the ladder’: inside England’s oldest and youngest towns. The following excerpts caught my eye:
‘Baby boomers have built an empire and empires need protecting,” says Reuben Young, a millennial who runs the pressure group PricedOut. “When younger people say, ‘We want our own house, we want to build more’, baby boomers see their empire as being under threat. God forbid that house prices fall and housing becomes cheaper for young people!”
Young is speaking at the Battle Of Ideas at the Barbican, close to the City of London, in October. Part of a panel addressing the question “Have Wrinklies Cheated Millennials?”, he offers some compelling arguments that they have: “Millennials will pay, over the course of their 20s, nearly £50,000 more in rent than baby boomers did at the same age. Millennials won’t have as big a pension as baby boomers, they’ll be paying more in taxes to fund an ageing population, and they are often spending half of their take-home pay renting homes they can be evicted from with just two months’ notice. You would be mad not to admit there is systemic intergenerational inequality in this country.”
There are young families in Minehead, but they live primarily on two estates, made up mostly of social housing. Minehead exemplifies Sabater’s point that old and young tend to live separately: the old in bungalows on the edge of town and, for the more prosperous, big Edwardian houses up on North Hill; younger families with low disposable incomes live on the estates; younger single people, many of them working at Butlin’s, are in private rented accommodation in the centre.
Growing up in Minehead can be problematic, despite the allure of moorland and sea. The town’s secondary school has struggled in the past (De Mendoza sent his son away to board) and there are few jobs for school-leavers, other than at Butlin’s or in a supermarket. The young who do stay can get bored and restless, and there are problems with antisocial behaviour, underage drinking and recreational drug use.
A further problem is that the large number of retirees has driven up property prices, and younger people on low incomes find it hard to get on the housing ladder. “Prices are too high for youngsters,” one woman living in social housing with her 12-year-old daughter tells me. “I feel older people have pulled up the ladder behind them.”
Stevens, a retired commercial salesman, needs two sticks to walk, but that doesn’t inhibit his bowling – he zips across the green in a wheelchair. “As far as Brexit is concerned, I can understand that they might think we’ve pulled up the drawbridge,” he admits, “but there’s a lot more to it than that. We’re of an age that we all voted in the original referendum [in 1975], but what we have now in the EU is not what we signed up for. Lots of us feel we were conned into it.” He made what he considers a rational choice and tried to read everything on Brexit that he could, though he drew the line at the Treaty of Rome. Brexit dominates many of the conversations I have in west Somerset, which voted leave by 60% to 40%.
Growing inequality
23. My rough sleeping engineer acquaintance made an extraordinary observation; it rings true to this day. He observed that since 2003, many people in the bottom-fifth of society experienced a higher rate of inflation than the rest of country in every year. While I was not in the position to verify his remark, I nevertheless treated him as a reliable witness; for I knew him to be a well-read individual, as he always whiled the time away in the Milton Keynes public library reading The Financial Times. I used to tease him about it, suggesting that he was probably a secret millionaire on a hunt for an impoverished fellow on whom to lavish his great fortune.
24. But his reflection is more accurate than many would credit him, on account of the fact that he was a rough sleeper; for according to a report published by Equality Trust, the richest one hundred people in Britain have amassed wealth equal to 30% of the poorest households. 30% is the equivalent to 18, 900,000 people – a very large number indeed! The Equality Trust goes on to suggest that this astonishing reality is owing to the spiralling income inequality in the last 40 years, which has created a chasm between the rich and the rest of society.
A sense of betrayal
25. The consequences of the above findings are enormous. These ramifications manifest themselves in poor health in terms of obesity and mental health, including the rise of crime generally. The rough sleeping community, although very conspicuous as their continued physical presence on the streets is a constant assault to many a people’s senses, an eyesore if you like, and yet, they are comparatively small in number. A far greater challenge is the growing number of British citizens who feel disenfranchised as a result of growing inequality. These are the people for whom the much heralded promise of a better tomorrow, the cradle to the grave blueprint, which was contained in the Beveridge Report, has proved to be nothing more than hot air. There is a genuine sense of betrayal, to the extent that a visceral desire that someone must pay, has taken centre stage in the popular mind.
26. This sense of betrayal came alive to me when I stumbled upon a tragic case of Bob Curry, which was reported in the Daily Mail in January 2018. Bob Curry, a 64 year old, was an SAS veteran whose claim to fame was leading the Iranian Embassy siege. He had fallen on hard times and to cut the long story short, ended up sleeping rough on the streets after his local council failed to offer him a suitable home. For, apparently, he did not have all the necessary documentations and therefore did not meet the strict qualification test. Now I do not know the ins and outs of the story, but if ever there was a case that bespeaks to the stupidity of English officialism, this, clearly was it.
27. When I add the tragic story of Bob Curry (there are many former service people, mainly men, who end up on the streets; some of whom even commit suicide or die on the streets) to a set of short films, ‘Made in Stoke-on-Trent’, which I recently appraised, I at once understand why Enoch Powell may still be an evocative character in British political discourse today. The short films were published in The Guardian and focused on communities in Stoke-on-Trent dealing with poverty. It is worth remembering that Stoke-on-Trent voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, thus the city in the process earned itself the title of “Brexit Capital” of Britain. Both instances spoke collectively with William Barrett.
For more details, please visit: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/jan/08/made-in-stoke-on-trent-episode-1-we-have-lift-off
Enoch Powell persuasive, but not decisive!
28. In his book, “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy,” William Barrett prophetically wrote: “Man’s feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized [officialism], impersonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider even within his own human society [country]. He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus [read the cradle to the grave experiment as set out in the Beveridge Report] that supplies his material wants… But the worst and final form of alienation, towards which indeed the others tend, is man’s alienation from his own self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can – usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten.”
29. So, to conclude: English officialism is clearly a very broad subject, way beyond the scope of this blogpost. But the instances highlighted above, may have created an atmosphere in which the stupidity of English officialism played right into Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech and to devastating effect. That effect was the galvanisation of many Britons for whom the five evils are their daily meat and drink. The five evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness have clearly not gone away 75 years since the Beveridge Report. Rather, they appear to have come back with vengeance following the decline of mainly manufacturing industries and the crumbling welfare. The situation was aggravated by austerity following the major financial crisis of 2008, which made inequality all the more visible. The combined net result of all these forces has been the emergence of an atomised society, in which the ‘left behind’ and the ‘lonely’ are probably in the majority. They feel politically abandoned and voiceless. It is to these that Enoch Powell’s speech still has a measure of force all these years after the event, and may have resonated with many in the face of growing disenchantment. Immigrants long seen as the undeserved leeches, a security menace, and an existential threat to an Island race; they accordingly became a convenient ‘pack horse’ when it came to carrying the justification for leaving the European Union during the Brexit referendum in 2016.