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National Review, a leading conservative journal, denounces Donald Trump
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LONDON
— Until recently, Donald J. Trump was best known in Britain for “The
Apprentice” television series, the Miss Universe contest and a
controversial golf course
development in Scotland. And most Britons would probably have viewed
his decision to enter the presidential race with no more than mild envy:
Why can’t British elections be as much fun as American ones?
Thanks,
however, to his incendiary comments about immigrants and Muslims, Mr.
Trump has moved from being a buffoonish figure on the margins of British
consciousness to the center of political debate. After Mr. Trump said
that he, if president, would stop Muslims entering the United States,
more than half a million people signed a parliamentary petition, thus requiring a debate in Parliament on whether to bar him
entry to Britain. (The debate, which was held this past week in a
committee, generated plenty of indignation but had no issue because the
power to refuse Mr. Trump admittance is held not by Parliament but by
the home secretary.)
Mr.
Trump also drew condemnation from leading British politicians,
newspapers, the Metropolitan Police and the mayor of London. Even the
leader of the UK Independence Party, which campaigns on a strong
anti-immigration platform, said Mr. Trump had “gone too far.”
When
Mr. Trump speaks of barring Muslims from entering the United States, I
hear an echo of a British politician from another age, one who is
largely forgotten here but whose views on race and immigration were as
polarizing in their time as Mr. Trump’s are now. Enoch Powell was a
politician whose career spanned most of the postwar period, first as a
Conservative and later as an Ulster Unionist. He had grave reservations
about mass immigration and frequently spoke in apocalyptic language
about its consequences.
Mr.
Powell was hardly an obvious demagogue. The Labour politician Denis
Healey once compared him to the Athenian statesman Demosthenes. He was a
classical scholar and gifted linguist, and his speeches were renowned
for their erudition. Examples from Roman history are not part of Mr.
Trump’s rhetorical repertoire.
In
1960, Mr. Powell was appointed minister of health in the Conservative
government. In this post, he encouraged many immigrants from the
Commonwealth to come to work in the understaffed National Health Service
— which adds a layer of irony to the fact that his most enduring fame,
or infamy, is for an epoch-defining speech he gave against immigration.
By
1968, he had become the opposition’s chief spokesman on defense — if
largely by virtue of the fact that, as a talented maverick, he was
regarded by the Conservatives’ new leader, Edward Heath, as too
dangerous to leave out. Speaking in Birmingham, England’s second largest
city and one already changed by extensive immigration, Mr. Powell argued that “we must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents.”
This
policy, he warned, “is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping
up its own funeral pyre.” In the most often quoted line — an allusion
to the poet Virgil — Mr. Powell said, “as I look ahead, I am filled with
foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with
much blood.’ ”
The
Times of London called it “an evil speech,” and the first direct appeal
to “racial hatred” made by a senior British politician. Mr. Powell was
summarily dismissed from his post by Mr. Heath.
Yet
his lurid warning about the dangers of mass immigration found a ready
audience. He received tens of thousands of letters of support for what
became known as the “rivers of blood” speech. Three days later, as a
Labour government bill against racial discrimination was debated in
Parliament, 1,000 dock workers marched from London’s East End to protest
the “victimization” of Mr. Powell.
There
are parallels between the way Mr. Powell gave voice to white
working-class anxiety and Mr. Trump’s primary campaigning. And like Mr.
Trump, Mr. Powell discovered a ready audience: A Gallup poll a few weeks
later found that 74 percent of those surveyed agreed with what Mr.
Powell had said. For immigrants like my father, who arrived in Britain
from Pakistan in the early 1960s, it wasn’t Mr. Powell’s words that were
frightening so much as that so many seemed to agree with them.
My
father settled in Luton, an industrial town about 30 miles north of
London that had a significant immigrant population. He worked on the
assembly line at the Vauxhall car factory, the largest employer in the
area. By the time my mother and siblings joined my father, in 1974, Mr.
Powell was already a marginal figure in national politics. But his
race-based views had been taken up by far-right groups like the National
Front.
The
National Front’s thuggish supporters were a visible, violent presence
on the streets during my childhood. Mr. Powell’s speech also lent its
anti-immigrant message a veneer of mainstream acceptability. The party’s
program was crude — a ban on nonwhite immigration and repatriation for
nonwhites — but, for a time, worryingly effective: In the 1979 general
election, the National Front had more than 300 parliamentary candidates
and won nearly 200,000 votes.
Growing
up in the shadow of the “N.F.” and knowing that there were hundreds of
thousands of Britons who wished to deport people like me induced both a
profound anxiety and a deep conviction that I would never be fully
accepted as British.
In
recent years, the target of nativist anxiety about otherness in Britain
has shifted from black to Muslim. From my background in Luton, I always
looked to the United States as a place where almost everyone was
“other,” from somewhere else; I imagined it as a nation that offered a
welcome to all, regardless of color or creed.
That
faith has been sorely tested by Mr. Trump. Like Mr. Powell, he
demonstrates the appeal of a charismatic leader who presents himself as a
principled truth-teller, the only man brave enough to break with the
establishment consensus on immigration. As Mr. Powell did, Mr. Trump
connects with voters — especially among the economically insecure white
working class — who feel they’re being lied to by the political elite.
The
difference between them is that the “rivers of blood” speech
effectively ended Mr. Powell’s political career (he never again held
high office, though he remained a member of Parliament until 1987),
whereas Mr. Trump has been rewarded so far for his harsh words. Mr.
Trump has drawn some criticism from other Republicans, but he is
certainly not the pariah that Mr. Powell became.
Mr.
Trump, like Mr. Powell before him, speaks for those convulsed by fear.
In his 1968 speech, Mr. Powell quoted a constituent who dreaded a future
when “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” That
paranoia — an ugly delusion that inverts the actual history of slavery —
was unfounded. Yet what is striking today is that though Mr. Powell was
cast into the wilderness for his views, arguably his warning about the
challenges to social cohesion from immigration was prescient.
Thankfully,
the rivers of blood he foresaw never flowed. But nearly five decades
later, Britain’s long experience of race riots and domestic terrorist
attacks suggests that the countervailing doctrine of multiculturalism
has not made for a land of milk and honey either.
The
growth of a radical Islamic identity among some young Muslims has led
to legitimate fears about the possible failure of British society to
fully integrate its immigrants. Here, the populist UK Independence Party
has inherited the mantle of Powellism. And in the United States,
particularly in the wake of December’s San Bernardino shootings, the
target of fear and loathing has also been Muslims.
The experience of Rose Hamid,
who was ejected from a Trump rally while silently protesting by wearing
a T-shirt that read “Salam I come in peace,’ ” demonstrated the
violence of such emotions. Mr. Trump is exquisitely attuned to popular
anxieties and highly talented at exploiting them.
Mr.
Trump has not even won his party’s nomination, yet his agenda already
seems to have influence. There have been several reports of British
Muslims being denied the right to fly to the United States, seemingly
only because of their religion. As someone who has long cherished the
idea of America, I am distressed to see how quickly fear can travel and
mutate from hot words to dangerous deeds.
The
success of Mr. Trump’s campaign is very disturbing, but the retaliatory
effort to bar him from Britain is a move that seems as petty — and
constitutionally suspect — as anything advocated by the mogul himself.
Even if nearly 600,000 people signed the parliamentary petition to keep
Mr. Trump out, a recent survey here also found that 29 percent of
respondents would favor a similar ban
on Muslims entering Britain. So rather than a futile petition, it would
be wiser to play the ball rather than the man: to dispute the actual
issues rather than dismiss him as primitive and dumb.
In
Britain, Powellism was eventually defeated as a political movement in
part because politicians across the divide united against his views, in
part because his dire predictions proved exaggerated and, not least,
because people of good will mobilized to stop groups like the National
Front from intimidating immigrant neighborhoods and winning elections.
But Mr. Powell’s legacy was long and bitter — a lesson for both Britain
and America that the price of not confronting the fears that fuel this
antipathy could be severe: Whether or not Donald Trump wins his
immediate political battle, he may, like Enoch Powell, win the war of
ideas.
Sarfraz Manzoor is the author of the memoir “Greetings From Bury Park.”
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