Page 289 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 279
Ure’s words, ‘an earthquake’: London meat-porters and dockers—hardly
traditional supporters of Conservative politicians—marched in his support;
thousands of other workers laid down their tools; and Powell received 110,000
letters (containing something like 180,000 signatures) all but 2000 of which
expressed approval for what he said. The speech and its immediate consequences
dominated the headlines for a full eight days.
Although many of the newspapers condemned what Powell had said in their
editorials, and most condemned the way in which he had said it, this was
outweighed by the sheer intensity and duration of coverage, an intensity which
signified that what could now be taken for granted in public debate over race and
immigration had changed. As a report in The Times observed:

Over the past six days Mr. Powell has stirred the national emotions more
than any other single politician since the war. Not even Aneurin Bevan at his
most acerbic so inflamed opinion—and so cut across traditional political
loyalties. (quoted in Seymour-Ure, 1974, note 16)

Powell has remarked that as a politician he regrets only what he has refrained
from saying rather than anything he has actually said; and that as a politician
what he says should aim ‘to provide people with words and ideas which will fit
their predicament better than the words and ideas which they are using at the
moment’. In his Birmingham speech (and in later speeches on the same subject)
Powell was concerned to give voice to a public opinion which had been unable to
find public expression although he knew it to exist.
Powell would claim that he did not seek to change public opinion but only to
give voice to the feeling—albeit an unfocused feeling—which already existed.
The change that Powell did seek was in the attitude of those in control of the
media—‘the best people’—so that instead of suppressing stories about the
discontent and hostility which resulted from black immigration and settlement,
the media should illuminate ‘the greatest problem overhanging the future of
Britain’. It may be objected that this is disingenuous in that whatever the
discontent surrounding race and immigration, the moment a politician of Enoch
Powell’s prominence draws attention to it, it is amplified and so a problem of a
different magnitude is created. But whatever validity this objection has should
not distract us from drawing the correct lesson from the coverage of the speech,
and from the impact of that coverage on future coverage of race and immigration:
namely, that the speech could only have created an ‘earthquake’ in a climate
where anxiety and discontent about race and immigration were both widespread
and deep, and where this anxiety and discontent had been accorded insufficient
attention in the mass media.
The effect of Powell’s speech was to convince those media controllers who
required convincing that any special responsibility to avoid worsening or
inflaming a delicate situation, which had often led them in the past to suspend or
downgrade normal news values, was now clearly outweighed by the need to keep