A half-hour BBC Radio 4 documentary was aired this evening with the title, “The Woman Who Never Was?”.  The article about it on the BBC’s website sets the scene:

Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech at a Conservative Party meeting in Birmingham in 1968 marked both the end of his chances of holding ministerial office and the birth of an enduring mystery.

In that speech he quoted a letter which referred to the plight of an unnamed woman pensioner in his Wolverhampton constituency whose life had, he claimed, been ruined by immigration.

This, according to Powell, was her story: “She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over.”

“She is becoming afraid to go out, windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes out to the shops she is followed by children, charming wide-grinning piccaninnies.”

‘Media circus’

The next day, Tory leader Edward Heath sacked Powell from his shadow cabinet as the debate over his speech and arguments over immigration reached boiling point.

The country demanded to know who this woman was but Powell repeatedly refused to say.

For the rest of the story listen here (realmedia file, 30 mins).  The search for Powell’s mystery constituent isn’t entirely conclusive.  But it doesn’t really matter in the context of the truths in this programme that are buried not very far beneath the surface ... the talk of white flight, of black disorder and the gradually unfolding, stone-cold certainty that Enoch, as they say, was only too damned right.

He was also plainly a fine and upright man.  I am puzzled by this emerging honesty from the BBC, and haven’t quite decided what to make of it.  OK, the area where the woman lived is leafy and pleasantly suburban today.  Perhaps the programme-makers supposed that leafyness and pleasant suburbia is the mellow, tolerating face of modern multiracialism, and there is no need anymore to hammer the old lessons home.  Perhaps they just don’t understand that reporting Powell’s probity links in a flash in the English mind to all that welter of care and frustration that will never dissipate, and will survive all official suppression.

So what next?  Nick Griffin is a moderate after all?  (Well, yes, actually he is!)