15-05-2025
Enoch Powell's shadow is troubling Labour
There's an old quote that gets an airing whenever Labour leaders talk tough on immigration. This week it has been the ugly wallpaper of social media: 'What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after.'
Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the campaigning director of the Institute of Race Relations, said that in the early 1970s. Coverage of Sir Keir Starmer's speech on immigration this week suggested that there could be nothing so violently against the grain of British politics as a Labour government that seeks to harden borders rather than throw them open. Try telling that to Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan and Ed Miliband's stonemason.
In that respect Sivanandan was right. The border policies of every
