The public have accepted that Britain is not just populated by white people – and have stopped imagining that it could ever be otherwise
In 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered probably the most inflammatory address ever given by a senior British politician. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding,” he declared. “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” The bloodletting, he anticipated, would be taking place because of a race war. Seeing migrants arrive from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia was, Powell said, “like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. Britain in the half century since has repudiated Powell’s racist prophecy. Non-white immigrants and their children are not an existential threat to this country, but rather the source of some its most celebrated achievements.
Birmingham, the city in which Powell gave his “rivers of blood” speech, has quietly become among the country’s most diverse places. Along with London, Leicester, Manchester and Luton, it is part of an urban England that is fast becoming more black and brown than white. About four in 10 people in Milton Keynes, Nottingham and Peterborough are non-white. The figure, according to the 2021 census published on Tuesday, is roughly one in four in Bristol and Leeds. Despite the best efforts of politicians like Powell and his ilk to turn people against each other on the basis of race and ethnicity, a more multiracial, multicultural country has become a feature of modern life. It is progress that the public have overwhelmingly accepted that Britain is not just populated by white people – and have stopped imagining that it could ever be otherwise.
