Last week, BBC Radio 4 came under criticism for broadcasting Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in full. Indeed, Dr Shirin Hirsch, one of the academics interviewed for comment on the speech, demanded that her contributions be removed on account of the fact that she was “disgusted by the way the BBC are promoting this.” Some critics, such as LBC pundit James O’ Brien, were particularly appalled that the speech was broadcast by the public service broadcaster, equating the BBC’s decision with providing a platform to right wing extremists.

However, having listened to the speech in full, I firmly believe that the BBC made the right decision, not least because, going forward, the BBC’s relevance and legitimacy depend upon its continued insistence on commissioning controversial content. The BBC and the programme’s presenter Amol Rajan (himself an immigrant from Kolkata) made sure to contextualise the speech so as to make clear that the program could only be construed as an endorsement of Powell’s views by someone who hadn’t listened. In truth, I only wish the BBC were a little more circumspect in the program’s promotion (the BBC did not make it clear that the actor Ian McDiarmid’s performance of the speech would be broken up with analysis from a range of commentators) and a little less tentative in its execution.

“Given that Powell’s speech introduced imagery which informs our politics today, there is no better time for the BBC to be broadcasting such a speech”

To be clear, my defence of the BBC is not derived from sympathy for Powell’s intolerance. I am the son of a commonwealth immigrant and I have demonstrably benefited from the race relations legislation to which Powell was so vehemently opposed. It’s just that in a week in which the children of the Windrush generation have been threatened with deportation despite living in Britain for over 45 years, we should not pretend that politicians sympathetic to Powell’s ideology do not occupy some very powerful positions. While active proponents of right wing extremism might be quiet for now, this does not mean that there aren’t some very extreme, and very right-wing, actions being taken by this government.

Regardless of what one thinks of Brexit, it would be churlish to deny the role that the immigration debate continues to play in the ongoing Brexit negotiations. Given that Powell’s speech introduced imagery which informs our politics today, there is no better time for the BBC to be broadcasting such a speech. As Peter Hain, a former Labour cabinet minister and anti-apartheid campaigner, said last week: “he [Powell] used this phrase ‘we’re becoming strangers in our own country’...it was that kind of sentiment coming off the doorstep [during the EU referendum].”

Therefore, it is a shame that, for younger Britons, Powell is almost an irrelevance. According to polling commissioned by British Future, less than a fifth of under-34s (18%) can pick Powell’s name from a list when asked who is associated with the phrase “rivers of blood”, compared with 82% of those aged over 65. British liberals should be clamouring for Powell and his legacy to be under the spotlight once more for the speech represents the dirty laundry of those who unironically argue that “political correctness has gone mad”. We should air it just as the BBC aired Powell’s immortal phrase “in this country, in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

Returning to the present, last week (and the last fours years since the passage of the 2014 Immigration Act) saw the Windrush generation fail so spectacularly that the government have actually apologised for mishandling the situation. On Monday, i News reported that the government’s startling insensitivity stretched to the production and distribution of a memo telling those being deported or removed from the UK to Jamaica to put on a local accent to avoid attracting “unwanted attention”. Given that the government has long had the ability to grant indefinite leave to remain to those whose presence in the country may be technically questionable but socially desirable, the government’s persistence can only be put down to cruelty or incompetence. Either way, Alastair Campbell is correct to note that the government’s inability to properly document these persons does not augur well for the millions of changes to immigration status that will be engendered by Brexit.

Another of Powell’s contemporaries, Harold Wilson, once said that “a week is a long time in politics,” and this past week has demonstrated three crucial things. First is that we still live with the legacy of Enoch Powell, a politician who was ostracised in his lifetime but who has had a greater impact upon British Politics than the establishment figures who shunned him. Following the speech, in which Powell expressed support for the repatriation of immigrants, denunciations appeared in newspaper editorials attacking his “appeal to racial hatred” and Edward Heath put paid to Powell’s political ambitions by casting him out of the shadow cabinet.

Second, Brexit has done very little to sideline immigration as a political issue. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, explains that “until two years ago I felt positive that the legacy of Enoch Powell’s poisonous and pessimistic rhetoric had been buried. Now I am not so sure. The ‘immigration panic’ – albeit mainly directed at white east Europeans – and Brexit have now brought some dangerous xenophobia back to the surface.” Unfortunately, it is not just Eastern Europeans who find themselves on the receiving end of naked prejudice. Attacks against Jews are up and as the horrifyingly named “punish a Muslim day” campaign makes clear, Islamophobia remains rife in Britain. Of course, no government official would condone this trend but it is our elected politicians who legitimise this climate of xenophobia.

Third, even if the targets of prejudice have changed (Farage himself promises more Indian doctors and less Romanian criminals) racism remains an active force, not just in British society but at the highest echelons of British politics. For fifty years now the River Thames, like the River Tiber, has “foamed with much blood,” but it is not too late for senior politicians to start draining the venom out of our discourse. Guaranteeing the rights of forty-seven thousand members of the “Windrush Generation” is a good start. Guaranteeing the rights of three million EU citizens would indicate that there is a real “wind of change” blowing through British politics.