"I believe there are certain things that are not at issue at all. ... And that is his character": Why we are still living in 1991, Part II.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece showing how the world of 1991 was still very much with us today. And if you ignore the bit where I confidently predicted a second Clinton would sit in the Oval Office, the comparisons between 1991 and the late 2010s hold up reasonably well.

This week, the US political scene has witnessed the spectacle of a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court being accused of sexual misconduct, the brave testimony of his accuser, and a combative response of the potential justice.. The parallels to 1991 apparently aren't done yet. 

In the summer of that year, the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, was retiring. In his place, George HW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, another African American, who had been an official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as a federal judge. Yet Thomas provoked panic and fear amongst those on the left. He was a strident conservative, and many liberals promised they would fight his nomination in the last ditch. The battle lines were drawn for his confirmation hearings.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee were not to be treated lightly. It was only four years since the same committee, headed by the same senator, a Joe Biden of Delaware, had sunk the nomination of Robert Bork. Bork had been chosen by Reagan for his impeccable conservative credentials. Yet during his hearings Bork floundered, as his conservative views came under attack for being too extreme, as did his role in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Bork had been the highest ranking Justice Department official to survive Richard Nixon's cull, the one who had fired the Watergate special prosecutor for Nixon. Bork was rejected by the committee, and later voted down by the full senate.

Despite the concerns over Thomas' views, and the power of the hearings, during the autumn of 1991 his nomination wound its way through the hearings. Towards the end of the process, a bomb was detonated under this orderly process. The media leaked that the FBI background checks on Thomas had thrown up reports that Thomas had made unwanted, sexually inappropriate remarks to a colleague, Anita Hill. Hill, now a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, was called before the committee to give evidence. What evidence she gave. The US public were treated to comments about the size of Thomas' penis, comments about pubic hair, about how long Thomas could last in bed, about Thomas' favourite porn stars.

But Thomas wasn't going down without a fight. In his own testimony, he denied everything, and claimed he was the subject of a "lynching." As a black man, the language was emotional, and designed to hit home.

It did the trick, but barely. The Judiciary Committee sent Thomas' name to the full Senate without a recommendation to accept or reject, a very rare move. Thomas was confirmed by the full Senate with 52 votes to 48, and not along party lines either. Some Democrats supported Thomas, while some Republicans tried to stop him taking office. But take office he did.

It is easy to see the parallels between the two events. In both 1991 and 2018, an extremely conservative choice to sit on the US Supreme Court fired up opposition to his confirmation. Liberal activists and interest groups draw a line in the sand. As the hearings come to a close, allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. They culminate in a dramatic showdown before the Senate, with accuser and defender both fighting for their lives and pouring out their souls.

However, there are two major differences between the hearings of 1991, and the hearings of 2018. Firstly, in 1991, Hill was questioned by the full committee. The optics, and the message they sent, were awful. An all male, all white, mainly elderly, committee, fired questions at the young black woman in front of them, some of them questions of an extremely explicit nature. The outrage at how Hill was treated bled into the 1992 general election. Bush was not re-elected, and a record number of women were swept into office. The Republican party have clearly taken this message on board. The mixed gender, mixed racial Democratic team on the 2018 Judiciary Committee posed their own questions to Brett Kavanaugh's accuser. The all male, all white Republicans of 2018 picked a female prosecutor to field their questions. They do not want to pour oil on the flames of an already difficult election year.

Secondly, in 1991, Anita Hill's lone voice was not enough to stop Clarence Thomas making it onto the Supreme Court. Thomas narrowly survived the process, and remains on the Court to this day, as the longest serving current justice. One reason the Bush White House stuck with Thomas was that opinion polls showed the vast majority of people believed his denials over Anita Hill's claims of sexual harrassment. In 2018, although the process has not yet reached its endgame, Kavanaugh's chances of ending up a Justice of the Supreme Court look less good than Thomas' did at this stage. Because millions of people believe Dr Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser.

I believe her. And you should too. We owe it to the people of 2018 to show that we are not really still living in 1991.

(To help me write this, I drew on this excellent article from the New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/us/politics/anita-hill-kavanaugh-hearings.html

What struck me was how some of the senators who questioned Hill in 1991 are *still* in the same roles, and have apparently learnt nothing...)

"Financial Armageddon"

What would financial Armageddon look like?

It probably says a lot that I can clearly remember this article, a full decade on, down to being able to remember the title, and some of the lines. It really did look like Armageddon at the time. In the autumn of 2008, the Western capitalist model of the world was staring into the abyss, and no one could be quite sure we wouldn't go crashing down into it.

I couldn't explain what caused it. I'm not sure, even now, anyone could explain for certain the causes, without either being very biased, or so technical no one understood them. But, with a handful of exceptions, most people did not know what was coming. Until the end of 2008, there had been gathering storm clouds, but most of it was hidden from full view. In late 2007, there'd been a run on Northern Rock, and the government had been forced to nationalise it. In the United States, there were serious concerns over the state of the mortgage market. But for most people, these were concerns in a far away land, that of economics, that none of them really understood.

Until on September 15th, 2008, the US investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It wasn't a bank in the sense most people understood. They had no branches, no current accounts of individuals. Instead, they dealt with the money of companies, taking it and investing it in other things, to look for a return. During the 1990s and 2000s, many banks had done this more and more. The lines between 'high street' banks and 'investment' banks was increasingly blurred. More worryingly, no one really knew where all this money, and associated debt, actually was. When Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest and most venerable names in world finance, applied for bankruptcy protection, this sent shockwaves around the system. Someone had owned up to how bad this situation was. The image of bankers, the new frontier of the 21st century economy, emptying their offices in cardboard boxes, showed how the mighty had fallen.

What made it worse was the Bush administration. Saddled as we are now with Trump, it is hard to think back on how awful Bush was. In the dying days of his presidency, Bush had found himself having to hand out money to mortgage lenders and banks. In September 2008, he decided enough was enough. His administration wouldn't get Lehman Brothers out of the hole they had fallen in to. They would be allowed to collapse.

Big mistake. This turned alarm into a full blown panic. Around the world, banks stopped lending money, as they were afraid of getting themselves into more and more debt. People and companies who had put their money into these labyrinthine schemes began to withdraw it, afraid it would all be lost. With the money supply freezing up, ordinary businesses found themselves out of money too.

In an intertwined global financial economy, the contagion and chaos in the USA spread around the world like wildfire. In the UK, the banks of the City of London found themselves buffeted by the same storms. But the UK's banks were slightly different. The same banks dabbling in international investment schemes were those that people held their money in. If they went down, all hell would break loose. Alistair Darling, the then Chancellor, has since said he was afraid of a breakdown of law and order if the most exposed bank, RBS (containing Natwest and Ulster Bank), closed.

The Bush administration realised it had made a grave error. In the parlance of the time, they had tried to show that no one was 'too big to fail.' And they'd turned a problem into a crisis. As September faded into October, the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, devised a plan to put up $700 billion, to 'hoover up' the debt that no one really knew who owned it. The US House of Representatives voted the plan down, wiping billions off of the world stock markets. Days later, they accepted a modified version of Paulson's plan. But the world money markets failed to respond. The money supply was still jammed.

Enter the unlikely hero of the hour. 

Since then, Gordon Brown has got a lot of bad press. He was not a telegenic politician, and inspired loathing and contempt in many. But he had the best economic brain in the land, and this was his hour. Between Brown and Darling, they unveiled a plan which did two things. Like in the USA, it would take the worthless debt out of the banks' hands. But it would also see the UK government take shares in banks in danger of collapse. In effect, those banks would be backed by the full weight of the UK economy. This worked. The pressure on them eased. In the USA, Paulson used his new powers to copy Brown's plan. As 2008 turned into 2009, the immediate crisis passed. In late 2008, Gordon Brown slipped up at Prime Minister's Questions. He meant to say the government had saved the banks; he accidentally said saved the world. The Tories opposite mocked him mercilessly. But he was right.

All of us have lived with the consequences since. In the short term, the lack of money available for companies and businesses led to a deep, painful recession, the worst in living memory. The £500 billion that Brown and Darling poured into the UK financial markets left the government in massive debt. When Labour went down to electoral defeat in 2010, the new Coalition government made it a priority to pay those debts back, which it did by sharply cutting spending on other government services. In the UK, this double whammy of deep recession and government cutbacks has led to what many have termed a 'lost decade.' My generation, those of us who came into the workforce during this lost decade, will live with the impact of the autumn of 2008 forever, as it forecast we will never catch up with our parents, or those below us, in terms of lost earnings.

But it is the psychological impact that has lingered most. At the time, there was outrage that the greed of investment bankers had taken us to edge of the precipice, peered over, and nearly taken the entire Western world with them. 'Banker bashing' became an accepted part of life, and it became toxic to say that you worked in the City of London, or on Wall Street. But those responsible were not held to account, save in some minor and token ways. The decade of low growth and austerity that followed wouldn't have been solved by jailing some City of London executives. But the notion did take hold that those at the top had wreaked havoc, and had been allowed to get away with it. It was believed that the notion, of those in far away places living it up at the expense of those struggling to get by, would benefit political parties of the left. Instead, it is the populist right that has seized the narrative and run with it. It is just possible, in the images of tumbling market and bankers losing their jobs, to see the shadows of Donald Trump, Brexit, and any number of backlash screams, coming to being in the background.

What I can clearly remember was how it felt. I was 18, in the last few weeks before I headed off to university, and the entire world seemed to be falling in. I followed the story avidly. It was my first introduction to economics, American politics, and the first clear difference in UK politics I was aware of. It was also the first truly global historic event that I had ever lived through. It shaped my outlook on how the world should, and could, be run. I will always remain a child of 2008.

Prague in the Spring Time

For many Czechoslovaks, it was the noise that alerted them. As day broke on August 21st 1968, they were woken by loud, rumbling noises in the streets. At first, many assumed they were hearing a large vehicle go past. But then it continued. Those brave enough to peer outside soon found out the truth. The country's worst nightmare had come true. The Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia.

The 1960s was the height of the Cold War. That meant that the countries in Eastern Europe languished under Soviet domination, and had done since they were overrun by the Red Army in the dying days of the Second World War. The Yalta and Potsdam agreements, signed between the victorious Allies, had committed the USSR to holding free and fair elections in the countries it had invaded. But no country led by Joseph Stalin was going to allow that. The regimes in these countries imposed one-party communist rule, and were to all intents and purposes Soviet puppet regimes. Dissent was ruthlessly crushed, with the full apparatus of secret police and stifling authoritarianism imported directly from the Soviet Union.

Only two countries had dared to break the mould. In the late 1940s, the leader of Yugoslavia, Tito, made it clear that he was willing to accept American money to rebuild his country. This lead to Yugoslavia leaving the Soviet sphere of influence, and forging its own middle way between the East and the West. In reality, the communist world probably wasn't big enough for the dominant personalities of Tito and Stalin. In Hungary in 1956, a new leader, Nagy, attempted to dismantle the communist system, and take Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact. This brief flowering of freedom had been swiftly crushed by Soviet forces, and Nagy was brought to Moscow as a prisoner and executed. Since then, political and cultural freedom behind the Iron Curtain was vastly curtailed.

But then along came Czechoslovakia in 1968. In January of that year, Alexander Dubcek became leader of the country, and introduced a package of mild reforms. The idea was to allow a measure of democratisation, free speech, and cultural expression, whilst simultaneously allowing the Czechoslovak communist party to hold on to power. Dubcek called these reforms 'socialism with a human face.' The cultural output, and the noisy free press, that emerged from under the shadow of repression was known as the Prague Spring.

The leadership of the USSR was not amused. Despite Dubcek's assurances of his commitment to communism and the Warsaw Pact, they saw this as the first chink in the armour of the Eastern Bloc. Having failed to dissuade Dubcek, at midnight on 21st August 1968 armies from the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed the Dubcek government. Despite Dubcek's call for no resistance, there were widespread protests against the Soviet invasion, and thousands confronted the Soviet forces on the streets. This so spooked the Soviets that they refrained from formally removing Dubcek until the following year. Protests continued, and in January 1969 Czech student Jan Palach burned himself to death in Wenceslas Square in Prague. Thousands attended his funeral.

Yet the damage was done, and there was no going back. Dubcek was removed, a new leader installed, the secret police resumed their activities, protests ebbed, and authoritarianism once again returned to Czechoslovakia.

This was a severe test for the Western alliance. The Truman Doctrine had committed the USA to supporting any people or government attempting to throw off communism. In 1956, the Suez Crisis had prevented a unified, credible response to the invasion of Hungary. Surely, this was the West's time?

But it failed. It was only six years since the world had teetered on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and there was no appetite for another showdown with the USSR. Even had it wanted to, the USA was in no position to respond. It was already bogged down in an anti-communist war in Vietnam, and the full scale of the quagmire was becoming apparent, with public support for the war in free fall, and massive protests starting to be seen. The US was also in the middle of a political crisis; the 1968 election was threatening to tear the country apart. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had died at the hands of assassins' bullets, the President had been forced to abandon his re-election bid, the Democratic Party was engulfed in a civil war, race riots were rocking the largest cities, and the spectre of racist George Wallace and the hardliner Richard Nixon hung over the electorate. With the leader of the Atlantic Alliance consumed by crisis, the rest of the West hung back. The Czechoslovaks were on their own.

The long term consequences of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were huge. It created the Brezhnev Doctrine, whereby the USSR said that any attempt to leave the Eastern Bloc would be met with force by the Warsaw Pact. Across the Eastern bloc, many communists who agreed with Dubcek and wanted reform, and those who wished to see communism done away with entirely, were cowed into silence by fear that the USSR would come crashing down on them. For now, it looked as if the Soviet Union's hegemony over Easter Europe was complete.

But the crushing of the Prague Spring also showed that armed force was all that would keep the communist regimes in place. There hadn't been many Czechoslovaks committed to stopping Dubcek. The idea that communism was a force for human good and progress was shattered. The invasion also drove many left wingers in the West away from support for the communist regimes. Since the 1920s, there had been many Western communists who had either pretended that the hard edge of the Soviet system was capitalist propaganda, or acknowledged its repression by saying that a few eggs would needed to be broken in the making of the omelette of the worker's paradise. But now the USSR was clearly shown as the authoritarian dictatorship the Soviet people already knew it to be. In both East and West, support for communism began to slide.

Lastly, but perhaps most significantly, an entire generation of Czechoslovak activists was inspired by the brief period of freedom they had enjoyed. They hoped that, one day, they could reprise their moment in the sun. They were the ones who would, two decades later, take the lead in tearing down the communist regime in the Velvet Revolution.

Czechoslovak citizens confronting the Soviet soldiers in Prague

(For more photos showing the Soviet invasion, only published this week, follow this link.)

Slaying the Giant: 70 Years of the NHS

It shall be the duty of the Minister of Health... to promote the establishment in England and Wales of a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvements in the physical and mental health of the people of England and Wales and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness...

The services so provided shall be free of charge

So reads the first two clauses of the National Health Service Act of 1946. 18 months after being given Royal Assent, the law came into force. On the 5th July 1948, the British National Health Service was born.

How great a leap of progress this was can be seen from the uptake of the new service. People presented themselves at hospitals, doctors, dentists, and opticians, many for the first time in their lives. Doctors were shocked at what they saw, appalled at the ill health of the nation. Many people had endured decades of chronic pain, living with conditions not expected to be seen in a modern democracy. Before 1948, disease and pain had been balanced by the shadow of the cost of seeking treatment. The ragtag of insurance schemes, benevolent funds, and company insurance schemes didn't even begin to cover everyone. For millions, they suffered in silence and in the shadows. But now, with the fear of not being able to afford it gone, things were different. The NHS had sent those old fears packing, forever.

It is often said to be Labour's greatest achievement. From the ashes of a difficult war and cripplingly expensive victory, Clement Attlee and his government had taken a huge step towards slaying Disease, one of the Five Giants laid out in the Beveridge Report of 1942. It was to be a pillar of the New Jerusalem they were building.

In reality, it was more complicated than that. Nye Bevan, the strident left-winger appointed as Minister of Health, cut deal after deal with deeply sceptical, conservative, medical practitioners to get the new NHS off the ground. "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he is reputed to have boasted afterwards about the consultants. And the entirely free nature of the service didn't last long. Charges were brought in the early 1950s, to pay for Britain's involvement in the Korean War. Although they were abolished in 1965, they returned after devaluation in 1968, never to be rid of again. And since the day the NHS launched, there have been arguments over the cost, waste, management, organisation, and level of private involvement. And the rumours that it is to be abolished have always swirled, never far from the surface.

Yet despite all this, the NHS is one of Britain's proudest achievements. It was the first truly universal healthcare system established anywhere in the world. It is the largest free at the point of use healthcare system anywhere in the world. It is one of the world's largest employers, and at the forefront of medical progress. 

Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor, once said of the NHS that it was the closest thing the people of England have to a religion. For once, I reckon he's right.

Nye Bevan, speaking to patients on the first day of the NHS, 5th July 1948

The Wit and Wisdom of... Bobby Kennedy, Mk III

Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world, I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future. There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world.

These are different evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.

It is these qualities which make of our youth today the only true international community. More than this, I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to ensure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress -- not material welfare as an end in/of itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would all be proud to have built.

Robert F Kennedy, giving the day of affirmation address at Cape Town University, 6th June 1966. Two years later to the day, he was gunned down in a hotel kitchen in California, while battling for the 1968 Democratic Party nomination for President.

Bobby Kennedy, announcing his victory in the California Primary. Minutes later, he was shot and killed.

Michael Gove, J'accuse

Michael Gove.

Now you've recovered a bit, let me apologise for giving you the nightmarish reminder of his existence. Unfortunately, this post is about him.

More directly, it is about how the ticking time bomb he built into the education system have begun to detonate.

Amazing as it seems, Gove actually ceased to be Education Secretary back in 2014. Since then, he has been Conservative Chief Whip (remember the time he got locked in the toilet?!), Justice Secretary, and is currently in charge of the department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Along the way, he helped to put a bomb under the political stability of the country by campaigning for Brexit, decried the existence of experts, and even launched a long shot bid for the premiership, which luckily failed, and even more luckily stopped the country being lumbered with Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister.

But it is for his time in charge of Britain's schools that he will be most remembered. And his education legacy is only now coming home to roost. For every major subject other than English and maths, 2018 marks the rolling out of the new GCSEs. These were revamped, largely due to concerns over 'dumbing down' (politically motivated criticisms, rather than being based on any actual evidence). There has been a reduction in modular assessment, and the focus is now on big exams at the end of two years. Coursework, or controlled assessment (research projects done under exam conditions) have been abolished for everything apart from where it was clearly essential, like art and technology.

I really don't want to get into the merits of the old GCSE vs the new, and how GCSEs compare to the systems that came before them. They're complex issues, and I'm not sure what my view on that debate is.

What I do have very strong views on are the new GCSEs. In particular, the pressure they are putting on teenagers up and down the country. And I know this because I see it, every working day. The looks on the faces of children that haven't slept properly in weeks. Who are still being dragged into school and sat through revision lessons, often long after the end of the school day, because there is so much to get them to remember. The looks of people who have to commit pages of mathematical and scientific formulae to heart, as well as twenty poems, a novel or two, and have a level of knowledge of English grammar that is just mind boggling. And that's just the core subjects of English, maths and science.

Let's take the subject I know best, history. Before this year, the history GCSE consisted of three elements; a piece of coursework, and two exams. This year, it is four elements, which doesn't sound like too bad an increase. But all four elements are now examined, in two exams of 1 hour 45 minutes each. Students in the GCSE history exams next week are getting four booklets of paper for one exam. Do you remember those exam desks?! They couldn't even fit one sheet of paper on!

And that's before we get to the content. I often look at the specification for history and wonder if I would be able to get a grade 9. And I have two history degrees and a number of years experience teaching students.

If this exam system was preparing people for the world of work, that'd be fine. If it was promoting a love of learning, and increasing genuine passion for these subjects, fine. It is achieving none of these things. No wonder exam related stress and anxiety are reaching unprecedented levels. The behaviour of the Y11s at my school has nosedived. It really is easy to see why.

I sat GCSEs in 2005 and 2006 (thanks French for complicating that.) They were not easy. I remember them being incredibly tough and stressful. And they had nothing on what these poor young people are going through. Anyone who smugly thinks 'well, they're just moaning/snowflakes/I did it and it did me no harm' should be forced to undergo the entire new GCSE experience and see how they'd cope. I don't think it would be pretty.

2018 will be the first of many years of stress and anxiety far beyond anything seen before in education, and far beyond what any child should have to endure.

And it can all be laid at the door of one man.

Thanks, Michael Gove. You are generating misery for no readily apparent gain. I hope you're really happy.

In Defence of Edward Heath

One story has dominated the news this week, the almighty cock up made by recent governments over the handling of records belonging to immigrants to Britain during the late 20th century. Named after the infamous ship that carried one of the first major groups of immigrants to post-war Britain, the Empire Windrush, the legal position around the Windrush generation is simple- when they arrived in the United Kingdom, they were citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, and had the right to move to the United Kingdom, live and work here. Britain was affectionately known as 'the Mother Country,' and thousands of people all around the world looked up to us, and chose to move and help us in our times of hardship after the Second World War. So leave it to the UK to manage to get into a tangle about whether or not now, some 65 plus years later, the people who moved here should be allowed to stay.

Today also marks a linked, particularly repulsive anniversary, 50 years since Enoch Powell, former youngest professor in the British Empire, former youngest Brigadier in the British army, and now a senior Conservative politician, rose to his feet in Birmingham's Midland Hotel, and gave a speech. His speech was a broadside against the Labour government's Race Relations Bill then working its way through the Commons. Powell cited examples of terrified white constituents in Wolverhampton, isolated in their schools and on their streets. To continue with immigration at this level, Powell argued, was proof we were "mad, literally mad, as a nation." "It is like watching a nation, busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre." Although his final line was delivered in Latin, it was a chilling image which gave the speech the name by which it is known: "I am filled with much foreboding. Like the Roman, I see the Tiber foaming with much blood."

The impact of the Rivers of Blood speech was immediate and dramatic. Thousands of London dockers, Labour supporters to the core, marched on Parliament, chanting Powell's name and offering him support. Telegrams and letters poured into politicians and newspapers across Britain, the vast majority of them in support of the views Powell had expressed. In years to come, the phrase 'Enoch was right' was adopted by the far-right, and it was effective. Clearly, there was a powerful groundswell of support for Powell's ideas. When he backed the Conservatives in 1970, and Labour in 1974, support in opinion polls and at the ballot box noticeably shifted.

This post is in defence of a man I wrote my undergraduate thesis about. Edward Heath was the leader of the Conservative party from 1965-1975, and Prime Minister from 1970-1974. History has not been kind to him. He was a pretty poor leader of the Conservative party, and his election win in 1970 was a total shock to everyone apart from himself. He was not easy to get on with, and inspired loathing amongst his many critics. In office, he presided over economic turbulence, with widespread strikes, pay and price freezes, and the drastic imposition of the Three Day Week in 1974, arguably the nadir of post-war British history. Heath also struggled to deal with the total collapse of order in Northern Ireland, with sectarian carnage and the horrific events of Bloody Sunday. Even his one definitive achievement, taking Britain into the European Economic Community, now lies in tatters. When Heath lost his third of four elections in late 1974, his detractors were circling. To finish him off, they persuaded his Education minister to challenge him for the leadership of the Conservatives, even though she was a fairly dreadful candidate herself. But she did better than anyone expected, and so Heath was ousted by a Mrs Margaret Thatcher. And so the world turned.

And yet, Heath deserves credit for two actions , one linked to Powell, one linked to a handling of immigration from the Commonwealth.

When Heath heard what Powell had said in April 1968, he acted instantly. Even though it was fast becoming apparent that Powell's position was immensely popular, Heath moved fast. Before the weekend was over, he had sacked Powell from the front bench of the Conservative party, by phone. The two men never spoke again.

This sent a powerful message to all those itching to follow in Powell's footsteps. Overt racism was a death knell for your career. Powell never held senior office again, eventually leaving the Conservative party, joining the Ulster Unionists, before being ousted from Parliament in 1987. Sacking Powell didn't stop racism in Britain. It didn't even stop racialist coding in British public life. And the ugly genie of racism seems to have been more fully let out of the bottle in recent years. But Heath did draw a line in the sand; overt, crude racism had no place in mainstream British politics.

Heath's other action to be praised for puts this, and indeed most subsequent, governments to shame. In 1972, Uganda's despotic and unhinged leader, Idi Amin, suddenly announced that the substantial Indian population of Uganda had 90 days to leave. Uganda was already a country wracked by violence, and this was seen as a removal of protection for the Ugandan Asians. The Ugandan Asian community numbered around 60,000 people, and it had originated in the days of the British control of Uganda, when they had been forcibly moved there by British colonial administrators. Amin was looking to expropriate the wealth of the Ugandan Asians to enrich himself and his supporters. As Uganda had been a part of the British Empire, most of these Ugandan Asians held British passports, much like the Windrush migrants.

In 1967, a similar situation had arisen in Kenya. In response, the Labour government of Harold Wilson had retroactively changed the law governing citizenship, effectively stripping the Kenyan Asians of their British passports and preventing them from fleeing to the UK. And Heath's government had tightened immigration controls only the year before. Many Conservative backbenchers were off the opinion that Britain had no obligation to these people, and shouldn't take them in, no matter how dire their predicament.

However, after failing to reason with Amin, Heath's government ignored the critics, and the precedent set by Labour in 1967, and agreed to take all those Ugandan Asians who were citizens of the UK and Colonies. Some 30,000 people upped and moved to the UK. Heath persisted with this policy in the face of ferocious opposition, much of it in the name of Powell and his message. It was a courageous policy, and one governments since should look on with a certain amount of shame that they have never made such a bold move to help those in need.

So, on this 50th anniversary of the Rivers of Blood speech, and as the government currently makes an absolute hash out of the issue of whether people who moved here when they were British citizens should be allowed to stay, it is worth remembering the example of Edward Heath. Racialism is beyond the pale. And Britain should help out those in need.