Racism on TV (Part 4)

Sir Robin Day, OBE (24 October 1923 - 6 August 2000) was a British political broadcaster and commentator. His obituary in The Guardian states that "he was the most outstanding television journalist of his generation. He transformed the television interview, changed the relationship between politicians and television, and strove to assert balance and rationality into the medium's treatment of current affairs." Sir Hugh Carleton Greene KCMG, OBE (15 November 1910 - 19 February 1987) was a British journalist and television executive. He was the director-general of the BBC from 1960 to 1969, and is generally credited with modernising an organisation that had fallen behind in the wake of the launch of ITV in 1955. On Saturday 20 April 1968 Enoch Powell made a controversial speech in Birmingham, in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain. It was an allusion to Virgil towards the end of the speech which has been remembered and gave the speech its common title: "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.' That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now." The main political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was the introduction by the Labour Government of the Race Relations Act 1968, which Powell found offensive and immoral. The Act would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain areas of British life, particularly housing, where many local authorities had been refusing to provide houses for immigrant families until they had lived in the country for a certain number of years. One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he had received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in Wolverhampton. The writer described the fate of an elderly woman who was supposedly the last white person living in her street. She had repeatedly refused applications from non-whites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a racist outside her home and receiving excrement through her letterbox. Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech, and he never held another senior political post. Powell received almost 120,000 (predominantly positive) letters and a Gallup poll at the end of April showed that 74% of those asked agreed with his speech. After The Sunday Times branded his speeches "racialist," Powell sued it for libel, but withdrew when he was required to provide the letters he had quoted from. Martin Guy Alan Webster (born 14 May 1943) is a former leading figure on the far-right in British politics. Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy (3 November 1919 - 18 October 2009) was a British journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author best known for re-examining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley, and for his role in the abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom. David Ernest Duke (born July 1, 1950) is an American white nationalist, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and former Republican Louisiana State Representative. Denis Tuohy, (born 2 April 1937), is a television broadcaster, actor, newsreader, and journalist who was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and now lives in County Down. He participated in several of the BBC's current affairs programmes of the 1970s, including the long-running Panorama and also presented ITV's This Week (known for a period of the 1980s as TV Eye). During the 1990s, he was mainly known for his work as a reporter for ITN.