Merridale Road in Wolverhampton may seem an innocuous address, but it was the childhood home to the two most important figures in the ultimately failed resistance to ‘progressive’ Britain. The next-door-but-one neighbours came to be vilified, in the case of Enoch Powell, and, as Mary Whitehouse, ridiculed. Powell, a classic scholar and local MP, gained infamy for his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech against colonial immigration in 1968, for which he was sacked as a shadow minister by Ted Heath. Whitehouse was a relentless critic of moral corruption on television, a medium that Lord Reith had promoted for enlightenment and betterment of society.
Both Powell and Whitehouse, in their own way, were like Canute ordering the incoming tide to recede. While regarded in the prevailing historical narrative as reactionaries, both would have known that a broader agenda was in play. They knew that the primary cause of their social concerns was not (for Powell) the immigrants themselves or (in Whitehouse’s) the actors or real-life characters on the small screen. Treacherous people in high places were the real culprits. .
For everyone who is awake to the ‘woke’ onslaught on our culture, we’re all Mary Whitehouse now. Some commentators are belatedly realising that the apparently puritanical housewife had a point. Reasoned feminist Louise Perry, in an article ‘What Mary Whitehouse got right’ argued that the permissive society unleashed in the 1960s has not benefited women. Perry asserted that while Whitehouse is portayed as a woman of Edwardian morals on the wrong side of history, the real bad guys were those who scoffed at her campaign for decency: –
‘At the same time BBC executives were rolling their eyes at the irritating behaviour of Whitehouse and her gang, the institution was enabling the abuse perpetrated by men like Jimmy Savile’.
What should we expect from an organisation whose head office is fronted by Eric Gill’s sculpture of an older man taking a boy for pleasure. By the 1970s, as the emancipation of women, or black people and of homosexuals had begun to overturn the hitherto ‘pale, male and stale’ hierarchy, there were serious efforts to legalise sex with children. The Paedophile Information Exchange was supported by several Labour politicians. Whitehouse feared for children, who were vulnerable to what she may have suspected as a hive of paedophilia in the BBC. Some playwrights and screenwriters were not hiding their proclivities.
In 1953 Whitehouse penned an anonymous letter to mothers in the Sunday Times advising how they could prevent their sons from becoming homosexual, and in 1977 she successfully sued Gay News for blasphemy following a vile depiction of Jesus. If Whitehouse was alive today, she would be deplatformed, and probably be in prison.
Criticising licentiousness at Pride rallies, for example, is now treated as a hate crime. Undoubtedly Whitehouse would have been appalled at the propagandising of trans ideology, and she would have rightly suspected that the ubiquitous multi-racial profiling in advertisements and television shows is more sinister than a well-intended countering of racism.
Numerous letters to the BBC were provoked by the comedy series ‘Till Death Do us Part’. I have written elsewhere on how the establishment used the vehicle of ‘East Enders’ to undermine and besmirch white working class Londoners, the people at the sharp end of mass immigration. So it was with the show starring Warren Mitchell (a brilliant Jewish actor born as Warren Misell). Alf Garnett was a stereotypical Cockney tradesman, of monarchist and Tory persuasion (although he was angered by Ted Heath’s lust for membership of the EEC). Brash and bigoted in his opinions, Garnett’s role was to teach white Britons, through the device of extreme expression, that any racial conscience on their part would be denounced as racism. We should love our neighbours, whatever their colour.
In 2012 Ben Thompson compiled Whitehouse’s vast pile of correspondence in the book Ban this Filth. His somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the indefatigable campaigner is tempered by his imperative for inclusivity (which of course is not really inclusive but a bias against white Christian heritage). Thompson noted that a colleague in Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Alliance had worked with Martin Esslin, head of drama at BBC Radio, in the German Service at Bush House in wartime. According to this person, Esslin was full of malign motives, and he praised Whitehouse in her efforts ‘not just against bad television, but against a diabolical conspiracy against our country and Christianity itself’.
Thompson alerted readers to a ‘racist conspiracy theory’, but what was racist about fearing that a man in a position of power and influence was subverting moral standards? A clue is given by his quoting of Whitehouse on this particular nemesis of hers, in reply to the fellow NVALA member: –
‘I don’t know whether you know that Mr Martin Esslin’s name, until recently, was Jules Pereszlenyi…What in my opinion is so outrageous is that this man, who is NOT an Englishman, and who accepted the hospitality of this country when he had nowhere else to go should corrupt OUR children….In my opinion no foreigner has a right to dictate in somebody else’s country, however many times he changes his name’.
Thompson defended Esslin as an East European Jew who had fled from the Nazis. Whitehouse and her fellow campaigners would have been too close to the bone, but clearly they were aware of the thrust behind the ever-pushing of boundaries by the BBC. Whitehouse was tackling something too monstrous: an intellectual movement advanced by the Frankfurt School, which has exploited its nominal religious identity as a sword and shield against anyone calling them out. Whitehouse could only slow the progress of Cultural Marxism.
