Call the Midwife
Lucille, an immigrant nurse working for the Nonnatus House, is beginning to question her staying in the UK. She is desperate to return to her family and her community despite Phyllis reminding her of the family she's made at Nonnatus who love and support her.Lucille does her best to throw on a can-do attitude, but her lukewarm enthusiasm is derailed by Enoch Powell and his historically toxic 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which divided the nation with its critical opposition to mass immigration.
Powell, however, sought to spin it as the erasure of whiteness, claiming to quote a constituent as saying:Powell was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet but his influence was deep and far reaching. Instead of seeing the situation as it plainly is, Mrs Patel being further along and struggling more than she, Greta begins echoing her husband's ideologies, ideologies that were in part shaped by Powell's vitriolic statement. The same statement that included a section on white birthing mothers being supposedly unable to obtain hospital beds because of the demands of immigrants.
However Lucille's unresolved feelings at the end of the episode serve as a cliffhanger for what's to come. They also suggest thatis laying the foundations for a deeper exploration into the history of race relations in Britain, exploring issues that still impact us as a society today."It was a big turning point for our society and the way we spoke of and behaved towards people who had come here from other countries, so that was something we felt we had to tackle.