John Enoch Powell, MBE (June 16
1912 – February 8 1998) was a
British politician, linguist, writer, academic, soldier and poet. He was a Conservative
Party Member of Parliament (MP) between 1950 and February 1974, and an
Ulster Unionist MP between October 1974 and 1987. He was controversial throughout
his career, and his tenure in senior office was brief. He held strong and distinctive views on issues such as race, national
identity, immigration, monetary policy, and the United Kingdom's entry into the European
Economic Community, which later became the European Union.
Life
Early years
Powell was born in Stechford, Birmingham, England, and raised there, the only
child of Albert Enoch Powell (1872–1956), elementary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886–1953; daughter of Henry
Breese, a Liverpool policeman, and his wife Eliza), who had given up her own teaching career after marrying. The Powells were of
Welsh descent, though by the time of Enoch's birth they had lived in the Black Country for four generations, working first as miners and then in the iron trade.[1]
In 1918 Powell and his parents moved to the King's Norton
area of Birmingham. From King Edward's School, Birmingham Powell became
a student of classics, specifically Latin and Greek (which would later influence his 'Rivers of Blood' speech), and was one of the few pupils in the school's history to attain 100%
in an end-of-year English examination. He completed his education at Trinity
College, Cambridge (1930-1933), where he fell under the influence both of the poet A. E.
Housman, then Professor of Latin at Cambridge, and of the writings of the German philosopher Nietzsche. He took no part in politics at university. After achieving a double first in Latin and
Greek, he stayed on at Trinity College as a Fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient manuscripts in Rome and producing
academic works in Greek and Welsh.[2]
In 1937 he was appointed Professor of Greek at Sydney
University aged 25 (failing in his aim of beating Nietzsche's record of becoming a professor at 24). Amongst his pupils
was the future Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam. He revised Stuart-Jones's edition of Thucydides' Historiae for the
Oxford University Press in 1938. His most lasting
contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus (1938).
As well as his education at Cambridge, Powell took a course in
Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, now the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, because he felt that his long-cherished ambition of becoming Viceroy of India
would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language.[3]
On arrival in Sydney he stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon break out in Europe, and that when it
did he would be heading home to enlist in the army.[4]
During his time there as a professor, he grew increasingly angry at the appeasement of Nazi
Germany and what he saw as a betrayal of British national interests. In a letter to his parents in June 1939, before the
outbreak of war, Powell wrote:
"It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they
would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors".[5]
Immediately upon the outbreak of war, Powell returned to England, although not before buying
a Russian dictionary, since he thought "Russia would hold the key to our survival and
victory, as it had in 1812 and 1916".[6]
War years
During World War II, Powell enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, almost a month after returning home. Powell enlisted in the
ranks as an Australian. In later years he recorded his promotion from private to
lance-corporal in his "Who's Who" entry, on other occasions describing it as a greater promotion than entering the Cabinet. He
was trained for a commission after, whilst working in a kitchen, answering the question of an inspecting officer with a
Greek proverb. In October 1941 Powell was posted to
Cairo. He was soon made a Major. He helped mastermind the attack on
Rommel's supply lines. Powell was made a Lieutenant-Colonel in August 1942. In August 1943 he was posted to
Delhi. Though he served in Africa with the Desert Rats, Powell never actually saw combat, serving for most of his military
career as a staff officer. It was in Algiers that the seed of Powell's dislike of the United
States was planted. After talking with some senior American officials, he became convinced that one of America's main war aims
was to destroy the British Empire. Writing home on February
16 1943, Powell said: "I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were...our terrible enemy, America...".[7]
Powell's conviction of the anti-Britishness of the Americans continued during the war. Powell cut out and retained all his
life an article from the Statesman newspaper of November 13 1943, in which the American Clare Boothe Luce said in a speech that
Indian independence would mean that the "USA will really have won the greatest war in the world
for democracy".[8]
He desperately wanted to go to the Far East to help the fight against Japan because "the war
in Europe is won now, and I want to see the Union Flag back
in Singapore" before, Powell thought, the Americans beat Britain to it.[9]
Powell began the war as the youngest Professor in the Commonwealth; he ended it as the youngest Brigadier in the British army, the only man in the entire war to go from
Private to Brigadier. Powell felt guilty for having survived when many of those he had met during his journey through the ranks
had not. When once asked how he would like to be remembered, he at first answered "Others will remember me as they will remember
me", but when pressed he replied "I should like to have been killed in the war."[10]
Conservative Party
Though he voted for the Labour Party in their 1945 landslide victory, because he wanted to punish the Conservative Party for the
Munich agreement, after the war he joined the Conservatives and worked for the
Conservative Research Department under R.A. Butler, where his colleagues included Iain Macleod and
Reginald Maudling.[11] After unsuccessfully contesting the Labour Party's
ultra-safe seat of Normanton
at a by-election in 1947 (when the Labour majority was 62%),[12] he was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West in the 1950 general election.
Powell's ambition to be Governor-General of India crumbled in February
1947, when Prime Minister Attlee announced that Indian independence was imminent. Powell was so shocked by the change of policy that he
spent the whole night after it was announced walking the streets of London, trying to take it in.[13] He came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that
once India had gone the whole empire should follow it. This logical absolutism explained his later indifference to the Suez
crisis, his contempt for the Commonwealth, and his urging that Britain should
scrap any remaining pretence that she was a world power.
On January 2 1952 he married Margaret Pamela Wilson (b
January 28 1926), a former colleague from Conservative Central
Office, who provided him with the settled and happy family life essential to his political career. They had two daughters.
Powell was a member of the Suez Group of MPs who were against the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal because such a move would demonstrate, Powell argued, that Britain could no longer maintain a
position there and that any claim to the Suez Canal would therefore be illogical. However, after the troops had left in 1954 and
the Egyptians nationalized the Canal in 1956, Powell opposed the
British attempts to retake the Canal because he thought the British no longer had the
resources to be a world power.[14]
In December 1955 he was made a junior Housing Minister and later became Financial Secretary to the Treasury, but in January 1958 he resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury colleague Nigel Birch, in protest at
government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch deflationist, or in modern terms a monetarist, and a believer in market forces.[15] (Powell was also a member of the Mont Pelerin
Society.) The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all, which Powell believed to
be a major cause of inflation, and in effect a form of taxation, as the holders of money find their money is worth less.
Inflation rose to 2.5% - a high figure for the era, especially in peacetime.
In the late 1950s Powell backed Deflation and in the 1960s was an advocate of free market
policies which at the time were seen as extreme and unworkable, as well as unpopular. In many respects, Powell can be seen as a
Thatcherite avant la lettre: he was calling for the privatisation of the Post Office and the telephone network as early as
1964, over 20 years before these changes actually took place;[16] and, like Mrs Thatcher later, he both scorned the idea of "consensus politics" and wanted the
Conservative Party to become a modern businesslike party, freed from its old aristocratic and "old boy network"
associations.[17] Perhaps most notably of all, in his
1958 resignation over public spending and what he saw as an inflationist economic policy, he anticipated almost exactly the views
that in the 1980s came to be described as "monetarism". [18].
Powell returned to government in July 1960, when he was appointed Minister for Health,[19] albeit outside the Cabinet, but this changed in 1962.[20] In this post he was responsible for promoting an ambitious ten-year programme
of general hospital building and for beginning the run-down of the huge psychiatric
institutions. In his famous 1961 "Water Tower" speech, he said:
"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising
unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside - the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express
the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault. Let me describe some of
the defences which we have to storm".[1]
The speech catalysed a debate that was one of several strands leading to the Care in
the Community initiative of the 1980s.
Later, he oversaw the employment of a large number of Commonwealth immigrants
by the understaffed National Health Service.[21] Prior to this, many non-white immigrants who held full rights of citizenship in
Britain were obliged to take the jobs that no one else wanted (eg. street cleaning, night-shift assembly production lines), often
paid considerably less than their white counterparts.
Along with Iain Macleod, Powell refused to serve in the Cabinet following the appointment of Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister. This refusal was not based on antipathy to Home personally but
was in protest against what Macleod and Powell saw as Macmillan's underhand manipulation of colleagues during the process of
choosing a new leader.[22] Following the Conservatives'
defeat in the 1964 general election, he agreed to return to the
front bench as Transport spokesman. [23] In 1965 he stood
in the first-ever party leadership election, but came a distant third to Edward Heath, who
appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Defence.[24]
In a controversial speech on May 26 1967, Powell criticised
Britain's post-war world role:
"In our imagination the vanishing last vestiges ... of Britain's once vast Indian
Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets. Under God's good providence and
in partnership with the United States, we keep the peace of the world and rush hither and thither containing Communism, putting out brush fires and coping with subversion. It is difficult to describe, without using
terms derived from psychiatry, a notion having so few points of contact with reality".[25]
Rivers of Blood speech
-
Powell was noted for his oratorical skills, and for being a maverick who cared little about what harm he did to his party - or
himself. On Saturday April 20 1968 he 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. Because of its allusion to Virgil saying that the Tiber would foam with blood, Powell's warning was dubbed
the "Rivers of Blood speech" by the press, and the name stuck.[26]
The central political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was instead the introduction by
the Labour Government of anti-discrimination legislation which would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain
areas of British life, particularly housing. Powell found this legislation offensive and immoral.
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 excreta through her letterbox. Despite combing the electoral register and other sources,
the editor of the local newspaper Clem Jones (a close friend of Powell's, who broke off relations with him over the controversy)
and his journalists failed to identify the woman. Powell refused to name her because he felt he had to respect her
confidentiality, even to the point of withdrawing from a libel action against a national newspaper (see below). After Powell's
death Kenneth Nock, a Wolverhampton solicitor, wrote to the Express and Star in April 1998
to claim that his firm had acted for the woman in question and to confirm that she existed but that he could not name her due to
rules concerning client confidentiality.[27] In January
2007 the BBC Radio Four programme Document, followed by the Daily Mail, identified the lady as Druscilla Cotterill, who
had died in 1978.[28] The speech was delivered while the
1968 Race Relations Bill (later Act) was making its way through Parliament, which was to make racial discrimination in housing
illegal.
Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech, and Powell 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 what Powell had said in his speech. The Sunday Times received a libel writ from Powell for branding his speeches
"racialist", but also gained a court order for disclosure of the letters he had received to demonstrate the validity of their
defence. Powell dropped the libel action as a consequence of the court order.
Some suspected that Powell was set up - TV cameras were not known to turn up at meetings of the West Midlands branch of the Conservative Political Centre, and some believe that Heath wanted
Powell to take the blame for his party taking a tougher line on immigration later that year. Conversely, Powell had issued an
advance copy of his speech to the media and their appearance at the speech may have been due to the fact that they realised the
content was explosive. [29]
Senior figures in the Conservative Party, such as Lord Baker, have disclosed that Powell
told them that he regretted giving the speech, for it ended his political career. However, it can be argued that Powell gave the
speech to increase his profile and popularity both amongst parts of the Parliamentary Conservative Party and in the country at
large. In July 1965 he came a distant third in the Conservative Party leadership contest, obtaining
only 15 votes. After the speech, however, Powell was transformed into a national public figure and won huge support across
Britain. Three days after the speech, on 23 April, as the Race
Relations Bill was being debated in the House of Commons 1,000 dockers
marched on Westminster protesting against Powell's "victimisation", and the next day 400 meat porters from Smithfield market
handed in a 92-page petition in support of Powell. Probably many of these workers would normally have been staunch Labour
voters.
Powell's popularity appeared to contribute to the Conservatives' surprise General Election win in 1970, which showed a late surge in Conservative support in
the West Midlands, near Powell's constituency. In "exhaustive research" on the
election, the American pollster Douglas Schoen and University of Oxford academic
R.W. Johnson believed it "beyond dispute" that Enoch Powell had attracted 2.5 million votes to the Conservatives. Johnson later
wrote that "It became clear that Powell had won the 1970 election for the Tories...of all those who had switched their vote from
one party to another in the election, 50 per cent were working class Powellites. Not only had 18 per cent of Labour Powellites
switched to the Tories but so had 24 per cent of Liberal Powellites". Johnson further believed that the votes Powell brought to
the Conservatives were "quite possibly four or five million".[30]
A Daily Express poll in 1972 showed Powell being the most popular politician in the country.
Slogan: "Enoch was right"
In the United Kingdom, particularly in England, "Enoch was right" became a phrase of political rhetoric throughout the 1970s,
employed generally by the far right, inviting comparison of aspects of contemporary English
society with predictions made by Powell in the Rivers of Blood speech. The phrase implies opposition to immigration and multiculturalism.
An unusual Conservative?
Powell had voted against the Schuman plan in 1950
and had supported entry only because he believed that the Common Market was simply a means to secure free trade. In March
1969 he turned forcefully against Britain's joining the European Economic Community. Opposition to entry had thitherto been confined largely to the Labour
Party but now, he said, it was clear to him that the sovereignty of Parliament was in question, as was Britain's very survival as
a nation. This nationalist analysis attracted millions of grass-roots Conservatives and others, and as much as anything else made
Powell the implacable enemy of Heath, a fervent pro-European, but there was already a deep emnity between the two.
The Conservatives had promised
at the 1970 election that in relation to the Common Market "Our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more, no less". When
Powell saw Heath sign an accession treaty before Parliament had even debated the issue, when the second reading of the Bill to
put the Treaty into law passed by just eight votes on second reading, and when it became clear that the British people would have
no further say in the matter, he declared open war on his party's line. He voted against the government on every one of the 104
divisions in the course of the European Communities Bill. When finally he lost this battle, he decided he could no longer sit in
a parliament that was not sovereign. In summer 1972 he prepared to resign, and changed his mind only because of fears of a
renewed wave of immigration from Uganda following the rise of Idi
Amin.
In February 1974 Powell left the Conservative Party, mainly because it had taken the UK into the
European Common Market, and advised the electorate to vote Labour, who promised a
referendum on whether or not the UK should remain in the EEC, as the only way to save the UK's sovereignty. Given the close
nature of the election (it resulted in a hung Parliament), it is possible that Powell's comments contributed to Heath's defeat.
He repeated this line in the October 1974 General
Election, and the referendum was held in 1975. However the result was a clear vote to remain in "the Common Market" (as it
was called on the ballot paper). In a March 1977 no-confidence vote, he voted to keep the Labour
government in power.
Powell's Euroscepticism was fuelled by a belief that the Cold War was a sham because the Soviet Union was not intent on invading
the West - so dependent was the USSR on receiving US and European grain surpluses for next
to nothing - and so he did not see the need to maintain the Western alliance as other Conservatives did. He also opposed the UK's
"independent nuclear deterrent" because he felt that, as it could not rationally be used, it was pointless. He believed that
American interest in Britain was an attempt to undermine Britain and give the United States a greater world role. Powell also
pointed out that American governments had always wanted European states, including Britain, to join the European Economic
Community because it was the 'political arm' of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and
therefore fitted into America's grand strategy against the Soviet Union.
Ulster Unionist Party
Since 1968 Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British
nationalist viewpoint he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to maintain British rule. From early 1971 he
opposed, with increasing vehemence, Heath's approach to Ulster, the greatest breach with his party coming over the imposition of
direct rule in 1972.
In a sudden general election later in 1974, Powell
returned to Parliament as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, having rejected an offer to stand as a candidate for the
National Front. He was a strong believer in the United Kingdom, and he believed
that it would survive only if the Unionists strove to integrate fully with the
United Kingdom by abandoning the devolved rule that Northern Ireland had until recently
enjoyed. He refused point-blank to join the Orange Institution - the first Ulster
Unionist MP at Westminster never to be a member (and to date only one of three, the others
being the former UDR member Ken Maginnis, and Lady Hermon), and he was an outspoken opponent of the more extremist Unionism espoused by the Reverend
Ian Paisley and his supporters.
Powell claimed that the only way to stop the Provisional Irish Republican
Army (PIRA) was for Northern Ireland to be an integral part of the United
Kingdom, treated no differently from any other of its constituent parts. He claimed the ambiguous nature of the province's
status, with its own parliament and prime minister, gave hope to the PIRA that it could be detached from the rest of the
UK:
"Every word or act which holds out the prospect that their unity with the rest of the United Kingdom might be negotiable is
itself, consciously or unconsciously, a contributory cause to the continuation of violence in Northern Ireland".[31]
During 1983 his local agent was Jeffrey Donaldson, later an Ulster Unionist MP
before defecting to the DUP.
In Powell's later career as an Ulster Unionist MP he continued to criticise the United States, and claimed that the Americans
were trying to persuade the British to push Northern Ireland into an all-Ireland state because the condition for Irish membership
of NATO, Powell claimed, was Northern Ireland. The Americans wanted to close the
'yawning gap' in NATO defence that was the southern Irish coast to northern Spain. Powell claimed he had a copy of a State
Department Policy Statement from 15 August 1950 in which the
American government allegedly said that the 'agitation' caused by partition in Ireland "lessens the usefulness of Ireland in
international organisations and complicates strategic planning for Europe". "It is desirable", the document continued, "that
Ireland should be integrated into the defense planning of the North Atlantic area, for its strategic position and present lack of
defensive capacity are matters of significance".[32]
In 1984, Powell also claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had
murdered Lord Louis Mountbatten and that the deaths of
the MPs Airey Neave and Robert Bradford were carried out by the USA in order to stop Neave's
policy of integration for Northern Ireland.[33] Then in
1986 he again argued that Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) had not
killed Airey Neave but that "MI6 and their friends" were responsible
instead.[34]
In February 1975, after winning the Conservative Party leadership election, Margaret Thatcher
refused to offer Powell a Shadow Cabinet place because "he turned his back on his own people" by leaving the Conservative Party
exactly 12 months earlier. Powell replied she was correct to do that, as he was no longer a member of the Conservative Party.
Powell did not welcome the election victory of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979. This was partly
because Powell did not believe a woman was capable of fulfilling the role, partly because Mrs Thatcher supported Europe, but
mainly because he felt that anyone who had served under Edward Heath was tainted and would, like Heath, soon buckle under
pressure. "Grim" was Powell's response when he was asked what he thought of Thatcher's victory. Powell later came to appreciate
and praise Thatcher's patience and tenacity in getting her own way, and although he was on supposedly good terms with Thatcher
(she claimed her own monetarist policies stemmed from Powell's, to which he remarked drily, "A pity she did not understand
them!"), he remained at odds with Thatcher over her pro-American foreign policy. Thatcher also dismissed Powell's arguments over
Airey Neave's murder, and he came into conflict with her in 1985 because of her support for the
Anglo-Irish Agreement, resigning his seat in protest and then regaining it at the
ensuing by-election. Powell (in a result that devastated him) lost his seat in the 1987 general election to the Social Democratic Labour Party's Eddie
McGrady, mainly due to demographic and boundary changes which resulted in there being many more Catholics in the
constituency than before. Ironically, the boundary changes had arisen due to his own campaign for the number of MPs representing
Northern Ireland to be increased to the equivalent proportion for the rest of the United Kingdom, as part of the steps towards
greater integration. He was offered a life peerage, which was regarded as his right as a former cabinet minister, but declined
it. He argued that, as he had opposed the Life Peerages Act 1958, it would be
hypocritical for him to take one.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2 1990, Powell claimed
that, because Britain was not an ally of Kuwait in the "formal sense" and because the balance of power in the Middle East had
ceased to be a British concern after the end of the British Empire, Britain should not go to war. Powell claimed that
"Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops come storming up the beaches
of Kent or Sussex"; after
Britain claimed to be defending small nations from attack, Powell said "I sometimes wonder if, when we shed our power, we omitted
to shed our arrogance".[35]
When German reunification was on the agenda in 1990, Powell claimed that Britain
urgently needed to create an alliance with the Soviet
Union in view of Germany's effect on the balance of power in Europe. This part of Powell's analysis was taken seriously by
the Atlanticist Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
who tried to persuade the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to halt unification,
but failed.
After Mrs Thatcher's Bruges Speech in 1988 and her increasing hostility to the abolition of the pound sterling in the last years of
her premiership, Powell made many speeches publicly supporting her attitude to Europe. When she was challenged by
Michael Heseltine for the leadership of the Conservative party in November 1990, Powell said he would rejoin the party - which he had left in 1974 over the issue of Europe - if Mrs Thatcher
won, and would urge the public to support both her and, in Powell's view, national independence.[36] As it turned out she resigned, and Powell never rejoined the Conservative
party.
His Ulster Unionism did not block his capacity for independent thought; he was critical of the Special Air Service (SAS) shootings of three unarmed
Provisional Irish Republican Army members in Gibraltar in March 1988.
Last years
In autumn 1992, Enoch Powell was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson's Disease.
He fought the affliction with his customary resolution, despite mounting incapacity. In 1994 he
published the St. Mathew's Gospel. During the final years of his life he managed occasional pieces of journalism and co-operated
in a BBC documentary about his life in 1995. When Labour won the 1997 General Election Powell told his wife that the electorate had voted to break up the
United Kingdom. By this time Powell had been hospitalised several times as a result
sustained because of falls. Powell began, but did not complete, work on a study of the Gospel of John. It was unfinished at the time of his death, aged 85, at 4:30am on
8 February 1998 at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in London.
Dressed in his brigadier's uniform, Enoch Powell was buried in his regiment's plot in Warwick
Cemetery, Warwickshire, ten days later, after a family requiem at Westminster Abbey and a public service at St Margaret's,
Westminster. He was survived by his wife and two daughters.
Personality
Despite his earlier militant atheism Powell became a devout Anglican, having thought in 1949 "that he heard the bells of St Peter's Wolverhampton calling him" (Heffer
p. 130) while walking to his flat in his (then future) constituency. Subsequently, he became a churchwarden of St Margaret's, Westminster. He spent much of his later life trying to prove, with
close textual reading, that Christ had not been crucified but stoned to death.
Powell was reading Greek by the age of five, learning it from his mother. At age 70 he
began learning his 12th and final language, Hebrew.
In August 2002 Powell appeared in the List of 100
Greatest Britons of all time (voted for by the public in a BBC nationwide poll).
Powell had remarked that "all political lives end in failure" and did not hesitate to agree that this maxim applied to his
own. Like Tony Benn (a personal friend from a different political background, whom Powell had
helped to renounce his peerage and so remain an elected Member of Parliament), he was seen by
supporters as putting conscience and duty to his constituents before loyalty to his party or the sake of his career.
Powell's rhetorical gifts were also employed, with success, beyond politics. He was a poet of some accomplishment, with four
published collections to his name: First Poems; Casting Off; Dancer's End; and The Wedding Gift. His
Collected Poems appeared in 1990. He translated Herodotus (The History of
Herodotus) and published many other works of classical scholarship. He published a biography of Joseph Chamberlain, which treated the split with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886 as the
pivotal point of his career, rather than the adoption of Tariff Reform, and which contained the famous line that "all political
careers, unless they are cut off at some happy juncture, end in failure". Powell published many books on political matters too,
which were often annotated collections of his speeches. His political publications were often as critical of his own party as
they were of Labour, often making fun of what he saw as logical fallacies in reasoning or action. His book Freedom &
Reality contained many quotes from Labour party manifestos or by Harold Wilson which
he regarded as nonsensical.
Criticism
Powell said "I have and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country
and another on grounds of his origins."[37] The public
tend to agree with this statement. The Trial of Enoch Powell, a Channel 4 television
broadcast in April 1998, on the thirtieth anniversary of his Birmingham speech (and two months after his death), saw a vote of
the studio audience yielded a 64% 'not a racist' result. However, many in the church did not: upon his death the Bishop of
Croydon stated "Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were
ashamed to acknowledge."[38]
Powell's detractors often assert that he was 'far-right', 'proto-fascist' or 'racist'. The first two charges clash with his
voting record on most social issues, such as homosexual law reform - he was actually
co-sponsor of a Bill on this issue in May 1965 - and the abolition of the death penalty, both liberal reforms which had limited support in the
Conservative Party at the time, although he did little to call public attention to his stance on these non-party "issues of
conscience".[39]
He voted against the return of the death penalty in 1969, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1983 and 1987. Although substantial sections of
the public supported Powell on the issues for which he was better known, most of the "liberal intelligentsia" tended to denounce
him as a racist. For some, this charge seems unconvincing in the light of Powell's pre-political
actions, and it was not until the late 1960s that he made speeches that addressed the issues of race and immigration. On this
view, he is perhaps better classified as a romantic British nationalist than any sort of fascist: like Michael Foot from the other end of the political spectrum (with whom he joined forces on constitutional
issues such as defeating House of Lords reform[40] and
opposing Britain's entry to the European Community), he was an ardent constitutionalist, worshipping Parliament as the cradle of
democracy, whereas most actual fascists want to abolish the democratic institutions.
Powell's speeches and TV interviews throughout his political life displayed a suspicion towards "The Establishment" in
general, and by the 1980s there was a regular expectation that he would make some sort of speech or act in a way designed to
upset the government and ensure he would not be offered a Life Peerage (and thus be
transferred to the House of Lords), which he had no intention of accepting so long as
Edward Heath sat in the Commons. (Heath remained in the Commons until after Powell's death.) He had opposed the 1958 Life
Peerages Act and felt it would be hypocritical to accept a life peerage himself, while no Prime Minister was ever willing to
offer him a hereditary peerage.
Powell in popular culture
The South African-born British musician Manfred Mann released an instrumental track entitled "Konekuf" in the 1970s, indicating his
opinion of Powell. The title is designed to be read backwards. John Cale's "Graham Greene"
also mentions Powell, although the context is more obscure, and in 1970 ska and reggae singer Millie sang "Enoch Power" against Powell. The song began with the German national anthem.
The Beatles' song "Get Back" was originally conceived as a
critical commentary of Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech. Earlier versions of the song, titled "Commonwealth" and "No
Pakistanis," the latter of which very closely resembles the finished product, are circulated with bootlegs of the
Let It Be sessions.
Arthur Wise's 1970 novel Who Killed Enoch Powell? examines what the consequences might be for the United Kingdom if
Powell were to be the victim of a political assassination. The novel was a runner-up for the MWA's Edgar award in the category of Best Mystery
Novel.
Powell's name was mentioned in some of the more daring BBC comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, e.g. in several
Monty Python's Flying Circus skits, including "Travel Agent" and
"Election Special". In a Christmas episode of Steptoe and Son, the elder Steptoe
sings "Enoch's Dreaming of a White Christmas," (after the fashion of the Bing Crosby song
"White Christmas") as he prepares Christmas decorations at the table. Powell is also
referred to approvingly by Alf Garnett a number of times in episodes of Till Death Us Do Part, as for example in an episode about a power cut, when he says "It's a
pity old Enoch ain't in charge. He'd sort them out. He'd put the coons down the pits, he would," as a black technician comes into
the room behind him to fix the family's broken television.
In 1976, a drunken Eric Clapton voiced his support of Powell onstage during a concert in
Birmingham, also stating that England had "become overcrowded" and was in danger of becoming "a black colony". As a result,
Clapton did not play in Birmingham again for a decade, and his remarks were a major factor in the eventual formation of
Rock Against Racism.
The main character in Moses Ascending, a novel about immigrants in London by
Sam Selvon, writes Powell a letter. The scene is highly ironic.
He is also mentioned in White Teeth (written by Zadie Smith), in the film East is East, the novel
The Buddha of Suburbia, and in many other films and novels
associated with Britain's ethnic minorities.
In the musical version of "Acorn Antiques" John The Director's ill-fated operetta of
"Acorn Antiques" is rehearsed in the "Enoch Powell Performing Arts Centre and Leisure Complex".
Notes
- ^ Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory
Tribune, London, 1970, pp. 10-11. SBN 356 03150 0
- ^ Roth, op. cit, pp. 18-20.
- ^ Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London,
1999
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p. 29.
- ^ Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London,
1999, p. 53.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 55.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 75.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., pp. 86-87.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 76.
- ^ Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio, February 19 1989.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., pp. 51-53.
- ^ Craig, F. W. S. [1969] (1983). British parliamentary
election results 1918-1949, 3rd edition, Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services. ISBN 0-900178-06-X.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p. 51.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., pp. 99-100.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., pp. 180-189.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p.318.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p.319.
- ^ "'One per cent not a triviality': Mr. Powell tells of dilemma", The
Times, London, 10 January 1958, p.8.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., pp.229 ff.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p.270.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p.255.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., pp.302-303 and p.315.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p.316.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., pp.327 ff.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 431.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., pp.349 ff.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 460.
- ^ Daily Mail, London, February 3
2007, pp 50-51.
- ^ Simon Heffer's biography, Like The
Roman, discusses the pre-publicity on page 449. Powell is quoted as remarking to Clem Jones, editor of the local newspaper,
that his speech was "going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket". The cameras were from ATV, whose news editor had received an early copy.
- ^ Simon Heffer, op cit., p. 568.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 543.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 635.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 881.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 906.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 933.
- ^ Heffer, op. cit., p. 934.
- ^ Letter from Enoch Powell in the Wolverhampton Express and Star,
October 1964, quoted in Humphry Berkeley, "Mr Powell: still
Yesterday's Man", The Times, London, 5 September 1972,
p.12.
- ^ "Bishops criticise Abbey over Powell honour", Irish Times, Dublin,
16 February 1998, p.14.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p.318.
- ^ Roth, op. cit., p.369
Bibliography
- Obituary of Enoch Powell, Daily Telegraph, London, 9 February 1998.
- Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell, London, 1969.
- Simon Heffer Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London, 1998. ISBN 0-297-84286-2
- Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune, London, 1970. SBN 356 03150 0
- Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell, London, 1998. ISBN 0-09-179208-8
- Tom Stacey, Immigration and Enoch Powell, London, 1970. OCLC 151226
Powell's writings
- Enoch Powell (1936) The Rendel Harris Papyri
- Enoch Powell (1937) First Poems
- Enoch Powell (1938) A Lexicon to Herodotus
- Enoch Powell (1939) The History of Herodotus
- Enoch Powell (1939) Casting-off, and other poems
- Enoch Powell (1939) Herodotus, Book VIII
- Enoch Powell (1942) Llyfr Blegywryd
- Enoch Powell (1942) Thucydidis Historia
- Enoch Powell (1949) (translation) Herodotus
- Enoch Powell (1950) (jointly) One Nation
- Enoch Powell (1951) (poems) Dancer's End and The Wedding Gift
- Enoch Powell (1952) The Social Services, Needs and Means
- Enoch Powell (1954) Change is our Ally
- Enoch Powell (1955, second edition 1970) (with Angus Maude) Biography of a
Nation, London, ISBN 0212983733
- Enoch Powell (1960) Great Parliamentary Occasions
- Enoch Powell (1960) Saving in a Free Society
- Enoch Powell (1965) A Nation not Afraid
- Enoch Powell (1966, revised edition 1976) Medicine and Politics
- Enoch Powell (1968) (with Keith Wallis) The House of Lords in the Middle Ages
- Enoch Powell (1969 [1999]) Freedom and Reality, Kingswood, ISBN 0-7160-0541-7 (this volume includes the text of the
Rivers of Blood speech.)
- Enoch Powell (1971) Common Market: The Case Against
- Enoch Powell (1972) Still to Decide, Kingswood, ISBN 0716005662
- Enoch Powell (1973) Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out
- Enoch Powell (1973) No Easy Answers, London, ISBN 0859690016
- Enoch Powell (1977) Wrestling With the Angel, London, ISBN 0-85969-127-6
- Enoch Powell (1977) Joseph Chamberlain, London, ISBN 0-500-01185-0
- Enoch Powell (1978) (editor Richard Ritchie) A Nation or No Nation, London, ISBN 0713415428
- Enoch Powell (1989) (editor Richard Ritchie) Enoch Powell on 1992, London, ISBN 1-85470-008-1
- Enoch Powell (1991) (editor Rex Collings) Reflections of a Statesman, London, ISBN 0947792880
- Enoch Powell (1990) Collected Poems
- Enoch Powell (1994) The Evolution of the Gospel
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