Enoch at 100: a Re-evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell - review

A false prophet.

By Vernon Bogdanor Published 04 July 2012

Enoch Powell at a meeting in London. Photo: Getty Images

Enoch at 100: a Re-evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell

Edited by Lord Howard of Rising

Biteback, 304pp, £25

Tony Benn once told me that he had put forward a Commons motion requiring the repeal in one fell swoop of every single item of legislation passed by Margaret Thatcher’s governments between 1979 and 1990. But, he continued, even if such a motion had been passed, which it was not, it would have made little difference. For Thatcher’s influence came not from her legislation but from her teaching; Benn added, sadly, that the left’s problem was that, since the days of Aneurin Bevan, that was precisely what it had lacked: a teacher.

Enoch Powell was, like Thatcher, a teacher of the right. Indeed, she was one of his pupils. This commemorative volume – Powell was born 100 years ago this June – comprising essays juxtaposed with speeches, seeks to evaluate his influence, an influence that derived not from office (in a parliamentary career of 37 years, he was in the cabinet for just 15 months) but from his role as a teacher. But what did he teach?

Powell’s early speeches had little impact. Lucubrations on such matters as the Royal Titles Bill and the money supply had little resonance outside parliament; they did not even receive much of a welcome in the Conservative Party, always suspicious of intellectuals. “Put that book away,” Charles Hill, a Conservative minister, told the newly elected Julian Critchley in 1959, when he saw him reading in the Commons smoking room. “Advancement in this party depends upon alcoholic stupidity.”

In April 1968, Powell made the notorious speech in which he foresaw “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” in consequence of excessive immigration. We were, he said, “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. He cited a constituent who told him: “In 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”; repeating a standard trope of the far right, he referred to an elderly widow terrorised by immigrants and by “wide-grinning piccaninnies” who could not speak English.

His solution was mass repatriation of non-white people. The speech led to racial violence in the Midlands but it made Powell a hero,
particularly to the lumpenproletariat, astonished and gratified to discover a person of culture and refinement prepared to echo their fouler thoughts. There are signs in this centenary volume that Powell came to regard the speech as something of a mistake. It was, in truth, unforgivable.

Defenders of Powell say that his prediction of the size of the non-white population, which he persisted in calling “immigrant”, was more accurate than that of his critics. But his predictions of ethnic conflict – indeed, of civil war – have proved spectacularly wrong.

Powell spoke of the “sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected”. The elderly widow terrorised by immigrants was convinced that, if Roy Jenkins’s Race Relations Bill creating the offence of racial discrimination in employment and housing were passed, “She will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”

Another stock fable of the far right is a supposed conspiracy of liberals or the “race relations industry” to suppress discussion of immigration. “Almost since that time [April 1968],” declares Iain Duncan Smith, in a foreword to Enoch at 100, “any attempt to enter the debate in a rational and measured way has been met with the allegation of racism.”

But the liberal conspiracy has not been very successful. In January 1978, Thatcher spoke of her fears of the country being “swamped” by those from another culture, while even supposedly liberal Conservatives have not hesitated to raise the alarm when the party is in trouble. Just before the 1992 election, with the Conservatives seemingly facing defeat, Douglas Hurd told an audience at Stevenage that the tide of bogus migrants was “one of the most serious problems” facing Europe in the next decade. This was translated by the Sun into the following headline: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of mass immigration”. Three days before the election, Kenneth Baker declared that Labour would “open the floodgates to a wave of immigration” and that Labour’s “open-door policy . . . would ignite a revival of fascism in Britain”.

In September 1995, Andrew Lansley, a former director of the Conservative research department, reported: “Immigration, an issue which we raised successfully in 1992, and again in the 1994 Euro elections campaign, played particularly well in the tabloids and has more potential to hurt.”

In Northern Ireland, too, Powell was a malign influence, condemning the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 as a step towards ceding Northern Ireland to the Republic and therefore treasonable. He urged the Unionists to reject power-sharing, a notion that he ridiculed but that seems at last to have brought peace to that troubled province.

Powell was one of the 20th century’s false prophets. In due course, no doubt he will receive an objective assessment. Enoch at 100 provides the material for that assessment.

Vernon Bogdanor is research professor at the Institute of Contemporary British History, King’s College London

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12 comments

Mon, 2012-07-16 23:24 — A. Cole (not verified)

The elephant in the room-

HOW HAS MASS IMMIGRATION BENEFITTED THE WHITE WORKING CLASSES?

Mon, 2012-07-16 20:07 — john bull (not verified)

So, safe in his nice SCR in Oxford, Bogdanor labels those who did not wish to see their ancestral homeland over run by the third world as the lumpenproletariat. I have always thought that one reason the British bourgoisie was so keen on mass immigration (apart from getting all the cheap servants obviously) was so that they could demonstarte their moralsuperiority over the hoi polloi.

One of the best books I have read in recent years was "The Likes of us:aPortrait of the White Working Class" by Michael Collins. He pointed out that for the indigenous working class in places like south London, immigration was a terrible injustice and a great disater. As he rightly pointed out, for the Polly Toynbees and Bogdanors of this world, blacks are an abstraction: they are there to be patronised and emotedover and told that they are the helpless victims of "institutional racism" The white working class of places like Brixton had a rather less rosy view of Afro-Carribean immigration. These were peoplewho, prior to the mid fifties, probably had never met a coloured person, and who saw theie children reduced to minority status in the localschools - or what pass for schools there these days - in a generation. It was THEIR ancestral areas, not Hampstead or North Oxford or Surrey, which were transformed out of all recognition, they not the Grauniad readers, who saw the sharp end of demographic transformation.

Collins made the point that most local whites in south London regarded blacks first and foremost as unwelcome competitors for jobs and housing, and as violent, criminally inclined and sexually predatory aggressors rather than passive victims. How Collins was ever allowed to write again in the post McPherson atmosphere of racial hysteria.I just dunno, especially as he was working for al-Beeb (peace be upon it)

Mon, 2012-07-16 19:26 — white flight man (not verified)

My primary school was in Brixton: was quite a liveable place in the sixties. When I was a kid, a lot of my relatives lived there, and in neighbouring areas like Peckham, Camberwell, The Elephant etc. They don't, I can assure you, live in them there parts no more. The drugs busts and gang rapes and drive by shootings and brutal (frequently fatal) muggings of elderly white people and black "Muslims" who probably couldn't spell Islam selling their hate sheets just got too exciting and they all baled out in the seventies: the few who were left got out after the riots of 81 and 83.

Yup, I can remember the old timers in the pubs there saying "You know, this area was so hideously white in the old days. Thank God for all this cultural enrichment."

That last bit was sarcasm, by the way. Enoch was right. London (or its inner boroughs) is now a third world pest hole.

Mon, 2012-07-16 08:35 — A.Cole (not verified)

When I read of these problems I remember Enoch with a sense of nostalgia....

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/gang-rape-is-it-a-race-issue-...

Mon, 2012-07-16 17:46 — Herbert (not verified)

I doubt if Powell would only want to remembered for 20 April 1968.

Mon, 2012-07-16 04:29 — Derek J Brown (not verified)

@Powell was a tragic figure that often occurs in politics: an intellectual with no brain.

Actually the term fits Benn better, but Benn exercised a divisive influence on Labour for decades until Blair took over!!!

Mon, 2012-07-16 04:29 — Derek J Brown (not verified)

@Powell was a tragic figure that often occurs in politics: an intellectual with no brain.

Actually the term fits Benn better, but Benn exercised a divisive influence on Labour for decades until Blair took over!!!

Mon, 2012-07-16 17:45 — Herbert (not verified)

I'm sure you're right about Benn (though I wouldn't call him an intellectual, which Powell certainly was). Much as I disagreed with a lot of what he said, I'd have given my right arm to be able to spend an evening talking to Powell. Not something I'd say of Benn.

Sun, 2012-07-15 23:20 — Enoch Fan (not verified)

Er,yes, I am sure the relatives of PC Blakelock, Pc Pat Dunne. WPC Nina McKay, PC Berezozsky (dunno about the spelling) Philip Lawrence, Kriss Donald, Charlene Downes, Ben Kinsella, Rob Knox (of Harry Potter fame) Tom ap Rhys Price, John Monckton of Chelsea, Geoffrey Bacon of Camberwell, Constance Brown, 72, of Streatham, Elizabeth Pinhorn , 96, of Herne Hill, Thomas Kidd, 61, of Tulse Hill, Ted Howell, 75, of Lewisham, Leslie Watkinson, 66, of Peckham, and Frank “Paddy” Dempsey, 56, of Clapham, Richard Mannington Bowes of Ealing, William McKeeney of Glasgow, Like Fitzpatrick of Dollis Hill, Lee Massey of Bradford, Gavin Hopley 19 of Oldham Ross Parker of Peterborough, David Lees of Prestwich, Christopher Yates,murdered by Zahid Bashir et al, Richard Everitt and Craig Marshall wish Emoch had been heeded. Not to mention the relatives of the 7/7 bombings. Well, apart from the relatives of the Moslem victims obviously who are delighted that their loved onesnow have their 77 virgins.

Sun, 2012-07-15 23:04 — Davidaslindsay (not verified)

Enoch was right. Right to line up with Tony Benn and Peter Shore, but against Margaret Thatcher, on Europe. Right to oppose both capital punishment and nuclear weapons, the two ultimate expression of statism as idolatry. On the latter, he again correctly sided with Benn and Shore against Thatcher. On both, he articulated what were in fact the views of many High Tories.

Right about the normalisation of Northern Ireland, conventionally known as total integration, which will almost certainly never now happen. Right to use the full panoply of central government planning to make significant additions to the National Health Service, and always to remain a stalwart defender of it.

Right to warn against importing the communal politics of the Indian Subcontinent. Right to oppose the subordination of our foreign policy to a foreign power. Right to denounce the atrocities at Hola. Right to support Britain’s non-intervention in Vietnam. Right to oppose the first Gulf War, which we fought as if buying oil from Saddam Hussein would somehow have been worse than buying it from the al-Sabahs (or the al-Sauds).

Right to reprimand Thatcher that “A Tory believes that there is no such thing as an individual who exists without society”, pointedly referring to Tories, an age-old culture or series of subcultures, rather than to the Conservative Party, a late and strictly conditional vehicle for Toryism.

Right to oppose abortion, and experimentation on embryonic human beings, unlike Thatcher; when he sought to outlaw such experimentation, he was supported by John Smith, the subsequent Labour Leader whose death not only paved the way for Blair, but alone persuaded Blair not to leave Parliament at the subsequent General Election as had been his intention. Right to support the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. Right to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse anyway, and to see Russia as our natural ally. Right to fight against grotesque erosions of our liberties, such as reversals of the burden of proof in certain cases.

But he was also wrong. Wrong about immigration at the time, in specific relation to British passport-holding East African Asians, although like a lot of people who had served in the Raj he had a great deal of respect for Islam, and he was in fact a fluent Urdu-speaker; those attempting to recruit him to that present debate should count themselves lucky that he is no longer alive to correct them.

Wrong about economics, although his followers were and are much worse than he was. Wrong in his inability to see that the implementation of his economic views was impossible without the huge-scale importation of people as much as of anything else, as part of that system’s overall corrosion of everything that conservatives exist in order to conserve. Wrong to scorn the Commonwealth. Wrong in the bitterness of his anti-Americanism. Wrong to support easier divorce.

Wrong to give aid and succour to the Monday Club, although he never joined it, when it was supporting the Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown (a move fiercely opposed by Nelson Mandela and the ANC, for all their other faults), and when it was supporting that Republic’s satellite, which first committed treason against Her Majesty and then very rapidly purported to depose her, removing the Union Flag from its own, something that even the Boer Republic never did. Wrong in his insistence on the utter otherworldliness of Christianity, a position which was wholly incompatible with his vigorous pulpit defence of bodily resurrection.

His present-day admirers and detractors alike should learn the lessons.