Encyclopedia
John Enoch Powell, MBE, PC, was a right-wing British politician and Conservative Party Member of Parliament between 1950 and February 1974, and an
Ulster Unionist MP between October 1974 and 1987. Controversial throughout his career, his tenure in senior office was brief; however, his skills as a polemicist and orator gained significant public support for his controversial views on issues such as race, national identity, immigration, and the
United Kingdom's entry into the
European Union, sparking national debates which continue to this day.
Life
Early years
Powell was born and raised in
Birmingham, the son of two schoolteachers. His formidable intelligence was apparent early on. From
King Edward's School, Birmingham he became a respected student of Classics, in particularly Latin and Greek and became one of the few students in the school's history to attain 100% in an end-of-year English examination . He completed his education at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a double first and fell under the powerful influence of
A. E. Housman. He was later appointed Professor of Greek at
Sydney University aged 25. Amongst his pupils was the future
Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam. He revised Stuart-Jones edition of
Thucydides'
Historiae for the
Oxford University Press in 1938. His most lasting contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus . Powell's achievement in other languages is typified by aedition of an important Welsh legal text.
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, in a bid to further his chances of being appointed
Viceroy of India.
While Powell was in Australia as a Professor he grew increasingly angry at the appeasement of
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".
Upon the immediate outbreak of war Powell returned to
England, although not before buying a
Russian dictionary because Powell thought 'Russia would hold the key to our survival and victory, as it had in 1812 and 1916'.
War years
During
World War II, Powell enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, almost a month after returning home because most of the recruiting stations would not take him and Powell only managed to join the Warwickshire's by enlisting officially as an
Australian. 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 here in the
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 the 16th February 1943 Powell said:
"I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were...our terrible enemy, America...".
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 the 13th November 1943 in which the American
Clare Booth 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".
Powell 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
flag back in
Singapore' before, Powell thought, the Americans beat Britain to it.
By the end of the war, he was the youngest brigadier in the
British army, having started off as a Private. He felt guilty at the end of the war for having survived when many of those he'd met during his journey through the ranks had not.
Conservative Party
After the war, he joined the Conservative Party and worked for the Conservative Research Department, where one of his colleagues was Iain Macleod. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West in the
1950 general election.
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.
He worked in Housing and then as Financial Secretary to the Treasury but in 1958, Powell resigned along with Peter Thorneycroft and Nigel Birch in protest at the government's plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch monetarist and believer in market forces. 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.
Powell returned to government in 1960 when he was appointed to the post of Minister for Health, albeit outside the Cabinet but this changed in 1962. In this post which he was responsible for promoting an ambitious ten year programme of general hospital building and for commencing 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".
The speech catalysed a debate that was one of several strands leading to the Care in the Community initiative of the 1980s.
Later, he encouraged a large number of
Commonwealth immigrants into the understaffed
National Health Service. Prior to this, many non-white immigrants who held full rights of citizenship in Britain were often obliged to take the jobs that no one else wanted , often paid considerably less than their white counterparts. Powell was vehemently opposed by the
Trade Union movement , but there is no doubt that in easing non-white immigrants into what was considered a prestigious form of career, he boosted the confidence of the immigrant population and helped lay the foundations of a future immigrant-descended permanent Afro-Caribbean and Asian middle class in Britain.
Along with Iain Macleod, Powell refused to serve in the cabinet position following the appointment of
Alec Douglas-Home as prime minister. Following the Conservatives' defeat in the
1964 general election he agreed to return to the front bench as Transport spokesman. 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.
In a controversial speech on 26 May 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".
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 immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain. Because of its allusion to
Virgil saying that the
Tiber would foam with blood, Powell's warning was christened the "Rivers of Blood" speech by the press, and the name stuck.
The central political issue addressed by the speech was not however immigration as such. It was the introduction by the then Labour Government of anti-discrimination legislation which would effectively criminalise the expression of racial prejudice 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 and his journalists failed to identify the woman. Powell refused to name her because he felt it was right to respect her confidentiality. 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. The speech was delivered while the 1968 Race Relations Bill was making its way through parliament, which was to make the colour bar in housing illegal.
Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech and Powell never held another senior political post. However, Powell gained considerable support from the public, receiving almost 120,000 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 as "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.
Three days after the speech, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the
House of Commons 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting at Powell's apparent "victimisation", and the next day, 400 meat porters from Smithfield market handed in a ninety-two page petition in support of Powell.
Some suspected that Powell was set up – TV cameras were not known to turn up at meetings of the West Midland 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.
An unusual Conservative?
Powell's popularity contributed 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. A
Daily Express in 1972 showed him being the most popular politician in the country. Powell had previously made an attempt to become leader of the party, but votes in his favour barely got in to double figures. It is rarely disputed that Powell would have the been the main contender from the Conservative right after
Heath's double failure in the 1974 elections, but whether he would have won the contest is a matter more of circumstance than of solid fact . Powell's disadvantage is that he was viewed as a man of questions and not answers- his rogueish nature would have also counted against him.
In February 1974 Powell quit 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 is possible that Powell's comments led 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" .
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. The UK's "independent nuclear deterrent" was also viewed negatively; because 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 argued that the Americans advocated European states, including Britain, to join the
European Economic Community because it was the 'political arm' of
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and therefore fitted into America's grand strategy against the
Soviet Union.
Ulster Unionist Party
In a sudden general election later in 1974, Powell returned to
Parliament as an
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 only survive if the Unionists strove to integrate fully with the United Kingdom by abandoning the devolved rule that
Northern Ireland had recently enjoyed. He refused point blank to join the
Orange Order - the first Ulster Unionist MP at
Westminster never to be a member , 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 was for
Ulster to be an integral part of the United Kingdom, treated no differently than any other of its constituent parts. He claimed the ambiguous nature of Ulster's status, with its own
parliament and prime minister, gave hope to the PIRA that it could detach Ulster from 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".
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 get Ulster into an all-Ireland state because the condition for Irish membership of NATO, Powell claimed, was the
Six Counties. 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 the 15th 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'.
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 by the Americans in order to stop Neave's policy of integration for
Northern Ireland. Then in 1986 he again argued that Irish National Liberation Army had not killed
Airey Neave but '
MI6 and their friends' were responsible instead.
Though he was on supposedly good terms with
Margaret Thatcher , he came into conflict with her in 1985 in protest because of her support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement, resigning his seat and then regaining it at the ensuing by-election. Powell lost his seat in the
1987 general election to the
Social Democratic Labour Party's Eddie McGrady, mainly due to both demographic changes and boundary changes resulting in there being many more Catholics in his seat of South Down 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.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 Powell claimed that because Britain was not an ally of Kuwait in the 'formal sense' and that the balance of power in the
Middle East 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' and 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'.
When German unification was on the agenda in 1990 Powell claimed Britain urgently needed to create an alliance with
Russia in view of Germany's effect on the balance of power in
Europe. This part of Powell's analysis was taken more 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 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 her and therefore, in Powell's view, national independence.
His unionism did not block his capacity for independent thought; he was critical of the
SAS shootings of three unarmed
IRA members in
Gibraltar in 1988.
Enoch Powell died at 4.30am on 8 Februrary 1998 from the effects caused by
Parkinson's disease at the age of 85, and is interred in Warwick Cemetery, Warwickshire. His wife, Pamela, and their two daughters, survived him.
Personality
Despite his earlier
atheism Powell became a devout
Anglican, having thought in 1949 "that he heard the bells of St Peter's Wolverhampton calling him" while walking to his flat in his constituency. Subsequently, he became a warden of
Westminster Abbey. He spent much of his later life trying to prove, with close textual reading, that Christ had not been
crucified but hanged.
Powell was reading
Greek by age 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" .
Powell had remarked that "all political careers end in failure" and did not hesitate to agree that this maxim applied to his own. Like
Tony Benn , 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 considerable 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 and published many other works of classical scholarship. He published a biography of
Joseph Chamberlain. Powell published many books on political matters too, that 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 nonsensical quotes from Labour party manifestos or
Harold Wilson.
Racist demagogue or lost Prime Minister?
Powell said "I have set and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin." The public tend to agree with this statement.
The Trial of Enoch Powell, a
Channel 4 television broadcast on the thirtieth anniversary of his Birmingham speech saw a vote of the studio audience yielded a 64% 'not a racist' result. However, 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."
Powell's detractors often assert that he was 'far-right', 'proto-fascist' or 'racist'. The first two charges seem to be incorrect in the light of his voting record on most social issues, such as
homosexual law reform and the abolition of the death penalty, both liberal reforms which had limited support in the Conservative Party at the time. Although the public tend to support Powell on the issues for which he gained fame, many journalists, commentators and politicians are among his detractors, and denounce him as a racist. For some though, this charge seems unconvincing in the light of Powell's Claims against this include that Powell was simply trying to garner support to become
Viceroy of India, and that it was not until the late '60s that he made speeches that addressed the issues of race and immigration.
Although a strong monetarist, his views were often socially relaxed. He voted for relaxed divorce laws in 1965 on the grounds that two unhappy people should not be forced to maintain their unhappy state. He also voted for relaxed abortion laws, claiming that such actions are on the conscience of the individual, not the government.
His 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 of the day and ensure he would not be offered a Life Peerage , which he had no intention of accepting so long as Edward Heath sat in the Commons. 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 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.
Powell's name was mentioned in some of the more daring BBC comedies of the 1960s and 70s, e.g. in several
Monty Python skits, including "Travel Agent" and "Election Special". In a Christmas epiode of
Steptoe and Son, the elder Steptoe sings "Enoch's Deaming of a White Christmas," as he prepares Christmas decorations at the table. And 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 didn't 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 , also a novel about immigrants.
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
Bibliography
- Daily Telegraph Obituary of Enoch Powell, 9th February, 1998.
- Foot, Paul, The Rise of Enoch Powell, Cornmarket Press /Penguin , 1969.
- Heffer, Simon, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998, ISBN 0-297-84286-2
- Roth, Andrew, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune, Macdonald, 1970.
- Shepherd, Robert, Enoch Powell, Hutchinson, London, 1998, ISBN 0-09-179208-8
- Stacey, Tom, Immigration and Enoch Powell, London, 1970, ISBN 0-85468-013-0 , ISBN 0-85408-024-1 .
Powell's writings
- Enoch Powell The Rendel Harris Papyri
- Enoch Powell First Poems
- Enoch Powell A Lexicon to Herodotus
- Enoch Powell The History of Herodotus
- Enoch Powell Casting-off, and other poems
- Enoch Powell Herodotus, Book VIII
- Enoch Powell Llyfr Blegywryd
- Enoch Powell Thucydidis Historia
- Enoch Powell Herodotus
- Enoch Powell One Nation
- Enoch Powell Dancer's End and The Wedding Gift
- Enoch Powell The Social Services, Needs and Means
- Enoch Powell Change is our Ally
- Enoch Powell Biography of a Nation
- Enoch Powell Great Parliamentary Occasions
- Enoch Powell Saving in a Free Society
- Enoch Powell A Nation not Afraid
- Enoch Powell Medicine and Politics
- Enoch Powell The House of Lords in the Middle Ages
- Enoch Powell Freedom and Reality Eliot Rightwat Books, ISBN 0-7160-0541-7
- Enoch Powell Common Market: The Case Against
- Enoch Powell Still to Decide
- Enoch Powell Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out
- Enoch Powell No Easy Answers
- Enoch Powell Wrestling With the Angel, London, ISBN 0-85969-127-6
- Enoch Powell Joseph Chamberlain, London, ISBN 0-500-01185-0
- Enoch Powell A Nation or No Nation
- Enoch Powell Enoch Powell on 1992, London, ISBN 1-85470-008-1
- Enoch Powell Reflections of a Statesman, London, ISBN 0-8477-9288-0
- Enoch Powell Collected Poems
- Enoch Powell The Evolution of the Gospel
See also
- Powellism - The political beliefs of Enoch Powell
- Radio Enoch - Anti-socialist pirate radio station that took its name from Powell
- Rivers of Blood
External links
- Powell interviewed shortly after his controversial "Rivers of Blood" speech.
- -publsihed by
