Enoch Powell

The Right Honourable John Enoch Powell MBE (June 16, 1912 – February 8, 1998) was a British politician. 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 immigration and the United Kingdom's entry into the European Union, sparking national debates which continue to this day.

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 MP for Wolverhampton South West in the 1950 general election.

Related Topics:
Conservative Party - Conservative Research Department - Iain Macleod - Wolverhampton South West - 1950 general election

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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 reconquer the Canal because he thought the British no longer had the resources to be a world power anymore.

Related Topics:
Suez Canal - Egyptians - British attempts to reconquer the Canal

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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. The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all- which Powell believed (and is now widely accepted) to be a major cause of inflation. Inflation rose to 2.5%; a high figure for the era, especially in peacetime.

Related Topics:
Financial Secretary to the Treasury - 1958 - Peter Thorneycroft - Monetarist

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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:

Related Topics:
1960 - 1962 - Psychiatric institutions - 1961

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"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." Middlesex University

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The ultimate result of this was the Thatcherite Care in the Community initiative of the 1980s.

Related Topics:
Thatcherite - Care in the Community - 1980s

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Later, he encouraged a large number of Commonwealth immigrants into the understaffed National Health Service. Prior to this, many non-white immigrants were often obliged to take the jobs that no one else wanted (eg. street cleansing, night-shift assembly production lines), often paid considerably less than their white counterparts. Powell was vehemently opposed by the Trade Union movement (who feared that immigrants were being used by capitalists to keep wages low by artificially increasing competition for jobs), 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.

Related Topics:
Commonwealth - Immigrant - National Health Service - Trade Union

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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.

Related Topics:
Iain Macleod - Alec Douglas-Home - 1964 general election - 1965 - Edward Heath

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In a controversial speech on the 26th May 1967 Powell criticised Britain's post-war world role:

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"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".

Related Topics:
Indian Empire - United States - Communism

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"Mass appeal"

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 20th 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 christened the Rivers of Blood speech by the press, and the name stuck.

Related Topics:
1968 - Immigration - Virgil - Tiber - Rivers of Blood speech

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One feature of the speech was the extensive quotation of a letter Powell had received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in Wolverhampton, 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. It is alleged that the National Front fed Powell with black propaganda, which he failed to recognize as such, although it has also been claimed that the women actually lived in Nottingham. The speech was delivered while the 1968 Race Relations Bill (later Act) was making its way through parliament, which was to make the colour bar in housing illegal.

Related Topics:
National Front - Black propaganda - Nottingham

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With appalling timing, Powell only realised later that of all the days he could have made a speech that some regarded as racist, it was on the anniversary of Hitler's birth - during a period of Britain's history when it was known that various neo-Nazis such as Colin Jordan and John Tyndall (the latter a future leader of the National Front and founder of the British National Party) held birthday parties in the Nazi leader's honour.

Related Topics:
Racist - Hitler - Neo-Nazi - Colin Jordan - John Tyndall - National Front - British National Party

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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 (predominantly positive) letters. The Sunday Times received a writ from Powell for branding his speeches as "racialist", and also gained a court order for possession of the letters he had received as a demonstration of the validity of their argument. Powell dropped the libel action as a consequence of the court order.

Related Topics:
Shadow Cabinet - The Sunday Times

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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.

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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 rap 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. The Conservatives had discovered in nationwide studies in the wake of the notorious General Election result in Birmingham Smethwick in 1964 (where Peter Griffiths took the safe seat of Labour's pending Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker) that a hard line on immigration would win them up to twenty Labour seats, but it took their defeat in the 1966 general election to push the Conservatives into deciding to "play the race card".

Related Topics:
Smethwick - 1964 - Peter Griffiths - Patrick Gordon Walker - 1966 general election

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Racist demagogue or lost Prime Minister?

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 poll in 1972 showed him being the most popular politician in the country; this popularity did not wane significantly during his lifetime. 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 (given that the eventual winner, Margaret Thatcher, won through playing down her support). 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. There is however, little doubt that the Conservatives would have won the 1979 election after the Winter of Discontent.

Related Topics:
General Election win in 1970 - West Midlands - Daily Express - 1972 - Heath's - 1974 - Margaret Thatcher - Conservatives - 1979 election - Winter of Discontent

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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 (and two months after his death) saw a vote of the studio audience yielded a 64% 'not a racist' result.

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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 (whom Powell grouped together as the "chattering classes") are among his detractors, and denounce him as a racist. For some though, this charge seems unconvincing in the light of Powell's pre-political actions. 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.

Related Topics:
Homosexual - Death penalty - Conservative Party - Chattering classes - Viceroy of India

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An unusual Conservative?

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. 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).

Related Topics:
1974 - European Common Market - October 1974 General Election - 1975

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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 adovcated European states, including Britain, to join the EEC because it was the 'political arm' of NATO and therefore fitted into America's grand strategy against the Soviet Union.

Related Topics:
Euroscepticism - Cold War - Soviet Union - United States - EEC - NATO

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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.

Related Topics:
Monetarist - 1965

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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 (and thus 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.

Related Topics:
1980s - Life Peer - House Of Lords - 1958 - Hereditary peer

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