WHEN ENOCH POWELL MADE his ‘Tiber foaming with much blood’ speech in April 1968, I was 18-years old and starting my young at heart Marxist phase (upon reflection, childlike phase would be more accurate) which lasted 12 years. As a stalwart of the Left and believing myself to have the answers (thanks to Marx) to every political and philosophical question against capitalism, and ready to join the argument – not, as one would suppose, against my class enemies: but, as is often the case with the Left, part of a continuing internecine conflict between the various chapters of the Marxist faith (Leninism, Trotskyism etcetera).
To me Enoch Powell was evil incarnate. Physically, he reminded me of an earlier period. He was old-fashioned looking; as if he had walked straight out of an Edwardian England long gone. A colonial England which he represented and I loathed. I, like many at the time, felt their liberal consciences stirred by the way our Empire treated its ‘subject races’. So when Enoch began to speak out against immigration, much of which at the time came from parts of our earlier empire; I became outraged and sickened when I saw London porters and Dockers leap to his support. I was bemused, not to say, confused to see my beloved proletariat beating a way to Enoch’s door.
Powell was racist. That is what the whole of the political culture believed; from the Left of the Tory Party, the Labour Party, Liberal Party, the British Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Workers Revolutionary Party, and even the Monster Raving Loony Party.
Enoch Powel was truly isolated. As his authorised biographer, Simon Heffer has written in today’s Daily Mail, ‘Because of his famous — or notorious — speech on immigration, delivered in Birmingham in April 1968, Powell’s wider achievements have been largely ignored…’.
The so-called 'Rivers of Blood' reference was based upon a scene from Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘I see wars, horrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood.’
This one reference eviscerated Powell’s future in mainstream politics. I myself, in my naive, ignorant, not to mention stupid and arrogant way; wanted to see Powell crucified for his racist, colonialist, and imperialist comments (remember I was a Marxist).
This one reference eviscerated Powell’s future in mainstream politics. I myself, in my naive, ignorant, not to mention stupid and arrogant way; wanted to see Powell crucified for his racist, colonialist, and imperialist comments (remember I was a Marxist).
POWELL however, proved himself the greatest political and parliamentary mind of the last century. He was no Karl Marx – that incredulous mountebank of a the philosopher, who wanted to change the world and did so briefly at such a great cost to those parts of humanity that were served his nostrums and had them systemized into a Hammer House of Horror that followed the Nazi Holocaust.
Enoch Powell ill deserved posterity’s judgement of him. At the time the Tory leader, Ted Heath, sacked him for his ‘racist’ comments. Since then the Tory Party has been fearful of any association with perhaps the greatest intellect that chose to live among them – and what has been the outcome of their disavowal? Why, David Cameron of course.
A racist, as I understand it, is someone who thinks his or herself superior to other races. Powell thought such a belief a wholly unbalanced state to be in mentally. Enoch, I remember back then was interviewed by David Frost and he put the racist charge to him. As I remember he loathed any such concept of racial superiority and would never countenance it. No human being of whatever colour is superior to the next.
But what Enoch Powell was talking of was culture. He was a Tory, unlike many of those who see themselves as such today. Powell believed in the superiority of our culture, just as did the French theirs, as well as the Italians, Spanish, Indian, and the amalgam of all other cultures.
Cultural superiority is not racial superiority. But Enoch did warn that uncontrolled numbers of immigrants could jeopardise British culture, and it was this he was speaking out against. Multiculturalism was anathema to Enoch Powell. He had seen what had happened in India and what it had led to. He called it communalism. It set Hindu and Muslim against each other after independence and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths as a consequence; until India’s Muslim population were given a country of their own, Pakistan - which then created a separate state known as Bangladesh.
BUT IMMIGRATION was not the only question that Enoch Powell tackled and proved himself right about. Europe also attracted Enoch’s attention. In the 1974 general election he, as member of the Tory Party advised Tory voters to vote for a party that promised a referendum on our continued membership of the Common Market. While his arguments were largely ignored then, they have now been accepted as being right by many millions who used at one time to discount them.
When Enoch chose, through principle, to advise the British public to vote for a party that promised a referendum, he was barracked by Tory supporters; and a classic exchange took place between himself and one of his accusers.
‘Judas’, a heckler cried.
‘Judas was paid!’ Was Powell’s instant reply. ‘I am making a sacrifice!’ He was more of a Tory than was his heckler. He also knew what such advice to the electorate would mean to his future – a future of near isolation from within the Tory Party, as well as national villain for his views on immigration.
I believe that Powell is due for revision, especially in light of the events surrounding the euro. Events that he forewarned his country of; events that would lead to the loss national sovereignty and national statehood, if our leaders pursued (as Ted Heath was intent upon doing) greater monetary and political union, from which the euro has become the ill-developed foetus that once aborted threatens economic chaos in Europe.
Enoch was a great man. He has no equal in modern politics; he would not recognise the modern Conservative Party as anything of the sort. Today the party is being led by social democrats; they are pro-Europe but somewhat spineless when it comes to the advocacy of a Federal Europe which they believe in, but know all too well (as Enoch did) that the British people would not willingly demolish their nation state, and allow Europe to collect and spend their taxes, and make their laws.
I think that Enoch was hated more for his views on Europe than immigration by the Tory leadership under Ted Heath. The so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech presented Heath with the perfect opportunity to rid himself of Powell, and this is what he did.
POWELL WAS much more than a single speech about immigration that disfigured his reputation and allowed his enemies within his own party to rid themselves of his influence. Immigration, Europe, the dangers of an overinflated public sector, and a belief in the operation of free markets with the minimum of regulation by the state. These were just some of the bullet points that Powell would still have addressed the nation with today, as he tried to do in the 1960s. He would have done so because, as we all now know, Powell’s earlier message to us is more relevant today than it was then.
Immigration has grown beyond Powell’s earlier expectations. While Europe has exceeded his own expectations of stupidity in the way the euro was given birth too; the public sector is now catching up to the private in terms of the country’s economy.
Today, throughout the continent of Europe, social democracy has inveigled itself upon the body politic[1] of all European nations. This has led to a narrowing of the private/public sector divide, and threatens private sector competition via European edicts that seek to put a stranglehold on the free market and competition.
If the likes of David Cameron, as well as other youthful and modern Tories, had ever taken the trouble, despite the finest education this country could give them, to engage in a passing interest in Powell; they might have understood the power and sobriety of his arguments, and may have found the courage to pursue them – but, of course, ambition is everything in politics.
[1] By the ‘body politic’ I mean each and every one of the main political parties throughout Europe.
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