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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.

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 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. His edition of Thucydides' Historia for the Oxford University Press published in 1938 remains the standard Oxford Classical Text for that author.

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. Powell also fought in Africa with the Desert Rats. 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 continued his obsession of the alleged anti-Britishness of the Americans 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 MP 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 reconquer 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. 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, 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 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.

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 the 26th 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 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.

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. Powell refused to name her because he felt it was right to keep 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 (Heffer, p. 460). 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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".

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 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.

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).

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.

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 (who largely controlled the UUP after their split from the Conservative Party) - 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 IRA 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 IRA 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 CIA 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 INLA had not killed Airey Neave but 'MI6 and their friends' were responsible instead.

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 get the then Soviet-leader Gorbachov to halt unification, but failed.

Though he was on supposedly good terms with Margaret Thatcher (she claimed her own monetarist policies stemmed from Powell's, to which he remarked drily, "A pity she did not understand them!"), 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 SDLP'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.

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 in 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 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" (Heffer p130) while walking to his flat in his (then future) 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" (voted for by the public in a BBC nationwide poll).

Powell is mentioned in several Monty Python skits, including "Travel Agent" and "Election Special".

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 (a personal friend from a different political background, whom Powell had aided to renounce his peerage and so remain an elected MP), he was seen as one of the last of the politicians to put 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 (The History of 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 (and two months after his death) saw a vote of the studio audience yielded a 64% 'not a racist' result.

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.

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 (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.

Bibliography

• Foot, Paul, The Rise of Enoch Powell, Cornmarket Press (hb)/Penguin (pb), 1969.
• Roth, Andrew, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune, Macdonald, 1970.
• Stacey, Tom, Immigration and Enoch Powell, London, 1970, ISBN 85468-013-0 (hardback), 85408-024-1 (paperback).
• Shepherd, Robert, Enoch Powell, Hutchinson, London, 1998, ISBN 0-09-179208-8
• The Daily Telegraph Obituary of Enoch Powell, 9th February, 1998.
• Heffer, Simon, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998, ISBN 0-297-84286-2

Powell's writings

• Enoch Powell (1969) Freedom and Reality Eliot Rightwat Books, ISBN 0716005417 (this volume includes the text of the Rivers of Blood speech.)
• J.Enoch Powell (1977) Joseph Chamberlain, London, ISBN 0-500-01185-0
• Enoch Powell (1977) Wrestling With the Angel, London, ISBN 0-85969-127-6
• 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 0-847792-88-0

See also

• Powellism - The political beliefs of Enoch Powell
• Radio Enoch - Antisocialist pirate radio station that took its name from antisocialist Enoch Powell
• Rivers of Blood

External links

• Obituary from The Guardian
• Papers of Enoch Powell
• Radio Interview on Immigration Powell interviewed shortly after his controversial "Rivers of Blood" speech. (Audio clip, 3:31 mins, Requires RealPlayer to listen)

• 1912 births
• 1998 deaths
• Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
• Alumni of the School of Oriental and African Studies
• British MPs
• Northern Ireland politicians
• UK Conservative Party politicians
• Members of the British Empire