Enoch Powell

A prophet, and therefore despised

Enoch Powell was regularly tarred as a racist, a Little Englander, and many other similar terms. To the intelligentsia, the Grauniad/BBC axis, he was the unacceptable - an middle/upper class gentleman who said in educated tones what the skinheads and their ilk grunted and sprayed on walls. Things like the following:

“Large parts of many of our cities will, by the beginning of the next century be occupied by a population which has nothing in common with the people of this country”

They had to insult him and cancel him, because the alternative was to try and debate him intellectually, and they couldn’t do that. They couldn’t do it because he was their intellectual superior - literally a genius - and he had facts and logic on his side. Hence the insults.

I was reminded of Mr Powell by a post by Niccolo Soldo, which is well worth reading in its entirety.

Enoch Powell and His 1959 Speech in UK Parliament On the Mistreatment of Mau Mau Prisoners

However, at the end of it, he posts a couple of Youtube video links. The first of which is where Powell (at ~5m ) says what I have illustrated regarding British cities in the year 2000 and later.

Before it at about 3.5 minutes, he offhandedly explains the reason behind the Windrush Scandal of the 2010s when morons in the Home Office tried to deport people who had arrived from the Caribbean in the 1950s (and later, but especially the arrivals prior to 1962). Essentially prior to 1962 there was no way to differentiate between native British and those from what was formerly the British Empire. In fact the issue persisted until 1971 because the 1962 act didn’t properly fix things but it was particularly problematic prior to 1962.

While Powell is most well known for his “Rivers of Blood” analogy regarding immigration that wasn’t the only thing he was right about. But he wasn’t perfect, sometimes he logically argued himself into positions that he then logically argued an opposite belief a year or two later and the result of this was he was a persistent pain to every government, whether he was supposed to be in it or not.

Niccolo discusses an earlier brush with controversy where he objected to the cover up of what were essentially war crimes by British forces in Kenya in the 1950s. This one was interesting because it aligned him with well known lefties like Tony Benn, with whom he had otherwise little in common politically. Although oddly at various times he adopted end positions similar to leftish ones but coming to them via completely different logical arguments.

For example he thought that Britain should unilaterally disarm itself of its nuclear weapons. His reasoning was that there was no point in having nukes, we’d only use them against the Soviet Union and that if we used them against the SU then it would be part of the wave that included the massive US strike and so our hits would be pointless pinpricks in comparison. I wonder what he’d think of today’s Russia/Ukraine war which certainly was partially enabled by Ukraine unilaterally giving up its nukes in the 1990s.

He was also anti-American, but again for quite different reasons from the commies. I think deep down he felt that the US had forced the British into a position where they had to give up the Empire and that rankled. He certainly believed that the US had not shared SIGINT with the UK during the war against Japan that it could have - something that my father also believed, in fact it seems to have been a common belief in relevant military intelligence circles - and I suspect he extended that to a general distrust. On the other hand, and somewhat ironically, a lot of what he said about the need for Europe to have its own forces to properly defend against the Soviet Union sound remarkably similar to what President Trump and his team have been saying.

One other area where he did find surprising commonality with the far left was another area where he was (IMHO) right, much to the displeasure of the chattering classes.

That commonality was in Britain joining the EEC in the 1970s. Powell was critical of the European Community (as it was in the 1970s) and saw that it was poorly suited to the UK. I don’t think he made the case as clearly as he could have but then at the time I was in pre-school so I’m basing this off what others report and they may well have lied. After all in the 1970s the received wisdom was strongly of the belief that the UK must be a part of the “European project”. There were grumbles about the CAP and so on, but the feeling was that the UK had to be “in Europe” and once in it would be able to negotiate to fix the bits that were most broken. It took a good twenty years for people to realize that there were fundamental constitutional differences, something that Powell understood well.

Enoch Powell, my father and I

As I commented on Niccolo’s post I had the fortune to meet Enoch Powell in the early 1980s. I think it would have been about April 1983 but I could be wrong. I don’t recall the reason Powell came, it could have been something to do with the Bible or Greek Patristics, it could have been theology, it could have been Gladstone or it could have been something totally different that I can’t guess. Anyway he spent a few days with my father for some reason and the two of them got on like a house on fire.

Both were Cambridge educated classicists, though my father was there a decade after Powell, and they had a number of other things in common. They were of essentially the same social class and similar background. Both had been in intelligence in WW2 and concentrated on the Japanese front. Both had been to India - my father as missionary, Powell as soldier in WW2. Both had learned Indian languages - Powell learned Urdu, my father Tamil. Both had worked with “working class” people - my father as a vicar in Rochdale, Powell as MP in Wolverhampton. They also shared a similar political outlook, though I don’t think they discussed politics much beyond sharing their distaste for Europe.

What I recall of those few days was what a nice man Enoch Powell was. As I mentioned in the comment, he helped me with my homework, which was Herodotus. I recall him, in addition to giving me specific advice, discussing with me and my father the various dialects of ancient Greek and how remarkable it was that an educated Greek in Constantinople could have read Herodotus written a thousand years or more earlier without much difficulty. I also recall him encouraging my father to learn German and even Russian because “you’ve learned two non Indo-European languages already, so both will be easy for you as a classicist”¹. Since Powell spoke (or at least read and wrote) multiple Indo-European languages, including both of those, he may have been optimistic but his encouragement undoubtedly helped.

He entirely failed to mention to me that he’d spent years as an academic studying Herodotus and had actually published a well known book about his work. But that did explain how he could know precisely what passage I was having trouble with from just the first few words.

One thing that stood out was his intellect. He wasn’t in any way patronizing but he made little attempt to disguise his brains. He started off assuming you could more or less keep up and would adjust down until you did. He was also curious about new things. I don’t think he was faking it when he asked me about home computers and what good they were for. I’m not entirely sure I gave him a good answers but the questions he asked helped me realize that I really enjoyed programming them and that therefore a computer programmer might be a good career.

The other main thing that he taught me was to distrust the media. He gave some specific examples regarding the IRA and Northern Ireland and how the BBC and the newspapers had exaggerated certain events. He also pointed out that the media had to pick and choose what to report on and that they could prioritize some events over others.

One other thing. Part of his background was (Anglican) Christianity. He might not have gone to church every day, but he certainly did go on Sundays and if the opportunity presented itself he would attend Matins or Evensong. It was just the sort of thing one did. And one behaved accordingly.

Who is the Enoch Powell of Today?

There probably isn’t one.

There are a couple of former Tory MPs who come close - both have substacks as it happens, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rt Hon Steve Baker FRSA - but while both are undoubtedly erudite I don’t think they have quite the same irritating quality of independence and voting against the party that he had. They prefer to make their objections known behind the scenes rather than on the floor of the House of Commons.

Another who might be thought of as similar is Rupert Lowe, formerly Reform and now his own Restore UK party. I admire Lowe in lots of ways and he has some of the same qualities. He certainly has the same obstinate streak that Powell had, which caused his nominal allies and colleagues so much strain. And like Powell that obstinate streak can have both positives and negatives. But while Lowe has some wonderful bon-mots and a similar general outlook on life he lacks the genuine intellectual superiority that Powell had. You can point out that it’s a different era, but the Powell who made his case on the Dick Cavett show in the youtube video has this air of intellect and smartness that Lowe lacks. Lowe would always call a spade a spade, Powell is the right circumstances would call it manually operated ferrous earth moving equipment.

It is of course questionable whether Britain needs another Enoch Powell, but he is going to go down in history as one of the most influential British politicians who were not Prime Minister².

1. Quote not exact because it was 45 years ago

2. Depending on how things play in the next few years Nigel Farage could be another one but hopefully we will see him in No 10. Powell’s wikipedia page is worth reading just to get a feel for how many things he was involved in from WW2 to the Falklands war and more