21 July 2005 Blog Home : July 2005 : Permalink
The National Review has an article which mentions Enoch Powell and follows that up with a piece in the corner blog. Given the recent bombs in London this is perhaps unsurprising since Enoch Powell is best known for his "Rivers of blood" speech, which is indeed what the article is about. Unlike the Baron, I was unable to hear the original due to being in my mother's womb at the time, and likewise I am unable to comment on Britian at the time, however as someone who subsequently grew up in multi-culti England thereafter I think I can comment on the accuracy of his predictions.
Firstly, Enoch Powell most certainly got a raw deal from the establishment and the press at the time, and his rhetorical style was not that of a popularist which meant that he was easily pigeonholed into the "eccentric old fool" category. Indeed as I grew up my general knowledge of his comment was along the lines of "racist, wrong, country not wracked with civil war", which is simplistic when looking at the speech itself. He was not 100% correct of course, but then few people are, and was I think overly pessimistic in terms of his expectation of a lack of integration, but he was certainly right enough in his identification of the drawbacks of what we now call political correctness and the like. Needless to say this part of the speech was not a part that was mentioned by the media, no doubt because they were precisely guilty of what he spoke:
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same news papers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong. The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming. This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.
Indeed I would say that his speech was remarkably influential despite the near universal opprobium it received amongst the chattering classes. It is undoubtedly true that he was somewhat naive in terms of the sourcing of some of the material he based his speech on, and on the date when he chose to make it (the 79th aniversary of Hitler's birth), but it is also clear that he did indeed speak to the fears of many of the "non chattering classes" and that he spoke both out of conviction and out of the not unreasonable suggestion that uncontrolled immigration was going to cause trouble unless everything went perfectly.
I met Enoch Powell once a little over 20 years ago, when I was probably a bit young to appreciate him, and my father insisted that we discuss my stumbling comprehension of Herodotus and the Illiad in their original language (both Powell and my father read classics at Cambridge) rather than politics, whether concerning UK immigration or Northern Ireland (Powell was Ulster Unionist MP for South Down at the time). However I do recall he was able to use Herodotus to make a brief digression on how historically every race or nation sees itself surrounded by "βαρβαροι" - that is to say less civilized/capable foreigners and that hence the word for foreigner frequently becomes insulting. Although my father and Powell prefered to discuss theology and classics rather than politics, it was very clear to me that Enoch Powell was a gentleman and a scholar, and clearly someone so talented he would have made an impact no matter what he did. Had he turned to industry or commerce I have no doubt he could have made squillions, had he devoted his life to academia he would no doubt have been a huge influence in whatever university he taught. Compared to today's politicians (of any country or political party) he was an intellectual giant and I think that may have been part of his problem because I got the feeling that he expected his audience to be intelligent too and as a result he frequently omitted words of explanation that would have made his positions more justifiable.
Politically Powell was similar to Margaret Thatcher, and she claimed to have based her economic policy on his (to which he responded that it was "A pity she did not understand them!"). However he was considerably more of a UK isolationist being skeptical of both the US and Europe as his wikiquote page indicates. It is in fact interesting to note that he was against the first Iraq war and, for that matter, much of the cold war; something that I suspect that many of the people who call him to mind today as a result of the predictions in his rivers of blood speech would be rather uncomfortable with.
It is clear that a lot of his positions would cause trouble today just as they did during his life, however I think he would both have been a godsend to the blogosphere, as he was able to argue logically and consistently on controversial subjects, and a beneficiary of it, since bloggers are typically able to gather the required background to defend people such as Powell from the misinterpretations of a lazy, biased press. Moreover since Powell held positions that were mostly liberal (in a Manchesater sense) if not libertarian, he would have provided a certain amount of intellectual rigour to a part of the political spectrum that sometimes seems to suffer from being closely identified as idiotarian.