People From Birmingham

"It is no kindness on the part of politicians to minimize the size which those problems will assume, even if from now onwards every possible legislative and administrative action is taken to limit it. To draw attention to those problems and face them in the light of day is wiser than to apply the method of the ostrich which rarely yields a satisfactory result – even to ostriches. We have just been seeing in Wolverhampton the cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the shape of communalism. Communalism has been the curse of India and we need to be able to recognize it when it rears its head here. Large numbers of Sikhs, who had been serving the Wolverhampton Corporation voluntarily and contentedly, have found themselves against their will made the material for communal agitation. They have the same right as anyone else to decide which if any of the rules of their sect they will keep, and they had found no difficulty in entering the Corporation's employment and complying with the same rules as their fellow employees. For those who took a different and a stricter view there were plenty of other opportunities of employment. It will be the opposite to the equal treatment of all persons within the realm if employers are placed in the position of adjudicating upon the requirements of their employees' religion. The issue in this instance, is not racial or religious discrimination: it is communalism."

"Some problems are unavoidable. Some evils can be coped with to a certain extent, but not prevented. But that a nation should have saddled itself, without necessity and without countervailing benefit, with a wholly avoidable problem of immense dimensions is enough to make one weep. That the same nation should stubbornly persist in allowing the problem, great as it already is, to be magnified further, is enough to drive one to despair."

"There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response. This is the kind of feeling which you in Walsall and we in Wolverhampton are experiencing in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns. We are of course in a minority – make no mistake about that. Out of over 600 parliamentary constituencies perhaps less than 60 are affected in any way like ourselves. The rest know little or nothing and, we might sometimes be tempted to feel, care little or nothing. Only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school. He looked at me as if I were a Member of Parliament for central Africa, who had suddenly dropped from the sky into Westminster. So far as most people in the British Isles are concerned, you and I might as well be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances."

"Often when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost for the gift of capitalism."

"Integration of races of totally disparate origins and culture is one of the great myths of our time. It has never worked throughout history. The United States lost its only real opportunity of solving its racial problem when it failed after the Civil War to partition the old Confederacy into a "South Africa" and a "Liberia"."

"I find in my constituency in the last few weeks an ominous deterioration, which is taking the form not of discrimination by white against coloured but of insolence of coloured towards white and corresponding fearfulness on the part of white. It is this which will be exacerbated by the projected legislation on discrimination and which we shall have to take into account in making up our minds on our attitude."

"It is advertising that enthrones the customer as king. This infuriates the socialist...[it is] the crossing of the boundary between West Berlin and East Berlin. It is Checkpoint Charlie, or rather Checkpoint Douglas, the transition from the world of choice and freedom to the world of drab, standard uniformity."

"Once you go nuclear at all, you go nuclear for good; and you know it. Here is the parting of the ways, for from this point two opposite conclusions can be drawn. One is that therefore there can never again be serious war of any duration between Western nations, including Russia—in particular, that there can never again be serious war on the Continent of Europe or the waters around it, which an enemy must master in order to threaten Britain. That is the Government's position. The other conclusion, therefore, is that resort is most unlikely to be had to nuclear weapons at all, but that war could nevertheless develop as if they did not exist, except of course that it would be so conducted as to minimise any possibility of misapprehension that the use of nuclear weapons was imminent or had begun. The crucial question is whether there is any stage of a European war at which any nation would choose self-annihiliation in preference to prolonging the struggle. The Secretary of State says, "Yes, the loser or likely loser would almost instantly choose self-annihiliation." I say, "No. The probability, though not the certainty, but surely at least the possibility, is that no such point would come, whatever the course of the conflict.""

"Cyril Chantler, one of Britain's wisest doctors, likes to give people a photocopy of Enoch Powell's book on medicine and politics and tell them that it's the best thing ever written on the NHS. Younger readers may not have heard of Enoch Powell, but he was a Tory minister of health in the early 1960s. He is most famous for his racist "rivers of blood speech," and I can remember protesting outside his Belgravia home. Could he really have written the best book on the NHS? I think that Cyril is right. One of Powell's strengths is that he was a distinguished classicist and writes beautifully, with directness, clarity, and wit: it's like reading Tacitus on the NHS. Another strength is his inability to dissimulate; the source of his catastrophic speech, his weakness as a politician, and his most famous observation that "all political careers end in failure.""

"Of all my pupils he always insisted on the highest standards of accuracy and knowledge in those who taught him. Woe betide the careless young master, as I was, who was guilty of a rash statement because, from the back bench of the Upper Sixth would come a voice, “But, sir”, followed by a long quotation from an author. He was a pupil from whom I learnt more than most."

"Powell establishes without argument, but by direct invocation of the central mysteries of his political faith, that our joining the European Community (as it then was) had created a crisis of legitimacy. If legitimacy lies concealed within institutions, and summarised not by reasons but by the power of their sacred names, then fundamental changes to those institutions can never be legitimate. To put it another way: to describe political processes in sacramental language is to rule out all changes which are not adjustments... Powell...was right...that this transformation amounted to a disenchantment with England, and a loss of those magical formulae on which our pride, allegiance and law-abidingness had hitherto depended. To the demoralised nation that we have become, Powell's language seems fraught and quaint. But we look around ourselves in vain for the alternative, recognising that no politician today has the ability to renew through his words the enchantment that has for centuries attached us to our country, and made it so natural to us to make the sacrifices required for its survival."

"Often Powell's audiences felt that he was speaking liturgically, when he touched on the subject of England. And they were right. In elucidating the idea of sovereignty, Powell invokes "the Crown in council, the Crown in Parliament and the Crown in judgement", blessing the existing institutions with names that repeat their magic without explaining it. When, in his famous St George's Day speech, he allows himself the use of purple prose...it is in order to emphasise the mystery of England. The "real presence" in the heart of politics of that inexplicable thing called the Crown, the very thing over which Shakespeare puzzled in his history plays."

"It was in his invocations of this thinking, feeling collective that Powell made his distinctive contribution to British politics... [T]hrough his language he placed this thing as squarely before the consciousness of his listeners as Shakespeare had done in his history plays, and invited them to recognise that he was talking not about an abstraction, but about their own destiny, which is but the microcosm of the larger destiny on which they depended."

"Powell's impact has not just been limited to public opinion polls. The Butler–Stokes data from 1970 and 1974 clearly demonstrated that Powell played a decisive role in winning the 1970 election for the Tories and came back to make an important contribution to the Labour victory in February 1974. He has been able to mobilise his supporters in opposite directions at two different elections four years apart without the benefit of a political organisation or a strong base in the leadership of either political party; influence of this sort is probably unprecedented in British political history... His ability to fill a hall was unrivalled in British politics between 1968 and 1974."

"We badly need another Enoch Powell to articulate the role of the nation state in the twenty-first century, but until such a paragon appears, we can return to the canon of his writings and speeches to remind us why the nation state still does and should matter... As well as Disraeli, but very few Tory thinkers since, Enoch Powell himself had a mission "to teach the English their nationhood", as well as a genius for defining it."

"The essence of representative democracy, Powell argued, is majority rule. No matter how consociational arrangements, there will always be some party or interest that is left out of the ruling coalition. So what is it that persuades the minority to put up with rule by the majority? Lincoln had suggested that it was the opportunity to change the government by swinging public opinion behind the opposition. But why should they be prepared to wait, particularly if the odds on success are long and there is a better chance of influencing events by taking the law into their own hands? Powell's answer was that the minority will only put up with majority rule, if there is some overarching community sentiment which is stronger than the conflicts of ideological, economic or political interest that customarily divide people on a daily basis."

"I tried to persuade him that he was too logical, a concept which he could neither accept nor understand... I do not recall meeting anyone else with a mind that had such a power of acquiring knowledge. At one stage when Enoch was detailed to become an expert on town and country planning, he acquired the standard textbook and read it from page to page, as an ordinary mortal would read a novel. Within a matter of weeks he had fully grasped both the principles of the problem and the details of the legal situation. Within a matter of a few months he was writing to the author of the textbook, pointing out the errors that he had made."

"Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes."

"Poor Enoch! Driven mad by the remorselessness of his own logic!"

"Enoch Powell has the finest mind in the House of Commons. The best trained, and the most exciting... Powellism is not wholly or even a mainly a right-wing creed: by those rather absurd touchstones that 'progressives' delight to use—abolition of corporal and capital punishment, implementation of the Wolfenden Report, the humanising of penal and mental health reform—Powell is a progressive. Typically, Powell declines to be typed. He does not fit into any political slot. He is just Enoch Powell... I am a fellow-traveller, but sometimes I leave Powell's train a few stations down the line, before it reaches, and sometimes crashes into, the terminal buffers. I am certainly less logical in my political approach, but I would argue that Powell suffers sometimes from an excess of logic."

"Powell is the politician who dominates our age as no other does. The arguments that he articulated in the 1960s and 1970s resonate across the world. On the one hand, the seemingly unstoppable rise of the populist right, from France's Marine Le Pen to Hungary's Viktor Orban. On the other, the abiding split on Europe within the Conservative party that no leader has ever healed. The age of Brexit is the age of Powell."

"On a robust set of assumptions, Powell was responsible for the victory of the Conservatives in 1970 and of Labour in February 1974."

"In the mid-Seventies he came to Oxford to give a talk about devolution... [A] large audience, perhaps half black and brown, came to heckle and boo their bogeyman. They were very quickly silenced as Powell wove his spell, proving that devolution was a nonsense, but adding that decolonisation had surely taught us that morally we couldn't refuse a vote for independence from a people that wanted it... Finally, someone suggested he couldn't mean it: what if Oxford voted for independence? Would he grant that? He replied that you could reduce any argument to absurdity with an absurd example but yes, if the people wanted it, how could one refuse? And then added, cuttingly, but why talk such nonsense about Oxford? Why not use real examples: what if Bradford, Brixton or Southall, which are really different, vote for independence? The words were spat out with real venom, eyes flashing. Immigration had not previously been mentioned: in the audience heads lurched back, as if a collective slap in the face had been administered. At the end everyone filed out in silence, as if physically beaten. Over dinner, I asked him why he had done it: he had come close to getting a standing ovation and then he had deliberately thrown it all away. “Oh yes,” he said, “I could see I had won them over, so I thought, if you want to accept me, it's got to be the whole package, not just my views on devolution. So I showed them the cloven hoof. I don’t want any easy victories.”"

"It's a dependable party game: who was the MP who...emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato, anti-American and opposed to Britain possessing nuclear weapons; pioneered the Clean Air Act ... became a vehement critic of Empire and hugely embarrassed a Tory government by a passionate condemnation of British treatment of Africans confined in the Hola Camp in Kenya? (The MP in question was so infuriated by the racist excuse that different standards applied in Africa that he/she actually cried with vexation at the end of the speech.) As Minister of Health the same politician earned an extremely progressive reputation by attacking the mental hospitals as oppressive Victorian institutions which ought to be closed to allow more humane care within the community... This MP was...the first in any party to argue for a minimum income for the old and the unemployed, argued for the nationalisation of the universities and completely free education for all students, and refused...the offer of a life peerage... Most people...would volunteer all sorts of left-wing Labour MPs: not one in a hundred would have guessed that the right answer was Enoch Powell."

"I never came close to understanding Enoch Powell. He was the only adversary in the House of Commons who ever seriously worried me. Others were nimble and could disconcert me for a moment, but Powell, by his appearance, voice and choice of words, radiated an authority which I had no immediate resources to match. We were almost neighbours in South Eaton Place, and he was invariably courteous to my wife. But I never had a friendly conversation with him, and never understood the admiration verging on worship which he inspired in intelligent commentators. I saw at first hand the harm done in turn by his negative eloquence on immigration in 1968, on Ireland in 1984/5 and throughout on Europe. It was a tragedy that such patriotic fervour, deep learning and forceful talent should have been dedicated to detecting non-existent conspiracies and upholding different causes of the sour right."

"If Enoch Powell had stood for leadership of the Conservative party he would have won "by a landslide" and if he had stood to be Prime Minister he would have won by a "national landslide"."

"Enoch Powell was unique in the absolutism of the intellectual and moral propositions on which he based his arguments. When he was Professor of Greek at Sydney his colleagues used to call him “the textual pervert”. He built glass towers of dazzling logical integrity, whose foundations in the real world became more and more precarious as they rose higher and higher. In politics as in life, a logical conclusion is usually a reductio ad absurdum."

"I think the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard was by Enoch Powell in 1959, castigating the Macmillan Government over the murder of African prisoners at Hola camp in Kenya; it had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes."

"All our hopes for England rest now on Enoch Powell."

"When I came to England in the late 60s, Sergeant Pepper was ruling the land, de Gaulle was the Great Satan and it was only months before Enoch Powell made his classical allusion to the Tiber. It is right that his speech that night has become a myth of a dark moment in contemporary British culture. His mean and ugly prophecies of bloodshed - rivers frothing with blood, no less - was not simply a mad outburst. It did not come from nowhere...It was no surprise, in the end, that Powell should pluck that evil image from his knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean world to portray the panic that had gripped the country. He was not speaking for himself alone, but he spoke too strongly, abandoning post-imperial euphemisms about non-European foreigners. His eyes flashed with prophetic conviction and suddenly, so it seemed to Ted Heath, the lunacy had gone too far. He sacked him from the shadow cabinet"

"I have met, talked with, and participated in meetings with Enoch Powell on a number of different occasions. He has a better and deeper understanding of economic principles, and a clearer conception of the relation between economic and personal freedom, than any other major political figure I have ever met. And even this is to put it mildly. Broaden the field as widely as you want, and I have met few men who have as sophisticated an intelligence on these matters as Powell."

"Everyone who wrote about him was certain of one thing: Enoch Powell was not a racist. He "said things we didn't agree with" (Tony Blair). He was "an extreme nationalist, but not a racialist" (Denis Healey). He inspired racialists "but was not a racialist himself" (Tony Benn). The Tory papers which revered him and called for parliament to be prorogued in his memory would not contemplate the possibility that he was a racialist. The unanimity was complete. Which is all very odd because the most important thing by far about Enoch Powell was that he was a racist pig of the most despicable variety."

"The Tory Kingdom would sooner or later have been his to command, for he had all the shining qualities which the others lacked. Heath would never have outmanoeuvred him; Thatcher would never have stepped into the vacant shoes. It was a tragedy for Enoch, and a tragedy for the rest of us too."

"What a theme, and what a speech, and what a speaker, and how Oliver Cromwell himself would have been thrilled to hear the parliamentary cause elevated to its rightful pre-eminence... Writing as an impenitent Leveller who still begs to differ with you (and Oliver Cromwell) in so many matters, I still cannot withhold my wonder and excitement at what I heard there today."

"If one thinker is to be credited with starting the long rightward shift in British conservatism from the 1980s onward, it is Enoch Powell (1912–1998). In a period of centrist compromise, Powell heralded Thatcherism, but he also did more. In elevating the market, Thatcherism, if not Thatcher herself, was at root global and multilateral. Powell revered the global market but wanted to return politics to the nation. At once economically globalist and geopolitically unilateralist, Powell was the herald of British conservatism’s turn against Europe. When sacked in 1968 from the shadow cabinet for an inflammatory speech on immigration, a shrewd Tory editorialist who sensed Powell’s appeal wrote that containing Powellism would occupy his party for the next decade. The editorialist was off by a factor of five. Containing Powellism would occupy the party for the next half century and, in the 2010s, it would finally fail."

"In Britain, a herald of the twenty-first- century hard right, made himself heard. Enoch Powell set himself and his career against the state-friendly centrism and multilateralism that attracted Toryism in the 1950s and 1960s. A powerful, unyielding mind, Powell was an early framer of a popular counter-faith in the unstable dual monarchy of the free market and nation that before long captured the right across Europe and the United States."

"I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got."

"He simply believes in Order and Authority and is always prepared to offer a half-brilliant, half-mad, intellectual defence of them."

"Ah, Enoch, dear Enoch! He once said something to me I never understood. He said, "You know, I've told you all I know about housing, and you can make your speech accordingly. Can I talk to you about something that you know all about and I know nothing? I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans." You know, I had no idea what he meant. I do now."

"I do wish that instead [of talking about the EEC] you would concentrate on making speeches on immigration, because that is so vitally important and you are so right about it."

"“Even if I were convinced that the result would be that we would have Labour administrations for the rest of my lifetime, I would say: Well, so be it.” Torn out of their context and repeated in a long series of news bulletins, Enoch Powell's words seemed far more savage than they did at the end of what must have been one of the most civilized political discussions of recent years. Each from his own standpoint, our two most distinguished Parliamentarians had expressed their passionate belief in our British system of Parliamentary democracy and their determination to rescue it even now from the perils of the EEC. If it had been a Labour Government that had taken us into the Market, Michael Foot would have been faced with Mr Powell's dilemma, and I am pretty certain he would have come to the same conclusion. Read in its context, the statement reveals only what we already know, that Mr Powell has one thing in common with Mr Foot—he cares more about our British Parliamentary democracy than about anything else in the world."

"Mr. Powell is an economic Whig but a political Tory."

"The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions...for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it...Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading...In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful...[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state."

"The thought struck me for the first time today that our duty to our country may not terminate with the peace – apart, I mean, from the duty of begetting children to bear arms for the King in the next generation. To be more explicit, I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were; and if the present hostilities do not actually merge into a war with our terrible enemy, America, it will remain for those of us who have the necessary knowledge and insight to do what we can where we can to help Britain be victorious again in her next crisis."

"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."

"I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable."

"The world has recently been treated for nearly a decade to the unusual spectacle of a great empire deliberately taking every possible step to secure its own destruction, because its citizens were so obsessed by prejudice, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as never to perform the few logical steps necessary for proving that they would shortly be involved in a guerre à outrance, which could be neither averted nor escaped."

"[In Italy, when every sentence is liable to be scanned for traces of anti-Fascist sentiment] it is obviously safer to begin by choosing a more congenial subject than a free Athens or a free Rome. In Germany the effect of National-Socialism has been the opposite. Racial doctrines and political antipathy to the whole Roman Empire and its cognate ideas have had the result of discouraging study of the Italic peoples and of Rome, the mistress of the world. On the other hand, a peculiar kinship has been detected between the ancient Greeks and modern Germans. Not only the Greek civilization in general, but Thucydides in particular, has proved exceptionally congenial. The intensely political outlook of Thucydides may be made serviceable to a doctrine which asserts the absolute dominion of the State over every phase of individual existence; and, as the more striking figures of Caesar and Augustus had already been captured as prototypes by Mussolini, Hitler might well be made to look very like Pericles—or Pericles, rather, to look like Hitler."

"In my own constituency (where I estimate that about 10 per cent of the population are immigrants from Asia or the Caribbean) I have the impression that, as no doubt elsewhere, the first phase, the sudden impact of Commonwealth immigration, is over. I am going to prophesy, however, that there will be subsequent phases, when the problem will resume its place in public concern and in a more intractable form, when it can no longer be dealt with simply by turning the inlet tap down or off. Long before the coloured population reaches 5 per cent of the total, a proportion will have filtered into the general population, mingled with it in occupation, residence, habits and intermarriage. On the other hand, the rest, numerically perhaps much the greater part, will be in larger or smaller colonies, in certain areas and cities, more separated than now in habits, occupation and way of life. The irregular pattern of population and living which grew up higgledy-piggledy in the early years of immigration will have been tidied up. It is for these colonies, and the problems thereby entailed on our descendants, that they will curse the improvident years, now gone, when we could have avoided it all."

"For over ten years, from about 1954 to 1966, Commonwealth immigration was the principal, and at times the only, political issue in my constituency in Wolverhampton. Between those dates entire areas were transformed by the substitution of a wholly or predominantly coloured population for the previous native inhabitants, as completely as other areas were transformed by the bulldozer. My uppermost feeling on looking back upon those years is of astonishment that this event, which altered the appearance and life of a town and had shattering effects on the lives of many families and persons, could take place with virtually no physical manifestations of antipathy. This speaks volumes for the steadiness and tolerance of the natives. Acts of an enemy, bombs from the sky, they could understand; but now, for reasons quite inexplicable, they might be driven from their homes and their property deprived of value by an invasion which the Government apparently approved and their fellow-citizens – elsewhere – viewed with complacency. Those were the years when a ‘For Sale’ notice going up in a street struck terror into all its inhabitants. I know; for I live within the proverbial stone’s throw of streets which ‘went black’."