Enoch Powell

"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."

"Christianity does not, repeat, not, look forward to a gradual betterment of human behaviour and society or to the progressive spread of peace and justice upon earth. Still less does Christianity purport to offer a scheme or general outline for bringing that about. Quite the reverse, it uniformly teaches, as if to emphasize the point for good measure, that things will get worse rather than better before we are through."

"It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at."

"What happens then when majorities in the directly elected European Assembly take decisions, or approve policies, or vote budgets which are regarded by the British electorate or by the electorate of some of the mammoth constituencies as highly offensive and prejudicial to their interests? What do the European MPs say to their constituents? They say: “Don't blame me; I had no say, nor did I and my Labour (or Conservative) colleagues, have any say in the framing of these policies”. He will then either add: “Anyhow, I voted against”; or alternatively he will add: “And don't misunderstand if I voted for this along with my German, French, and Italian pals, because if I don't help roll their logs, I shall never get them to roll any of mine”. What these pseudo-MPs will not be able to say is what any MP in a democracy must be able to say, namely, either “I voted against this, and if the majority of my party are elected next time, we will put it right”, or alternatively, “I supported this because it is part of the policy and programme for which a majority in this constituency and in the country voted at the last election and which we shall be proud to defend at the next election”. Direct elections to the European Assembly, so far from introducing democracy and democratic control, will strengthen the arbitrary and bureaucratic nature of the Community by giving a fallacious garb of elective authority to the exercise of supranational powers by institutions and persons who are – in the literal, not the abusive, sense of the word – irresponsible."

"Of course I am very proud of being a Tory. Yes, in my head and in my heart I regard myself as a Tory. As I have said, I was born that way; I believe it is congenital. I am unable to change it. That is how I see the world... [The EEC] is the most un-Tory thing that can be conceived."

"[Conservative Party bosses are] Athenian oligarchs who would always sacrifice culture for class."

"It is one of the handicaps arising from our insularity and a peculiar side effect of our self-conceit that we are simply incapable of comprehending the depth and durability of the resentment which is held against us by the Germans and the French, by the Germans for the obvious reason that we defeated them; by the French for the less obvious but still more potent reason that we did not share in their defeat... Nobody is more Francophile than I am. But we understand nothing if we do not understand the axiomatic nature of the laws of attraction and repulsion between an off-shore island nation and the political system of the adjacent continent... Politics is the continuation of war by other means... It is a little reminder that for the principal continental nations, notably Germany and France, the European Economic Community is indeed "the continuation of war by other means"."

"The TUC are about as desirous of providing an alternative government to the Crown in Parliament as the Chiefs of Staff... The fear of domination by trade union power is among the most divisive and the most spurious."

"I am one of what must be an increasing number who find the portentous moralisings of A. Solzhenitsyn a bore and an irritation. Scarcely any aspect of life in the countries where he passes his voluntary exile has failed to incur his pessimistic censure. Coming from Russia, where freedom of the press has been not so much unknown as uncomprehended since long before the Revolution, he is shocked to discover that a free press disseminated all kinds of false, partial and invented information and that journalists contradict themselves from one day to the next without shame and without apology. Only a Russian would find all that surprising, or fail to understand that freedom which is not misused is not freedom at all.Like all travellers he misunderstands what he observes. It simply is not true that ‘within the Western countries the press has become more powerful than the legislative power, the executive and the judiciary’. The British electorate regularly disprove this by electing governments in the teeth of the hostility and misrepresentation of virtually the whole of the press. Our modern Munchhausen has, however, found a more remarkable mare’s nest still: he has discovered the ‘false slogan, characteristic of a false era, that everyone is entitled to know everything’. Excited by this discovery he announces a novel and profound moral principle, a new addendum to the catalogue of human rights. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have a right not to know, and it is a more valuable one.’ Not merely morality but theology illuminates the theme: people have, say Solzhenitsyn, ‘the right not to have their divine souls’ burdened with ‘the excessive flow of information’.Just so. Whatever may be the case in Russia, we in the degenerate West can switch off the radio or television, or not buy a newspaper, or not read such parts of it as we do not wish to. I can assure Solzhenitsyn that the method works admirably, ‘right’ or ‘no right’. I know, because I have applied it with complete success to his own speeches and writings."

"Look where you like...and you will see the political structure of the EEC being progressively and deliberately used to draw Britain into inextricable attachment – industrially, agriculturally, socially, and economically – to the West European land mass by weakening and then extinguishing its organs of independent self-determination. It is the assertion of continental hegemony over the off-shore island nation; but within that continental hegemony the hegemony of France, which twenty years ago would have been scoffed at as unthinkable, is today a practical and growing reality. In the web that is being woven quietly, unhurryingly, unceasingly, the purchase of Chrysler (UK) by Peugeot would be one more thread. It is a political and not an economic question, a national and not an industrial question, upon which the British Cabinet have to decide. If they understand, Her Majesty's government will say no."

"Robin Day: So you would say, would you – I hope I am not misrepresenting you – that the question of parliamentary sovereignty and national sovereignty as affected by our membership of the EEC, is the issue on which you would like to see most people have as their reason for voting one way or the other? Enoch Powell: Yes, for – in peace as in war, it is the great, the ultimate, question for any nation. If we still are a nation. So really I am inviting the British people and have been these many years, to say whether or not they intend still to be a nation."

"Might I indicate the difficulty which some of us feel over collective compassion? The good Samaritan had compassion. If two good Samaritans had compassion, that would still be individual compassion, not collective compassion. If the good Samaritan had been obliged by decree of the Roman Emperor to assist the traveller, that would not be compassion at all, because it would be done under obligation."

"Being a nation is, in the last resort, subjective; those who feel they are a nation and behave accordingly are one."

"Is the Chancellor aware that I envy him the opportunity and the privilege of announcing a step that will strengthen the economy of this country and help to restore our national pride and confidence in our currency?"

"The first rule of German statecraft is the maintenance of the Common Market link with France... Germany and France are the Siamese twins of the European Community. Britain, we ought clearly to understand, all humbug set aside, is expendable. Her function in the Community is to provide the continent with a captive market for dear food, and to place at the disposal of the Community for common use Britain's assets, whether they be the seas around her coasts (the ‘Community's fish stocks’) or her sources of power (the ‘Community's energy stocks’). It is not by accident that Britain finds herself the milch cow of Europe: that was the idea of it from the start... [T]he capture of the United Kingdom by the Common Market represented the reversal of Britain's successful maintenance of her independence since the 16th century: the counter-attack in a new, non-military form had at last succeeded and reduced the historic arbiter of Europe, at least temporarily, to the disarmed status of another European state. The combination of Germany and France, that eventuality dreaded and always frustrated by our forefathers, has produced, albeit under an expected guise, the outcome they foresaw."

"[The source of continuous hostility to Unionism for years has been] that nest of vipers, that nursery of traitors, which is known as the British Foreign Office."

"If identical goods were being produced at widely differing efficiency in different parts of the United Kingdom or if the United Kingdom and Germany, or Japan, or the United States, were part of a single unit with a single currency, then of course the less efficient producers would be knocked out. That is why Germany is so keen for Britain to go into the European Monetary System, so that it can wipe out the British industries which it is in competition."

"The few Roman Catholics who serve in the [[w:Ulster Defence Regiment|[Ulster Defence] regiment]] today are very brave men indeed. They do so at the risk of their lives in a way that their colleagues do not. I am proud to have some of those men in my constituency and to know them personally."

""Because it has come to be so" is the only, but to him sufficient, answer which the Englishman gives for his institutions and the authority which is immanent in them."

"The Englishman instinctively treats loyalty as by its nature unconditional, because he has – so to speak – nowhere else to go: the Crown and the institutions described collectively as those "set in authority under it" are his peculiar possession, they are his own history, his own nationhood, and he can only defy them and divest himself of them at the cost of denying himself."

"There is no doubt that the contrast is patent between what we call, with too gross a classification, the developed and the undeveloped countries... Why is there this difference, this divergence, this bifurcation? ... [I]t is not due to any difference in intellectual capacity, human ability or insight. It is an absurd notion that the European is intellectually superior to vast millions of the human race in Asia and elsewhere. The subtlety, the insight, the power of reflection and of argument to be found in India and elsewhere are equal to anything which is within our conception or grasp. As for character and human ability, it would be ludicrous, and a confession of total and boorish ignorance, to say that it is difference in those respects which accounts for these differences of experience. In case I be misunderstood, may I say at once that I do not believe that the IQ method of analysing the human race produces useful results for this purpose. I doubt whether many of the characteristics which we regard as typically and transcendentally European are purely intellectual. I think they have in them very much of the moral and very much of the social."

"Will the right hon. Lady take the opportunity today and every day to make clear to the country, as only she can, that the courses that are being commended to her by the official Opposition and by many other voices mean nothing but a deliberate return to hyper-inflation?"

"I soon came to know in the weary debates and the 104 divisions against the European Communities Bill who it was with whom I shared feelings of anger, outrage and hatred at what was being perpetrated. I am aware that the "Left" is supposed to be motivated only by the desire to be unimpeded by "Europe" in converting Britain into a socialist state; but I am compelled to depose that the instincts and reasoning of the "Left" opponents of membership...were exactly as nationalistic, not to say patriotic, as my own...[I part company with Labour only] because of my blind, high Tory ultimate faith in the people. If they are the people I thought and still want to think that they are, those who represent them will assuredly be pulled back in time from the betrayal of their birthright of parliamentary freedom either to a European state or to a Marxist bureaucracy."

"The nation state is the product of that logic. In England ... it was worked out to its final conclusion at the Henrician reformation, the event by which the English nation state was fully realised. All exertion of authority, whether the making or the enforcement of law, the taking of collective decisions of an executive (i.e. not legislable) character, the imposition and collection of taxes, the judgment of causes—in short, all duress brought to bear by the society upon the individual—proceeds from one source, and that source an internal and native one. The England of Henry VIII found it impossible that its laws should be made, that its causes should be judged, or that a revenue should be procured from it by an external authority. In other words, there was no such thing as external authority: the expression was a contradiction in terms... There is a name for appealing over the head of the Crown to an authority outside the realm, and that name is treason. The word may be disused, but the thing is not; and the penalties of praemunire, which those guilty of it formerly incurred, were not disproportionate to its seriousness."

"[A]llegiance is the very essence of nationhood, there is no meaning in nationhood without allegiance. Nationhood means that a man stands to one nation, to one loyalty, against all others—that is what it is about."

"[I see no reason to depart from my view] that at some point along the line of growth, absolute and proportionate, of the Commonwealth population in London and the other English cities affected, there lies the certainty of violence on a scale which can only be adequately described as civil war."

"The Conservative Party in the House of Commons has played ball with Paisley for 18 months, during which he has sat among them on the government benches but voted against them... For was he not the secret weapon of those who wanted to send Ulster the way of white Rhodesia? … That is why the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Humphrey Atkins, and the Northern Ireland Office spent the first year-and-a-half of this Parliament building up Ian Paisley and whispering to him and to everybody else that he was going to be the big white chief under a new set-up which they planned to introduce. They recognized in him a man with no dedication to the Union, a man who would abuse the Parliament of the Union to its face and declared that he owed it no allegiance... He is afraid for his own skin, and afraid of the fringe men of violence on whose backs he would fain ride, provided he can distance himself from them when serious trouble looms. The old adage holds good; all bullies are cowards, and most cowards are bullies. That is the last trait which completed the portrait of the man who the enemies of the Union are hoping against hope will put them in business again."

"Of course we didn't know how distinguished we were. We didn't know that others were to get the Nobel Prize and not share it with us for the monetarist theory. But, of course, men are not primarily activated by economic motives and I have always therefore assigned free economics a place only, a subordinate place, inside the whole of politics. And, in speech after speech to my countrymen, I've said: "Now, if you don't care for this or that, then that's your choice. Go your ways, but if what you are wanting is this or that economic result, then this is the way to get it." But I have never regarded economics as other than subordinate in the scale of values and, in recent years, and particularly vis-à-vis this government, which I think is sometimes too materialistic, too ready to establish what it calls competitive criteria."

"[T]hose of us who have seen—the insight is not restricted to any single party or to politicians alone—the future population content of inner London and other great cities have been unable to imagine that that could come about without at some stage—I will use phrases which I have used myself—inner London becoming ungovernable or violence which could only effectually be described as civil war."

"If you want to know what the SDP is about, look at its morning star, Roy Jenkins, the greatest Euro-bureaucrat of them all, a man who would never put up with anything British if he could find something foreign to embrace instead. The SDP is the extreme pro-European party, whose one common characteristic and undisputed stance is devotion to the destruction of Britain's parliamentary independence. Anyone who thinks that a bit rough should be aware that one of the SDP's proposals is to take away even the scrutiny, let alone control, of European legislation from the House of Commons and give it to the Assembly at Strasbourg."

"If, on the other hand, the Conservative party invites the electorate to link national independence in its mind with Bennery and all things 'left' and to discern in membership of the Community a bulwark against the dangers of socialism, the implications are still more disreputable; for this is nothing other than saying that one would rather live under the tutelage of foreigners than incur the risk of one's fellow countrymen being free to make up their own minds. That would be to stamp the Conservative party as a class party with a vengeance, a slur the more damaging because there were in fact, at the time of the original debates, Conservatives inside and outside Parliament who did advocate membership on precisely that ground—blood brothers, no doubt, of those who in an earlier generation viewed the rise of Hitler with equanimity or approval as a safeguard against Communism."

"Lord Scarman found that what he calls "the black community" was alienated. He found also that the black community suffered a number of disadvantages: in a period and in areas of special difficulties—economic, occupational, environmental—it had more than its fair share. The assumption—it is not argued; it is not even explicitly stated: it is an assumption—is that the black community is alienated because it is disadvantaged. That is a dangerous gap in the reasoning; for it is by no means self-evident, and by no means necessary, that the two facts should be connected as cause and effect. There is another possible explanation of the alienation. It is that the community, being of that size and composition and in those circumstances, is alien: alienation can be a manifestation of being alien. It can be the self-perception and the being perceived by others as different and distinct; and, in the case of a black community...it is a difference which is instantly and mutually visible and which produces mutual coherence or repulsion."

"We were dragged into folly by the Americans over Iran. We were dragged into folly by the Americans over Afghanistan. Neither national interest nor moral obligation requires us to be dragged by them into folly over Poland."

"Yet we slink about like whipped curs ... our self-abasement principally takes the form of subservience to the United States ... we are under no necessity to participate in the American nightmare of a Soviet monster barely held at bay in all quarters of the globe by an inconceivable nuclear armament and by political intervention everywhere from Poland to Cambodia. It is the Americans who need us in order to act out their crazy scenario... We simply do not need to go chasing up and down after the vagaries of the next ignoramus to become President of the United States."

"I would sooner receive injustice in the Queen's courts than justice in a foreign court. I hold that man or woman to be a scoundrel who goes abroad to a foreign court to have the judgments of the Queen's courts overturned, the actions of her Government countermanded or the legislation of Parliament struck down."

"The Prime Minister [Margaret Thatcher], shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the "Iron Lady". It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made."

"It is not unknown for people coming to my house to be told by the taxi-driver that there is no charge. It is an unintended and unsought testimonial, but I would be surprised if that I feel is not what the mass of my fellow countrymen feel. I don't feel separate just because I was a professor of Greek. My countrymen say: "this man sees what we see, he feels as we feel, he's one of us, thank God.""

"It is conventional to refer to the United Nations in hushed tones of respect and awe, as if it were the repository of justice and equity, speaking almost with the voice of God if not yet acting with the power of God. It is no such thing. Despite the fair-seeming terminology of its charter and its declarations, the reality both of the Assembly and of the Security Council is a concourse of self-seeking nations, obeying their own prejudices and pursuing their own interests. They have not changed their individual natures by being aggregated with others in a system of bogus democracy... Does anybody seriously suppose that the members of the United Nations, or of the Security Council, have been actuated in their decisions on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands by a pure desire to see right done and wrong reversed? That was the last thing on their minds. Everyone of them, from the United States to Peru, calculated its own interests and consulted its own ambitions. What moral authority can attach a summation of self-interest and prejudice? I am not saying that nations ought not to pursue their own interests; they ought and, in any case, they will. What I am saying is that those interests are not sanctified by being tumbled into a mixer and shaken up altogether. An assembly of national spokesmen is not magically transmuted into a glorious company of saints and martyrs. Its only redeeming feature is its impotence... The United Nations is a colossal coating of humbug poured, like icing over a birthday cake, over the naked ambitions and hostilities of the nations."

"The British Labour Party has always been nationalist, if not insular, and...not just democratic but parliamentarian. But it is confrontation with the EEC that has presented the Labour Party with an uninhibited appeal to patriotism. Internationalist it may be in phrases; when it comes to policy, it is nationalist."

"I am not mistaken in knowing that in 1935 I was convinced there would be another German War and I must expect to be killed in it. I am not mistaken in remembering that in 1937 at a Trinity College feast, when the guest of honour said 'Our Government is doing its best to prevent war', I shouted out from the fellows' table 'But we want war'. I am not mistaken in remembering that in 1937, driving to Boar's Hill with Gilbert Murray, I said to him "There's no hope for us unless we go to war with Germany" and he looked me straight in the eyes and replied "I think so too". Nor have I imagined the immensity of the relief when on 3 September 1939 I learnt that appeasement and betrayal were over and that England, if it went down, would go down fighting."

"Nobody disputes, I believe, that our nuclear weaponry is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities, she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide – the extinction of our race – in the most literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. An officer may, in the hour of his country's defeat and disgrace, commit suicide honourably and rationally with his service revolver; but in any collective context the choice of non-existence, of the obliteration of all future hopes, is insanity."

"By one of those happy combinations of circumstance in English history which half persuade us that our nation is specially favoured by Providence, the Book of Common Prayer was preserved intact through more than four centuries while the passage of time subtly imparted to it the supercharge of archaism and familiarity which it could not possess at the outset but which make it a uniquely English vehicle of religious and ritual expression."

"Until the synodical revolution of the Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974, the language of the Book of Common Prayer was distinguished by being uniquely authoritative, established and fixed by the Crown in Parliament, the supreme source of authority in this realm... The Tractarians were doubly right when they acclaimed the Book of Common Prayer as the proof of the catholicism of the Anglican Church: right because the words and formulae, being themselves impregnable, were susceptible of an interpretation which bridged the gulf of the Reformation; and right because the essential mark of catholicism, uniformity imposed by universal authority, was placed upon it by the untrammelled imperium of the English nation state. Without the authoritative fixity of its liturgy, the unique comprehensiveness and broadmindedness of the Church of England would not have been possible."

"I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination—'seeing', to quote a recent speech of the British Prime Minister, 'the rest of the world as its rightful fiefdom.' How any rational person, viewing objectively the history of the last thirty-five years, could entertain this 'international misunderstanding' challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension. The notion has no basis in fact... If Russia is bent on world conquest, she has been remarkably slothful and remarkably unsuccessful."

"I don't think that would be entirely unfair. There are some things which get on one's nerves and some things that don't. And I'm, to use a rather journalistic word, allergic to the things that are typically American. I think that's fairly natural to someone who has just been described as a Tory and is always ready to describe himself as a High Tory."

"At the invitation of Her Majesty's Government, the United States is about to station on the soil of the United Kingdom nuclear weapons which, we are told, will be used only after consultation and by joint decision with Her Majesty's Government. Anyone who, after the experience of the last few days and of recent years, imagines that the United States will defer to the views of the Government of this country is living in a dangerous fool's paradise. Anyone in office who entertains that illusion is in no position to serve the security of this country."

"It was educational heresy to justify spending money on education to make factories and enterprises more profitable and competitive. "The state which tries to use its power to exalt and promote the one kind of learning to the disadvantage of the other is an inhuman and barbarous state. In the end it will bring down upon its subjects the penalties which attend upon all humanity and barbarism, when the greedy expectations attached to the advancement of science turn to bitterness and disillusionment." Education was a good thing in itself. It was a strong human instinct and needed no secondary justification."

"Having risen at my customary hour of seven, going down, tiptoeing down, and seeing the paper slanting through the letterbox, and reading the words “Heath's Gamble...” Heath's Gamble? I thought. Gamble? So I pulled it through and it fell out flat on the mat: “Heath's Gamble Fails”. So I took it up with me to the bathroom and sang the Te Deum."

"The prospect I have put before you demands that government, politicians and public answer the following question: What sort of a country will Britain be when its capital, other cities and areas of England consist of a population of which at least one-third is of African and Asian descent? I have not dodged that question since it was first posed. My answer, upon a maturely considered judgment, is that it will be a Britain unimaginably wracked by dissension and violent disorder, not recognizable as the same nation as it has been, or perhaps as a nation at all."

"Does the right hon. Lady understand—if she does not yet understand she soon will—that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?"