Enoch Powell and the Sovereignty of Parliament - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen thank you for braving the bad weather come to this lecture which is the fourth in a series on post-war politicians who have made the weather that is set the political agenda even though none of them became prime minister and the first three lectures were on an hour in Bevin who was founder of the National Health Service Ian McLeod the apostle of rapid decolonization in Africa and Roy Jenkins the pioneer of liberal legislation on personal liberties and race relations in the 1960s and the Apostle also of party realignment and today's lecture the fourth is on Enoch Powell and he pronounced his surname incidentally Powell and not poles people sometimes do now Enoch Powell was a very popular politician and there's a possibility that if we'd had a presidential system of direct election that he might have become leader of the country though I think the probability is not but as a possibility he would have been but unlike the first three people I've talked about Bevan McLeod and Jenkins he had no major legislative achievements to his credit and part of the reason for that he was in government only for a very short time a much shorter time than perhaps most people imagined he was a member of the cabinet for just 15 months and he held junior posts in government for a further four years so he wasn't a man of government or of any legislative achievement and one reason for his short period in government is that he was a very difficult colleague who didn't hide his dislike and indeed contempt for at least two of the conservative party leaders whom he served under a howl millon and Edward Heath his antipathy to Edward Heath is notorious but he was also very hostile to Harold Macmillan and if I can tell a personal anecdote I met Enoch Powell as a student and I was shocked by his very direct manner when he said of Harold Macmillan I couldn't stand the sight of him but he then added with a smile I'm sure he felt the same way about me and I think he did macmillan put him at the side of the cabinet table and he was sitting in the chair in the middle and Powell's at the side of the cabinet table Macmillan said so he didn't have to look at those staring obsessing fanatical eyes he said he didn't lie incidentally that is also the position in which Edward Heath put Margaret Thatcher when he was Prime Minister now Harold Macmillan was a difficult colleague in 1958 he resigned from Harold Macmillan's government and was brought back in 1960 in 1963 he refused to serve Harold Macmillan's successor Sir Alec douglas-home he was brought back to the shadow cabinet by Alec Hume after the conservative defeat in 1964 and he was retained there by Edward Heath Hume successor but in 1968 for reasons that I will describe later he was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Edward Heath and he was never in the cabinet or shadow cabinet again but his period in the political wilderness coincided with his great popularity in the country he was widely distrusted by his colleagues but greatly admired by the general public so Powell's significance came not from what he achieved in Parliament or in government but what he stood for or what he taught if you like he was the better or worse a teacher rather than a legislator like my next two subjects Tony Benn and Keith Joseph none of whom are particularly distinguished for leged of achievements but who made a great impact on public opinions and Powell himself said that was the job of the politician he said the task of the politician is to provide people with words and ideas which will fit their predicament better than the words and ideas they are using at the present and I think Powell altered for better or worse the nature of political discussion on four issues there are firstly the role of the free market secondly immigration thirdly the European Union and fourthly the dangers of Scottish devolution which he said would lead to separation now I am sure you will all have noticed that these issues are at the very forefront of current political debate particularly the last three immigration the European Union and Scottish independence so when you agree or not with Enoch Powell views it would be difficult to deny his contemporary relevance and some would say that he was prescient that he predicted with uncanny accuracy the future problems in British politics others would say that he aroused irrational fears and appeal to the worst instincts of voters and that of course is for you to decide but my task in this talk is to outline his career as fairly as I can now Enoch Powell or Jack Enoch Powell he was actually christened was born in Birmingham oddly enough in Stepford which was Roy Jenkins constituency though he had nothing in common with Roy Jenkins they're polar opposites I think politically he was born in June 1912 and perhaps symbolically a violent thunderstorm accompanied his birth he was an only child and both of his parents were teachers his father became headmaster of an elementary school but his mother had to give up her position upon marriage as was the rule in those days but she compensated by teaching her son who was to be her star pupil she taught him the alphabet at the age of three and he picked her up very quickly and was already reading books then and he had the habit even at the age of three of lecturing other people on subjects that interested him and as early as the age of three he was nicknamed the professor his natural conservatism with a small scene came out very early in life as a young boy he was taken by his parents to Carnival Castle and on entering one of the rooms in the castle he removed his cap and when asked why he said because it was in that room that the Prince of Wales had been born now Powell's mother had taught herself Greek from the New Testament and when Powell was 12 she taught him Greek and he proved an outstanding scholar at school in the classics he was single-minded and won all the classics prizes and said that he would become an academic in classics but he found to his horror when working on the Greek historian Thucydides but one of the commentators on him was called John u Powell and he said you can't have two great Greek scholars called John Powell so from then on he began to call himself J Enoch Powell and then simply Enoch Powell that's how I became he knocked out in December 1929 he went up to take to Cambridge to take the scholarship exam in classics at Trinity College Cambridge the examinations lasted three hours but Powell walked out of every one after one and a half hours and he later said that in his Greek prose composition he had given two versions one in the style of the Citadis and one in the style of Herodotus the examiners wrote to his headmaster but in the translation paper he had offered two translations one in the style of Plato and one in the style of Herodotus in addition they said Powell had annotated the translations not surprisingly he won the scholarship at Cambridge he did nothing but work he played no part whatever in politics or indeed in anything else and later in life he said of himself I saw my life when I went to Cambridge far too much I realize in retrospect as a simple continuation of the prize scholarship winning knowledge eating process of the working side of my school life I literally worked from half-past five in the morning until half past 9:00 at night behind a sported oak except when I went out to lectures that was not because I disliked my fellows it was that I didn't know there was anything else to do when school friend called on him to ask him out for tea Powell replied thank you very much but I came here to work he declined an invitation from the master of the college the only example in living memory he declined an invitation from the master of the college to the freshman's dinner giving us his reason pressure of work as an undergraduate he contributed an article to a learning journal in Greek history not surprisingly he won all the classics prizes achieve a double first and was offered a fellowship by his college but he was more ambitious than that he wanted to become the youngest professor in the Commonwealth and he succeeded in 1937 he became professor of classics at the University of Sydney in Australia the age of 25 then two years later in 1939 he was appointed professor of Greek and classical literature at Durham and that was a post to be taken up in January 1940 but before that the war intervened and Powell joined the army but not before he'd published a lexicon of Herodotus and that is a book detailing every word used by Herodotus and its origins and he said he hoped that book would secure him immortality because anyone studying Greek would have to read it and it would preserve his name even at if as he expected he was to be killed in the war because he said he had no hesitation in joining up but he remembered the First World War when the average period of survived in the trenches was about six weeks and he thought he probably would not survive and he endeavor determined there should be some memorial to his name incidentally a recent novel of alternative history has been published by a man called CJ's Sansom called Dominion and it's about what Britain would have been like in 1952 if we'd made peace with Germany in 1940 and the kind of Quisling government at that time headed by Lord Beaverbrook in which Powell is the Secretary of State for India now I whatever you think of Enoch Powell that seemed to be very unfair that he had no sympathy at all with Nazi Germany indeed he helped some Jewish academics in classics from Germany to leave the country and he says he realized from a very early stage there will be a war with Germany and then he would have to fight in it and he actually welcomed becoming a war and this novel by sounds from Dominions actually quite a good Knoll but unfair to the panel I think and as well as his lexicon of Herodotus before the war he wrote volumes of poetry which he published including a poem describing his own feelings when war broke out feelings which were to say the least rather unusual he said I wrote a poem in which I described people joining up at the outbreak of the war like bridegroom bridegroom's going to meet their bride that's how joining up was for me the thing expected for so many years the thing which one feared wouldn't happen but would instead be replaced by disgrace and humiliation it had happened the chance had come at last as I once described it I felt I could hear the German divisions marching across Europe and I could hear the drumming coming through the earth and coming up again in Australia where no one else could hear it and he loved the army he said later I took to the army like a duck to water it seemed to me such a congenial environment the whole institution of the army the framework of discipline the exactitude of rank the precision of duty this was something almost restful and attractive to me and I took great pride in smartness at drill there are always I suppose some absurd compliments one remembers one that I shall remember all my days with my platoon sergeant saying to the company commander that I was the smartest soldier in the company he said I take that as a very very great compliment he once said later in life whether sincerely or not that his great regret was not to have been killed in the war like many of his friends well that was sincere or not we don't know but what we do know wasn't he was as successful in the Army has he'd been in academic life he entered the army as a private and ended as a brigadier one of the youngest brigadiers in the army during the war something very important happened to him that he was working in the intelligence section of the Indian Army and he says he fell in love with India he said I fell head-over-heels in love with it he said if I'd have gone there a hundred years earlier either left my bones there he learned undo to familiarize himself with Indian civilization and was later to talk to his Indian born constituents in Urdu in Wolverhampton which couldn't have been very unusual and India aroused his political interests the importance of India to Britain preserving the Empire and he's described this in fairly laconic terms it's in one day when the monsoon broke in Delhi in June 1944 I suddenly said to myself you're going to survive there'll be a time when you won't be in uniform painful though it may be you've got to face it there'll be a lifetime for you and a lifetime not as a soldier this was the opening of the door from one mental room to another and there was the answer of course you'll go into politics in England and you went into politics to preserve the Indian Empire so you won't be surprised to know he joined the Conservative Party and he obtained a post in the conservative research department but he found his surprise he was rather innocent I think that the Conservatives weren't insted in India they were insted in matters like housing and education and the economy and so on but in any case the Labour Party were in power and they were committed to Indian independence and Powell remembered spending one evening I think in 1947 after the separation of India had become a political fact walking about the streets all night trying to digest it one's whole world had been altered and he didn't want to accept Indian independence and he by all accounts sent a memorandum to Churchill objecting to it and Churchill asked he was a rat the research department asked who was that young madman who has been telling me how many divisions I will need to reconquer India despite this a Powell became a candidate in a by-election in 1947 in a Labour seat which he couldn't hope to win and he was then adopted for Wolverhampton South West despite the chairman of the constituency Association warning the selection committee before he came in now I just want to say to you before the next candidate comes in don't be put off by appearances it became the candidate for Wolverhampton southwest which he represents in Parliament till February 1974 and he entered the Commons in 1950 as a devotee a substring supporter of the free market he was given junior office by Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan and became a junior minister Treasury but in 1958 the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter thornycroft resigned because he thought the Conservatives were not sufficiently committed to cutting public expenditure and Powell resigned with him he was brought back by Harold Macmillan in 1960 as Minister of Health a position then outside the cabinet but he entered the cabinet in 1962 and he established it's fair to say a reputations a humane Minister who was particularly concerned over issues were not then fashionable TB patients long stay young patients matters of social welfare in general he extended visiting hours in hospitals and he introduced new uniforms to staff in mental hospitals he paid particular concern so picking tone with mental hospitals and he once said only the best is good enough for Broadmoor which wasn't again a popular thing to say but in 1963 he resigned again for the second time or rather refused to serve and McMillan's successor Sir Alec douglas-home who was chosen in very controversial circumstances and it wasn't wholly clear why Powell refused to serve it's true he'd supported Humes competitor are a butler but Butler was willing to join the government but Powell said this was a matter of honour that he'd said he would not serve under Hume if he was chosen and he had to stick to that even if I was didn't and Hume called him in to try and get him to change his mind and Powell replied typically well I don't expect Alec you expect me to give you a different answer on Saturday from the one I gave you on Friday I'd have to go home and turn all the mirrors round so he was in the wilderness again now Hume lost the 1964 election narrowly and resigned the conservative leadership in 1965 and then within a contest for leadership between Edward Heath and Reginald maudling but Powell thought he'd put his hat in the ring to test his free-market views a platform for those views and it showed he had very little support at that time because he had 150 votes and one modelling had 133 but Powell only had 15 nevertheless Heath was magnanimous and put Powell in the Shadow Cabinet as defence spokesman where you thought Pratt's he couldn't do too much harm but after 1966 Powell began to take up the issue of immigration and on the 23rd of April 1968 he made a speech at Burma in which I will talk about in some detail which has a claim to be the most explosive speech ever made in Britain since the war and which led to him being expelled from the shadow cabinet but first I want to put that speech in context of the immigration issue which was a consequence of the end of empire now by the 1960s Powell and come to accept as you had to perhaps that the Empire had ended and you weren't going to reconquer India but very characteristically he said if the empires come to an end it must be finished with completely you mustn't bother with all the leftovers of empire like the Common Wealth free immigration all these other things Britain the stand for Britain forget about all the historic ties it was a characteristic logical shift if you like but because of the Empire Britain did not have at the time Powell spoke and did not have to 1981 it may seem old now but Britain had no definition of British citizenship that citizenship until 1948 was Imperial that is everyone living in the British Empire Oh allegiance to the king and therefore could freely move from any country in the Empire to another of course in those times not many people did move transport costs were expensive and there will be little travel now this position was undermined by two developments fundamental developments I think occurring the late 1940s the first was the independence of India which Powell had argued against because before the independence India all the countries would become independent had been countries of white settlers Australia Canada New Zealand and South Africa and they looked at at least the white people there looked to Britain as the mother country so they were happy to recognize the king as king of Australia Canada South Africa so on but of course the Indians Indian was not a country of white settlement it was an indigenous country if you like a mother country of its own and they didn't see the king as a symbol of allegiance but as a symbol of British domination over India so the Indian said when we become independent we don't want to remain a monarchy we want to become a republic but we want to remain in the Commonwealth as a republic could it be done and that was a problem for British policy makers they they had two alternatives the first is they could have said no you can't the Empire involves allegiance to the king it says going to be a tightly knit Empire if you said that you'd say the Empire would be problem as two entirely a white Empire but people said after all there's no difference in principle between India Africa for that matter and Australia Canada because the pole purpose of the Empire is to prepare countries to self-government and independence Canada had been the first in 1867 then Australia New Zealand India the first non-white country policymakers in Britain both labour and conservative the Empire is not based on color and an independent country is free to choose its own form of government the engines choose to have a republic we therefore want India to remain in the Commonwealth this means we have to find a new formula so the test is no longer allegiance to the king but the test is the king and now the Queen should be recognised as head of the Commonwealth a symbolic title with no powers I say that advisedly the letter in the time today which is mistaken about this Commonwealth Charter saying that the Queen is acting on advice in signing it she's not it's a purely symbolic position with no powers of any kind attached to it it's like the position of supreme Governor of the Church of England it's not accountable to anyone a pure symbolic position that holds the Commonwealth together and it's the basis for the multiracial Empire and the Asian and African members have entirely followed the Indian lead they don't want to be monarchies they are all Republic's it's inching the Queen's it's it's often forgotten the Queen's Christmas and Commonwealth Day broadcasts are not made as Queen of Britain or queen of anywhere else but there's head of the Commonwealth and therefore not made on the advice of Ministers British ministers have no constitutional role to advise her as head the Commonwealth now this meant a less tightly knit Commonwealth but a multiracial Commonwealth and a much larger one which now covers one-third of the world and in it in that Commonwealth non-whites outnumber White's by six to one this was a decision made by the Labour government post-war but strongly supported by the conservative opposition wasn't a matter of party opposition but Powell didn't support it he said this was a sham he said it substitutes symbolism for real allegiance so that's the first change and occurred in the forties the second change was the Canadian said we want our own local definition of citizenship of what it means to be a Canadian citizen and other member states of the Commonwealth would follow so we had to make some decisions as to what to do and we did in the British Nationality Act of 1948 which Powell again was opposed to and what we said was this that citizens of the various self-governing Commonwealth countries like Canada on Australia and citizens of the United Kingdom and the non self-governing colonies were all Commonwealth citizens with free right of entry into Britain again that would before mass migration was thought about now some people say that alter the position it didn't it just rationalized the previous position of the Empire or Commonwealth being a single unit but in theory it meant that 800 million people could have the right to settle in Britain now at the time it's fair to say most policy makers were thinking about Australia and Canada and then think about the war and our kith and kin and all that and they were saying you can't stop Australians and Canadians coming to Britain they probably didn't believe that many people from the West in news or India would come to Britain with very high transport costs and it wasn't clear that Britain would have full employment for a long period there'd be jobs and so on but I hasten to add this that even if they thought that they would have made the same decision the reason being that they could only distinguish between Australia Canada on the one hand and India the West Indies on the other by putting a color bar in statute and no British politician was prepared to do this it went against the whole idea Empire to discriminate on grounds of color so they did not take that decision and they did not take the decision only British people and British citizens because that meant denying entry to Australians and haida and so on now the Labour government put forward that act but it was again supported strongly by conservatives now many would argue and this was Powell's argument this was backward-looking legislation it is um-- dacow he civ Empire which was disappearing but Britain was the mother country which had to set an example and the motto that people used was Kiva's Britannicus like Kiva's romance um just as any Roman citizen since the Empire was it in the Rome so anyone in the Commonwealth was a citizen of Britain whatever the color all had the same status and allegiance commands of peridots later on because most of those who favored unlimited immigration were on the left in politics and bitter critics of Empire but the free entry policy derived its justification from Empire so it should have been the wrong way around the Conservatives should have supported the imperialist part in left should oppose it but it hasn't worked the other way around now we didn't begin to restrict immigration from the Commonwealth by 1962 but by that time almost all the primary immigration from the Commonwealth had already occurred now governments in the 1950s thought about restricting immigration but didn't do so and they've been accused of weakness for not doing leave the Conservative government's but that's unfair they weren't weak they thought it would be wrong in principle and if you take the conservative Home Secretary in the 1950s so David Maxwell Fyfe who was not generally thought to be a liberal minded person he said this in a cabinet memorandum even to contemplate restricting immigration from the colonies would be a step forward toward breaking up the Empire and in other quarters it would be regarded as evidence that the government are in favor of a color bar the Colonial Secretary Adam Lennox boy to again is not generally thought of a liberal said he would only accept control if it was applied to the old Commonwealth as one of the new he said to me it would be a tragedy to bring to an end the traditional right of unrestricted entry into the mother country of her Majesty's subjects and quite unthinkable to do so on grounds of calais 39:58 and he threatened to resign if governments persisted with that which they didn't so it was a matter of principle they weren't going to do it now you may think they were right you may think they were wrong but the main primary immigration to Britain came between nineteen forty-eight and 1962 and by the time that government started to restrict immigration it was too late if you if he wants to restrict it now in the 1950s there were about half a million primary so-called primary migrants into Britain from the old Commonwealth as a matter of comparison from 2004 there were one of our half people from Poland and other century 1/2 million people from Poland and other Central European countries who came to Britain a half of whom about 3/4 millions staying permanently so it's many more from the commonwealth immigrants from the 50s now with family reunifications the number of half-a-million would at least double after 1962 but there was now no way of preventing the growth of immigration because you couldn't stop dependents coming in in being humane to do so stop spouses and children and parents and the light coming in you could only see you could only alter it by forcible repatriation which not even Enoch Powell ever suggested but after 1962 with two important exceptions which I shall discuss primary immigration came almost completely to an end in 1962 the an act was passed limiting immigration but Britain was already in the process of being transformed from a homogeneous nation at the head of a multiracial Empire to a multicultural country with no Empire it's a great change and critics of the policy it was too late but critical policy and we were never asked we were never consulted out there now the 19th 619 62 the Conservative government of Howell Macmillan now distinguished between citizens who were allowed to enter the country and citizens who weren't and the administration of it is quite complex and I won't go into his pub to come pick already but broadly speaking people from the New Commonwealth lost their right of unrestricted entry they had to get an employment voucher a work voucher to enter and the numbers were strictly regulated but there was still no over-dependence so the main immigrations dependents and primary immigration was over dependents still had an unconditional right of entry but the issue was becoming politically explosive in parts of the West Midlands and I think this is what infants pawel that in the 1964 general election the Labour Party won the election with a 3.5 percent swing but in one Seaton's melech where there was a large immigrant population there was a 7.2 percent swing to the Conservatives and the seat was lost by Labour to a conservative alderman called Peter Griffiths who it was said he rightly ran a racialist campaign and that was very much noticed because the person whom Griffiths defeated was the Labour Foreign Secretary or proposed foreign territory Patrick Gordon Walker so it was a very high-profile constituency and there were two other constituencies and other in Birmingham and Slough eaten and Slough where the Conservatives won the seat from Labour against the national swing now when alderman Griffiths won this seat Harold Wilson the Labour Prime Minister sent a telegram to Gordon Walker and said the whole country knows why you lost and all honor to you and when Peter Griffiths took his seat in parliament Wilson said this constituted a lasting brand of shame on the Conservative Party and Griffiths would be a parliamentary leper in the House of Commons and one of Wilson's allies Richard Crossman wrote in his Diaries ever since the sematic election it has been quite clear that immigration can be the greatest potential vote loser for the Labour Party if we are seen to be committing a flood of immigrants to come in and blight the central errors in all our cities now many conservatives were unaware of this they represented rural constituencies but Powell and the constituency in the West Midlands would have been aware of it and would have noticed what was happening now the Labour Party in 1962 had opposed a commonwealth immigration act and are good for free entry but 1965 actually tightened the working of the act with a white paper which reduced the numbers of work vouchers available for Commonwealth immigrants a much more stringent application of legislation and again Crossman wrote in his diary politically fear of immigration is the most powerful undertow today we felt we had to out jump the Tories by doing what they would have done and so transforming our policy into a bipartisan policy transforming their policy sari into a bipartisan policy and both parties accepted the argument which i think is accepted now as a consensus but if you want to create good race relations in Britain you have to have restrictions on immigration so that it's of manageable proportions and they said the argument for immigration restrictions is not racist so integration is possible if people do not feel it's unlimited and never-ending some people on the Left disagreed with that and said we still want free entry and some people on the rights of whom Powell was a leader so that didn't go far enough now as ill luck would have it another crisis arose unexpected crisis which in whose going to increase the number of primary immigrants into Britain because of the position of the Kenyan Asians now when Kenya had become independent in 1963 the Asians in Kenya were given the option of retaining their traditional Commonwealth citizenship or becoming Kenyan citizens now um there were 200,000 clean Ian Asians of whom only 20,000 applied for Kenyan citizenship the reason being that they feared I think rightly fear discrimination by the Kenyan authorities and many of those through applied for Kenyan citizenship didn't get it because of bureaucratic delays and so on now the discrimination against Asians in Kenya intensified within pendants and many sought to leave the country and there were about 200,000 who had passports issued by the British government which gave them the right of entry now the Labour government some would say panic but anyway they acted very rapidly they pushed through a Commonwealth immigration bill restricting the right of holders of British passports in Kenya to enter the country and this went through in just a few days it was pushed through in a great hurry now some conservatives voted against it including Ian McLeod who I spoke up in my second lecture and also a very young MP you became quite distinguished later on Michael Heseltine and some Labour people voted against it as well Michael foot and Shirley Williams because the effect of this legislation was to leave those Kenyan Asians in effect stateless with no rights but polls showed and vast majority in the country were in favor of this legislation and again Crossman voting across one wrote in his diary he said a few years ago everyone here would have regarded the denial of entry to British nationals with British passports as the most appalling violation of our deepest principles now they're quite happily reading aloud their departmental briefs in favour of doing just that now in the shadow cabinet the Conservatives and the Edward Heath leadership were very unhappy about supporting this legislation and two members of the shadow cabinet said they would only support it if the Conservative conservatives did not oppose the race relations bill which Roy Jenkins was pursuing through pom producing through Parliament and what Roy Jenkins was doing as a kind of counterpart to limiting the rights of the key nation was to have a race relations act extending the prohibition against discrimination to employment and housing there was already an act about public places pubs restaurants and theaters this extend it to employment and housing now some conservatives again here in the cloud and Michael Heseltine voted for the race relations legislation but the conservative Shadow Cabinet at which Enoch Powell's a member decided not to support it but not to oppose it either but to produce a reasoned amendment opposing certain elements in the race relations legislation particularly the elements involving race relations ports rights to damages and they said you must make a distinction between a company systematically discriminating and a private individual and they said if you don't it will exacerbate the racial feeling and they said that was important but they said we must be very clear that the fact we're not supporting this bill we must give no countenance to any suggestion with supporting racialist policies and therefore will be very sensitive in what we say about it so that we are not mislead and this is the context of the Birmingham speech of Enoch Powell on the 20th of April and he began in this way you may say this is a strange way of showing sensitivity to racial problems he said a week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent a middle-aged quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalized industries after a sentence or two about the weather he suddenly said if I had the money to go I wouldn't stay in this country I made some deprecated reply to the effect that even this government couldn't last forever but he took no notice and continued I have three children all of them been through grammar school two of them married now with family I shan't be satisfied till I've seen them all settled overseas in this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man and he then said what he is saying thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking not throughout Great Britain perhaps but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history and he then said those whom the gods wish to destroy they thirst make mad we be mad literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population it is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre he then spoke of the race relations legislation which he said was risking throwing a match onto gunpowder because it was elevating the immigrants and his descendant into a privileged or special class and he said it was establishing a one-way privilege by Act of Parliament and he near the end of his speech he concluded with the passage that's become most famous he said as I look ahead I am filled with foreboding like the Roman I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood the speech is sometimes called the rivers of blood speech you didn't use that phrase he used the phrase which came from Virgil but I telling any of his audience knew that the quotation the river Tiber foaming with much blood and if it were being charitable you might say that was metaphorical and he shouldn't use that particular phrase but still there was enough in that speech to cause troubles now there are already serious differences of opinion on the actual policies between Powell and the rest of the shadow cabinet there was first that he said it was really very difficult if not impossible for Commonwealth immigrants to integrate secondly he wouldn't enforce equal rights for non-white people thirdly should ban dependence which was not the policy of the conservative shadow cabinet and therefore used to pose a race relations bill in principle it was absurd to say in my opinion it was a one-way privilege because it could be invoked by whites as well as non-whites and Powell said that he'd seen notice for employment saying Jamaicans only that was just as illegal under the Act saying no coloreds but of course it would be in vote more by non-whites since they were more likely to be discriminated against and that oddly enough went against public opinion because although most people favored strong immigration control they also favored the legislation against discrimination but the most important point I think of the speech was not the precise differences of opinion but the inflammatory language which particularly annoyed the shadow cabinet having said that the issue must be treated very sensitively and there were various anecdotes which I wrote repeat rather unpleasant anecdotes about bad behavior by Caribbean landlords but studies previously had shown bad bad there was there's no exceptionally high instance of abuses and property which colored landlords are responsible and there was widespread discrimination against non-whites one organization sent out a British person the Hungarian person the West Indian to answer job applications and advertisements for rented accommodation and found widespread discrimination and found that the worst of it was that often the immigrant wasn't aware that he or she was being discriminated against that there was very widespread discrimination and a Heath said that he thought the speech was racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions and he ran up Enoch Powell to say that he was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet those were the last words or two of them ever exchanged public opinion showed again oddity that 69% disapproved of the dismissal perhaps they thought it was unfair he hadn't given him I don't know but anyway he said he said at the time that he disputed that he was a racialist he was asked is it true you don't like colored people mr. Powell he said I have very little background the West Indians and West Indians so that's regrettable you talk so much about them so I can't help it but I have considerable background knowledge of the peoples of India and Pakistan who formed three-fifths of all the immigrants I fell in love with India when I went there and I have no sense of superiority because of a white skin either to an Indian or a West engine now this was a time when both party leaders were very unpopular Wilson in the Labour government because the economy wasn't doing well and the Heath the conservative opposition leader because he didn't seem to be able to communicate to the public and Powell became immediately a kind of a folk hero there were marches of Smithfield porters and Dockers in his favour and you know there was clearly a very strong element to many people didn't regularly vote concerns in the working-class element supporting him and then in East thorn in November he made an even more inflammatory speech saying integration was not possible without mass repatriation and that if you didn't have mass repetitively voluntary that civil war was likely and you'll get an idea of the flavor from the first video of power which if the IT people can put it on of a meeting or other raucous meeting alright in this game they are you see there's the BBC there's the television here television that's what television is poor in this country television in this country is used to cut when I referred two years and more ago to whole areas towns and parts of towns across England being occupied by different sections of the immigrants and immigrant descended population the prediction was derided and denounced the facts which have since become known have proved it true I have demonstrated that even after making every concession however improbable however unreal a fifth or a quarter of such towns and cities as Wolverhampton Birmingham and in a London will in course of time consist of the Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants there has been no attempt at refutation no refutation is now possible I declare that in my judgment based upon what knowledge I have of human nature and upon what observation I have made of events in the world the prospective growth in this country of the comic of the Commonwealth immigrants and immigrant descended population will result in civil strife of appalling dimension and that institutions and laws let alone exhortations will be powerless to prevent like that gives you an idea of flavour hole from power now in 1970 the Conservatives won the general election and Edward Heath became prime minister ironically there are indications that Heath owed his success to Powell who dissociated in voters Minds the idea that the Conservatives were more hostile to immigration than the Labour Party and that see to end ironically seemed to end Powell's chances of the conservative leadership because there was now a government which believed in the free market that Powell did and it was going to adopt a very stringent policy on immigration and indeed the heath government in 1971 passed legislation which in effect equated Commonwealth citizens with aliens with fault with foreigners in general and had a definition of those who are entitled to free entry called a petiole which was someone with a parent or grandparent born in Britain you may say that's an implicit Calabar and there was to be no further large-scale immigration now then things began to go into Powell's direction again firstly because the heath government entered Europe and I'll talk about in a few moments secondly because he abandoned in 1972 his free-market policy for a policy of intervention in industry and a statutory incomes policy which Powell's strongly opposed to but thirdly because of what happened in Uganda which was even worse than what happened in Kenya because in Uganda the African dictator President Amin expelled 73,000 Ugandan Asians from the country gave them three months to leave in in 1972 and there were 73,000 asians in uganda and around half of them had British passports now the heath government in contrast to the previous Labour government accepted these people coming in and was the last large-scale primary immigration that we had but again Powell was opposed to that now the only non European Union immigration we now have our dependence as eylem seekers and those very few who can get work permits which are rigidly ration so we have a strict problem but you'll notice I said none your peon Union because the problem now presents itself in a new form with the European Union because the free movement of people's is a basis of the Treaty of Rome signed in 1957 again it was signed when there were just six countries in the European community France Germany and Benelux countries in Italy no one thought the ex communist countries which were at a lower level of Economic Development would be part of Europe but nevertheless it now follows that people anyone from 27 26 other countries 27 from the summer when Croatia joins have free entry into the United Kingdom and other countries so that's like the situation with Common Wealth immigration before 1962 with this difference but before 1962 we could alter the position by statute we can't alter the Treaty of Rome by statute unless 27 other countries agree there has to be an amendment of the Treaty of Rome which requires unanimous agreement I'll give you some idea of the figures of immigration which may interest you from 1881 to 1914 around 325 thousand Jews came into Britain from Eastern Europe from 1933 to 1939 about 50,000 Jews from Germany and countries around Germany in 1948 262 250 thousand people from the Caribbean 1972 30,000 expelled Ugandan Asians two thousand four one and a half million East Europeans of whom around three quarters of million remain and then free immigration from Romania and Bulgaria so immigration is again a key issue it takes a different aspect is nothing to do with color but take a different aspect with the European Union and all studies show that one of the main reasons why people are opposed to European Union is the immigration issue so this takes me onto the second of powers great issues which is Europe and power was opposed to our entry into the your peon community as it then was precisely because he said it involves restrictions on British sovereignty and of course one key restriction is the ability to decide upon your own immigration policy that's one restriction of sovereignty the Italians and Greeks and now finding other restrictions on sovereignty and Powell said because of our own long history uninterrupted history Parliament plays a crucial role in Britain which it doesn't in any of the other continental countries and that we define ourselves not as Europeans but as partly in Europe but partly out and he's our folk memories of 1940 and going even further back to the Napoleonic Wars when we stood alone against the continent not as being part of Europe and he said the main reason for that is that unlike the continental countries we couldn't be defeated in a land war because of the English Channel and he said our similarity is not with the continental countries but with another half in half out country which is Russia who couldn't be defeated because of her immensity immense size and therefore it's natural that Britain and Russia should have a common interest which we don't have with the continent and therefore we can never totally commit ourselves the continent the way that for example the French the Germans and other people could do and that because of our long history of institutional continuity we are more aware of what the sacrifice of sovereignty means and continental countries are and he said if you look at the original six four of them only came into existence within the last two centuries and of course he would now say that countries of Central and Eastern Europe many of them only came into existence in 1918 whereas we of course have a much longer history and our historical experience is so profoundly different from that of our continental neighbors and this he says was widened after the war because the continental six which formed the community had all been either fascist countries are occupied by fascist countries and had to start again with new constitutions because they started with new constitutions they were quite happy about building new institutions which we didn't like to do we evolutionary and relied on adapting the institutions of the past House of Lords House of Commons and monarchy and so on rather than creating new ones and therefore Europe wasn't really appropriate for us now in making this argument he faced Edward Heath who was the most Pro European Prime Minister we've had since the war I'll give me the only genuinely European Prime Minister and he become Prime Minister in 1970 now in his campaign Enoch Powell said in speech in June 1973 which was prescient as regards his future the principle of self-government was more important than party allegiance and an interview afterwards he said he'd be prepared to face Labour rule rule the Labour Party for the rest of his life if that preserved the sovereignty of parliament now Powell had voted with the Labour Party against entry into Europe the Labour Party's policy and opposition then was rather similar to David Cameron's now the Labour Party said we want to renegotiate to secure better terms of Britain and then we will put the issue to the British people in a referendum and Powell said that gave people the one chance to leave Europe now in February 1974 Heath called an election not on the issue of Europe but an issue arising from his statutory incomes policy and the clash with the miners which that led to because the mines were breaking the policy and go on strike to try and breach it and Heath policy was who governs the miners or us Powell said that was a bogus issue because as a result of the oil crisis the government would have to pay the miners extra whoever won the election the rise in the price of oil we needed the coal and therefore we had to pay the miners more he said I consider it an act of gross irresponsibility that this general election has been called in the face of the current and impending situation the election will in any case be fraudulent for the object of those who called it is to secure the electorate's approval for a position which the government itself knows to be untenable in order to make it easier to abandon that position subsequently it as it is unworthy of British politics and government to try to steal success by telling the public one thing during the election and doing the opposite afterwards he never explicitly said vote Labour he spoke during the election campaign for the so called keep out movement of keeping Britain out and three days before the election he said a vote for labour is the only way to ensure that Britain stays out of Europe and he said in that speech here is a man who promised his electors in 1970 that he would do everything in his power to prevent British membership who voted against it in every division major or minor which took place in the ensuing Parliament who did so even when success would have precipitated a dissolution who allied himself openly on the subject with his political opponents who made no secret of his belief that its importance overrode that of all others and who warned that was one of the issues on which men will put country before party so he said he would not stand as a conservative he said you can't stand an individual under the British system the parliamentary system depends on party he had to support a party he said there was only one way that people could get rid of Edward Heath and keep out of Europe and the day before the election he said he'd voted by post for the Labour candidate in his old constriction see a Wolverhampton southwest and a meeting just before the election you can see what happened if the IT people have that for one man however there was no doubt about the truth behind the selection mr. Powell described it as a fraud and withdrew retirement brief and with only a few days to go before poling mr. Powell Rhea merged into the spotlight to urge his supporters to vote labour a remark which prompted one of them to call him a Judas Judas was paid Judas was paid I am making a sacrifice a look at the shortest election campaign since the war now in the February 1974 election the Labour Party won a narrow victory there was a hung parliament labour had four seats more than the Conservatives and formed a minority government and Edward Heath never held office again now in such a narrow election you can say a host of factors could have been important but I don't think anyone could doubt the Powell's intervention made a difference and the swing against the Conservatives in the West Midlands which was Powell there was larger than elsewhere and I think my opinion there's no doubt that power made an important difference there had to be another election with a minority government with one stable in October 1974 and in that election Powell stood a gain of a parliament but not as a conservative but as an Ulster Unionist for the Ulster constituency of South down where which is seat he held until 1987 and he then took up his the final cause which I will be discussing his hostility to devolution he said Northern Ireland should have not have devolved institutions it should be integrated into the rest of the United Kingdom and governed just like London or Cornwall or any other part of the United Kingdom to show the nationalist population that they couldn't detach I'll stir from United Kingdom either by force or any other way and he was also opposed to Scottish devolution he said asymmetrical devolution was not possible it raised the famous West Logan question which he is a real originator that you cannot have Scottish MPs voting for English laws when English MPs don't vote for Scottish laws and he was the main opponents of the devolution legislation in the 1970s Oh tam DL is often thought of as the hero of defeat and he said the strains would inevitably lead to separation now Enoch Powell lost his seat in Southdown in 1987 because a nationalist vote which has hitherto been split United Round one candidate and he lived on until 1998 when he was buried he was buried in the uniform of a brigadier of his regiment shortly before he died in 1997 the Blair government won the election and Powell's comment was they have voted to break up the United Kingdom because he thought the Blair's government sponsors on devolution would have that effect now let me conclude briefly Ironsides and in such a long lecture we're talking about his legacy you can sell the one hand he was a very very clever man perhaps one of the cleverest who's been in British politics since the war who achieved very little in ledges or any other terms he was not a team player some people sometimes say he's a great parliamentarian but none of his important speeches in night after 1964 were made in Parliament they were made in the country where he couldn't be criticized or and you couldn't debate with him and he was much less popular in Parliament than in the country his colleagues either disliked or distrusted him and they had no confidence in him he didn't try as an own reven had done and Tony Benn was to do and Jenkins was to do to build up a faction supporting him would have been difficult to do cuz on some issues he was surprisingly liberal for example he was opposed to capital punishment and he supported homosexual law reform which perhaps one wouldn't think of but his strength lay in the country not in Parliament it's a very difficult thing in our system to impose as it were populous strength in the country in Parliament and the very actions that made him a celebrity in the country made him distrusted by his parliamentary colleagues but I suspect that he altered public opinion he could fill a hall he said politician don't alter public opinion but articulated and express it and he arguably mobilized supporters in two general elections in opposite directions 1974 the Conservatives 1974 for labour a remarkable feat on the free market he was a precursor of Margaret Thatcher's views more generally he channeled the alienation and disillusionment of the 1960's which people some people thought would lead to swing to the left the student revolt the permissive society and all that but his real consequences were a swing to the right to Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph and the reaction against the 1960s on immigration you may say that he legitimized hostilities and non-white people certainly his predictions of ethnic conflict have not come true and despite various blemishes I think it can reasonably said that ethnic relations in Britain are a success story and they were on the whole of peaceful and tolerant multicultural society you may say that's partly due to restrictions on immigration but these old little to power and the multicultural society was begun before he started his speeches on the subject now as I say immigration is now a key problem in a different way in regard to Romania and Bulgaria in a way which Powell would have understood as a restriction of sovereignty but on the European Union and on devolution the jury are still out David Cameron's accepted that a renewal of British consent for Europe is needed that full hearted consent the abandonment of sovereignty has not been given devolution it could lead to Scottish independence we don't know at the moment the odds are not the odds are against it but what unites all Powell's thinking is the logical consequences of the end of empire and return to a sense of Britishness he is the prime representative in post-war politics of British nationalism or perhaps better to say English nationalism and English nationalism defines itself partly in opposition to Scottish devolution but more importantly with euro skepticism and power once said nationhood with all that word implies is what the Tory party is ultimately about and he saw it as an absolute so the consequence of the end of empire should be with return to Britishness or to Englishness which is represented itself in parliament in a sovereign Parliament do not diminish that sovereign Parliament by subordinating Westminster to the European Union or by creating competing Parliament's in Scotland and Wales which is a symbol that Westminster can no longer represent the interests of people in Scotland and Wales over him that represented the watershed the parting of the ways for saying that a separate nation has been admitted to be there in Scotland and Wales above all powell expressed a huge gap which perhaps did exist between the political class and the people in a poll in the Financial Times on the 18th of February this a couple of weeks ago 50 percent said they want to leave the European Union 37 percent said they want to remain in but people who take that view of leaving may say they are not properly represented in Parliament which is why you could gain support people who were opposed to immigration said their views weren't properly representing parliament people who favor in English pants or English nationalism or say the Scots and Welsh are getting away too much they say they are not properly representing Parliament on all these issues the elite some say will agree there was a consensus we should enter European Union there was a consensus on primary immigration broad consensus on Scottish devolution but the people were opposed to it now powell articulated that opposition and was kept out by the elite consensus and the parliamentary system now was that a good thing or a bad thing i leave that for you to decide you

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: Politics, Conservative, Britain, History, Immigration

Id: dCpfIqQsBGQ

Length: 70min 31sec (4231 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2013