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London Review of Books, Vol. 41 No. 18 · 26 September 2019
pages 5-8 | 5925 words
Wedded to the Absolute
by Ferdinand Mount
Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain by Paul Corthorn
Oxford, 233 pp, £20.00, August, ISBN 978 0 19 874714 7
There is still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded
as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell
delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches
delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in
the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I
can recall of ‘We shall fight on the beaches.’ Rereading the full text
(some three thousand words), I find that almost every sentence is eerily
familiar.
One should not discount the hypnotic power of Powell’s physical
presence. Those dark glaring eyes that followed you round the room, the
grim ironic twist of the lips that seemed to mock what you hadn’t yet
said, the villain’s moustache he had grown, he told Malcolm Muggeridge
in 1940, in imitation not of Ronald Colman but of Friedrich Nietzsche,
whom he adored and to whom he bore a resemblance. Above all, that harsh,
thrilling, unnaturally slowed-down voice. Has anyone else ever made the
loveable Brummie accent sound sinister, at least until Peaky Blinders
came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard
Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan
couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like
Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated
Enoch way down the table where he couldn’t catch his glittering eye.
There is only one passage in Powell’s Birmingham speech that I had quite
forgotten, still a remarkable one, in which Powell pays tribute to the
‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse,
soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in
the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced
as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to
wear their turbans at work. By then, most British bus companies had
already agreed to drop the ban on turbans. Powell’s own Wolverhampton
dropped it the following year. In 1974, Stonehouse faked his own
disappearance by leaving a pile of clothes on a Miami beach (forgetting
the absence of tides strong enough to carry his body out to sea). He
later resurfaced in Australia, then returned to England, where he joined
the English National Party before being jailed for seven years on 21
charges of fraud, theft and forgery. He died in 1988. More than twenty
years later, it was confirmed that he had for most of his political life
been spying for Czechoslovakia. He is the only person to be praised by
name in Powell’s speech. What an ally.
Stonehouse apart, how it all comes back to me. The high-flown beginning:
‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable
evils.’ And that sonorous, sulphurous finale: ‘As I look ahead, I am
filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber
foaming with much blood”.’ (Actually, it wasn’t a Roman but the Sibyl
who makes this prophecy, in Book VI of the Aeneid – a rare lapse for
such a formidable classicist.) And, in between, the descent into the
most vivid and shocking particulars: the widowed old-age pensioner in
Wolverhampton who had lost her husband and two sons in the war and whose
life was now made unbearable by the ‘negroes’ – Powell was still using
the word in a speech he gave at Hatfield in 1987 – who had taken over
her street:
The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her
out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a
price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his
tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go
out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox.
When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming,
wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they
know. ‘Racialist’, they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is
passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so
wrong? I begin to wonder.
I find it impossible now not to hear echoes from closer at hand:
‘flag-waving piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’ – has anyone else
between Powell in 1968 and Boris Johnson in 2002 used the word
‘piccaninnies’? And what was it Johnson said about women in burkas? ‘It
is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking
like letterboxes.’ Coincidental no doubt – but what other politician
(except Stonehouse as postmaster general) has had occasion to talk about
letterboxes? And as for those legendary excreta, how odd that of all the
available metaphors, Boris should have chosen to describe Theresa May’s
efforts to improve her EU deal as ‘like polishing a turd’.
Of course Powell wasn’t the first politician to draw people’s attention
to the strangeness of the immigrants pouring into their cities. The
locus classicus here remains chapter two of Mein Kampf:
I was strolling through the inner city of Vienna once, and I suddenly
bumped into an apparition in long kaftan with black locks. ‘Is that
really a Jew?’ was my first thought, because of course they didn’t look
like that in Linz. I watched the man surreptitiously and carefully, but
the longer I stared into this strange face and examined it feature for
feature, the more there came into my brain a different version of the
first question: ‘Is that really a German?’
Powell’s critics suspected at the time that he made some of his material
up, that there is more than a touch of urban myth about the stories he
told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of
the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in
Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from
Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an
old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the same.’
A miasma of doubt hung over the tale for another forty years until smart
detective work by Simon Burgess for a Radio 4 documentary revealed that
the widow did exist and that one of her friends had written to Powell
about her. Her name was Drucilla Cotterill, and she had been teased by
the Jamaican children whose families had moved into the street, Brighton
Place. The excreta, though, were pushed through someone else’s letterbox
and as part of a family feud, not out of racial motives. Nor of course
was it likely that the only English word known to the children would be
‘racialist’. What other language would they be speaking? Further
investigation revealed other corrective details. Mrs Cotterill was
indeed tiny (four foot six inches), but she had never had children, and
like most people in the street at that time she did not have a
telephone. She drank quite a bit, and was sectioned more than once, but
her former West Indian neighbours insist that most of the time they all
got on perfectly well together. Drucilla sometimes babysat their
children, and they sent flowers to her funeral. Powell was proud of the
way he had continued to protect the identity of his constituent. Yet one
cannot help feeling that by breaking open the carapace in which
political life is normally conducted and drilling down into the tender
flesh of ordinary life, he had abused her privacy all the same.
The arguments Powell deployed were a calculated combination of the
commonplace, the untrue and the toxic. It was already agreed by almost
everybody that recent rates of immigration from the Commonwealth had
been too steep for Britain easily to absorb, socially and economically.
That had been the rationale for the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962,
and for the further restrictions imposed by the 1968 Act, which had
received royal assent only a month before Powell spoke. On top of that,
the Conservative Party in opposition had an official policy, partly
devised by Powell himself, of assisted repatriation for immigrants who
wanted to return home. Powell does mention this policy in his speech,
but then carries on in his tone of vatic despair, encouraging the
illusion that nothing was being done. We were ‘watching a nation busily
engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre’. We were ‘mad, literally
mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some fifty
thousand dependants’. This was because only a small minority would make
any proper effort to integrate. ‘To imagine that such a thing enters the
heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their
descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.’ As he
was to elaborate at Eastbourne later that year, ‘The West Indian or
Asian does not by being born in England become an Englishman … in fact
he is a West Indian or an Asian still.’
Today this looks like the most flagrant of all Powell’s false
prophecies. At the most conspicuous level, half the England football
team are the children of immigrants; the top four members of Johnson’s
cabinet are the children or grandchildren of immigrants, and so on
throughout society. Integration is a slow and awkward process, and those
whose loyalties are evolving should not be hustled into either-or
holding pens, let alone subjected to Norman Tebbit’s cricket test.
Powell’s predictions for the sizes of the immigrant and
immigrant-descended population turned out to be pretty accurate. His
grim predictions of race war did not.
But the most immediately repellent feature of the speech is its
deceitful narcissism: only I, Enoch, have the courage to tell the truth
which the high-ups are keeping from you, that terrible truth which may
destroy us all if we do not act now. This ominous preening is a feature
of the rhetoric of many a contemporary Brexotic.
Though it is the physical presence of this ‘alien wedge’ that so
disturbs Powell, he speaks as if the immigrants themselves are not
actually present, that they’re not listening or at any rate can’t
understand the implications of what he is saying. Not the least of
Powell’s wilful misprisions was to treat the riots in Brixton and
Toxteth in 1981 as a fulfilment of his prophecy, when they were clearly
a reaction by the black population to the feverish racism to which he
himself had given such public licence and to the heavy-handed police
tactics which had ensued. Although the rioting set the rundown quarters
of half a dozen cities ablaze, not much blood actually foamed. Hundreds
of police officers were injured, but I can trace only one fatality, of a
man in Toxteth who was struck accidentally by a police vehicle. In the
riots that occurred at intervals over the next decades, many of them
more to do with unemployment than racial tensions, only the murder of PC
Keith Blakelock at Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, in 1985 seemed to
threaten the possible fulfilment of Powell’s predictions.
In 1968, however, the impact of the speech was instantaneous. There has
been nothing like it before or since. Ted Heath, with the agreement of
his leading cabinet colleagues, straightaway sacked Powell as shadow
defence minister. Like the broadsheets, what he deplored about Powell’s
speech was its ‘tone’, but of course the tone was the speech. And
opinion polls showed that 74 per cent of the public approved of it,
hundreds of East End dockers marched in Powell’s support, and he
received 100,000 letters, almost all laudatory and along the lines of
‘At last someone has dared to speak out …’ Some of Powell’s lifelong
opponents, including the young Devon MP Michael Heseltine, conceded that
their constituents, even in rural areas which had scarcely seen a black
face, were right behind Enoch. If the present system of election to the
Tory leadership had been in operation, he would have swept home in any
potential contest.
Exhaustive research carried out by the American pollster Douglas Schoen
with the assistance of R.W. Johnson suggested that Powell’s
recommendation to vote Conservative was decisive in Heath’s rather
surprising election victory in June 1970, while his recommendation to
vote Labour (so as to secure a referendum on Britain’s membership of the
EEC) was instrumental in the Tory debacle in February 1974.[*] I am not
wholly convinced by this thesis. After all, by the spring of 1970
Wilson’s government was exhausted and discredited, while Heath’s
government was broken by the miners. Still, there’s clearly something in
it. What was not then foreseeable was that Powell would eventually
decamp to the Ulster Unionists (in 1974), never to hold office again,
pursued by Lord Hailsham’s parting gibe: ‘Enoch has now crossed the
water. He has found a new constituency and a new cause to betray and
they have a new leader to desert.’
All through his period in Northern Ireland (he remained the Ulster
Unionist MP for South Down until 1987), Margaret Thatcher took care to
stay on friendly terms with Powell, partly out of a certain sympathy
with his views and partly because his support, even when it was tacit,
could do her no harm, but she never made any move to tempt him back into
the Tory fold, for fear of the rumpus. I happened to be sitting in the
Commons gallery the afternoon that Powell paid tribute to the Iron
Lady’s Falklands victory – almost the only British foreign policy action
after 1945 that he wholly approved of, since it involved the recapture
of British territory and nothing else. The public analyst, he said, had
reported that ‘a certain substance … consisted of ferrous matter of the
highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly
resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage
for all national purposes.’ Thatcher turned to acknowledge the
compliment from the gaunt old warhorse sitting way behind her with the
other Ulster members, and the whole exchange, ponderous but curiously
poignant, was later printed, framed and hung in her office.
Powell was certainly not forgotten. When he died in 1998, the Daily
Telegraph declared that he ‘will survive more surely than any other
British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill’. If
political and parliamentary culture should be all but destroyed, ‘those
brave few who wish to restore it will find in the thoughts of Enoch
Powell something approaching the Bible.’ A Festschrift to mark what
would have been his hundredth birthday in 2012 drew contributions from
all the paladins of the Tory right: Roger Scruton, Andrew Roberts, Simon
Heffer, Iain Duncan Smith. His stream of long, considered speeches
continued to ripple through Tory minds, all the more perhaps because
they were now running underground. During his wilderness years Powell
became the Baptist of the Brexit movement. Puffing a book entitled Enoch
Was Right by one of his Ukip lieutenants, Nigel Farage trumpeted, ‘Enoch
never goes away.’
*
Biographies of Powell, many written by ardent fans, now run into double
figures, the longest and most enjoyable, by Simon Heffer, standing at
nearly a thousand pages. This latest study, by the Belfast lecturer Paul
Corthorn, attempts something different: to follow the meanders in
Powell’s thought and to unpick his abiding obsessions. It is a crisp and
compelling piece of work. Corthorn does not give us much biography or
background (Drucilla Cotterill is only named in a brief footnote, for
example), but this gives him space to quote amply and tellingly from
Powell’s speeches and letters. By halfway through, the reader is already
baffled that Powell should ever have been mistaken for an icy, unbending
man of principle. On the contrary, he was driven this way and that by
volcanic passions, transformed by his eloquence into marvellous
rhodomontade, sometimes persuasive and germane, sometimes fantastical to
the point of delusion.
The zigzags he scorches on the historical record are remarkable in
themselves. After a brilliant academic start – he became professor of
Greek at Sydney in 1937 aged 25 – he rose in the war to the rank of
brigadier without ever seeing action (something about which he always
felt guilty). In 1945, he voted Labour as a protest against Appeasement.
In 1950, he became a Tory MP. By 1955, he was a junior Treasury
minister. In 1958, he resigned along with his chancellor in protest
against Macmillan’s refusal to cut public expenditure. By 1960, he was
back in government as minister of health. In 1963, he refused to serve
under Alec Douglas-Home, enraged by the way Macmillan had stitched up
the leadership process. Back as shadow defence minister under Heath, he
was sacked in 1968. In February 1974, he urged his supporters to vote
Labour; in October that year, he stood as an Ulster Unionist.
The changes in his political views are no less remarkable, and it is on
these that Corthorn concentrates. He doesn’t, however, say much about
the first and abiding influence on Powell’s outlook: his wartime service
in the British army, and especially in India: ‘One of the happiest days
of my life was the 20th of October 1939. It was then for the first time
I put on the King’s coat.’ He described it fifty years later as ‘the
most important thing I ever did, perhaps the only important thing I ever
did’. He was buried in his brigadier’s uniform. He loved the discipline,
he loved the hierarchy, and above all he loved the Raj. He was animated
then by the ‘hopes of a lasting union between “white” and “coloured”
which the conception of common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords’.
When Powell joined the Conservative Research Department after the war,
he wrote an 8000-word memo to his boss Rab Butler explaining that ‘for
some two generations ahead ultimate responsibility for the government of
India will continue to be with Britain.’ He followed this with an even
longer memo of 25,000 words describing how Britain could hang on, which
Butler recalled as arguing that ‘with ten divisions we could reconquer
India’. At Powell’s insistence, he showed the memo to Churchill, who
‘seemed distressed and asked me if I thought Powell was “all right”’.
Churchill might well have been distressed; only a couple of years
earlier he had been dreaming the same impossible dream. Up until 1951 at
least, Powell continued to believe that ‘in its widest sense, the nation
is the Empire.’ Which meant that there must be a common citizenship for
all under the British crown, from the Himalayas to the Falklands, from
Vancouver to Vauxhall. In December 1949, already the prospective
candidate for Wolverhampton South West, he was arguing that ‘we must
reduce or remove the barriers to free movement within the Empire of
goods, of money and, above all, of human beings.’
So he had been shattered by Attlee’s decision to send out Mountbatten to
bring India independence: ‘It was a shock so severe that I remember
spending the whole of one night walking the streets of London trying to
come to terms with it.’ Now and then he sat down in a doorway and put
his head in his hands. Clearly the whole basis of British citizenship
now had to be rethought. The Conservative Party had to ‘be cured of the
British Empire’ and ‘find its patriotism in England’. The Commonwealth
was a sham, ‘a symbol to prolong the spirit long after life has departed
the body’. By 1964, he was arguing, anonymously as ‘A Conservative’ in
the Times, that the Commonwealth was ‘the cause of the massive coloured
immigration in the last decade which has inflicted social and political
damage that will take decades to obliterate’. As early as 1955, he had
supported the West Bromwich bus drivers who went on strike when an
Indian immigrant was taken on as a trainee conductor: ‘However
wrongheadedly and gropingly, I believe the strikers … to have
apprehended the dangers for this country of any appreciable coloured
population becoming domiciled here.’
*
At the same time, through the 1950s and 1960s, another enormous volte
face was switching the synapses in Powell’s planet-sized brain. In fact,
it was a double volte face. Initially, during his first months as an MP
in 1950, he had refused to toe his party’s line and had supported
Labour’s refusal to join the European Coal and Steel Community; he was
at that point opposed ‘to any pooling of sovereignty with the European
countries which would automatically result in severing [Britain] from
the non-European countries of the Empire’. But in 1961 he supported
Macmillan’s application to join the EEC and blasted those who still
worshipped ‘at the deserted shrine of Commonwealth preference’. If
anything, he was more passionate on the issue: ‘It is as a European
power … that we shall work out a Britain in the 1970s which does not
need make-believe to bolster its self-respect … This is Britain’s
worldwide role, no less than that of France or Germany, to be herself
genuinely and fearlessly, in the Europe and the world of the 1970s.’
More striking still, he now believed that
the instinctive resistance of the British to anything which would limit
their treasured independence and national sovereignty has been much
softened. They have become accustomed to the notion that the decisions
of international bodies on which Britain is represented but which she
does not control might be accepted without abandoning their pride that
‘Britons never shall be slaves.’
No modern Remainer could put it better.
That was said in a broadcast on 5 April 1965. On 21 March 1969, in a
speech to Conservative women in Clacton, Powell declared that Britain
should now withdraw its application to join the Common Market. It was
fast becoming ‘an absurdity and a humiliation’. The time had come to
resume our independence and freedom of action. He tried to smooth over
his Europhile past: he had merely ‘supported, as being right on balance
at the time, the decision of Harold Macmillan to seek membership of the
Common Market’. As we have seen, he had been far more enthusiastic than
that. By the time of the first EU referendum in 1975, he had become
apocalyptic about the dangers of staying in: ‘Belonging to the Common
Market … spells living death, the abandonment of all prospect of
national rebirth, the end of any possibility of resurgence.’ By 1982,
Europe had become ‘the question precedent to all other questions, the
be-all and end-all of all political activity and belief, an issue
literally of life and death’.
These twists and turns may seem both absurd and repellent. How could a
man of such fabled intelligence switch so violently from one absolute to
its opposite without stopping to reflect whether he might be partly or
wholly wrong in one opinion or the other? Yet there is, I think, an
identifiable drive which persists through all Powell’s U-turns and
Z-bends. He is always wedded to the absolute, hostile to qualification,
compromise or nuance, as much the heir of Hegel as of Nietzsche. Always,
he is restlessly pursuing the ultimate safe haven: the nation, resolute,
inviolate, isolated by her own choice, all-embracing, all-commanding,
solipsism incarnate, her powers not to be subsumed or subdivided in the
tiniest degree. Like other nationalists (de Gaulle, Trump, Putin), he
came to loathe and fear multilateral bodies (the Commonwealth, the UN,
the EU) and all the codes and conventions that they spawn. For the same
reason, he fiercely opposed all human rights movements: ‘All
international conventions to recognise human rights … involve the
cession of sovereignty; that is, they imply the transfer to an external
authority of the power to secure enforcement of its decrees inside the
respective states.’ He considered it futile, for example, for the
Helsinki Group to monitor Soviet compliance, because in the final
resort, the Soviet Union would always act in its own interest.
For much the same reason, Powell was suspicious of any meddling in the
internal affairs of other nations. ‘With the internal politics of Spain,
of China … even of Russia herself, we have no business; only our own
essential interest gives us the right to range ourselves with or against
another power.’ That was in 1951. Forty years later, he was arguing the
same thing: ‘Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops
come storming up the beaches of Kent or Sussex … We as a nation have no
interest in the existence or non-existence of Kuwait.’
This connects with another of his abiding obsessions, his loathing of
the United States, which he didn’t visit until he was 55 and liked as
little as he had expected. Back in 1943, he had written home of the
possibility of ‘a war with our terrible enemy, America’. Fifty years
later, at the time of the first Gulf War, he was arguing that much ‘of
our present malaise arises from the abject subordination to America and
American purposes’. He regarded the search for peace in Northern Ireland
as driven by the malevolent machinations of the US government, and
insisted that the CIA, or possibly MI6, was behind the murders of Airey
Neave and Lord Mountbatten. Conspiracy theory came naturally to him.
*
Nationalism expressed with Powell’s intensity tends to repel historians,
or at any rate to unnerve them. Ernest Gellner, for example, says he is
‘allergic to the history of ideas approach, because nationalism as an
elaborated intellectual theory is neither widely endorsed, not of high
quality, nor of any historic importance’. He argues in Nations and
Nationalism (1983) that nationalist rhetoric is so saturated with false
consciousness that ‘who said or wrote precisely what doesn’t matter
much.’ Eric Hobsbawm, in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990), went
further: nationalism involves so much ‘belief in what is patently wrong’
that ‘no serious historian of nation and nationalism can be a committed
political nationalist’. From Mazzini to Powell, it’s all tosh.
But I think this disdain misses the crucial point. Yes, it is profitless
to attempt serious analysis of most nationalist narratives, with their
rubbish heaps of false memories and embroidered legends. But what
matters isn’t so much the sentimental content of the narrative but its
iron framework: the insistence that the nation is the supreme political
fact, the one in which every citizen finds, and ought to find, his or
her greatest fulfilment and which therefore demands all our loyalties;
that it can exist and prosper only in vigorously policed independence
from all other nations. For this reason, nationalism refuses to kowtow
either to economic theory or to religious faith, both of which can only
be its servants and must never be allowed to be its master. Powell’s
twists and turns illustrate all this rather aptly.
In the 1960s, he became the darling of the neoliberals. Ralph Harris and
Arthur Seldon, the genial masterminds of the Institute of Economic
Affairs, regarded him as their most potent advocate. No one else in
British politics could argue the case for free markets even half as
persuasively. So Harris and Seldon were deeply disappointed when, as
minister of health and afterwards, Powell became the most vigorous
defender of the National Health Service. ‘See how you have comforted the
common enemy,’ Harris wailed to him. But Powell refused to budge: not
only did a universal, state-financed service provide better care to the
patient and at a lower cost than any insurance system (a view largely
confirmed by recent comparative research), it was also ‘completely
triumphantly justified on the simple ground that a civilised
compassionate nation can do no other. It, and all the other social
services, is the corporate recognition by the community of its common
obligation to its individual members.’ If the nation was to pull
together, its least fortunate members could not be left out. Modern
nationalists, from Bismarck onwards, usually include an extensive
welfare state as part of their package. Free markets come second to
national cohesion.
Powell was equally stern in resisting the moral intrusions of religion
into the proper business of the nation. As a young man in love with
everything German, he had been a fervent Nietzschean and so an avowed
atheist. In his late twenties he hovered on the edge of desolation. Just
before Dunkirk he wrote to his parents: ‘Henceforward the only emotions
of which I am capable seem to be hatred, ambition and selfishness, and I
feel possessed and burnt up with them.’ An odd letter for an only child
to write in the darkest days of the war, but then Powell was only
intermittently attentive to his effect on other people. Later, he came
back to the Church and described himself as an Anglican, but more out of
reverence for the C of E as a hallowed component of Englishness than
because of any sympathy with the Sermon on the Mount. Reviewing
Douglas-Home’s memoirs, he could not help sneering at the Scottish
squire’s naive acceptance of ‘the simple message of Christ’. Nietzsche,
I fancy, would have felt the same about Sir Alec. Heffer argues
plausibly that, later still, Powell veered back towards Nietzsche, or at
any rate Carlyle. During a fascinating TV debate with Father Trevor
Huddleston in 1969, Powell described the essential teachings of
Christianity as ‘in deliberate and direct conflict with human reality
and human experience’, and denied that his duties as a politician could
be derivable from them.
In the same way, he regarded the UN and its moral precepts as
fraudulent, because they presupposed or aspired to a state of world
peace, ‘whereas the very nature and existence of the nation itself are
inseparable from force, which is why the rise and growth and
disappearance of nations is mediated by force … Without war the
sovereign nation is not conceivable.’ Force is integral to Powell’s
vision of human existence. However awful, war is a necessary and
laudable thing, as it was for de Gaulle and Churchill. During the first
EU referendum, he voiced ‘the haunting fear, which I am sure I am not
alone in feeling, that we, the British, will soon have nothing left to
die for. That was not a slip of the tongue. What a man lives for is what
a man dies for, because every bit of living is a bit of dying.’ In other
words, his greatest dread was that the EU might actually succeed in its
overarching mission: to prevent war.
Powell did not invent Europhobia. It was always lurking there on the
right wing of the Tory Party, from the moment Macmillan launched his
application in 1961. Among the general public, opposition to it was
seldom below 35 per cent and was often much higher. But it was Powell
who introduced the extravagant paranoia that has finally, twenty years
after his death, blown the party apart. It was Powell, and nobody but
Powell, who fully articulated the four separate obsessions that have
melded to inspire the Brexit movement: loathing of mass immigration,
revulsion against the EU (and, in particular, of the ultimate
destination of a federal Europe), dislike of devolution in any part of
the UK, and disdain for human rights. Each of these is individually
calculated to weaken the nation, we are told; applied en masse, they
will destroy it.
What then is a nation? ‘It is that which thinks it is a nation’; ‘that
self-consciousness which is the essence of nationhood’. It is we
ourselves who decide what the nation is, and ourselves alone; ‘Sinn
Féin’, or ‘Sinn Féin Amháin’, as the Irish put it. From this simple
assertion follows something much more alarming, and it is this alarm
which Powell never ceased sounding, and which still throbs in our ears
today. If it is we and nobody else who invent the nation, then we can
uninvent it, or let it slip, or go to pieces. ‘The question of joining
the Common Market is the most fundamental of all’; ‘It is a question not
merely, what sort of a nation are we to be but what nation are we to
be?’ If direct elections to the European Parliament took place, ‘it
would no longer be possible to pretend that Britain has not ceased to be
a nation.’ Well, they did take place, rather few of us voted, and the
roof didn’t fall in. In the same way, during the riots in Handsworth,
Birmingham, in 1985, Powell foresaw a Britain ‘unimaginably wracked by
dissension and violent disorder, not recognisable as the same nation as
it has been, or perhaps as a nation at all’. If, as Ernest Renan claimed
in What Is a Nation? (1882), ‘the existence of the nation is a daily
plebiscite,’ then we must be living on a knife edge.
The borders of a nation are not for Powell tiresome impediments to human
intercourse, they are the precious delineators of sovereignty. A hard
border is a good border. How he would have loathed the smudgings of the
Good Friday Agreement, signed two months after his death, just as he
abominated ‘the capitulation at Hillsborough’ in 1985. How little he
would care about the dangers of a hard border in Ireland after Brexit.
All his life he railed against the easygoing English presumption that
Irish citizens were not really foreigners.
Paradoxically, while Powell sets out to magnify the nation as the
bulwark of our individual destinies, he at the same time makes it look
as fragile as a paper lantern, forever liable to burn or tear or simply
float off into the night sky, leaving us bereft. He refuses to
contemplate the possibility that, in the real world, the nation might be
a more resilient thing, able to absorb shocks and humiliations and
hardships, to confront social and economic and, yes, political change,
and emerge in an altered but not diminished state. If we go on at this
rate, the nation must be ruined, Sir John Sinclair lamented after the
British defeat at Saratoga in 1777. ‘There is a great deal of ruin in a
nation,’ replied Adam Smith.
Here, I think, is Enoch Powell’s abiding legacy: not his undeniable
racism, or his cold disregard for the welfare of those he identified as
‘an alien wedge’, but rather the lurking angst he instilled and
bequeathed about the future existence of the British nation, the sense
of an imminent catastrophe. Boris Johnson excoriates the ‘doomsters’ and
‘gloomsters’. But who was the Father of all Doomsters? Who first
implanted the obsessive belief that breaking out of the prison house of
Brussels was our only possible salvation? If Enoch Powell had never
existed, I very much doubt that Boris Johnson would be where he is today.
[*] Johnson described this research in the LRB of 23 January 1997.
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