[A review of Simon Heffer,Like the Roman: the Life of Enoch Powell. Phoenix (London, 1999)]
I should begin my article on Enoch Powell’s life, as described by Simon Heffer, with a discussion of Powell’s poetry and his poems. This is my way into an appreciation of a great politician. His political behaviour is characterised by two attributes of character: a massive and logical intelligence alongside a vast capacity for learning, and, the practical ability to apply himself to promotion in large organisations, such as the Conservative Party, the House of Commons, or the British Army. These two things, added to his uncompromising national loyalty, made of him a formidable or great politician. But all of this talent or even genius, had a single drawback, namely, that he shied away from the final doing of the deed, the dirty work. He was within a hair of becoming leader of his party, and thence prime minister, but it seems to me that he almost preferred to become the enemy of the man who beat him to that role, a man of much less ability, of less ethical and intellectual power. It is the blending of great intellect and ethical coherence, along with a gigantic ambition and practical ability to rise through the ranks, which we see in him and his career; and then, at the summit, we see a failure to finally get there, followed by a period of hanging on, but never finding the will to make that final leap. But no man is perfect in every way.
Powell was asked toward the end of his life, in an interview, what he most regretted not doing in his life. He replied, that he regretted not dying in North Africa with the others of his generation. During the war, he had risen through the ranks from private to brigadier, but in all that time, and he agonised over this later, and even while it went on, he never faced the enemy directly, or put his life at risk for his country. That is a significant thing about him: he would have preferred to die rather than to live having run away; he was intrinsically loyal to ideas, to ideas such as the nation; and logical about them, too. Somehow, the ambition, the self-mastery, and the superb mind, almost guaranteed that he would fail to achieve the ultimate reality and objective of all his labours; for, the job of leading, at the summit, is a kind of role which has a raw power about it, requiring a sovereign freedom, which is counter to the idea of a parliament and reason. The ruler of a thing is not exactly subject to it. Just so, the soldier must eventually murder the enemy in combat, or die; and these are not rational things, not a logical orderly event, even if the war in which these dire things happen were to be just and right. Brave in everything, he was perhaps just a little too much of a romantic and a poet to get involved in the dirt of reality and direct power. His great enemy, Heath, had no such scruples. I suppose that's one explanation for why he did not become prime minister. But there is another.
It would not surprise me if, or, it would be my suspicion that, Powell’s ambition, which was considerable, were not thwarted and defeated by the same instinct which allowed him to write poetry, and to publish several small volumes of it, as a young man. When he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and later on, while a professor of Classics, and during the war, he took a serious interest in writing short lyrics in the style of one of his teachers, A.E. Housman. Housman, a minor poet of limited gifts, was very popular in England at that time. Powell, who wanted to write poems, did so in the style of Housman, but otherwise with some originality. His are short regular lyrics, pessimistic in tone, concerned with rural life, and particularly with love affairs and the episodes of youth.
I say that a limitless ambition in practical matters, is at odds with an inclination to abstract order; and that it is also at odds with poetry. Poetry has the quality of belonging to an order and a hierarchy similar to the one to which the Christian saint belongs; the things of the world are not the things of heaven; rather, heaven and world are mutually exclusive. Those who are first shall be last. Where as the saint can lay claim to having a supreme authority over spiritual matters, he must also have none over the world, because Christianity insists that the poor and meek alone enter that kingdom. The prizes and supremacy of poetry should be considered foolish by the hierarchies and powers of the world. Poetry makes nothing happen; poetry is a mug’s game; the appropriate reward for poetry is a supply of sack; poetry is idleness, and song.
Now, it could be said of Powell, as it was said of Coleridge, that he might have made something of himself, if he were not a poet. And Powell, who is otherwise the most logical, intelligent, and useful of the politicians of the post-War era, does have the air about him, of having had a certain unavoidable foolishness, a certain lack of actual power, and an inherent destiny of the failure of his ambitions.
Powell began his working life as a professor of Classics, and took a job at the University of Sydney, aged twenty-five. He admired Nietzsche at that time, and like Nietzsche, he was a professor of Greek; he was younger than his comparable peers, and, like Nietzsche, unusually persistent with his study. He had not been at this for long, when the war broke out, and he returned to England to join the army. After the war, he became an Anglican Christian.
He served in Africa and India, but was coerced to join the intelligence branch of the Army, because of his language learning skills, and his ability to do analysis and write reports. At the time, his heart, so to speak, told him that he would prefer to be in the infantry, but he never managed to achieve that, and his requests to be sent to the front in Africa or Europe were not granted. A man in old age, feeling that he would have liked to have died for his country at a moment when many others did, is not unusual; but I think that it is unusual when a senior politician says it. And it is clearly related to his poetic instinct, his grasp of life in the way Housman described it. As if intrinsically, existence is not intrinsically of great value, and that it can lose its value entirely, if love or honour or principles are broken.
By the end of the war, having spent time in India, he decided that he had wanted to become Viceroy, and, determining that this could only be achieved by serving as a politician for a while, on his demobilisation as a brigadier, he went to the nearest Conservative Party branch, while still wearing his brigadier’s uniform, and put himself forward as a candidate for member of parliament. It's characteristic of a practical and ambitious, and also logical man, to have acted like this. He decided that he wanted the near-impossible, calculated that he could achieve it, and then having located the way toward it, began the journey, aiming to finish in record time, by the shortest route.
It was a couple of years later that the British handed over control of India to the Indian parliament, making his ambition impossible of achievement. But by that time, he had got the hang of canvassing and representing his constituency in the usual ways, and he had been selected as the candidate for Wolverhampton South West, and so he resigned himself to becoming a member of parliament only. For the rest of his political life, over four decades, through the fifties to the late eighties, he was continuously in office, although only at the beginning of his career was he a minister. He put himself forward for leadership of the party in the mid-1960s, and then observed Ted Heath win that election; afterwards, he confined himself to giving speeches in the House, and around the country, usually in direct conflict with his party and particularly in conflict with Heath. He had failed to win the highest office.
It strikes the reader of his biography, that Powell had a formidable prophetic ability, derived from his analytic cast of mind. He also concerned himself with first principles of parliamentary government of the nation, and therefore, he became a great parliamentarian, who saw it as unquestionable that parliament and the English constitution, deriving from the English people, must be sovereign. He became antagonistic to the other men of his time, because they tended to be socialist or internationalist, and not to share his intellectual insight. His great arguments with the governments of the time are perhaps all because of these three or four things, which I will deal with separately, in no particular order.
First, the Common Market and Britain’s membership; the Common Market which became the EEC and then the EU. Second, immigration into Britain from the Commonwealth. Third the sovereignty of Parliament and nationalism at the end of empire. Fourth, Northern Ireland and its membership of the United Kingdom. And finally, economics and financial management of spending: broadly the theory of what money is. I do not say that this list is exhaustive of his major passions. These are notably reactive positions, which he took in order to combat the intentions of other politicians; he is not noteworthy for having conceived a theory of active change to the country or its laws. He believed that a trade agreement is good, but the Common Market was obviously not going to remain a mere treaty; immigration to Britain was contrary to the idea of citizenship and national loyalty; the Commonwealth was a useless continuation of finished empire; Northern Ireland must remain part of the United Kingdom, ruled from Westminster, and not surrendered; and that printing money is the cause of inflation and an inflated pound must not be used to pay debts. His political career was devoted to proving these things, in an environment where his contemporaries lacked his intellect and his adherence to logic.
A nation should survive and that a nation with a parliament which is national and sovereign, should use that sovereignty in its own interests alone. Other countries stand to the nation either as friends or enemies; members of parliament, who must adhere to the constitution, have no responsibility for any of these foreign countries, or any foreign citizens. What made him a parliamentarian was, that even if certain national problems could be resolved by other means, such as by urgent action which circumvents the constitution, revolutionary activities, fiat actions by a prime minister, he would never consent; parliament alone should resolve problems, and apply its traditional methods.
Now the EU, or the Common Market, was and is incompatible with a national parliament. Powell knew this because he interested himself in the history of Britain. He wrote a history of the House of Lords, for instance. But his sense of the inheritance of the past by the present seems to have been so deep that it applied, regardless of knowledge or study. That is, our traditional way of doing things must not be changed, since what we have inherited is what we effectively are. Unless a country determines to try to die, or to give up the struggle to exist, and to let itself merge into a larger ‘country’, it has no option but to continue along the path which history and the ancestors have left to it. He believed, that should a country change, it must only do so after parliamentary activities have taken place, after debate, voting, consent. It is for this reason that he also considered the United States to be, in theory at least, Great Britain’s chief enemy, because that country had taken the empire from Britain, and was active in reducing its influence and freedom, and changing it in various other ways. For this reason, in 1977, he advocated an alliance between Russia and the United Kingdom, seeing it as a means of securing Britain’s freedom in Europe, and perhaps against the otherwise overwhelming power of the United States.
The Common Market, to his mind a good way of making trade easier when it was first established, began to show itself as something which would one day become a kind of militarised and diplomatic entity, forming a new nation which would envelope and destroy Great Britain’s independence. In order to join with that, the United Kingdom parliament would effectively, sooner or later, have to vote itself out of existence. He could not accept this.
Let us turn to immigration. Powell had spent years in India; he not only accepted the imperial settlement: he wanted to be the King’s lieutenant in India, and to be installed as Viceroy. While the empire still existed, he was entirely committed to it, and conceived of it as a legitimate property belonging to England; and when it was gone, he continuously called for England to cease any claim to empire, and to accustom itself to being without foreign possessions, or interests abroad, and to behave accordingly. For instance, he saw no need for Britain to attempt to hold onto the Suez Canal in 1956. One of the negative and indirect effects of a colonial attitude toward Britain was, that Commonwealth citizens had the right to immigrate into Britain; this was because, for almost two decades after the war, people who were subjects of the Commonwealth were also permitted to enter the United Kingdom and to live and work there. India and Pakistan, having a large populations, and offering few economic opportunities to their own populations, were the source of hundreds of thousands of new ‘citizens’ who arrived in Britain as a result. Likewise, the West Indian people of the Caribbean Islands. Movement inside the Commonwealth was free and without borders.
The law to put an end to this open border policy was only passed in 1962 (Commonwealth Immigrants Act), by which time the multiracial and multicultural Britain with which we were familiar while I was growing up, had already come to pass. There have never been any attempts to reverse this mass and generally uninvited, unwanted immigration; indeed, a law passed in 1965 prevented any British citizen from making any personal effort to reverse it, on the back of the government’s determination not to do so. But by the time of Margaret Thatcher, and until the time of Blair, the non-British population did not significantly increase, except by new births; however, at the same time, hardly any effort was made at a political level, to normalise the new citizens and to coerce them to become British. On the contrary, to a fair extent, ‘communities’ of immigrants formed, and set up several enclaves inside the country; this did not always occur, but that it occurred at all, was a terrible injury to the nation. If this judgement needs to be explained, it can be explained as follows: foreign people who retained their foreignness without any compunction, gathered in specific British cities, where they encouraged each other to speak the languages of foreign countries, and practice their ancestral religions and legal standards, and in anyone's judgement this must be considered contrary to the idea of the nation.
But to a strict parliamentarian politician, there are at least two significant logical and ethical problems with this sequence of events, of a purely political nature, and Powell was unable to turn a blind eye to them, as we know.
Until the 1962 Act had been passed, and before the 1965 race discrimination law, and others which came after it, to deter any comment on the matter, Powell had already begun giving speeches and try to affect policy on the problems of immigration. Powell became a famous politician of a peculiar and heroic kind for many, in 1968, as everyone knows. It should be mentioned, that in the 1968 speech he did not say anything which he had not said before, but that this particular one was disseminated widely by the national press.
The immigration issue resolved itself down to this specific issue, for Powell: the immigrants were living in Britain without any demonstrable loyalty to the country. They were not ethically citizens of the nation. They remained almost totally foreign bodies. His notion of loyalty and citizenship was defined as loyalty and obedience to the Crown, but there was no way of finding out whether the new citizens were loyal, or how they deserved membership of the nation. And this contradicted the idea of a nation with a national and sovereign parliament. For, parliament takes its authority from the national people and the constitutional set up. But the constitutional set up and people do not have any means of dealing with a foreign body living among it. Allowing large numbers of foreign people to settle in Britain is an attack on the constitution and the idea of national parliament. Nor could any changes to the constitution be made to accommodate them, unless a plebiscite or vote was taken so to change it, yet none of the political parties were willing to do that, because the British people would certainly have called for expulsions or repatriation.
It is thought that Powell’s political career changed after the 1968 event, but it does not seem to have done so at a political level. He continued to be a conservative member of parliament. On a personal level, he became famous, and for the rest of his life he received mail from across Britain, giving him support and thanks. In the early years after the famous speech, Royal Mail delivered large bags full of letters every day to his constituency office, and Powell was forced to employ assistants to deal with them. His method of campaigning and expressing his ideas had always been to give public speeches, which were usually published afterward, and to write for the newspapers. This continued, but in the years after, invitations to speak about immigration were frequent if not continuous. On the other hand, as the years progressed, both the Labour and Conservative parties treated him as an outsider, and the mass media began to speak of him as an isolated individual, a symbol of intolerance and racism.
For his part, he insisted on absolute freedom to speak his mind on any subject, going so far as to give his blessing to the Labour party, when his own party seemed to be doing wrong on some important issue. He gave his support to Michael Foot’s Labour party when matters related to the Common Market, negotiated by Ted Heath, were at stake. Because of the Northern Ireland peace talks which went on during the 1980s, which looked likely to result in the hand over of Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, he left the Tory party and joined became an MP for the Ulster Unionist Party.
Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister tended to give vent to ideas which Powell had been espousing since the late 1950s. It is a shame that Powell had not become leader of the party in those earlier years. He disagreed with Thatcher on the approach which should be taken to the Irish question, and he was disappointed by her policy on the Northern Irish parliament, in which Irish republicans, as well as unionists, would be able to decide the nation’s laws and its future. How could it be, that Ireland, another country, could interfere in the political decisions of a province of the United Kingdom?
What is most consistently amusing in Simon Heffer’s account of Powell’s life, is the matter of the economy, and Heffer’s description of the quarrels between Powell and the government, about the nature of debt and money. Throughout the 1960s, Powell had claimed that the measures taken to reduce inflation, by both the Labour and Conservative parties, would not work. Those measures did not work. He found it absurd, that in order to reduce inflation and to protect the pound, the government had resorted to begging shopkeepers to keep their prices low. Meanwhile, the government itself printed money to cover its debts, and refused to believe that this could alter the value of the currency.
The Institute for Economic Affairs was set up sometime in the seventies, and was aligned with Powell on these difficult questions. Powell and Keith Joseph were the principle thinkers who inspired that organisation; it eventually gave rise to Margaret Thatcher, and continued to advise her while she was prime minister.
Powell did not stand for parliament in the 1987 election; by that time he was seventy-six years of age. Thatcher’s government offered him a seat in the House of Lords, but he did not accept it, because, a notable scholar of the Lords, he did not approve of lifetime peerages, and believed that the House should remain as he had found it: an irrational institution, but one which worked, in which men received their seat by arcane rules of primogeniture and succession. Like the monarchy.
I think it is clear from the way I have presented his life, that I generally approve of his conduct and his opinions. That is to say, I would like to have seen him as the prime minister, a role which he wanted, as he showed when he stood for the leadership of the Conservative party in the early 1960s. I cannot see how anyone can disagree with any of his opinions, unless they want to see an end of Britain, and its parliament. Or, perhaps, unless there were some weakness of the nation which meant, that for pragmatic and opportunistic reasons, parliament were forced to diminish itself and diminish the nation’s independence and coherence, in the face of some kind of defeat, calamity, or severe impoverishment. It has been a problem that the Heath government, for instance, saw defeat were there was none, and shifted Britain into Europe, and reduced the power of the prime minister, for no good reason.
I don’t wish to make a concise summary of Powell’s life and achievement simply in order to round off this essay. The EU, large scale immigration, the nature of the economy, the commonwealth, Northern Ireland, have each of them been the opportunity to prove that Powell was right. He used to say, that the British people would vote to leave the Common Market or the EU, given the chance. That immigration would spiral out of control and threaten the country with civil war. That inflation could only be solved by a cut in spending and a reduction of the size of the state; and so on. These problems are still here, and he had the strange power of being able to predict how they would develop, how they would continue, what their results would be, if not dealt with in the way he proposed. It’s the power of logic, reason, and independent freedom of mind and speech that is working here. The principles he believed in, on which his logic worked, were, family, God and Christianity, the nation, and the national common law government by parliament. Like everyone else, I’m depressed that the issues which preoccupied a man who rose to prominence in the 1950s, are hardly less relevant today, seventy-five years later.
But the question of whether Parliament still governs Britain in a meaningful way is, these days, moot. The growth of the overwhelming wealth of the City of London, which has delivered power to a financial oligarchy has been a gradual and largely invisible process, and has left the nation dependent on the wishes of that group of people; this has been accompanied by the break up of parliamentary responsibility, to non-elected by state governed organisations (so called quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations); the politicisation of a judiciary which has also been given powers over political matters, and frequently prevent the government and parliament from serving the people; these are developments which could not have been foreseen or allowed during Powell's time in parliament.
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