Enoch Powell

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Simon Heffer's biography of Enoch Powell, published in 1999

John Enoch Powell, MBE (June 16 1912 – February 8 1998) was a British politician, linguist, writer, academic, soldier and poet. He was a Conservative Party Member of Parliament (MP) between 1950 and February 1974, and an Ulster Unionist MP between October 1974 and 1987. Controversial throughout his career, his tenure in senior office was brief. He held strong and distinctive views on issues such as race, national identity, immigration, monetary policy, and the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community, which later became the European Union.

Life

Early years

Powell was born and raised in Birmingham, England, the only child of Albert Enoch Powell (1872–1956), elementary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886–1953; daughter of Henry Breese, a Liverpool policeman, and his wife Eliza), who had given up her own teaching career after marrying. The Powells were of Welsh descent, though by the time of Enoch's birth had lived in the Black Country for four generations, working first as miners and then in the iron trade.

From King Edward's School, Birmingham Powell became a student of classics, specifically Latin and Greek (which would later influence his 'Rivers of Blood' speech), and was one of the few students in the school's history to attain 100% in an end-of-year English examination. He completed his education at Trinity College, Cambridge (1930-1933), where he fell under the influence both of the poet A. E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at Cambridge, and of the writings of the German philosopher Nietzsche. He took no part in politics at university. After winning a double first in Latin and Greek, he stayed on at Trinity College as a Fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient manuscripts in Rome and producing academic works in Greek and Welsh.

In 1937 he was appointed Professor of Greek at Sydney University aged 25 (failing in his aim of beating Nietzsche's record of becoming a professor at 24). Amongst his pupils was the future Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam. He revised Stuart-Jones's edition of Thucydides' Historiae for the Oxford University Press in 1938. His most lasting contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus (1938).

As well as his education at Cambridge, Powell took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, now the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, because he felt that his long-cherished ambition, of becoming Viceroy of India, would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language.

On arrival in Sydney he stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon break out in Europe, and that when it did he would be heading home to enlist in the army. During his time there as a professor, he grew increasingly angry at the appeasement of Nazi Germany and what he saw as a betrayal of British national interests. In a letter to his parents in June 1939, before the outbreak of war, Powell writes:

"It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors".

Immediately upon the outbreak of war, Powell returned to England, although not before buying a Russian dictionary, since he thought "Russia would hold the key to our survival and victory, as it had in 1812 and 1916".

War years

During World War II, Powell enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, almost a month after returning home. Powell enlisted in the ranks as an Australian. In later years he recorded his promotion from private to lance-corporal in his "Who's Who" entry, on other occasions describing it as a greater promotion than entering the Cabinet. He was trained for a commission after, whilst working in a kitchen, answering the question of an inspecting officer with a Greek proverb. Though he served in Africa with the Desert Rats, Powell never actually saw combat, serving for most of his military career as a staff officer. It was here in Algiers that the seed of Powell's dislike of the United States was planted. After talking with some senior American officials, he became convinced that one of America's main war aims was to destroy the British Empire. Writing home on 16 February 1943, Powell said: "I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were...our terrible enemy, America...".

Powell's conviction of the anti-Britishness of the Americans continued during the war. Powell cut out and retained all his life an article from the Statesman newspaper of the 13th November 1943, in which the American Clare Boothe Luce said in a speech that Indian independence would mean that the "USA will really have won the greatest war in the world for democracy".

He desperately wanted to go to the Far East to help the fight against Japan because "the war in Europe is won now, and I want to see the Union Flag back in Singapore" before, Powell thought, the Americans beat Britain to it.

Powell began the war as the youngest Professor in the Commonwealth; he ended it as the youngest Brigadier in the British army, the only man in the entire war to go from Private to Brigadier. Powell felt guilty for having survived when many of those he had met during his journey through the ranks had not. When once asked how he would like to be remembered, he at first answered "Others will remember me as they will remember me", but when pressed he replied "I should like to have been killed in the war."

Conservative Party

Though he voted for the Labour Party in their 1945 landslide victory, because he wanted to punish the Conservative party for the Munich agreement, after the war he joined the Tories and worked for the Conservative Research Department under R.A. Butler, where his colleagues included Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling. After unsuccessfuly contesting the Labour Party's ultra-safe seat of Normanton at a by-election in 1947 (when the Labour majority was 62%), he was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West in the 1950 general election.

Powell's ambition to be Governor-General of India crumbled in February 1947, when Prime Minister Attlee announced that Indian independence was imminent. Powell was so shocked by the change of policy that he spent the whole night after it was announced walking the streets of London, trying to take it in. He came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that once India had gone the whole empire should follow it. This logical absolutism explained his later indifference to the Suez crisis, his contempt for the Commonwealth, and his urging that Britain should scrap any remaining pretence that she was a world power.

On January 2 1952 he married Margaret Pamela Wilson (b 28 January 1926), a former colleague from Conservative Central Office, who provided him with the settled and happy family life essential to his political career. They had two daughters.

Powell was a member of the Suez Group of MPs who were against the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal because such a move would demonstrate, Powell argued, that Britain could no longer maintain a position there and that any claim to the Suez Canal would therefore be illogical. However after the troops had left in 1954 and the Egyptians nationalized the Canal in 1956, Powell opposed the British attempts to retake the Canal because he thought the British no longer had the resources to be a world power.

In December 1955 he was made a junior Housing Minister and later became Financial Secretary to the Treasury but in January 1958 he resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury colleague Nigel Birch, in protest at government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch deflationist, or in modern terms a monetarist, and a believer in market forces. (Powell was also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.) The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all, which Powell believed (and is now widely accepted) to be a major cause of inflation, and in effect a form of taxation, as the holders of money find their money is worth less. Inflation rose to 2.5% - a high figure for the era, especially in peacetime.

Powell returned to government in July 1960 when he was appointed Minister for Health, albeit outside the Cabinet, but this changed in 1962. In this post he was responsible for promoting an ambitious ten-year programme of general hospital building and for beginning the run-down of the huge psychiatric institutions. In his famous 1961 "Water Tower" speech, he said:

"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside - the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault. Let me describe some of the defences which we have to storm".[1]

The speech catalysed a debate that was one of several strands leading to the Care in the Community initiative of the 1980s.

Later, he oversaw the employment of a large number of Commonwealth immigrants by the understaffed National Health Service. Prior to this, many non-white immigrants who held full rights of citizenship in Britain were obliged to take the jobs that no one else wanted (eg. street cleansing, night-shift assembly production lines), often paid considerably less than their white counterparts.

Along with Iain Macleod, Powell refused to serve in the Cabinet following the appointment of Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister. This refusal was not based on antipathy to Home personally but was in protest against what Macleod and Powell saw as Macmillan's underhand manipulation of colleagues during the process of choosing a new leader. Following the Conservatives' defeat in the 1964 general election, he agreed to return to the front bench as Transport spokesman. In 1965 he stood in the first-ever party leadership election, but came a distant third to Edward Heath, who appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Defence.

In a controversial speech on May 26 1967, Powell criticised Britain's post-war world role:

"In our imagination the vanishing last vestiges ... of Britain's once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets. Under God's good providence and in partnership with the United States, we keep the peace of the world and rush hither and thither containing Communism, putting out brush fires and coping with subversion. It is difficult to describe, without using terms derived from psychiatry, a notion having so few points of contact with reality".

Rivers of Blood speech

Main article: Rivers of Blood speech

Powell was noted for his oratorical skills, and for being a maverick who cared little about what harm he did to his party - or himself. On Saturday April 20 1968 he made a controversial speech in Birmingham, in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain. Because of its allusion to Virgil saying that the Tiber would foam with blood, Powell's warning was christened the "Rivers of Blood speech" by the press, and the name stuck.

The central political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was instead the introduction by the Labour Government of anti-discrimination legislation which would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain areas of British life, particularly housing. Powell found this legislation offensive and immoral.

One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he had received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in Wolverhampton. The writer described the fate of an elderly woman who was supposedly the last white person living in her street. She had repeatedly refused applications from non-whites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a racist outside her home and receiving excreta through her letterbox. Despite combing the electoral register and other sources, the editor of the local newspaper Clem Jones (a close friend of Powell's, who broke off relations with him over the controversy) and his journalists failed to identify the woman. Powell refused to name her because he felt he had to respect her confidentiality, even to the point of withdrawing from a libel action against a national newspaper (see below). After Powell's death Kenneth Nock, a Wolverhampton solicitor, wrote to the Express and Star in April 1998 to claim that his firm had acted for the woman in question and to confirm that she existed but that he could not name her due to rules concerning client confidentiality. In January 2007 the BBC Radio Four programme Document, followed by the Daily Mail, identified the lady as Druscilla Cotterill, who died in 1978. The speech was delivered while the 1968 Race Relations Bill (later Act) was making its way through Parliament, which was to make racial discrimination in housing illegal.

Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech and Powell never held another senior political post. Powell received almost 120,000 (predominantly positive) letters and a Gallup poll at the end of April showed that 74% of those asked agreed with what Powell had said in his speech. The Sunday Times received a libel writ from Powell for branding his speeches "racialist", but also gained a court order for disclosure of the letters he had received to demonstrate the validity of their defence. Powell dropped the libel action as a consequence of the court order.

Three days after the speech, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the House of Commons 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting Powell's "victimisation," and the next day 400 meat porters from Smithfield market handed in a ninety-two page petition in support of Powell.

Some suspected that Powell was set up - TV cameras were not known to turn up at meetings of the West Midlands branch of the Conservative Political Centre, and some believe that Heath wanted Powell to take the blame for his party taking a tougher line on immigration later that year. Conversely, Powell had issued an advance copy of his speech to the media and their appearance at the speech may have been due to the fact that they realised the content was explosive.

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Badge supporting Powell's views.

Senior figures in the Conservative Party, e.g. Sir Kenneth Baker, have divulged that Powell later told them that he regretted giving the speech, for it ended his political career.

Slogan: "Enoch was right"

In the United Kingdom, particularly in England, "Enoch was right" is a phrase of political rhetoric, employed generally by the far right, inviting comparison of aspects of contemporary English society with predictions made by Powell in the Rivers of Blood speech. The phrase implies criticism of immigration and multiculturalism.

An unusual Conservative?

Powell's popularity appeared to contribute to the Conservatives' surprise General Election win in 1970, which showed a late surge in Conservative support in the West Midlands, near Powell's constituency. Still, Heath's victory was a shattering blow to Powell, as they were implacable rivals. A Daily Express poll in 1972 showed Powell being the most popular politician in the country. Powell had previously stood in the 1965 Conservative leadership election, but had polled a mere 15 votes.

In February 1974 Powell left the Conservative Party, mainly because it had taken the UK into the European Common Market, and advised the electorate to vote Labour, who promised a referendum on whether or not the UK should remain in the EEC, as the only way to save the UK's sovereignty. Given the close nature of the election (there was a hung Parliament), it is possible that Powell's comments contributed to Heath's defeat. He repeated this line in the October 1974 General Election, and the referendum was held in 1975. However the result was a clear vote to remain in "the Common Market" (as it was called on the ballot paper). In a March 1977 no-confidence vote, he voted to keep the Labour government in power.

In March 1969 Powell had turned forcefully against Britain's joining the European Economic Community. Opposition to entry had thitherto been confined largely to the Labour Party. He had voted against the Schuman plan in 1950 and had supported entry only because he believed that the Common Market was simply a means to secure free trade. Now, he said, it was clear to him that the sovereignty of Parliament was in question, as was Britain's very survival as a nation. This nationalist analysis attracted millions of grass-roots Conservatives and others, and as much as anything else made Powell the implacable enemy of Heath, a fervent pro-European.

Powell's Euroscepticism was fuelled by a belief that the Cold War was a sham because the Soviet Union was not intent on invading the West - so dependent was the USSR on receiving US and European grain surpluses for next to nothing - and so he did not see the need to maintain the Western alliance as other Conservatives did. The UK's "independent nuclear deterrent" was also viewed negatively; he felt that, because it could not rationally be used, it was pointless. He believed that American interest in Britain was an attempt to undermine Britain and give the United States a greater world role. Powell also argued that the Americans advocated European states, including Britain, to join the European Economic Community because it was the 'political arm' of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and therefore fitted into America's grand strategy against the Soviet Union.

The Conservatives had promised at the 1970 election to negotiate about entry into the Common Market, that entry to be accomplished only with the full-hearted consent of the British parliament and people. When Powell saw Heath sign an accession treaty before Parliament had even debated the issue, when the second reading of the bill to put the treaty into law passed by just eight votes on second reading, and when it became clear that the British people would have no further say in the matter, he declared open war on his party's line. He voted against the government on every one of the 104 divisions in the course of the European Communities Bill. When finally he lost this battle, he decided he could no longer sit in a parliament that was not sovereign. In the summer of 1972 he prepared to resign, and changed his mind only because of fears of a renewed wave of immigration from Uganda following the rise of Idi Amin.

Ulster Unionist Party

Since 1968 Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to maintain British rule. From early in 1971 he opposed, with increasing vehemence, Heath's approach to Ulster, the greatest breach with his party coming over the imposition of direct rule in 1972.

In a sudden general election later in 1974, Powell returned to Parliament as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, having rejected an offer to stand as a candidate for the National Front. He was a strong believer in the United Kingdom, and he believed that it would survive only if the Unionists strove to integrate fully with the United Kingdom by abandoning the devolved rule that Northern Ireland had until recently enjoyed. He refused point-blank to join the Orange Institution - the first Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster never to be a member (and to date only one of three, the others being the former UDR member Ken Maginnis, and Lady Hermon), and he was an outspoken opponent of the more extremist Unionism espoused by the Reverend Ian Paisley and his supporters.

Powell claimed that the only way to stop the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) was for Northern Ireland to be an integral part of the United Kingdom, treated no differently from any other of its constituent parts. He claimed the ambiguous nature of the province's status, with its own parliament and prime minister, gave hope to the PIRA that it could be detached from the rest of the UK:

"Every word or act which holds out the prospect that their unity with the rest of the United Kingdom might be negotiable is itself, consciously or unconsciously, a contributory cause to the continuation of violence in Northern Ireland".

During 1983 his local agent was Jeffrey Donaldson, later an Ulster Unionist MP before defecting to the DUP.

In Powell's later career as an Ulster Unionist MP he continued to criticise the United States and claimed that the Americans were trying to persuade the British to push Northern Ireland into an all-Ireland state because the condition for Irish membership of NATO, Powell claimed, was Northern Ireland. The Americans wanted to close the 'yawning gap' in NATO defence that was the southern Irish coast to northern Spain. Powell claimed he had a copy of a State Department Policy Statement from 15 August 1950 in which the American government allegedly said that the 'agitation' caused by partition in Ireland "lessens the usefulness of Ireland in international organisations and complicates strategic planning for Europe". "It is desirable", the document continued, "that Ireland should be integrated into the defense planning of the North Atlantic area, for its strategic position and present lack of defensive capacity are matters of significance".

In 1984, Powell also claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had murdered Lord Louis Mountbatten and that the deaths of the MPs Airey Neave and Robert Bradford were carried out by the USA in order to stop Neave's policy of integration for Northern Ireland. Then in 1986 he again argued that Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) had not killed Airey Neave but that "MI6 and their friends" were responsible instead.

Though he was on supposedly good terms with Margaret Thatcher (she claimed her own monetarist policies stemmed from Powell's, to which he remarked drily, "A pity she did not understand them!"), he came into conflict with her in 1985 in protest because of her support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement, resigning his seat and then regaining it at the ensuing by-election. Powell (in a result that devastated him) lost his seat in the 1987 general election to the Social Democratic Labour Party's Eddie McGrady, mainly due to demographic and boundary changes which resulted in there being many more Catholics in his seat than before. Ironically, the boundary changes had arisen due to his own campaign for the number of MPs representing Northern Ireland to be increased to the equivalent proportion for the rest of the United Kingdom, as part of the steps towards greater integration. He was offered a life peerage, which was regarded as his right as a former cabinet minister, but declined it. He argued that, as he had opposed the Life Peerages Act 1958, it would be hypocritical for him to take one.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 Powell claimed that, because Britain was not an ally of Kuwait in the "formal sense" and that the balance of power in the Middle East ceased to be a British concern after the end of the British Empire, Britain should not go to war. Powell claimed that "Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops come storming up the beaches of Kent or Sussex"; after Britain claimed to be defending small nations from attack, Powell said "I sometimes wonder if, when we shed our power, we omitted to shed our arrogance".

When German reunification was on the agenda in 1990 Powell claimed Britain urgently needed to create an alliance with the Soviet Union in view of Germany's effect on the balance of power in Europe. This part of Powell's analysis was taken seriously by the Atlanticist Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who tried to persuade the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to halt unification, but failed.

After Mrs Thatcher's Bruges Speech in 1988 and her increasing hostility to the abolition of the pound sterling in the last years of her premiership, Powell made many speeches publicly supporting her attitude to Europe. When she was challenged by Michael Heseltine for the leadership of the Conservative party in November 1990, Powell said he would rejoin the party - which he had left in 1974 over the issue of Europe - if Mrs Thatcher won, and would urge the public to support both her and, in Powell's view, national independence. As it turned out she resigned, and Powell would never rejoin the Conservative party.

His unionism did not block his capacity for independent thought; he was critical of the Special Air Service (SAS) shootings of three unarmed Provisional Irish Republican Army members in Gibraltar in 1988.

Last years

In 1994 Powell was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson's disease. He fought the affliction with his customary resolution, despite mounting incapacity. For the last few years of his life he managed occasional pieces of journalism, co-operated in a television documentary about his life in 1995, and began, but did not complete, work on a study of the Gospel of John. He died, aged 85, at 4:30am on 8 February 1998 in London. Dressed in his brigadier's uniform, he was buried in his regiment's plot in Warwick Cemetery, Warwickshire, ten days later. He was survived by his wife and two daughters.

Personality

Despite his earlier militant atheism Powell became a devout Anglican, having thought in 1949 "that he heard the bells of St Peter's Wolverhampton calling him" (Heffer p. 130) while walking to his flat in his (then future) constituency. Subsequently, he became a churchwarden of St Margaret's, Westminster. He spent much of his later life trying to prove, with close textual reading, that Christ had not been crucified but stoned to death.

Powell was reading Greek by the age of five, learning it from his mother. At age 70 he began learning his 12th and final language, Hebrew.

In August 2002 Powell appeared in the List of "100 Greatest Britons of all time" (voted for by the public in a BBC nationwide poll).

Powell had remarked that "all political lives end in failure" and did not hesitate to agree that this maxim applied to his own. Like Tony Benn (a personal friend from a different political background, whom Powell had helped to renounce his peerage and so remain an elected Member of Parliament), he was seen by supporters as putting conscience and duty to his constituents before loyalty to his party or the sake of his career.

Powell's rhetorical gifts were also employed, with success, beyond politics. He was a poet of some accomplishment, with four published collections to his name: First Poems; Casting Off; Dancer's End; and The Wedding Gift. His Collected Poems appeared in 1990. He translated Herodotus (The History of Herodotus) and published many other works of classical scholarship. He published a biography of Joseph Chamberlain, which treated the split with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886 as the pivotal point of his career, rather than the adoption of Tariff Reform, and which contained the famous line that "all political careers, unless they are cut off at some happy juncture, end in failure". Powell published many books on political matters too, which were often annotated collections of his speeches. His political publications were often as critical of his own party as they were of Labour; often making fun of what he saw as logical fallacies in reasoning or action. His book Freedom & Reality contained many quotes from Labour party manifestos or by Harold Wilson which he regarded as nonsensical.

Criticism

Powell said "I have and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origins." The public tend to agree with this statement. The Trial of Enoch Powell, a Channel 4 television broadcast in May 1998, on the thirtieth anniversary of his Birmingham speech (and two months after his death), saw a vote of the studio audience yielded a 64% 'not a racist' result. However, many in the church did not: upon his death the Bishop of Croydon stated "Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge."

Powell's detractors often assert that he was 'far-right', 'proto-fascist' or 'racist'. The first two charges clash with his voting record on most social issues, such as homosexual law reform - he was actually co-sponsor of a Bill on this issue in May 1965 - and the abolition of the death penalty, both liberal reforms which had limited support in the Conservative Party at the time, although he did little to call public attention to his stance on these non-party "issues of conscience". He voted against the return of the death penalty in 1969, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1983 and 1987. Although substantial sections of the public supported Powell on the issues for which he was better known, most of the "liberal intelligentsia" tended to denounce him as a racist. After his death a confidante revealed that Powell had told him - on condition that this was not to be made public whilst he was still alive - that some lines of love poetry he had composed in his youth were written to a man.

For some, this charge seems unconvincing in the light of Powell's pre-political actions, and it was not until the late 1960s that he made speeches that addressed the issues of race and immigration. On this view, he is perhaps better classified as a romantic British nationalist than any sort of fascist: like Michael Foot from the other end of the political spectrum (with whom he joined forces on constitutional issues such as defeating House of Lords reform and opposing Britain's entry to the European Community), he was an ardent constitutionalist, worshipping Parliament as the cradle of democracy, whereas most actual fascists want to abolish the democratic institutions.

In many respects, Powell can be seen as a Thatcherite avant la lettre: he was calling for the privatisation of the Post Office and the telephone network as early as 1964, over 20 years before these changes actually took place; and, like Mrs Thatcher later, he both scorned the idea of "consensus politics" and wanted the Conservative Party to become a modern businesslike party, freed from its old aristocratic and "old boy network" associations. Perhaps most notably of all, in his 1958 resignation over public spending and what he saw as an inflationist economic policy, he anticipated almost exactly the views that in the 1980s came to be described as "monetarism".

Powell's speeches and TV interviews throughout his political life displayed a suspicion towards "The Establishment" in general, and by the 1980s there was a regular expectation that he would make some sort of speech or act in a way designed to upset the government of the day and ensure he would not be offered a Life Peerage (and thus be transferred to the House of Lords), which he had no intention of accepting so long as Edward Heath sat in the Commons. (Heath remained in the Commons until after Powell's death.) He had opposed the 1958 Life Peerages Act and felt it would be hypocritical to accept a life peerage himself, while no Prime Minister was ever willing to offer him a hereditary peerage.

Powell in popular culture

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Badge supporting Powell's views.

The South African-born British musician Manfred Mann released an instrumental track entitled "Konekuf" in the 1970s, indicating his opinion of Powell. The title is designed to be read backwards. John Cale's "Graham Greene" also mentions Powell, although the context is more obscure, and in 1970 ska and reggae singer Millie sang "Enoch Power" against Powell. The song began with the German national anthem. The Beatles' song "Get Back" was originally conceived as a critical commentary of Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech. Earlier versions of the song, titled "Commonwealth" and "No Pakistanis," the latter of which very closely resembles the finished product, are circulated with bootlegs of the Let It Be sessions.

Arthur Wise's 1970 novel Who Killed Enoch Powell? examines what the consequences might be for the United Kingdom if Powell were to be the victim of a political assassination. The novel was a runner-up for the MWA's Edgar award in the category of Best Mystery Novel.

Powell's name was mentioned in some of the more daring BBC comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, e.g. in several Monty Python's Flying Circus skits, including "Travel Agent" and "Election Special". In a Christmas episode of Steptoe and Son, the elder Steptoe sings "Enoch's Dreaming of a White Christmas," (after the fashion of the Bing Crosby song "White Christmas") as he prepares Christmas decorations at the table. Powell is also referred to approvingly by Alf Garnett a number of times in episodes of Till Death Us Do Part, as for example in an episode about a power cut, when he says "It's a pity old Enoch ain't in charge. He'd sort them out. He'd put the coons down the pits, he would," as a black technician comes into the room behind him to fix the family's broken television.

In 1976, a drunken Eric Clapton voiced his support of Powell onstage during a concert in Birmingham, also stating that England had "become overcrowded" and was in danger of becoming "a black colony". As a result, Clapton did not play in Birmingham again for a decade, and his remarks were a major factor in the eventual formation of Rock Against Racism.

The main character in Moses Ascending, a novel about immigrants in London by Sam Selvon, writes Powell a letter. The scene is highly ironic.

He is also mentioned in White Teeth (written by Zadie Smith), in the film East is East, and in many other films and novels associated with Britain's ethnic minorities.

In the musical version of "Acorn Antiques" John The Director's ill-fated operetta of "Acorn Antiques" is rehearsed in the "Enoch Powell Performing Arts Centre and Leisure Complex".

Bibliography

• Obituary of Enoch Powell, Daily Telegraph, London, 9 February 1998.
• Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell, London, 1969.
• Simon Heffer Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London, 1998. ISBN 0-297-84286-2
• Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune, London, 1970. SBN 356 03150 0
• Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell, London, 1998. ISBN 0-09-179208-8
• Tom Stacey, Immigration and Enoch Powell, London, 1970. OCLC 151226

Powell's writings

• Enoch Powell (1936) The Rendel Harris Papyri
• Enoch Powell (1937) First Poems
• Enoch Powell (1938) A Lexicon to Herodotus
• Enoch Powell (1939) The History of Herodotus
• Enoch Powell (1939) Casting-off, and other poems
• Enoch Powell (1939) Herodotus, Book VIII
• Enoch Powell (1942) Llyfr Blegywryd
• Enoch Powell (1942) Thucydidis Historia
• Enoch Powell (1949) (translation) Herodotus
• Enoch Powell (1950) (jointly) One Nation
• Enoch Powell (1951) (poems) Dancer's End and The Wedding Gift
• Enoch Powell (1952) The Social Services, Needs and Means
• Enoch Powell (1954) Change is our Ally
• Enoch Powell (1955, second edition 1970) (with Angus Maude) Biography of a Nation, London, ISBN 0212983733
• Enoch Powell (1960) Great Parliamentary Occasions
• Enoch Powell (1960) Saving in a Free Society
• Enoch Powell (1965) A Nation not Afraid
• Enoch Powell (1966, revised edition 1976) Medicine and Politics
• Enoch Powell (1968) (with Keith Wallis) The House of Lords in the Middle Ages
• Enoch Powell (1969 [1999]) Freedom and Reality, Kingswood, ISBN 0-7160-0541-7 (this volume includes the text of the Rivers of Blood speech.)
• Enoch Powell (1971) Common Market: The Case Against
• Enoch Powell (1972) Still to Decide, Kingswood, ISBN 0716005662
• Enoch Powell (1973) Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out
• Enoch Powell (1973) No Easy Answers, London, ISBN 0859690016
• Enoch Powell (1977) Wrestling With the Angel, London, ISBN 0-85969-127-6
• Enoch Powell (1977) Joseph Chamberlain, London, ISBN 0-500-01185-0
• Enoch Powell (1978) (editor Richard Ritchie) A Nation or No Nation, London, ISBN 0713415428
• Enoch Powell (1989) (editor Richard Ritchie) Enoch Powell on 1992, London, ISBN 1-85470-008-1
• Enoch Powell (1991) (editor Rex Collings) Reflections of a Statesman, London, ISBN 0947792880
• Enoch Powell (1990) Collected Poems
• Enoch Powell (1994) The Evolution of the Gospel

See also

• Powellism - The political beliefs of Enoch Powell
• Radio Enoch - Anti-socialist pirate radio station that took its name from Powell
• Rivers of Blood

External links

• Obituary from The Guardian
• Papers of Enoch Powell are held at Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and are accessible to the public.
• Radio Interview on Immigration Powell interviewed shortly after his controversial "Rivers of Blood" speech. (Audio clip, 3:31 mins, Requires RealPlayer to listen)
• Official portrait of Enoch Powell by David Griffiths