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Enoch
Powell Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain
Paul
Corthorn
Oxford: University
Press, 2019 Hardcover.
xvi+233 p. ISBN 978-0198747147. £20
Reviewed
by Pete Dorey University of Cardiff
For many British
people, particularly those who are older, white and working-class, Enoch Powell
remains remembered solely, and affectionately, for his controversial 1968 ‘rivers
of blood’ speech, in which he prophesied racial conflict in Britain, due both
to the scale of immigration during the late 1950s and into the 1960s, and the
fact that these immigrants would then have children of their own, thus further
increasing the non-white population of Britain. He thus called for an end to
immigration, and, indeed, a policy of repatriation. This speech alone ensured
Powell’s legacy, and even today, mention of his name will often evoke fond
memories among some elderly voters; some of them might even suggest that Powell
was ‘the best Prime Minister Britain never had’. Certainly, when there have
been sporadic urban riots, or clashes between black youth and the police, even
in the 21st Century, a few voices will always be heard asserting: “I’m not
racist, but Enoch was right, wasn’t he?” Yet Powell is a very
important political figure in post-1945 British history for reasons far beyond his
trenchant views on immigration, important though these certainly were. Paul Corthorn’s
Enoch Powell is therefore to be welcomed for several reasons. First, it
is not a biography of Powell per se, but an authoritative and well-informed
account of his beliefs and philosophy – their origins, their substance and
their development. Second, this lucidly written book makes extensive use of
Powell’s own previously unpublished archives, private papers and
correspondence, and thus provides a truly original addition to the existing
literature on Powell’s life and works. Third, rather than adopt a purely
chronological approach, the book is organised thematically, with each chapter
examining Powell’s stance and thinking on a specific policy. Fourth, Powell’s
ideas and beliefs are contextualised, so that we understand what or who Powell
was reacting to, or engaging with, in terms of policy developments and
political events. Fifth, Corthorn highlights the manner in which Powell often
found himself arguing with (or against) individuals and organisations who were,
in many respects, his intellectual and ideological allies and kindred spirits.
This aspect of Powell indicated his iconoclasm, for he sometimes found himself
challenging, through didactic speeches and rigorous logic, erstwhile colleagues
on the Right, such as the Conservative Party, and free-market think tanks like
the Institute of Economic Affairs; his targets and criticisms were certainly
not confined to the Left. Beyond his opposition
to immigration, Powell was most renowned, at least among academics, for his
economic stance. He was widely viewed as a maverick or lone voice for his
economic views during the 1950s and 1960s, when he eloquently extolled the
alleged virtues of the free market (what would now be called ‘neo-liberalism’)
in an era when many very senior Conservatives had accepted aspects of dirigisme
via Keynesianism, economic planning, and incomes policies. Powell denounced
this, insisting that the immutable laws of supply and demand, and ‘the market’
could not be circumvented or eradicated by such idealistic naivety or intellectual
fads. He shared, with Friedrich Hayek, a deep concern that State intervention
in economic affairs was cumulative and exponential (what Hayek had warned was
‘the road to serfdom’), not least because politicians became convinced that
further political control and regulation were the cure for economic problems,
rather than often causing or exacerbating them – the medicine was actually
making the patient more ill. He lamented the ‘prejudices which have been
allowed to harden against the market economy’ [54], although by the 1970s, his
economic arguments and warnings were being more widely accepted among some
Conservatives, and it could be argued that he prepared some of the intellectual
ground for Thatcherism in the Party, and its transformation into a party of
neo-liberalism. The irony is that by
the time Powell’s economic ideas were finally becoming more widely respected
and accepted among some senior Conservatives, he had left to join Northern
Ireland’s Ulster Unionist Party. This was after having urged British electors
to vote for the Labour Party in the February 1974 general election, because
Labour (but not the Conservatives) was pledging a referendum on whether the UK
should remain in the European Economic Community (even though it had only joined
the previous year). As a staunch opponent of UK membership – he was an
unashamed nationalist and passionate advocate of ‘parliamentary sovereignty –
Powell was prepared to countenance a Labour government solely to ensure a
referendum in which he could actively campaign for the UK to ‘Leave’ the EEC.
As with his economic ideas, Powell was in a minority at the time, although
widely recognised as a very articulate and eloquent speaker and campaigner, a
‘cult figure’ perhaps, and maybe ‘ahead of his time’, but today, his hostility
towards the EU – like his free-market economic ideas – is widely shared in the
Conservative Party; indeed has become its default position. Yet Corthorn reveals
that for much of the 1960s, Powell was actually in favour of UK membership of
the then EEC, primarily because of the expected boost it would provide to
Britain’s ailing economy and British agriculture. Powell’s stance changed
considerably at the end of the decade, though, to the extent that he
subsequently became one of the most trenchant critics of the UK’s membership.
There was no specific event which prompted Powell’s apparent u-turn, but he increasingly
developed arguments which focused on the loss of sovereignty and nationhood
which the UK would suffer by joining an increasingly bureaucratic supranational
institution, and this objection soon superseded his erstwhile support for membership
on economic grounds [111]. It also compounded Powell’s personal and
intellectual struggle with maintaining loyalty to the Conservatives’
parliamentary leadership, because he found it increasingly difficult to
reconcile his continued support for the former Party of patriotism and defence
of British institutions (key tenets of Conservatism) with what had seemingly
become the Party of Europe, with Prime Minister Heath openly and
enthusiastically pro-European: the political became personal, and Powell’s
parliamentary speeches sometimes became acerbic in their rhetorical attacks on
Heath, not just for his Euro-enthusiasm, but his increasingly dirigiste
economic policies during 1972-73. Meanwhile, in spite
of endorsing the Labour Party in the 1974 general elections (there were two,
one in February, and another in October), solely because he viewed the promised
referendum as a means of campaigning for a vote to Leave the EEC, Powell also
recognised a constitutional conundrum: he believed strongly in an indivisible
and inviolate form of parliamentary sovereignty, in which an elected Parliament
(or, rather, the elected House of Commons) comprised MPs who exercised their
judgement in making decisions on behalf of the electorate – Edmund Burke’s
insistence that MPs were representatives, not delegates. Yet a referendum, in
practice, meant empowering the electorate to express its views on a specific
question on a particular issue, with MPs then expected to act on the
electorate’s verdict. Such a form of ‘direct democracy’ –
regardless of whether it is desirable in principle – is constitutionally
incompatible with the precepts of parliamentary sovereignty, and Powell was
uncomfortably aware of this. Having opposed the
Conservative Party’s apparent commitment to European integration, Powell then
became voluntarily embroiled in the tortuous politics of Northern Ireland,
where paramilitary violence was a ‘normal’ occurrence in some districts. He
joined the Official Unionist Party, a Protestant party committed to maintaining
Northern Ireland’s constitutional status as a full member of the United
Kingdom, and thus vehemently opposing (re-)unification with the Republic of
Ireland. Yet even here, Powell soon found himself in conflict with some of his
new party colleagues, because whereas many Unionists wanted Northern Ireland to
be granted considerable devolution and self-government within the UK, Powell
was an ‘integrationist’ who wanted Northern Ireland to be politically tied more
closely to the rest of Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) – a genuinely United
Kingdom. Having opposed the UK’s membership of the EEC on the grounds of
parliamentary sovereignty and opposition to European integration, Powell
subsequently urged greater integration of Northern Ireland into the UK
political system, which would thus mean that the Province would be much more
actively and closely subject to the sovereignty of Parliament. In Powell’s
view, the type of devolution and self-government favoured by many of his
Unionist colleagues weakened the Union (between Northern Ireland and Britain),
created divided loyalties (who were the Unionists loyal to – a devolved
government in Belfast or Westminster?) and undermined the sovereignty of the UK
Parliament, because the latter was expected to surrender considerable
day-to-day control to a semi-autonomous sub-national political institution
elected by the people of Northern Ireland only. What becomes clear
from this clearly-presented and very well-written book is the extent to which
Powell thought carefully and deeply about key issues and policies, spanning
economic affairs, Europe, immigration, international relations, Northern
Ireland, and sovereignty. Sometimes, as over British membership of the European
Economic Community, his critical thinking and genuflection led him to change
his mind, and in so doing, led him to diverge from the stance of the
Conservative Party at the time (indeed, even depart from the Party altogether).
On other issues, it was his firm beliefs and strong convictions which caused
tensions with those around or close to him in the first place, such as his
commitment to Northern Ireland’s closer integration with the UK, which was not widely
shared by his Official Unionist party colleagues. Ultimately, one does not have
to agree with Powell(ism) to acknowledge that he was one of Britain’s most
iconoclastic and fascinating political figures, and no stranger to controversy,
both because of some of his views, and the manner in which he expressed them. Moreover, he was
simultaneously an intellectual in the Conservative Party, and a populist
politician, with his views on issues such as immigration, and Europe, positing
a distinction and divergence between ‘the people’ and ‘the political elites’,
with the latter betraying the former. This particular theme has strongly
re-emerged in recent years, as was clearly evident in the campaign for the UK
to Leave the European Union, in order to curb immigration and restore
parliamentary sovereignty. If Powell was still alive today, he would almost
certainly have felt wholly vindicated. On the other hand, he might have felt
apprehensive that neo-liberalism, which he did so much to promote and proselytise,
now seems to be on the defensive, as ‘market failure’ has become exposed to
more critical scrutiny and greater public awareness, in the context of
austerity, decimated public services, lack of affordable housing, graduate
debt, poverty wages, and massive inequality; the ‘trickle down’ of wealth long
ago dried up – assuming, of course, that it ever occurred to start with.
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