The Lives and Afterlives of Enoch Powell: The Undying Political Animal 2018058889, 2019001764, 9780429805172, 9780429805158, 9780429805165, 9781138339286, 9780429441158

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Introduction
Reigniting controversy
No Iago, no Churchill
Populism, nativism, autochthony
Notes
References
1 Powell and after: Immigration, race and politics in Britain
Introduction
Migration to Britain from the Commonwealth, 1948–1981
The politics of immigration, 1964–1979: before and after Powell
Testing the impact of Powell and immigration
Analysis 1: Cross-tabulation analysis
Estimating the electoral impact of immigration before and after Powell
Powell’s legacy? Racial attitudes and partisanship since the 1970s
Conclusion
Notes
References
2 Wrathful rememberers: Harnessing the memory of World War II
in letters of support to Powell
Memory peddling or Powell’s exploitation of the war
Displacement and disempowerment
Turning in their graves
What “finest hour”?
Welfare chauvinism
Conclusion: emotions in distateful movements
Notes
References
3 Powell and the media: an insider’s account
A family friendship put to the test by migratory dynamics
Powell learning the tricks of the journalist trade
Private aftermaths of a national furore
How Powell shaped my own career as a journalist
From Powell to Farage
Note
References
4 An international press review of the Powell moment (1968–1973)
Comparing Powell
Hard to pigeonhole
Holding a mirror to England’s racial problem
Immigrant communities: low-profile attitude, resilience, agency
Conclusion
Notes
References
5 The rise of the Runnymede Trust: Enoch Powell and the media
wars
The genesis of Runnymede
A new organization in action
The media wars
Conclusion
Note
References
6 Enoch Powell, British nationality and the Irish question,
1968–1987
Irish citizenship and British nationality law
The belonging of Ulster Unionists
Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974
Irish voting rights
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
7 Enoch Powell, Julian Amery and debates over Britain’s world role
after 1945
Empire
Europe
Conclusion
Notes
References
8 The end of an intellectual journey: How Alfred Sherman’s ideas
on immigration and the British nation were framed by Powellism
(1968–1979)
Introduction
Sherman’s relationships with Powell in perspective
Powell’s 1968 speech as a watershed in Sherman’s thinking.
New Right new racism
Sherman as the intellectual link between Powell and Thatcher (1976–1979)
The “Eurosceptic” dimension of Powellism: how and why Sherman
misunderstood it in the 1970s
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
9 “Enoch was right” – the Powell effect on the National Front in
the 1970s
The creation of the National Front and the impact of Powell’s April 1968 speech
A gulf separating a free marketer and Conservative like Powell from the National Front
The National Front’s strategy to harness Powell’s ideas and popularity
Powell was never one of them
Conclusion
Notes
References
10 The ambivalence of UKIP towards Enoch Powell’s legacy
Europe
Immigration
Populism
Conclusion
Notes
References
Conclusion
Note
References
Index

Citation preview

The Lives and Afterlives of Enoch Powell

Fifty years after Enoch Powell’s self-styled detonation in the form of his so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech, this volume brings together contributions from international scholars in the field of history, political science and British studies, with new insights from hitherto unexplored archives. It investigates some of the key national and grassroots parameters which, from above and from below, led to Powell’s violent irruption into the immigration debate in 1968. It apprehends Powell as a political and intellectual figure firmly established in the British Tory tradition, a tradition that was to shape the 1970s’ debate on race and immigration and be avidly instrumentalized by the British far right. It also analyses Powell’s positioning vis-à-vis the Irish question and apprehends Powell’s late-1960s’ moment from an international standpoint, as one of the early stages of the conservative revolution that was to culminate in 2016 with Trump’s election. Last, this book weaves a thread between Powell and another recent political detonation: Brexit. Olivier Esteves is Professor of British Studies at the University of Lille, France. Stéphane Porion is Senior Lecturer in British Studies at the University of Tours, France.

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right Series editors: Nigel Copsey, Teesside University, and Graham Macklin, Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo.

This new book series focuses upon fascist, far right and right-wing politics primarily within a historical context but also drawing on insights from other disciplinary perspectives. Its scope also includes radical-right populism, cultural manifestations of the far right and points of convergence and exchange with the mainstream and traditional right.

The Portuguese Far Right Between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy (1945-2015) Riccardo Marchi Never Again Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982 David Renton Antifascism in Nordic Countries New Perspectives, Comparisons and Transnational Connections Edited by Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey and Johan Lundin The March on Rome Violence and the Rise of Italian Fascism Giulia Albanese Aurel Kolnai's 'War Against the West' Reconsidered Edited by Wolfgang Bialas The Ku Klux Klan and Freemasonry in 1920s America Fighting Fraternities Miguel Hernandez The Lives and Afterlives of Enoch Powell The Undying Political Animal Edited by Olivier Esteves and Stéphane Porion

The Lives and Afterlives of Enoch Powell The Undying Political Animal

Edited by Olivier Esteves and Stéphane Porion

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Olivier Esteves and Stéphane Porion; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Olivier Esteves and Stéphane Porion to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Esteves, Olivier, editor. | Porion, Stâephane (M. Stâephane), editor. Title: The Lives and Afterlives of Enoch Powell / [edited by] Olivier Esteves, Stâephane Porion. Description: First edition. | London ; New York, NY : Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in fascism and the far right | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018058889 (print) | LCCN 2019001764 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429805172 (adobe) | ISBN 9780429805158 (mobi) | ISBN 9780429805165 (epub) | ISBN 9781138339286 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429441158 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998--Political and social views. | Powell, J. Enoch (John Enoch), 1912-1998--Influence. | Conservatism--Great Britain--History--20th century. | Right-wing extremists--Great Britain--History--20th century. | Great Britain--Politics and government--1964-1979. | Great Britain--Race relations--Political aspects--History--20th century. | Great Britain--Emigration and immigration--Political aspects--History--20th century. | Politicians--Great Britain--Biography. | Conservative Party Great Britain)--Biography. Classification: LCC DA591.P64 (ebook) | LCC DA591.P64 E565 2019 (print) | DDC 941.085--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058889 ISBN: 978-1-138-33928-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44115-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of contributors Introduction

vii viii ix 1

OLIVIER ESTEVES

1 Powell and after: Immigration, race and politics in Britain

13

ROBERT FORD

2 Wrathful rememberers: Harnessing the memory of World War II in letters of support to Powell

32

OLIVIER ESTEVES

3 Powell and the media: an insider’s account

47

NICHOLAS JONES

4 An international press review of the Powell moment (1968–1973)

65

OLIVIER ESTEVES

5 The rise of the Runnymede Trust: Enoch Powell and the media wars

81

BRETT BEBBER

6 Enoch Powell, British nationality and the Irish question, 1968–1987

97

DAVID C. SHIELS

7 Enoch Powell, Julian Amery and debates over Britain’s world role after 1945 PAUL CORTHORN

113

vi

Contents

8 The end of an intellectual journey: How Alfred Sherman’s ideas on immigration and the British nation were framed by Powellism (1968–1979)

126

STÉPHANE PORION

9 “Enoch was right” – the Powell effect on the National Front in the 1970s

145

STÉPHANE PORION

10 The ambivalence of UKIP towards Enoch Powell’s legacy

162

KARINE TOURNIER-SOL

Conclusion

176

STÉPHANE PORION

Index

186

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Estimated net change in voting due to immigration, 1964–1979

25

Tables 1.1 Attitudes about immigration, 1964–1979 1.2 Voter perception about which party would be more likely to stop immigration, 1964–1979 1.3 Immigration policies, 1970–1974. Voter reports of their own preferences and perceptions of Conservative and Labour Party positions 1.4 Attitudes to race and immigration and identification with the Conservative and Labour Parties, 1983–1996

21 22

23 27

Acknowledgements

This edited volume finds its source in a one-day conference on Enoch Powell held at Sciences-Po Lille on 27 January 2018. The great bulk of the papers presented there are published in the following pages. As all edited volumes and conferences, this has been a complexly collective effort. We would like to thank the large number of colleagues whose contributions big and small have made these two events possible, first the conference, then the book. Administrative and academic staff at Sciences-Po Lille proved instrumental in guaranteeing maximum logistic efficiency to the conference: Sophie Bécart, Guillaume Duseigneur, not to mention Cécile Leconte and Emmanuel Roudaut, of course. At CERAPS political science research centre, Jean-Gabriel Contamin, Etienne Penissat, Younes Haddadi and Djazia Bielicki did their utmost to ensure the conference was a smooth affair in most inauspicious times, i.e. the merging of the three Lille universities. We also would like to thank CRECIB and ICD (University of Tours) for their support, especially Monica Zapata, Isabelle Peymirat Cochet and Norberta Dias da Cruz. Nonna Mayer proved, unsurprisingly, a wonderfully stimulating panel chair and her input in the debates was appreciated by all present. Also deserving our gratitude is Lucie De Carvalho. The chapter on Powell and the international press necessitated the mobilization of translation skills from various colleagues. To be thanked are Sylvain Feucherolles and Thomas Serrier (German), Gabriella Marongiu (Italian), Thomas Beaufils (Dutch). Also to be thanked is Peo Hansen. Rob Ford’s reading of strategic parts of the manuscript proved decisive. And we both would like to extend our gratitude to the staff at Routledge who have pushed us forward throughout this academic project and have been very flexible people to work with. Olivier Esteves and Stéphane Porion

Contributors

Brett Bebber is Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Violence and Racism in Football: Politics and Cultural Conflict in British Society, 1968–1998 (2012) and the editor of Leisure and Cultural Conflict in Twentieth-Century Britain (2012). His current research examines the development of race relations expertise and integration ideas in post-war Britain. He has published various articles on the topic in The Journal of Social History, Contemporary British History and The Journal of Civil and Human Rights. Paul Corthorn is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast. He is joint editor of the Labour History Review and author of In the Shadow of the Dictators: The British Left in the 1930s (2006; paperback 2013). His next book, Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Olivier Esteves is a Professor in British Studies at Université de Lille and also teaches at Sciences-Po Lille. His research focuses on the history and sociology of race and ethnicity in Britain. He has worked on British intellectuals, notably George Orwell and Bertrand Russell. He is the author of various monographs, including The “Desegregation” of English Schools: Bussing, Race and Urban Space (Manchester University Press, 2018). His research team is CERAPS (UMR 8026), in political science. Robert Ford is Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Revolt on the Right, a study of the rise of UKIP, and has published in a range of academic journals including the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Political Studies and the European Journal of Political Research. His academic interests include the politics of immigration, racial attitudes, the radical right, the politics of welfare and electoral politics in Britain. Nicholas Jones has spent a lifetime in journalism. After training on local newspapers, he joined The Times and then spent 30 years as an industrial and then political correspondent for BBC radio and television. He has written extensively on the way politicians and public figures seek to

x

List of contributors use – and manipulate – the news media. His first book Strikes and the Media (1986) examined the role of trade union leaders in the industrial disputes of the 1980s. In Sultans of Spin (1999) he revealed the way his father Clement Jones, then editor of the Express and Star, had advised Enoch Powell on his media strategy.

Stéphane Porion is Senior Lecturer in British Studies at the University of Tours, France. His PhD thesis was a study of Enoch Powell’s political and economic ideas (1946–1970). His key research interests focus on post-war Conservatism and Britain’s radical right parties. His latest publications include “George Wallace and Enoch Powell: Comparing the Politics of Populist Conservatism in the US and the UK” (a chapter co-written with Michael Kazin in Postwar Conservatism, A Transnational Investigation: Britain, France, and the United States, 1930–1990, Palgrave, 2017) and “Diana Spearman’s Role within the Post-War Conservative Party and in the ‘Battle of Ideas’” (Women’s History Review, June 2018). David Shiels is a policy analyst at the think tank Open Europe and a College Research Associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge. He also works as a researcher for the authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher and has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has been an Archives By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and a representative on the User Advisory Group at the National Archives at Kew. His PhD thesis was a study of Enoch Powell and his book, Enoch Powell: The Outsider, will be published by I B Tauris in 2019. Karine Tournier-Sol is Senior Lecturer in British politics at the University of Toulon, France. Her key research interests focus on Britain’s relations with the European Union, the UK Independence Party and populism. With Chris Gifford she co-edited The UK Challenge to Europeanization: The Persistence of British Euroscepticism (Palgrave, 2015). Her most recent book is Prendre le large : le UKIP et le choix du Brexit (Paris, Vendémiaire, 2017).

Introduction Olivier Esteves UNIVERSITY OF LILLE

Blue plaques are unmistakable symbols of the UK landscapes. In London, for instance, their function has mostly been to produce a celebratory consensus around the rich historical heritage and cultural vibrancy of the country’s capital, from Mozart and Handel to Jimi Hendrix, from Gandhi to Churchill, from Virginia Woolf to George Orwell. Across the Irish Sea, 88 of them are known to bedeck the city of Belfast walls, from Rory Gallagher to Van Morrison, from the ill-fated designer of the Titanic to poets Philip Larkin and Louis MacNeice. And in Scotland, Andrew Carnegie and Adam Smith each has his plaque in quaint Kirkcaldy, some 30 miles north of Edinburgh. These are predominantly names of figures who have made history, but countless plaques in the country commemorate people of more obscure renown. In Wolverhampton alone, some 40 of them were erected from 1983 to 2005.

Reigniting controversy Blue plaques have mostly been serving as props to what Michael Billig has termed “banal nationalism”. Much like the unwaving, barely noticeable flags on public buildings, their purpose is nevertheless “to cover the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced” (Billig 1995, p. 6). They are small, interlocking loci which have sustained Britain’s imagined community. Although the immense majority of those plaques are innocuous and remain barely noticed by passers-by, there are times when the memories of a history foaming with much rage are sparked back into controversy. The January 2018 suggestion that Enoch Powell ought to get a blue plaque in Wolverhampton is unmistakably one such time. Hailed as a common-sense idea by the substantial portion of public opinion that, like in the 1980s and 2000s, has always believed that “Enoch was right”, the prospect has unsurprisingly met with fierce resistance from the anti-racist left and beyond. Much of the controversy revolves around the public function of such plaques: are they just about people (Powell) or can they be about events (the Birmingham speech of 20 April 1968, commonly known as the “Rivers of blood” speech)? Are they meant to celebrate or to commemorate? Can these plaques possibly do both simultaneously for different Britons with clashing views on the enfant terrible of the British right?

2

Olivier Esteves

The commemorative/celebratory binary at the heart of the blue plaque polemic is a memorial straightjacket urging Britons to remember Powell as either a hero or villain and then take the risk of being dismissed either as a “racist” by some or a “liberal do-gooder” by others. It almost seems that there is no way out of this racist/non-racist (or anti-racist) aporia, unless one takes a few steps back and starts asking some of the questions we have endeavoured to ask in this book. In itself, this dichotomy is reflected by political, media and scholarly lexicon. Notice, for instance, how the phrase “rivers of blood speech”, has imposed itself or been imposed with barely any possibility to refer to this rhetorical act as anything else. In a way, the phrase partakes of the “hero vs. villain” dichotomy: for the Powellites, it encapsulates the necessity to do something now before actual blood is shed, whereas for the anti-Powellites, it highlights how ludicrously pessimistic the populist’s forecast was, in a country that today has some of the highest proportions of mixed-marriages in Western nations. In order to remove some of this sound and fury around Powell, we have collectively decided to drop the phrase “rivers of blood” speech and to refer instead to the “Birmingham speech”, the “1968 speech”, “Powell’s speech” (since it towers above all else in the man’s career). “Rivers of blood” was a media-fabricated term and has all too often lived a most bizarre life of its own, not to mention the (also ludicrous) fact that in the speech, there was originally one river only, the river Tiber. But to come back to the plaque polemic. Would it not be more appropriate, if one were to be erected at all, to have it on the façade of the Midland Hotel from which Powell delivered his speech, which is today known as the Macdonald Burlington Hotel in New Street? Although hardly possible because the owners would not want it, this would at least single out a populist, opportunistic rhetorical exercise by a maverick, albeit intellectually brilliant politician. Instead of seemingly paying tribute to an individual career, a plaque on the Birmingham hotel would commemorate an act of discourse that the anti-racist left, ethnic minorities themselves and radical right whites probably all regard as one of the most important speeches in contemporary British history. Another option is possible. As Justin Gest’s 2015 ethnographic fieldwork in Barking and Dagenham (East London) has shown, mainstream voters have a very keen sense that those they elected into the Commons often do not live in the areas they represent, a fact made possible by quite unrestrictive British election laws in this respect and which is all the more keenly felt in London constituencies, i.e. in places not far away from Westminster, where it is possible for MPs not to have two homes (Gest 2016, p. 199). Enoch Powell was all too aware of this. In a Daily Telegraph piece that foreshadowed his Birmingham speech, he likened the New Commonwealth influx of immigrants to a new invasion suffered by those who had survived the Luftwaffe two decades earlier, before claiming that he was painfully cognisant of this situation as one who “live[d] within the proverbial stone’s throw of a street which ‘went black’” (The Daily Telegraph, 16 February 1967). The

Introduction

3

truth, however, was slightly more complex than that. For one thing, Powell never aimed at remaining a Wolverhampton MP for 24 years (1950–1974). Although, as Nick Jones highlights in his chapter, Powell did relish spending a great deal of time in his constituency home on weekends and on long parliamentary recesses, it still remains that for much of the week his abode was not near a street that “went black” in the Black Country, but rather in upmarket South Eaton Place in the heart of Belgravia (London). It is also worth remembering that the very man who fallaciously claimed that one school in Wolverhampton had a nearly all-black class actually sent his two daughters to a central London school, before they went to fee-paying Wycombe Abbey, where black girls, if there were any, were more likely to have been daughters of African ambassadors. Back in 1968–9, many demonstrators against Powell made no mistake about his abode: a few communist militants put up a large swastika banner in front of the Belgravia house and anti-racist protest letters were directly sent to this house (The Guardian, 09 February 1968). The tension caused some concern among neighbours. This was particularly the case of one lifelong Labour militant, Anne Symonds, who lived on 30 Eaton Place, after Penguin Press, in Paul Foot’s The Rise of Enoch Powell, had wrongly published Powell’s address as 30, instead of 33, South Eaton Place. Irritated by the publisher’s gaffe, she stated that quite apart from “the thought that I live with Enoch Powell […] I don’t want a brick through my window” (The Guardian, 20 February 1969). Powell lived in that house until his death in 1998. A few yards from a blue plaque with internationally successful playwright and composer “Noel Coward lived here” written on it, it was sold by Powell’s widow that same year. Eleven years later, in the wake of the credit crunch, the house was again on sale for £3.65 million. As for the Wolverhampton house, the Powells sold it in 1975, after the populist right-winger had become elected Unionist MP for South Down (Northern Ireland). Pamela Powell recalls, painstakingly avoiding the received wisdom that the immigrant presence brought house prices down: “We bought our house in 1954 for £1,300 – semidetached, five bedrooms, very cold as you remember, didn’t have a telephone – and we sold it in 1975, using a different name, and got exactly the same money we paid for it after twenty-one years because all around had so greatly changed” (The Times, 22 February 2009). Occurring each after two major economic crises (1973, 2008), the sale of the two houses still illuminates the way the two Powell abodes were almost on two different English planets. Despite the almost metronomic conjuring of Powell’s ghost, which writer Sarfraz Manzoor has likened to a “toxic cloud above all political debate on race relations” (The Guardian, 24 February 2008), several ironies clearly indicate that as this book goes to press both people and buildings have simply moved on. These ironies make the building of a plaque unfeasible for pragmatic reasons. For many years, a West Indian family – the Walkers – lived in the very same house as the Powells, on Merridale Road. The family was anxious to avoid any recognition of their home, particularly by the news media. Another irony is that Powell’s former parliamentary office has now been transformed into a West

4

Olivier Esteves

Indian heritage centre, a change that Labour MP Eleanor Smith interprets as “poetic justice” (Channel Four, 31 October 2017). Last but not least, this MP for South West Wolverhampton, exactly Powell’s turf, is the first West Indian MP to have ever been elected in the West Midlands as a whole.

No Iago, no Churchill These reminders are not anecdotal. They underline the complex interconnections between the micro- (Wolverhampton and its various neighbourhoods), the meso- (West Midlands), the macro- (Britain or rather England) and supermacro- (the former British Empire in Powellite discourse on immigration, the United States as a racial foil in Powellite discourse, not to mention Europe and the Common Market) levels that must be appraised when studying a figure with such proclaimed local rootedness as well as such national resonance overnight. For the social scientist, these layers of meanings are both centripetal (the neighbourhood is a powerful symbolical axis, whether seen as a terrain to be defended against racist forces or as a threatened space encroached on by immigrants) and centrifugal: the defiled letter box mentioned by Powell, like a stone thrown in a pond radiating out in ripples, has something to say about the Keynesian-Fordist welfare state, about British national identity, about post-colonial visions of orderliness (after Mary Douglas’s anthropology of dirt as a symbolic “matter out of place”) (Douglas 1966), and about British (or rather English) fears of American-style black ghettoes. Another example of this interconnectedness is similarly instructive: the January 1969 “March for Dignity”1 held by the “Black People’s Alliance” and the “Zimbabwe solidarity action committee” exposed two enemies, one at home (“racialism”),2 one abroad (“imperialism”) (Bourne 1998), but it was abundantly clear from the video footage and the slogans shouted to the 8000-strong crowd that Enoch Powell in Wolverhampton and Ian Smith in Rhodesia were two sides of the same ugly coin. The struggle, then, could not but be multi-scalar, as individuals carrying “Disembowel Powell” or “Black Power: Fire This Time” took on Rhodesia House and South Africa House before being thwarted by the police forces.3 This multi-scalar interconnectedness, added to the way in which Powell has been mythified into a villain or hero, means that one of the challenges facing future research is to reterritorialize Powell, by firmly placing him back into specific territorialities, the most obvious of which being Wolverhampton itself (Hirsch 2018). These territorialities may be geographical, political, symbolical, professional, ethnic, associational or even emotional (Goodwin, Jasper & Polletta 2001). In the pages that follow, Brett Bebber analyses the foundation of the Runnymede Trust in May 1968 as an immediate political response to Powell’s speech. Nick Jones investigates the way Powell’s instrumentalization of the media through his contact with his own father, Clement Jones, was an early stage in the weaving of a powerful connection between two discrete professional fields, 16 years before the term “spin doctor” appears to have

Introduction

5

4

been coined. David Shiels illuminates the way Powellite discourses on immigration harnessed the Irish question. One other way of reterritorializing Powell is to research, for different political actors and at different times, his lasting influence on debates on immigration, race, nation and multiculturality. This lasting influence can hardly be exaggerated. Some of it is perfunctorily rhetorical. It ranges from the all-too-obvious, as in Boris Johnson’s 2002 claim that “the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” (Daily Telegraph, 10 January 2002), the last word being an obvious echo of Powell’s “charming, wideeyed piccaninnies” harassing this frightened widow, to the not-so-obvious but clearly there, as in David Barnett’s praise of the 2016 book The Good Immigrant: “If I could, I’d push a copy of this through the letter-box of every front door in Britain” (The Independent, 06 October 2016). Most of this influence, however, is programmatic and ideological and needs to be reterritorialized into specific decades, if only to challenge the ahistorical, disembodied “Enoch was right” or its symmetrical contrary vilifying Powell as a timeless, Iago-like villain (Schofield 2013, p. 10). To launch this analysis, Robert Ford reappraises the centrality of immigration and race in electoral behaviour from shortly before Powell’s moment (1964) to the advent of Thatcherism in 1979. Then, Stéphane Porion analyses the Powell effect on the National Front in the 1970s, which desperately needed “charismatic leadership” and explains why Powell never was one of them. In another chapter, the same author studies the way Alfred Sherman – who was one of the pivotal architects in the advent of Thatcherism – was, to a large extent, a champion of Powellism, but on the European question. As for Karine Tournier-Sol, she studies the interconnectedness between Powellism and UKIP in more recent years. Paul Corthorn aims at re-evaluating Powell from the standpoint of a broader declinist discourse, taking into account not only race and immigration, which is what this book is primarily about, but also the disintegration of the British Empire, Europe, international relations and the economy. This he does by drawing a comparison between the political itineraries of Powell and Julian Amery.

Populism, nativism, autochthony A quite shallow definition of “populism” of the kind we have been fed for more than a decade5 could be that “populism” is when “politicians tell the people what they want to hear”. Powell’s rhetoric, rather than his style, peerlessly matches this definition. Indeed, in some of the most notorious cases, he impersonated a political ventriloquist mechanically quoting the epistolary grievances bestowed on him. Although evident, that point is often lost in the presentations or analyses made of the Birmingham speech. From documentaries (White Season, BBC, 2008) to essays about race (Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, Eddo-Lodge 2017, p. 117), and the sheer political contrast between these notwithstanding, the infamous claim that “in this country

6

Olivier Esteves

in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” is often mistakenly quoted as being by Powell himself and not by some unnamed constituent whom Powell quoted in a performative rhetorical gimmick. Some letters of support to Powell corroborate this sense of confusion over “who speaks”. For instance, a woman from Colchester (Essex) vehemently agreed with the populist’s tragically declinist oracle: “The immigrants will, as you said, soon have the whip hand” (Stafford, D3123/14). As Bill Schwarz has underlined, thanks to such quotes and to other rhetorical devices, “an inchoate jumble of racial bigotry crossed the threshold from private reverie to public wisdom” (Schwarz 2011, p. 19). Just as disturbingly, Powell’s discourse and the fears and resentments he voiced (rather than his high-flown style, his quoting of Virgil, etc.) tend to invalidate classical distinctions between top-down and bottom-up approaches. And accordingly, a study of Powell’s populist politics should include an “ethnography of populism”, whose contours are here delineated by Dutch sociologist Paul Mepschen: “By focusing the ethnographic lens on everyday perspectives and behavior, the emphasis in the social analysis of populism shifts from electoral politics and political discourse only, to processes of articulation, interpellation, and to agency” (Mepschen 2016, p. 64). These everyday perspectives and behaviours weigh on electoral behaviour, as is analysed here by Robert Ford. In another perspective, they also weave their way into the epistolary expression of resentful autochthony analysed in one of Olivier Esteves’s chapters, through letters of support to Powell, which frequently harness memories of the Second World War, in order to express their hostility to immigrants who are regarded as “space invaders”. As Sara Farris puts it in her study of what she calls “femonationalism”, i.e. the instrumentalization of women’s rights by the far right, “the people that is called upon to act against the Other is not […] a shapeless demos, but a specific ethnos or natio” (p. 60). It was (also) as a bounded, ethnicized, beleaguered and insular ethnos that the Powellites apprehended their identity, through tropes of autochthony, such as “displacement, nostalgia, and respectability” (Mepschen 2016, p. 48). Many perceptions, themes and feelings permeating the letters of support to Powell cohere with ethnographies of populism in other countries and at other periods. Indeed, much of the contents in these 1968 letters allows many parallels with Michele Lamont’s study of the American and French working classes in the 1990s, Justin Gest’s study of Barking and Dagenham as well as Youngstown (Ohio) in the 2010s, not to mention, indeed, Paul Mepschen’s analysis of the “New West” neighbourhood of Amsterdam in the years 2009–2011 (Lamont 2000; Gest 2016; Mepschen 2016). What all this reveals is that the Powell moment of 1968 should be seen as a pivotal political precursor to the upsurge of radical right-wing politics at the turn of the 21st century. Like the chaos unleashed at the time of the Democratic convention in August 1968 in Chicago, Powell’s detonation is an often forgotten episode of 1968, lost in celebrations of a (left-wing) revolutionary year from Paris to Mexico City, from Prague to Belfast, from Rome to Tokyo. Both Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s moment in August 1968 and Powell’s a few months before adumbrate the Western revolt on

Introduction

7

the right, by a (white) “silent majority” striking out against radical students, immigrants, left wingers, undeserving “freeloaders”, etc. In this sense, there is a real need to further “deparochialize” the figure of Powell, i.e. to analyse his rhetoric, his politics and his following from a broader international perspective. Another chapter from this book, by Olivier Esteves, is an international press view of articles dealing with Powell, mostly from the European and US press. Although quite modest in itself, this deparochializing effort serves as a complementing counterpoint to the reterritorializing effort mentioned above: instead of narrowing the focus on Powell to specific domains in British politics or society, the idea is rather, here, to broaden the perspective on a figure whose analysis is too often limited to English/British confines. If we now place the focus on populism as electoral politics more traditionally understood, much academic research published since the mid-2000s likewise serve to highlight key components of Powell’s politics itself. Among the plethora of books and articles published on the catch-all concept of populism, it is possible to identify nine specific traits that help to make sense of Powell’s ideology, career, as well as of the responses he brought about and the party reactions his campaign generated. These elements are mostly drawn from the works of political scientists or sociologists, such as Barr, Kaltwasser, Lucardie, Moffit, Mudde and Taggart, all of whom deal primarily with European, North or South American populisms. These nine points are bound up with nativism and autochthony, be it directly or indirectly. To begin with, Mudde and Kaltwasser suggest the following minimal definition of populism, which is an apt starting point: Populism is a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale of the people. This means that populism is in essence a form of moral politics, as the distinction between “the elite” and “the people” is first and foremost moral (i. e. pure vs corrupt), not situational (e.g. position of power), socio-cultural (e.g. ethnicity, religion), or socio-economic (e.g. class) (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2012, pp. 7–8). In terms of populism as a political style, two features identified by Moffit help to make sense of Powell. First, “populist leaders must strike a balance between appearing as both ordinary and extraordinary to appeal to ‘the people’. In doing so, they must ostensibly be ‘of the people’ as well as simultaneously beyond ‘the people’” (Moffit 2016, p. 52). The Birmingham speech is a perfect illustration of this two-sided strategy: by quoting both from Virgil’s Aeneid (after some dithering about whether he should quote him in English or Latin) as well as from resentful constituents themselves, Powell firmly set his place both way beyond the people and well as profoundly of them. Second, Moffit positions populist leaders as being characterized by “bad manners”, which to him does not necessarily mean having

8

Olivier Esteves

a vulgar accent or speaking or behaving in a specifically uncouth or coarse way (Moffit 2016, p. 45). Some populist leaders have sometimes seemed aloof or snobbish (e.g. Geert Wilders, Ross Perrot), at a remove from, say, George Wallace’s self-proclaimed (and genuine) fondness for ketchup at every meal. Yet they have committed breaches of protocol for strategic purposes and such was so blatantly the case for Powell. It is well known that immediately prior to the Birmingham speech, he deliberately refrained from revealing the contents of his speech to Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet (Schofield 2013, p. 209). More importantly, what was shocking about the speech was not so much what he said in it rather than how it was said. As Schofield pointed out: “Powell had violated the central premise of the political consensus – the rule of polite opinion” (Ibid., p. 238). How strategic the violation of polite, elite-friendly norms of behaviour was is highlighted within the speech itself, where Powell famously warned: “I can already hear the chorus of execration … How dare I say such a horrible thing?”, in a rhetorical ploy that cunningly combined Weberian ethics of conviction with ethics of responsibility. Three partisan elements follow from these style-related features. First, many populists, as Mudde and Lucardie have argued, present themselves as party purifiers intent on restoring the original ideology of a party (believed to have been diluted or betrayed by the current leaders) rather than as actual “prophets” who articulate a thoroughly new ideology for new times (Lucardie 2000, pp. 176–7; Mudde 2016, p. 10). This, clearly, is also the case for Powell. Once he realized, in 1974, that the Conservative party could not be “purified” according to his terms, he crossed the Irish Sea and became an Ulster Unionist Party MP. The second point is that while he was still a member of the Conservative Party, he nurtured a self-image of keeping at the margins of the political game despite keeping his parliamentary seat in Wolverhampton. As Mudde says in general terms: “Populist radical right parties prefer to keep ‘one foot in and one foot out’ of government, meaning that they prefer to keep their oppositional image, by using radical rhetoric and pushing for excessively radical policies, rather than run the risk of being perceived as ‘normal’ governmental party and part of the ‘corrupt elite’” (Mudde 2016, p. 16). Third, the way the Conservative Party dealt with Powell’s populist threat within its ranks is also evocative of political party reactions vis-à-vis populists in general. These are classically of four types: “isolation, confrontation, adaptation and socialization” (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2012, p. 213). Heath’s party in 1968 and in the years that followed opted both for “isolation” as well as “adaptation”: the former was illustrated by his swift exclusion from Heath’s shadow cabinet, which had built a cordon sanitaire around Powell. It is worth recalling here that the man literally became persona non grata and was ostracised within the party he had spent his life working for. Mudde and Kaltwasser posit that the isolation strategy is in itself a mirror image of the populist language, since “it assumes that the political world should be seen as a moral battle, which is (almost) impossible to solve through democratic channels”. “Adaptation” to Powell was clearly illustrated by the way the 1970

Introduction

9

Conservative Party platform did include some points on immigrants’ repatriation. More broadly speaking, the recurrent come back of Powell’s ghost in debate on race and immigration testifies to myriad cross-party “adaptations” through decades, and it is some of these adaptations and reconfigurings that are analysed in the pages that follow, notably by Robert Ford, Stéphane Porion and Karine Tournier-Sol. Three points remain to be made, one on the perceived failure of democratic rule, one on cross-class alliances, the last one on “nativism” itself. The sense of emergency and crisis populists exploit is intensified by what is seen as the betrayal, political naivety or cosmopolitanism of the elites, which seems to rig the democratic process itself. It is no coincidence that constituents, in their letters of support to Powell, very often use words such as “referendum” or (less often) “plebiscite”: the idea is that had they been consulted as behooves a full-fledged democracy, they would have refused both the concept of a multiracial Britain and the Race Relations Bill itself, a feeling which is borne out by polling evidence. This frustration, which in the present case is also experienced as a menace to the essence of (freedom-based) Britishness, is in line with the populist “belief that the volonté générale should be implemented without any restrictions. Nothing is more important than the general will of the people” (Mudde 2007, p. 151). It is no coincidence either that Powell himself was one of the first senior British politicians to push for greater use of referendum. Nativism, the need for direct democracy in the form of referendum, and the sense of betrayal by the elites all facilitate cross-class alliances, which is often what populist leaders strive for (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2012, p. 5). The mythified ethnos that native Britons are summoned to identify with at the exclusion of New Commonwealth immigrants is made up of a portion of the working class and of many middle-class folks. It is noteworthy that media coverage emphasized, not only in Britain, the Powellite alignment of dockers, meat porters, etc. While it is itself debatable how many dockers actually sided with Powell (Lindop 2001), it does remain that the core of Powell supporters did not take noisily to the streets and was made up of suburban middle classes, as is testified by the large number of support letters sent from Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Devon, etc. This is precisely how, in Powell’s case, the hazy notion of the “silent majority” should be understood. One last point. Rather than engage in debates on what kind of “right” Powell was identified with (either “far”, “extreme” or “radical”), it seems important to associate his rhetoric and ideology to “nativism”, which is a “key feature of the populist right” according to Mudde and “an ideology that holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the nation state’s homogeneity” (Mudde 2016, p. 6). As Duyvendak and Kesic underline, although a more appropriate concept than mere “nationalism” to make sense of the contemporary upsurge of populist parties in Europe, the concept happens to be very rarely deployed (Duyvendak & Kesic 2018). As we have said above, it may be argued that Powell’s rocket-like career served as a (British) prologue to this contemporary upsurge and that it was nativist at its core.

10

Olivier Esteves

Nativism is commonly used to study the United States, say, from the period of reconstruction to the end of the First World War. In his foundational work, John Higham defines nativism as “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e. ‘un-American’) connections” (Higham 2011, 4). Higham distinguishes three types of nativism: religious nativism (Catholics as a threat to the WASP model), political nativism (the Red Scare), and racial nativism (100% Americans vs. presumably inferior though threatening races, i.e. all non WASPs). From this triad, Duyvendak and Kesic have wrought another one, adapted to the Netherlands and more broadly to contemporary Europe: religious nativism (in the form of Islamophobia, although they do not use the word itself), class nativism (elites as a threat to the nation) and racial nativism (immigrants and ethnic minorities lumped together as occupying too much space, literally, politically and symbolically). Elements two and three of this triad are very germane to apprehend Powell and his following, whereas the first one (religious nativism) is only minor: at a time when Islam as such was outside political debate in Britain and Britons had never heard of “hijabs”, “fatwas” or “jihad” (Esteves 2011), it was Sikh customs and militancy that were construed as a threat, particularly in the West Midlands and Southall. This is true despite the very obvious fact that anti-Sikh feelings and discourses in the 1960s pale into insignificance when compared with current polemics about Islam, many of which have been conditioned by foreign policy issues. Three tropes connected with nativism are central to Powellite discourses and perceptions. One is home politics, a rudimentary, 1960s’ form of what William Walters would label “domopolitics” in the post-9/11 securitization of Western societies (Walters 2004), with homes being seen as under constant siege. A second one is (race-based) rootedness naturalizing national belonging and suggesting a culturalization of citizenship that, in turn, legitimizes welfare chauvinism discourses. That rootedness, after Pierre Bourdieu, needs to be questioned (Bourdieu 2000, pp. 142–3). Third, the centrality of nostalgia. Duyvendak talks about a “revanchist nostalgia” that is prevalent in Western Europe today. Again, it may be argued that Powell set the tone for much of this in Britain. In this neighbourhood-centred nostalgia, “spatial transformations have largely been interpreted as temporal developments” (Duyvendak 2011, p. 108). To put it differently, in Powellite perceptions the hackneyed phrase “there goes the neighbourhood!” is very often racebased coded language. It is often based on a notion of territorial rights, along the lines of “we were here first”, which itself gives the natives the right to prescribe to immigrants how they must behave (Ibid., 110). In all of this, and as hopefully we have managed to demonstrate in this book, top-down discourses and bottom-up indignant feelings are remarkably in sync. Further, Powell’s 1968 episode also set the tone for much of the British debate on race and immigration and adumbrated some of the European contemporary waves of nativist populism. It is highly ironic that a post-Brexit book about a quintessentially English figure might serve to illuminate, if indirectly, some current political debates in Europe.

Introduction

11

Notes 1 I have found alternatively “March For Dignity” and “March of Dignity”. 2 “Racialism” was nearly always used in the 1960s and “racism” was not, at least not in Britain. 3 For video archives, check: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SYNo2t6nxg (accessed 06.04.2018). 4 It is often claimed that the first occurrence of the term was in the New York Times (21.10.1984), on the Mondale/Reagan televised debates. 5 In 2004, Cas Mudde was already referring to the “contemporary populist Zeitgeist” (p. 31).

References Primary sources Staffordshire Record Office Powell papers, letters in support, bundles D3123/14; D3123/15; D3123/167.

Secondary sources Billig, M. (1995), Banal Nationalism, London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (2000), Pascalian Meditations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourne, J. (1998), “UK: The Powell Effect”, Race and Class, 39(4), pp. 59–62. Douglas, M. (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Duyvendak, J.W. (2011), The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Duyvendak, J.W. and Kesic, J. (2018), “The Rise of Nativism in Europe”, Europe Now, available at https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/01/31/the-rise-of-nativism -in-europe/ (accessed 19.09.2018). Eddo-Lodge, R. (2017), Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, London: Bloomsbury. Esteves, O. (2011), De L’invisibilité à l’islamophobie : les musulmans britanniques (1945–2010), Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po. Farris, S (2017), In The Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gest, J. (2016), The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality, London and New York: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. and Polletta, F. (2001), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Higham, J. (2011 [1955]), Strangers in the Land. Patterns of American Nativism, 1860– 1925, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hirsch, S. (2018), In the Shadow of Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Koselleck, R. (2006), “Crisis”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 67(2), pp. 357–400. Lamont, M. (2000), The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration, New York and Cambridge, MA: Russell Sage Foundation/Harvard University Press.

12

Olivier Esteves

Lindop, F. (2001), “Racism and the Working Class: Strikes in Support of Enoch Powell in 1968”, Labour History Review, 66(1), pp.79–100. Lucardie, P. (2000), “Prophets, Purifiers and Prolocutors: Towards a Theory on the Emergence of New Parties”, Party Politics, 6(2), pp.175–185. Mepschen, P. (2016), Everyday Autochthony: Difference, Discontent and the Politics of Home in Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, PhD dissertation. Moffit, B. (2016), The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mudde, C. (2007), Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mudde, C. (2016), On Extremism and Democracy in Europe, London: Routledge. Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C.R. (2012), Populism in Europe and the Americas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pilkington, H. (2016), Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Schwarz, B. (2011), The White Man’s World: Memories of Empire (Vol. 1), New York and London: Oxford University Press. Taggart, P. (2000), Populism, Buckingham: Open University Press. Walters, W. (2004), “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics”, Citizenship Studies, 8(3), pp.237–260.

1

Powell and after: Immigration, race and politics in Britain Robert Ford UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

Introduction Immigration was an unusual issue in post-war British politics. Migration attracted strong and sustained public opposition from the moment significant numbers of migrants began to arrive. Every poll conducted in the 1960s and 1970s showed lopsided majorities in favour of restricting or completely halting Commonwealth migration. In such a situation, we would normally expect rational political parties to react to public preferences by pushing for strong restrictions on immigration. Instead, both mainstream parties maintained key elements of the framework set up in the 1948 British Nationality Act, enabling significant Commonwealth settlement throughout this period, refused to push for a complete halt to immigration or to consider the repatriation of settled migrants, despite intense hostility in the British electorate. Immigration was, therefore, an issue with persistent destabilizing potential in this period, due to an enduring divide between the more liberal policies offered by mainstream party elites and an electorate that favoured strict control. Why were liberal policies maintained despite intense public opposition? One factor is race and racism – both its presence in the electorate and elite resistance to acknowledging it in policy. Although migrants came to Britain from many regions in the post-war era,1 it was specifically black and Asian immigration that evoked negative headlines and public hostility (Ford 2011). Racial prejudice among the British population played a large part in this (Rose et al. 1969; Ford 2008). Such racial animosity was much rarer among British political elites and racially discriminatory rhetoric and policy were taboo in a political class many of whose members had fought the Nazi dictatorship in their youth. Even policymakers willing privately to acknowledge the existence of racial prejudices in the British public generally resisted enshrining them publicly in discriminatory rhetoric or legislation, for fear that doing so would legitimate more extreme forms of racial discrimination at home and damage Britain’s relations with its former imperial colonies abroad (Layton-Henry 1984, Chap. 6; Hansen 2000, Chap. 1).

14

Robert Ford

Policymakers were also constrained by the liberal citizenship regime set up by the 1948 British Nationality Act, which granted the right to settle and work in Britain to all those living in Britain’s former imperial colonies (Hansen 2000).2 This made restricting immigration difficult, as it required reforming citizenship law to create different classes of citizens, which would obviously be discriminatory, or abandoning the citizenship links between Britain and the colonies, which would jeopardize the foreign policy goal of close bonds between Britain and the Commonwealth. A more restrictive policy regime was gradually developed, beginning with the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and concluding with the 1981 British Nationality Act, which finally severed the legal links between Britain and its former colonial territories. But between the 1948 British Nationality Act and its 1981 namesake and successor, there were a series of intense debates about citizenship, Empire, race and immigration during which substantial settlement of black and Asian Commonwealth migrants continued despite intense public opposition. Enoch Powell’s Birmingham 1968 speech, which announced his arrival on the stage as the highest profile and most controversial opponent of such migration, falls right in the middle of this period – after the first restrictions had been introduced, but before the links between Britain and its former Empire were fully severed. It is this volatile period that forms the focus of this chapter. I will assess Powell’s impact on the electoral politics of immigration in the 1970s, and argue that Powell’s intervention was the first step in a lasting alignment on immigration and race, with the Conservatives emerging as the party of opposition to migration and scepticism about ethnic diversity, which was back then referred to as “multiracial society”.

Migration to Britain from the Commonwealth, 1948–1981 There were three major sources of migration to Britain from the black and Asian countries of the Commonwealth during the period when the 1948 British Nationality Act was in force. The first was labour migration. The 1948 BNA granted Commonwealth citizens unrestricted rights to live and work in Britain. The large differences in living standards between Britain and the colonies made this an attractive option for many. The first wave of colonial immigrants were also accepted by British governments as a means to meet the strong demand for labour in a full employment economy rebuilding itself after the Second World War. Demands for workers in a full employment private sector economy and labour shortages in state-run public services such as the National Health Service created a strong “pull” for immigration, while high unemployment and poverty in Caribbean and South Asian former colonies added a strong “push” encouraging workers to leave (Layton-Henry 1984, Chap. 2; Solomos 2003, pp. 51–54). Rising migrant inflows and escalating tensions over black and Asian migration, including so-called “race riots” in 1958, led to growing pressure to restrict migration. British governments began to restrict Commonwealth migrants’ rights to work in Britain from 1962 onwards, reducing and controlling the flow

Powell and after

15

of labour migration – after this point, migrants could only come to Britain for work if issued with a voucher by the government. However, a second wave of South Asian immigrants arrived soon after, during a time of economic slowdown and rising unemployment, driven by a different “push” factor: persecution by newly independent African governments. Asian minorities who had settled in British East Africa during the colonial era found themselves facing rising hostility and discrimination in some Eastern African states, whose leaders found them to be a convenient scapegoat for domestic economic and social problems (Layton-Henry 1984, Chap.6). While the British governments of the time were well aware of the public hostility to further Asian immigration, it was legally and politically difficult to restrict their settlement. The African Asians still held British passports acquired before the colonies’ independence, which conveyed full and unrestricted settlement rights in Britain, and so had a strong legal case to be accepted. There was also political pressure from the liberal wings of both parties to respond to the ethical imperative to accept British passport holders seeking to flee countries where they faced a clear threat of violent persecution – passport holders who had taken out British citizenship in good faith and who usually had no other citizenship options to fall back on.3 Successive waves of African Asian migrants were therefore accepted in substantial numbers to settle in Britain, but these acceptances were accompanied by further rounds of reform to British citizenship laws by British governments of both parties seeking to prevent future inflows. These reforms stripped most non-white British passport holders in former colonial states of their migration rights and thus reduced the risk of political crises in these states triggering further migrant influxes. In the end, the political imperative to respond to public opposition to black and Asian immigration trumped the legal and ethical pressure to meet obligations incurred to former colonial subjects who had taken up the offer of British citizenship. However, Commonwealth citizens already in Britain retained the right to bring their families to the country and this family reunion channel remained a substantial source of migration from the Caribbean and South Asia throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As a result of these factors, black and Asian immigration from the early 1950s until the final citizenship reforms of 1981 occurred at a level above that desired by the public, generating widespread and frequently passionate opposition. The questions this chapter will examine are: did this opposition to immigration have significant political consequences and what role did Enoch Powell play in those effects?

The politics of immigration, 1964–1979: before and after Powell Immigration policy was seldom subject to public political debate in the first two decades of post-war British politics, despite gradually rising rates of black and South Asian migration settlement and growing public hostility. In the 1950s successive Conservative governments took no legislative action to restrict immigration, ignoring unrest within the party ranks and growing

16

Robert Ford

hostility to immigrants in the urban areas where they settled, culminating in racial attacks in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958. Immigration did not feature in any of the 1950s election campaigns by either party (Layton-Henry 1984, pp. 30–38). In the first years of the 1960s the situation changed somewhat, as black and Asian migration rates accelerated, increasing pressures for restriction within the governing Conservative Party (Ibid., pp. 38–43), culminating in the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which put strict restrictions on primary labour migration from the Commonwealth – Commonwealth citizens no longer had a right to migrate to Britain for work but required a government voucher to do so. The Labour party strongly opposed these measures as racially discriminatory and hence, by the 1964 election, the two parties were already drifting towards distinctive positions on immigration. However, both parties avoided significant direct discussion of immigration in the 1964 campaign. Both parties had internal divisions over immigration that they did not want to publicize or exacerbate and many in both parties’ elites were also strongly opposed to campaigns that mobilized and might further inflame racially intolerant attitudes in the electorate. However, several Conservative Party candidates sought to exploit the issue locally. The most prominent of these was Smethwick in the West Midlands, where a little-known Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, ran a notoriously inflammatory local campaign4 in an area with high immigration and succeeded in unseating the shadow Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, on a swing twice the national average (Steed 1964, pp. 354–355; Layton-Henry 1984, pp. 57–61). The upset in Smethwick brought home to the Labour leadership the explosive electoral potential of anti-immigrant feeling and, combined with the narrowness of Labour’s victory (a precarious five-seat parliamentary majority), tilted the party leadership towards restriction. Both parties’ leaderships continued to regard open campaigning on the issue as taboo and as a result immigration once again did not feature prominently in the 1966 election campaigns (Butler and King 1966, pp. 250–254). The ceasefire between party elites over immigration persisted until 1968, when rising discrimination and hostility from the African majority in the newly independent African Republic of Kenya led growing numbers of ethnically Asian Kenyan residents, who held British passports, to migrate to Britain.5 As the rate of arrivals accelerated, there was a spike in hostile press attention and public opposition, panicking the Labour leadership, whose memories of Smethwick were fresh. It moved quickly and ruthlessly to restrict the inflow via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which imposed controls on immigration for all passport holders except those with a UK-born parent or grandparent, stripping the Kenyan Asians of their migration rights retrospectively. The Act eroded the bipartisan consensus that had previously kept immigration out of political debate. It was a transparently race-biased piece of legislation, explicitly designed to assuage public hostility to Kenyan Asian migration by stripping a large population of Asian British passport holders of

Powell and after

17

their rights and was attacked as such by the Labour left and the left-wing press. The Labour leadership attempted to stem this criticism by introducing Britain’s first race relations legislation. This, in turn, drew forth fierce criticism from some Conservatives who saw it as an attack on free speech and, most importantly, was the issue that drew Enoch Powell into the immigration debate. Powell’s well-known speech, delivered in Birmingham on 20 April 1968, was made three days before the second reading debate on the Race Relations Bill in Parliament. Powell defended the right to speak plainly about the prejudices of his constituents, violating the elite taboo on publicly acknowledging racial hostilities, claiming the “avoidable evil” of immigration must be confronted squarely: “To see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.” Powell ridiculed the proposed race relations legislation, claiming: The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming … For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. (Powell 1968) Powell broke radically with the incrementalism of the migration debate up until this point, demanding an immediate halt to all immigrant settlement from the Commonwealth and government-sponsored repatriation of settled immigrants. The public, media and political reaction to his speech was dramatic, as Powell no doubt intended. Public support for his position was very strong, with around four-fifths of voters agreeing with his statements in the immediate aftermath to the speech (Schoen 1977, p. 37). Powell was immediately sacked by Edward Heath from the Shadow Cabinet,6 but remained within the Conservative Party as a backbench MP. For the remaining two years of the Labour government, Powell campaigned regularly against immigration and retained a very high public profile (Schoen 1977, Chaps 2 and 3). Powell’s views on immigration were more often aired and more widely reported than the views of the actual Conservative leadership. Even as Heath and the party leadership tried to distance themselves from him, Powell repeatedly identified himself as a Conservative and his views as Conservative policy and urged his supporters to vote for the Conservative Party (Studlar 1978). The politics of immigration had changed again by the time of the next election in 1974. With the Conservatives in office, Powell continued his campaigns on immigration, but now trained his sights on his own party. He fiercely criticized the Heath government’s Immigration Act in 1971, although this was a highly restrictive piece of legislation designed to assuage the concerns he had mobilized and articulated. He also attacked the 1973 decision to grant entry to Britain for 27,000 Asian British passport holders expelled on short notice from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972, in very similar circumstances to the Kenyan Asians in 1968 – the difference being that while Wilson abandoned

18

Robert Ford

British passport holders abroad, Heath accepted the obligation to help them despite strong domestic opposition. Powell repeatedly accused the Home Office of lying to the British public about the true number of Ugandan and other immigrants arriving and his persistent high-profile attacks on the incumbent government confused the picture for voters, as, despite the passage of new migration restrictions, they were being told by the highest profile opponent of migration that the government was too soft. Powell added further to the confusion by very publicly breaking with his former party and encouraging his supporters to vote for Labour in the two 1974 elections. Although the reason for his switch was opposition to Heath’s EEC policy rather than immigration, most of his supporters cared more about the latter and may therefore have seen his break with the Conservatives through this prism. Voters in 1974 were faced with a Conservative Party whose two best known figures were regularly and publicly at odds over immigration. The situation was very different in 1979, when the Conservatives faced the voters for the first time under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher had been sympathetic to Powell’s positions on immigration in the late 1960s (McLean 2001, p. 211) and recognized the strength of public feeling on the issue, which in the 1974–9 period was manifesting itself in a rapid rise in support for the far-right National Front (Layton-Henry 1984, Chap.7). The influence of Powell on Thatcher is also visible in the rhetoric they apply to the issue. Powell, in 1968, defended speaking out on immigration as follows: The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils … Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after … I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else … to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal. (Powell, 1968) Thatcher, 10 years later, uses more prosaic language to make essentially the same point: I think there is a feeling that the big political parties have not been talking about this … If you do not want people to go to extremes, and I do not, we ourselves must talk about this problem and we must show that we are prepared to deal with it … we are not in politics to ignore people’s worries: we are in politics to deal with them. (Thatcher, 1978) Thatcher, as leader of the Conservative opposition, was in an even stronger position than Powell to establish a clear distinction between the parties on immigration restrictions. She exercised this opportunity in a heavily reported television interview on “World in Action” in January 1978, when she expressed sympathy with voters afraid that Britain was being “swamped by people with a different culture” and repeatedly promised that the Conservatives

Powell and after

19

would “hold out the prospect of an end to immigration” (Thatcher 1978), as Porion also forefronts in his chapter on the connection between Powell, Alfred Sherman and Thatcher. After her election in 1979, Margaret Thatcher followed through on her campaign promise for tough new immigration restrictions, passing the 1981 British Nationality Act, which greatly restricted British citizenship rights and imposed strict limits on immigration settlements. This did not “end” immigration as her “World in Action” interview had promised, but it did reduce levels of settlement from the New Commonwealth, which fell by over a third from over 50,000 in 1978 to 33,000 in 1983, after the British Nationality Act came into force. With immigration settlements stabilized at their lowest levels for over 20 years and Powell gone from mainstream politics, immigration dropped down the political agenda in the 1980s. The parties remained strongly differentiated on this issue – a legacy of Powell and Thatcher’s mobilization of anti-migration voters and Labour’s mobilization of ethnic minority voters threatened by Powell and Thatcher’s rhetoric. The Conservatives seldom campaigned on immigration from 1979 until the 2000s, but arguably they did not need to – the reputational legacy of Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher ensured they were seen by voters as the party of immigration control.

Testing the impact of Powell and immigration For an issue to have an important impact on electoral politics, three things need to happen (Butler & Stokes 1971, p. 281). First, the issue must matter for voters: they must have clear and strongly held views about it. Second, opinion on the issue needs to cut across existing political alignments. Third, voters must perceive a clear difference between the parties on the issue and respond to this perception. I use British Election Study survey data to test the degree to which these three different conditions held throughout the 1964–1979 period and whether Powell’s interventions in 1968–1974 changed the picture. I focus on voting for Labour or the Conservatives, as levels of third-party voting in this period were low and largely unrelated to immigration. The data used are from the post-election cross-sectional surveys carried out after every election, except October 1974, which is omitted as there were insufficient questions on immigration. Three main independent variables are employed to capture the effects of immigration. The first is the level of anti-immigrant feeling. Respondents were asked “Do you think too many coloured immigrants have been let into this country or not?” The large majority who agreed with this statement are then classified according to how strongly they felt about it. Those who felt “very strongly” that coloured immigration7 should be reduced are coded as “strongly anti-immigrant”, while those who felt “strongly” about reducing coloured immigration are coded as “moderately anti-immigrant”. These two groups are compared with the control group of voters who did not want immigration reduced and those who only felt weakly about the issue.

20

Robert Ford

The second measure looks at perceptions of the parties’ migration stances. Unfortunately, there is not a consistent measure of this across all elections. In 1964–1970 and in 1979, I use the question “Which party is more likely to keep immigrants out, the Conservatives or Labour, or don’t you feel there is much difference between them on this?” In the February 1974 survey data, this question is not available, so a separate question is employed asking voters what they believe each party’s policy on immigration to be. Those who believed a party proposed the halting of immigration or the repatriation of immigrants are classified as believing that party would stop immigration. The perception of a significant difference between parties is more likely to be consequential if this is an issue that matters to a voter. For this reason, a third variable is included interacting the first two variables. The interaction creates dummy variables consisting of those who, for example, feel strongly that immigration should stop and believe the Conservatives are more likely to stop it. This allows a test of whether those with strong feelings about immigration are more likely to switch votes based on a combination of strong opposition to immigration and a perception that one party is best placed to halt it. I employ a series of demographic controls capturing many of the main structural factors influencing British voting – age, gender, social class, housing type, religious affiliation, church attendance, region, education, union membership and political values.8 The levels of missing data on some of these items are quite high and so in order to maintain an acceptable sample size and prevent possible biases from listwise deletion, multiple imputation methods are employed in the regression analyses. Controls for partisan identification are not included for two reasons. First, it is likely that if the immigration issue influences vote choice, it may also influence party identity choice in a similar fashion. Second, party identity in Britain is considerably more volatile and more closely related to vote choice than in the United States where the concept was developed (Bartle 1999, 2001, 2003). The effects of immigration attitudes were also tested on party identity and were found in every case to follow a very similar pattern to that shown for vote choice.

Analysis 1: Cross-tabulation analysis Table 1.1 shows the distribution of attitudes about black and Asian immigration in the 1960s and 1970s. Opposition to immigration is widespread throughout the period, with around 85% of respondents in each survey at least somewhat opposed. There is a small decline in strongly anti-immigrant sentiment in the 1970s – falling from 49% of respondents in 1970 to 40% in 1979, but a desire for lower migration is expressed by lopsided majorities in every survey.9 The emergence of Powell in 1968 is not associated with any rise in restrictionist sentiment between 1966 and 1970, neither is there any decline following his departure from mainstream politics after 1974.10 The first two conditions for significant issue voting were therefore met throughout the 15-year period from 1964 to 1979: public feelings about the immigration issue were strong and heavily skewed in favour of restriction.

Powell and after

21

Table 1.1 Attitudes about immigration, 1964–1979

Strongly anti-immigrant Moderately anti-immigrant Weakly anti-immigrant Not anti-immigrant N (total)

1964

1966

1970

Feb. 1974

1979

47

48

49

42

40

28

27

28

30

35

12

11

10

14

12

14

15

13

14

14

1468

1541

1016

1043

1841

Source: British Election Studies, 1964–1979

Now we turn to public perceptions of the two political parties on immigration. The first question, shown in Table 1.2, asks which party voters believe is more likely to stop immigration. In 1964 and 1966, prior to Enoch Powell’s emergence, a majority of respondents say there is “not much difference” between the parties. Among those who do perceive a difference, however, somewhat more rate the Conservatives as the party of restriction than Labour – an advantage that rises from five percentage points in 1964 to 13 percentage points in 1966. Breaking the figures down by party identification suggests, however, that this advantage is mostly the result of existing Conservative partisans becoming more convinced that theirs is the party of restriction. Only a small minority of Labour identifiers see the Conservatives as more likely to restrict immigration, reducing the potential for switching on the issue. While some divides in perceptions on immigration were emerging even before Powell’s rise in 1968, they were refracted through partisan lenses and most voters did not see the parties as having substantially different policies on the issue. The balance of opinion shifted decisively in the Conservatives’ favour after Enoch Powell’s interventions began in 1968. The share of voters who saw the Conservatives as more likely to halt immigration more than doubled from 28% in 1966 to 58% in 1970. This total includes nearly two-thirds of Conservative identifiers and more than half of Labour identifiers – illustrating that Powell’s stance had “cut through” even among voters who identified with his political opponents. Far more voters perceived a difference between the parties after Powell’s interventions than previously – the share saying there was “not much difference” falls by over 20 points among voters in general and by even more among Labour identifiers. At the election when Powell was most prominent, the public thus favoured the Conservatives over Labour to deliver the immigration restriction they wanted by very large margins. The pattern is very similar in 1979 and suggests Margaret Thatcher was able to reinforce the partisan differentiation Enoch Powell had helped introduce.

22

Robert Ford

Table 1.2 Voter perception about which party would be more likely to stop immigration, 1964–1979 1964

1966

1970

1979

27 22 52

28 15 57

58 4 34

61 2 33

5

13

54

59

35 11 55

44 9 48

65 3 33

65 2 31

24

35

62

63

20 32 48

18 22 61

52 11 36

54 4 39

-12

-4

41

50

1248

1403

1827

1899

All voters Conservatives Labour Not much difference Conservative advantage Conservative party identifiers Conservatives Labour Not much difference Conservative advantage Labour party identifiers Conservatives Labour Not much difference Conservative advantage N (total)

Source: British Election Studies, 1964, 1966, 1970 and 1979

Unfortunately the question examined in Table 1.2 was not asked in 1974, so we cannot compare attitudes consistently over the whole period. We can, however, use a question fielded in 1970 and 1974, which asks respondents for their own preferred immigration policy and also asks what they believe the policies of the two main political parties to be – Table 1.3 shows the results. Voters’ own opinions remained fairly stable – over 70% of respondents in both years favoured at least a complete halt to new immigration, while a fifth of voters favoured assisting the repatriation of already settled immigrants. There is, however, a marked shift in voters’ perceptions of the two main parties’ positions. In 1970, voters tended to think the Conservatives position was more restrictive than it actually was: 36% erroneously believed the party would completely halt immigration settlement and 22% believed the Conservatives would introduce assisted repatriation– both positions Enoch

Powell and after

23

Table 1.3 Immigration policies, 1970–1974. Voter reports of their own preferences and perceptions of Conservative and Labour Party positions 1970

Assist in sending immigrants home Stop further immigration, allow immigrants here to stay Allow immediate families and a few skilled workers Allow new workers and their families Allow free entry Don’t know N (total)

February 1974

Own

Conservative

Labour

20

22

4

19

7

3

50

36

19

53

29

22

22

19

30

21

22

27

4

6

23

4

15

15

2 3 1827

2 16 1050

9 18 1096

10 23 1096

11 14 1050

Own

2 2 1096

Conservative

Labour

Source: British Election Studies, 1970 and 1974

Powell had advocated but which did not enjoy widespread support among the Conservative leadership. In February 1974, after four years of the Heath government, the pattern of perceptions was very different. Only 7% now believed the Conservatives were proposing a repatriation programme and only 36% believed the party would at least halt immigration. The proportion thinking the Conservatives favoured allowing new settlement of immigrants tripled from 8% to 24% – even though the party had passed legislation in 1971 explicitly designed to end the new settlement of immigrants. Between 1970 and February 1974 large numbers of voters thus moved from seeing the Conservatives’ policy on immigration to be more restrictive than it actually was to perceiving it as less restrictive than it actually was. It is likely that Enoch Powell played a role in both misperceptions. In 1970, the vast majority of voters had heard about Powell’s speeches and approved of them11 and correctly identified the positions outlined in them. As Powell was campaigning as a Conservative, it is quite plausible that many voters then erroneously attributed Powell’s positions to his party. But by February 1974, the Conservative leadership’s passage of controversial new legislation to restrict black and Asian immigration had been drowned out by the furore over acceptance of Ugandan Asian refugees, with the criticism of accepting migrants led once again by Powell. Powell attacked his own government’s decision to accept refugees from Uganda and repeatedly

24

Robert Ford

claimed that the government was deceiving the public over the numbers of immigrants it was accepting (Schoen 1977, pp. 70–73), a charge the government found it hard to refute as there was little high-quality data on the number of Ugandan Asians arriving. Thus, once again, voters may have formed their political opinions based more on Powell’s backbench interventions claiming the Conservatives now backed substantial migration than on the Conservative government’s claims to be restricting it. Perceptions of Labour’s position moved in the opposite direction. In 1970, at the end of six years of Labour government, nearly a third of respondents perceived Labour to have a more liberal position than it actually had, despite the party’s controversial passage of restrictive immigration legislation stripping Kenyan Asians of their migration rights in 1968. By February 1974, after four years in opposition, the proportion overestimating Labour’s liberality on immigration fell to around a quarter, while another quarter did not know what the party’s policy was. The perception that Labour was “soft” on immigration thus faded during this period, as the focus of Powellite criticism was now on a Conservative government presiding over a new migration crisis. The net result of these changes was to blur the lines between the parties – while voters saw the Conservatives as much more restrictive than Labour in 1970, this advantage was far smaller in 1974.

Estimating the electoral impact of immigration before and after Powell The logistic regression models provide some illumination about when and how immigration mattered overall, but as logistic regression coefficients are hard to interpret they do not provide a clear sense of the substantive importance of immigration. To get a clearer idea about what these coefficients mean in real electoral terms, I constructed a series of regression models to estimate the impact of immigration by comparing predicted rates of voting for each party in models with opposition to immigration, views about the parties’ migration policies and an interaction between the two, compared to “baseline” models with a full set of typical predictors of vote, but with immigration variables excluded. This is not an estimate of the actual change in vote choices produced by immigration, which cannot be estimated with certainty without panel data, but does provide a consistent estimate of the impact immigration attitudes have on vote choices, which we can use to trace the approximate influence of the issue over time. Figure 1.1 shows the results of this exercise. My models suggest immigration was consistently advantageous for the Conservatives throughout this period, with the addition of immigration variables to the model producing an increase of between one and 2.5 percentage points in predicted Conservative voting in each election. Immigration is nearly always harmful to the Labour vote, with a reduction in predicted voting for the party in four of the five election studies. The effects of immigration are, however, not constant. The Conservatives already gained some ground from immigration in the 1964 and

Powell and after

25

Figure 1.1 Estimated net change in voting due to immigration, 1964–1979

1966 elections, suggesting that immigration possessed the power to move votes even before Powell focused on the issue. The 1970 and 1974 results provide, however, indicative evidence of “Powell effects”. The estimated increase in Conservative voting when immigration variables are included is three times as large in 1970, the election held in the wake of “the Birmingham speech”, than it was in 1964 and 1966, before Powell began speaking out against immigration. Adding the immigration variables produces a 2.5 percentage point increase in Conservative voting, and a 1.5 percentage point decline in Labour voting, resulting in a total “swing” to the Conservatives of four percentage points. In 1974, when Powell was the most prominent critic of Conservative policy as too liberal and advocating his supporters back Labour, the effect of immigration on Conservative voting is half that seen in the previous election and adding immigration variables increases Labour vote estimates for the only time in the series. The overall “swing” from Labour to the Conservatives when the immigration variables are added falls from nearly four percentage points in 1970 when Powell was campaigning for the party to less than one point in 1974, when he was campaigning against it. There is less evidence that Margaret Thatcher gained a significant advantage from immigration in 1979. Although the Conservatives enjoyed their strongest ever advantage on immigration policy perceptions in 1979, the effects of immigration on vote choices are muted. The proportion of the electorate voting Conservative rises by 0.6 percentage points when the immigration variables are added and Labour voting falls by 0.2 percentage points, producing a similar overall “swing” from immigration as in the February 1974 election. This is not because the public were unaware of the Conservatives’ immigration policies:

26

Robert Ford

the overwhelming majority of respondents believed the Conservatives were more likely to stop immigration. Yet it seems this did not translate as effectively into votes in 1979 as in 1970. There are two possible reasons for this. First, other issues had come to the fore, most importantly Britain’s dismal economic performance. The late 1970s were the era of “stagflation”: a miserable combination of high inflation and rising unemployment and there were no major crises over immigration in the 1974–9 government as major as those over the Kenyan Asians in 1968 or the Ugandan Asians in 1973. Voters’ opposition to migration remained, but their attention went elsewhere after 1974, in particular to economic issues (IPSOS-MORI 2018). Second, Thatcher’s Conservative party was distinctive from Labour on a wider range of issues than Heath’s party had been. Powell’s attacks on immigration were valuable to the Tories of 1970 because the party was less distinctive on other issues. Thatcher did not need immigration to distinguish her party from Labour, as she was offering a radical break with the past on a broader front.

Powell’s legacy? Racial attitudes and partisanship since the 1970s The evidence from the 1960s and 1970s British Election Studies thus strongly suggests that hostility to black and Asian immigration had a statistically significant effect on voting decisions throughout a 15-year period from 1964 to 1979, an effect which was strongest in 1970 when Enoch Powell was advocating for the Conservative opposition and weakest in 1974 when he was campaigning against the Conservative government. But did the impact of race and immigration extend beyond this period? Was the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of Powell and Thatcher sufficient to align voters hostile to migrants and ethnic minorities with the Conservative party over the longer run? Table 1.4 shows the results of logistic regression analyses testing the influence of four different measures of outgroup hostility on Conservative and Labour partisanship throughout the Conservative Thatcher–Major governments of the 1980s and 1990s, controlling for standard demographic predictors of party affiliation.12 The alignment of white voters with hostile attitudes to migrants and minorities, which began with Enoch Powell’s mobilization of these voters in the late 1960s, endured throughout the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. White voters who considered themselves prejudiced against black and Asian people (self-rated prejudice), those who expressed discomfort about working with black or Asian colleagues or having relatives marry someone from a different race (social distance), those who expressed negative views about immigrants as a group (attitudes to immigrants scales) and those who wanted black and Asian immigration reduced – all of these outlooks predict stronger white identification with the Conservative party and weaker identification with the Labour party, on every occasion on which they are asked. This pattern is consistent over time and across measures, suggesting that this is a persistent political alignment. Just as in the post-Civil Rights United States racially

Powell and after

27

Table 1.4 Attitudes to race and immigration and identification with the Conservative and Labour Parties, 1983–1996

Conservative models 1983 1984 1986 1989 1990 1991 1994 1995 1996 Labour Models 1983 1984 1986 1989 1990 1991 1994 1995 1996

Self-rated prejudice

Social distance

Reduce black/ Asian immigration13

Attitudes to immigrants scales14

0.66*** 0.31** 0.58*** 0.72*** 0.66*** 0.41** 0.57*** 0.50***

0.20*** 0.19*** 0.29*** 0.24*** 0.21*** 0.12** 0.17***

0.47*** 0.55*** 0.61*** 0.43** 0.64*** 0.74*** 0.26+ 0.55***

0.14*** 0.22*** 0.07** -

-0.42*** -0.34** -0.28*** -0.66*** -0.47*** -0.36** -0.41***

-0.08+ -0.10* -0.14** -0.16** -0.14* -0.11*

-0.42*** -0.36* -0.36* -0.50*** -0.51*** -0.53***

-0.06 -0.18*** -

-0.34***

-0.10*

-0.45*** -0.44***

-0.08***

Source: British Social Attitudes surveys, 1983–1996 Significant results in bold: *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

conservative whites have aligned with the Republican Party and white racial liberals and minorities with the Democratic Party (Kinder and Sanders 1996), in post-Powell Britain, racially conservative whites consistently aligned with the Conservative Party and white racial liberals and minorities with the Labour Party (Heath et al. 2013).

Conclusion Public opposition to immigration was politically consequential at several points in the 1960s and 1970s. In all the elections of this period, all three of the conditions required for issue voting were met: the public felt strongly

28

Robert Ford

about immigration, their feelings were skewed heavily towards restricting the arrival of immigrants and one political party was generally perceived as more likely to bring these restrictions about. In all cases, the party that benefited as a result was the Conservatives. Labour never succeeded in persuading the public that it would be more effective at restricting immigration; the best the party could manage was to limit the magnitude of its losses on the issue. However, the impact of immigration was not the same at every election. The electoral significance of the issue was largest in 1970, then fell back in 1974 and was relatively weaker in 1979. These shifts are not the result of any changes in public sentiment about immigration, as the British public remained consistently hostile to immigration and skewed in favour of restricting it throughout the period. The impact of immigration instead seems to be determined in particular by perceptions of the two main parties’ relative strength on the issue and this, in turn, seems to have been critically influenced by the interventions of Enoch Powell. The Conservatives’ largest electoral gains on immigration came in 1970, when Powell was regularly campaigning as a Conservative and many voters came to believe that his preferred policies of total migration control and state subsidized repatriation were the policies of the Conservative Party. The Conservatives advantage from immigration was weakest in 1974, when Powell’s continuing high-profile campaign for immigration control was directed at a Conservative government. Although Margaret Thatcher also sought to mobilize public concern about immigration, her more measured approach to the issue resulted in a more muted electoral benefit to the Conservatives in 1979, when immigration issues were also not uppermost in voters’ minds. The persistent gap between what the public wanted on immigration and what successive governments were willing or able to deliver opened up opportunities throughout the period for entrepreneurial opposition to mobilize public anti-immigrant hostilities with radical anti-immigration policy proposals. Enoch Powell was not the only political entrepreneur who sought to capitalize on this opportunity but he was by far the most prominent. After his intervention in 1968, Labour’s controversial efforts to restrict immigration after the Kenyan Asians crisis were swiftly forgotten as public and press attention focused on Enoch Powell’s dystopian images of “grinning piccaninnies” pushing excreta through pensioners’ letter boxes and his claims that immigration could easily be stopped and already settled immigrants with little difficulty encouraged to leave the country. This strident rhetoric was very much in tune with public preferences, although the policies Powell recommended were never likely to work in practice. When Powell’s party predictably failed in office to deliver the results he had demanded he turned on it and the public turned with him. The elections of 1974 were so close that, had the Conservatives managed to maintain their strong image on immigration, they would likely have won another majority. This was clearly not lost on Margaret Thatcher, who held out the “clear prospect of an end to immigration” when the Conservatives were once again in opposition, although it is likely she too knew no such end could realistically be delivered.15

Powell and after

29

The statements and actions of Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher on immigration echoed through the political system long after the former had departed from the Conservative Party and the latter from office. A lasting division over migration and race was created, with racial intolerance and opposition to immigration predicting greater support for the Conservatives and lower support for Labour throughout the 1980s’ and 1990s’ Conservative governments. However, ethnic minority voters neither forgot nor forgave the hostility encouraged and exploited by Conservative politicians and voters in this period and have remained strongly aligned with the Labour party ever since Powell’s 1968 (Shaggar 2000; Heath et al. 2013). Long after Enoch Powell departed from public life, his ghost continued to haunt the Conservative Party, shaping perceptions of the party among both the racially intolerant and those who were the targets of their intolerance.

Notes 1 There was much less negative reaction to the substantial influx of Polish immigrants immediately after the Second World War or to the sustained migration of much larger numbers of Irish migrants throughout the post-war period. 2 Enoch Powell was a longstanding critic of this legislation, although when he was Health Minister in the early 1960s he did not oppose the recruitment of Commonwealth medical staff to work in the NHS. 3 A very detailed and authoritative account of this complex controversy can be found in Hansen 2000, 4 Including frequent use of the slogan “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour”, which Griffiths did not use himself but refused to condemn. 5 The Kenyan Asians were exempt from the migration controls of 1962 due to a loophole relating to the unusual way these controls were introduced. They also did not have any Kenyan citizenship to fall back on, as the Kenyan government had forced them to choose between British and Kenyan citizenship when Kenya became independent. The Wilson government’s introduction of migration controls thus rendered many of them stateless. The tangled and tragic story of the Kenyan Asians is discussed at great length in Hansen (2000). 6 A decision 70% of voters considered wrong (Schoen 1977, p. 37). Heath allegedly never spoke to Powell again (Hansen 2000). 7 Note that I am here simply employing the original survey terminology and not endorsing such a description of black and Asian immigration. The fact that “coloured immigration” was routinely employed in social surveys in the 1960s and 1970s but has now ceased to be an acceptable way of describing immigration from South Asia and the Caribbean is an interesting example of how British social norms concerning race have shifted in response to ethnic diversification. 8 Details of these controls are provided in the Appendix. 9 A comparison of these attitudes with actual immigration settlements during the period also reveals no relationship at all between attitudes and previous or current black and Asian immigration levels. 10 There was one notable change in public sentiment following Powell’s departure: support for voluntary and assisted repatriation, Powell’s favoured solution to the immigration problem, dropped considerably between 1974 and 1979 and opposition to a repatriation policy rose even faster.

30

Robert Ford

11 Seventy-seven percent of 1970 BES respondents had heard Powell’s views, 75% correctly identified his position as repatriation of immigrants and 83% of those who had heard Powell’s views declared themselves “glad Enoch spoke”. 12 Full details of the control variables are provided in the Appendix. 13 In 1995 and 2003, reduce immigration. 14 In 1983 and 1989, this is a scale of attitudes about the children of immigrants. In 1995, it is a scale of attitudes to immigrants themselves. 15 Reforms to restrict family reunion migration, by 1979 the main source of black and Asian immigration to Britain, were never proposed by Thatcher or seriously discussed by her colleagues (Hansen 2000, Chap. 10). Although efforts were made to restrict entrance to those believed to by marrying in order to gain entrance to the UK, the impact of these was relatively limited. This “primary purpose” rule was abandoned by Labour in 1997.

References Bartle, J. (1999), “Improving the Measurement of Party Identity in Britain”, British Elections and Parties Review, 9(1), pp. 119–135. Bartle, J. (2001), “The Measurement of Party Identification in Britain: Where Do We Stand Now?”, British Elections and Parties Review, 11(1), pp. 9–22. Bartle, J. (2003), “Measuring Party Identification: An Exploratory Study with Focus Groups”, Electoral Studies, 22(1), pp. 166–173. Butler, D. and King, A. (1966), The British General Election of 1966, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, D. and Stokes, D. (1971), Political Change in Britain (2nd ed.), London: Macmillan. Ford, R. (2008), “Is Racial Prejudice Declining in Britain?”, British Journal of Sociology, 59(4), pp. 609–636. Ford, R. (2011), “Acceptable and Unacceptable Immigrants: How Opposition to Immigration in Britain is Affected by Migrants’ Region of Origin”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(7), pp. 1017–1037. Hansen, R. (2000), Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heath, A.F. (2013), The Political Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. IPSOS-MORI (2018), “Important Issues Facing Britain”, https://www.ipsos.com/ip sos-mori/en-uk/important-issues-facing-britain (accessed 25.10.2018). Kinder, D. and Sanders, L. (1996), Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Layton-Henry, Z. (1984), The Politics of Race in Britain, London: HarperCollins. McLean, I. (2001), Rational Choice and British Politics: An Analysis of Rhetoric and Manipulation from Peel to Blair, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Powell, E. (1968), “Speech to the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre”, transcript, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-ofBlood-speech.html (accessed 25.10.2018). Rose, E. and Associates (1969), Color and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations, London: Oxford University Press/Institute for Race Relations. Schoen, D. (1977), Powell and the Powellites, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaggar, S. (2000, Race and Representation: Electoral Politics and Ethnic Pluralism in Britain, Manchester:Manchester University Press.

Powell and after

31

Solomos, J. (2003), Race and Racism in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Steed, M. (1964), “Appendix: An Analysis of the Results”, in Butler, D. and King, A., The British General Election of 1964, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Studlar, D. (1978), “Policy Voting in Britain: The Colored Immigration Issue in the 1964, 1966 and 1970 General Elections”, American Political Science Review, 72(1), pp. 46–64. Thatcher, M. (1978), “Interview with World in Action”, transcript, https://www.marga retthatcher.org/document/103485 (25. 10. 2018).

Appendix 1

Table A.1 Control variables employed in the 1964–1979 voting regression analysis Variable Gender Age Social class

Region

Religion

Education

Housing

Questions used Dummy for male Control for respondent’s age Dummies for respondent’s household occupational grade Six categories: Professional/higher manager (A) Lower manager/administrative (B) Skilled/supervisory non-manual (C1A) Lower non-manual (C1B) Skilled manual (C2) Unskilled manual (D) Dummies for region respondent lives in: 1964, 1966 and 1970: Scotland; Wales; North; Midlands/East; South West; London and South East 1974 and 1979: Scotland; Wales; North; North West; Yorkshire/Humberside; East Midlands; West Midlands; East Anglia; South West; London; South East Dummies for respondent’s self-identified religious denomination: Church of England/Church of Scotland; Roman Catholic; Nonconformist Dummies for the age respondent left school: Left under 16 years old; left at 16; left at 17 or 18; left after 18 Dummy for renting housing from the local council (dummy for renting privately was tried, but dropped as it was not significant in any models)

Variable Political values

Questions used 1

2

3

Left-right values measured using responses to the following question: Do you think big business has too much power? Libertarian-authoritarian values measured using responses to the following question: Do you think the death penalty should be used for certain crimes? Attitudes to the welfare state are measured using responses to the following question: Should the government spend more on social services?

Table A.2 Dependent and control variables employed in the 1983–2003 partisanship regression analysis Variable Gender Age Social class

Region

Religion

Education

Housing

Questions used Dummy for male Control for respondent’s age Dummies for condensed Goldthorpe-Heath social class Five categories: Salariat Routine non-manual Petty bourgeoisie Manual foremen and supervisors Working class Dummies for government region respondent lives in: Scotland; Wales; North; North West; Yorkshire/ Humberside; East Midlands; West Midlands; East Anglia; South West; London; South East Dummies for respondent’s self-identified religious denomination: Church of England/Church of Scotland; Roman Catholic; Nonconformist Dummy for frequent church attendance (more than once a month) Dummies for educational qualifications: No qualifications; O-level/CSE/GCSE; A-levels; Higher education not degree; Degree Dummies for renting housing from the local council and for renting privately

2

Wrathful rememberers: Harnessing the memory of World War II in letters of support to Powell Olivier Esteves UNIVERSITY OF LILLE

In 1989, at age 77, Enoch Powell was interviewed on the radio show “Desert Island Discs” (BBC Radio 4). Many years after the furore of his Birmingham speech had ebbed, the conservative figure was asked how he wished to be remembered. After giving some trite answer he confided: “I should like to have been killed in the war” (Hirsch 2018, p. 104). As had been his wont, he delighted in projecting an image of self-sacrifice for his fellow countrymen. More tellingly, Powell’s avowal at the dusk of his life is an umpteenth illustration that, to quote Paul Gilroy, there is indeed “something neurotic about Britain’s continued citation of the anti-Nazi war” (Gilroy 2004, p. 97). As an academic hailing from a country – France – where memories of the Second World War are mired in embarrassment and guilt, this dimension appears to me as all the more salient. It is therefore no surprise that British constituents harnessed the memory of the Second World War (and sometimes the First World War) as a moral and political vehicle to vocalize their support of the populist leader back in 1968. In about one-fifth of the 1500 letters investigated for this research, an oft repeated argument is that Britons, thanks to whose bravery Hitler and the Luftwaffe had been repelled, were now, in the late 1960s, unable, unwilling or forbidden to repel a new invasion in the form of large-scale New Commonwealth immigration. By and large, the present research complements, illustrates and specifies rather than actually contradicts prior analyses of the same sources, by Whipple, Schwarz and Schofield (Whipple 2009; Schwarz 2011; Schofield 2013). These private confessions often bemoaning the loss or the wounding of dear ones in the war weave together a public narrative of anger seething with a sense of betrayal, injustice and revanchist nostalgia. It is often a malleable “common-sense”, “a chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions” (Crehan 2016, p. 145) utilizing the war in ways that most often deracialize the racial through demographic, geographical and historical references. This apparently common-sense approach rested on the notion that, to put it bluntly, size matters twice: the size of the immigrant influx was perceived as just too large and the size of the country was perceived as just too small. To quote one letter from Hounslow: “We are just a speck on the atlas” (G). Yet, and as was to be expected, some give free rein to deep-seated prejudices they feel would normally be dismissed as “racialist” in polite public debate. In the words of

Wrathful rememberers

33

Bill Schwarz: “Letter-writing in this mode functioned as a bridge between public and private, giving what were perceived as essentially private worries a public form. Letters gave voice, as putatively private and personal media, to what otherwise was unspeakable in public” (Schwarz 2011, p. 37; see also Whipple 2009, p. 719). One evident reason for the Second World War to have been a pivotal cognitive map is simply that the great bulk of the letters were sent by constituents old enough to have lived through one or frequently two wars. Just how pivotal this cognitive map is is made obvious by the fact that, in some cases, it is impossible to tell whether certain Powell supporters did actually fight in the war. As in Powell’s statement at age 77 quoted above, many letters are unclear on this point. One retired man from Golders Green (North London) writes: “After fighting two wars for our freedom against invasion must we now sit back and allow England to be taken over by coloured forces, and put up with a government that is encouraging them?” (C). Unsurprisingly, too, this cognitive map of the war reaches beyond supporters of Powell. Less than 10% of the mail that the Wolverhampton MP received was critical of his immigrant baiting and, among these letters, war reminiscences were frequently summoned, albeit in an opposite manner. For instance, a man from Nottingham states that: “In 1939 this country went to war against a man who felt that a particular race should be eliminated from his country. I don’t believe you in your more rational moments would deny the right of British citizens, whatever their colour, to live in Britain” (H). Likewise, a Skipton (West Yorkshire) trade unionist complained that: “The ignorant, prejudiced demonstrations inspired by your words, the baiting and scuffles outside the Commons and elsewhere, are reminiscent of incidents during the persecution of the Jews in Berlin in 1935–8” (H). All in all, the letters in support harness the same themes, the same memories, invoke the war as a powerful vector of self-legitimization, but in a wholly different way, construing Britishness as inclusive identities rather than as exclusive, colour-based boundaries, depending on whether the war memorial frames are configured as universalist or instead nationalist, cultural ones (Ritscherle 2005, p. 4–5). As has already been posited in the “populism” section of the introduction, letters of support and Powell’s speeches made up a long-distance conversation of sorts, with letters being sent as offerings that the Tory leader could avidly quote in his next speech (Schofield 2013, p. 25–26). Numerous letters include references such as “do not bother replying, you must receive thousands of such letters” as well as “feel free to use what I just told you”. In this sense, the contact that Powell was establishing with disgruntled constituents from across the country was an asymmetrical ritual of interaction wherein Powell’s messianic extraordinariness is in stark contrast with the assumed (or proclaimed) ordinariness of constituents. A complex intersectionality informs many of these epistolary offerings to Powell: gender references abound (“I lost my husband in the war”) and are interspersed with racial ones (“we did not need coloured immigrants to defend ourselves in the war”), class ones (“it is us the ordinary folks who were

34

Olivier Esteves

expected to bear the burden of the war and now of this new invasion”) as well as cultural ones (“Germans were much less different from us than the Pakistanis”).1 As for the social frames of memory that inform these documents, they are broadly of three types: individual, familial and national. The second one, in classically Halbwachsian fashion (Halbwachs 1992 [1925], p. 54–83), is absolutely central and does confirm the sense of epistolary offerings since family history traditionally belongs to the private rather than the public realm. After a brief study of the way Powell had instrumentalized the memory of the war in his rhetoric against immigration up to and including in his 1968 Birmingham speech, I will try to analyse the way memories of the Second World War promoted a discourse on displacement and disempowerment among those self-styled ordinary voters. Then emphasis will be laid on the sense of “great betrayal” that memories of the war generated among them. The focus will be placed on how among some of those constituents supportive of Powell, the immigrant presence was experienced as a symbolical re-enactment of the war, but in a manner which was different, if not contrary, to the war as “defining the nation’s finest hour” (Gilroy 2002, p. 95). Such deeply controversial reconfigurings of the war confirm, again after foundational work by Halbwachs, the processual nature of collective memory as a continually repeated reproduction of the past in present sociocultural contexts. Lastly in this chapter, I will try to explore the extent to which the war and the pre-1939 period were mobilized in order to nurture a welfare chauvinism common sense.

Memory peddling or Powell’s exploitation of the war At least twice prior to the huge inflow of supporting mail Powell invoked war memories in his effort to rally Britons against coloured immigration. The war was a key theme in his rhetoric, albeit not the central one. It was completely absent, for instance, from his Walsall speech delivered on 9 February 1968, as well as from his Eastbourne speech to the London Rotary Club on 16 November of the same year. The first occasion on which Powell instrumentalized such memories was in his Daily Telegraph piece entitled “Facing Up to Britain’s Race Problem” (16.2.1967), 16 months prior to the Birmingham speech. In it, he depicts the situation of ordinary folks in Wolverhampton who cope astonishingly peacefully with what they see as an invasion of coloured immigrants. Yet, he states: “Acts of an enemy, bombs from the sky, they could understand; but now, for reasons quite inexplicable, they might be driven from their homes and their property deprived of value by an invasion which the Government apparently approved and their fellow-citizens – elsewhere – viewed with complacency.” The second time Powell used those memories was, of course, in the Birmingham speech itself. The harassed lady mentioned in it is described as having “lost her husband and her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-room house, her only asset, into a boarding house”. Importantly, in this laconic reference are interwoven some of the most recurrent themes of

Wrathful rememberers

35

the letters sent immediately in the wake of the speech: the sense of being betrayed by the State that protects immigrants but does not help deserving Britons who have bravely defended the country, the sense of being displaced and outnumbered, the sense of having one home’s potentially invaded by unwanted Others soon to be protected by the law of the land.

Displacement and disempowerment Powell and Churchill Numerous constituents hail Powell as the only mentally sane politician, thus echoing his Birmingham utterance, i.e. “we must be mad, literally mad”. All other statesmen, according to these constituents, either turn a blind eye to what they regard as a national scourge or, treacherously, abet it in order to secure for themselves a political place in the sun. Implicit or explicit references to war, appeasement and invasion abound and in them Powell is turned into a new Churchill, the one man able to address (or at least echo) these constituents’ sense of displacement and disempowerment. For instance, Powell is regarded as a lone voice telling truth to power: “Like Churchill in the 1930s, you will just have to go pegging away against the stream” (G), writes a man from Cheshire. Another man also from Cheshire states: “Remember Winston Churchill, who was a ‘lone voice crying in the wilderness’ for so long – I have no doubt that eventually you will be proved right, as he was” (A). Powell is time and again presented as a political reincarnation of the hero of the war, be it in terms of bravery and love of country (“like Churchill in the pre-1939 era, you stand alone […] as the one politician with sufficient courage and patriotism”, G), visionary power (“we might one day need Powell just as much as the country needed Mr Churchill’s far-seeing powers”, G), oratory skills (“this is the speech we have all been waiting for […] it is the best since Winston Churchill’s on the ‘Battle of Britain’”, G), or almost God-ordered mission to save Britain (“Churchill once saved this country, may I suggest that you could well do the same”, G). Like other political prophets, Powell’s voice will probably go unheeded, a pessimistic scenario well in tune with populist critiques of the elites’ out-of-touchness. A constituent from Cornwall regrets that a “warning like this has been long overdue, but I am afraid it will be disregarded, as Winston Churchill was when he spoke of the Nazi menace” (B). The ghost of Churchill is so often summoned that sometimes the name “Churchill” itself needn’t be mentioned. “I can remember one or two voices crying in the wilderness in 1933–45 about the German menace. They were denounced as war-mongers as you are now being denounced as inciting racial warfare. Events proved them right as they will surely prove you right if we do not act urgently now” (G), writes a man from Surrey. Another man from Torquay (Devon) states that “This is a time when a man makes his mark in history by forgetting politics and politicians – a time when, as at Dunkirk, only the truth rings true” (B).

36

Olivier Esteves

The Powell–Churchill parallel was given credence by glossing over – or being unaware of – the self-evident fact that the so-called “dark million” lived in a country with a population approximating 55 million in the late 1960s. This did not register, however, either with the working and middle classes living in multiracial neighbourhoods of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds or with Cornwall, Surrey and Devon folks who lived many miles away from any coloured immigrant clustering but felt, nevertheless, that the imagined community of Britain was threatened by the alien presence. Therefore, and this point bears repeating, the “invasion common sense” was like Gospel truth to these supporters. One woman from Coventry wrote that “we are obviously becoming a large ‘resistance’ movement in ‘our’ own country” (G). A retired man from London bitterly quipped: “Together with millions of Britishers in 1939 I was fighting to prevent England being invaded – but what the hell do they call this now, tourism?” (B). Stealth The theme of invasion is all pervading, in letters that frequently point out the insidiousness of the perceived menace as opposed to the evidence of the Nazi aggression embodied by the deafening sound of bombings. In this respect, these perceptions are evocative of well-oiled anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic discourses, with themes such as “peaceful penetration”, “domination by stealth”, etc. (Gallagher 1987, p. 138–139; Kushner, 1989). One woman, an old-age pensioner from London, regrets that “the ‘socialists’ have allowed this country to be invaded, a thing we fought the Germans twice, to keep out the enemy” but “now they are infiltrated” (A). A man from Dagenham (Essex) writes: “After all if we were at war we would repel any invaders, but because we are at peace we are prepared to let peaceful invaders enter” (C). Another Londoner draws an analogy with the fall of Rome. Like Rome, Britain is “being colonized by her colonies” according to him: “It is heart-breaking to see the country we fought for being handed over to an unarmed one”. Such comments are often interspersed with scathing accusations of felony in high places as well as with narratives of decadence and national suicide. A woman from Farnham (Surrey) admits to being “saddened at the prospect of our country, which has survived two devastating wars, being dominated by an alien race and culture within a few generations. This is inevitable as they reproduce at a fantastic rate” (B). Another man from Surrey (New Malden) writes that “after all, we fought two wars to prevent being over-run by other nationals, and, as you say, it is national suicide to allow this invasion to continue” (C). A cultural menace Whether retired or not, numerous constituents were aware that many of their fellow country people would balk at filling the gaps in the job market that were filled by immigrants. This is why the cultural and civilizational menace

Wrathful rememberers

37

allegedly embodied by immigrants is a recurrent theme while the threat for British jobs is much more rarely described. That perception is in sync with much more recent research on far-right discourses and perceptions, for instance within UKIP (Goodwin & Milazzo 2015, p. 308–309). A woman from Waltham Forest bitterly notes that: “My first husband was killed in the last war fighting for freedom against invasion of the Germans but now we are up against a bigger invasion – the coloured population which is overflowing our shores and changing our ways of life” (D). A man from Cricklewood (Northwest London) believes that “many of us fought during the war in various parts of the world to preserve our country and our way of life!” (E). One apparently uneducated, retired woman from East Ham, expresses ethnocentrism most bluntly, taking pride in the fact that Britons “believe in one God, not like the Puckistan [sic.]” (C). The following are among the strongly prejudiced or overtly racist statements, which were here expressed unabashedly to Powell: “British boys died fighting to make England a land fit for filthy niggers to defile and pollute.” (Man, London) (C) “It may be interesting to know that one of the reasons that Hitler hated the Jews was because he accused them of allowing coloured people into Germany to bastardize the race; and the way things are going here, that is exactly what is happening. I think it is criminal.” (Man, Cardiff) (A) “Hitler solved his racial problems with greater economy and efficiency.” (Woman, Croydon) (G) White exile The displacement and disempowerment motif finds a logical outcome in what is believed to be large-scale emigration to predominantly white parts of the former Empire, i.e. Canada, but mostly Australia and New Zealand. The sense of displacement is expressed in the choice word itself, for “expatriation” or “expat(triate)” are never used in letters, only “emigration”, “emigrant”, “immigrant”. “Expat(triate)” being used for white immigrants from powerful countries and “immigrants” for often less white folks from less rich countries (Koutonin 2015), this word choice illuminates a perceived racial inversion whereby the “black man” indeed does seem to have the whip hand over the “white man”. It also echoes this disgruntled constituent’s confession to Powell in the Birmingham speech: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” One grandfather from Camden says: “It is dreadful to think that having fought two wars in my lifetime to preserve our way of life, to see it handed over to an alien race” and that he is personally acquainted with four families who are leaving to go to Australia (B). A Labour Party stalwart from Portsmouth says that his whole family served in the army through several wars, “but, I also say to any youngster, leave this country, with God as my witness” (B). Absence of individual or familial agency is perceived in two

38

Olivier Esteves

complementary ways: constituents do not choose to stay in their neighbourhoods, they have to and feel trapped in them and if they leave the country they do not choose to either: this immigration is no expatriation indeed but rather a form of exile in its classically tragic sense. The perceived emigration process exposes as empty lies slogans such as “from the cradle to the grave” as a foundational motto to the British welfare state or “most of our people have never had it so good” in Macmillan’s speech about post-war prosperity (Bedford 1957).

Turning in their graves The sense of having been betrayed by the Wilsonian elite that introduced the Race Relations Bill at Parliament pervades the letters to an astonishing degree. The more solid the war credentials are considered to be, the more seething the indignation against elites appears. Quite often, these credentials are presented as so many badges of merit at the very beginning of letters. They are individual ones or embrace whole families, which, in turn, only aggravates the sense of betrayal, especially if relatives died in the war. Examples of such legitimizations of moral credibility abound. They are sometimes couched in nationalistic terms, such as here with this man from Derby: “At just turned eighteen years of age I was awarded the Mons Medal for what I naturally thought was defending my homeland against the foreigner” (C) or this other man from Stoke-on-Trent: “I joined the forces not to save the Poles, the Jews, the Czecks or any other race, but to help in saving my country and my family, and then I stayed in the army for 19 years always glad to give my best endeavours to the land I love most of all” (B). This woman from Stockport also vindicates the massive war sacrifice for national, rather than universalist, ends: “Our loved ones didn’t die in two wars to make England free for coloured people – they died for us, it’s enough to make them turn in their graves!” (D). Such nativist readings of the war one generation after the armistice are at loggerheads with the way, during the conflict, British racial tolerance was advertised at home and abroad as the universalist antithesis of Nazi Germany (Rose 2003, p. 245–259). In many cases, exposure of the Race Relations Bill is never far from such self-presentations, as in this constituent from Essex: “I spent a long time with the RAF during the war, under the impresion [sic] that I was fighting for freedom. Who’s [sic] freedom? I fail to see any left in this dead country of mine when I am told who I must not refuse to sell my own house to” (C). Narratives of personal sacrifice to the nation frequently include stories of years of hard work, as with this retired man from Wrexham (North Wales): “I started work down the coal-mine at the age of 14, continued at that class of work until the age of 65, to receive OAP with the exception of my service in the Royal Navy in the 1914 war” (B). Likewise, individual merit may extend to some who are not British: “I speak as an Irishman who served eighteen years with the British army, including the six years of the last war and my father before me served for twenty two years” (E). As is the case here and in

Wrathful rememberers

39

so many other cases, merit and moral credibility are almost construed as quantifiable givens that are accumulated within a family unit and are only exacerbated by the number of dead dear ones during the war: “On the day that Chamberlain declared war I was up at the recruiting offices of the RAF within two hours. I feel therefore, that I, my two brothers (and in other wars going back as far as the Boer War) the male members of my family have done their share only to be told virtually by Callaghan and Co. ‘you must be prepared to take second place to ‘British Citizens’” (D). Or, in more laconic terms: “My brother like millions of others gave his life to this country, God only knows what he could think today” (G). According to these constituents, this great betrayal can only have occurred because the large bulk of Britons are thoroughly naive or “literally mad” (to quote Powell), because the elites are treacherous and/or “literally mad”, too, and because the immigrants are hell bent on exploiting the generosity of British welfare. In many cases, frustration and indignation against this perceived unfairness to whites are expressed in terms of abuse, against the elites and/or against immigrants. One man from Worthing (West Sussex) laments: “To think that I spent 4 years in France so that super educated subintelligent nit-wits could live safely to tell me years later with whom I am to live and how!” (G) and another man from Worcestershire (who lived in Birmingham for 50 years) writes: “25 years ago many of us were fighting to ensure the freedom of our country for our heirs, but the forthcoming Bill will reduce us to nothing more than puppets to be operated by the ever-increasing number of ‘smart Alec’ immigrants encouraged by and protected by the proposed Act” (G). A woman from Essex declares: “How unjust it is to expect we English, after giving our substance in war, to save our beloved country, should now be expected (or rather forced) to bow the knee in all things to a host of scroungers” (C). In numerous epistolary testimonies, the individual is interspersed with the familial and the national, where, typically, “English” is confused with “British”. Some eloquent illustrations of this interconnection include references to war cemeteries or memorials, wherein private mourning is solemnly reflected on public sites of memory that, in these people’s perceptions, are symbolically defiled both by Wilson “and some of his cronies” (B), as well as by the coloured immigrants who have been let in by the “weak politicians who have not got the guts to back up our sacrifice” (B). One man from Gloucester writes: “Every time I pass a war memorial in a village or town I think that the men whose names are inscribed fought and died to protect something which is now being given away by a minority” (G). Another man, from Liverpool, described his cycling in the Yorkshire countryside and his being moved by forests of soldier crosses in war cemeteries: “My heart seemed to swell with pain at the thought of those sleeping dead and the sorrows of their womenfolk. They were ploughmen and other simple craftsmen. They had died that I might live. This should be a land with room for the sons of those heroes to live” (G). It therefore comes as no surprise that to many of those constituents

40

Olivier Esteves

supportive of Powell, the influx of coloured immigrants brought about a symbolical re-enactment of the war challenging hitherto shared memories of a glorious “People’s war” (Schofield 2013, p. 210).

What “finest hour”? In what was a largely shared feeling, a woman from Cambridge argued that “all the losses in the two world wars were in vain” (G). Another man, from Hainault (Essex), more bluntly claims that: “When I was in the war one of the things I fought for was the write [sic] to tell a bloke I did not like him, and to be able to sell my house to who I liked” (A). An elderly lady from Northampton, whose husband was mutilated in the war, avows that “it makes one feel –what an appalling waste – we won the war but not the peace” (A). Another commonly shared perception was that it may have been preferable for the Germans to have won the war, either because German civilization is white, Christian, European or because the 1945 victory was doubly pyrrhic: the human cost was frightening and in these Powell supporters’ eyes the military victory only paved the way for large-scale immigration. Below is a compilation of such declarations: “How many of our young lads would have gone off to fight so bravely if they could have foreseen the future? Very, very few I imagine.” (G) “As a police officer at Notting Hill in London during the war, the raids and the bombs, I shuddered at the prospects of being invaded by the Germans. Now, on second thoughts, I am not so sure. I think it would have been better for us to have been invaded by the Germans!” (G) “We would have been better off if we had accepted Germany instead of throwing our youth away to reject them. My family has been decimated over the centuries and the last two world wars, fighting to keep separate and independent and for ‘King & Country’ uselessly if the Race Bill and the Immigration Act is successful without going to a plebiscite of Income Tax paying voters.” (D) “I would rather have surrendered to the Germans than lose my freedom to the immigrants.” (F) “I would rather have as neighbours some of the Germans who I fought against than almost any of those coloureds!” (F) “I would go as far as to say that the people of this country would have been given far more consideration under German rulers. I often wonder who won the last great war, when I think about the state of this country today.” (A) “I feel I would prefer to have lost the last war now than be faced with the future which intellectual do-gooders have in store for us.” (D) From what is perceived as an unquestionable given – the New Commonwealth influx as an invasion and the Race Relations Bill as a reverse type of

Wrathful rememberers

41

discrimination, which taken together signal a demographic and political takeover of the non-whites – various conclusions are ventured that are always presented as highly subjective and personal judgments, hence the recurrence of the first person (“I think”, “I would rather” etc.). The tentativeness of such apparently common-sense perorations (“I am not so sure”, “I feel”, “I often wonder”) is mostly owing to the fact that Nazis are not any more presented as the real historical enemy of the country, even by those who had relatives killed by the Germans. This tentativeness is also explained by the way selfstyled patriots are here compelled to question traditional frames of reference in British/English national sentiment, through what can only be described as a nativist and populist form of revisionism challenging the nation’s “finest hour”. There is something profoundly disturbing and ironic in the fact that these respectable, ordinary constituents should, in their private confessions to Powell, express views that, in the decades that follow, would be associated with the National Front, the British Movement, Blood & Honour and Combat 18 (Pollard & Feldman 2016, p. 330). That perception is also profoundly tragic: these constituents, believing that immigrants have stolen the land (the invasion common sense), the laws and British freedom (as epitomized by the Race Relations Bill), are led to believe that immigrants have symbolically deprived them of the most glorious episode in their recent history. In some way too, these people also feel that they have even been stolen their nostalgia of pre-multiracial Britain. Left with nothing to be proud of as Britons, these constituents are also forced into a national realization of symbolical emasculation: as a woman from Reading puts it: “This is the first time in British history that British people have behaved like jelly and allowed an invasion to take place” (B), which itself is a tragic sign of national decline, another theme that runs through the letters (Whipple 2009, p. 720). This stultification of virility among a people with erstwhile Churchillian qualities of bravery complements Powell’s exposure of the “literally mad” character of the British, who as a nation are compelled to come to terms with their debility in body and brain. Such gutlessness, also actively fuelled in those folks’ perception by the undeserved entitlements of the British welfare state, starkly contrasts with the State’s bureaucratic force in carrying out its anti-discrimination schemes, through descriptions that also borrow extensively from war imagery. One woman from Bristol refers to the poison of the 1968 legislation, before warning: “We have to be careful, of course, or the Race Gestapo will get us” (G). Another woman, from South London, vilifies what she sees as the “Gestapo methods” of Mr Callaghan in carrying out his asinine anti-discrimination schemes. These are only inflated versions of the far-right critique of the “race-relations industry”, which had already become routine in the late 1960s (Esteves 2018, p. 123). They also illuminate the deep suspicion of public agents and of “the State” among those constituents, much of whose adulthood had been spent before the emergence of the post-1945 welfare state.

42

Olivier Esteves

Welfare chauvinism Although it has been challenged by some scholars (Banting & Kymlicka 2006), there is a widely shared, uncontroversial sense that public trust in welfare redistribution tends to rest on a broad assumption of likeness: the stronger the sense of imagined community within a nation, the more likely taxpayers will be to acquiesce to tax schemes funding schools, hospitals, unemployment benefits, etc. After all, the great state builders at the root of welfare provision (T.H. Marshall, William Beveridge, Gunnar Myrdal in Sweden) hardly believed otherwise (Wolfe & Klausen 1997, p. 240). It therefore should come as no surprise that welfare chauvinism was a powerful driver of epistolary support to Enoch Powell. Hardly substantiated as historical facts because the overwhelming majority of immigrants were in Britain to work, Welfare chauvinist perceptions, like others, were internalized as unquestionable givens when Powellites put pen to paper in the spring of 1968.2 These were often vocalized in blunt terms, such as here with this man from Havering (East London): “As an ex-serviceman from the last war I object to providing from my taxes a utopia for these people” (G). “These people” as alleged welfare recipients are often singled out for their absolute Otherness. For instance, one woman from Winchester inveighed against Pakistanis who were “invited” to Britain in order “to do things we feel are wrong – such as having several wives – and even utterly beastly things, such as the cruel ritual killing of food animals”. According to her, these foreigners were “not merely stealing our birthright, and that of our children, but being handed it on a plate!” (D). Here again, the theme of elite betrayal is woven into gritty expressions of welfare chauvinism, as is also the case in the following question: “Was it all a land fit for heroes to live in and their descendants, or to make it a Black paradise?” (G). Very often, it is assumed that what drew immigrants to Britain in the first place was not the prospect of jobs, which is quite rarely mentioned, but rather the possibility to sponge off welfare help. Again, such deprecatory gossips, which were circulating even in white-only villages of Surrey, Devon, Somerset were raised into undeniable givens with the force of truth. The main reason why this is so is because stereotypes thoroughly identifying racialized Others with “idleness” have been so deeply rooted. These may be fuelled from contemporary media narratives about the (black) “underclass” in the USA, Britain and South Africa (Goldberg 2009, p. 238) or from more historical stereotypes harking back to colonial times themselves. As McClintock puts it: “Of all the stigmata of degeneration invented by the settlers to mark themselves from the Africans, the most tirelessly invoked was idleness” (McClintock 2009, p. 364). The war itself is sometimes summoned into the nativist rants dismissing immigrants as a bunch of undeserving scroungers. Rather than wonder about the contribution to the welfare state made by New Commonwealth immigrants (Simpson 2018), some constituents expel these further away from mental constructions of the deserving imagined community by denying their

Wrathful rememberers

43

very role in the war effort itself. One woman claims: “We managed during the war years in hospitals and factories without coloured people” (G), which perfectly fits with totalizing narratives around the Second World War that, aided during and after the conflict by media representations, efficiently produced a consensual, cohesive memory of the war that excluded all more or less marginal groups from representations of the war (Calder 1991, p. 658–689). Whitewashed memories of Dunkirk, the Blitz and the Battle of England expelled non-white colonial solders from the imagined community of Britain at its celebrated “finest hour”, thereby denying post-1945 immigrants of any legitimacy to welfare help, that is, supposing these immigrants did claim some of these benefits at all. The necessity to obliterate colonial contributions to the war effort allowed these Powellites to deprive these immigrants of their British citizenship by ignoring their very highest duty as citizens: that of being ready to sacrifice their lives and to kill unknown others for the so-called “Mother country” (Yuval-Davis 2006, p. 208). It is important to underline the sheer strategic and symbolical power of that amnesia. Welfare chauvinism is boosted in some of the letters not only by the above-mentioned cultural Otherness of immigrants, by racially myopic visions of “White Dunkirk”, but also by personal recollections of having endured tough times when the welfare state itself was inchoate. This, too, is a form of revanchist nostalgia, taking the broad form of “why would they be helped whereas I was never helped once?”. One woman from Hounslow (West London) argues: “In the last 2 world wars, we were supposed to be fighting for a better world!! Some hoped! I sometimes think we could achieve a lot if only the so-called welfare state, family allowances, social security etc. … were all abolished, and people paid their own insurances against these things” (G). An ex-service man living in Kent feels he is watching his “country being turned into a human cesspit” and says he never claimed any benefit in his life before adding: “My generation has lived through two world wars, brought up our families during the depression on starvation wages, and are now being pauperized in our old age to give aid to every denigrator of Britain and finance their crazy schemes.” Such feelings cohere with contemporary fieldwork, particularly Jeremy Seabrook’s 1969 exploration of “White Backlash” in Blackburn (Seabrook 1971). It also chimes with analogous narratives in the United States, where race and generation boundaries coalesce into countless individual and family stories of “pulling oneself by the bootstraps” that descendants of Irish, Italians, Poles and Slavs hurl at African-Americans dismissed as undeserving freeloaders (Katznelson 2005; Jacobson 2008, pp. 177–205). In some letters to Powell, such rhetoric goes beyond welfare chauvinism to question the very existence of welfare help itself, one effect of which is, it is claimed, to produce a nation of gutless whiners. In this sense, then, the introduction of welfare schemes is construed as a major facet of British national decline, yet another controversial perception.

44

Olivier Esteves

Conclusion: emotions in distateful movements As has been made evident in these pages, epistolary illustrations of “White Backlash” and their connection to the war are systematically interspersed with strong, sometimes contrasted emotions of anger against perceived injustice, of fear, of shame. These, following what might be termed the rehabilitation of the “emotional” in the analysis of social movements (Pilkington 2016, p. 178), need to be studied sociologically, not just as autonomous psychological phenomena (Jasper, Goodwin & Polletta 2001, p. 47). One of the stumbling blocks here is that, as Jasper, Goodwin and Polletta put it: “It is hard to identify emotions from brief newspaper accounts of protest events. Historical research precludes the participant observation that may be the best means for identifying the emotions of protest” (Ibid., p. 5). If the many thousands of epistolary offerings to Powell allow for longer unburdening of emotions than mere letters to the editor, it does remain that “White Backlash” ethnographies by Gest, Lamont, Ezekiel, etc. are in themselves better suited to the analysis of the role of emotions in social movement and contentious politics than archival material which, however abundant, has been stacked in dusty boxes for decades. These structural differences notwithstanding, the study of emotions in “distateful movements” faces some common hurdles, one of which needs detain us here. “Distateful” is understood as meaning “individuals and groups with whom the researcher shares neither political orientation nor way of life and whose politics and/or way of life are found objectionable” (Esseveld & Eyerman 1992, p. 217). In her seminal ethnography on the English Defence League, Pilkington refers to the way research into the lived realities of farright activists is often explicitly or implicitly discouraged in academia. Against the deterring effects of what she calls a scholarly “cordon sanitaire”, she states that “uncomfortable views, and those who express them, have to be treated seriously, academically and politically, rather than dismissed, caricatured or ridiculed […]. Some will consider this too high a price to pay” (Pilkington 2016, p. 1). The contagion by stigma for those carrying out research into the categories of voters who hold views and ideologies repugnant to most academics also means that some of the researchers into far-right or nativist movements have often combined such research with studies of stigmatized ethnic minorities and immigrants, as though they deemed this necessary in order to pre-empt any accusation of “racism”. This has been the case in the academic trajectories of Gest, Ezekiel, Pilkington for instance. Although letters of support to Powell were sent half a century ago, the political afterlives of Powellism, the effects of which were daunting in the run-up to the Brexit vote, mean that research into the way Powell supporters voice their loathing of anti-discrimination legislations, their fear of immigrant influxes and their shame at feeling that the identity of their nation as they see it is being diluted proves controversial business too. It is worth quoting Schofield’s methodological advice: “Both efforts, to humanize and dehumanize Powell, fail as history” (Schofield 2013, p. 10). This advice ought to be extended to any research

Wrathful rememberers

45

into Powell supporters, their responses, their fears, their anger, their sense of injustice. For both indeed a robustly interpretivist approach is warranted, an approach “which seeks to know the social world through understanding the meanings actors ascribe to it” (Pilkington 2016, p. 4). This is probably the only way out of a political, moral, epistemological catch-22, wherein academics are either called on to stigmatize stigmatization or to express a degree of empathy towards a silent majority vociferating how marginalized it is.

Notes 1 These are not verbatim quotes from actual letters but ideal-typical summaries of letters studied that refer to the war(s). 2 I personally agree with sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad’s analysis of immigration and work as being intrinsically inseparable (Sayad 2004).

References Primary sources Stafford Record Office, Powell papers, Letters in support, bundles D 3123/10 (noted as A in the text) ; D 3123/11 (noted as B) ; D 3123/12 (noted as C) ; D 3123/13 (noted as D) ; D 3123/14 (noted as E) ; D 3123/15 (noted as F) ; D 3123/167 (noted as G). Stafford Record Office, Powell papers, Letters against, bundle D 3123/110 (noted as H).

Secondary sources Banting, K. and Kymlicka, W. (eds.) (2006), Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Calder, A. (1991), The Myth of the Blitz, London: Jonathan Cape. Crehan, K. (2016), Gramsci’s Common Sense, Inequality and Its Narratives, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Elton, G. (Lord) (1965), The Unarmed Invasion, A Survey of Afro-Asian Immigration, London: Collins. Esseveld, J. and Eyerman, R. (1992), “‘Which Side Are You On?’ Reflections on Methodological Issues in the Study of ‘Distateful’ Social Movements”, in Diani, M. and Eyerman, R. (eds.), Studying Collective Action, London: Sage. Esteves, O. (2018), The “Desegregation” of English Schools: Bussing, Race and Urban Space, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ezekiel, R.S. (1995), The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen, New York: Penguin. Gallagher, T. (1987), Glasgow: The Uneasy Peace, Religious Tension in Modern Scotland, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gilroy, P. (2004), After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Abingdon: Routledge. Goldberg, D.T. (2009), “Racial Knowledge”, in Black, L. and Solomos, J. (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (2nd ed.), London: Routledge. Goodwin, M. and Milazzo, C. (2015), UKIP, Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

46

Olivier Esteves

Halbwachs, M. (1992 [1925]), On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, S. (2018), In The Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jacobson, M.F. (2008), Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post Civil-Rights America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jasper, J.M., Goodwin, J. and Polletta, F. (2001), Passion Politics: Emotions and Social Movements: Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Katznelson, I. (2005), When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in 20th century America, New York: Norton. Koutonin, M.R. (2015) “Why Are White People Expats when the Rest of Us Are Immigrants”, The Guardian, 13 March. Kushner, T. (1989), The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McClintock, A. (2009), “The White Family of Man”, in Black, L. and Solomos, J. (eds.), Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (2nd ed.), London: Routledge. Pilkington, H. (2016), Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pollard, J. and Feldman, M. (2016), “The Ideologues and Ideologies of the Radical Right: An Introduction”, Patterns of Prejudice, 50 (4–5), pp. 327–336. Ritscherle, A. (2005), “Opting Out of Utopia: Race and Working-Class Political Culture in Britain during the Age of Decolonization, 1948–68”, University of Michigan, PhD dissertation. Rose, S. (2003), Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sayad, A. (2004), The Suffering of the Immigrant, Cambridge: Polity Press. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Schwarz, B. (2011), The White Man’s World: Memories of Empire (Vol. 1), New York and London: Oxford University Press. Seabrook, J. (1971), City Close-Up, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Simpson, J. (2018), Migrant Architects of the NHS, South Asian Doctors and the Reinvention of British General Practice (1940s–1980s), Manchester: Manchester University Press. Whipple, A. (2009), “Revisiting the ‘Rivers of Blood’ Controversy: Letters to Enoch Powell”, Journal of British Studies, 48(3), pp. 717–735. Wolfe, Alan W. and Klausen, J. (1997), “Identity Politics and the Welfare State”, Social Philosophy and Policy, 14(2), pp. 231–255. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006), “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging”, Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), pp. 197–214.

3

Powell and the media: an insider’s account Nicholas Jones JOURNALIST

When Enoch Powell delivered what journalists subsequently headlined his “Rivers of Blood” speech in April 1968, I was a young press reporter, starting out on a career that would take in 30 years as a BBC political and industrial correspondent. Like other aspiring journalists of my generation, I was already beginning to face questions about the racist nature of some of the language we were using in news reporting, a challenge that propelled my father, then editor of Wolverhampton’s local evening newspaper, to the forefront of the fallout from Powell’s inflammatory intervention. In offering a personal insight into the events 50 years ago, I look back on my family’s links with the MP; reflect on the private advice about media tactics that my father gave Powell ahead of the infamous speech; and assess how my own journalism, and that of the news media at large, has been influenced by the furore that followed. To a large degree, many of my comments are congruent with Brett Bebber’s analysis, in his chapter, of the way the Runnymede Trust invited journalists to generate a debate about race-based news events among the British mainstream media. Enoch Powell’s Birmingham speech became a constant thread during a lifetime in journalism. My father was the local editor who stood out against the great upsurge in popular support for Powell on the MP’s home patch. The fallout from my parents’ shattered friendship with Enoch and his wife Pam would resurface quite often in my own career and in later years had a profound influence on my own attempts to explore the way politicians have exploited fears over immigration. My initial motive in revealing the help and guidance that my father gave Powell was to explore the lengths to which politicians will go in their attempts to manipulate the news media for political gain. Although I did not realize this at the time of writing, my account of the friendship between a newspaper editor and an ambitious politician would gain a far wider significance. Rather than Powell having been taken by surprise by the notoriety that his speech would acquire, this was precisely what the MP had planned. By retelling my parents’ account of the events that preceded what they judged was Powell’s coolly calculated act, I have offered a chronology that some might consider constitutes a direct rebuttal to the assertions of Powell’s

48

Nicholas Jones

supporters and apologists who have argued that he had no prior inkling of the outcry and racial tension that his remarks would provoke. A close relationship between a prominent politician and a favoured journalist is not uncommon but given the impact that Powell has had on British race relations, the basis of my parents’ friendship needed to be explained. As I was to discover, my narrative caught the attention of commentators, playwrights and novelists in their struggle to understand the Powell enigma. In the years leading up to the 50th anniversary of the speech, at a time when immigration was again high on the news agenda, I found I could offer an insight into Powell’s motives and behaviour. There were some difficult questions for me to answer about my father’s role in guiding a leading politician as to how best to secure favourable publicity. For those seeking inspiration on ways to dramatize the personal story behind the build-up and fallout to the speech, I could, together with my wife, provide first-hand observations about Powell as a husband and father and an appreciation of what had been such a happy social relationship between two families all those years ago.

A family friendship put to the test by migratory dynamics Perhaps my starting point should be the 1967 spring conference at Stratfordupon-Avon of the Guild of British Newspaper Editors. My father, Clement Jones, editor of the Wolverhampton Express and Star since 1960, had been elected the guild’s president the previous year. One of my father’s first tasks on assuming the leadership of the guild was to ask his fellow editors how they should respond to the mounting criticism of press treatment of racial conflict, a portent perhaps of the events that would unfold the following year. I had been invited to attend the social events that weekend together with my wife. The guest speaker was Powell, first elected Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West in 1955, whose constituency home was a few streets away from the one in which we lived. My mother, Marjorie, was especially fond of Pam and the two families regularly spent time together at weekends when the MP was in his constituency. Powell, a former Minister of Health, had been appointed to Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet after the Conservatives’ defeat in 1964. He had gained considerable prominence for the strength of his free market beliefs and he was still pursuing his ambition to become Conservative leader, despite having finished a lowly third in the party’s 1965 leadership contest. In a press survey before the 1964 general election he identified immigration as the “biggest local issue” in his constituency and in subsequent speeches and newspaper articles he called for tighter controls on the number of immigrants and their dependants entering the country from the British Commonwealth. At the time this was treated by the press as largely a national argument rather than being of particular interest to local newspapers – an outcome that was about to change.

Powell and the media

49

As a schoolboy growing up in Wolverhampton during the 1950s I had seen the impact of the arrival of a large influx of immigrants, mainly West Indians and Kenyan Asians. I have vivid memories of seeing men, carrying suitcases, wearing flared trousers and wide-brimmed hats, walking out of Wolverhampton railway station, presumably after arriving at Liverpool or Tilbury on ships from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and other Caribbean islands. As a family, we often spoke about how these new arrivals were finding their way around the town, getting jobs, arranging somewhere to live, settling in and even joining the queues at Wolverhampton’s bustling fruit and vegetable market. We remarked on how Asians had started to take over local newsagents and other small shops. My father, who joined the Express and Star as a district reporter in 1943, had seen the transformation from the start. As the metal-bashing industries of the West Midlands – known as the Black Country because of all the smoke from factory chimneys – expanded rapidly in the post-war years, additional labour was needed in foundries and workshops and there were plenty of jobs available. By the early 1960s, the challenges that Wolverhampton faced in absorbing these new arrivals and their families had risen up the news agenda because of the impact on local authorities across the West Midlands. Much of the Express and Star’s coverage focused on the pressure being placed on services such as maternity hospitals and primary schools and widening unease about the changing nature of some neighbourhoods. My father had become concerned about increasing fears of racial tension in the town and he and my mother, who served as a justice of the peace at Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court, had no wish to see Wolverhampton witness the disturbances seen in other major cities. For some years social researchers had been challenging national and local newspapers over their reporting of skirmishes between young black and white youths. Once the spectacle of youth violence around the Notting Hill tube station and back streets of North Kensington started attracting wider attention in 1958, teenage hooliganism and lawlessness was increasingly identified in media coverage as being a racial problem. Youth violence had always been a major news item, but the added dimension of colour had whetted the appetite of newsrooms across the country. Journalists were on the alert, ready to report any repetition in their locality of what news media had determined were the “race riots of Notting Hill” (Jones 1982, p. 7). When I reflect on my own reporting in the early and mid-1960s for local evening newspapers, for The News (Portsmouth) and the Oxford Mail, I remember how we needlessly worked in references to colour. As opposed to Wolverhampton, neither city had a large immigrant population, but Portsmouth, through its links with the Navy and the docks at Southampton, was home to a wide cross-section of families from Caribbean and Commonwealth countries and Oxford had a vibrant Asian community. In our reports about disturbances or other petty offences, we would indicate if any of those involved were black or from a particular ethnic group, even if this bore no relation to what had happened and when identification on racial grounds was not an issue. I realize now that we were gratuitously stereotyping people of colour.

50

Nicholas Jones

For my father, as editor of an evening paper with one of the largest circulations in the provinces, there was a growing awareness of the damage such reportage might do to harmonious race relations. My father’s concern was that police reports of incidents and magistrates’ court cases that would not have been considered newsworthy but merely routine had they involved only indigenous whites were being given considerable prominence, with headlines and other references clearly informing the reader that blacks were involved (Ibid., p. 8). These wider editorial issues would soon take second place once Enoch Powell delivered two speeches early in 1968 that would challenge the credibility and authority of newspaper editors in the West Midlands and test the perseverance of their journalists. On visits home I had already begun to detect signs of a slight uneasiness in the Powell–Jones friendship. I could tell that my father was becoming increasingly troubled by the pitfalls faced by a local newspaper editor when deciding how to present stories about the demands that Wolverhampton’s immigrant population were imposing on local services and the frequency with which complaints about this pressure was being touched on in letters to the editor. When the Powells were at our home or we had met up for a picnic, I noticed that, in their conversations, my father and mother tended to skirt round local controversies preferring to talk about national politics, rather than matters directly affecting Wolverhampton or Powell’s constituency. My parents’ discomfort was partly explained by the changing nature of the neighbourhood we shared. Our two families had homes in streets on either side of two of the main thoroughfares into Wolverhampton. Unlike our house, which was part of a newer post-war development, the Powells lived in a road of larger Victorian and Edwardian properties, many of which were being divided up into rooms, then sublet to West Indians and Kenyan Asians. My parents had mentioned to me that they knew the Powells feared that the value of their house, in what had once been “a very respectable road”, had gone down in value. Years later, in her only full-length interview, Pam described in the book, Enoch at 100, how the area around their semidetached, five-bedroom home had become “totally, totally different” because of immigration. They finally sold the house in 1975 for £1300, precisely the same amount that they had paid to purchase it in 1954 (Howard of Rising 2014, p. 305). A starkly different fate on the real estate market would befall their house in South Eaton Place (London), as Esteves points out in the introduction to this book. The impact that the arrival of immigrant families was having on property prices in certain parts of Wolverhampton was fuelling recriminations over what became known as “white flight” as longstanding residents sold up and moved away. This was just one of the anxieties that were influencing the local news agenda, feeding into family discussions about the changing nature of Wolverhampton. My father was said by his editorial staff to know the “Black Country and its environs like the veins on the back of his hands” and he was fully abreast of the pressure points that were developing. So was my mother

Powell and the media

51

who, in addition to serving as a magistrate, was a local campaigner for prison reform and family planning. Both were regular attenders at the Wolverhampton meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers). Political differences had not previously been a barrier, but their longstanding friendship was about to be tested as never before as soon as Powell began to outline the reasons why he believed his constituency was one of fewer than 60 out of 650 constituencies in the United Kingdom in which there was “a sense of hopelessness and helplessness” (Walsall speech, 9 February 1968) because of the failure to address problems resulting from the continued flow of immigration In the weeks preceding the guild of editors’ 1967 conference Powell had made 26 speeches on a range of national issues, but it was not until the summer of that year that he once again campaigned openly for a curb in Commonwealth immigration. First, he proposed that family members should not be allowed to settle in the United Kingdom; he went further that autumn, calling for a reduction in the annual intake of 50,000 immigrants. In February 1968, Powell gained national publicity for his warning that another 200,000 Indians in Kenya could exercise “an absolute right of entry” (Walsall speech, 9 February 1968). His assertion that the government had been “absolutely inactive” was backed up by other Conservative politicians and such was the clamour they created the Labour government was forced to introduce a voucher system to control the number of Kenyan Asians entering the country. Powell had issued his challenge at a Conservative dinner in Walsall, not far from Wolverhampton, and for the first time he had succeeded in turning the spotlight directly onto his own constituency after claiming in the speech that a constituent had told him “his little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school”. Journalists from the Express and Star and Birmingham Evening Mail visited schools in Wolverhampton South West but failed to track down either the child or the class. Reporters made a point of speaking to head teachers at all the primary schools and to other members of staff and none of them said this could ever have happened in their school. My father challenged Powell about the story and explained that as editor he had been receiving similar anonymous complaints, but that they had all proved to be false and could be traced back to members of the National Front. The MP and editor might have been good friends for some years, but as my father recalled, he felt his editorial judgement was on the line: At that particular time, the National Front were very, very strong, and they were running a myth factory in the area. There were little cells which used to meet regularly, usually in some of the working men’s clubs, which were hotbeds of racism in those days. They were inundating me with anonymous letters of one sort or another, abusive, and that kind of thing. I quizzed Enoch afterwards about it and he would never admit to it, but I’m quite sure that the business of “one white child in the class” came from a letter to him from the National Front. I learned very, very early on not to fall for them. But he didn’t. (Interview with Nicholas Jones)

52

Nicholas Jones

Although it was only after my mother’s death in 1991, followed by Powell’s death in 1998, that my father finally talked freely to me about the traumatic events that he faced, I had already sensed in the weeks after the controversial Walsall speech in February 1968 about there being only one “white child in her class” that my parents were unusually reticent whenever the Powells were mentioned in conversation. Their friendship had developed quite quickly in the mid to late-1950s, soon after Powell was adopted as prospective Conservative candidate. The two men were on a fast track for promotion: my father became news editor and then editor, while Powell was appointed a junior housing minister within five years of being elected MP. As our house was only a short walk from his constituency home, Powell often dropped in to see my father. On these occasions, they would talk animatedly for hours and soon there was a strong bond of family friendship.

Powell learning the tricks of the journalist trade My father particularly admired Powell’s diligence as a constituency MP. During parliamentary recesses, he would get out the electoral roll and walk the streets: he aimed to knock on the door of every constituent each year. Powell was keen to learn all he could about the processes involved in news management and, with the Conservatives in opposition, he was more determined than ever to get maximum exposure in the news media. Having fought unsuccessfully against Edward Heath for the party leadership, he was dissatisfied with the way his speeches were being promoted by the party machine and my father instructed him on how best to shortcircuit Conservative Central Office. To start with, he urged Powell to understand how journalists worked: From having handled a lot of his speeches, I knew what he needed to do. I said, ‘Your speeches are very good, Enoch, but the real gist of them, the real guts, are usually buried somewhere in the middle, or towards the end. And journalists are a lazy lot of so-and-sos, and half of them won’t read down there. What you want to do is put an aide-memoire on the front, picking up three or four good points and indicating the pages in the speech which they come from. And you’ll find that people will pick up on those. They’ll probably ignore the rest of the speech, but you’ll get the maximum publicity.’ And he did that immediately and did get very, very good results. (Interview with Nicholas Jones) Father’s advice was that Saturday afternoon was perhaps the most opportune moment to deliver a hard-hitting political speech. The trick was to deliver an embargoed copy the previous Thursday or Friday to a hand-picked group of political editors and leader writers on Sunday newspapers; they would be only too keen to preserve the embargo; and, if all went as planned, Powell would end up getting sustained coverage throughout the weekend. The aim of my father’s strategy was to stretch coverage over three days: first, it would be

Powell and the media

53

reported on Saturday evening news bulletins; then in the Sunday papers; and, finally, their coverage would be picked up again in Monday’s papers. Needless to say, Powell was meticulous in following my father’s advice, both on overall strategy and on points of detail, such as the need to highlight on the front page the two or three most important sentences. My father used to remark in later years that he had “a very good pupil” in the local MP, who had a “wonderful turn of phrase” when it came to visualizing a potential headline. The response to his February speech in Walsall was larger than for any previous intervention and in my father’s opinion this was the moment that Powell decided to campaign wholeheartedly against immigration: “He had bags and bags of supportive mail, and he more or less indicated to me, that started his train of thinking that led to the Birmingham speech in the April.” In her interview for Enoch at 100, Pam revealed that her husband had expected there to be “a bigger reaction” in terms of publicity after the Walsall speech: “That is why he decided he would have to do it again. Enoch wanted to make people in the country at large understand what was going on in constituencies like ours” (Howard of Rising 2014, p. 306). The first inkling my father had that the Birmingham speech was not a run-of-the-mill event, and might attract the publicity that Powell craved, was when he called in at the family home two or three days before he was due to speak, as is now well known: We were talking together in my dining room, and I think I said casually, “Well, what have you got coming up, Enoch?” And he said, “Look Clem, I’m not telling you what is in my next speech. You’ll get an advance copy in the fullness of time. But you know how a rocket goes up into the air, breaks up and explodes into lots of stars and then falls down to the ground. Well, this speech is going to go up like a rocket, and when it gets to the top, the stars are going to stay up.” (Interview with Nicholas Jones) Powell had followed faithfully my father’s instructions: copies of the text, under a 3pm embargo, had been distributed in advance to a carefully selected group of favoured journalists; the newsroom at the Express and Star and other news outlets received their copies on the morning of the speech, Saturday 20 April 1968. Early that afternoon, on their way to the meeting of West Midlands Conservatives at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham, Enoch and Pam had dropped off their two daughters with my mother. Being asked to look after Susan and Jennifer for the afternoon was a reflection of the depth of the two families’ friendship. My mother had spent many happy hours with Pam and her girls; our dog, Topsy, was a particular favourite. On occasions when the Powell’s were away for a day or two, I remember going along to their house to feed Susan’s hamster. Numerous family picnics, usually including a visit to a medieval church or other place of historic interest, had cemented a close relationship. I well recall one day out to the source of the River Thames in 1966 as we were joined by my wife to be. Our wedding present from the Powells was a picnic bag.

54

Nicholas Jones

My mother was particularly well read. She was a great admirer of Powell’s intellect and they could often be found locked in deep conversation, the joke within the family being that he was one of the few people she knew in Wolverhampton who could out-quote her. Given these happy memories, I can picture my mother’s anguish as she read the copy of Powell’s speech that my father had brought home with him after the paper had gone to press that afternoon. He told me that one of the sentences highlighted on the front page accompanying the text was the line that gave the speech its name: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see, ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” The events that followed are impressed on family memory: my mother was so shocked by the racist tone of the speech and the cold and calculated way in which it had been planned and executed, that she told my father that she did not want to see Powell ever again: “What we both found so offensive was the reference to a little old lady being the only white person in the street, having excrement pushed through her letterbox, being surrounded by grinning piccaninnies shouting abuse at her” (interview with Nicholas Jones). Although as appalled as my mother, father said he “funked it” that afternoon. He could not bring himself to greet Powell on his return from Birmingham or tell him exactly what he thought of the speech, so my mother was left with the task of taking the two girls to the front door when Powell called to collect them. My father said the look on my mother’s face, and her demeanour as she answered the door, must have forewarned him: “She was strong willed, and she said to Enoch, ‘I don’t think we shall be seeing each other again for a very long time.’ Powell said to her, ‘Well, I suppose it’s the end of a good friendship now, isn’t it?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it is.’ She handed over the two girls and that was it” (interview with Nicholas Jones). Powell’s prediction about the impact of the speech proved correct: the fallout reverberated for months and the rights and wrongs of his protestations are argued about to this day. He had followed the media strategy with such precision that my father acknowledged that he had in effect acted as Powell’s spin doctor, some 15 years before the phrase actually meant anything in the English language. He had given the MP invaluable advice on how to manipulate the news media. The following week was a searing experience and few provincial newspaper editors had faced a stiffer test of their duty to provide balanced coverage. His first task that weekend was to prepare an editorial for Monday’s newspaper, but he feared the worst: Ted Heath made a martyr out of Enoch, but as far as the Express and Star’s circulation area was concerned, virtually the whole area was determined to make a saint out of him. From the Tuesday through to the end of the week, I had ten, fifteen to twenty bags full of readers’ letters; 95 per cent were pro-Enoch. In each edition, we gave over a couple of pages to them, but we had to scrape every day, to try to find a few balancing letters. Some were pretty abusive about me, containing excrement and

Powell and the media

55

that sort of thing, half a dozen sheets of used toilet paper. I had people ringing me at home, all sorts of hours, saying: “Oh, is that the bloody nigger lover?” Just like that. I had a couple of windows broken at home. I suffered, I think, just as so many others did in the aftermath of the speech. (Interview with Nicholas Jones) The Wolverhampton sorting office could not cope with the 40,000 postcards and 5000 letters posted to the paper; extra staff were drafted in. At the end of the week there were two processions through the town, one of Powell’s supporters and the other of those opposed to him. Both brought petitions to the editor and they met outside the office front door where police kept them apart. Peter Rhodes, the Express and Star’s historian, said Powell’s speech had generated a level of correspondence to his local paper unseen either before or since (Rhodes 1992, p. 170). Letters of support had also been arriving by the sacksful at the Powell’s family home in Belgravia. When interviewed in 1995 for “Odd Man Out”, a BBC profile of her father, Susan Powell revealed that, as an 11-year-old, she had kept a diary describing what happened when their house was besieged by supporters in the days following the speech: It was all very exciting as a child. The Police were there. In my diary I refer to the letters that arrived. And we used to have our own Royal Mail van purely for daddy, bringing sacks and sacks of letters, and on the Thursday the 23rd of April, for example, we’d already had 23,000 letters. And the next day there were 50,000. And I remember sitting round the dining room table, along with other friends, just slitting letters. And they just piled up. And this was incredible. (Powell 1995) Emboldened by the support he received, Powell started libel proceedings against the Sunday Times, which had questioned the accuracy of his account of the elderly widow having excrement pushed through her letter box. In a leading article, the paper accused Powell of spouting “the fantasies of racial purity” (2 February 1969). The suggestion that he had indulged in Goebbels-like propaganda was repeated on posters at anti-Powell demonstrations in London. A report of one protest march, which was sent out on the wire service of the Press Association news agency, contained a reference to a demonstrator carrying a placard accusing Powell of Nazi-like tactics. When the Press Association story was published by the Express and Star, Powell extended his libel proceedings to include my father’s paper. It was, in effect, a “gagging writ”, intended to prevent newspapers from repeating the allegation about Nazi-style propaganda. After months of legal correspondence, Powell was forced to settle his action in April 1970. He received an apology in court from the Sunday Times, but no damages or costs and obtained no more than a retraction from the Express and Star, which maintained throughout that it had printed the Press Association report in good faith. This limited outcome, said my father, was

56

Nicholas Jones

attributable to Powell’s refusal to reveal the identity of either the pensioner who was said to have suffered at the hands of the “charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies” or the constituent who had written the letter describing her plight. He had argued that all correspondence between MPs and their constituents enjoyed parliamentary privilege and therefore could not be disclosed without permission. Pam Powell insisted in Enoch at 100 that her husband would “never, ever” have revealed details of constituents’ correspondence. “We had to stop the case and settle for a draw. And we were very strapped for money” (Howard of Rising 2014, p. 308). A year after Powell’s death, the journalist Bruce Page, who had been running the Sunday Times Insight page, described how in the aftermath of the Birmingham speech, he and other journalists had been sent out to find victims of racial attacks motivated by support for Powell (Page 1999). My father had told me that journalists from the Express and Star had marked off electoral registers to identify every street where West Indians and Kenyan Asians were living but had failed to find either a road or a group of residents who fitted Powell’s description (interview with Nicholas Jones). In his account, Page said the testimony of potential victims was not required, “thanks to a brilliant move by one of the Sunday Times’ lawyers who had the idea of subpoenaing Powell’s correspondence; Powell immediately withdrew his action” (Page 1999). Almost a decade later, after months of research, a BBC Radio 4 documentary programme, “Document”, said it believed the lady who had been followed to the shops by “charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies” was Druscilla Cotterill, then aged 61, living in a street called Brighton Place, a crescent of eight terrace houses in Merridale, part of Powell’s constituency (Thomson 2007). Presenter Mike Thomson, and archivist, Dr Simon Burgess, were praised for their “brilliant detective work” by the Daily Mail for identifying the widow who had been “terrorised by immigrants.” (Barton 2007). Three neighbours interviewed for “Document”, who had been children at the time, admitted they had teased Mrs Cotterill “quite a bit, mainly like knocking on the door and running off”, but they denied having posted excrement through her letter box. In its follow-up to the programme, Daily Mail journalist Fiona Barton traced Mrs Cotterill’s relatives and spoke to former residents. They said she had “felt uncomfortable to find herself the only white person in the road” and that it was a friend of hers who wrote to Powell. The Daily Mail praised Powell’s “noble decision to keep Druscilla’s identity a secret” as it had enabled her to “live out her life in anonymity” (Barton 2007). She died in an old people’s home in Wolverhampton in 1978.

Private aftermaths of a national furore To my surprise, three months after the case was settled, my father, at the age of 55, announced his early retirement. He probably had no alternative other than to accept the redundancy terms he was offered, but such was his debt to the Express and Star for a lifetime’s employment, he rarely mentioned the

Powell and the media

57

repercussions he must have faced as editor for having stood up to Powell and then having his reputation as editor challenged in the courts. Despite my gentle probing in the years until his death in 2002, I realized he had no wish to revisit his final months in the editor’s chair or elaborate on the discussions that went on behind the scenes with the paper’s owners. Father retained a degree of loyalty to his former friend and it was only shortly after my mother’s death in 1991 that I discovered there had been a reconciliation of sorts. Simon Heffer, who interviewed my father at length for his biography, Like the Roman, recorded the events that were held to mark Powell’s 80th birthday in 1992, including a dinner attended by former colleagues and friends. In a moving speech of thanks, Powell suddenly “seemed an old man … his voice becoming thinner, less resonant, less powerful” (Heffer 1998, p. 937). Heffer said the celebrations also “provided an opportunity to demonstrate that he was not now a man to harbour grudges; among those invited was Clement Jones, to whom he had barely spoken since 1968” (Ibid., p. 937). Before her death my mother had met Pam briefly at a social occasion and there had been a tearful conversation, but she made it clear repeatedly that she could not forgive Powell for the language he had used and especially the allegation about a pensioner having excrement pushed through her letter box. As one chapter closed for my father, another opened and he used his retirement to help train and guide journalists from Britain and around the world. During his time as editor, he had given his full support to the National Council for the Training of Journalists. The Express and Star was the first paper to offer trainees the chance to learn Teeline for taking notes rather than the much harder task of mastering Pitman shorthand.1 He had been appointed to the Press Council in 1965 and served on its complaints committee; he was a member of both the International Press Institute and the Commonwealth Press Union and later that year he led a delegation to advise South African newspapers on the efforts being made by the provincial press in Britain to maintain impartiality when reporting racial conflict. After retiring, he began his work with UNESCO; he visited Indonesia to advise on the restructuring of the press; and helped to train journalists from the Third World at an institute in Berlin established by the newspaper publisher Axel Springer. His experience was reflected in a wide range of publications. Within a year of leaving the Express and Star, he was contributing to Race and the Press, a series of essays published by the Runnymede Trust. He helped to prepare a world survey of media ethics for UNESCO and followed that in 1980 with an aide memoire on the relationship between the news media and ethnic minorities that was later republished by the Commission for Racial Equality as an occasional paper under the title, Race and the Media: Thirty Years’ Misunderstanding. Re-reading it, I was struck by the strength of his criticism of the vast majority of national newspapers for having kept up their readers’ interest in Powell’s views during the 1970s by giving his speeches and interviews undue priority and sensational

58

Nicholas Jones

headlines. Blame for “the unrest those speeches subsequently created” could be “laid at the door of the news media” because of the prominence Powell had been given: “It was at this time, too, that the great mythology about immigrants boomed and its fantastic stories were frequently given credence by the news media, not necessarily as hard news but more often in quotations from speeches or interviews, letters to the editor and radio phone-in programmes” (Jones 1982, p. 15). My father’s concern about the way in which radio phone-in programmes might have helped to fuel racial intolerance was based on personal experience. One of his post-retirement roles was to assist with the launch in 1976 of Beacon Radio, a new commercial radio station for the West Midlands, formed by a consortium that included the Express and Star’s parent company. He acknowledged subsequently that late-night phone-in programmes had a tendency to attract callers with extreme views. He told me that he thought radio presenters needed firmer guidance on how to respond. On one occasion, much to his embarrassment, Beacon Radio had been criticized by the licensing authority, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, because a presenter had not intervened immediately to cut off a caller using racially intolerant language. Phone-ins were low-cost programming for newly launched commercial stations as it was the listeners, invited to telephone the station to give their views, who helped to fill the air time, but discussions on controversial issues like race relations had to be strictly moderated and there had to be tight editorial supervision. He noted that callers living in areas where high concentrations of immigrants were building up tended to echo the coverage in the national press: “When first single streets and then whole areas started ‘going black’ the headline writers did not have to search far for useful and evocative headline words such as ‘ghetto’ to aggravate the situation” (Jones 1982, p. 9). When assessing my father’s writing and interviews on his role in the build-up to and aftermath of the Birmingham speech, I was struck by the fact that he had expressed no misgivings about having given Powell an insider’s understanding of how to excite and exploit the news media. In his book, A History of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr outlined the steps that my father had advised Powell to take and then asserted: “He would regret the advice” (Marr 2009, p. 303). My regret was that I failed to ask my father the direct question that perhaps I should have done: “As a journalist, was it a mistake on your part to have guided a politician on how best to manipulate the news media?” The furthest he went in his 1980 paper, Race and the Media, was to wonder whether journalists should have foreseen the outcome. He agreed with Lord Devlin, a former Chairman of the Press Council, that the media could “hardly have ignored” Powell’s speeches and it had to be recognized that Powell was “an astute self-publicist” who had mastered the art of writing speeches that contained “a few well-chosen phrases and headline words which journalists could easily abstract”. In reflecting on the repercussions of “the

Powell and the media

59

destructive force of Powellism”, my father harked back to the imagery that Powell had originally used when predicting the speech would go up like a rocket: “Powell struck the match which lit the fuse which caused the explosion which made racism acceptable to many people; crystallised the unspoken fears of many, and structured racism into British society” (Jones 1982, p. 9).

How Powell shaped my own career as a journalist My father’s friendship and subsequent confrontation with Powell and his later efforts to encourage more informed and balanced race reporting had a considerable influence on my own career. Within six months of joining BBC Radio Leicester as a news producer in January 1972, Leicester became the preferred destination of many of the Ugandan Asians expelled by President Idi Amin. Radio Leicester, which started broadcasting in 1967, was the first local radio station established by the BBC and because of the city’s already sizeable Asian and West Indian population, it was at the forefront of attempts within the BBC to develop local programming to engage diverse communities. President Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian minority, giving them 90 days to leave the country, forced Leicester City Council to take immediate steps to prepare for a massive influx. A high proportion of the 27,000 who opted to emigrate to the United Kingdom were determined to join families and friends who had settled in Leicester and Ealing in West London. I was one of the station’s four news producers and we suddenly found ourselves at the centre of a national news story. Our local output concentrated on the preparations being made by the city council and local Asian organizations to open reception centres and other essential tasks such as helping the new arrivals to find accommodation and school places for their children. The station was also expected to contribute to the BBC’s national output and we recorded interviews and news reports for Radio 4 programmes such as “The World at One” and “The World Tonight”. We tended to steer clear of the wider political arguments that had been provoked by the arrival of the Ugandan Asians: as the local BBC station our focus was resolutely on the positive, explaining and illustrating the efforts being made to integrate those expelled by Idi Amin. As my father noted in his publication, Race and the Media, the arrival of the Ugandan Asians produced a predictable response from the national media: press, radio and television “found no lack of instant spokesmen to proclaim doom and disaster and to say that what had been so long prophesied had now arrived” (Jones 1982, p. 9). In an attempt to connect with a growing potential audience among Asian and West Indian families living within its reception area, Radio Leicester had launched “Getting Together”, the first local radio programme aimed at involving different racial groups. Eddie Vickers, programme producer, was charged with the task of recruiting local people from the ethnic population who spoke English and who were able to contribute and present the programme:

60

Nicholas Jones We were the station with probably the highest ethnic population; around 27 per cent were from different racial groups. The challenge we faced was to find stories that reflected their positive contribution to the city. Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech had forced the BBC to focus on what we were broadcasting locally, but there was no template for a weekly half-hour programme like ours, there was no guidance on the rules we should follow or the language we should use, just a wish to involve different groups and to hear how they were participating in local life. (Interview with Nicholas Jones)

On the strength of Radio Leicester’s success in launching “Getting Together”, Vickers was invited by Dipak Nandy, the first director of the Runnymede Trust whose personal itinerary is analysed by Brett Bebber in Chapter 5, to attend an inaugural meeting in Birmingham in late 1968. Vickers agreed with my own experience as a reporter on local newspapers: we were perhaps not thinking hard enough about the wording of our news reports and broadcasts and the importance of avoiding needless stereotyping. The National Union of Journalists, of which I am a life member, finally revised its code of conduct in 1975 to urge that someone’s race or nationality should only be mentioned if it were strictly relevant. Journalists were enjoined not to “originate material which encourages discrimination on grounds of race, colour, creed, gender or sexual orientation”. My interest in the minutiae of my father’s dealings with Powell was reawakened by my switch to political reporting at BBC Westminster after having spent the late 1970s and 1980s covering the divisive industrial disputes that were such a feature of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The early 1990s saw the revival of the Labour Party under the leadership of Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair. The emergence of New Labour, followed by Blair’s landslide victory in the 1997 general election, owed much to the efforts of the party’s media advisers, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, who transformed Labour’s approach to publicity and promotion. Instead of reacting to events, the party was determined to go on the offensive and a key tactic used by Mandelson and Campbell was to trail speeches and policies in advance in a bid to capture the news agenda, the very same technique that my father had urged Powell to master, although in a far more rudimentary fashion than was possible in the late 1990s given the rapid expansion of television output, the opportunities presented by a 24-hour news cycle and the burgeoning growth of online media. I thought an insider’s account of Powell’s premeditated efforts to manipulate the presentation of his Birmingham speech made an ideal introduction for my next book, Sultans of Spin, which charted the behind-the-scenes story of the rise of New Labour’s spin doctors and image makers. My father’s role in assisting Powell with the promotion of his speeches had been mentioned by Simon Heffer, in Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, and analysed by Mike and Trevor Phillips in their book, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of

Powell and the media

61

Multi-racial Britain, but I was anxious to explore in greater detail the tricks of the media trade that my father had imparted to Powell, while also explaining the breakdown in the Powell–Jones family friendship. Few relationships are harder to penetrate than the elusive, off-therecord encounters and liaisons that can prove so mutually beneficial to an aspiring journalist and an up-and-coming politician. My previous attempts to investigate the often hidden connections between party publicists and political reporters had been widely regarded by both sides as a nuisance and I was regularly berated by Mandelson and Campbell for being obsessed with the process and mechanics of political communication rather than the Labour Party’s policies. My contention was that the perhaps the greatest power of a spin doctor was in deciding where to place an exclusive story, in choosing the journalist or media outlet to be favoured in the hope and expectation of gaining favourable publicity. Powell had clearly been fascinated by the processes involved in news management and there had been what, in effect, was a two-way trade: my father was getting an unprecedented insight into the thinking of a government minister and Powell was picking up tips on how to use the media to promote his career. My interest in the largely unseen influence of those who seek to guide and direct the way news was reported reflected not only my father’s experiences but also those of my mother during her years as a justice of the peace in Wolverhampton. She was exercised by the influence of newspaper reporting on the administration of justice by magistrates’ courts and in her book, Justice and Journalism, published in 1974, she examined whether the punishment of publicity was being fairly administered. While serving on the bench in Wolverhampton, she had concluded that the penalty of publicity in the local newspaper was often far greater, and potentially far more damaging than any punishment that the courts could impose. She would ask us how we three journalists – that is my father, my brother (George Jones, formerly political editor of the Daily Telegraph) and I – could defend publicity for summary offences when it was “incurred by a random selection of accused persons, for reasons which have to do with news value, not with justice”. She knew the score: it might have been a sharp-eyed journalist, perusing the day’s court list, who had spotted a name that rang a bell locally; or perhaps it was a police officer or court official who was friendly with the court reporters who had tipped them off as to the right court to go to. In my introduction to Sultans of Spin, I was determined to give her full credit for making the stand that she did after reading with utter dismay what she believed was Powell’s deliberate use of language to exploit fears over immigration. Her refusal to “funk it” and her steadfastness that Saturday afternoon in rebuking her dear friend caught the imagination of the playwright Chris Hannan and the artistic director Roxana Silbert, who staged his play What Shadows, based around the Birmingham speech, which had its premiere at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in October 2016.

62

Nicholas Jones

Hannan had spent many hours with me and my wife asking for insights and anecdotes about the Powell–Jones friendship, as had two other playwrights, Tom Cottle and Tom Miller, who had a read-through of their play, Enoch, at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, in September 2015. Enoch was provisionally booked for a run at the Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, but fell out of the programme when the Birmingham Repertory Theatre announced that What Shadows was in production. The author Andrew Smith, who likewise had been fascinated by our family recollections, recaptured the Wolverhampton of the 1960s in his novel, The Speech. Smith tells a story of how “in the shadow of Powell’s speech, a violent crime” brings together disparate characters whose lives had been profoundly affected by an undercurrent of intolerance. The opening scenes on Hannan’s play build on the friendship between the two couples, their picnics together and Powell’s eagerness to tap into my father’s expertise. Seeing Paula Wilcox portray my mother rebuking Powell and then berating my father (George Costigan) for having offered advice, prompted some timely reflection on my part, a salutary reminder perhaps of my own culpability as a journalist. My mother’s condemnation of my father was a powerful moment in the play and, watching it being acted out on stage, led me to wonder whether she might have been equally shocked to have discovered that her own son had given advice to Nigel Farage on how to promote himself in his bid to become leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party.

From Powell to Farage Family history has unexpected ways of repeating itself. My father discovered to his cost that he had unwittingly provided Powell advice on exploiting the news media and, decades later, I would come to realize that I, too, had inadvertently given a helping hand to an up-and-coming politician who would similarly seek to gain political capital by taking advantage of fears over immigration. My minor but, at the time, perhaps influential role in Farage’s seemingly inexorable rise had many parallels. I first met Farage, one of UKIP’s founders, when he stood in the 1994 parliamentary by-election at Eastleigh in Hampshire, but it was not until after the 1997 general election that he began seeking my advice, ahead of the 1999 European Parliament elections, when he was elected an MEP for South East England. He quickly became one of UKIP’s most quoted politicians and I was well aware of how assiduous he had been in seeking publicity. I was asked by the producer of Radio 4’s “Any Questions” whether I thought Farage would be able to acquit himself in a live programme. My assurance that he would be a confident panellist, more than capable of answering topical questions and holding his own, was duly appreciated and he subsequently made his debut appearance in March 2001, a few months before urban disturbances in Oldham, Burnley, Bradford, soon to be overshadowed by the global tragedy of 9/11. Later he thanked me for having helped him “get launched into broadcasting” (Jones 2015, p. 213). Farage rarely missed a trick and, on another

Powell and the media

63

occasion, he asked my advice on the best time for UKIP to hold its annual party conference: should it be before the Conservatives’ conference or later in the autumn so as not to be overshadowed? My suggestion was that it should be squeezed into the weekend before the Conservative gathering, thus irritating and upstaging the Tory leadership by grabbing the headlines – advice he promptly followed (interview with Nicholas Jones). After Farage’s election as UKIP leader in 2006, I noticed how he had progressed from haranguing Brussels and was increasingly seeking to exploit fears over EU immigration, the issue that became a key campaign tactic in the 2013 local council elections; again, in the 2014 elections for the European Parliament, when UKIP topped the poll; and later, in the long campaign ahead of the UK vote to leave the EU in the 2016 European Referendum. In hardening UKIP’s stance against EU migrants, Farage had understood how this would appeal to the dominant Conservative-supporting Eurosceptic press, which was relentless in attacking Prime Minister David Cameron for his government’s failure to meet targets for reducing net immigration and which was only too ready to portray Farage as the bloke next door with a pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, a hero for those whose voices had not been heard by the political elite. After retiring from the BBC in 2002, on reaching the age of 60, I received a phone call from Farage at home asking me to become a UKIP press officer, an offer he repeated in 2014 after UKIP secured more MEPs than either the Conservatives or Labour. I had no hesitation in turning him down: while I had been happy to discuss media tactics, having written so much about the dark arts of political manipulation, I valued my political neutrality as a journalist and broadcaster and most certainly had no wish or the slightest intention of helping to promote UKIP’s divisive policies. A shared experience with my father reflected a reciprocal but often hidden trade-off between journalists and politicians. In return for inside information, and perhaps the possibility of an exclusive story line, we can offer guidance on the inner workings of the news media. My advice, like my father’s, was freely given without any expectations on our part. The full extent of our interlocking family connections was only brought home to me in December 2014 when the Daily Telegraph published details of private correspondence from the mid-1990s that Farage had written several times asking Powell to endorse him as a parliamentary candidate for UKIP, a fact that is explored in Karine Tournier-Sol’s chapter. Our behind-the-scenes roles in promoting politicians might surprise some former colleagues given the notoriety of Powell and Farage but there can be very few journalists who have not been asked at some point in their careers to give a pointer, or at least some encouragement, to those desperately seeking publicity.

Note 1 Pitman shorthand, a phonetic system using symbols to represent the spoken word, was once of the most popular form of stenography used by secretaries, reporters and other for taking notes.

64

Nicholas Jones

References Barton, F. (2007), “Widow in Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood Speech Really Did Exist”, The Daily Mail, 2 February. Heffer, S. (1998), Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Howard of Rising, Lord (ed.) (2014), Enoch at 100: A Re-evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell, London: Biteback Publishing. Jones, C. (1982), Race and the Media: Thirty Years’ Misunderstanding, London: Commission for Racial Equality (first published by UNESCO 1980). Jones, N. (1999), Sultans of Spin, London: Victor Gollancz. Jones, N. (2015), The Election A-Z, Chatham: Urbane Publications Ltd. Marr, A. (2009), A History of Modern Britain, London: Pan Books. Page, B. (1999), “Enoch’s Letters of Blood”, Prospect, February. Phillips, M. and Phillips, T. (1998), Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, London: HarperCollins. Powell, E. (1968), “Walsall Speech”, 9 February 1968, https://www.enochpowell.net/ fr-80.html. Powell, S. (1995), Interview in “Odd Man Out”, BBC Television. Rhodes, P. (1992), The Loaded Hour: A History of the Express and Star, Worcester: SPA Ltd. Thomson, M. (2007), “Document”, BBC Radio 4, 23 January.

4

An international press review of the Powell moment (1968–1973) Olivier Esteves UNIVERSITY OF LILLE

The figure of Enoch Powell remains quintessentially English. A household name in British politics, Powell is but little known on the continent, which, in itself, probably underlines the need to internationalize research on him. There have already been some welcome signs of this through contributions by American colleagues (Whipple 2009) or through attempts at comparing Powell with other populist figures, the most obvious example being George Wallace (Porion and Kazin 2017). This book, then, partakes of an inchoate, international conversation among scholars working in history, political science, sociology and British studies. One way of deparochializing Powell is to investigate foreign press responses to his speech and to his populist repertoire, something which, although a modest archival effort in itself, we believe to be quite illuminating. In order to do so, the years 1968–1973 from La Stampa and Il Corriere de la Serra (Italy), Die Zeit and Der Spiegel (West Germany), the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal (United States), Le Monde (France), the Irish Times and the Irish Independent (Republic of Ireland), De Telegraaf and De Volkskrant (The Netherlands), Le Soir (Belgium), Journal de Genève and Gazette de Lausanne (Switzerland) have been looked into. For various logistical reasons the details of which need not detain us here, certain national presses could not be included in this study (notably from northern Europe and former Dominions of the British Empire). Similarly, national presses of countries that were not democracies in 1968 were left out (Spain, Portugal, Greece). Quantitatively, it was the Irish press that covered Enoch Powell’s upsurge most extensively, the Irish Times digital archives’ producing 156 hits for “Enoch Powell” in the year 1968 alone, just as many as most British dailies. The American press also developed a keen interest in the populist’s rise, particularly the New York Times, which sent some reporters to investigate the West Midlands grassroots. It is noteworthy that both the Irish and US dailies quoted, on April 22 1968, very large chunks from the Birmingham speech. More broadly speaking, the Irish and American presses prove of particular interest, if only because of the number of Irish immigrants in Britain – those “internal Others” (Myers 2015, p. 21) who were very little targeted by the Powellite

66

Olivier Esteves

backlash – and because of the spectre of American-style “hot summers” exploited by Powell in the wake of American riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination (4 April 1968), a mere two weeks before his Birmingham speech. If one leaves aside what US journalist Studs Terkel labelled the “American obsession” (i.e. race) whether race be connected with immigration or not, the fact is that France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and others were not in the late 1960s grappling with issues of immigration, integration, welfare chauvinism, far-right populism, etc. Therefore, it was often with a degree of bafflement that their national press reported on events from Wolverhampton, Birmingham and the London docks accommodating Powellite demonstrations. In this way, too, of course, the 1968 Powell movement was a harbinger of issues that would cross the channel in years and decades to come.

Comparing Powell Powell and Wallace The international mediatization of the civil rights movement in the US and of its “White Backlash” responses meant that a substantial number of readers of quality papers in Europe (and of course in the US) had already heard of Alabama governor and zealous promoter of racial segregation George Wallace before they heard of Powell. The year 1968 would also culminate with Wallace’s presidential campaign as an independent and the Southern populist would garner an impressive 13.5% of the vote. In many articles, then, some superficial parallels were drawn between Powell and Wallace, often in the form of soundbites that helped make sense of Powell’s politics and electoral tactics. Referring to the Powell-driven rift within the Conservative Party, the Washington Post noticed that “Britain’s ‘Wallace’ has his own party edgy” (4 November 1968). A few months before the same paper had quoted a Tory MP, Nicholas Scott, who quipped that “Enoch Powell is assuming the mantle of George Wallace of Alabama” (22 April 1968). Couching the terms of the British debate on integration in a language that was understandable by American public opinion, the “Race Relations Bill” was often introduced as a “Civil Rights Bill” in Martin Luther King’s country (the Washington Post, 24 April 1968; 26 April 1968). As its arch opponent, Powell was logically presented as a Wallace-like figure: the New York Times (6 June 1970) dismissed him as a “George C. Wallace with an Oxford accent”, comparing him to “an old-style Southern-American race-baiter” (28 April 1968). The Wall Street Journal stated Powell may be considered as a “George Wallace with a bowler hat” (26 April 1968). Leaving aside these idiosyncrasies, the same paper more seriously referred to “the white backlash familiar to American politics” rearing its ugly head this time around in Britain (Ibid.), at a time when, for the record, the phrase “White Backlash” had only recently become a mainstream one in American media (Fortner 2015, p. 241–242).

International press review: Powell moment

67

In another piece published just before the US presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal lampooned the “cherished myth of the worker”, i.e. the mythical notion that the workingman is “the chief force for liberty, racial equality and social progress” (1 November 1968), a view soon to be exposed as erroneous by the numbers of American people that would cast their votes for Wallace. Borrowing from analyses of the working class by Richard Hoggart and George Orwell, the article also elaborated on the British racial debate and the Powell threat, seen as allowing some parallels with Wallace’s: “It is apparent that British workers fear the competition of Negroes, the same motives frequently attributed to American workers attracted by Mr. Wallace.” In much the same way, a piece from Frenchlanguage Belgian paper Le Soir included an interview of a Caribbean academic in New York fearful for his career and future, a few weeks before “the American presidential election of fear”. The man contemplated leaving the country, but “in order to go where?” (pour aller où?), asked the paper (30 October 1968): This man is not unaware that racism is no American preserve. He does know that in England, which many Blacks his generation will still call “the Mother country”, comparable circumstances lead to strikingly similar reactions towards the coloured section of the population. He also knows that conservative MP Enoch Powell has the same role as George Wallace, who like him, and despite their respective trade-union traditions, is supported by very upwardly mobile white folks. Tellingly, the Belgian paper delineated the first signs of a cross-Atlantic populist upsurge, with leaders such as Powell and Wallace exploiting feelings of being “strangers in their own lands” among voters who feel elbowed aside by minorities (racial minorities and immigrants reified into a vague “they”) demanding equal treatment before the law. To cut a long story short, having been privileged for so long, any movement towards equality was experienced as unfairness (to whites). The electoral backlash illustrating these feelings of displacement was, in return, experienced as an unfair menace to men such as this black academic in New York, whose individual contribution to American academic life and collective contribution to British history as a member of the West Indian group were obliterated in both Wallace and Powell’s political calculations. The elitist populist In many key respects, the other comparisons found in international press articles undergird the ideological, style and rhetorical intricacies of Enoch Powell. Again, these parallels are often meant for the readership of these papers to come to terms with a hitherto unknown figure who burst very violently on the British and to a much lesser extent the international political stage. The Dutch Volkskrant presented him as a “Prophet of the White British”, a man with a “metallic voice”, a “razor-sharp face”, himself a bizarre mix of “Poujade, Wallace and Goldwater” (23 November 1968) (on Poujade, see Souillac 2007).

68

Olivier Esteves

Powell’s complexity is also highlighted by the way certain parallels may appear tempting at first glance, but are ultimately invalidated on closer scrutiny. Another common practice is for papers to cautiously state that “some compare him to” rather than “he may be compared to”. The Washington Post states that the Wolverhampton MP “is compared to Hitler and Joe McCarthy, but even his critics credit him with intellectual integrity, brilliance, and an almost puritanical social and political life” (9 January 1969). Similarly, the New York Times balks at any serious association between Enoch Powell and Joseph McCarthy (28 April 1968): the latter was merely a “cynical thug” who could not become a serious demagogue, whereas the former is depicted as a “a brilliant scholar who believes totally in himself and in his mission – which could make him more or less dangerous” (New York Times, 15 June 1970). Be that as it may, the Conservative Party’s severe crisis sparked by Powell was “a crisis of the dimensions that faced the Republican Party in the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy” (New York Times, 13 June 1970). This parallel was all the more appropriate as in the 1970 general elections, Powell denounced the presence of “enemies” and “traitors” within the “civil service”, tapping into McCarthy-style conspiracy theories. A long, detailed article in Le Monde (4 May 1968), which even quotes some Nietzsche-inspired teenage poems by the English populist leader, refers to “his mix of daring and demagoguery on the race issue, which has deserved him some parallels with Cromwell, De Gaulle,1 Goldwater, Wallace, Poujade, Mosley. It would seem that he is probably an admirer of De Gaulle’s. No doubt, his intellectual brilliance places him way above the loud-talking rabble-rousers” who have very short-lived, rocket-like political careers in their countries. Le Monde also ventured to suggest that “he is starting to embody a reactionary Robespierre”. Last, both Le Monde (7 July 1970) and the Swiss Gazette de Lausanne (18 July 1970) likened Powell to the Swiss Conservative member of parliament James Schwarzenbach, who campaigned to limit the number of foreign workers, despite the unanimity against him among the major institutions, parties, trade unions, churches, etc. Unsurprisingly, Oswald Mosley’s name crops up as well. In terms of style and rhetoric, the Washington Post argued that it made no sense to compare Powell to Mosley, because “Powell is far too fastidious to be a convincing rabble-rouser” (28 April 1968). But in ideological terms, some parallels were drawn between the Wolverhampton MP and the fascist leader. The British left-wing columnist Claud Cockburn, having moved to County Waterford in 1947, wrote a regular column in the Irish Times. In one of these (1 May 1968), he offered a vitriolic depiction of his only meeting with Powell in his very posh Belgravia House when he was minister of Health (1960–1963). Cockburn was scathing about Powell’s personality, the man being according to him the most ridiculously conceited man he had ever met, before venturing the following comparison; “One cannot help recalling that Hitler’s philosophy and appearance were once regarded as richly comical and far too absurd to be dangerous.” Then Cockburn moved on to references to Mosley. He

International press review: Powell moment

69

claimed that after Powell’s Birmingham speech, the happiest man in Europe must be Mosley himself, who lived comfortably close to the Windsor house in Paris. A parallel of sorts was therefore suggested with Powell’s abode in the heart of Belgravia, the implicit idea being that two leaders who proclaimed to be close to the people were totally alienated from the masses. Cockburn also imagined that Mosley must have taken delight in “the latest flood of sewage released by Enoch Powell”. As has already been suggested, other articles venture commonalities between Powell and De Gaulle in France and or Barry Goldwater in the United States. Regarding the latter, it is an obvious fact that with hindsight both were political precursors to the Conservative revolution in their respective countries, be it in terms of their economic and social policies or in terms of their approaches to race relations issues. The Washington Post argued that both Goldwater and Powell had polarized opinions, with liberals (in the American sense) likely to adhere ever more strongly to policies that were anathema to Powell: “Like the Arizona right-winger [Goldwater], he [Powell] may strengthen the liberal consensus that he is challenging by forcing community leaders to take a more forthright stand on racial issues than ordinarily they might be inclined to do” (29 April 1968). Although indeed there was a powerful liberal mobilization against Powell (as the foundation of the Runnymede Trust analysed in Brett Bebber’s chapter indicates), it can hardly be denied that the maverick conservative swung the British political pendulum to the right (Hillman 2008, p. 96–99), with some dire immediate and long-term effects for liberals of all hues. De Gaulle All allusions to the French statesman are devoid of any reference to race and immigration and it is strictly in terms of their respective approaches to foreign policy and national sovereignty, to France’s and the UK’s position vis-à-vis the United States, and to the post-colonial function of their nation in newly decolonized countries that Powell–De Gaulle parallels were ever ventured. In itself, this parallel served to illustrate Powell’s political ambiguity. The Washington Post again underlined the fact that Powell was critical of Britain’s role east of Suez and that his worldview in this particular respect could easily be likened to that of De Gaulle (28 April 1968). In some way, both men displayed what Bertrand Russell called in a New York Times 1957 article a form of “aristocratic and cultural contempt” (Russell 2005 [1957], p. 176) towards the United States, which, according to the philosopher, was very deeply rooted among Tories. It is no coincidence that both the French and British leader publicly expressed strong criticism of US involvement in Vietnam. Powell himself published an op-ed piece in the New York Times (1 March 1971) unambiguously called “America’s Moral Egocentrism”. Introduced by the paper as “a Conservative member of parliament”, who is “regarded as a spokesman of Britain’s extreme right”, Powell nevertheless draws from the

70

Olivier Esteves

“At War With Asia” article by Noam Chomsky, although he remains critical of parts in it which he labels a “Marxist brew”. Above all, he lambasts (like De Gaulle, once freed from the burden of Algeria after the Evian accords of 1962) the futility of the war in Vietnam, which is self-evident to all sharp observers outside the United States: “The military futility of the operations, so glaringly obvious and even predictable to the other side of the world, was apparently invisible to the Americans.”

Hard to pigeonhole Many papers highlight the ambivalence in, rather than the paradox between, Powell’s stances in the field of race relations and immigration and his views on foreign policy issues and what in the 21st century are called “societal questions”. The Dutch Volkskrant (23 November 1968), like others, stresses the fact that, in spite of his political pedigree, he never expressed any enthusiasm for Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime. Similarly, the reactionary leader was against the death penalty and had no problem with homosexuality. In times when the Keynesian consensus would remain strong at least for a few years, Powell’s neoliberalism was also noticed by many papers. The Brussels-based Le Soir kept referring to Powell as the “enfant terrible” of the Tory party, whose politics was “absolutely contrary to his own party’s”, particularly in the economic field, where he promoted the “wholesale denationalisation of state-owned industries” (8 October 1968). In 1974, the Wall Street Journal hailed Powell as “this British maverick politician who probably has the best economic head of British politics” (30 September 1974), which is completely in line with the American Establishment paper’s leanings. In 1965, two and a half years before his Birmingham speech, the same had published a long portrait of the Wolverhampton MP. It was reminded that this champion of laissez-faire economics also happened to have been at the head of the NHS. Truly, the man was “at home with paradox” (16 November 1965). Powell was also hailed as having “a knack for the cutting phrase that earns delighted assent even from those fellow Tories who privately think his policies are vote losers”. Much as in Britain, one of the key issues with Powell was whether he should be labelled as a “racist” politician or whether his infamous 20 April 1968 should be written down as “racist”. The Wall Street Journal bluntly raised the question: “Does ‘conservative’ imply ‘racist’?” in the wake of his Birmingham detonation, before answering in the negative. According to them, the truth was rather that, sadly, the Tory MP’s inflammatory rhetoric might well tarnish his party as a whole, despite his being promptly sacked from the shadow cabinet: “By guilt through association, millions of thoroughly tolerant conservatives get a vague bigotry brand they don’t in the least deserve” (26 April 1968). The Irish Times exposed Powell’s political “irresponsibility” in presenting the issue of coloured immigration “in such lurid terms” (23 April 1968). A few days earlier it singled out Powell’s playing of the race card for political purposes: “Powell has planted a fiery cross in the field of race

International press review: Powell moment

71

relations”; his “lurid imaginings of a Black Britain are a serious political power-play” ( Irish Times, 22 April 1968). The Washington Post asked that a distinction be made between Powell, his speech and the effects of his speech. In order to do so it quoted the British Spectator, to which Powell himself had contributed repeatedly, but which took their distances from the conservative MP: “Mr Powell is no fascist (not even quasi-), but his speech has been welcomed by those who are. He is a Christian, yet the emotion his speech has sanctified is that of hate” (29 April 1968). The paradox exposed by The Spectator and quoted in the Washington Post is in sync with televised debates opposing Powell to Trevor Huddleston, Bishop of Stepney and anti-apartheid militant (Schofield 2013, p. 259). It is also exposed in some of the (small) number of letters against Powell based in the Stafford archives. The German press was also alive to some of Powell’s political idiosyncrasies and was, overall, less prone to label him “racist” than, say, the Swiss or Italian presses. A piece in Die Zeit was entitled: “Hands Off Enoch!” (“Hände Weg von Enoch!”, 26 April 1968), which attempted to make sense of Powell’s political ambivalence, characterized by “a mix of well-rounded conceptions, a blend of national pride, unfettered capitalism and humanitarian ideals”. If anything, it was claimed, Powell outclassed the great bulk of his colleagues in the Conservative Party. The article stumbled against the difficulty in pigeonholing Powell’s politics, again, typically by refusing to compare him: “He would never be a Goldwater, he is not dumb enough. He wouldn’t be a Mosley in a black shirt, he opposed the death penalty. He wants to repatriate the coloured folks to avoid inhumanity on both sides.” In another somewhat positive article, this time from Der Spiegel (8 January 1973), Powell’s long sojourn in Germany (1927–1934) was described and the country itself was deemed as his “intellectual home” (“Geistige Heimat”), owing to the influence wrought on him by Nietzsche, Schiller, Hegel and Goethe. The Italian press investigated is often way more critical than the West German one. While acknowledging that Powell in 1972 was the unrivalled mouthpiece of his party, Il Corriere de la Serra straightforwardly referred to the “racist tenaciousness” (13 June 1969) of his politics. As for La Stampa, it labelled the Birmingham speech “unambiguously racist” (23 April 1968). For the Italian paper, Powell had shattered the bipartisan consensus “whereby racial arguments cannot be mobilized or put forward for electoral ends” (21 April 1968). Many of the papers indeed, like their counterparts in Britain, underline the way Powell committed a grave breach of political decorum by so abruptly expressing his views, which nevertheless found an echo among many British citizens, “who yet are often very liberal and open-minded on all other social, political and religious questions” (Le Soir, 23 April 1968). It is for this reason that Powell could hardly be shrugged off as an “insignificant rebel in politics” (Ibid.). The Dutch Volkskrant also referred to “a riot among conservatives over Powell” (Rel om Powell) within the House of Commons. The Amsterdam paper stated that “it is the first time in British history

72

Olivier Esteves

that the coloured question is becoming a real political issue” (23 April 1968). It would seem, then, that in many respects, Powell’s ambivalence itself is a reflection of the ambivalence of the British towards what the Times called “the Dark Million”, in a series of articles dated 1965. The international press generally stressed that Powell’s 1968 speech was a disturbing litmus test for the British approaches to race, a test that might well have some repercussions on their international repute.

Holding a mirror to England’s racial problem Some papers were quick to expose both the fact that, prior to Powell’s speech, the issue of multiracial tolerance had but been an untested, abstract notion in England and that the speech itself revealed in a most violent way the vacuity of British celebrations of national fair play and colour blindness ( Husband and Hartmann 1974, p. 172). Those two types of argument were often developed in the Irish and American press, which was not unconnected to both Ireland’s and the United States’ troubled history with Britain. The Wall Street Journal noticed that “intellectually, Britain lives with a strongly moral concept of racial justice formed when race was an abstract issue. But practically, much of Britain lives in fear that its neighbourhood will someday turn other than white” (26 April 1968). In much the same way, their colleagues from the Washington Post, in an article entitled “Facing Up”, stated that “in its palmier imperial days Britain had no Commonwealth immigration bars and was proud of it. It also had not many immigrants” (23 April 1968). The Irish Times likewise underscored the post-colonial dimension of the issue now facing the country: “Britain is now being presented with the bill for her imperial past, of which the right-wing Tories are so proud that one might be forgiven for being surprised at their latter-day insistence on counting the cost” (26 April 1968). Regarding the turban controversy at the root of Powell’s campaign, the New York Times reported, after the Wolverhampton borough had yielded to Sikh demands, first, that most Sikhs actually go turbanless, implicitly meaning that Powellite exposure of the “canker” of “communalism” (in the Birmingham speech) was an exaggerated affair. Second, that “The British did not mind Sikhs wearing turbans to drive their tanks in the war. But their buses today that’s different” (10 April 1969). For others, this discrepancy between abstract principles and lived, perceived or fancied reality smacked of plain hypocrisy and ludicrous delusions of multiracial toleration. The Irish Times, for instance, quipped that “last week’s explosion exposed the fatuousness of claims that Britons have no prejudice” (30 April 1968), which probably echoed the way, historically, Britishness constructed itself also (or primarily) on an anti-Catholic and anti-Irish basis. Somewhat suspiciously using the same words, the New York Times exposed the “fatuousness of claims that Britons have no prejudice” before adding that “the color prejudice that many Britons have long denied they shared with White Americans burst out with astonishing ferocity” (28 April 1968).

International press review: Powell moment

73

Powell’s focus on immigration in his campaigns, for obvious demographic reasons (coloured immigrants made up a mere 2% of the population) was also exposed as “dangerous, vicious nonsense” (6 June 1970). Ben D. Segal, a consultant on federal equal opportunity programs in the US, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying: “The British who used to smugly turn up their noses at the racial problems in the United States, all of a sudden find themselves with a serious racial problem of their own” before concluding on the ominous note that “the disease of racism is more widespread than most believe” (20 June 1968). More interestingly perhaps, in a particularly illuminating piece entitled “The Smell of the Beer Hall” (15 June 1970), a New York Times journalist present at a Birmingham rally during the 1970 general elections expressed his amazement that “it was possible to believe that even in Britain, tranquil Britain, hate could succeed as a political device”. As has been suggested by Camilla Schofield (Schofield 2013, p. 250) and Alice Ritscherle (Ritscherle 2005, p. 262), the real Powell stalwarts were more likely to be a silent majority of middle-class voters rather than ranting dockers or uncouth folks parading with banners replete with spelling mistakes for the bourgeois classes to laugh at: in Birmingham on that day “there were silver-haired ladies and skinheads and workers, but mostly middle-class, ordinary English men and women”. In a 30-minute speech, these interrupted 25 times to applaud. The German Die Zeit also believed, rightly, that “the people who send him letters of support are petit-bourgeois folks who wouldn’t rent their vacant rooms to Pakistani immigrants” (26 April 1968). In a piece from the Irish Times entitled “I Listen in Despair” (6 May 1968), a reporter living in England carelessly started a conversation about Powell with his neighbours and was taken aback by the potency of their anti-immigrant prejudices and unwavering support of the conservative MP, however “decent” these neighbours may be in all respects besides race and immigration. In a scathing article, which stated that “Mr Powell seems to be as proud of his sacks of fan-mail than as any Hollywood sex-goddess”, the Irish Times also reckoned that “most of the people who write to him are not converts to his cause; they had converted themselves long since. They are timid sorts who have been made bold enough by his example to take shelter behind it” (26 April 1968). Obviously, whether “timid sorts” or not, some of these mobilized in ways that went beyond the mere sending of supportive mail or the deprecatory gossiping against “them”. Der Spiegel stated that on the very weekend of the Birmingham speech, 700 Wolverhampton folks voted against the right of “coloured people” (“Farbigen”) to join “working-men clubs” (29 April 1968), a choice which the soon implemented Race Relations Bill would make illegal. Some Belgian and Dutch papers likewise underlined the strategic and symbolical role played by immigration officers. Le Soir (26 April 1968) described at some length the collective letter of support to Powell sent by some 40 of them working at Heathrow, which was bound to have disastrous effects on public opinion. The Dutch Telegraaf went further in interviewing

74

Olivier Esteves

some of these officers, one of whom vilified Britain’s too liberal policy on Commonwealth immigrants: “Everyone is lying. Pakistanis and Indians are dodgers. All my colleagues are tired of the chaos, bribery and deception connected with this whole immigration business” (26 April 1968). The irritation echoed the claim made, and reproduced in the British media, that some 39 immigration officers at the main London airport had allegedly forged about 1000 passports from the Indian subcontinent. As is well known, some local authorities had been heavily strained by the sudden influx of New Commonwealth migrants in 1960–1962. The Dutch Telegraaf (27 April 1968) reported the way in which the Ealing borough in West London had some 7000 immigrant children out of a total of 41,000, overwhelmingly concentrated in Southall. Its schooling and social services being unable to cope satisfactorily still in 1968, the borough officially stated it could not accept more immigrants unless they be dispersed elsewhere, for instance in nearby Hounslow. This, according to the Dutch paper, was an unprecedented move from a local authority. Another Telegraaf piece interviewed a Wolverhampton local councillor according to whom ethnic clustering in Powell’s city would inevitably produce some urban ghettoes unless one started dispersing families (17 May 1968). In a country – the Netherlands – where housing dispersal for immigrants from Surinam and Indonesia was an object of debate (Robinson et al. 2003, p. 25–27), the British lukewarm attitude to introducing such schemes was in itself interesting for a Dutch readership. Ultimately in England, “spreading the burden” of the immigrant presence, which was largely apprehended through the lens of strains on welfare services, took the form of schooling dispersal in some areas of large-scale New Commonwealth influx (Esteves, 2018), symbolized by a Southall in whose Chamber of Commerce Powell was to give a speech on 4 November 1971. Like some of the Irish and American press, the Italian papers analysed here often point to the way Powell was actively challenging the English self-image as a nation of tolerance. In so doing, La Stampa, for instance, empathized with the left (“For the English Who Truly Believe in the Equality and Moral Foundations of their Democratic System, Today has been a Bitter Day”, 24 April 1968), especially on witnessing the London dockers’ Powellite outburst, which was construed as “the absurd spectacle of workers assuming the most reactionary viewpoints” (27 April 1968). In France, Le Monde also repeatedly referred to “the very odd spectacle of a few hundred dockers demonstrating in Westminster” (25 April 1968). Last, it is worth quoting the way Il Corriere exposed the apparent thanklessness of the British: although the immigrants mostly had very menial jobs that nobody wanted to have, “Indians and Blacks [were] largely despised, which is somewhat paradoxical” (13 June 1969). Italy’s still being a country of massive emigration decades before coffin boats arrived at Lampedusa, the Italian press expressed a degree of bafflement at events around the Powell phenomenon in England. The Swiss Journal de Genève (13 December 1968) labelled Powell a “racist” with whom the majority of Britons agreed, before pointing to how emotional an issue immigration was in Britain;

International press review: Powell moment

75

it was even argued in Gazette de Lausanne (7 October 1976) that the question was traumatic for British public opinion (“traumatise l’opinion nationale”). The Journal de Genève rightly pointed to the wide gap dividing “the intellectual sections of the population”, driven to welcome immigrants either out of post-colonial guilt or to wallow in the delusion that there still was an Empire, as opposed to the working classes who see “Jamaicans and others as rivals on the job market”. Hence, for these “to nurture feelings of hospitality proves way more difficult” (13 December 1968). It also exposed Tory hypocrisy towards Powell: although it had sacked him from the shadow cabinet, the Conservative Party did retain some of his ideas on repatriation for its electoral platform (1 June 1970). In effect, Powell’s campaign did also foreshadow the 1971 Immigration Act, a further clamp down on New Commonwealth influxes largely inspired by Powellite perceptions. It is worth bearing in mind that the rules set up in 1971 were the ones that led to the Windrush migrants’ crisis of 2018, highlighting the way Powell’s legacy is still wielding influence on British politics today. Powell’s campaign was bound to have deleterious effects on Britain’s reputation abroad, particularly in Commonwealth countries. The Wall Street Journal posited that “too abrupt a departure from the liberal policies of the past could destroy Britain’s remaining political influence with the dark-skinned peoples of the Commonwealth, an influence that it has tried hard to retain, even to the extent of largely alienating the whites of Rhodesia and South Africa” (9 June 1970). At the same time, the American paper also laid bare the hypocrisy of countries like India and some East African states, which had deep-seated ethnic problems of their own but lost no time in ranting against Britain’s racist immigration policies (Ibid.). One last point deserves to be made here, about Britons of Irish descent and Northern Ireland. It is a fact that the Powell campaign had virtually nothing to say against the Irish. It is therefore unsurprising that the Irish press never really regarded Powell as a political menace to those who, de facto, constituted the largest immigrant group in Britain in the late 1960s. Apart from British pockets of sectarian strife (Glasgow and its “Old Firm” game, Liverpool to some extent), the Irish presence was only apprehended as a problem where there were individual cases of undeserving “tinker Irish”. Powellite silence about the Irish also helps to make sense of the way in which the Conservative’s campaign was probably more a moral panic about race and colour than about immigration per se. The Irish Times emphasized exactly this point: “A high proportion of those coming into the country from outside (as we in Ireland are in a privileged position to know) are not coloured” (26 April 1968). This also reflects the total assimilation of countless families with Irish names across the country. That some of these lost no time in joining the Powell bandwagon was much to the chagrin of Gerry Fitt, Republican MP for Belfast West: “I am appalled that anyone of Irish extraction in Great Britain should ally themselves with the bigotry of Enoch Powell”; Irishmen ought to know “the evils of discrimination in the past, and which still occur

76

Olivier Esteves

in Tory Northern Ireland” (27 April 1968). In a similar vein, the Irish Times (4 May 1968) reported that, following a poll, an estimated two-thirds of the students from Queen’s University in Belfast supported Powell’s campaign, a tendency that was probably unique on British campuses at the time. It bears repeating that indeed campuses were AMONG the few places where Powell was clearly personae non grata.

Immigrant communities: low-profile attitude, resilience, agency The papers investigated for this chapter lay more stress on ethnic minority and immigrant militancy than on low-profile attitudes to life in Britain. There are probably different reasons for this. First, the Sikh turban controversy on Wolverhampton public transports was itself an immediate cause to Powell’s campaign (Feldman 2011, p. 281–283). The German Spiegel insisted on the way Sikh militancy locally was considered as a problem (29 April 1968). Second, some papers were keen to publish (because they made for great quotes) fiery declarations by some Sikh or West Indian militants. Third, “race relations” themselves are more often apprehended through the lens of actual issues to be addressed (competition for jobs, urban disturbances, strains on welfare services, discrimination) rather than as unproblematic, quotidian experiences that, too often, are deemed unnewsworthy. This is probably at the root of the concept of “race relations” in Britain as well as in the US (Cox 2009, p. 75–79). That circumstantial and structural slant notwithstanding, the Washington Post, for instance, lay particular stress on how West Indians, Pakistanis and Indians in Britain lacked any really effective voice. Most of these people were still immigrants and full of fear, insecure, overly concerned about not “making of fuss”. According to the American paper: “In this respect they resemble more the Mexican ‘wetback’ than any of our racial or ethnic minority groups” (20 June 1968). There were Black Power militants in Britain, but these were insignificant and only served to polarize ethnic minority opinion, who by and large had very little time for them. The Dutch Telegraaf published a long article on the grassroots situation in Wolverhampton a few weeks after Powell’s incendiary speech (17 May 1968). It underscored the city’s “efforts against the forming of ghettoes” and interviewed one Neil Prendergast, a Surinamese entrepreneur who owned a lemonade factory with a 70-person multiracial staff. The man was very proud that some 100,000 West Indians actually drank his lemonade and admitted to being “far too busy to be concerned with this whole business” about Powell. Urged further, he argued: “Personally I have never noticed any of all this.” To him, white and black staff worked together “in a brotherly fashion”. One white worker talked about an “irrational fear of coloured immigrants”; his “neighbours are Asian and West Indian and they are very decent folks”. This portrait of local, coloured businessman Prendergast gave the lie to stereotypes about immigrants as seeking work, stealing jobs or living off welfare help. Although it could always be

International press review: Powell moment

77

dismissed as the exception that proves the rule by Powell supporters, the article’s main asset was that it placed the focus on Wolverhampton’s day-to-day lived realities across some “racial divide”, which was being conjured into existence by certain political interests rather than a palpable reality experienced on the ground. Much more “insecure” and “full of fear” than minorities already living in England were those wishing to emigrate there. The French Le Monde laid stress in two lengthy articles (11 March 1970; 22 June 1970) on the plight of hundreds of would-be immigrants from Kenya and Uganda, African Asians, who were pushed to and fro across Europe, stranded in many airports as a direct result of the deleterious effects of Powell’s campaign on immigration policies (Schofield 2013). For the record, the number of new Commonwealth immigrants plummeted by about 35% from 1968 to 1969. A Le Monde journalist interviewed five African Asians who got help from Université de Vincennes to the east of Paris, a brand new “people’s campus” created in the wake of the 1968 May Rebellion. The French paper focused on the case of three Ugandan Asians, who were refused entry at Heathrow, sent back to Uganda, then transferred forcefully to Nairobi, then Madagascar, then Mauritius. From thence they flew back to London, were then expelled to Paris, then Amsterdam and, last, London, where they were finally accepted. It was estimated that there were 20 similar cases in Copenhagen, 22 in Belgrade, four in Sofia and 10 in Zagreb. The Le Monde articles illuminate the way Powell’s campaign was a hard-felt one not only among immigrants and ethnic minorities already in Britain, but also by these hundreds of people aiming at emigrating to the country. Because these individuals and families were their relatives, minorities present in Britain were vocal in criticizing such a state of affairs. One of the main activities of the Indian Workers Association, as well as its Pakistani counterpart, was to deal with visa and passport issues from the Indian subcontinent. Some of its leaders tried to get organized across ethnic and religious boundaries. One Mr Joshi, secretary of the IWA (UK)2 stressed one week after Powell’s speech that a “Black People’s Alliance” was being formed owing to the emergency situation experienced in Britain (Irish Times, 29 April 1968). Other papers reported vitriolic statements by immigrant leaders. The Irish Examiner quoted one N.S. Mangat from Ealing, who claimed that “the Enoch virus is a mutation of the dead Hitler virus” and that like Hitler it would disappear: “Enoch Powell has ended his political career”, confidently stated Mr Mangat (25 November 1968). Other immigrant leader statements drew from comparisons between ethnic clustering in Britain and in the US. The recurrent deploying of “America” as a foil whose racial violence and urban ghettoes were menacing “England’s green and pleasant land” (Melchow 2011, pp. 161–163) naturally elicited the curiosity of the New York Times. One article (29 April 1968) quoted the same secretary of the Indian Workers Association, Mr Joshi, who dismissed the use of violence outright but made it clear that they might be forced into adopting violence, “We are not the people who create Detroits. Detroits are forced

78

Olivier Esteves

upon us”, thereby reversing the responsibility of potential racial violence on the Powellites themselves rather than the immigrants and minorities. In another article, racial strife was, instead, apprehended as “a woeful legacy of empire”: “The British situation does not come close to that in the United States” (11 April 1969), be it in terms of racial hostility or in terms of ethnic minority militancy, which was, if anything, inchoate in Britain. Interviewed as he was relishing a curry in an Indian restaurant, the leader of the Black People’s Alliance which had organized the March for Dignity in January 1969 was also quoted as giving an ominous reminder of the post-colonial dimension of Powellism: “If Powell is right and rivers run with black people’s blood here, then rivers will certainly run with the blood of whites in the Caribbean, India, Africa and Pakistan – and we’ve got much, much bigger rivers” (Ibid.). Rhetorically pressured by Powell’s invectives and incensed by its concrete consequences in the form of racial violence, some immigrant leaders felt they were compelled to embrace US-imported “self-defence is no offence” slogans. It is very doubtful whether the bulk of Sikhs or of New Commonwealth immigrants at large readily identified with these.

Conclusion Like some British dailies, some of the European and American papers discussed in this chapter endeavoured to dispel certain myths that Powellites swallowed whole. Two deserve a mention. The first is the sense of being flooded by immigrants, the second is about the purview of the Race Relations Act (1968). Regarding the former, and as happened so frequently in the US, “the myths and stereotyped fears [seemed] to dominate”. The fact was that the “dark million” represented a paltry 2% of the population and yet “myth has it that the country is being flooded”, lamented Mr Segal in the Washington Post (20 June 1968). The much mediatized docker strike was a grotesque symptom of these fears. The same Mr Segal noted with dismay that angry dockers numbered about 28,000 in London, only four of whom were coloured workers. The Irish Times also duly noted that dockers and meat porters did not have jobs that were menaced by immigrant competition (26 April 1968). Unsurprisingly then, these people’s behaviour “must have shocked those who believed in the legend of the traditional fair mindedness of the British workingman” (Ibid.). Other articles (notably from the German and Dutch press) preferred to lay stress on how, in some constituencies, there was indeed a deep-seated feeling of being overwhelmed by immigrants, despite the paltry 2% (nationally) quoted above. Powell himself had tried to reap political benefits from this discrepancy, arguing as he did at the beginning of his Walsall speech (February 1968) that the plight of places such as Walsall was of no concern to the vast majority of Britons, for whom New Commonwealth immigration was completely unconnected to their lives. Powell had referred to the “sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response”.

International press review: Powell moment

79

The second myth drew less interest from international journalists but is nevertheless noteworthy. It has to do with the mythical scope of the Race Relations Bill, which was implemented after a 14-hour debate in the Commons, less than three months after Powell’s speech. According to the Washington Post, Wilson’s bill to limit discrimination in the field of housing and employment was “the true test of national decency” (23 April 1968). Many thousands of angry constituents certainly believed otherwise, arguing in their massive epistolary support to Powell that the Bill itself would, if implemented, sanction “reverse discrimination” in England. Such imaginings had been given free rein by Powell’s use of the “whip hand” metaphor allegedly mobilized by another constituent, which he avidly quoted. The Belgian newspaper Le Soir told a wholly different story in the wake of the Bill’s passing into law (11 July 1968). It insisted on the impracticability of the newly implemented legislation: indeed, what judge, what court would decide that a job or a lodging refused had been refused solely on the basis of racial criteria at the exclusion of everything else (better suitability of other applicants, etc.)? With hindsight, and with the number of Race Relations Acts replacing prior inefficient laws of the same name, it is extremely hard to argue against the Belgian newspaper. Despite that, Powell had been central in providing reverse discrimination arguments against the “race relations industry” and a white backlash common sense, which generations of (white) Britons would rally around in the years and decades to come.

Notes 1 In The Observer (28 April 1968), Ivan Bates also made a parallel between Powell and the French leader. 2 The IWA in Southall, the largest in the country, ran very much independently from the national headquarters.

References Archives Staffordshire Record Office, Powell papers, Letters in support (D 3123/16; D 3123/167) Staffordshire Record Office, Powell papers, Letters against (D 3123/109; D 3123/110).

Press archives Corriere de la Serra De Telegraaf De Volkskrant Die Zeit Gazette de Lausanne Journal de Genève La Stampa Le Monde

80

Olivier Esteves

Le Soir The Daily Telegraph The Guardian The Independent The Irish Examiner The Irish Times The New York Times The Times

Secondary sources Cox, O.C. (2009), “Race Relations”, in Back, L. and Solomos, J., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, London: Routledge. Esteves, O. (2018), The “Desegregation” of English Schools: Bussing, Race and Urban Space, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Feldman, D. (2011), “Why The English Like Turbans: Multicultural Politics in British History”, in Feldman, D, and Lawrence, J., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fortner, M.J. (2015), Black Silent Majority, The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hillman, N. (2008), “A ‘Chorus of Execration’? Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Forty Years On”, Patterns of Prejudice, 42(1), pp. 83–104. Husband, C. and Hartmann, P. (1974), Racism and the Mass Media, London: DavisPoynter. Melchow, H.L. (2011), Special Relations: The Americanization of Britain?, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Myers, K. (2015), Struggles for a Past: Irish and Afro-Caribbean Histories in England, 1951–2000, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Porion, S. and Kazin, M. (2017), “George Wallace and Enoch Powell: Comparing the Politics of Populist Conservatism in the USA and the UK”, in Berthezène C. and Vinel J.C. (eds.), Postwar Conservatism, A Transnational Investigation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ritscherle, A. (2005), Opting Out of Utopia: Race and Working-Class Political Culture in Britain during the Age of Decolonization, 1948–68”, University of Michigan, PhD dissertation. Robinson, V., Andersson, R. and Musterd, S. (2003), Spreading the Burden: A Review of Policies to Disperse Asylum Seekers and Refugees, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Russell, B. (2005 [1955–1957]), Détente or Distraction?, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Vol. 29), London: Routledge. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Souillac, R. (2007), Le mouvement Poujade. De la défense professionnelle au populisme nationaliste (1953–1962), Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Whipple, A. (2009), “Revisiting the ‘Rivers of Blood’ Controversy: Letters to Enoch Powell”, Journal of British Studies, 48(3), pp. 717–735.

5

The rise of the Runnymede Trust: Enoch Powell and the media wars Brett Bebber OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY, NORFOLK, VA

The origins of the longstanding race relations advocacy body called the Runnymede Trust lie partially in the political environment engendered by Enoch Powell’s polarizing series of speeches about Britain’s immigration policy and the country’s future race wars given in 1968 (Walsall speech in February, Birmingham speech in April and Eastbourne speech in November). As a key voice in the emerging field of British race relations in the 1960s, the Trust was created during Powell’s political moment and in its initial iteration constitutes an indirect legacy of that moment. Founded in the same year, Runnymede grew quickly from a small handful of staff into one of the most trusted sources of information on race relations, immigration and discrimination. By focusing on a wide range of initiatives –including public information, anti-discrimination legislation, media accountability on race relations and migration politics, and statistical interpretation and analysis – Runnymede established itself as a trusted, objective counterbalance to Powell’s anti-immigrant bombast in British newspapers and television. Tracing the creation of the Trust and the enterprising plans under first director Dipak Nandy offers a glimpse at the media conflicts and sociopolitical shifts experienced by those seeking to undermine and discredit Powell’s political rhetoric. Nandy’s quixotic leadership propelled Runnymede into an emerging race relations professional scene and established it as a central feature of the political landscape of race and immigration in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Undoubtedly, its earliest experiences and the form its initiatives took were directly shaped by Powell’s populism, especially his suggestions of a pending racial crisis and the “invading hordes” of migrants that purportedly threatened British society, as is argued in the introduction to this volume.

The genesis of Runnymede Founded in 1968, the Runnymede Trust emerged at a moment when racial tensions simmered and racial politics in Britain and elsewhere throbbed with intensity. As one Runnymede retrospective commented, 1968 “was a year crowded with events in the field of race relations – the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, the 1968 Race Relations Act, the Urban Programme, and

82

Brett Bebber

the first of a series of violent speeches by Enoch Powell all date from that year” (Stephen et al. 1974). Importantly, Runnymede emerged not only in the midst of polarizing political debates about race, migration and belonging, but also as many liberal race relations organizations and Labour politicians reached a tenuous consensus. As other scholars have demonstrated, the Race Relations Act and aspects of the Urban Programme acted as a counterweight to increasingly restrictive immigration policy (Saggar 1992, pp. 76–78; Dean 2000, pp. 259–283; Bleich 2003, pp. 46–48). As influential members of the liberal intelligentsia, and with high hopes of influencing Labour on race relations legislation, many of Runnymede’s trustees agreed with this “limitation-integration” equation and accepted as necessary the balance of proactively integrating existing Commonwealth migrants to Britain while supporting immigration law that actively prevented more from entering. Other flashpoints shaped Runnymede in its early period, including the 1970 general election (and the Tories’ surprising win), the 1971 Immigration Act, the 1968 and 1972 expulsions of Asians from East Africa (respectively, Kenya and then Uganda) and the addition of Britain to the European Economic Community in 1973, all of which tested Runnymede’s emerging framework of migrant advocacy. That Runnymede emphasized media accountability and information services as first practical measures meant that Powell’s outsized influence also wrought much of its initial profile. Runnymede’s beginnings can be traced to a number of interconnected threads in the emerging professional field of race relations work in the years before 1968. The two men most responsible for its organizational footing were Anthony Lester and Jim Rose, two early race relations professionals. Both had worked alongside the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), an important race relations research agency and with the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (NCCI), an early race relations organization with responsibility for establishing local community relations collectives and an emerging clearinghouse of information on migrant integration challenges. Rose came to the IRR after a career as an intelligence officer and as a former director of the International Press Institute, an organization to promote freedom of the press. His career in journalism and publishing coincided with his work at the IRR, where he served as the lead on the Survey of Race Relations, a massive five-year research project that aimed at a summative review of British race relations in the mould of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944). In 1968 Rose, along with his assistant Nicholas Deakin, were collating and finalizing the findings in the massive volume Colour and Citizenship. Alongside his IRR work, Rose chaired the Public Relations Panel of the NCCI, where his media capacity and strident liberalism helped champion responsibility in media reports on race and immigration. It was here that he met Dipak Nandy, who served as a local representative on the panel. With Rose at the helm in 1966, the panel agreed to “watch the general climate of opinion as expressed by the mass communications media and where possible take positive steps to improve treatment of relations between the immigrant and host communities in the press and broadcasting services” (NA/HO 231/16, NC/PR/66/1). Sanitized as their language could be, Rose set the initial undergirding for Runnymede’s later approach to media in place.

The rise of the Runnymede Trust

83

By 1968, Rose believed that challenging Powell’s run in the media was a top priority: “The Powell campaign, among its achievements, has created a climate of thought in which pretty well every factual statement about immigrants, from any authoritative source official or other, is politically highly charged.” Without proper contextualization in the press, the slapdash use of data and other fearmongering stories about the deleterious effects of New Commonwealth migration would be damaging: “If favourable [the statement or report] raises hackles and counter arguments. If unfavourable it inflames race prejudice further. The fuller the perspective in which factual developments are presented the less true this will be” (Rose and Leslie, undated). Rose felt that interested advocates, including those on the NCCI and its local committees, could cultivate relationships with local press and coordinate dayto-day fact sharing with reporting staff to improve the tenor of coverage of migrants’ communities and immigration policymaking. He warned that race relations campaigners “should not let hostile propaganda go unanswered whether it appears in the correspondence columns or in speeches reported in the paper” (NA/HO 231/16, NC/PR/66/5). Rose’s substantial imprint on Runnymede’s media sensibilities and attentiveness to press coverage of migrants and immigration would establish media accountability as a first initiative of the organization. A second key influence, Anthony Lester, remained one of the most influential race relations legal experts in Britain. He had served as Legal Secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), an umbrella group of ethnic organizations mobilized after Martin Luther King, Jr’s visit to the United Kingdom in 1964. As CARD disintegrated due to internal conflicts, Lester continued his work with the Legal and Welfare Panel of the NCCI, the Fabian Society and the Labour Party (Perry 2016, Chap. 6). His chief aim was to construct diligent and complete anti-discrimination law patterned after statutory commissions in the United States and Canada and to convince Labour of its necessity. Having been central to the push for the 1965 and 1968s Race Relations Acts, he worked extensively with CARD to collect evidence that discrimination was widespread throughout employment, education and housing. Lester’s extensive experience in America conditioned his commitment to legislation as a necessary requirement of anti-discrimination and anti-racist action. He took a law degree at Harvard in 1962 and spent the summer of 1964 among the activists in the Mississippi Summer Project, interviewing both civil rights lawyers and white supremacists as part of an Amnesty International project on race in the American south (Lester 1965). In 1967 he wrote, “there is very little time left in which to shape the future of race relations in Britain … a laissez faire approach to race relations, although politically expedient in the short term, would ultimately be disastrous” (Lester and Deakin 1967, p. 1). He added: “The recent experience of the United States and Canada indicates that law can have a powerful and benign effect in discouraging discrimination and promoting racial equality. As a direct result of the Civil Rights Act 1964, the

84

Brett Bebber

cake of custom has been broken in Mississippi and Alabama” (Lester and Deakin 1967, pp. 6–7). With Lester’s consultation, much of the UK’s 1968 Act would be shaped by American and Canadian ideas, structures, and with American consultation (Bleich 2003, Chap. 3; Bebber 2018). As a central influence in Runnymede’s founding, American comparisons to British race relations and strong government lobbying would be part of its modus operandi. As one later director of Runnymede recalled, its founders “were much encouraged and influenced by what had been happening in the United States” (Dummett 1987, p. 89). Runnymede’s attempts to popularize and justify antidiscrimination legislation also endeavoured to undermine the arguments about “reverse discrimination” promoted by many of Powell’s constituents, who saw the Race Relations Act not only as unnecessary, but also damaging to the livelihoods of white Britons (see Olivier Esteves’ contribution to this volume). Dipak Nandy, the first director, proved a third important contributor. Born to a bourgeois family in India in 1937, Nandy came to England in 1956 to pursue a university degree. He began a PhD in English literature at the University of Leeds in 1960, but was pleasantly distracted by lectures in physics, maths, philosophy and music. A proper polymath, Nandy’s extracurricular learning occurred in the migrant communities of Leeds: “It was there that I discovered the extent of the racial problems in England” (interview with Brett Bebber, 2015). He assembled an Afro-Asian Society at Leeds that “belonged to the broad, united front approach – take the problem which you are facing, gather as many allies from as many sectors as you could.” In 1962 he took an academic post at the University of Leicester and shortly founded the Leicester Campaign for Racial Equality (LCRE) that like the Afro-Asian Society, identified pubs and clubs that operated a colour bar. Like Lester and other CARD leadership, Nandy aimed to collect concrete evidence of racial discrimination in public places to demonstrate the need for local police and state intervention. Despite the relative growth of organizations interested in British race relations by the mid-1960s, Rose, Deakin, Lester and Nandy created Runnymede not only to counter Powell’s influence on the media, but also because the internal dynamics at CARD and the decline in influence of the NCCI created a space in the emerging race relations professional field that they aimed to fill. As Kennetta Perry’s trenchant history of CARD detailed, intra-class and intra-ethnic rifts emerged between a leadership of middle-class intellectuals and professionals like Nandy and Lester and those who wanted grassroots participatory democracy that focused on mobilizing South Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities and rejecting bourgeois liberalism (Perry 2016, pp. 212–215). More militant activists eventually resented that Lester became the face of CARD during discussions about race relations legislation. From Lester’s perspective, CARD “was taken over by a rather unsightly coalition of Maoists, Trotskyites, [and] Stalinists, acting in a completely unscrupulous way” (ROHP, BL, C1334/01). A clear division emerged between predominantly white bourgeois liberals seeking political influence and a working-class coalition whose immediate social and economic interests proved unequivocal and central to their activism. In the same

The rise of the Runnymede Trust

85

contentious period, members of CARD and the West Indian Standing Conference (WISC) proposed a boycott of NCCI because of its links to a disappointing Labour administration and its slow progress, and perceived regression, on racial justice. At CARD’s national convention in November 1967, members of WISC resolved to remove “white do-gooders” from CARD’s leadership and the organization embraced emerging Black Power ideas that leaned towards explicitly pro-black mobilization, international anti-imperialism and confrontational political strategies (Perry 2016, pp. 238–241). On the very same weekend as CARD’s conference, where a majority vote carried the organization into this new territory, Nandy returned to a meeting of several race relations professionals at Ditchley Park (Oxfordshire) to discuss the founding of Runnymede as an alternative organization. Lester had organized a conference on racial discrimination in employment and many of the white liberals involved in race relations work were present. He and Nandy delivered the news to their circle of professionals. Together, they floated the idea of establishing an anti-discrimination organization that could carry on anti-discrimination work, in a variety of ways, from their unified, liberal perspective. “Anthony, Jim Rose, Nicholas Deakin, Philip Mason – the director of the Institute of Race Relations – and I were there”, remembered Nandy. “We went for a long walk in the snow, and went round and round the grounds. And looking back now, I realize that the object was to rope me into run the thing” (ROHP, BL, C1334/11). He said: “From that Ditchley Park meeting, that was when Runnymede was conceived” (interview with Brett Bebber, 2015). Over the next six months, Lester and Rose put together a bipartisan leadership marked by middle-class and elite liberal representatives of race relations work in Britain. These trustees included people with political access and clout, including conservative MP Edward Boyle, chocolatier and businessman Adrian Cadbury, Jock Campbell – the Chairman of Booker-McConnell and man with colonial interests and influence at the IRR – and Peter Medawar, a Nobel laureate in physiology and naturalized British citizen. A board of advisors with specialized expertise had more influence on the day-to-day work: Lester, Rose, Deakin, Race Relations Board legal advisor Geoffrey Bindman and advertising executive Clem Leslie. Lester thought it “a group of extraordinary enlightened people who could see the way the land was going”, and one sensitive to the new frontiers presented by Powell’s manoeuvres (ROHP, BL, C1334/01). But beyond Nandy, it had “relatively few minority people in its real leadership” (ROHP, BL, C1334/10). Frightened by their experience at CARD, the organization would generally aim to be inclusive of all anti-discrimination and anti-racist advocates from any party, but Lester proactively established the body as a trust with no membership, “so that it couldn’t be taken over in the way that CARD had done” (ROHP, BL, C1334/ 01). Its initial funding came from both sides of the Atlantic due to Lester and Rose’s international connections. The New World Foundation of New York, the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust (UK) and the Hilden Trust (UK) all

86

Brett Bebber

provided money and the IRR offered offices for the first six months. The trust would firmly represent the entrenched liberal progressive approach to race relations that supported the state’s efforts to promote integration and fight discrimination – importantly, within the context of racist immigration restriction – but avoided the radical left and Black Power approaches its members considered counterproductive. Naming it after the field in which the Magna Carta was sealed reflected this broad British appeal. As David Stephens, a deputy under Nandy, recalled: “If it was called the ‘Campaign Against Racism’ or something it would put off certain elements. Calling it the Runnymede Trust gives it the prestige or the cache it wouldn’t otherwise have” (ROHP, BL, C1334/12). Nandy reluctantly left his academic post in the summer of 1968 to prepare for a start date in October, at a time when Powell’s vitriolic rhetoric had initiated a political storm about the state of British migration, citizenship and race relations. Yet the exact contours of Runnymede’s work were just taking shape. Lester used Runnymede’s emerging cache to extend his influence on anti-discrimination legislation and encouraged Nandy to educate the public to favour the Race Relations Act in spite of Powell’s objections. To Lester, Runnymede could be “independent, objective, authoritative, and a combination of an expert think tank and public education body” (ROHP, BL, C1334/01). He actively sought to follow the model of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith in the United States, which aimed to counter anti-Semitic propaganda. He also had connections with the Potomac Institute in Washington, DC, which lobbied for civil rights by strategically building political relationships. The trustees presented Runnymede as a globally aware public policy influence, which ultimately bolstered its credibility and legitimacy. Jim Rose brought his influence from the Press Institute and publishing to bear and used Runnymede to fight the media battles that Powell seemed to be winning. He charged Nandy with engaging the press and challenging its predominantly negative tropes in discussing migration, deportation, crime and policing, and race relations. In particular, Rose wanted the organization to refute the misleading and ill-cited facts that fuelled Powell’s arguments. Nandy recollected those early conversations with Jim Rose: “We had been talking about the need for someone to contradict, what is nowadays called ‘instant rebuttal’ … I was a pioneer of instant rebuttal. That was my job.” Rose charged him to “get a rebuttal out to Fleet Street tomorrow” when Powell spoke. Within weeks, “all the centre-left press sent me copies of Enoch’s speeches and wanted my instant rebuttal” to print in the evening or next morning’s editions (interview with Brett Bebber 2015). Nicholas Deakin also felt that while the other emerging semi-statutory bodies, the Race Relations Board and the Community Relations Commission, each had well-defined responsibilities, there was no liberal voice countering Powell in the media. “We didn’t have an organization that would deal effectively with rumour and prejudice. That became clear in 1968 with Enoch Powell … We needed an organization that would provide instant information

The rise of the Runnymede Trust

87

of an objective kind that could be injected into the debate and used to counter this kind of rumour and exaggeration and scaremongering of the kind Powell was engaged in. That was what the Runnymede Trust was invented to do” (ROHP, BL, C1334/06). Later director Usha Prashar’s understanding of the organization’s founding was similar: “It was set up in response to the hysteria based on Enoch Powell’s speech. It was to get accurate information out based on evidence and to really enhance its credibility, to position the issues within the broader context of social policy” (ROHP, BL, C1334/05). Anthony Lester agreed: “During a really bad time in race relations it acted as an influential counter-propaganda body in nailing the lies that were being put out” (ROHP, BL, C1334/01). Born in the summer of 1968, refuting Powell’s ersatz claims about migration and belonging became a high priority at Runnymede, flanked by other prospective initiatives that would establish credibility and objectivity in race relations work.

A new organization in action Wedding these multiple agendas – countering Powell in the public sphere, engaging in public education, promoting anti-discrimination legislation and building a united front against racist rhetoric – required a lot of work from the staff, regardless of the trustees’ visions. Nandy faced the practical task of establishing a programme and identifying achievable goals to reset the contours of the public debate on migration and belonging in the wake of Powell’s speeches. In early 1969, Nandy conceded that “the general atmosphere of race relations has been steadily worsening and public opinion now is probably more hostile towards coloured immigrants than ever before.” Powell had contorted the public conversation, setting the terms so that “the real issue underlying the debate is whether coloured people have any right to be here at all, and whether in consequence they have any claim whatever to our sympathy or consideration.” Any agenda, then, should not “encourage or reinforce the prevalent view of coloured people as ‘problems’ to English society”. Neither should Runnymede be in the business of “remedial programmes” that emphasize “that if only all coloured immigrants could be brought up to certain (unspecified) British specifications, then all will be well in race relations.” This work was best left to the Community Relations Commission, which could assume the “double risk” of alienating migrant communities because of a perceived “paternalist approach and of reinforcing such paternalism as exists among whites” (Runnymede Trust March 1969). Runnymede must move beyond the “multiracial tea parties” that sustained the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants: “We should be prepared to experiment with other, perhaps more devious, approaches to the multi-racial ideal.” For him, Powell’s success in making migrants into problems and race relations into a sullied, impossible idealism demanded a response that was experimental and cutting.

88

Brett Bebber

Nandy’s prospectus for Runnymede, then, went beyond Rose and Lester’s original aims and well beyond a plan for merely providing instant rebuttal to Powell. Based on his reading of the social landscape, he saw an “immediate and urgent need” for “positive education and propaganda in race relations from a body capable of having an important effect on public attitudes and behaviour”. The Trust’s core concept became “the provision of information and the promotion of public education on race relations” (Nandy 1968). Beyond fighting the immediate daily media battles and influencing long-term policymaking, the Trust would undertake experimental instruction on sensitivity and practical integration in businesses, companies, trade unions and journalism. In sum, it wanted not only to undermine Powell, it also wanted to make the public less susceptible to his messages. Over its first five years, Runnymede attempted to convince key figures in industry, education, housing and media by providing simple information such as codes of conduct for hiring and training migrants or examples of subtle exclusion and racisms in unions and press publications. It targeted the leadership of ethnic organizations to get involved and spent a vast majority of its budget on programmes for personnel managers, trade union schools, technical colleges and adult education centres. One Runnymede voice suggested that in conducting training: “We must avoid an organizational structure in which the participants are split up into the enlightened preachers on the one side and the unregenerate on the other.” It added: “We have to adopt a practical, nuts-and-bolts approach” that avoided generalities and linked their training to “the day-to-day working experiences of our audiences” (Ibid.). Short-term research, which could highlight the experiences of migrants in British life and relate directly to policymaking and education initiatives, also became a key feature of their early work. One of the central shifts in race relations thinking that Runnymede’s founding reflects is the attention to educating the native, predominantly white population rather than expecting or pursuing the assimilation of the migrant population. While earlier NCCI and local authority methods emphasized the absorption of migrants into British culture, Runnymede was born of professionals whose language centred on achieving equal opportunity and proactive integration by negating native prejudice. Its attention to the press and engaging Powell and others’ demonizations of criminal migrants led to a more nuanced appreciation of language and concepts in the developing rhetoric of battles in the public sphere. In choosing to pioneer public education and sensitivity training in race relations, Nandy argued that “at least as much emphasis has to be placed on the education of majorities as of minorities, and programmes for the reduction of prejudice.” He added that when terms like “‘hordes’, ‘flood’ and ‘invasion’ become common currency” not only do migrants become the so-called “problem”, but: [T]he only appropriate solution will be seen to lie in the ever more stringent controls (with all the attendant hysteria over “evasions”). It has also to be admitted that the term “immigrant” is to some extent a code-word (very like the phrase “law and order” in the United States). It excludes

The rise of the Runnymede Trust

89

these people from full consideration as citizens of this country entitled to the whole range of rights enjoyed by all citizens as such, and there is a dangerously easy shift from discussion of controls to talk of “repatriation”. The effect on the coloured community is to increase their sense of rejection, isolation and bitterness, and to turn them further inwards upon themselves. (Runnymede Trust 15 January 1969) Both training and media interaction required consideration of the use of keywords and potentially damaging racial language, a message Runnymede hoped its trainees would learn. Runnymede exposed that continuing to parrot the terms present in anti-immigrant idioms allowed native Britons to project migrants as external to British life and to imagine them as problems rather than citizens.

The media wars In the immediate context of 1968 and 1969, training journalists and holding the media accountable for the debilitating tenor of their coverage of migrants proved central to this mission. Preventing Powell from dominating headlines not only required providing the right information but encouraging the press to present the news differently. Rose and Deakin argued in Colour and Citizenship that the media had developed an insatiable appetite for stories about race and immigration and that editors often purposefully enflamed the prejudices of their reading public. This tendency proved especially evident in stories about crime and violence, as well as in television discussion programmes that turned into “gladiatorial shows” between those with extreme positions on either side of the immigration debate. They said: “We are not suggesting that there should not be free discussion on matters of public importance but that there are ways of promoting discussion without giving prominence to expressions of irrational prejudice” (Rose 1969, p. 744). Nandy ensured that Runnymede would explore this dynamic. He accepted that Runnymede could not waste time battling conservative editors whose coverage of migrants “has largely been characterised by sheer malevolence and ill-will” or those who featured Powell as a heroic populist. Instead, Runnymede’s watchdogging should be focused on self-declared neutral papers and broadcasters who unwittingly introduced coded language and racialized meanings into their reporting. He was particularly frustrated with the BBC, a body he perceived as deeming that: “Race is news only when heads are being broken, not otherwise.” He added that: “In consequence, people who may themselves have had no experience of coloured people as workmates or neighbours or acquaintances came to perceive race relations as a perennially explosive and unpleasant issue.” Irresponsible headlines or sensationalized television “may well contribute to a view of coloured people as at best irritants in the social body and at worst people who are constantly associated with problems, tensions and riots”. (Nandy, undated (1969?)) This awareness

90

Brett Bebber

was especially important given the increasing role of mass media communication in democratic societies. As one of the short-term research projects, he proposed a study of recent coverage of immigration to help reconfigure the “philosophical vision of the place and role of the press in modern society”, especially in regards to improving race relations (Ibid.). The resulting publication provides an excellent aperture onto how Runnymede called for drastic shifts in the coverage of migration, race and social integration in the wake of Powell’s populism. Race and the Press: Four Essays included the study carried out by the Assistant Editor of the Sunday Times Hugo Young and other essays by Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, Telegraph and Argus (Bradford) editor Peter Harland and Express and Star (Wolverhampton) editor Clement Jones, whose son gives personal insight into this question in his chapter of this volume. Each considered the multifaceted difficulties of selecting stories and headlines, deciding on the use of racial identifiers when discussing subjects and selecting letters to the editor for publication. Evans and Young advocated that though papers aim to be neutral, race relations stories must be given special consideration. Young wrote: “Racial stories are news, fundamentally, because they are thought to reflect a general problem. Many events are felt to be newsworthy which, if they did not ostensibly have a racial dimension, would simply not be news. Street brawls, overcrowding, rowdy behaviour, employment disputes, housing difficulties – these are among the stories commonly found in this category.” He suggested “they would not be in the papers … if they did not contain a racial aspect” (Race and the Press 1971, p. 31). Therefore papers must avoid journalistic neutrality in favour of journalistic objectivity. To the editors, neutrality “implies a professional indifference to the underlying meaning of the facts” and therefore ignores any sense of responsibility for how they are displayed or positioned. “Objectivity, on the other hand, is a more positive virtue. It does not demand indifference, nor is it necessarily vitiated by the fact that the writer writes from some basic conviction.” Instead, “the desirable commitment is simply a commitment to good race relations – a positive acknowledgement that racial coverage can directly affect race relations, and a positive determination to avoid unnecessary damage.” Evans proposed a code of conduct for editors that assumed this principled purpose. He recognized that Powell’s “tiger of racial fear has been fed with an ever-tighter control of coloured immigration and lately it has been demanding the real red meat of repatriation. The Press has played a crucial part in this” (Race and the Press 1971, p. 45). Built in consultation with the Press Association of Asia and after review of the United States’ Kerner Commission’s commentary on press coverage of racial violence in America, Evans’ recommended code of conduct aimed to change that dynamic by providing general guidelines for supporting objectivity.1 In sum, it suggested deliberate attempts “to break false stereotypes by publication of stories that run counter to common prejudice”, employing staff who know migrant languages, using “cool and moderate language” in headlines and descriptions of racial stories, and denying the right to print or

The rise of the Runnymede Trust

91

broadcast rumour. It even advised that competing papers should “meet to discuss a common period of delay for checking first reports of apparently racial violence” and that fact checking should be mandated (Race and the Press 1971, pp. 54–59). Evans, who regularly worked closely with Runnymede, emphasized the last point to hold Powell’s exaggeration to task. Evans’ chief complaint was “the way racial stories tend to be reported against only the flimsiest background of verifiable fact. Fact is stretched into fantasy” (Race and the Press 1971, p. 49). Avoiding this difficulty became particularly challenging when the press apparently needed to report what Powell said in his speeches, even if “Mr. Powell’s emotive language and inflammatory use of statistics” gave many editors no joy. Rather than allowing Powell “to supply his view of the figures [while] a grateful Press lapped them up”, Evans proposed that “the duty was to present the news squarely and soberly and not to build up sensationalism by sensational treatment … to check what could be checked and to set out separately and coolly the nearest assessment one could make of the validity of Mr. Powell’s assertions” (Race and the Press 1971, p. 52). This proposed objectivity also rejected a press that provided refuge for the “Polyanna-ish propaganda of extreme liberalism, in putting a comforting shine on genuine racial problems” (Race and the Press 1971, p. 51). The news, Evans thought, could maintain its credibility and commitment to truth telling in stories about race and race relations not only by conveying the thoughts of their subjects, but by checking their accuracy. Clement Jones, whose paper covered Powell’s home district in Wolverhampton, stated his position more bluntly: “If you choose to descend to the level of the gutter in what you publish or say in public, you should expect the worst kind of reaction from your readers … To perpetuate colour prejudice through our papers is anti-social, and well-nigh criminal” (Race and the Press 1971, p. 13). Runnymede issued the volume of essays and the code of conduct and built a longlasting relationship with Evans and Young. Both editors encouraged many reporters to fact-check race and immigration statistics with Runnymede, and Runnymede borrowed their credibility in training and other attempts to shift press coverage towards objectivity. Another of Runnymede’s strategies in these ongoing media wars was to undermine the concept that the idea of “hordes” or “waves” of “invaders” – terms consistently used by Powell and his like – were backed by solid statistical evidence. In particular, Nandy understood the number of New Commonwealth migrants to be fewer than his adversaries suggested and wanted to put the onus of proving an untenable number onto the opposition. Runnymede took particular gumption with Powell’s poorly evidenced forecast of the millions and millions of migrants to come. In his first week on the job, Nandy remembered feeling utter disbelief at Powell’s arbitrary calculations for the future: “He was making population projections. When I saw that, I thought it was insane rubbish … I dashed off a paper saying: ‘Mr. Powell has all the gestures but none of the substance of true scholarship.’ It really sent him through the roof!” (interview with Brett Bebber 2015). At the time, Runnymede associates constantly reiterated that, “facts and statistics seldom declare their meanings by themselves.

92

Brett Bebber

They have to be interpreted” (Runnymede Trust 15 January 1969). To Runnymede, Powell’s tactic of citing inflated numbers of migrants and situating them as more than what Britain could accommodate needed to be undermined. To do so, Runnymede produced a series of briefing papers spread widely to the media that chased down inaccuracies in Powell’s demographic sources. Nandy also ensured that the media had the most up-to-date statistical data, much of which of which he collated himself. In June 1969 in Wolverhampton, Powell cited a BBC Opinion Research Centre poll of Commonwealth migrants about their thoughts on re-emigrating and used the idea that 38% eventually wanted to return home as support for a twisted argument that many migrants supported his repatriation scheme. He gambled by citing other anecdotal evidence from the Wolverhampton Community Relations Commission and journalist Claire Hollingworth to suggest that voluntary assisted repatriation was in the best interests of migrant families. Nandy’s subsequent briefing shows him at his nitpicking best. He analysed Powell’s evidence line by line in cracking precision. He noted that the BBC researchers reported the findings with heavy reservations about a high non-response rate, a small sample size and the use of white interviewers to potentially influence answers. He also demonstrated that both Hollingworth and the Wolverhampton officials believed many potential repatriates considered the option because of substantial apprehension caused by Powell’s speeches. He went on to cite an alternative study with credible methods in Manchester that found 90% of New Commonwealth migrants planned to make the city their permanent home (Runnymede Trust, 11 June 1969). Nandy also attacked Powell’s provocative 1968 estimate that 5–7 million migrants of colour could be expected by 2001. He noted that: “What is chiefly impressive about this speech is the arrogance and the blindness to facts of Mr. Powell himself”, Nandy issued credible professional estimates of 3.5 million, taking account of non-permanent settlers and British-born black children as citizens. Despite Nandy’s attention to numerical details, he concluded: “It should be clear that the numbers involved are neither here nor there. No amount of factual correction will change Mr. Powell’s view of the matter. However many coloured people there are in Britain, there will probably always be too many for him” (Runnymede Trust 9 June 1969). Nonetheless, the briefing papers proved a quick and media-friendly counteraction to Powell’s grandstanding, a fact check that also undermined the practical logic of voluntary assisted repatriation. To further undermine Powell’s indiscriminate use of statistical data, Runnymede intended to make plain how the immigration numbers regularly cited by the media should be generated. Nandy distributed a pamphlet titled “How to Calculate Immigration Statistics”, which laid out how his office came to their own conclusive numbers using data collated by the Home Office, Board of Trade surveys and the General Register Office. In it, Nandy stated: “There can be no rational discussion of immigration policies, let alone rational policies on this question if immigration statistics are miscalculated or misunderstood” (Nandy 1970, p. 1). His formula aimed to account for the net balance of migration, given both immigration and

The rise of the Runnymede Trust

93

emigration, and to differentiate itinerant labourers and visitors from permanent settlers. Importantly, Runnymede’s statistics made a clear separation between “coloured migrants” and others in effort to pinpoint the number of migrants Powell’s political rhetoric specifically vilified. This required special attention to documented voucher holders, those with Commonwealth and colonial passports and dependants entering within contemporary migration law to get an estimate of “coloured” newcomers (Runnymede Trust 1972). It also required omitting all migrants from the so-called “white dominions”, including Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Essentially, this demographic sought to figure out how many people with dark skin were coming or going without having any form of data that asked for self-identification. Such a fickle undertaking highlighted the way in which Runnymede allowed anti-immigration tropes to determine the statistical categories. Nandy and subsequent statisticians aimed to make a clear determination of the number of migrants to Britain – and usually landed on much smaller numbers than those quoted by others – by using skin colour and place of origin as primary categories specifically to counter Powell and other Conservatives’ overestimations. Unfortunately, in this case, providing objectivity to a public debate meant adopting the basic assumptions of Powell’s argumentation: people living in Britain should be categorized by phenotype, and a lower final number of “coloured migrants” would be better for harmonious race relations. Nonetheless, from 1970, representatives from the Community Relations Commission, the Institute of Race Relations, the Race Relations Board and Runnymede cooperated on a fluid strategy to finalize criteria for counting who they wanted to count. Furthermore, they hoped to use those statistics positively rather than as a weapon that promoted fear. Without any existing attempt to survey migrant communities, the group agreed that in the future: “Statistics were an important tool of management which could be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of policies designed to reduce discriminatory practices and promote the integration of the coloured communities. They were also of vital importance in showing the fallacies lying behind many of the destructive myths about immigrants and coloured people” (Working Party on Statistics 1971). When framed properly, statistics generated over time about housing and employment might highlight integration successes in addition to charting discrimination. “Upon such collection depends the successful carrying out and development of positive policies designed to ensure equality of opportunity in all fields of activity” (Working Party on Statistics 1970). But Runnymede and other race relations thinkers ran into the same difficulties fracturing many discussions of racial determination. As a social and legal construct, determining “race” or who qualified as a “coloured migrant” was fraught with ontological, categorical and statistical challenges, making it very difficult to find the right statistics with which to counter anti-immigration advocates’ loose use of inflated numbers. After these initial forays, Runnymede delegated their future statistical projects to professional statisticians, especially as race relations questions began to capture the attention of more academic fields. The census of 1971 also offered new mathematical data to massage. The Trust sponsored the Runnymede Census

94

Brett Bebber

Analysis Project and asked Gillian Lomas of the Centre for Environmental Studies to produce acute statistical reports in a series entitled The Coloured Population of Great Britain. In an opening salvo to the series, Nandy criticized the “inspired guesswork” of policymakers’ use of statistics and hoped that Lomas’ deeper dive would “limit the extent of the disagreement on possible and relevant policies” about migration (Lomas 1973). Lomas’ work furthered Runnymede’s goals by working specifically with the data on places where migrants often settled, including Manchester, Bradford, Leicester and Wolverhampton (Lomas 1975). Others undermined the modernist suppositions of demography and played with the relationship between scientific information, fearmongering, and policymaking. Runnymede worked closely with D.E.C. Eversley, whose work challenged the idea that because Britain’s immigration law allowed dependants and children to join males who settled before 1962, Britain’s Asian and Afro-Caribbean population would soar given the birth rates of those countries. Paying closer attention to sex, age, marital composition and reproductive habits allowed Eversley to more accurately predict incoming dependants as far less than the tens of millions prognosticated by some (Eversley 1973). This tradition of reassessment of basic statistical assumptions, and the willingness to scrutinize the use of statistics by anxious policymakers continued at Runnymede into the 1980s (Runnymede Trust/Radical Statistics Race Group 1980).

Conclusion The Runnymede Trust – borne predominantly of the visions of Anthony Lester, Jim Rose, and Dipak Nandy – established itself as a chief player in antidiscrimination advocacy by the early 1970s. It melded several different agency priorities – the promotion of anti-discrimination legislation, media accountability, public education of workers and managers, and pioneering work on immigrant statistics – in an attempt to negate the influence of Enoch Powell on the media and the prominent position he assumed in speaking on race and immigration policy. Although shaped by the emerging race relations field and its emphasis on policymaking, Runnymede also considered battling Powellite rhetoric an important initial strategic initiative. Its early leadership cast Runnymede as a necessary addition to the emerging race relations scene and found a niche by focusing on the coverage of race and migration in the press, as well as the production of reliable statistics on immigration to undermine Powell’s use of exaggerated numbers. In the end, Runnymede’s initial programme not only undermined Powell’s legitimacy in the media, but also hoped to re-educate his audience.

Note 1 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission after its chair Governor Otto Kerner, Jr., of Illinois, investigated the causes of recent rioting in African American and Latino neighbourhoods in the United States (Watts in Los Angeles, Division Street in Chicago, Newark). The report sharply criticized the adoption of a white perspective by the media.

The rise of the Runnymede Trust

95

References Primary sources Black Cultural Archives (Brixton) Nandy, D. (14 June 1968), “The Scope of the Runnymede Trust: Prospects and Proposals”, 14 June 1968, in Runnymede Collection (hereafter RMEDE), RC/RF/4/07, folder J. Nandy, D. (undated, 1969?), “Race and the British Press, 1956–1968”, RMEDE RC/ RF/24/2, folder A. Rose, E. J. B. and Leslie, S. C. (undated), “An Official Information Policy on Race Relations” RMEDE, RC/RF/4/02/A. Runnymede Trust (March 1969), “Beyond Legislation”, RMEDE, RC/RF/4/07, folder J. Runnymede Trust (9 June 1969), “Immigration and Repatriation: Some Comments”, RMEDE, RC/RF/4/07, folder J. Runnymede Trust (11 June 1969), “Immigration and Repatriation: Briefing Paper No. 2”, RMEDE, RC/RF/4/07, folder J. Stephen, D. et al. (1974), “The Runnymede Trust, 1968–1974,” May 1974, RMEDE, RC/RF/4/07, folder J.

British Library Deakin, N., Runnymede Oral History Project (hereafter ROHP), interviewed by Kjartan Sveinsson, 16 October 2008, C1334/06. Lester, A., ROHP, interviewed by Sarah Isal, 30 September 2008, C1334/01. Nandy, D., ROHP, interviewed by Michelynn Lafleche, 21 February 2009, C1334/11. Phillips, Sir T., ROHP, interviewed by Rob Berkeley, 7 April 2009, C1334/12. Prashar, U., ROHP, interviewed by Michelynn Lafleche, 8 October 2008, C1334/05. Stephens, David, ROHP, interviewed by Kjartan Sveinsson, 19 November 2008, C1334/10.

Interview Nandy, D. 17 May 2015, Nottingham.

Manchester Central Library Runnymede Trust, “Immigration and Race Relations in the United Kingdom: Background Information,” 15 January 1969, in Bernard Langton Papers, M784/7, folder 12.

National Archives (Kew) NCCI Public Relations Panel, Meeting Minutes, 10 May 1966, HO231/16, NC/PR/66/1. NCCI Public Relations Panel, “Some Notes for Guidance on Relations with the Local Press,” 1966, HO231/16, NC/PR/66/5. Working Party on Statistics, First Report, 23 September 1970, CK2/242, CRC/WPS 70/3, 3. Working Party on Statistics, Meeting Minutes, 9 February 1971, CK 2/242, CRC/WPS 71/1.

Secondary sources Bebber, B. (2018), “‘Standard Transatlantic Practice’: Race Relations and Antidiscrimination Law Across the Atlantic”, Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 4(1), pp. 5–36.

96

Brett Bebber

Bleich, E. (2003), Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking Since the 1960s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dean, D. (2000), “The Race Relations Policy of the First Wilson Government”, Twentieth Century British History, 11(3), pp. 259–283. Dummett, A. (Autumn 1987), “The Runnymede Trust, 1968–1987”, New Community, 14(1/2), p. 89. Eversley, D.E.C. (1973), A Question of Numbers?, London: Runnymede Trust. Lester, A. (1965), Justice in the American South, London: Amnesty International. Lester, A. (1967), “The Need for Legislation”, Fabian Research Series: Policies for Racial Equality, 262, July, pp. 6–7. Lester, A. and Deakin, N. (1967), “Introduction”, Fabian Research Series: Policies for Racial Equality, 262, July. Lomas, G.B.G. (1973), Census 1971: The Coloured Population of Great Britain, Preliminary Report, London: Runnymede Trust. Lomas, G.B.G. (1975), The Coloured Population of Great Britain, A Comparative Study of Coloured Households in Four County Boroughs, London: Runnymede Trust. Nandy, D. (1970), How to Calculate Immigration Statistics, London: Runnymede Trust. Perry, K.H. (2016), London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and The Politics of Race, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Race and the Press: Four Essays (1971), London: Runnymede Trust. Rose, E.J.B (ed.) (1969), Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations, London: Institute of Race Relations. Runnymede Trust (1972), Immigration and Settlement, 1963–1971, London: Runnymede Trust. Runnymede Trust/Radical Statistics Race Group (1980), Britain’s Black Population, London: Heinemann. Saggar, S. (1992), Race and Politics in Britain, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

6

Enoch Powell, British nationality and the Irish question, 1968–1987 David C. Shiels WOLFSON COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

For almost 13 years, between October 1974 and 1987, Enoch Powell served as the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) member of parliament for South Down.1 At the time of his decision to seek the UUP nomination in mid-1974, Powell had just passed the peak of his political influence, but he remained a prominent figure on the national political stage. To many observers at the time, his interest in Northern Ireland politics was seen as idiosyncratic and his journey into Ulster politics an example of his refusal to play by the normal rules of the political game. It was a decision which served to further isolate him from the mainstream of national politics, while also confirming an unfavourable impression of the Ulster Unionists on the mainland. The man once spoken of as a potential prime minister (whether seriously or otherwise) had now left the political arena. As the journalist Max Hastings wrote in the Evening Standard, had Powell remained a member of the Conservative Party “he could probably have had its leadership. But the series of miscalculations that began a year ago with his vote for the Labour Party in the February Election has now left him crowing on the dunghill of Ulster with [Ulster Unionist leaders] Mr William Craig and Rev. Ian Paisley” (20 January 1975). Powell’s interest in Northern Ireland, and reactions to it, reveal much about British attitudes towards Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is significant that Powell was the only Cabinet-ranking politician in the era of the Troubles who became directly involved in the local politics of the province. It is true that many Westminster politicians – particularly prime ministers and secretaries of state for Northern Ireland – became intimately acquainted with the issue during that time and there were other politicians from Great Britain who identified with either a pro-Unionist or pro-Nationalist point of view. But no other national politician made the leap to become directly involved in the electoral battles there.2 Always thought to be an “outsider” in Northern Ireland (Belfast Telegraph, 13 December 1974), Powell did not see the conflict in sectarian terms. As he explained shortly after losing his seat in 1987, “I dissent from the use of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ to denote anti- and pro-Union” and this had been a consistently held position during his career (Powell letter, 3 July 1987, POLL 9/1/4). He was uncomfortable with the formal link between the UUP and the Orange Order and, in later years, did not share Unionist

98

David C. Shiels

opposition to the promotion of the Irish language in Northern Ireland.3 (See Powell to Biggs-Davison, 10 March 1983, POLL 1/1/32.) Powell himself believed that Northern Ireland was a logical extension of his political interests, since the questions raised in the conflict there went right to the heart of what he called “the life and death of nations” (speech at Enniskillen, 7 February 1970). Just as the conflict in Northern Ireland was concerned with questions around nationality and belonging, citizenship and identity, sovereignty and independence, so it was linked to the other causes he was linked with during his career post-1968 – opposition to immigration and campaigning against British membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). For the most part, the interconnectedness of these subjects was not acknowledged by other politicians at the time, partly because the conflict in Northern Ireland was generally seen as something separate from events in Great Britain. This was a line of thinking that Powell criticized and he sought to use his prominent position to put the issue on the national agenda. From 1969, shortly after the outbreak of the Troubles, he began to speak on the subject regularly, addressing audiences in Great Britain and Northern Ireland and challenging the orthodox interpretation of Northern Ireland as a selfcontained and isolated conflict. The decision by the British government to deploy troops on the streets of the province was, he believed, a turning point. He now felt that he had licence to speak out, overturning the convention whereby MPs representing English constituencies did not speak on the internal matters of the province. Events, he believed, were now the responsibility of the British government in precisely the way that – for instance – events in Rhodesia were not, because “Ulster” (as meaning Northern Ireland in practice) had been an integral part of the United Kingdom. As a Westminster MP, he therefore felt he was entitled to speak on matters affecting the unity and security of the realm, so long as he observed the necessary courtesies towards the Unionist leadership of the province. It was also his desire to demonstrate to audiences in England that the government’s handling of the situation in Ulster was a portent of its ability to defend Britain from any similar situations that might develop on the mainland: “‘This means you”, he told Conservatives at Bridgnorth (Shropshire), echoing the words of the 1930s anti-Appeasement journalist Douglas Read (speech at Bridgnorth, 27 August 1969). What seems to have struck Powell in August 1969 was that the violence in Ulster presented a challenge to the authority of the British State similar to the challenges faced by other Western European nations over the previous 18 months. As he told the Conservative ladies at Bridgnorth: “The thing which happened in Ulster in the last two or three weeks has little kinship with the Irish troubles of the 1920s and before. It has great kinship with what has been happening in the universities and cities of the United States, with what happened in Paris last year, with what happened in Berlin the year before – and in London too we have seen a glimpse of its face for a moment now and again” – a parallel which appeared to be confirmed by newspaper reports of a Frenchman and a German having been arrested in Derry “for throwing petrol

Powell, British nationality, Irish question

99

bombs at police” (speech at Bridgnorth, 27 August 1969). Powell’s analysis of the events in Derry was strikingly similar to that put forward by Stormont MP Albert Anderson the previous October, who had drawn parallels between the events “at Grosvenor Square in London, in Paris, Dublin, and now in Londonderry” (quoted in Prince 2007, p. 161). Nonetheless Powell’s suggestion that the 1969 disturbances had “little kinship” with the historical conflict was called into question by the way that the situation in Ulster was developing through 1969. As Paul Bew has explained, an important transition in the nature of the Troubles had taken place following the demonstrations carried out by People’s Democracy earlier in 1969 (Bew 2007, p. 493). There was another aspect to Powell’s thinking about Northern Ireland that also has to be understood in the context of his campaigning against Commonwealth immigration. From his earliest speeches on the subject in 1969, Powell also defined the Northern Ireland conflict as a question about the control of borders and the movement of people between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Specifically, he questioned the special status reserved for Irish citizens in British nationality law and the existence of the Common Travel Area between Ireland and the United Kingdom. In doing so, Powell was challenging the assumptions underpinning the relationship between the UK and Ireland and, in particular, the understanding that the British government had a special responsibility – primarily because of its obligations in Northern Ireland – to operate policy sensitively in these areas. Insofar as it has been referred to in existing scholarship, Powell’s interest in the status of Irish nationals in the UK has been seen as an extension of his campaign against Commonwealth immigration or a revival of old prejudices against the Irish population in Britain. For John Corbally, for instance, Powell’s interest in Irish immigration was evidence that he was “consistent in his bigotry” in that he opposed any special treatment of those who were mainly white immigrants compared to black or Asian immigrants (Corbally 2015, p. 115). Paul Corthorn has, by way of contrast, acknowledged the relevance of Powell’s views on nationality law to his wider understanding of the Northern Ireland question (Corthorn 2012, pp. 974–975) but there are other angles of the issue to be explored. First, as will be argued in this chapter, Powell had, until 1969, been relaxed about the subject of Irish immigration to the UK, but reversed this position on the outbreak of the Troubles. Second, Powell’s thinking about the special status of Irish citizens in the UK evolved in the context of common membership of the EEC, a development that, to some extent, limited the UK’s sovereignty in respect of nationality law. Finally, while the possibility of restricting Irish citizens’ rights in the UK was considered by successive governments, this was always ruled out for a range of practical and political reasons. Powell persisted in raising the question of Irish citizens in a number of ways, but struggled to find a hearing in either Great Britain or in Northern Ireland.

100

David C. Shiels

Irish citizenship and British nationality law The “special status” of Irish citizens in the UK in British nationality law has been the subject of much discussion in the academic scholarship and there has been recent interest in the experience of Irish immigrants vis-à-vis the experience of Commonwealth immigrants in the second half of the 20th century. The 1948 British Nationality Act and the 1949 Ireland Act recognized that Irish citizens were not aliens and extended to them certain rights, including the right to vote, similar to those of Commonwealth citizens. Although Irish citizens were included for the purposes of immigration control in the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, in practice, the right of entry of Irish citizens into the UK was not affected. Scholars such as Kathleen Paul have argued that the special status afforded to Irish citizens reflects the “racialized” nature of British immigration policy and suggested that the Irish in Britain suffered from a case of “mistaken identity” (Paul 1996, p. 135). Mary Daly has pointed out that there is an irony in the fact that Ireland, “which sought to escape from the ‘umbrella’ of British nationality, retained the right of free entry into the United Kingdom that is now denied to the citizens of dominions and former dominions … that were disinclined to press for a separate citizenship in the 1920s and 1930s” (Daly 2001, p. 407). During the 1960s, even when he was starting to speak out on the question of Commonwealth immigration, Powell did not seriously question the status of Irish immigrants in Britain (see Maude and Powell 1970, p. 226). Writing in 1982, he claimed that he had, since the late 1950s, “argued for the citizens of the Irish Republic to be put on the same basis as other non-citizens of the UK” (Powell letter, 22 December 1982, POLL 3/2/1/36). There is, however, contradictory evidence to show that even in 1968 he accepted the wholly orthodox view held by policymakers that Irish immigrants were to be regarded as a special case. Indeed, in the autumn of that year, several months after his notorious Birmingham speech, Powell said as much in public. Among his papers in Cambridge, there is a press clipping confirming this. The quotation in question comes from a newspaper feature in which Powell was asked various questions by members of the public who had written in. One correspondent, identified as an R. Stewart from Bradford, asked Powell the following question: [Question] What do you think about the Irish coming to Britain? I know they do great work, building homes and roads and some of them get drunk and cause a bit of trouble. But, in general, what do you think of them? [Answer] I assume “Irish” means “citizens of the Republic of Ireland”. The republic is geographically part of the British Isles, has a population of only 2,500,000, and shares a long and relatively open frontier with the United Kingdom. This being so, I just do not think it would be worth the practical trouble involved to treat the Irish as aliens, though that is what they really are. It’s not logical, I agree, but then, it’s Irish. (press clipping, POLL 12/1/27; see also Cooke 2012, p. 258)4

Powell, British nationality, Irish question

101

This was a striking quotation for a number of reasons and certainly important to unpack. First of all, Powell is careful to make it clear he is only referring to the “citizens of the Republic of Ireland” and not people from Northern Ireland; however goes on to make a claim about the propinquity of Great Britain and Ireland – in referring to the republic as being geographically part of the “British Isles”, he is implying that he sees a cultural and ethnic affinity between the peoples of the two countries. He points out that the republic has a small population compared to that of the United Kingdom and then makes a point about the “open frontier” with the United Kingdom – in other words, the land border between Northern Ireland and the republic. He takes the view that it would “not be worth the practical trouble” to discriminate against Irish citizens – a view that certainly reflected official thinking at this time and, indeed, concerns about the practicality of border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were a common theme of all Home Office discussions of this issue in the post-war period. The fact that Powell acknowledged these points and was prepared to use them in defence of the existing status of Irish citizens in British law shows that he had thought about the issue. It also casts doubt on his later claim that he was consistent in his attitude to immigrants regardless of colour or background. By the following year, however, Powell was beginning to change his tune on this subject, as he began to take a closer interest in the “Troubles” emerging in Northern Ireland. In his August 1969 speech at Bridgnorth, quoted above, he said that “we simply must have more control over the admission, the movement and the activities of aliens in this country than is exercised at present”. He added that it was no longer possible to ignore the question why the same principle ought not to be applied to the Republic of Ireland: “There is a contradiction here which I believe will sooner or later have to be resolved” (speech at Bridgnorth, 27 August 1969). His comments were picked up in The Times the following day, which reported the story under the headline: “Powell Raises Question of Irish Republic Citizens in Britain” (28 August 1969). Powell returned to the subject in Enniskillen in February the following year when he set out a fuller critique of British nationality law as it pertained to citizens of the Irish Republic. In this speech, Powell argued that British policy towards Irish citizens was deliberately designed to obscure the fact of Irish partition or, as he put it, the belonging of Northern Ireland and the not belonging of the Republic of Ireland. He argued that, during the existence of the Irish Free State between 1922 and 1949, Britain had been unwilling to confront the reality of Irish separation from the British Empire and had instead “pretended” (his word) that Ireland was still within the Allegiance. The 1948 British Nationality Act had abolished allegiance to the crown as the basis of Commonwealth citizenship and it was this act that opened up what he called the “Pandora’s Box” of Commonwealth immigration to the UK. The Ireland Act of 1949, he said, had “invented a new category of human being” who was neither a British subject nor a Commonwealth citizen, while the newly recognized Republic of Ireland was declared to be “not a foreign

102

David C. Shiels

country” (speech in Enniskillen, 7 February 1970). Powell went on to note that in 1962, when controls on Commonwealth immigration were imposed for the first time, those controls were not applied to Ireland. Mary J. Hickman described this as the “forced inclusion” of Irish Citizens in British nationality law (Hickman 1998, p. 299). What Powell’s assessment overlooks is that the Irish government recognized the importance of the special place given to Irish citizens in British law and to some extent collaborated with the British government on this account. In his Enniskillen speech in 1970, Powell also called for a wider reform of nationality law, so that “the entry, the residence, the settlement and the franchise of the citizen of the Republic would have to be determined exactly as those of a Frenchman” (speech in Enniskillen, 7 February 1970). The comparison with other European nationalities is interesting because Powell was aware that if the UK and Ireland joined the EEC, then Irish citizens would enjoy enhanced freedom of movement of rights. In his early 1970s’ speeches, Powell expressed his concerns about the ambition of the EEC to develop a common citizenship, although he acknowledged that this was something that would be debated in the future. At this time, he was more concerned about the would-be demographic balance in Northern Ireland and indeed this was a concern that was discussed by the officials in London and Belfast prior to joining the European Community. In Northern Ireland, Irish citizens had not hitherto enjoyed full rights of employment or of the franchise, since workers from the republic had to apply for work permits from the Northern Ireland Ministry and, although resident Irish nationals could vote at Westminster elections, the local franchise was not extended to them (Daly 2017). Powell was aware that long-term demographic trends worried Unionists and he continued to develop this argument in speeches in the late 1970s. During the 1970s, of course, the twin causes of “Euroscepticism” and anti-immigration politics had not come together. Insofar as European freedom of movement was an issue in British politics, there was concern about the “brain drain”, the outwards emigration of British nationals to other European countries. Before the UK joined the EEC, Powell had commented that (as paraphrased by one official) “the only advantage of Britain’s entry would be that the coloured immigrants need not return to their countries of origin but could be absorbed by the European labour market” (Blakeway to Smith, 21 May 1971, FCO 26/797). The other thing to highlight here is Powell’s opposition to dual nationality, particularly in the context of nationals who held Irish and British citizenship. He also argued that Northern Ireland had to be included in British nationality law or rather that there could be no distinctions made for Northern Ireland: “The border is not the border of Northern Ireland; it is the border of the United Kingdom” (speech in Enniskillen, 7 February 1970). This is a striking claim in the context of today’s discussion about Brexit and the border, especially where Northern Ireland has sometimes been talked of as a possible “back door” for immigrants wanting to come to Great Britain (Guardian, 21 June 2017).

Powell, British nationality, Irish question

103

During the 1970s, Powell continued to take an interest in the subject of Irish citizens in Britain, both in the context of wider reforms of immigration law and in the context of the Northern Ireland security situation. Security considerations also influenced official thinking on this matter and the governments in the 1970s, both Conservative and Labour, gave consideration to how immigration or border controls might be reformed as a form of retaliation against the Irish government – particularly in response to the perceived laxity of cross-border security. In 1971, at the request of Edward Heath, the Prime Minister, the Home Office had conducted a study into the measures that might be open to the UK government should it wish to retaliate against the Irish government and there are clippings of Powell’s speeches on the subject in the Home Office files (Bohan to Edwards, 27 September 1971, TNA: HO 344/422). The imposition of immigration controls against Irish citizens was considered but eventually ruled out on the grounds that it would be impractical in the context of the difficulty of policing the land border. Just as importantly, it was recognized that restrictions on Irish citizens might require the imposition of border controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which would be resented by Unionists. Border controls were also inconsistent with the Heath government’s European policy: it would hardly have been seen as a signal of good neighbourliness. The prospect of joint membership of the EEC reduced the possibility that the UK could take unilateral action against Ireland. Powell’s position, meanwhile, continued to be that Ireland should be treated without special favour. Translated into policy, this would have led to a serious deterioration in UK–Ireland relations.

The belonging of Ulster Unionists During the early 1970s, Powell continued to speak out on the subject of Northern Ireland, using his position as a prominent critic of Prime Minister Edward Heath to challenge the bipartisan consensus that existed on Northern Ireland. In doing so, he was strongly critical of what he saw as a deliberate strategy on the part of the British government in treating the Northern Ireland conflict almost as a matter of international policy. He was opposed to bilateral engagement with the Irish government on what he regarded as an internal matter for the United Kingdom. For the most part, Irish matters were effectively quarantined, but there were moments when it seemed that the issue could escalate out of London’s control. In February 1971, the IRA succeeded in killing the first British soldier in Northern Ireland. As the death toll of British soldiers rose, commentators began to question the purpose of the military mission to Northern Ireland. One prominent critic of the Army presence was Paul Johnson, then a journalist for the New Statesman, who wrote in July 1971 that “the only indices of change in Northern Ireland are the toll of British casualties and the cost to the British taxpayer, both of which are rising steadily.” In Johnson’s view, the situation in Northern Ireland could be compared to a conventional colonial situation, “just

104

David C. Shiels

like old times – in Guyana, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden and so forth” and to a modern military peacekeeping burden “on the scale of Vietnam” (23 July 1971). Powell was aware of the salience of these concerns. In Omagh (Co. Tyrone) Powell argued that the presence of the British Army in the province was misleading to the public back at home and in this represented a further barrier to the understanding of the province on the part of the general public – the implication being that Northern Ireland was being deliberately talked about by politicians in such a way as to imply that the Army was being deployed there in a colonial peacekeeping role rather being used at home in aid of the civil power: The public in Great Britain are invited to regard Ulster as, in [a] famous phrase, a “far-away country of which we know nothing”, and the presence of British soldiers, under attack here, as similar to their presence in Malaysia, Cyprus or Aden. One of the main objects of the terror is to operate upon the minds of the British electorate so as to sicken them with things Irish and make them wish to contract out of the whole business (speech at Omagh, 11 September 1971). Similarly, the existence of the Stormont regime added to the impression that Britain was an external power: “The whole vocabulary of three governments, Westminster, Belfast and Dublin, implants the notion that there are somehow three coordinate states, and that as two of them are geographically on the same island, Westminster is the ‘third man out’” (speech at Omagh, 11 September 1971). In September 1971 Powell’s fears were confirmed when “tripartite” talks were held between the leaders of the three governments in London, Belfast and Dublin. Although “fruitless”, these talks were, in Powell’s mind, likely to “encourage the enemy and shake the confidence of everyone who was loyal or inclined to loyalty. I hope such an error will not be repeated” (speech at Penzance (Cornwall), 13 November 1971). By early 1972, Powell was beginning to be recognized in Northern Ireland for his staunch support of the Union, in the guise of a latter-day Edward Carson (Belfast Newsletter, 23 July 1972). At the end of March that year, with the security and political crisis deepening, the government announced its decision to “prorogue” the Stormont parliament. Powell opposed the decision on the ground that the proposals put before MPs at Westminster fell short of the “parliamentary reunification of Northern Ireland with Great Britain in a substantive and integral sense”, which he had long advocated (Hansard, 28 March 1972, vol. 834, cols. 269–70). Like James Kilfedder, the North Down MP who similarly advocated “democratic direct rule … treating Northern Ireland like any other part of the United Kingdom”, Powell feared that the form of temporary government envisaged in the legislation was a continuation of colonial rule in Ulster by other means. Outgoing Premier Brian Faulkner famously claimed that Britain had treated Ulster as though it were a “coconut

Powell, British nationality, Irish question

105

colony” (Bourke 2003, p. 196). Powell was also wary of the “makeshift” nature of the legislation, in the sense that the Bill before the House was renewable year by year. For Powell, aware of those who had called for direct rule as an interim step on the way to a united Ireland, the temporary nature of the legislation was dangerous: “We create a situation, and set up an organisation, which inherently is and always will be tentative, which every month that it exists carries within itself the seeds not of union but of disunion” (Hansard, 28 February 1972, vol. 834, col. 271). Powell’s speech to the House of Commons on 28 March repeated his earlier points about the importance of security measures in tackling the situation in Ulster. When Labour MP Gerald Kaufman pointed out that similar security measures “failed in, for example, Algeria, French Indo-China, Palestine, Cyprus and Aden”, Powell retorted that: “There is one profound difference between those places and Northern Ireland, and that is that the majority of the inhabitants of Northern Ireland identify themselves with this country, regard themselves as part of this country and wish to remain indefinitely part of this country” (Hansard, 28 March 1972, vol. 834, col. 275). It was not long after Stormont was abolished that Powell said what he really thought about the existence of that parliament. Speaking to a Scottish audience a few months later, he said: “It was possible to take refuge in the illusion that Northern Ireland, having a parliament and a government of its own, was really somewhere else, a ‘far-away country’ of which we needed to know nothing. That comfortable illusion is gone, and gone forever.” (speech at Keith, Banffshire, 22 April 1972) Following this he addressed an audience in Northern Ireland, when he argued that the province could not long be treated as a colony and its status must be recognized by “full integration with the remainder of the realm” (speech at Newtonards, Co. Down, 6 May 1972). The March 1972 abolition of Stormont had left open a political vacuum in Northern Ireland; the uncertainty about the political situation was an opportunity for more extreme Unionist voices such as that of William Craig of the Vanguard Movement. Powell was aware of these dissenting voices within Unionism and sought to provide alternative counsel to Unionists. This was the purpose of his speech to the East Belfast Unionist Association at the beginning of June 1972, when he spoke directly to the Unionist audience. “Let me be plain with you”, he said, “The nationality which Ulster asserts is not an Irish nationality, nor an Ulster nationality, nor any separate nationality whatsoever. Of all these, Unionism is a denial and a repudiation” (speech at Belfast, 2 June 1972.)

Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 The most high-profile discussions around the status of Irish citizens in the UK were associated with the rise of anti-Irish sentiment in the mid-1970s, as the IRA intensified its mainland campaign. In 1974, the IRA carried out

106

David C. Shiels

attacks in Manchester, Birmingham and London, the most notable being the pub bombings in Birmingham in November, when 21 people were killed in what was one of the most brutal acts of terrorism in the whole of the Troubles for which six men were wrongfully convicted of the bombings in a notorious miscarriage of justice. For a short period there was some sign of growing public anger in Britain; there were attacks on Irish citizens and their property in cities like Birmingham. For a moment, the government was worried that the violence in Northern Ireland would spill over onto the streets of England (Sandbrook 2012, p. 169). In response to the bombings on the mainland, there was a demand for firm action to combat the terrorist threat. The Wilson government announced a raft of new security measures and brought forward legislation containing some of the most draconian anti-terrorist provisions ever seen in the United Kingdom. As well as proscribing the Provisional IRA, legislation was brought forward to give the police greater powers of detention and the power to exclude individuals suspected of terrorist activity from Great Britain (“exclusion orders”), who could be sent back either to Northern Ireland or to the Irish Republic. One MP even likened the prospect of the banishment of individuals from one part of the country to another to the policy of forced removals that took place in apartheid South Africa (Hansard, 28 November 1974, vol. 882, col. 668). Checks were put in place at ports of entry in Great Britain: in effect, movement of people between the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland was now monitored – and the fact that this was done by police rather than immigration officials was not always understood by individuals travelling between the two islands. In his seminal study, Paddy Hillyard has discussed defining the impact of treating the Irish as a “suspect community” in Great Britain – and he also notes how Ulster Protestants were viewed with suspicion as well as Catholics (Hillyard 1993). At the time, there was widespread political support for the government’s measures and, indeed, they did not go far enough for some MPs from across the political spectrum; opinion polls showed a surge in support for the reintroduction of the death penalty for terrorist offences (Sandbrook 2012, p. 168). On capital punishment, incidentally, Powell was at odds with public opinion since he remained a firm opponent of the death penalty even in cases of terrorism.5 He supported the government’s main proposals but was concerned about the appearance of double standards in responding to terrorist incidents on the mainland. He worried that the introduction of exclusion orders implied the creation of internal border within the United Kingdom, without effectively making provisions for the land frontier between Northern Ireland and the republic – a concern that was shared by others in the House of Commons. From Powell’s point of view, the Prevention of Terrorism Act fell short in terms of avoiding the issue of immigration controls and he continued to press for border checks between the UK and the Irish Republic, including at the Irish border. Powell’s response to the Prevention of Terrorism Act reflected his particular concerns as an Ulster Unionist MP and he had a private meeting with Harold Wilson in 10 Downing Street to reiterate his position. As Wilson described it, Powell wanted to see a “UK umbrella” put over the legislation so that

Powell, British nationality, Irish question

107

reciprocal provisions could be applied to allow the authorities from Northern Ireland to exclude suspected troublemakers from Great Britain (Powell’s note, “Tuesday 26 November 1974”, CAC: POLL 1/6/28). Wilson recorded that Powell was making a “perfectly fair, logical point, doctrinal point, legal point, in terms of the integrity of the United Kingdom” but also noted that the government was primarily concerned with the best practical response to the situation at that time (official record, “Tuesday, 26 November, 1974”, TNA: CJ4/971). In the event, the government proceeded with the legislation as originally intended, but it was amended in 1976 to include a reciprocal provision for the exclusion of individuals from Northern Ireland. In the context of these debates, Powell continued to speak out about what he saw as the “anomaly” of Irish citizens’ rights in Britain, but even in the context of a rise of anti-Irish opinion during the mid-1970s there was little sign that Powell’s views had much popular appeal. For one thing, there was little distinction in the public mind between Irish people from the north and those from the south – and, as someone who represented an Ulster seat, Powell had to be careful what he said on the subject. Arguably, his demand for identity checks on citizens in Northern Ireland was one policy where he risked upsetting Ulster sensitivities about being treated as second-class citizens. As Richard Weight has argued, by the mid-1970s British public opinion did not distinguish between Unionists and Nationalists or Protestants and Catholics. They had grown weary of everything to do with Northern Ireland (Weight 2002, pp. 534–535). This was the moment when support for British withdrawal began to grow, and one version of a “British Nationalist” (Heffer 1998, p. 768) response to the bombing campaign in Britain – the path that Powell did not support – would have been to put up a drawbridge between the two islands. Far from embracing Powell’s mission to save the Union, his solution to the problems in Northern Ireland was seen as less relevant than before.

Irish voting rights In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the question of Irish voting rights came back on the agenda as the Labour government announced plans to introduce a reform of British nationality laws. Powell himself helped to draw the matter to the attention of the Ulster Unionists. In 1976, Powell set out his position on the status of Irish citizens in a memo addressed to James Molyneaux, parliamentary leader of the Ulster Unionists. Powell told Molyneaux that it was essential for the UUP “to take a position on the anomaly whereby – since the foundation of the Free State and since the recognition of the Republic, by virtue of the Ireland Act, 1949 – citizens of the Irish Republic have, as such, been treated in the United Kingdom for virtually all purposes as enjoying the status of British subjects”. He added that if the party were to take up a position on the subject, it would require the “maximum airing beforehand” and canvassing of opinion “is essential for any impact to be produced” (Powell to Molyneaux, 12 March 1976, POLL 9/1/8).

108

David C. Shiels

Powell lamented the fact that his own position on Irish citizens had until recently not drawn much support from his colleagues within the Ulster Unionist Party. The issue, however, had the potential to “fatally weaken” the Unionists because the special rights enjoyed by Irish citizens was “consciously maintained as part of the anti-Unionist and ‘re-unification’ philosophy of British politicians” (Powell to Molyneaux, 12 March 1976, POLL 9/1/8). On the point, it should be noted, Powell’s argument was misconceived, since the special provision enjoyed by Irish citizens in the UK was actually in part recognition of the obligations that Britain had towards citizens from Northern Ireland: it was the view of officials that Irish citizens could not be discriminated against in Britain without also discriminating against British citizens in Northern Ireland (by way of immigration checks, for example). Developing his theme, nevertheless, Powell argued that there were two particular issues affecting British nationality law. These included the UK’s acceptance of dual nationality, which was at that time much less widely accepted in the world. In Powell’s view, reform of nationality law to disallow dual nationality would have a “helpful” effect in separating British and Irish nationality. The second area of concern related to EEC rules on entry, settlement and employment in the UK, which, he said “already goes far to create an EEC nationality superseding the nationalities of the member states”. Powell added that this was one of the most “profound” aspects of EEC membership – and something which was “dangerously anti-Unionist” (Powell to Molyneaux, 12 March 1976, POLL 9/1/8). The point that Powell was driving at here went directly to Ulster Unionist concerns about long-term demographic trends in Northern Ireland – and the worry that, one day, the Protestant/Unionist majority in the province would be replaced by a Nationalist/Catholic majority. As Powell pointed out in his memo, Northern Ireland had enjoyed a derogation from the EEC Treaty of Accession with regard to the freedom of movement rules in the European treaties. Previous rules, which had placed certain restrictions on the rights of Irish nationals working in Northern Ireland, had been allowed to continue (Daly 2017). This was due to come to an end in 1977. From a Unionist point of view, this raised the prospect of Irish citizens coming to Northern Ireland. Or, as Powell put it, “There would then be no limit upon Irish Nationals exercising – irrespective of citizenship law – their right to settle and work in Northern Ireland” (Powell to Molyneaux, 12 March 1976, POLL 9/1/8). In other words, Powell was suggesting that British membership of the European Community ruled out the possibility of controlling the Irish border for immigration purposes – and not only that, it copper fastened the rights of Irish citizens as they applied in the United Kingdom. In fact, it was left to the government of Margaret Thatcher to implement reforms in the 1981 British Nationality Act. For her part, Thatcher was not very sympathetic to the rights of Irish citizens in British law. As leader of the opposition, she was interested in the possibility of restricting Irish voting laws and once in office faced pressure to include the question of voting rights for

Powell, British nationality, Irish question

109

Irish citizens, believing that the Labour Party was actively targeting the Irish vote. Very early in her term, when concerned about perceived laxity of Ireland’s approach to border security, Thatcher mused that “the only way of changing Dublin’s attitude towards the IRA would be to deprive Irishmen in the UK of the vote and to bring them fully within the UK’s immigration law. The fact that both countries were members of the EEC was, however, a complicating factor in exerting pressure on Ireland” (National Archives/ Thatcher Foundation, Northern Ireland, Note for the record, 23 August 1979). Her own personal sympathies on the subject notwithstanding, and pressure from Powell and others on the right, the Thatcher government chose not to make any reforms that would have withdrawn rights from Irish citizens. In 1980, the Irish government, sensing the growing salience of this issue in Britain, sought to have the question of citizenship rights included in the joint studies that were established at the Anglo-Irish Summit that year. The Ulster Unionists pressed to have the rights of Irish citizens and the existence of the Common Travel Area reviewed (Molyneaux to Thatcher, 10 December 1980, Thatcher Foundation). Thatcher herself saw the question of reciprocal voting rights for British citizens in the Irish Republic as a very poor “quid pro quo” (Telegram, 26 July 1982, Thatcher Foundation), but the idea of reciprocity became an important one in Anglo-Irish relations. British citizens living in the Republic were given voting rights in parliamentary elections in 1985. The fact that negotiations between Britain and Ireland were ongoing in the early 1980s prompted Powell to take an interest in the nationality of civil servants working in the government of Northern Ireland at that time. Among his papers from 1983, there is a press clipping announcing the appointment of one official, Maurice Hayes, as the permanent secretary to the (Northern Ireland) Department of Health and Social Services (press clipping, Down Recorder, 1 December 1983, POLL 3/2/1/36). Apparently picking up on a reference to the fact that Hayes was the son of “a Waterford father and a Kerry mother” (a reference to counties now in the Irish Republic), Powell wrote to James Prior, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to investigate whether Hayes held Irish nationality. Unsatisfied by reassurances that Hayes was a British citizen with a British passport, Powell said that it was incumbent on senior civil servants to take steps to renounce any dual nationality they might hold. As he explained to Prior, “as long as the Government of Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Office deal direct with a foreign country, namely, the Irish Republic, considerable embarrassment and anxiety must attach to so substantial a number of those in senior positions holding the citizenship of both countries” (Powell to Prior, 19 March 1984, POLL 3/2/1/36). At a time when civil servants holding prominent roles in Northern Ireland did so at considerable personal risk, the point that Powell was making about nationality and allegiance may have been regarded as insensitive, to say the least. Thirteen years after the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed, the rights of people born in Northern Ireland to claim Irish citizenship was enshrined in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The British government’s willingness to

110

David C. Shiels

accept the principle of dual nationality in an international treaty was therefore far removed from Powell’s understanding of the nature of citizenship. These questions were related in Powell’s mind, because of the perceived failure on the part of British governments to defend the integrity of the United Kingdom and their unwillingness to offend the sensitivities of a neighbouring state. Powell always claimed that he wanted to see good relations with the Irish Republic, but this is somewhat at odds with his espousal of policies that would have had a huge impact on Ireland and its diaspora population. There is some evidence of anti-Irish prejudice in letters that Powell received, even if some of his supporters made no distinction between the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh (see Whipple 2009, p. 724). Certainly, Powell gave credibility to the notion that the Irish were a “suspect community”, in Hillyard’s phrase. At the same time, the effect of Powell’s campaigning on these issues is hard to discern. The writer John Walsh recalls the impact of his Irish immigrant father of Powell’s Birmingham speech and of hearing Powell later call for the repatriation of immigrants with green passports (Harte 2003, p. 297). This issue is also touched upon by Olivier Esteves in his chapter on the international press and Powell’s anti-immigration campaign.

Conclusion If Powell’s campaign against Irish immigrants did not resonate with sections of the public in the way that his campaign against Commonwealth immigration did, this may say something about popular attitudes towards race and immigration more generally. Corbally’s point that Powell was “consistent in his bigotry” notwithstanding (Corbally 2015, p. 115), given his original acceptance of Irish immigrants back in 1968, it is clear that this was not the whole story. Finally, it should be noted that a Powellite approach to Irish policy was rejected and recent statements by the UK government show there is no appetite to revisit the question of the rights afforded to Irish citizens in British law. The fact that Irish citizens will continue to have freedom of movement into the United Kingdom and will continue to have voting rights has not been called into question, neither has the right, enshrined in the 1998 Belfast Agreement of people born in Northern Ireland to be Irish and therefore European citizens – although this is not to say that there have not been concerns about how these rights will be enshrined in law. Even in the context of Brexit, no political party has advanced a “Powellite” view of citizenship – a somewhat remarkable fact in a debate that has been dominated by immigration and border policy. The comment by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP Ian Paisley Jr following the referendum in 2016 saying that he was “relaxed” about the Ulster Unionists requiring Irish citizenship is evidence of this (Belfast Telegraph, 8 August 2016). Nevertheless, it is possible to see Powell’s influence in recent criticisms of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (Kenny and Pearce 2018). Meanwhile, the precedent of the Windrush scandal in 2018 does not provide grounds for confidence in British policy in the area of

Powell, British nationality, Irish question

111

nationality laws (Irish Times, 20 April 2018). The long-term consequences of UK withdrawal from the EU and its impact for Irish citizens in the UK remain to be seen.

Notes 1 Powell, along with his fellow UUP MPs, resigned his seat in December 1985 in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement and was re-elected in the subsequent by-election in January 1986. 2 The MP Andrew Hunter left the Conservative Party in 2002 and later sat as a member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) group, 2004–2005, while still representing an English seat. 3 In 1998, when Ulster Unionists were protesting the use of the Irish language at Queen’s University, Belfast, Powell told one correspondent that “the struggle in Ireland is about the nation to which Ulster shall belong. There is no reason why it should depend upon a single language or a single religion” (Powell letter, 26 January 1998, POLL 9/1/17). 4 This is taken from a Sunday newspaper feature in which JEP had given written answers to questions posed by readers, “Answer Me That, Enoch Powell”, Weekend, 2–3 October 1968. It is not clear from the clipping in which newspaper this appeared. 5 For Powell’s early expression of opposition to the death penalty, see Powell, “Hanging, Logic and the Public”, Daily Telegraph 1973, quoted in Collings 1991, pp. 228–232.

Bibliography Primary Sources Churchill Archives Centre, The papers of J. Enoch Powell, POLL, press clipping, 2-3 October 1968, POLL 12/1/27 speech at Bridgnorth, 27 August 1969, POLL 4/1/5, speech at Enniskillen, 7 February, 1970, POLL 4/1/6; speech at Omagh, 11 September 1971, POLL 4/1/7; speech at Penzance, 13 November 1971, POLL 4/1/7; speech at Keith, Banffshire. 22 April 72, POLL 4/1/8; press clipping, POLL 12/1/27; Note, “Tuesday 26 November 1974”, POLL 1/6/28; Powell to Molyneaux, 12 March 1976, POLL 9/1/8; Powell letter, 22 December 1982, POLL 3/2/1/36; Powell letter, 3 July 1987, POLL 9/1/4; press clipping, Down Recorder, 1 December 83, POLL 3/2/1/36; Powell to Prior, 19 March 1984, POLL 3/2/1/36; Powell to Biggs-Davison, 10 March 1983, POLL 1/1/32; Powell letter, 26 January 1998, POLL 9/1/17. The National Archives, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO 26/797, Blakeway to Smith, 21 May 1971, FCO26/797. The National Archives, Home Office, HO 344/422, Bohan to Edwards, 27 September 1971. The National Archives, Home Office and Northern Ireland Office, Registered Files Series, TNA: CJ4/971 “Record of a conversation between the Prime Minister and the Rt. Hon. Powell, Enoch M.P., at the House of Commons at 3.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 26 November, 1974.” The National Archives, Prime Minister’s Papers, “Note of a Conversation between the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at 10 Downing Street on 23 August 1979 at 12 noon.” PREM 19/84, https://www.margaretthatcher. org/document/117914. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, www.margaretthatcher.org: Molyneaux letter to Thatcher, 10 December 1980, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/125320; Gow minute to MT, 27 July1982 https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/122796.

112

David C. Shiels

Secondary Sources Bew, P. (2007), Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourke, R. (2003), Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas, London: Pimlico. Collings, R. (1991), Reflections of a Statesman: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, London: Bellew. Cooke, A. (2012), “Enoch Powell and Ulster”, in Howard of Rising, L., (ed.) (2012), Enoch at 100, London: Biteback Publishing. Corbally, J. (2015), “The Othered Irish: Shades of Difference in Post-War Britain, 1948–1971”, Contemporary European History, 24(1), pp. 105–125. Corthorn, P. (2012), “Enoch Powell, Ulster Unionism and the British Nation”, Journal of British Studies, 51(4), pp. 967–997. Daly, M.E. (2001), “Irish Nationality and Citizenship Since 1922”, Irish Historical Studies, 32(127), pp. 377–407. Daly, M.E. (2017), “Brexit and the Irish Border: Historical Context”, A Royal Irish Academy-British Academy Brexit Briefing. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/ sites/default/files/Documents/files/2017-10-30%20Brexit%20and%20the%20Irish% 20Border%20Historical%20Context.pdf. Harte, L. (2003), “Somewhere Beyond England and Ireland: Narratives of ‘Home’ in Second-generation Irish Autobiography”, Irish Studies Review, 11(3), pp. 293–305. Heffer, S. (1998), Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London: Orion. Hickman, M.J., (1998), “Reconstructing Deconstructing ‘Race’: British Political Discourses about the Irish in Britain”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21(2), pp. 288–307. Hillyard, P. (1993), Suspect Community: People’s Experience of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts in Britain, London: Pluto Press. Kenny, M. and Pearce, N. (2018), ‘Will Post-Brexit Britain Overcome or Fall Further Upon Enoch Powell’s Troubling Legacy’, New Statesman, https://www.newstatesma n.com/politics/uk/2018/04/will-post-brexit-britain-overcome-or-fall-further-upon-e noch-powell-s-troubling. Maude, A. and Powell, J.E. (1970), Biography of a Nation (rev. ed.), London: J. Baker. Paul, K. (1996), “A Case of Mistaken Identity: The Irish in Postwar Britain”, International Labor and Working-Class History, 49, pp. 116–142. Prince, S. (2007), Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles, Newbridge: Irish Academic Press. Sandbrook, D. (2012), Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–79, London: Allen Lane. Weight, R. (2002), Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000, London: Macmillan. Whipple, A. (2009), “Revisiting the ‘Rivers of Blood’ Controversy: Letters to Enoch Powell”, Journal of British Studies, 48(9), pp. 717–735.

Newspapers Belfast Newsletter Belfast Telegraph Evening Standard Guardian New Statesman The Times

7

Enoch Powell, Julian Amery and debates over Britain’s world role after 1945 Paul Corthorn QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST

In the course of their political careers, spanning from 1945 to the early 1990s, Enoch Powell and Julian Amery grappled with the changing international position of the United Kingdom – involving rapid decolonization, European integration and a close, but sometimes fraught, relationship with the United States. Both often categorized as being on the Conservative right and both fervent imperialists at the end of the Second World War, Powell and Amery soon moved in different directions. Amery became a prominent figure in the Conservative pressure group, the Monday Club, formed in 1961 in response to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s policy, outlined in his 1960 “Winds of Change” speech, not to stand in the way of the independence of British colonies in Africa. Meanwhile, by the early 1960s Powell was calling for a more determined move away from empire and a more tightly defined international role for Britain, with its defence priorities in Europe. Many contemporary assessments of Amery’s position were critical. Denis Healey, the Labour politician who had a lifelong interest in foreign affairs and served as Defence Minister from 1964 to 1970 and who had known Amery since university, considered that he “could not adjust his thinking to the realities of the post-war world” and remained “locked in the imperial dream” (Healey 1990, p. 149). Yet Amery was relatively distinctive in combining strong support for British participation in European integration with his commitment to the empire (Young 1998, p. 17). Since the late 1960s, Powell’s position on international affairs has been seen by some as a constructive effort to come to terms with the end of empire, but it has also been recognized that his views on British membership of the European Community changed profoundly – with implications for defence policy (Utley 1968, pp. 101–103; Shepherd 1996, p. 285). Comparing the development of Powell and Amery’s positions, this chapter situates them fully within passionate and, at times, divisive debates inside the Conservative Party. Although Powell (1912–1998) was seven years older than Amery (1919–1996), their political lives intersected at various points after they both entered Parliament in 1950 (Cosgrave 2018). Their backgrounds were, of course, quite different. John Enoch Powell was the only child of teachers who had won a scholarship to King Edward’s School in Birmingham and, from there, a scholarship to study classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Already calling himself J. Enoch Powell

114

Paul Corthorn

(to avoid confusion with the classicist J.U. Powell), he secured a fellowship at Trinity before being appointed as professor of Greek at the University of Sydney at the age of 25. Julian Amery’s father, Leo, was a senior Conservative politician who had served in the Cabinet as Colonial Secretary between 1924 and 1929. Amery attended Eton College and then Balliol College, Oxford. Both Powell and Amery served in the army during the Second World War. At the start of the war, Powell returned to England to enlist as a private and rose through the ranks to become a brigadier in military intelligence. Amery, who had been a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, served, in the early part of the war, as an attaché at the British Legation in Belgrade and then undertook special missions, including to the Middle East. Briefly in the Royal Air Force (RAF), Amery joined the army in 1941 and was later a liaison officer to the Albanian resistance movement and then, as the war drew to a close, worked for Winston Churchill’s personal representative to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek. Powell and Amery both entered Conservative politics after the war. While Powell voted Labour in 1945 to register his disapproval of Appeasement, Amery unsuccessfully contested the Preston North constituency (Heffer 1998, p. 99). From 1946 Powell worked at Conservative Central Office, in the Parliamentary Secretariat (merged into the Conservative Research Department in 1948), before winning the seat of Wolverhampton South West in 1950 – when Amery won Preston North. Amery and Powell gained their first experience of government at around the same time. Powell became Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Housing in 1955, Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1957 and then Minister for Health between 1960 and 1963, spending 15 months in the Cabinet from summer 1962. Cabinet rank always eluded Amery who, between 1957 and 1964, was successively Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State and Financial Secretary at the War Office, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, Secretary of State for Air and Minister of Aviation. Amery was out of parliament between March 1966, when he lost Preston North, and March 1969, when he won Brighton Pavilion at a by-election. The mid- and late 1960s had, of course, seen dramatic developments in Powell’s career. An early exponent of freemarket economics, he had put his name forward in the Conservative Party leadership contest in 1965 but came third (and last), gaining only 15 votes. Powell subsequently became a controversial Shadow Defence Secretary, advocating a withdrawal from East of Suez and questioning the reliance on nuclear weapons. Following his dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet in April 1968, Powell did not hold senior office again within the Conservative Party or the government – and, indeed, he became an Ulster Unionist MP in October 1974, holding the South Down constituency until 1987. Amery, meanwhile, served as Minister of Public Building and Works, Minister for Housing and Construction and Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the 1970 to 1974 Conservative government that secured entry to the European Community.

Enoch Powell and Julian Amery

115

It is too much to suggest that Amery and Powell led parallel lives but there are some interesting overlaps. Anecdotally, this would include the use of books on the late 19th- and early 20th-century Liberal and then Liberal Unionist politician Joseph Chamberlain to make political points about their own present-day priorities. In 1951, Amery used his volume of a huge biography to make connections between Chamberlain’s 1903 plan to introduce economic protection (called tariff reform) within the empire and European integration (Amery 1951, pp. 1050–1055; Crowson 2007, p. 222). In 1977 Powell, opposing devolution in Northern Ireland and keen to reject proposals to rework the United Kingdom along federal lines, used his short biographical study of Joseph Chamberlain to argue that, even amid the debates over Irish Home Rule in the 1880s and 1890s, the creation of a federation would have destroyed the constitution of the unitary United Kingdom state (Powell 1977, pp. 71–74; Corthorn 2019). There were concrete links between Amery and Powell, too. It was on Amery’s invitation that in 1953 Powell joined the Suez Group, which urged the British government to maintain control of the area (Shepherd 1996, p. 111). The two politicians corresponded with one another throughout their careers and Powell, although he was not a member, often addressed Monday Club audiences. Moreover, both Powell and Amery were – as we will see – concerned to tackle British “decline”. Decline was a major theme in modern British history from the late 19th century, embracing economic, imperial and international dimensions, which rose to particular prominence as a political issue in the years after 1945. It is undoubtedly the debates over relative economic decline that have been examined most thoroughly, with an investigation in particular into the prevailing and largely unquestioned perceptions of decline, dubbed “declinism” (Tomlinson 1996). Yet there has also been a recognition that the repercussions of imperial decline intersected with fears of economic malaise that were articulated around the turn of the 1960s (Ward 2001, pp. 8–11; Tomlinson 2003, pp. 201–22). Tracing the relationship between Powell and Amery, this chapter focuses on international affairs – Amery’s main preoccupation. In doing so, it uses material from both the Powell and Amery papers held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge as well as some early speeches held among Powell’s (largely) constituency papers at Staffordshire Record Office. The chapter has two parts, the larger one looking into Empire and the smaller one dealing with Europe.

Empire As Powell entered politics, he was firmly in the imperialist camp and wary of the increased power of the United States. As early as 1942 when he was based in North Africa, Powell had feared that, with the increase in US naval strength, “the British Empire would only exist on American sufferance” (POLL1). Within his imperial strategic analysis, India – where Powell was based from summer 1943 – assumed a central place. At the end of 1944, he wrote: “Without the power to deny India to an enemy … Britain can neither

116

Paul Corthorn

hold her possessions farther East nor protect the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand nor in the long run maintain even her position in the Middle East” (POLL2). Powell took this strategic assumption with him to the Conservative Parliamentary Secretariat, where he specialized in defence (Ramsden 1980, pp. 121–122). In the event, of course, Indian independence was granted by the Labour government in summer 1947. Moreover, much to Powell’s regret and contrary to his demand for Britain “to resume full control”, the Conservative Party eventually agreed to it even though, without agreement between the main Indian parties, it involved the partition of British India into India and Pakistan (POLL3, 4, 5, 6). Despite the loss of India, when Powell contested the 1950 general election in Wolverhampton South West, he argued for a “greater imperial unity” with a “merging and pooling of powers by its autonomous parts in those matters which concern them all”, broadly understood to mean economic, defence and foreign policy (STAFF1; Shepherd 1996, p. 81). Julian Amery shared the imperialism of his father, Leo Amery, who had, over the years, developed various schemes to unite the Empire and Commonwealth (Louis 2002, pp. 71–90). Indeed, it was fitting that Leo Amery spoke in support of his son in Preston North in 1950 and emphasized the importance of imperial trade (The Times, 16 February 1950). Julian Amery was also a founder member of the Suez Group, which, comprising about 40 backbench MPs, sought to maintain military control, amid local political instability, over the Suez Canal in Egypt that was owned by a joint AngloFrench company. Amery considered that “the base in Suez was the key to our position in the Middle East and in Africa” (Toye 2011, p. 287). Powell thought likewise. His view was that Britain “would have ceased to be a great power” if it proved unable to stand up to Egypt, a “midget power”, and lost control of a “vital strategic area” (POLL7). Powell and Amery collaborated very closely at this point (AMEJ1, 2, 3) Indeed, Leo Amery considered that his son and Powell were two of the group’s most committed members (POLL8; Heffer 1998, p. 189). In July 1954 Powell and Amery were among the 26 Conservative MPs to vote against the government when the Suez Agreement, by which Britain would withdraw from the Canal Zone (with the right to return if it became part of a war zone) was debated in the House of Commons (Hansard, vol. 531, col. 821, 29 July 1954; Greenwood 2000, pp. 112–115; Schofield 2013, p. 107). Nevertheless, signs of a change on Powell’s part slowly became apparent. In 1952 he had expressed his public unease about the emergence of the British Commonwealth, which had been formally constituted three years earlier, amid growing decolonization, as an association of “free and equal” former members of the Empire, with the British monarch as its symbolic head. Powell took specific aim at what he saw as the nonsense of the Conservative policy of self-government within it, arguing that: “If a territory is autonomous, then presumably its own government has the power to alter the relation of that country to any other in the world.” (POLL8) In 1953 he dismissed the title of Head of the Commonwealth as “essentially a sham” in Parliament

Enoch Powell and Julian Amery

117

(Hansard, vol. 512, cols. 240–248, 03 March 1953). Here was a point of conflict with Amery, who was emphatic that with “the Commonwealth and Empire, Britain still counts as a great power in a world where the standards of power are set by the United States and the Soviet Union” (Amery 1953). But, in any case, it was the formal conclusion of the Suez Agreement in October 1954 that proved pivotal for Powell and he left the Suez Group the following month (Onslow 1997, p. 297). Powell argued that: Britain, and also the Conservative Party, have now to rethink their foreign policy and what used to be their imperial policy on new premises. Territories and positions that had a value as part of a worldwide system may in isolation have no value or less than no value. The Suez agreement showed decisively that Britain was no longer able or willing – there is no real difference – to maintain that world system at one of its vital points, if that meant the exertion of force. (STAFF2) In summer 1956, the new Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal and thus defied the terms of the Suez Agreement under which the Suez Canal Company was not due to return to the Egyptian government until 1968. Powell remained detached, considering that any British action had already come too late to be effective (Heffer 1998, pp. 206–208). Amery, of course, saw things differently. He not only wanted a firm response to Nasser but also played a part in seeking to foster an “Anglo-French axis in Middle Eastern and European affairs”. Ostensibly as peacemakers but later revealed to be in collusion with Israel, the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt prompted domestic and international outcry. With financial pressure from the United States, this all led to unconditional withdrawal, which made Amery outraged (Onslow 2006, pp. 90–91). As decolonization gathered pace in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Powell grappled with “a vanished Empire” (POLL10). He argued that Britain should “not … live in the past of a world-wide empire and the dominion of the seas” (POLL10). Powell took issue with a “conviction of national decline” which he saw advanced by Conservatives – like Amery – who, as he saw it, clung to the remnants of Empire (POLL10). Yet, as Shadow Defence Minister, Powell went against a degree of cross-party consensus which emphasized the importance of maintaining, and even increasing, Britain’s presence “East of Suez” – Malaysia and Singapore – at the expense of Britain’s commitment to Germany where the Soviet threat was perceived to have lessened. This was the line adopted in the government’s February 1965 Defence White Paper and in the Conservative policy document, Putting Britain Right Ahead, which was published for the party conference in October 1965 (Shepherd 1996, p. 301). At the conference itself, Powell took issue with this perspective, asserting that Western Europe was central to British defence policy (POLL10). Powell did not think that it was possible to continue to exert power far from their geographical base – a view with clear implications for US involvement in Vietnam, which had

118

Paul Corthorn

increased substantially since 1964. Recognizing the “mutual antagonism” between the Soviet Union and China, the Sino-Soviet split, which had emerged publicly in 1961, undermined the notion of a monolithic Communist threat. Powell argued that among “the new independent countries in Asia and Africa, the eventual limits of Russian and Chinese advance…will be fixed by a balance of forces which will itself be Asiatic and African” and whose attainment could be “delayed rather than hastened by Western military presence” (POLL11). Powell had prompted debate but Conservative Party policy remained committed to a presence east of Suez (POLL12). Powell became even more forthright after his dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet in 1968. Amery had written to Powell in a supportive manner at this juncture. Referring to Winston Churchill’s period out of office in the 1930s and his attack on Appeasement, Amery told Powell: “I hope you will not be as long in the wilderness as Winston was, but just to let you know that in a different way, I am sure you are as right as he was!” (POLL13). Despite this, Amery and Powell soon found themselves publicly in conflict over their view of Britain’s role in the world as they both delivered lectures on “Britain’s military role in the 1970s” at the Royal United Services Institution (RUSI), the defence and security think tank.1 By now the situation had changed. In January 1968 the Labour government had announced that it was ending its role in Malaysia and Singapore (Pham 2010). Powell spoke at the RUSI first, in September 1968. He was dismissive of concerns about stability in South East Asia after British withdrawal, asking: “In what sense is stability in south-east Asia a matter of life and death to the United Kingdom? Every political alteration anywhere in the world has or may have economic implications for the United Kingdom; but from this it cannot be deduced that those implications, if they could be foreseen, would be worthwhile exerting the military effort necessary to prevent political change or to guide it in the desired direction.” Powell argued that it was in any case now clear that in Vietnam “the USA must extricate itself regardless of eventual stability”, a view that is briefly touched on by Esteves in his chapter on Powell and the international press. Powell called for services “profoundly different in motivation, philosophy, organization and armament from the Services which garrisoned and policed a world-wide Indo-British empire”. Powell argued that a “European field army” was needed together with volunteer reserves – the Territorial Army (TA) – as a “means of expanding and maintaining that army for as long as the conflict might have to be prolonged”. Since the late 1940s Powell had argued that, in the nuclear age, war would continue in much the same way as before. Now he attacked the reduction of the TA on the mistaken belief that nuclear weapons would mean that there would be only “a brief war or no war at all” (POLL14; French 2012, pp. 169–170, pp. 291–293; Corthorn 2019). Amery replied in January 1969. He was “very much in agreement” with Powell over the need to expand the TA but there the similarity ended. In contrast to Powell, he placed the danger from the Soviet Union right at the centre of his interpretation, frankly arguing: “Looking ten years ahead, the

Enoch Powell and Julian Amery

119

Soviet Union alone presents a military threat to the British Isles” (AMEJ4). Amery also stressed the imperative of working with the United States – even amid ongoing difficulties, most notably the US frustration at the UK’s unwillingness to join the war effort in Vietnam.2 With the United States keen for the United Kingdom to maintain its presence in South East Asia, Amery argued: “In the confrontation between the Free World and the Communists, the Americans play the most decisive part. Without them there can be at the present time no valid defence of Europe or of Asia … if it is sometimes difficult to live with them, it would be much harder to live without them.” Powell had not gone as far as suggesting abandonment of nuclear weapons but Amery was quick to argue that “without a nuclear capability, we would have no choice but to submit to blackmail, unless we could be sure of American nuclear retaliation on our behalf.” In economic terms, he also saw things very differently to Powell. Despite the relative decline in importance of Commonwealth trade compared with that from Western Europe, Amery still insisted that “half of our trade and investments lie in the Eastern Hemisphere and most of it in the area East of Suez”, which he defined notably broadly as “the arc of countries which stretches from New Zealand and Australia through Singapore, Malaysia, India and Pakistan, across the Persian Gulf, and down the East African Coast to Central Africa and South Africa”. He went on: The British stake in the area is immense. Nearly half our exports are directed to it. We draw from it essential supplies of oil, rubber, tin, wool, tea, copper, gold, diamonds and uranium. We have the major share in its banking, insurance, shipping and aviation transactions. (…) The importance to the British economy, to our living standards and to our whole social structure, of our stake East of Suez can scarcely be exaggerated. (AMEJ4) In the event, neither Powell nor Amery’s vision became a reality. When the Conservatives returned to government in 1970 under Edward Heath, they retained a limited political and military commitment in South East Asia, institutionalized in the form of the 1971 Five Power Defence Arrangements involving the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore.

Europe Differences over Europe were just as stark between Amery and Powell. In 1950, as the Labour government rejected the French ultimatum to decide promptly whether to join the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the Conservative Party opposed that decision, Amery was part of the cross-party British Committee of the Economic League for European Co-operation that was outspoken on the issue. In a letter to The Times, the committee argued that it was crucial to “take our full share in working out the Schuman Plan” because “the security and economic progress of Europe can only be achieved if

120

Paul Corthorn

Britain, France and Germany work together on the task” (The Times, 22 May 1950). Amery’s views were thwarted. In 1955, with the United Kingdom standing aloof, the six West European states already in the ECSC (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) convened at Messina in Sicily and agreed to form the European Economic Community (EEC), with a common market and customs union that were enacted in the Treaty of Rome (1957) and came into being in 1958. Nonetheless, Amery’s own commitment was undimmed. In 1956 he took up the chair of the UK Council of the European Movement (his father, who also combined support for European integration and the empire, had been a vice-chair of the same organization in the late 1940s when it was the British United Europe Committee) (Crowson 2007, p. 120). And as Minister of Aviation between 1962 and 1964, Amery was a strong advocate of the notoriously expensive Anglo-French Concorde aircraft – on the basis that a close alliance between Britain and France was central to a strong Europe (Cosgrave 2018). In 1950 Powell had been one of six Conservative MPs who abstained when the Conservative Party opposed the government’s decision not to join the ECSC (Shepherd 1996, pp. 84–85). The overall Conservative position was based on an acceptance of European unity as a check against Communism, a view that aligned it with the United States (Crowson 2007). Powell’s concern, at this stage, was the Empire. He was opposed to “any pooling of sovereignty with the European countries which would automatically result in severing her from the non-European countries of the Empire”. He further argued that “unlike the countries of the continent, Britain’s main defence obligations lie overseas in the countries of the Empire or those bordering upon it” (STAFF3). Yet Powell was later supportive of the British bid to join the emerging European Community, despite his awareness that it was a political and military, as well as an economic grouping. After the Conservative government under Harold Macmillan applied for membership in 1961, Powell embraced economic arguments in favour of joining (POLL10). Powell maintained this position even after the French President Charles De Gaulle vetoed the UK application in January 1963 (POLL10). Seeing the Empire’s breakup as inevitable and the Commonwealth as a pretence, Powell was dismissive of those in the Conservative Party, such as Victor Montagu (formerly Viscount Hinchingbrooke), who argued that British membership would damage trade with the Commonwealth. Instead Powell – who had by now firmly established his free-market economic credentials – emphasized the potential advantages in the large European market (POLL11). Having already argued that the priority in defence was Western Europe, Powell asserted that Britain was “a European power … no less than … France or Germany” because this offered an alternative to “the illusion of our ‘special relationship’ with the United States” (POLL11, 15). Powell continued to hold this position as Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson submitted the UK’s second application for European Community membership in May 1967 and even after it was promptly rebuked by De Gaulle (POLL14).

Enoch Powell and Julian Amery

121

Powell dramatically changed his position in March 1969, identifying objections to European Community membership about both economics and sovereignty.3 He now argued that “being an island, we are a commercial nation with the maximum number of options open” and that the “ideal thing for us would be freedom of trade with as many countries as possible”. He thus identified the European Community’s common external tariff as one of its disadvantages for the UK. Powell further argued that the European Community involved a “series of complex, bureaucratic institutions not easy to reconcile with our own very different system of administration under parliamentary control” (POLL16). Powell subsequently took up the point about sovereignty strongly but others had made it earlier. During the House of Commons debate over the UK application in August 1961 the Conservative Derek Walker-Smith, the former minister of health, had explicitly argued that European political union, which he held to be the long-term goal, would undermine sovereignty (Grob-Fitzgibbon 2016, p. 277). On the Labour side, Douglas Jay, Michael Foot and Peter Shore had expressed similar concerns (Broad 2001, p. 46). Sovereignty now formed an important part of the debate between Amery and Powell at the Conservative Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee in February 1970. Powell’s view was that “a majority of British people did not see how they could become part of a political union”. Amery, contrariwise, argued that these concerns should be overridden. He contended that the international political argument for joining was particularly powerful at this point amid fears that the United States would seek to limit its commitments to Europe in the near future (BOD1, Heffer 1998, p. 546).

Conclusion After 1970, Powell and Amery grew further apart. Despite his reputation as an imperialist, Amery’s enthusiasm for membership of the European Community facilitated his inclusion in Heath’s government (Cosgrave 2018). Meanwhile Powell became one of the foremost critics of the government’s European policy in an increasingly bitter feud with Heath. With UK membership of the Community secured in 1973, Powell and Amery campaigned on opposing sides in the 1975 referendum that had been called by the now Labour government AMEJ5; (Saunders 2018). With the Conservatives, according to Nicholas Crowson, having become “the party of Europe”, it was Powell rather than Amery who was out of line with the bulk of Conservative opinion (Crowson 2007, p. 14). Indeed, it was not until the end of the Cold War that opposition to membership of what had become the European Union (EU) began to grow in Conservative circles with the erosion of the argument that European integration offered a bulwark against Communism (Saunders 2018, pp. 374–375). Amery remained, above all, wary of the Soviet Union. It was little surprise that in the early 1980s, Alan Clark, later a junior minister, described him as “anti-Soviet” (Clark 2000, p. 225). Yet Amery’s views were only an exaggerated version of those held by many Conservatives. Hostility to the Soviet Union,

122

Paul Corthorn

and an embrace of the Anglo-American relationship, ran deep in Conservative circles and had been energized under Margaret Thatcher as a leader who devoted considerable effort to developing stronger relations with the United States and, especially before coming to power in 1979, had taken pains to warn of the continuing and even growing Soviet threat (Cooper 2010). Indeed, it was Powell’s arguments that were much more unusual in Conservative circles. His position was increasingly based on the premise that “Russia” did not pose a threat to Western Europe – on the explicit basis that “Russian aims and ambitions in Eastern Europe are no guide to Russian aims and ambitions in Western Europe” (POLL16). From 1979, Powell even began to argue that Britain and the Soviet Union should form some kind of international alliance as a counterbalance to what he saw as the growing alignment between the United States and China. Meanwhile, as Amery continued to champion the importance of the British nuclear deterrent, Powell came out in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1983 – amid the wider rise of the largely left-wing peace movement (Corthorn 2019). By the time that Amery was among a select group of people invited to a dinner party to celebrate Powell’s 80th birthday in 1992 – just before Amery himself retired from the House of Commons – their paths had diverged considerably (AMEJ6). Yet, in different ways, both had sought to respond to British “decline” – an issue that was itself given political salience in the 1970s and 1980s because of Thatcher’s attempt to mould an interpretation of it that suited her own political ends (Cannadine 1997, pp. 275–281; Tomlinson 2009; Saunders 2012, pp. 25–30).

Notes 1 RUSI changed its name to the Royal United Services Institute in 2004. 2 The Labour government under Harold Wilson was, in fact, continuing the policy adopted by the Conservative government: offering moral support to the United States and providing military training for the South Vietnamese army that was backed by the United States. The Wilson government also clandestinely sold arms to the United States, including napalm. Wilson juggled criticisms of the United States from within his Cabinet, from the parliamentary party and the rank and file with a commitment to maintaining good Anglo-American relations: see Vickers 2008, pp. 47–48; see also Busch 2001. 3 There were, in fact, three European Communities – the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), and the European Economic Community (EEC) – which were governed by common institutions after 1967.

References Primary Sources AMEJ1: Julian Amery to Enoch Powell, 12 January 1954, Julian Amery papers, Cambridge Churchill Archives Centre [hereafter CAC], AMEJ 1/2/71.

Enoch Powell and Julian Amery

123

AMEJ2: Julian Amery to Enoch Powell, 23 January 1954, Julian Amery papers, CAC, AMEJ 1/2/72. AMEJ3: Enoch Powell to Julian Amery, 2 December 1953, Julian Amery papers, CAC, AMEJ 1/2/72. AMEJ4: Julian Amery, “Britain’s Military Role in the 1970s: Another View, A Lecture” given at the RUSI on 15 January 1969, The Royal United Services Institution Journal, June 1969, 5–13, Amery papers, CAC, AMEJ 7/1/40. AMEJ5: Enoch Powell to Julian Amery, 26 February 1975; Julian Amery to Enoch Powell, 28 February 1975, Amery papers, CAC, AMEJ 2/1/72. AMEJ6: Jonathan Aitken to Julian Amery, 21 April 1992, Amery papers, CAC, AMEJ 2/1/156. BOD1: Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee minutes, 18 February 1970, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Conservative Party Archive, CRD 3/10/1/2. POLL1: ‘Victory’, 11 October 1942, Cambridge, Enoch Powell papers, CAC, POLL 1/6/2. POLL2: Enoch Powell, Memorandum, New Delhi, 16 December 1944, CAC, POLL 3/1/1. POLL3: Enoch Powell to R.A. Butler, 3 December 1946, CAC, POLL 3/1/4. POLL4: Enoch Powell, Memorandum, 3 December 1946, CAC, POLL 3/1/4. POLL5: Enoch Powell, ‘India: Proposal for a Working Committee’, 28 February 1947, CAC, POLL 3/1/5. POLL6: “India – 3rd June 1947”, CAC, POLL 3/1/5. POLL7: Enoch Powell, speech at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Penn Ward Branch, South West Wolverhampton Conservative Association, Rose and Crown Inn, Penn Road, Wolverhampton, 6 November 1953, CAC, POLL 3/1/11. POLL8: Leo Amery to Enoch Powell, 12 December 1953, CAC, POLL 1/1/11. POLL9: Enoch Powell, draft of “Problems of Empire” for Birmingham Post, November 1952, CAC, POLL 6/1/1. POLL10: speech at St George’s Day Banquet, 22 April 1961 ; speech at Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, 6 July 1963 ; speech at Trinity College Dublin, 13 November 1964 ; speech at the Conservative Party Conference, 1965; speech at St Albans, 30 October 1962 ; speech at Bromley, 24 October 1963, CAC, POLL 4/1/1. POLL11: BBC Home Service, “Conservative Party Conference”, 22.55, 14 October 1965; Light Programme, “Any Questions”, 18 March 1966, CAC, POLL 4/1/27. POLL12: Conservative Party Leader’s Consultative Committee (LCC) minutes, 16 February 1966, Cambridge, Churchill Archives Centre, Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg) papers, HLSM 2/42/2/10; LCC minutes, 25 July 1967, CAC, POLL 3/2/1/8. POLL13: Julian Amery to Enoch Powell, 23 April 1968, CAC, POLL 4/1/4. POLL14: Enoch Powell, lecture on “Britain’s Military Role in the 1970s” at the Royal United Services Institution, 18 September 1968 ; Enoch Powell, speech at the City of London, 31 May 1967, CAC, POLL 4/1/3. POLL15: Enoch Powell, speech at Bloomsbury, London, 1 December 1965, CAC, POLL 4/1/2. POLL16: Enoch Powell, speech at Clacton, Essex, 21 March 1969; speech at Farnham, Surrey, 7 March 1969, CAC, POLL 4/1/5. STAFF1: Staffordshire Record Office, Powell Papers, Enoch Powell speech at St Philip’s Parish Hall, Penn Fields, 16 February 1950 Political Correspondence and Other Papers of J. Enoch Powell, D3123/223. STAFF2: Staffordshire Record Office, Powell Papers, Enoch Powell, speech at the Annual General Meeting of the Penn Ward Branch of the Wolverhampton South

124

Paul Corthorn

West Conservative Association at the Rose and Crown Inn, Penn Road, Wolverhampton, 12 November 1954, D3123/223. STAFF3: Staffordshire Record Office, Powell papers, Enoch Powell speech at the Annual General Meeting of the Penn Ward Branch of the Wolverhampton South West Conservative Association at the Rose and Crown Inn, Penn Road, Wolverhampton, no date but early 1950, D3123/223.

Secondary sources Amery, J. (1951), The Life of Joseph Chamberlain (Vol. 6), London: Macmillan. Amery, J. (1953), “A Conservative View of the Commonwealth”, Political Quarterly, 24(2), pp. 167–180. Broad, R. (2001), Labour’s European Dilemmas: From Bevin to Blair, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Busch, P. (2001), “Supporting the War: Britain’s Decision to Send the Thompson Mission to Vietnam, 1960–1961”, Cold War History, 2(1), pp. 69–94. Cannadine, D. , (1997) “Apocalypse When? British Politicians and British ‘Decline’ in the Twentieth Century”, in Clarke, P. and Trebilcock, C. (eds.), Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, A. (2000), Diaries: Into Politics, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Cooper, J. (2010), “The Foreign Politics of Opposition: Margaret Thatcher and the Transatlantic Relationship before Power”, Contemporary British History, 24(1), pp. 23–42. Corthorn, P. (2019), Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cosgrave, P. (accessed 19 November 2018) “(Harold) Julian Amery”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Crowson, N. (2007), The Conservative Party and European Integration Since 1945: At the Heart of Europe?, Abingdon: Routledge. Greenwood, S. (2000), Britain and the Cold War, 1945–1991, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Grob-Fitzgibbon, B. (2016), Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Healey, D. (1990), The Time of My Life, London: Penguin. Heffer, S. (1998), Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998. Louis, W.R. (2002), “Leo Amery and the Post-war World, 1945–1955”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30(3), pp. 71–90. Onslow, S. (1997), Backbench Debate within the Conservative Party and its Influence on British Foreign Policy, 1948–1957, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Onslow, S. (2006), “Unreconstructed Nationalists and a Minor Gunboat Operation: Julian Amery, Neil McLean and the Suez Crisis”, Contemporary British History, 20 (1), pp. 73–99. Pham, P.L. (2010), Ending “East of Suez”: The British Decision to Withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore, 1964–1970, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Powell, J.E. (1977), Joseph Chamberlain, London: Thames & Hudson. Ramsden, J. (1980), The Making of Conservative Party Policy: The Conservative Research Department Since 1929, London: Longman.

Enoch Powell and Julian Amery

125

Saunders, R. (2012), “Crisis? What Crisis? Thatcherism and the Seventies”, in Jackson, B. and Saunders, R. (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saunders, R. (2018), Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shepherd, R. (1996), Enoch Powell: A Biography, London: Hutchinson. Tomlinson, J. (1996), “Inventing ‘Decline’: The Falling Behind of the British Economy in the Post-war Years”, Economic History Review, 49(4), pp. 731–757. Tomlinson, J. (2003), “The Decline of the Empire and the Economic ‘Decline’ of Britain”, Twentieth Century British History, 14(3), pp. 201–222. Tomlinson, J. (2009), “Thrice Denied: ‘Declinism’ as a Recurrent Theme in British History in the Long Twentieth Century”, Twentieth Century British History, 20(2), pp. 227–251. Toye, R. (2011), Churchill’s Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made, London: Pan Books. Utley, T.E. (1968), Enoch Powell: The Man and his Thinking, London: Kimber. Vickers, R. (2008), “Harold Wilson, the British Labour Party and the War in Vietnam”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 10(2), pp. 41–70. Ward, S. (ed.) (2001), British Culture and the End of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Young, H. (1998), This Blessed Spot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair, London: Macmillan.

8

The end of an intellectual journey: How Alfred Sherman’s ideas on immigration and the British nation were framed by Powellism (1968–1979) Stéphane Porion UNIVERSITY OF TOURS

“I was privileged to know Enoch personally. (…) I tried without success to bring him into the shadow-cabinet leaderships, he may have told you of our long meetings, and Keith Joseph’s tergiversations. I regret that national leaderships eluded him. As one of his admirers, I thank you for the support you gave him which sustained him through travails” (Sherman to Pamela Powell, February 1998, POLL 1/7/1).

Introduction Alfred Sherman (1919–2006) took up a career in journalism as a regular columnist for The Jewish Chronicle as early as 1963, The Daily Telegraph from 1965 to 1986, and The Salisbury Review from 2002 to 2005 at the end of his life, publishing his views on economic issues and the question of immigration. The only political office that he held was that of councillor for Kensington and Chelsea in one of the country’s safest Conservative constituencies (Vinen 2009, p. 64). As noted by his obituary in The Times, there was an ideological shift in his political thinking from communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s to New Right and free market ideas in the 1970s: Alfred Sherman, a journalist, policy thinker and undeniable iconoclast, was a leading influence on Margaret Thatcher after she became party leader in 1975. A former communist who had fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, Sherman had, between his late twenties and late forties, undergone a spectacular ideological conversion from the far Left to the extreme Right. (The Times 29 August 2006) In September 1974, a month before the second general election of that year, which had ushered in Edward Heath’s crushing defeat at the polls in February, Sherman decided to co-found a think tank with Keith Joseph – the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). Its aim was to promote free-market beliefs and take part in the battle of ideas for a revival of economic liberalism for,

The end of an intellectual journey

127

apart from the Institute of Economic Affairs set up in 1957, almost no think tank had committed itself to challenging the Keynesian post-war consensus paradigm (Burgess and Alderman 1990, pp. 14–15). Sherman thus played such a pivotal role in the intellectual development of Thatcherism in the late 1970s through the CPS (The Times 31 August 2006) and through his being a close and personal adviser to Margaret Thatcher that she acknowledges his influence in her memoirs: “I could not have become leader of the Opposition, or achieved what I did as Prime Minister, without Keith [Joseph]. Nor, it is fair to say, could Keith have achieved what he did without the Centre for Policy Studies and Alfred Sherman” (Thatcher 1995, p. 251). Sherman viewed himself as “Thatcher’s chief intellectual provider” (Young 1989, p. 22) and liked to brag that he “had articulated her instincts” (The Guardian 29 August 2006). As Dennis Kavanagh puts it in Sherman’s biographical note for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “In his drafts of speeches, and in his journalism, he provided many of the ideas that collectively became known as Thatcherism” (Kavanagh 2010). Yet, Sherman later declared about his former hero, with no deference at all (Vinen 2009, p. 290): “Lady Thatcher is great theatre as long as someone else is writing her lines; she hasn’t got a clue” (The Telegraph 28 August 2006). Once in power in the 1980s, not only did Thatcher deviate from Sherman’s advice but she also gradually fell out with him as he had become critical of her governments – according to him, “there was a process of ‘de-Shermanization’ underway” (The Guardian 29 August 2006). Some fresh studies of Thatcherism have particularly accounted for Thatcher’s ideological debt to Powell from an economic and neoliberal perspective (Vinen 2009; Porion 2011; Schofield 2012; O’Hara 2013) and showed how Powellism could be viewed, in E.H.H. Green’s own words, as “aspects of ‘Thatcherism’ [that] had existed avant la lettre” (Green 2002, p. 14). In her 1994 seminal study on new right discourse on race and immigration, Anna Marie Smith sets out to analyse the “ways in which [Powellism] laid part of the foundation for Thatcherism” (Smith 1994, p. 129) and arrives at the following conclusion: Thatcher differed from Powell on race in one important respect: she was far more effective in representing her racist views as the moderate position which stood between extremist demands from both the right and the left. She benefited in this regard from the rise of the National Front in the 1970s, and from the shift in her own party, even among the pragmatic “wets”, to the right. Powell always had to contend with Heath’s criticisms which marginalized him as a right-wing extremist. Thatcher was much more free to situate her own extremism as a sensible and mainstream position. (Ibid., p. 179) Although her concluding remark is appropriate enough, the author overlooks the crucial role that Sherman played under the radar – he had thus fuelled the development of Thatcherism with a specific approach to the issues of race and immigration in a Powellite vein.

128

Stéphane Porion

This chapter relies primarily on archival material and aims to analyse the way in which Powellism framed Sherman’s own thinking on race, immigration and the British nation in the late 1960s and the 1970s. As the latter was Thatcher’s close adviser, it can hardly be denied that, regarding these issues, Sherman turned out to be, to some extent, the intellectual link behind the scenes between Powellism and Thatcherism. Moreover, the chapter will highlight that Sherman’s intellectual journey on British membership in the EEC after the 1975 referendum had not yet been completed – he had not really taken into account the issue of British sovereignty and his understanding of Powellism was actually parochial.

Sherman’s relationships with Powell in perspective There still remains a gap in historiographical debates in so far as the various studies on Powellism – even the latest ones (Lord Howard of Rising 2012; Schofield 2013) – and Powell’s biographies in general (Shepherd 1997; Heffer 1999) do not either mention the name of Alfred Sherman at all or trace Powell’s inspiring influence on Sherman’s thinking. However, both men were acquainted, although they were not close friends. As the various archives show (Sherman papers and Powell papers, respectively held at Royal Holloway (London) and at Cambridge), they sometimes met over political dinners in the 1970s and even had private, albeit sporadic, correspondence. In the private letter of condolences cited as the epigraph to this chapter, Sherman pays tribute to his mentor for the stimulating and fundamental debates they had together and wishes he had played a greater role when Thatcher was in power. In addition, Sherman wrote in his memoirs: “If Powell … had not acted, who knows? Margaret Thatcher might have remained among the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ of the Conservative Party” (Sherman 2005, p. 24). Sherman did his utmost to rehabilitate Powell into Thatcher’s first inner circle as he thought that he could be instrumental in defining what was to be known as Thatcherism and in setting out policies. Before the 1979 general election for instance, he went so far as to suggest to Keith Joseph that Thatcher should seek Powell’s support and have “him in [their] camp” as all of them had repudiated Heath’s Conservatism: “Were Powell to mute his antagonism or even show some moderated benevolence towards us during the election period, while leaving open the possibility of some post-electoral arrangement that would be the most we could hope for. But all these considerations are for you and Margaret” (private note from Sherman to Joseph 6 June 1978, AC 114). Furthermore, just after Sherman had quit the CPS, he formed “a small unit for thought and political influence, … called Policy Search” in 1984 and hoped that Powell would both “be guest at [their] receptions and lunches” and accept to Latinize the motto (“Dare to think, let nothing or no one trammel you”) for his coat of arms (letter from Sherman to Powell, 20 December 1984, POLL 1/1/36).

The end of an intellectual journey

129

Powell’s and Sherman’s respective personality and style display a certain number of commonalities. Richard Cockett argues that Alfred Sherman “could be, on occasion, arrogant and querulous”. He would make “provocative and outspoken comments” and seemed to “specialize in being wilfully politically incorrect”. Just as Enoch Powell had aroused controversy and discontent with his April 1968 speech, Alfred Sherman faced exactly the same situation, even though he benefitted from freedom of speech, being a journalist and a political adviser. As the same author puts it, “[Sherman] reserved his plainest speaking manner for the delicate subject of immigration, advocating an extremely restrictive policy that was always at odds with his libertarian views on economic matters. His views on immigration and equally important, the way in which he expressed them put him beyond the pale in such company as the Selsdon Group”1 (Cockett 1994, pp. 234–235). More importantly, both men claimed to be arrogant intellectuals and men of ideas with superior brains,2 even if it meant harbouring enemies or offending people (Vinen 2009, p. 65). Indeed, Powell acknowledged this particular nature of his, making up his iconoclasm: “I am intellectually arrogant. This is one of the things about me, I’m afraid that I have a conviction in my own capability of being right when everybody else is wrong. I have a savage reliance on the working of my own intellect, which renders me impervious to intellectual isolation” (Powell’s interview with Anne Brown, 13 April 1986, p. 2, POLL 4/1/29 and POLL 3/2/5/2; Collings 1992, p. 29). In an Observer profile dated 21 August 1983, Sherman used Montesquieu’s words to depict this dilemma: “A man of ideas usually has difficulty in a society. Few meet with his approval. He is bored with the majority of people whom he chooses to call bad company. Inevitably, they are made aware of his disapproval. Thus he creates so many enemies” (Cockett 1994, p. 234). All in all, Sherman considered himself to be “a man of ideas fallen among party politicians” (Ibid., p. 235). On a political level, Sherman is reported to have turned his attention to the issue of immigration at a late stage in his career, only using the immigration card in the 1978 by-election of the Ilford North seat3 that the Conservatives won again (Sherman 2005, pp. 97–98) and in the run-up to the 1979 general election (Barker 1981, pp. 3 and 20; Philpot 2017, pp. 137–140). In fact, Sherman had focused on the Deptford constituency4 much earlier to gauge the scope and detrimental impact of immigration over there (Sherman, Deptford and the 1964 General Election, 11 November 1971, Folio FHT/ F117; Sherman, Deptford, AR A5/4/5, Box 15).

Powell’s 1968 speech as a watershed in Sherman’s thinking. Although Powell had by 1968 become a pariah for many Conservatives within in his own party, Sherman began to grasp the meaning of Powellism as both “constructing an alternative post-imperial nationalist strategy which redefined the conservative nation and a political strategy built around … repatriation, and an end to New Commonwealth immigration, plus the

130

Stéphane Porion

defence of the nation-state” (Lynch, 1999, p. 38). Philip Lynch points out the crucial impact that Powellism had on figures such as Sherman, who were also concerned by what they perceived as the dangers of immigration. Sherman thus noticed that Powell could garner public support, even from traditionally Labour supporters and realized that Powellism could fuel his own ideas, since he had already started to contest the economic benefits for the British nation to have such a cheap pool of labour force made up of New Commonwealth immigrants (Sherman, 28 June 1968, AC 1312, Box 35, Folder 6). In that regard, Powell’s speech turned out to be a watershed in Sherman’s thinking on race and immigration as one of his interviews in June 1968 reveals: Enoch Powell’s stand opposing further important (sic) of foreign labor – i.e. favouring restriction of immigration – [is] very courageous. A lot of humbug [is] being talked by both political parties about the question of freedom of Commonwealth residents in less developed countries to migrate to Britain. Powell is strongly supported by the working classes (notably the union), and is still a force to be reckoned with. The liberal press in the United States would like to think that Powell’s career has been ruined by his stand on immigration, but it is not so. (Ibid.) Powell’s assessment of the immigration problem in Britain in his well-known speech – depicted by Douglas Schoen as “a strange mixture of populist assertion and anecdote, statistics and classical allusion” – boiled down to voicing his constituents’ discontent and despair and attacking both the Race Relations Bill and the ongoing inflow of immigrants (Schoen 1977, pp. 32–33) and pushed Sherman to further explore what he saw as the adverse economic impact of coloured immigrant workers in the UK when Britain, going through stagnation, started to be seen as the sick man of Europe. It was all the more important for Sherman to do so, as when Powell was Minister of Health in the early 1960s, he had never called for a halt in the immigration of New Commonwealth nurses and doctors.5 Sherman highlighted the “increasing burden” on the welfare state and “low marginal productivity” in order to condemn the delusion of this cheap available labour force: The immigrant workers and their above-average sized families created significant welfare costs, in education, health, and housing. Even the cheaper immigrant labour failed to restore the competitive position of British textiles, resulting in severe Asian unemployment and ethnic tensions, blighting once bustling northern cities. (Sherman 2005, p. 74) Sherman’s reasoning seems flawed here and only aims to blame the low-paid immigrant labour force: British textile had been going through inexorable decline since the mid-1920s and it is difficult to imagine how the cheapest workers could have saved it.

The end of an intellectual journey

131

Sherman was also critical of the compelling arguments used by his enemies (“the immigrationists”) – economic rationalization and a labour shortage. Spurred to pursue Keynesian policies designed to guarantee economic growth through demand management, Sherman argued that British governments, as “economic planners”, created a high level of labour demand, which resulted in artificially increasing high social benefits and thus had to drastically increase public expenditure to meet the costs of education, skills and amenities, because “Britain import[ed] masses of poor, unskilled, uneducated, primitive and under-urbanised people” (Sherman, 9 September 1976). He also added: “To justify continued immigration, Socialists and self-styled liberals do not shrink from the most blatantly racist arguments, namely, that coloured immigrants should be systematically recruited to fill jobs which are uncongenial to Englishmen because of pay, conditions, status, or any other reason” (Ibid.). Sherman’s use of “most blatantly racism” is ambivalent here: it is difficult to tell whether he is exposing the economic racism against immigrants implacably relegated to the bottom end of the labour market, thus oddly siding with the left, or whether he is being critical against the racism experienced by white natives, whose working-class section is being prevented from working in an effort to make room for immigrants. Looking at employment, Sherman compared full employment in the 1950s with rising unemployment in 1970s’ Britain in crisis to claim that despite the immigration legislations of 1962, 1968 and 1971 the import of immigrants kept wages low and increased unemployment, unveiling the failure of “socialist” planning – a term he deliberately used in order to rule out the post-war Keynesian paradigm: “The use of cheap third-world labour has proved a false economy. It has proven a disincentive to modernisation, and to effective modernisation of the labour market” (Sherman, 23 June 1977, p. 6, AC 29/B1/2/22, Box 3). As argued elsewhere, Sherman pointed out that it was a delusion to think, as the “socialist” planners did, that “the use of an under-educated coloured sub-proletariat filling the worst jobs with worst housing, schools and amenities” would be a “sine qua non for economic recovery” and “a substitute for modernisation and investment” (Sherman, 9 September 1976).

New Right new racism Powell showing the way It is often assumed that cultural racism in the British context stemmed from Powellism – “it was [Powell], in his speeches and writings in the late 1960s and 1970s, who developed the themes of the new racism” (Gordon and Klug 1986, p. 13). Powell called for the preservation of “a homogeneous nation” (Taggart 2000, p. 96), through voluntary repatriation for instance – that is to defend a (largely reified) definition of the British way of life encompassing the English language, customs, beliefs, feelings, culture and identity in the British nation, bonding similar people together – and thus rejected what they

132

Stéphane Porion

perceived as the “otherness” of coloured people constituting an alien element in Britain (Powell 1978, p. 165). In a populist vein, Powell used the fears and resentments of ordinary people, no matter how genuine they were, to make immigration a dangerous issue since too many immigrants (“in numerical terms”) would be impossible to integrate (Powell, 20 April 1968), thereby jeopardizing the homogeneous nation (Porion 2009; Kazin and Porion, 2017). According to Martin Barker, “the object of fear” becomes “real” for ordinary people and has nothing to do with “some paranoiac delusion” or “some misunderstanding of real threats”: The very existence of fears about damage to the unity of the nation is proof that the unity of the nation is threatened. The fears are self-validating. For the feelings, the customs make up the nation for all it is worth. The nation is its “way of life”. This theory allows a redefinition of racial prejudice. Here it has nothing to do with disliking foreigners, or with discriminating against them. You are racially prejudiced if you refuse to adopt the characteristic life style of the country in which you have chosen to live. (Barker 1981, p.17) As has already been highlighted, there was a link between new racism and New Right ideas, and Powell just showed the way to other conservative ideologues, such as Alfred Sherman: During the 1980s, several sociologists and antiracists discerned the growing presence of a British “new racism” … It was a racism said to have been first articulated in the speeches of Enoch Powell in the late 1960s, nurtured in the New Right intellectual circles of the 1970s, burst into prominence in the early 1980s with the publicity accorded to the polemical output of writers associated with the radical right-wing journal The Salisbury Review, and then disseminated by many newspaper columnists and lead writers in both the broadsheets and the tabloids. (Modood 2005, p. 27) Powell and Sherman linked the ideas of “race” and “nation”, appealing to emotions, and calling for the preservation of British culture and identity with common-sense arguments. Sherman, a populist and Powellite champion of new racism In the late 1970s, Sherman started to recycle the same arguments as Powell’s in order to shed light on the problems caused by immigration – “immigration was bound to import problems” (Sherman, 9 September 1976, p. 16) – and pursued the very same populist strategy (Kazin and Porion, 2017) designed to promote cultural racism. Indeed he thought immigrants could not “adapt to western ways”, which resulted in “resentment” among the British population (Sherman, 9 September 1976, p. 16)

The end of an intellectual journey

133

The imposition of mass immigration from backward alien cultures is just one symptom of this self-destructive urge reflected in the assault on patriotism, the family, … traditional morality, … respect for the law, thrift, hard work and other values … in short, all that is English and wholesome. (Ibid.) Sherman claimed to voice the concerns of the silent majority for whom “immigration never ceased to be an issue” (Sherman, 8 September 1976). Echoing Powell’s speech, he said: “For the ordinary Englishmen mass third world immigration is a source of distress and foreboding and a threat to the national character of their homeland” (Sherman, letter to The Times, 22 February 1978, p. 1, AC 821). To fend off accusations of racism, Sherman pursued a three-pronged strategy. First, he did not blame the immigrants but the elites, the establishment and “the immigrationists” for the situation they created: “This country’s representative institutions and party system imposed mass Third-World immigration against the wishes of the majority of the native population” (Sherman, 8 September 1976, p. 16). This caused difficulty to immigrants Sherman referred to in derogatory terms (Taggart 2000, p. 94), as “a disaffected lumpenproletariat” – “an embittered anti-social coloured mass, unskilled, unqualified, unemployed, a danger to the community” in the shape of “catastrophic communal conflict” (Sherman, 8 September 1976, p. 16). In Sherman’s eyes, it would seem that the mass of British motives was destined to oppose itself to the immigrants taken as a whole, as a mass of “disaffected, lumpenproletariat” folks, whereas Powell in his reference to the Sikh community in April 1968, as Brooke potently argues (Brooke 2007), had been deeply marked by the communalism within India, internecine feuds within the nation, which were threatening to rear their ugly head in Britain after mass immigration. In both prospects, there would be chaos, but not of the same nature. Sherman also disclosed “the conflict between the instincts of the people and the intellectual fashions of the Establishment where British nationhood is concerned” (Sherman, 9 November 1979, p. 18). He called for resistance, speaking as though he were the new spokesperson for ordinary people, just as Enoch Powell had meant to become earlier (POLL 12/1/12; POLL 12/1/14; The Sunday Times 8 September 1968; Time Magazine 17 January 1969; Schofield 2013, p. 235): “For millions of ordinary English men and women these epithets hold no terrors … whatever the elites may preach or do” (Sherman, 9 September 1976, p. 16). In fact, Sherman argues that “what moves immigrationists is not sympathy for the immigrant, but antipathy to their own people” (Sherman, 21 March 1978, p. 5, AC 821). Second, Sherman thought that if anything was done to control and curb immigration, it would mean “courting accusations of racism” (9 November 1979, p. 18); in other words, “to point out the effects of immigration was ‘racist’” (Sherman 2005, p. 69), that is why “too many people are frightened off by accusations: ‘racialists’, ‘elitist’ or simply ‘old-fashioned’, which makes

134

Stéphane Porion

cowards of nearly all” (Sherman, 9 September 1976, p. 16). In addition, Sherman sketched out his own definition of racism in various writings to try and stress that he was no racist at all, just as Powell had already done (Birmingham Post 4 May 1968, p. 8; POLL 12/1/12; The Times 4 May 1968; Collings 1992, pp. 59–60), especially in his 1969 TV interview with David Frost. Racism was thus, in Sherman’s eyes, still couched in biological or scientific terms: “A theory which ascribes differences – whether observed or imputed – to genetic inheritance and which believes that nations can be ranged in an order on the basis of these inheritances: that is all ” (Sherman, 6 June 1977, p. 18, AC 29/B1/2/22, Box 3). Elsewhere, he argued that “racialism is the belief that intellectual, cultural and moral qualities are genetically transmitted among the main racial groupings of mankind, that racial groups can be graded according to these qualities as inferior, with the racialists’ own group at the apex” (Sherman, 8 September 1976). According to Martin Barker: “Sherman has himself offered a definition of racism according to which he would not be a racist … The prevalence of a definition of racism in terms of superiority/inferiority has helped conceal how common is a form of racism that does not need to make such assertions” (Barker 1981, p. 4). Indeed, Sherman’s own stigmatizing stance meant that one group of individuals or one race was innately inferior to others in terms of intelligence, cultures or customs. That is why he considered British culture to be superior to that of black Caribbeans. Clearly, in Sherman’s appreciation, “culture” as made up by ascriptive features had replaced “race” in an effort to stave off accusations of racism. And it is significant that he should have singled out Caribbeans for blame since these, as opposed to South Asians, were overwhelmingly British in many cultural respects. Sherman was therefore a champion of new racism. Third, Sherman rejected the concepts of “race” and “racialism”, which were “imported from the new world as a result of the Americanisation and vulgarisation of British social studies and brandished in McCarthyite style against critics of mass immigration” (Sherman, 8 September 1976). It was reminiscent of what Powell had said in February 1973: [The separation of races] comes from the United States, where “race” is used to distinguish Negro from non-Negro; but this is clearly a specialised and American acceptance of the term. The importation of American vocabulary into the discussion of circumstances in the United Kingdom is dangerous and misleading – and not because it’s the United Kingdom. (Collings 1992, p. 60) In his 1968 speech, Powell was extremely concerned by mass immigration and kept using figures to condemn it. To Sherman, the scope of the problem was similar in the mid-1970s; it was still a question of massive inflows of immigrants to integrate. He contended that the various immigration acts since 1962 had been a huge failure in cutting down coloured immigration and wrote in 1976: “In Britain there are millions of mainly poor ill-educated under-urbanised immigrants” (Sherman, 9 September 1976, p. 16). Indeed,

The end of an intellectual journey

135

the 1981 census recorded an increase of the black and Asian population to 2.1 million from 1971 to 1981 – about one-third could be accounted for by net immigration (Spencer 1997, p. 146). But Sherman insisted on the fact that tackling the issue of immigration for politicians would mean going beyond the “debate focused exclusively or even primarily on numbers, specific abuses and economic benefits” as these “are only symptoms of the underlying ill” (Sherman, 8 September 1976).

Sherman as the intellectual link between Powell and Thatcher (1976–1979) The major troubles that disrupted the Notting Hill carnival in late August 1976 were another turning point in Sherman’s thinking. Commenting on their meaning in the press, he wrote: “the widow’s curse of ‘dependants’ and the professionalization and scale of illegal immigration sparked off an expression of the pent-up sense of outrage felt by millions of English people at the scope and implications of continuous mass immigration from the Third World. These feelings have been magnified by the Notting Hill riots” (Sherman, 8 September 1976). To make things worse for Sherman, the Labour Party introduced a new Race Relations Act the same year. As a matter of fact, Sherman published two major articles in The Daily Telegraph on 8 and 9 September. He underscored that “the missing dimension in the public debate was nationhood” (Ibid.) and claimed that “procedures should be worked out whereby citizenship would be a function of nationhood, not of race, but membership of historic nations: English, Scots, Welsh, Ulster” (Sherman, 30 September 1976, p. 2, AC 821). As he puts it: Citizenship can be conferred by law and taken away, and move with frontiers. It is designed to reflect membership of a nation; but some nations do not automatically confer citizenship to non-nationals born on their territory. As they would be given a voice in the nation’s fate. Assimilation is possible only in the course of time as original family ties and folk memories fade and if the non-nationals’ original culture is related to their host nation’s. (Sherman, 8 September 1976) Therefore, “Parliament can no more turn a Chinese into an Englishman than it can turn a man into a woman” (Ibid.). At the same time, Sherman realized that the only political party that had succeeded in using the immigration card was the National Front (Sherman, 23 June 1977, p. 10, AC 29/B1/2/22, Box 3). Indeed, Sherman’s assessment was vindicated by the party’s growing momentum in electoral or membership terms. The National Front benefited from the Powell effect to a large extent until the mid-1970s (Ignazi 2003, p. 185, Porion 2012, pp. 325–327).6 To stop its surge, he thought that the Conservatives should really tackle the issue of immigration:

136

Stéphane Porion Conservatives must not only re-affirm the Englishman’s right to his national home, but the spiritual and social values it traditionally embodied, and English England in every sense of the word. This in no way excludes the openness and fair treatment of foreigners, the scope for refugees, scholars and an enterprising few which have traditionally marked out Britain.7 On the contrary, it is precisely mass immigration of primitive peoples which has exploited British generosity, tolerance and fairmindedness and is now threatening their continued persistence. (Sherman, 30 September 1976, p. 3, AC 821)

Sherman thus managed to convince Keith Joseph, who was Thatcher’s most loyal shadow Cabinet ally, that views on immigration had shifted. His strategy was to use Joseph’s influence on Thatcher to accept a radical change in the Tories’ stance on immigration. In July 1976, Joseph had thus singled out immigration as one of the themes that Thatcher and her colleagues should “hammer away over during the next months” (Joseph, 22 July 1976). In December 1976, he circulated a discussion paper in which he pointed out that the Conservative policies had “moved significantly” and added: “But we have not yet had to face the dilemmas involved in fulfilling our pledges. We should, I believe, be ready to disappoint the expectations of immigrants if the only alternative is to disappoint the expectations of the English. The English have rights too” (Joseph, 7 December 1976, p. 2). In his recent book on Thatcher, Robert Philpot has shown that Sherman, as an eminence grise, managed to shape the Thatcherite stance on immigration: Immigration, of course, represented a key element of the wider populist “common ground” strategy that Sherman had been urging on the Tory leader … [L]egitimising Mrs Thatcher’s instincts by suggesting they were in tune with a public mood, which was frustrated by a liberal-leaning establishment, would often elicit a positive response. Immigration was not an issue of race, … but one of nationhood. (Philpot 2017, p. 138) Sherman thought that it had been hard for Conservative politicians to cope with a range of burning issues, such as immigration, – for they remained “taboos” (Sherman 2005, p. 88) – and it was high time that Thatcher broke the yoke of “political censorship” – “an open conspiracy to stifle debate and preclude political expression of widespread popular feeling”. “For the ordinary Englishmen mass third immigration was a source of distress and foreboding and a threat to the national character of their homeland” (Sherman in The Times, 22 February 1978, pp. 1–2, AC 821). He helped Thatcher to prepare an interview on “World in Action” in January 1978. Thatcher thus delivered a whole speech on immigration and “her text reproduced much of Powell’s discourse”. As Anna Marie Smith puts it: “Her tough stance on black immigration reassured her right-wing backbenchers at a time when she was tactically obliged to make several concessions to the Tory ‘wets’” (Smith 1994, p. 179). On 31 January 1978, The Daily Mail gave the speech its entire front page:

The end of an intellectual journey

137

If we went on as we are, then by the end of the century there would be 4 million people of the New Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture … [I]f there is a fear that it might swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in. (Thatcher quoted in Barker 1981, p. 15) Although her speech generated a political furore and blame was quickly pointed at Sherman, Thatcher had no intention of backing down: she got a postbag of 10,000 letters of support – which was reminiscent of what had happened to Powell after his April 1968 speech – and there was a Conservative rise in opinion polls (Philpot 2017, p. 139). Her speech served as “an appeal to the National Front’s potential voters” (Pitchford 2011, p. 226). Five days before the 1979 British general election, Thatcher took part in a programme on BBC Radio 4 and, being under pressure by a black listener to remove a statement she had made a year before (Britain was being “swamped” by immigrants with alien cultures), she refused to do so and declared instead: “Some people do feel swamped if streets they have lived in for the whole of their lives are really now quite, quite different” (Thatcher quoted in Barker 1981, p. 1). The Sun made this its front page the next day. As for the next page, covering the end of the political campaign, the newspaper depicted National Front party members as “twisted little men, with views similar to Hitler’s, with a mixture of crackpot economies, jingoism and odious racialism”. The editorial backed up the leader of the Conservative Party and offered her valuable propaganda and support against “the National Front’s despicable attitudes” by claiming: “Fortunately, it no longer matters what these revolting people say. At last one of the major political parties have [sic] grasped the immigrant nettle … No reasonable person – black or white could quarrel with Tory plans for tightening the rules governing immigration. The proposals are fair, responsible and humane” (Ibid.). As Anna Marie Smith points out: “Like Powell, Thatcher claimed to be acting as a responsible representative who merely reflects existing anxieties. She characterized the views of her racist constituents as natural and justifiable sentiments, and located the source of racial antagonisms in the black population” (Smith 1994, p. 180). The Conservative Party won the 3 May 1979 general election with an overall majority of 43, thereby putting an end to dealignment and the National Front’s rise. Sherman’s populist and Powellite strategy seemed successful: the Conservatives were back in power. As Camilla Schofield puts it, there were “massive swings to the Conservatives in Islington through to the East End, to Dagenham: in areas where the National Front had been more active” (Schofield 2013, p. 341). Powell commented on Thatcher’s populism after her victory: “People hearing her are convinced that she shares the same frustrations and nurtures the same ambition” – “in a single word ‘nation’” (Ibid.). However, as Robert Ford argues in his chapter, it is debatable that Thatcher “gained a significant advantage from immigration in 1979”.

138

Stéphane Porion

The “Eurosceptic” dimension of Powellism: how and why Sherman misunderstood it in the 1970s Powellism: the preservation of Britain’s homogeneity and sovereignty in the 1970s In its attempt to redefine the politics of nationhood in a post-war imperial context, Powellism fused two political aims to protect British sovereignty – i.e. the preservation of a racially and culturally homogeneous nation and the opposition to Britain’s further political integration into the EEC. Some studies have already pointed out the complexity and originality of Powellism hinging on “an attempt at a consistent underlying logic, unusual in British Conservatism” in the 1970s (Wellings 2011, p. 103). Britain was therefore, in Powell’s eyes, under attack from within (with the threat of too many New Commonwealth immigrants to integrate) and from without (with Brussels’ supranational powers of interference). After the outcome of the 1975 referendum on British membership in the EEC, “[Powell’s] logic of homogeneity and democracy informed some of [his] thinking regarding the consequences of immigration and European integration”, such as his April 1976 speech to the Monday Club (Ibid., p. 104). Sherman’s own narrative of British integration in the EEC in the 1970s: a rejection of Powellism? There remains a long note in the archives (Sherman papers, Thatcher papers), entitled “Britain and the EEC – The Flood Street Declaration”, which Sherman drafted in June 1978 for Keith Joseph, expounding his view on the European question. Sherman meant to talk it over with Powell, but “the meeting never took place” as marked in pen in the upper right corner of the document (Sherman, 6 June 1978, AC 115, Box 3). What is striking is that, at the time, the latter was no longer a member of the Conservative Party and, still, Sherman was eager to get his opinion on this. In the 1970s, Sherman, just like Thatcher, had not yet developed a thorough assessment of Britain’s membership in the EEC from a political perspective as Powell did with his stark opposition to the 1972 Act of Entry – “the unthinkable act” (Collings 1991, p. 225) and Brussels’ infringements on British sovereignty. Sherman was much more concerned with the economic implications that belonging to the Common Market entailed, which meant a range of “economic dis-benefits” since the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy affected British trading interests (Sherman 2005, p.78). He viewed British membership as a real asset for Britain and overlooked its impact on national sovereignty: What I see as our middle-of-the-road Europeanism: on the one hand, we do not begrudge minor concessions of sovereignty to the Community, any more than we do to NATO … To suggest that parliamentary sovereignty

The end of an intellectual journey

139

has been abrogated because we accept those of Brussels regulations which we do not reject is to mistake form for content. Just as I believe that our entry into Europe adds more our history than it subtracts. Similarly I believe that middle-of-the-road membership enhances our economic strength and hence our independence and sovereignty. (Sherman, 6 June 1978, p. 2, AC 115, Box 3) Although in the aftermath of the 1975 referendum, Sherman contended that the Conservative Party should respect popular consent and Britain remain in the EEC, one is struck by the proleptic irony of his comment in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum: People have asked whether we are irrevocably bound to accept Brussels’ rulings … Sovereignty remains with the people in parliament. By a substantial majority the people of this country voted in a referendum in favour of remaining in the EEC, and parliament embodied the national will in legislation. No parliament can bind its successors … So if at any future date, which I devoutly hope will not come about, a majority of the electorate were to wish otherwise, parliament would doubtless embody their wishes. But we shall do everything possible to make the community a success, and help it evolve into a balanced partnership rather cast gloom by envisaging the worst. In a happy marriage, people do not raise hypothetical questions about divorce. (Ibid., p. 3) From this perspective, Sherman did not share Powell’s nationalist stance of “Little Englandism”, thinking Britain’s identity and sovereignty were not actually being undermined by Powell’s clearly identified “enemy without”. To him, the EEC was not to turn into a federal unit absorbing national identities and sovereignties: I do not envisage anything like the emergence of a new European nationhood in the foreseeable future, on the analogy of the Americanism of the USA. Neither in the UK nor in the rest of the Nine, has the treaty superseded nationhood, however defined. Just as Frenchmen remain French, Flemings Flemish, and Italians Italian, so we in Great Britain remain what we were before 1972 (… All logic and history are against the likelihood of the emergence of a single European or Communal nation. The historic nations, formed during centuries, remain. (Ibid., pp. 4–5) As a matter of fact, the 1979 Conservative Manifesto section on Europe stated that the party intended to “work honestly and genuinely with [its] partners in the European Community” and only called for a radical change in some Community economic policies (the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy) that did not “suit Britain’s or Europe’s best interests” (1979 Conservative Manifesto). At the time, the Tories had thus

140

Stéphane Porion

accepted the sacred principle of the free movement of people within the EEC and only aimed to reduce immigration from outside the European Community through a quota system. Once in power, Thatcher immediately tried to get a rebate in British contributions to the European budget as she “wanted her money back” (Dublin speech, 30 November 1979). As history has shown, it took her some time to really address the question of British sovereignty and rule out any possibility of a federal Europe in her September 1988 Bruges speech. When Sherman was still close to her, he wrote an epistle to Powell on November 1981 returning to the issue of British sovereignty so as to fully grasp Powell’s Eurosceptic beliefs. Powell’s answer was short but crystal clear: I do not regard sovereignty as being more than metaphorically involved in the matter of mass immigration … Membership of the Commonwealth … in no way abrogates the exclusive legislative and other powers of Parliament … Membership of the EEC remains unique as a comprehensive transfer to an external body of the legislative, taxing and political power in the United Kingdom, and I do not propose to be associated with acceptance of that transfer. (Powell, 23 November 1981, POLL 1/1/29) To conclude this section, one may argue that in the 1970s Sherman had only espoused some dimensions of Powellism (economic and ethnically cultural), but not the Eurosceptic one. Therefore, it is easier to see why at the time Thatcher, advised by Sherman, had not started to turn her attention to the issue of British sovereignty and was only concerned with the economic implications of British membership in the EEC as reflected in the 1979 Conservative Manifesto.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that Sherman played a significant role behind the scenes in influencing Thatcher’s ideas on race and immigration and he should thus be viewed as the intellectual link between Powellism and what was to be known as Thatcherism from this perspective. However, Sherman had not really grasped the Eurosceptic dimension of Powellism in the late 1970s – that is the defence of British sovereignty – and so, he did not push Thatcher in that direction. Both Sherman and Thatcher were mainly concerned by the economic issues that belonging to the EEC entailed. It is then no surprise to read in Sherman’s memoirs that, at the end of Thatcher’s first term in office in 1983: “European encroachment on British sovereignty was to be warded off” (Sherman 2005, p. 126). Powell’s April 1968 speech and the riots which disrupted the 1976 Notting Hill carnival were watersheds in Sherman’s thinking on the issues of race and immigration. While the first one led Sherman to challenge the benefits for the UK to have a cheap labour force made up of New Commonwealth

The end of an intellectual journey

141

immigrants in the late 1960s, the second one made him recycle Powell’s arguments – “stricter accounting, control and repatriation of all who are not British citizens” (Sherman, 30 September 1976, p. 2, AC 821). He also dwelt on the ideas of nationhood and citizenship and managed to convince both Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher that a new approach to the issue of immigration should be adopted by the Conservatives. Sherman pursued an efficient populist common-sense strategy, which resulted in Thatcher’s raising controversy in January 1978 when she claimed that “Britain was swamped by immigrants” in a Powellite rhetoric. Sherman also allowed Thatcher to crush the National Front’s upsurge by preventing them from enjoying electoral monopoly over the issue of immigration. In that respect, he trained Conservative candidates in the 1979 general election campaign with a “speaking module on immigration”. He briefed them with compelling arguments when the issues of immigration and race were addressed. Two key ideas stand out in Sherman’s module: “A party with our record and beliefs can only be implacably opposed to the National Front and to all other factions which seek to rouse or exploit racial hatred” (p. 1, CPS 6/2) and “a new Nationality Act to clear up the discrepancies and anomalies in the law as it stands [will be implemented]” (Ibid., p. 2). After the Conservative victory at the polls, Sherman justified the need for the upcoming Nationality Act: “Arguments for limiting the influx of Asian fiancés and … fiancées to safeguard immigration control need no rehearsing. Yet this cannot be done without being seen to discriminate legislatively and administratively” (Sherman, 9 November 1979). In practice, Thatcher’s government introduced the “Primary Purpose rule” in 1980, which prohibited “the entry of affianced or spouses unless the British citizen partner could show that the primary purpose of marriage was not settlement” (Spencer 1997, p. 147). According to Ian R.G. Spencer: “The intention behind the British Nationality Act of 1981 was to bring nationality and immigration legislation into line … In effect it replaced the composite citizenship of the United Kingdom and colonies created by the Nationality Act of 1948” [that Powell had rejected so much] (Ibid., p. 148). Therefore, even though Powell did not join a Conservative government as Sherman had suggested to Keith Joseph and Thatcher (6 June1978, AC 114), he could rely on Sherman to press Thatcher to implement a new and more restrictive Nationality Act designed to trim down immigration – that would be Powellism with a vengeance.

Notes 1 The Selsdon Group was set up by Nicholas Ridley (among other Conservatives) in September 1973, after Edward Heath’s set of U-turns. Its aim was to promote the free-market ideas embraced in the 1970 general election Conservative Manifesto, whose formulation dated back to January 1970, when Heath held a brainstorming session of his shadow cabinet at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon.

142

Stéphane Porion

2 In her study of training Conservative minds for the battle of ideas, Clarisse Berthezène argues how hard it is to use the label of “a Conservative intellectual” (Berthezène 2011, pp. 29–45). As for E.H.H. Green, he stresses the fact that Powell was an oddity among his Conservative fellows: “Conservative suspicion of abstract logic and reason (in the Oakeshottian technical sense) found expression in party criticisms of its own members, like Enoch Powell, who was described as ‘too clever by half ’ and possessing an ‘over-logical mind’” (Green 2002, pp. 283–284). 3 Ilford North (London borough of Redbridge) had always been won by the Conservatives since 1945, except in October 1974 when the Labour Party was returned to power. 4 Since 1950, Deptford had been won by the Conservatives except in 1966. It was also key in the run-up to the Brixton riots (1981). It was eventually abolished in 1983. 5 In March 1968, just before Powell’s Birmingham speech, Ralph Harris pointed out to Powell that his general thought was inconsistent with his ideas on immigration, because it was not coherent to advocate a control of immigration and free-market ideas (implying the free circulation of workers) at the same time (POLL 1/1/49; Powell, 8 March 1968). 6 See Stéphane Porion’s chapter on the National Front and the BNP in this book. 7 See Karine Tournier Sol’s and Olivier Esteves’s chapters (Powell’s letters of support) on the confusion between “Britain” and “England”.

Bibliography Primary sources Archives Cambridge Archives Centre Churchill College, Powell papers, files POLL 1/7/1; POLL 1/1/36; POLL 4/1/29; POLL 3/2/5/2; POLL 1/1/49; POLL 12/1/12; POLL 12/1/14; POLL 1/1/29. LSE Archives, London Alfred Sherman, “Deptford and the 1964 General Election”, 11 November 1971, folio FHT/F117. The Centre for Policy Studies, file CPS 6/2. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, www.margaretthatcher.org. Keith Joseph’s confidential note to Margaret Thatcher, 22 July 1976, www.margarettha tcher.org/document/111233. Keith Joseph’s Discussion Paper, 7 December 1976, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/110178. Royal Holloway (University of London), Alfred Sherman papers, files AC 114; AR A5/4/5, Box 15; AC 1312, Box 35, Folder 6; AC 821; AC 29/B1/2/22, Box 3; AC 115, Box 3.

Political Writings and speeches Collings, R. (ed.) (1991), Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, London: Bellew. Collings, R. (ed.) (1992), Reflections, London: Bellew. Powell, E. (20 April1978), Speech in Birmingham. Powell, E. (1978), A Nation or no Nation? Six Years in British Politics, London: Batsford.

The end of an intellectual journey

143

Sherman, A. (8 September1976), “Why Britain Can’t Be Wished Away”, The Daily Telegraph, p. 16. Sherman, A. (9 September1976), “Britain’s Urge to Self-Destruction”, The Daily Telegraph, p. 16. Sherman, A. (9 November1979), “Britain is not Asia’s Fiancée”, The Daily Telegraph, p. 18. Sherman, A. (2005), Paradoxes of Power, Exeter: Imprint Academic. Thatcher, M. (30 November1979), Speech in Dublin. Thatcher, M. (1995), The Path to Power, London: HarperCollins.

Manifestos 1979 Conservative Manifesto, http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1979/1979-conservative-manifesto.shtml

Secondary sources Barker, M. (1981), The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe, London: Junction Books. Berthezène, C. (2011), Les Conservateurs britanniques dans la bataille des idées, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Brooke, P. (2007), “India, Post-Imperialism and the Origins of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’”, Historical Journal, 50(3), pp. 669–687. Burgess, S. and Alderman, G. (1990), “Centre for Policy Studies, The Influence of Sir Alfred Sherman”, Contemporary Record, 4(2), pp. 14–15. Cockett, R. (1994), Thinking the Unthinkable: Think Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983, London: Fontana Press. Gordon, P. and Klug, F. (1986), New Right New Racism, Nottingham, Searchlight Publications. Green, E.H.H. (2002), Ideologies of Conservatism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heffer, S. (1999), Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London: Phoenix. Howard of Rising, Lord (2012), Enoch at 100: A Re-Evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell, London: Biteback Publishing. Ignazi, P. (2003), Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kavanagh, D. (2010), “Sherman, Sir Alfred”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/97388. Kazin, M. and Porion, S. (2017), “George Wallace and Enoch Powell: Comparing the Politics of Populist Conservatism in the US and the UK”, in Berthezène, C. and Vinel, J. C. (eds.), Postwar Conservatism, A Transnational Investigation: Britain, France, and the United States, 1930–1990, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lynch, P. (1999), The Politics of Nationhood, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Modood, T. (2005), Multicultural Politics (Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. O’Hara, K (2013), “The Conservative Dialectic of Margaret Thatcher’s First Term”, in Carr, R. and Hart, B.W. (eds.), The Foundations of the British Conservative Party: Essays on Conservatism from Lord Salisbury to David Cameron, New York and London: Bloomsbury. Philpot, R. (2017), Margaret Thatcher: The Honorary Jew, London: Biteback Publishing.

144

Stéphane Porion

Pitchford, M. (2011), The Conservative Party and the Extreme Right, 1945–75, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Porion, S. (2009), “Le discours des rivières de sang d’Enoch Powell. Approche raciste ou simple remise en cause du multiculturalisme”, in Prum, M. (ed.), Éthnicité et eugénisme. Discours sur la race, Paris: L’Harmattan. Porion, S. (2011), “Enoch Powell et le powellisme: entre tradition disraélienne et anticipation néo- libérale, 1946–1968”, University of Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, unpublished PhD thesis, Porion, S. (2012), “Alfred Sherman: Evolution d’une pensée ‘raciste’ au sein de la Nouvelle Droite britannique (1974–1979, 2001–2005) ?”, in Prum, M. (ed.), Racialisations dans l’aire anglophone, Paris: L’Harmattan. Schoen, D. (1977), Enoch Powell and the Powellites, London: Macmillan. Schofield, C. (2012), “‘A Nation or no Nation?’ Enoch Powell and Thatcherism”, in Jackson B. and Saunders, R. (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Shepherd, R. (1997), Enoch Powell: A Biography, London: Pimlico. Smith, A.M. (1994), New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Spencer, I.R.G. (1997), British Immigration Policy since 1939, London and New York: Routledge. Taggart, P. (2000), Populism, Buckingham: Open University Press. Vinen, R. (2009), Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era, London: Simon & Schuster. Wellings, B. (2011), English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: Losing the Peace, Oxford, Peter Lang. Wright, P.L. (1968), The Coloured Worker in British Industry: With Special Reference to the Midlands and North of England, London: Institute of Race Relations. Young, H. (1989), One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, London: Macmillan.

The Press Birmingham Post The Daily Telegraph The Guardian The Times

9

“Enoch was right” – the Powell effect on the National Front in the 1970s Stéphane Porion UNIVERSITY OF TOURS

As the 50th anniversary of Powell’s Birmingham speech was drawing closer, some protest letters were sent to several newspapers to condemn the BBC broadcast of his speech read by actor Ian McDiarmid on the occasion. Many did not understand why this speech – “widely recognised as one of the most provocative, racist public pronouncements in recent UK history” (The Guardian, 12 April 2018), should be commemorated in Britain, especially at a time when populist far-right parties were sweeping across Europe. As Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff put it in The Guardian, “Why the BBC would think to do this at a time when far-right nationalism and casual racism is on the rise in Europe and the UK is baffling … Fascists from the BNP, EDL and Britain First have been modelling their language upon it ever since” (Ibid.). As a joint letter supported by Labour MPs Kate Osamor and Preet Kaur Gill and MEP Claude Moraes, main union leaders (NEU, UCU, BFAWU and CWU) and anti-racism campaigners (Talha Ahmad, Weyman Bennett and Sabby Dhalu Stand up to Racism co-conveners) states: Powell’s speech was a touchstone for racists and the far right, and is still celebrated by the racist right of today, who say “Enoch was right” … Fifty years on, there is creeping Powellism in the Conservative party. Many who came as children in the Windrush have been persecuted and had their rights removed by the government … It is crucial that we draw the real lesson of Powell’s speech: that racism must be kept out of our society and elections. (The Guardian, 19 April 2018) These opinion letters unveil the link created in popular memory between Powell as a driving and inspiring force expounding overtly racist and xenophobic views and the extreme right in Britain. In addition, the Powell legacy and especially the slogan “Enoch was right” have posed a problem for the Conservative Party’s detoxifying strategy since the Cameron years. Indeed, in 2007, the Tory candidate in the West Midlands seat of Halesowen and Rowley Regis, Nigel Hastilow, was forced to step down from his parliamentary candidacy, after writing a newspaper article in which he had declared: “When you ask most people in the Black Country

146

Stéphane Porion

what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration. Many insist: ‘Enoch Powell was right’” (The Guardian, 4 November 2007). Little public support from the Tories ensued, except from journalist Simon Heffer, who became vocal in his endorsement of the Powellite discourse on immigration and raised the following question in a Daily Telegraph article: When will Tories admit that Enoch was right? I am, in the first instance, genuinely outraged at the insult the Hastilow affair throws at the memory and reputation of Enoch Powell … Why is this man considered so evil that to mention him approvingly is a career-ending step, just as if someone had praised the social policies of Hitler or Pol Pot? (7 November 2007) Much controversy resurfaced in August 2014, when Tory MP Gerald Howarth, a former defence minister, “warned about the dangers of immigration to Britain as he perceives them in a leaked e-mail to a constituent and declared that Enoch Powell was right in his anti-immigration ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April 1968” (The Independent, 27 August 2014). These political events thus highlight the fact that it has been difficult for the Conservatives to de-racialize the immigration question and come to terms with the Powell legacy ever since. William Francis Deedes accounts for the toxic Powell legacy for his party: “Enoch Powell made it impossible for us to tackle the immigration problem … Enoch Powell’s explosive speech of 1968 had one other unfortunate consequence. It created a phobia in influential quarters about establishing facts on race” (The Spectator, 18 August 2001, p. 20). For much of the British far-right, Enoch Powell has, on the contrary, been elevated to the status of a national hero. For example, the National Front (NF) decided to commemorate Powell’s Birmingham speech with much praise. Indeed, on 20 April 2018, Kevin Layzell posted the following laudatory comment on the NF’s website: Powell’s speech electrified the nation and totally divided it. On the one side millions of patriotic, responsible Britons recognised instantly the truth of Powell’s warning, and on the opposing side was the heartless political Establishment … Powell gave his warning that Rivers of Blood would flow. And we witness now, fifty years later, the rivers of our people’s blood flowing: here are some of the victims of the multi-racial, multi-criminal nightmare that has been forced onto us by the wicked and heartless establishment: … Enoch Powell, the man who warned us. (http://www.na tionalfront.info/2018/04/20/enoch-powells-river-of-blood-speech/) The National Front implicitly hammered anew the popular motto “Enoch was right” in 2018 and recalled that Powell’s populist and visionary ideas had been much inspiring in the late 1960s and in the 1970s when the party benefited from a breakthrough. Powell was presented again in 2018 as a national hero. In terms of a politics of memorialization, the National Front may be

“Enoch was right”

147

willing to come to terms with its failure to capture Powell in the late 1960s and early 1970s and offer a fresh narrative that would legitimate the party’s harnessing of Powell’s legacy and vindicate the prophecy “Enoch was right”. This failure still etches so much on the psyche of the party that it is possible to find unreliable websites reconsidering history with an alternative and fantasized interpretation: “John O’Brien offered Powell the leadership of the National Front” and “the NF under Tyndall did offer Powell a chance to stand as a candidate but not as party leader” (www.alternatehistory.com). The catchphrase “Enoch was right” has indeed been used and popularized by the British far right, all the more so at a time of crisis. For example, the cover of November 1972 Spearhead – one of the NF’s magazines – displayed Powell’s face with the headline “Enoch Right, Tories Wrong” during the Uganda immigration crisis and after the vote on the Act of Entry into the EEC (Spearhead, November 1972). More generally, it is often the case to see far-right members at demonstrations wearing brand merchandise, like badges, T-shirts and fridge magnets, emblazoned with the slogan “Enoch was right”. And more recently, it has been turned into the title of a book to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Powell’s April 1968 speech. The day before the event, British political activist and Breitbart News1 editor Raheem Kassam self-published Enoch Was Right: “Rivers of Blood” 50 Years On, to vindicate Powell’s prophecy made in his speech. Looking at the secondary literature on the National Front, there are usually some mentions of Powell’s name, but not a whole chapter devoted to the Powell effect on this party. That is the case for Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley’s 2018 book. Alex Carter simply recalls that Powell’s April 1968 speech “helped to pave the way for the NF’s subsequent growth” (Carter quoted in Copsey and Worley 2018, p. 91). Matthew Goodwin and James Dennison rapidly highlight the same idea in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right: “The NF emerged against the favourable backdrop of … Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech” (Goodwin and Dennison 2018, p. 523). What dominates the historiography is encapsulated in Thurlow’s view: according to him, the speech “allowed the National Front to exploit popular racist attitudes as Powell ‘brought the language and arguments of the neo-fascist political fringe into the heart of the establishment’” (Thurlow quoted in Copsey and Worley 2018, p. 75). However, two particular analyses have in part addressed the interplay between Powell and the National Front and should thus be mentioned. In 1996, Martin Durham published a chapter on “The Conservative Party, the Extreme Right and Political Space (1967–1983)” and partly studied the NF’s ambivalent response to Powell’s immigration discourse from 1968 to 1979 by means of the party’s publications (Spearhead and Candour). In 2011, Mark Pitchford enhanced the analysis by focusing on Powell’s impact on the NF, the Monday Club and the Conservative Party from 1968 to 1979 (pp. 164–177). This chapter thus aims to fill a gap in the historiography by exploring the Powell effect on the National Front2 and the way the party harnessed his legacy. It will be based on archive material from the Powell papers and on all

148

Stéphane Porion

the sources available for a researcher studying far-right parties (parties’ publications and websites and leaders’ speeches). The analysis will also use Roger Eatwell’s “ten theories of the extreme right” (Eatwell 2003), more particularly “supply-side factors” and “theorizing charismatic radical right leadership” (Eatwell 2018). After assessing the National Front’s response to the rise of Powell’s populism and exploitation of his anti-immigration discourse, the chapter will account for Powell’s constant refusal to join this party.

The creation of the National Front and the impact of Powell’s April 1968 speech On 7 February 1967, Arthur Chesterton, “the anti-Semitic, anti-liberaldemocracy founder and leader of the ultra-conservative League of Empire Loyalists (LEL)” managed to unite the LEL, the British National Party (unrelated to the current one) and members of the Racial Preservation Society, which coalesced into the National Front3 (Goodwin and Dennison 2018, p. 522). Although, to start with, the NF was “still a tiny political organization, claiming 2,500 members, of whom 1,000 were nominal” (Sykes 2005, p. 105), Mark Pitchford considers that the “inchoate NF quickly provided the previously fractured extreme right with a common focus. It emerged in a context that included fears about immigration and Europe and became Britain’s largest extreme-right party. It presented the Conservative Party with its biggest challenge from the external extreme right since Mosey in the 1930s” (Pitchford 2011, p. 145). Indeed, the NF “achieved some minor electoral successes and high visibility in the 1970s” (Goodwin and Dennison 2018, p. 522). As Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley point out: The National Front was a household name in 1970s Britain4 … For years, the Front owned the far-right brand … The Front’s subsequent electoral growth – it captured nearly a quarter of a million of votes in local elections in 1977, beating the Liberals in the Greater London Council elections in 33 seats – led many to view the NF as Britain’s fourth political party, poised even to displace the Liberals as Britain’s third political party. (Copsey and Worley 2018, p. 2) As has already been noted, Powell’s April 1968 speech was a boon for the NF, and this was encapsulated for instance in the following contemporary comment: “After a year spent wallowing in gloomy obscurity, the new party was granted yet more manna from heaven, this time in the shape of one Enoch Powell” (Edgar 1977, p. 122). Shortly after Powell’s Birmingham speech, The Times quoted NF leader Chesterton who quipped that “what Mr Powell has said does not vary in any way from our view … He has articulated what millions think and have been unable to say” (24 April 1968). One NF member of the Huddersfield branch also acknowledged the beneficial Powell effect on party membership: “Powell’s speeches gave our membership and morale a

“Enoch was right”

149

tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speeches we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of the Tories organizations” (Taylor 1982, p. 21). More generally, at first glance, the NF leadership supported Powell’s step “in providing an occasion for the voice of the nation to be heard” (Candour, May 1968, p. 49). For example, Chesterton declared in Candour a few months after the April 1968 speech: “Mr Enoch Powell saw his chance and seized it. At long last he spoke out loud and clear … Enoch Powell, the Little Englander, became a national hero overnight. During recent months the National Front has done some superb work and achieved world-wide publicity” (Candour, February 1969, p. 10). As for Tyndall, he said in Spearhead: That Mr Powell has now spoken is to be welcomed … Enoch Powell himself does not perhaps know fully enough what a service he has done the nation. He spotlighted the race problem … by speaking on behalf of the vast majority of ordinary Britons … It needed the Powell affair to blow the lid off the whole big fraud. (Spearhead, May/June 1968, p. 2) Tyndall thought that the NF would take advantage of the impetus given by Powell’s Birmingham speech to become the “party representing all classes”; in his eyes, “the party that heeds their voice will be the party of Britain’s future” (Ibid., p. 3). At a local level, as the archives disclose, Powell became very popular among NF activists in 1968 and had a boosting effect on the development of local branches. For example, an activist from Surrey wrote to him: “Should you be forced to resign from the Conservative Party because of it … may I introduce our organisation, THE NATIONAL FRONT, which is achieving growing support” (21 April 1968, D 3123/14). A patriot from London congratulated Powell for his April 1968 speech and wrote: I long ago left the Tory Party over the Race issue and now have the honour to be a branch organiser of the National Front which says exactly what you said at the weekend: “SEND THEM HOME.” More and more Conservatives are leaving the Tory party and joining the NF because of the Racial question … Our survival as a Nation and a race are at stake. (undated, D 3123/16) Powell was raising much hope among NF party members and, as Mark Pitchford puts it, “if Powell’s intervention resulted in his departure from the Conservative Party, he might provide the external extreme right with the calibre of leadership it had lacked since the 1930s” (Pitchford 2011, p. 165). It is interesting to notice that despite the fact that “many National Front members and extreme right voters saw Powell as their saviour”, “John Bean claimed that the initial spurt in membership after Powell’s speech faded after twelve months” (Ibid., p. 166). Consequently, the NF was not actually going

150

Stéphane Porion

to capitalize on the Powell effect during the 1970 general election: “Powell’s decision to remain within the Conservative Party made extreme-right voters’ quandary even more acute, and thus increased the likelihood that they would vote Conservative” (Ibid.). It thus raises the question of what strategy the NF should pursue in the 1970s to continue to take advantage of Powell’s 1968 impetus. Powell’s marginalization within his own party resulted in an implicit consensus among the Conservatives under Heath’s leadership, which meant that while the party would not promote a nationalist stance, immigration should not be seen as a top priority of its political agenda. This left room for Powell during the 1970 general election to tackle the immigration question with more radical ideas than the party’s official ones– a halt to immigration, a large-scale assisted voluntary repatriation policy and a reform of British citizenship. To ward off Powell’s ideas, this, in turn, led Heath’s government to pass the 1971 Immigration Act. Powell was unhappy with the provisions of the act over the categories of “patrials” and “non-patrials”. The new legislation had not taken into account his proposal of a voluntary repatriation policy (Porion 2016). Consequently, while Powell continued to be a dissident voice within the Conservative Party, which did not want to go as far as Powell with immigration restrictions, the NF adopted his alarming statement, made it its own and pushed forward more radical ideas. In that respect, according to Paul Hainsworth: Powell’s individual interventions on the theme of immigration attracted more publicity and support that did the campaigning of the National Front party in Britain. At the same time, the Powellite discourse served to give substance and a sort of legitimacy to that of the National Front and other extreme right movements. (Hainsworth, 2008, p. 75) This mechanism partly explains why the NF went through a stage of expansion until the mid-1970s (Hansen 2000, p. 182; Ignazi 2003, p. 185). It benefited from significant support in urban working-class areas with huge immigrant populations, especially in the East End of London, cities such as Wolverhampton and West Bromwich in the West Midlands, Leicester in the East Midlands and Bradford in West Yorkshire, but not really from “secular dealignment” in the 1970s (Norris 2005, pp. 38, 71 and 218).

A gulf separating a free marketer and Conservative like Powell from the National Front As early as 1977, Martin Walker stressed that Chesterton’s 24 April 1968 statement in The Times was exaggerated on the grounds that if there were “items of policy which were identical”, there was however “a [wide] gulf which separated a free marketer and Conservative like Powell from the corporate state thinkers of the NF” (Walker 1977, p. 114). Although the label

“Enoch was right”

151

“extreme right” is a slippery and contested one (Hainsworth 2008, pp. 7–12) and “essentialist categorizations of the extreme right are fraught with problems” as “it is not easy to provide neat, self-contained and irrefutable models of extreme rightism” (Hainsworth quoted in Carter 2005, p. 14), Elisabeth Carter analysed the taxonomy of the extreme right in Western Europe. She considered the NF to be a “neo-Nazi party, radically xenophobic, which adheres to classical/biological racism and rejects outright existing democratic institutions, procedures and values” (Carter 2005, pp. 27, 43 and 50). She also argued that for this British right-wing extremist party, the fight against immigration was a priority, as this issue was central to its ideology: “The NF’s vehement xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment were illustrated in the party’s most notorious policy – the compulsory repatriation of New Commonwealth immigrants” (Ibid., p. 33). Matthew Goodwin and James Dennison support Carter’s analysis and add that the NF epitomized three core features: ethnonationalism, anti-establishment populism and conspiratorial anti-Semitism (Goodwin and Dennison 2018, pp. 521–522). Unsurprisingly, there were wide noticeable ideological differences between Powellism and the core ideas promoted by the NF. While Powell called for voluntary assisted repatriation, which would be implemented by the creation of a new ministry (Collings 1991, pp. 390–393) to tackle the immigration question, the NF advocated compulsory repatriation, as it claimed for example in 1969 that immigrants amounted to a burden of £267 m on the British economy through welfare measures and competition with British natives in the job market (Spearhead, April/May 1969, p. 15). Moreover, Powell ruled out any idea of “a multiracial British society” with arguments epitomizing new or cultural racism5 and explained it to Douglas Brown on BBC Radio 4 on 1 December 1968, a few months after his Birmingham speech: If by a multi-racial society you mean a society which is deliberately and indeed artificially compounded by bringing together masses of people from different backgrounds, different cultures, and implanting them in a nation with a long and continuous history, a nation probably as homogeneous as any there is in the world in its feeling … then I believe that the idea is a mischievous and a dangerous one. (Powell 1973, p. 91) Powell also claimed elsewhere that “the basis of [his] conviction [was] neither genetic nor eugenic; it [was] not racial, because [he] [could] never discover what ‘race’ [meant] and [he] [had] never arranged [his] fellow men on a scale of merit according to their origins. The basis [was] political” (Powell 1977, p. 5). As for the NF, it considered “multiracial Britain” to be the expression of “a degenerate society” (Spearhead, November 1969, p. 8) and used “so-called scientific arguments” to vindicate crude biological racism and prohibit miscegenation (Spearhead, June 1970, p. 10) so as to protect the purity of the white English race and the homogeneity of the nation (Spearhead, Spring 1967, p. 5):

152

Stéphane Porion The sciences of genetic, eugenics and anthropology gradually penetrating the mists of ignorance and confusion … are producing overwhelming evidence of the basic inequality of human beings, both individually and in ethnic groups. Furthermore, they have already given the firmest possible proof that this inequality is in essence hereditary and can only be slightly affected by alteration in environment (poverty/education) … we can create an apartheid-style society … This we do not want to have to do … The other choice is simply – repatriation. (Spearhead, January 1970, pp. 8–9)

The National Front was also quite critical of Powell’s sudden U-turn to oppose the Common Market (Spearhead, October 1969, p. 2): “It noted [in Spearhead] that [Powell] had only recently come to oppose the Common Market, was a ‘little Englander’ rather than looking to the White Commonwealth6 and, while supporting law and order, did not oppose permissive legislation7 and did not stand for ‘conservative moral values’”8 (Durham 1996, p. 85). More importantly, the NF staunchly rejected the economic side of Powellism. For example, while Powell, a champion of free-market ideas, was vocal in his opposition to the Heath government’s bailout of Rolls-Royce, the NF thought that state intervention was crucial as British economic interests had to be defended at all costs: The Tory Party has been a party allied closely to the internationalist, capitalist economy, unregulated by national or public considerations … Was it not Enoch Powell who said: “When I am in Church, I go down on my knees and thank God for the gift of Capitalism?” Enoch Powell, with whom this journal has often agreed, is way off beam when he says that the Government should not help Rolls Royce in its financial difficulties. (Spearhead, December 1970, p. 3) In 1973, Tyndall sent a letter to Powell, published in Spearhead, stating that his free-market ideas were absolutely not in tune with Britain’s interests and national sovereignty (Spearhead, September 1973, pp. 10–11). Powell’s reply, which was also released in Spearhead, boiled down to turning Tyndall’s criticism down flat (Spearhead, December 1973, p. 11). Consequently, Powell by no means intended to promote the same ideas as those of the National Front, even if immigration was for both of them a top priority of their respective political agendas.

The National Front’s strategy to harness Powell’s ideas and popularity In his study of fascism in Britain, Richard Thurlow wrote that “the NF made political capital of Powell’s impact and racial populism moved from the gutter to the centre of politics in inner city areas” (Thurlow 2009, p. 246). Chesterton, and then Tyndall, then leaders of the party, pursued a clear strategy to

“Enoch was right”

153

harness Powell’s ideas and popularity. Using “supply-side arguments” set out by Roger Eatwell in his “ten theories of the extreme right” (Eatwell 2003) – that is “studying factors such as the leadership and programmes of the insurgent and mainstream political parties, or the media”, in other words “the messages that reach the voters”, it is clear that Powell was like a pharmakon in the ancient Greek sense for the NF – both a cure and a poison at the same time – and so had to be carefully dealt with. That is why for example, Martin Webster qualified the NF’s support to some of Powell’s ideas during the 1970 general election: “This journal did not allow itself to be swept up in the hysteria of Powellism” (Spearhead, June 1970, p. 13). The NF needed to find political space to promote its ideas and compete with Powell, who was isolated within the Conservative Party, and the Monday Club (the political opportunity structure). To what extent was Powell going to help or hinder the development of the NF and to legitimize this extreme right party? The NF kept hammering in its publications that Powell had suddenly turned his attention to the issues of immigration and race, while the NF members had long warned against the massive influx of coloured immigration in the UK (Tyndall 1966, p.16). For example John Tyndall reasserted this in his autobiography: Many of us sounded these warnings long before Mr. Enoch Powell made his entry into the racial controversy. By the time that Mr. Powell decided, in 1968, that the moment had come to speak out in protest again what was happening, I had been saying just the same things for more than 10 years – and I was 22 years younger than he and, not occupying any public office, had none of the facilities and information that were available to him … Naturally we welcomed Mr. Powell’s conversion to our view point on immigration on the basis of “better late than never”. (Tyndall 1988, p. 416) The NF believed that Powell had done so out of political expediency and ambition to overthrow Edward Heath’s leadership: Powell’s latest speech on coloured immigration was first rate, but we must resist the temptation to regard him as a Messiah … The time is ripe, therefore, for the Thames to foam with blood. Heath’s blood. But what guarantee have we that Powell will not discard the cutting edge of the immigration issue when he has achieved the Tory leadership. Absolutely none. Powell knows that there is only one “bandwagon” which in his political lifetime can drive him to Downing Street, and that is the Tory Party Machine. (Spearhead, June/July 1969, p. 3) The National Front advised its readers in Spearhead that “we should not look to the politicians of the ‘establishment’ [like Powell] to give a real lead in anything” (Spearhead, September 1969, p. 15). Therefore, to avoid a drain of

154

Stéphane Porion

its members to the Conservatives, Chesterton claimed: “My advice to those who rely for salvation on the Conservative Party is that they should become long-distance swimmers, to be able to reach some such place as Sark9 when the crisis comes!” (Ibid., p. 5). The NF’s leadership backed up some of Powell’s speeches, especially when they had a tremendous impact in the press (Spearhead, June 1970, “Bravo Enoch” November 1972, “Enoch Right, Tories Wrong”), in order to harness the popularity of his ideas. However, it also kept reminding its readership that Powell was a member of the Conservative Party – “there is no disposition to fire him from the Conservative Party” as was claimed in Candour for instance (July 1973, p. 75) – the latter would never enforce the Powellite measures. In that respect, by agreeing with Powell on halting immigration at all costs, the NF also tried to benefit from indirect national press coverage, as Powell enjoyed large-scale mediatization (the mediatization thesis). However, this ploy had limited effect since “at times, the media attack the electoral extreme right directly”. As Roger Eatwell put it, “in Britain the tabloid press picked up the ‘National Front is a Nazi front’ theme (begun by anti-fascist activists) during the 1970s, when there were fears that the Front was about to make a major electoral breakthrough” (Eatwell 2003, p. 60). It was thus difficult for the NF “to create a legitimate discourse about immigration and conceptions of citizenship” (the discursive opportunity structure), since the party’s history was tainted with the fascist legacy: the NF was not successful when it tried to portray itself as “a legitimate part of the national tradition” (Ibid., p. 62). This was a main hurdle for this party in exploiting the specific issue of immigration and making it “a winning formula”, despite a transient electoral breakthrough in the 1970s (Ibid., 64). It also accounts for the NF’s electoral collapse in the May 1979 election when the Conservatives were returned to power. By promising a new Nationality Act in her Manifesto, Thatcher was more trustworthy than the NF in the electorate’s eyes to solve the problem of rising immigration and defend Britishness.10 What plagued the National Front in the 1970s was not having a skilful charismatic leader that could hold the party together against factionalism and infighting. The same author also highlights a problem related to the definition of “charismatic leaders”, before identifying core features ascribed to them: “oratorical confidence, an ability to use the media, a sense of mission which tends to be inclusionary and/or about building identity, the use of narratives about the leader’s life …, the use of a friend-enemy, Manichean, categorizations, and … the use of symbolism” (Eatwell 2003, p. 66). As he also notices: What if Enoch Powell had joined the NF [in 1974], giving the party added legitimacy? In general, the European extreme right has prospered where it has charismatic, media-attractive leaders – a marked contrast to the ageing A.K. Chesterton, who led the early NF, or the bombastic and pompous Tyndall, who was its leader for most of the 1970s … This Powell scenario is meant to underline … a point about the study of the extreme right. (Eatwell 2000, p. 176)

“Enoch was right”

155

Due to raging internecine rivalries, the NF was a “weakly organized, poorly led and divided party” with several leaders taking over in the 1970s, according to Elisabeth Carter. She argues that “the acute ideological and strategic or tactical factionalism that was developing within the NF in turn led to organizational change and leadership factionalism” (Carter 2005, pp. 66–67). She also adds: Exacerbating this dissent and factionalism, if not causing it in the first place, was a remarkable lack of charisma, authority and expertise in party leadership … Tyndall lacked the charisma of other right-wing extremist leaders, even though he thought of himself as an inspirational leader. In addition, he displayed none of the political skills necessary to exploit opportunities for the good of the party. (Ibid., p. 68) Having a close look at Spearhead or Candour, one is struck by the fact that Arthur Chesterton, John Tyndall or Martin Webster kept conveying the message that their party was not at all wooing Powell and coaxing him into becoming the leader of the party. Despite rumours from the Press (such as The Mirror) that Powell had accepted to join the NF and take over its leadership, Martin Webster sent them both a letter to clarify the situation – “there could be no question of our approaching Mr. Powell to become the leader of the NF; and no question of Mr. Powell accepting even if we were disposed to invite him” (5 April 1977, POLL 3/2/1/10, File 2). There was too high an ideological divide between them for Powell to take the leadership of the NF. That same year, as Lord Hailsham’s political diary shows, some influential Conservative members, such as Peter Carrington and Rab Butler were also “quite certain that Enoch had agreed to lead the National Front” (Lord Hailsham, 2 November 1977). To quash rumour, Powell wrote several official letters to NF representatives and his reply was crystal clear: “As a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, there is no question of my accepting alternative or additional party affiliations” (15 March 1977, 11 August 1977, 10 September 1977, POLL 3/2/1/10, File 2).

Powell was never one of them Richard Thurlow argues that “[despite being]” isolated by the Conservative leadership, Powell ignored the racialist political fringe (Thurlow 2009, p. 246). Although Powell has often been seen as a man of contradictions, he was always consistent in his refusal to join the National Front, in spite of having received many calls to do so. In that respect, the 1973 West Bromwich byelection is worth analysing. It marked a relative electoral achievement for the NF candidate, Martin Webster, who got 16.2% of the share of votes under the first-past-the-post system, not that far behind Conservative candidate David Bell, only ahead with 3000 votes. Powell had declined to publicly support the latter – who was one of Powell’s constituents and admirers for 14 years – due

156

Stéphane Porion

to an ideological divide over the questions of immigration and Europe. Powell commented on the Conservative candidate’s defeat: “This is what I warned Bell would happen. The election should have largely turned upon the issues of immigration and the EEC” (Heffer 1999, pp. 667–668). As for Martin Webster, he considered that Powell’s refusal to publicly back up the Conservative candidate meant an entrenched support to the National Front. Biographer Simon Heffer dismissed this: “The Front’s policy of compulsory repatriation, not to mention many of their other National Socialist-style policy, was entirely opposed to Powell’s own beliefs” (Ibid.). In the aftermath of the by-election, NF party member A.D.C. Webber had a short-lived correspondence with Powell. He was the prospective NF candidate in the North East Wolverhampton constituency for the upcoming general election. Aged 21, with no political experience whatsoever, he was looking for Powell’s precious advice and support (27 February 1973, POLL 3/ 2/1/9, File 1). In his 22 May 1973 letter, Webber wrote to Powell: “I have naturally been happy about your refusal to speak on behalf of Mr. Bell, the Conservative candidate for West Bromwich. The result of this by-election is important to me as it will give me an indication of my chance in the General Election” (POLL 3/2/1/9, File 1). He also ensured support to Powell: “A man like Martin Webster, and indeed any future National Front MP, [would] be extremely valuable allies for you in the House of Commons” (Ibid.). However, in his next letter, Webber expounded a more realistic view of the situation: “I realize you have not given any support to any National Front candidate but your words undoubtedly had an influence on the West Bromwich by-election result, and I felt I had to say ‘thank you’ in case no one else did … You can count on us for support” (12 June 1973, POLL 3/2/1/9, File 1). This gave a sense that Powell was possibly seen, in Roger Eatwell’s own words, as a potential inspiring “leader displaying coterie charisma”. Although he was not politically affiliated to the NF, he managed to “attract a hard core of supporters, more locally, who held that he was driven by a special mission and had the ability to win support” (Eatwell 2018, p. 264). In other words, Powell became a steadfast guide who exerted real centripetal pull around him. This can be accounted for by the fact that traditionally the leader of the Conservative Party should not be scared of making unpopular decisions, if they are right for the country, and educate public opinion that will eventually understand and approve of wise leadership. As noted by D.T. Studlar: “Enoch has defied this Tory tradition by appealing directly to public opinion. By thrusting himself forward as the spokesman for the public on the coloured immigration issue, Powell has raised himself to popular favour” (Studlar 1974, p. 378) and, through a knock-on effect, to NF members’ favour. Powell accepted to be interviewed by Webber,11 but he made it crystal clear that he “did not give support, apparent or otherwise to any National Front candidate” (24 May 1973, POLL 3/2/1/9, File 1). On the last letter that Powell received from Webber, he left the following handwritten comment: “I had in no sense supported the NF candidate at West Bromwich, and declined

“Enoch was right”

157

to answer hypothetical questions about any other constituency. I also declined to give Webber advice on a political career as he had chosen his own party and must ask it for help” (12 June 1973, POLL 3/2/1/9, File 1). This shows that party affiliation and identity were paramount to Powell; he had no intention in 1973 to pursue a strategy of entryism neither was he looking to become the providential leader of the NF in case of a departure from the Conservative Party. More generally, from 1968 to 1973, Powell seemed to have played a significant part in boosting the National Front, as many members secretly hoped that he would end up being one of them. Michael Billig notices that Powell was often asked by his constituents in private correspondence if they should start supporting the National Front. By refusing to give clear instructions at all, Powell did not explicitly talk them out of becoming NF potential recruits or voters (23 June 1977, POLL 3/2/1/10, File 2; Billig 1978, p. 348). In June 1975, when Powell’s leave campaign for the referendum on Britain’s EEC membership failed, Beatrice Carthew, a former staunch Powellite, wrote to him: It seems very right and proper that I should be writing to you on the day of the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, for Pam told me you said it was “terrible” for me to join the National Front … Pam said you referred to “democracy” and said the Front was “dangerous” (Boy, I wish it were!), well, as to democracy, has any party since the war included in an election manifesto the fact that they proposed to turn the United Kingdom into a multi-racial society? Not on your life! “Democracy” appears to be one of those fair-weather friends. (Carthew quoted in Schofield 2013, p. 310) She added: “Well, in my early teens I was an overseas member of the Fascist League and a member of the Croix de Feu.12 I suppose it’s something like malaria, once in your blood stream it cannot be removed” (Ibid.). Powell replied to her letter in a very diplomatic way by reassuring her that first, she had never done anything “terrible”. He also stated that the NF was not a dangerous party insofar as it was an official one. The rest of his letter sheds light on the very reason why he had always refused to join the NF: My point has always been that by abandoning the attempt or the hope of influencing those who form or might form a majority in the House of Commons and joining an organisation which has no present representation, there is little prospect of it; one is by implication rejecting parliamentary government itself in favour of some other kind … I am obstinately – perhaps thickly – parliamentarian. (Ibid., p. 311) As a matter of fact, Powell’s comment explains why he eventually decided to join the Ulster Unionist Party after quitting the Conservative Party in 1974 and not the National Front. John O’Brien, the NF leader from 1970 to 1972,

158

Stéphane Porion

wrote to Powell in 1977 that should he eventually decide to join the National Front, he would receive the “kiss of death” as “the top leadership of the party [was] sheer poison” (1 July 1977, POLL 3/2/1/10, File 2).

Conclusion As Thurlow argues, “there can be little doubt that the NF would not have survived if Enoch Powell had not unwittingly given it such a helping hand in its infancy” (Thurlow 2009, p. 249). In popular memory, Powell is still often strongly associated to the 1970s’ National Front as they both fought for a halt on immigration and the preservation of the homogeneous British nation. For example, Hanif Kureishi, who was a teenager and young adult in the 1970s, considers that “Powell was creating the conflict he claimed to be the solution to. He soon found himself supported by the National Front” (The Guardian, 12 December 2014). Camilla Schofield thinks that “Powell’s desire to be buried in full military attire was to many the fitting endpoint of a man of thought to have fascist inclinations”, but to her, “Powell’s career fits uneasily within the political parameters of the heavily Powellite National Front party” (Schofield 2013, p. 3). In 2018, the National Front commemorated the 50th anniversary of Powell’s April 1968 speech and tried again to harness his legacy. The NF has been struggling to occupy political space within the radical right since 1979 when the party split into competing factions. This strategy was not successful in improving the party’s fate at the 2018 local elections. In late July 2018, its leader (Kevin Bryan) announced his resignation. Conversely, Powell was a driving force for the 1960s’/1970s’ National Front and should thus be viewed as a steadfast guide who exerted real centripetal pull around him, even though he never became one of them (Porion 2012). John O’Brien, wrote to Powell in 1977 to thank him for delivering his April 1968 speech whose impact had been significant on him: When you spoke at Birmingham on April 20th 1968, life for some people, as a result of that speech, became changed to a degree which had been undreamed of. I was one of those people. As a result of that speech, and your unfair and unmerited dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet, I formed an association which had as its slogan “Powell for Prime Minister”. We printed windscreen stickers … Mr Powell, as a result of your speech, I turned from the pursuit of horticulture … to the pursuit of politics in an attempt to save my country from the effects of immigration. My journey led me eventually to the Chairmanship of the National Front. (24 June 1977, POLL 3/2/1/10, File 2) Although the National Front had to compete with Powell on the territory of immigration, the latter’s intervention boosted NF recruitment: in the early 1970s indeed, disillusioned Conservatives, such as several leading Powellites (Roy Painter and John Kingsley Read) or Monday Club members joined the NF, especially after Powell’s failure to have his motion over the Uganda immigration crisis adopted at the annual Congress of the Conservative Party

“Enoch was right”

159

in October 1972: “its party membership by 1973 was at the dizzy heights of some 14,000” (Nugent 1977, p. 175). But the Powell effect actually turned out to be quite detrimental for the National Front in the short run as it created a catch-22 situation: “To the degree to which the NF supported Powell, it weakened the case for an independent alternative to the Tory right; to the degree to which it criticized him, it alienated those who eulogized the opponent of immigration, not only outside the organization, but within it” (Durham 1996, p. 89). At the end of the decade, a revitalized Conservative Party regained political ground as Thatcher had decided to address core issues in her Manifesto, such as immigration, British identity and Britain’s role on the international scene, which appealed to NF potential voters. The NF got very poor results at the 1979 general election, while it had fielded 303 candidates. That was how Thatcher pushed the NF into the ultra-fringe of British politics, putting an end to its ambition of becoming a mainstream political party.

Notes 1 Breitbart News is seen as a far-right syndicated American news, opinion and commentary website. It was created by conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart in 2007. It supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. 2 For an analysis of UKIP and the Powell legacy, see Karine Tournier Sol’s chapter. The BNP’s exploitation of the Powell legacy will be examined in the conclusion of the book. 3 Both the Greater British Movement (GBM) and the National Socialist Movement were excluded from the creation of the National Front due to their toxic open commitment to Nazism and anti-Semitism. Yet, after GBM leader John Tyndall moderated his stance, GBM members were thus entitled to join in 1968, as well as members of small far-right organizations. 4 As Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley put it, “the name of this new organisation, the ‘National Front’, had been used by Chesterton before. It had been the name given to a short-lived group which had been formed by Chesterton and Collin Brooks towards the end of 1944 … In the early 1950s, Andrew Fountaine also established a ‘National Front Movement’ (Copsey and Worley 2018, p. 7). 5 For further developments, see Stéphane Porion’s chapter on the influence of Powellism on Alfred Sherman. 6 See Spearhead February 1971, pp. 10–11. 7 During a House of Commons debate in June 1960, Enoch Powell was one of the 22 Conservative MPs who voted alongside the Labour opposition for an amendment designed to decriminalize consenting male homosexual acts in private. Powell was also against death penalty. 8 See Spearhead January 1970, p. 7. 9 Sark is part of the Channel Islands, nestled in between Guernsey and Jersey. 10 See Stéphane Porion’s chapter on Alfred Sherman in this book. 11 This interview never took place as Webber had to cancel it. 12 Croix de Feu (French: “Cross of Fire”) French political movement (1927–1936). Originally, an organization of World War I veterans, it embraced ultra-nationalistic, fascistic views. Under the leadership of François de La Rocque (1885–1946), it held popular demonstrations in reaction to the January 1934 French political and economic crisis engendered by the sudden mysterious death of Alexandre Stavisky. It intended to overthrow the government, subsequently lost ground and was abolished by the 1936 Popular Front government.

160

Stéphane Porion

References Primary sources Archives Cambridge Churchill College Archives Centre, Powell papers, POLL 3/2/1/10, Files 1 and 2. Staffordshire Record Office, Powell papers, bundles D 3123/14, D 3123/16.

National Front publications Candour Spearhead

Margaret Thatcher Foundation Hailsham Papers, MSS1/1/12, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/8C6EE38A87DE4E3389580877746FEB52.pdf.

Political writings and speeches Collings, R. (ed.) (1991), Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, London: Bellew. Powell, E. (1973), No Easy Answers, London: Sheldon Press. Powell, E. (1977), Wrestling with Angels, London: Sheldon Press. Tyndall, J. (1966), Six Principles of British Nationalism, London: Albion Press. Tyndall, J. (1988), The Eleventh Hour, London: Albion Press.

Secondary sources Billig, M. (1978), Fascists (A Social and Psychological View of the National Front), London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Carter, E. (2005), The Extreme Right in Western Europe: Success or Failure? Manchester: Manchester University Press. Copsey, N. and Worley, M. (eds.) (2018), “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: The British Far Right Since 1967, London and New York: Routledge. Durham, M. (1996), “The Conservative Party, the British Extreme Right and the Problem of Political Space, 1967–1983”, in Cronin, M. (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition, London: Macmillan. Eatwell, R. (2000), “The Extreme Right and British Exceptionalism: The Primacy of Politics”, in Hainsworth, P. (ed.), The Politics of the Extreme Right from the Margins to the Mainstream, London: Pinter. Eatwell, R. (2003), “Ten Theories of the Extreme Right”, in Merkl, H. & Weinberg, L. (eds.), Right-Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century, London and New York: Routledge. Eatwell, R. (2018), “Charisma and the Radical Right”, in Rydgren, J., (dir.) The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edgar, D. (1977), “Racism Fascism and the Politics of the National Front”, Race and Class, XIX(2), pp. 111–131. Fielding, N. (1981), The National Front, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

“Enoch was right”

161

Goodwin, M. and Dennison, J. (2018), “The Radical Right in the United Kingdom”, in Rydgren, J., (dir.) The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hainsworth, P. (2008), The Extreme Right in Western Europe, London and New York: Routledge. Hansen, R. (2000), Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heffer, S. (1999), Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London: Phoenix. Ignazi, P. (2003), Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kassam, R. (2018), Enoch Was Right: “Rivers of Blood” 50 Years On, independently published. Norris, P. (2005), Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nugent, N. (1977), “The Political Parties of the Extreme Right”, in Nugent, N. and King, R. (eds.), The British Right, Guildford: Saxon House. Pitchford, M. (2011), The Conservative Party and the Extreme Right 1945–75, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Porion, S. (2012), “Le National Front et Enoch Powell: ‘L’un des leurs’?”, in Vervaecke, P. (ed.), A Droite de la droite (Droites radicales en France et en GrandeBretagne au XXe siècle), Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Porion, S. (2016), “La Question de l’immigration au Royaume-Uni dans les années 1970: le Parti conservateur, l’extrême droite et l’‘effet Powell’”, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, pp. 157–174. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Sykes, A. (2005), The Radical Right in Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Studlar, D.T. (1974), “British Public Opinion, Colour Issues, and Enoch Powell: A Longitudinal Analysis”, British Journal of Political Science, 4(3), pp. 371–381. Taylor, S. (1982) The National Front in English Politics, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Thurlow, R. (2009), Fascism in Britain, From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Walker, M. (1977), The National Front, London: Fontana.

The press The The The The The

Guardian Independent Spectator Telegraph Times

Websites http://www.nationalfront.info/2018/04/20/enoch-powells-river-of-blood-speech/. www.alternatehistory.com.

10 The ambivalence of UKIP towards Enoch Powell’s legacy Karine Tournier-Sol UNIVERSITY OF TOULON

Enoch Powell’s name is regularly associated with the UK Independence Party (UKIP): the question of ideological proximity resurfaces now and then in the media (Open Democracy UK, 28 October 2008; The Guardian, 6 January 2014; International Business Times, 21 May 2014), fuelling a controversy which was first raised by Nigel Farage himself when he explicitly acknowledged Powell as his political hero in a 2008 interview (Total Politics, 27 October 2008). Although it was the first time that Farage publicly expressed his admiration for Powell, he would later write in his autobiography that it actually all went back a long way, at least to 1992 when he met the figure he called “the great man” (Farage 2011, p. 74). From then on, UKIP’s emblematic leader would regularly be asked about his position towards Powell’s legacy. The aim of this chapter is to explore the direct and indirect connections between Enoch Powell and UKIP, that is to say, the actual links between the two as well as their ideological commonalities. Looking into previous research on UKIP, it appears that this subject has never been studied so far. Ford and Goodwin mention only briefly Powell’s “help” to UKIP’s founding leader (before it was even UKIP), Alan Sked, in a 1992 parliamentary by-election (Ford and Goodwin 2014, p. 22). In a previous article on the political traditions informing UKIP’s thinking, I have already identified Enoch Powell’s influence, yet this influence was merely one among many, which is why it was not at the core of the article (Tournier-Sol 2015a, pp. 145–146). Surprisingly enough then, the debate on this issue has been mostly limited to the media and no academic so far has engaged in the task of delving into what is definitely a very intriguing and potentially fruitful question. This chapter is therefore a first attempt to do so. It is important to underline at this stage that there is little material available on this specific subject, apart from sporadic statements by Nigel Farage, mainly in response to questions asked during media interviews, as well as a couple of press articles. Consequently, the analysis will investigate the common points between Enoch Powell’s political discourse and UKIP’s by relying on various primary sources on each: discourse data from speeches of Powell1 and Farage, media interviews, but also election Manifestos in the case of UKIP, as well as Powell’s archives based at Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. The study will, of course, include the

Ambivalence of UKIP towards Powell legacy

163

“Birmingham speech”, which is at the heart of this book, but will extend beyond that. As a matter of fact, three main common topics clearly emerge from this comparison: Europe, immigration and populism. The chapter is structured along these three themes and raises the question of the ambivalence of UKIP towards Enoch Powell’s legacy. The argument here is that although this ambivalence owes much to the fact that Powell is a controversial figure, it also reflects the major dilemma faced by UKIP between, on the one hand, the party’s search for credibility and respectability on its way to institutionalization and, on the other hand, its very identity as a populist anti-political establishment (APE) party as defined by Abedi (Abedi 2004, p. 12).

Europe The first part of this analysis is devoted to the issue of Europe for the very reason that UKIP was founded primarily as a single-issue party in 1993 (Usherwood 2008), a kind of pressure group entirely devoted to campaigning for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU). Europe is therefore UKIP’s very raison d’être – immigration came later, as will be demonstrated below. It is also the most obvious connection between Enoch Powell and UKIP and one that is openly acknowledged by the party as it is not contentious. UKIP was born out of the Eurosceptic tradition (Tournier-Sol 2015a, p. 142); its forerunner, the Anti-Federalist League (AFL), had been created two years earlier to oppose the Maastricht Treaty. The party therefore originates from this very British Eurosceptic tradition to which Enoch Powell also belongs, as one of the most ardent opponents to membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) in the 1970s, and a leading figure of the “No” campaign in the 1975 referendum. Part of this tradition actually pre-dates the Eurosceptic label itself, which was born in the UK in the mid-1980s (Spiering 2004, p. 127; Leconte 2010), and encompasses those who were referred to as “anti-Europeans” in the 1940s and 1950s, and then as “anti-Marketeers” in the 1960s and 1970s (Forster 2002). Accordingly, UKIP follows in the political footsteps of Powell, who according to his authorized biographer Simon Heffer was no less than “the first British Eurosceptic” (New Statesman, 8 December 2017) – although it might be argued that he had actually supported membership in the early 1960s, albeit “as a commercial, rather than political event” (Schofield 2013, p. 157), a point that Porion’s chapter in this volume also touches on in comments on Alfred Sherman. A thorough study of UKIP’s and Powell’s discourses on Europe reveals strong similarities. For one thing, both rely heavily on comparable arguments, the major one being the preservation of national sovereignty, which is a key element of the Eurosceptic tradition dating back to the first House of Commons debates on Britain’s initial application to the EEC in 1961.2 It is recurrent in Powell’s speeches, as for instance during the debate on the second reading of the European Communities Bill in February 1972, when Powell firmly opposed the “essential sacrifices of sovereignty” entailed by EEC membership, speaking of a “surrender”

164

Karine Tournier-Sol

(Hansard, 17 February 1972). UKIP’s narrative also stresses the defence of national sovereignty, which according to Nigel Farage has been “destroyed” by the Maastricht Treaty (Farage 2011, p. 70). The only means to restore it is to withdraw from the EU: “Unless we leave, our democracy, our law-making powers, and our sovereignty will continue to be salami-sliced away by the EU” (UKIP 2015). This reflects the fact that UKIP belongs to the “sovereignty-based type” of Euroscepticism as defined by Sørensen (Sørensen 2008, p. 8). Accordingly, Powell and UKIP want the UK to be a free, independent, self-governing nation – a vision that, for them, is fundamentally incompatible with EEC/EU membership. Enoch Powell declared in 1973: “Independence, the freedom of a self-governing nation, is in my estimation the highest political good” (Powell 1973). This is precisely what UKIP aims at recovering: “We want our country back” (UKIP 2014a). Powell and UKIP also repeat that they do not want the UK to be reduced to the status of a mere region or province in a European state. As Powell warned in the run-up to the February 1974 general election: “Into the next Parliament will be completed the absorption of Britain into the new European state as one province along with others” (Powell 1973). This rhetoric pervades UKIP’s discourse; it has been a consistent element of the party’s political platform over the years. In its Manifesto for the 2001 general election, it stated: “We seek an independent, outward-looking Britain, not the offshore province of a centralised Europe” (UKIP 2001). The party reiterated this idea in 2010: “We do not want or need to become a province in a European superstate” (UKIP 2010). In 2015, it used the same rhetoric to counter the traditional portrayal of Eurosceptics as “little Englanders”– a derogatory term harking back to colonial times and conjuring the image of some sort of inward-looking English nationalist: “The longer we stay in the European Union, the more we become like ‘little Englanders’, an isolated, insignificant, offshore province in a country called Europe” (UKIP 2015). In the same logic, Powell and UKIP explicitly refuse to be labelled “anti-European” and turn the argument around. Enoch Powell already used this line of reasoning in 1971: The word “European” has been appropriated to membership of the Community. Consequently those who advocate British membership have arrogated to themselves the style of “Europeans” and describe their opponents as being “against Europe”. As I shall argue, if these labels have to be used at all, they ought to be transposed, and the label “antiEuropean” affixed rather to those who wish Britain to accede to the Community than to those who oppose this. It is as a European among Europeans that I claim to speak to you. (Powell 1971) Similarly, although UKIP can be classified as a “hard Eurosceptic” party (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2004, p. 3), or a “Euroreject party” (Kopecký and Mudde 2002, p. 302), it fiercely denies being anti-European (“We are not

Ambivalence of UKIP towards Powell legacy

165

anti-European”, UKIP 2001, 2005). On the contrary, Farage claims that UKIP members are the only “true Europeans” as they want not only the UK, but every member state to leave the EU altogether and get their sovereignty and democracy back (Farage 2013a). UKIP therefore consistently insists that although it is anti-EU, it is not anti-European. This distinction is all the more important to draw for the party as its short history has been marked by infiltration by the far right, and UKIP has been struggling for several years to get rid of the racist label often attached to its name (Tournier-Sol, 2017). Another major common point between Powell’s and UKIP’s discourses is the instrumental role of history in justifying their Euroscepticism. Daddow has demonstrated that this feature in itself was part of the Eurosceptic tradition (Daddow 2013). UKIP’s narrative invokes British history and historical traditions as a fundamental reason for its outright rejection of European integration: “The fact is we just don’t belong in the European Union. Britain is different. Our geography puts us apart. Our history puts us apart. Our institutions produced by that history put us apart. We think differently. We behave differently” (Farage 2013a). This is also a recurring aspect of Powell’s speeches about the EEC, with numerous references to the Second World War in particular, which is crucial to make sense of Powell’s thinking but also of his following, as Esteves demonstrates in his chapter: A victorious continental enemy, determined to absorb this United Kingdom into its dominions, could not have dictated at Westminster a more comprehensively humiliating surrender than the Act which Parliament passed in 1972 in order that this country should become part of the European Community … Wilhelm II could not have demanded so much; I doubt if Hitler would have demanded more. I can still only half believe that I was myself an unwilling witness to my country’s abnegation of its own national independence. (cited in Schofield 2013, p. 300) Nigel Farage also regularly mentions the Second World War in his speeches, which might also be linked to the significant number of veterans among UKIP supporters, accounting for the party’s image as the “Dad’s Army” of British politics (Evans 2014, p. 4): “We will not betray the memory of our grand-parents’ generation who went to war to make sure that we could be a free democratic country” (Farage 2013b). A final and significant aspect worth underlining is the inherently English dimension of Powell’s and UKIP’s visions despite their claim to speak for Britain or the UK as a whole. This point is acknowledged by Schofield in her authoritative book: “Though Powell spoke consistently of the British nation and later tied his career to the cause of Ulster Unionism, it was the English countryside, the English people, English history and the English Crown in Parliament that sat at the heart of his political imagination” (Schofield 2013, pp. 4–5). Even though times have changed since the 1970s, notably with the

166

Karine Tournier-Sol

introduction of devolution, such a confusion still permeates UKIP’s discourse. Hayton has convincingly demonstrated that UKIP’s vision of Britishness is essentially Anglo-centric (Hayton 2016, p. 408). This fusion between Englishness and Britishness still pervades the English nationalist discourse today, and has been clearly identified by Wellings as one of the very characteristics of Euroscepticism: “Euroscepticism is in all but name English nationalism, but it is an English nationalism that still characteristically speaks the language of Britishness” (Wellings 2010, p. 503). That is why despite its very name, UKIP might be better described as an English nationalist party, even though it refuses to be limited to this label and claims that it has elected representatives in all four nations of the UK.3 There is therefore a clear ideological continuity between Powell’s and UKIP’s discourses on Europe, which illustrates the point that they belong to the same Eurosceptic tradition. Additionally, this political proximity stems from the fact that UKIP also borrows from the Conservative tradition (Tournier-Sol, 2015a, p. 144), and particularly from the brand of “organic patriotic Toryism”, which stresses such themes as the “nation, family, duty, authority, standards and traditionalism” (Hall and Jacques 1983, p. 10; Bevir and Rhodes 2003, p. 117) – a brand to which Powell also belongs, together with Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, for instance. The ideological porosity between UKIP and the right of the Conservative party is illustrated by the repeated defections of Tory politicians (such as Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless for instance) to UKIP over the years since its foundation. This is also why UKIP has long been seen as no more than a splinter group of the Conservative Party.4 However, there are also more concrete connections, i.e. actual links, between UKIP in its early years and Enoch Powell in the twilight of his life, before he died in 1998. In 2014, a series of letters between Powell and several UKIP officials were unearthed from the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge University and released in the Daily Telegraph. They showed that UKIP made repeated attempts over the years to enlist Powell’s support, with varying success. On only one occasion did Powell actually accept to speak in support of a UKIP candidate: in 1993, he shared a platform with the party’s historic and founding leader Alan Sked, in a by-election in Newbury (Ford and Goodwin 2014, p. 22) – at the time it was not UKIP yet, but its forerunner, the AFL. Sked and Powell both had academic backgrounds, as Sked was an historian at the London School of Economics (LSE), which may account for the degree of affinity between the two men. Nigel Farage, who was Powell’s chauffeur for the rally, reminisces about this “memorable” episode in his autobiography, making no secret of his admiration for “the great man” and acknowledging his influence: “That meeting, with a man who had achieved so much and sacrificed so much for his principles … inspired me” (Farage 2011, pp. 75–76). One year later, in 1994, Nigel Farage wrote to Enoch Powell to ask for his support in a by-election, which Powell declined to do. Alan Sked even asked Powell to stand as a UKIP candidate in the 1995 European elections, underlining the fact that the party’s

Ambivalence of UKIP towards Powell legacy

167

policy was then to boycott any seat it might win. Powell turned down the offer, though, saying he had retired from politics. However, over the following four years, several UKIP candidates wrote to Powell asking for his endorsement, which he gave to three of them (Daily Telegraph, 12 December 2014). There were therefore actual links over the years between Enoch Powell and UKIP, although Powell’s role remained very low key. Yet the support he occasionally granted testifies to some political and ideological proximity between them. However, it was strictly limited to Europe, a subject on which his legacy was not controversial and it did not extend to immigration, which was not an issue at the time for UKIP. As Alan Sked said later: “We never ever discussed immigration. That was not a topic the party took any interest in or notice of under my leadership” (The Commentator, 15 December 2014).

Immigration It was indeed only a few years later that immigration took centre stage for UKIP. The fusion between Europe and immigration skilfully operated by the party dates back to 2008–2010. UKIP then successfully connected its core policy on Europe, which was a low salience issue for voters, to immigration, which, on the contrary, was a high salience issue for the electorate. The decisive strategic shift was made possible following the expansion of the EU’s free movement zone (Schengen borders) to Eastern European countries in 2007– 2008 (the so-called A8 countries).5 This new strategy allowed the party to widen its electoral potential and to exist on the domestic political stage, beyond European elections once every five years. UKIP’s discourse then made EU membership the main cause of the increasing immigration in the UK. At the same period, in a 2008 interview for Total Politics, Nigel Farage (by then UKIP leader) sparked controversy by explicitly acknowledging Enoch Powell as a key inspiring influence, naming him as his “political hero”. Coincidence or design, this occurred the year of the 40th anniversary of the Birmingham speech – from which Farage quickly distanced himself, trying to defuse the crisis while standing up for Powell: “I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got” (Total Politics, 27 October 2008). From then on, as immigration became the main focus of the party, the figure of Enoch Powell was regularly associated with UKIP, fuelling its already contentious image. Following UKIP’s surge in 2012–2013, Nigel Farage further dissociated himself from the infamous speech – yet not so much on its content as on its impact: “The Powell speech was a disaster. Everybody ran scared of discussing this for decades” (The Guardian, 28 July 2013). In fact, he used the comparison to turn the argument around and position his party as moderate and mainstream, implicitly contrasting it with Powell’s approach: “Now, I think what UKIP has done is to help make immigration a sensible, moderate, realistic, mainstream debate” (The Guardian, 28 July 2013). The UKIP leader was thereby trying to

168

Karine Tournier-Sol

widen his party’s electoral appeal in an effort to reach beyond its core supporters, which required it to project a more respectable image. It was part of a larger strategy to gain credibility in the context of UKIP’s move towards professionalization, an evolution that the party’s unprecedented success called for (Tournier-Sol 2017). Powell’s divisive figure sat uneasily with this search for respectability. It brought UKIP back to its reputation as a racist party, something Nigel Farage was trying hard to shed. Dissociating himself from Powell’s legacy on immigration, and particularly from his Birmingham speech, was a necessary step to try and detoxify the UKIP brand. Yet keeping Powell at arm’s length was no easy task and the question kept resurfacing. A few months later, in a TV interview on Sky News, Farage was “caught” agreeing with the “basic principle” of the Birmingham speech after being read a passage on the impact of immigration without being told the name of the author (The Guardian, 5 January 2014) – although it seems hard to believe that Farage did not identify Powell’s words straight away. It reveals how UKIP and Powell are seen as interconnected, due to the allegations of racism that are made against them. As a matter of fact, UKIP’s position is highly ambivalent: although Powell’s legacy is seen as too toxic and divisive as the party tries to optimize its electoral potential, UKIP actually often uses a comparable rhetoric – particularly in speeches or interviews. It is part of its dog whistle strategy, the implicit subtext being “Enoch was right”. There are many examples of this. UKIP conjures up visions of multicultural Britain that are reminiscent of the “Rivers of Blood” speech and the “total transformation” evoked by Powell (Powell 1968a), though at the time the term used was not “multicultural” but “multiracial”. In his speech to the spring party conference in the run up to the 2014 European elections, Nigel Farage drew a grim and alarming picture of Britain: In scores of our cities and market towns, this country in a short space of time has frankly become unrecognisable. Whether it is the impact on local schools and hospitals, whether it is the fact that in many parts of England you don’t hear English spoken any more. This is not the kind of community we want to leave to our children and grandchildren. (Farage 2014) In an echo to Powell’s statement that the British “found themselves made strangers in their own country”, the UKIP leader also declared that he had felt “awkward” not hearing English spoken on a train journey in suburban London (The Guardian, 28 February 2014). There is also a similar discourse on the “huge pressure” that “mass uncontrolled immigration” places on public services, which according to UKIP are “under threat” (UKIP 2014b). This is a recurrent argument of the party, also used by Farage during the referendum campaign in 2016 (BBC News, 3 June 2016). Once more, this rhetoric echoes the Birmingham speech, particularly the following extract: “They found their wives unable to obtain

Ambivalence of UKIP towards Powell legacy

169

hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated” (Powell 1968a). Both UKIP and Powell resort to scaremongering tactics, designed to generate moral panic. The “Romanian crime wave”6 evoked by Nigel Farage in his speech to the party conference in 2013 (The Independent, 20 September 2013) recalls Powell’s vision, implying that the British are under threat, “under attack” (Powell 1970) – a rhetoric also used by Farage during the EU referendum campaign in 2016, when he exploited the sex attacks carried out in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, declaring that there was a risk of such assaults in Britain should the country vote for Remain (Daily Telegraph, 4 June 2016). The last and maybe best example of UKIP striking the same chord as Enoch Powell on immigration is the infamous “Breaking Point” poster, released during the EU referendum campaign and which showed a long queue of mostly non-white migrants with the slogan: “Breaking Point: the EU has failed us all. We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” The billboard triggered controversy and was widely condemned. It was compared to 1930s’ Nazi propaganda, but also to the “Rivers of Blood” speech: the human tide that is about to sweep across the UK echoes the “rivers of blood” flowing over Britain. The parallel was drawn and scathingly exposed by the Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones: Powell foresaw an unchecked inflow of black immigrants creating civil war; this poster tells us absolutely the same thing about the people headed our way, it claims, across borderless Europe. This tide of faces summons up exactly the same swarms and rivers and hordes of otherness and racial difference that Powell spoke against in 1968 and that so many have tried to evoke since – the National Front and the BNP among them. I don’t think this UKIP poster creators would be insulted by the Enoch Powell comparison. (The Guardian, 16 June 2016) It is hard therefore not to detect a Powellite undertone in UKIP’s rhetoric on immigration, even though times have changed, which obviously makes a strict comparison difficult. UKIP’s reply to this is to pride itself in having detoxified the immigration issue, thereby going beyond Powell as well as beyond the far right to which it is also frequently compared: “We have proved the point that it is not extremist to talk about immigration: it is the responsible and right thing to do to talk about immigration” (Farage 2014). Whereas Powell “had made it impossible to even talk about [immigration]” (New Statesman, 8 December 2017), UKIP has succeeded in reopening the debate on this “real issue” faced by “real people”, resorting to a populist rhetoric that is also reminiscent of Enoch Powell.

Populism Populism is traditionally considered as a vague and elusive concept (Canovan 1999, p. 3), its heterogeneity making it difficult to define. As stated in the

170

Karine Tournier-Sol

introduction of this book, the main common denominator of populist parties is to oppose the people to the elite, perceived as “two homogeneous and antagonistic groups” (Mudde 2004, p. 543). Populist discourse offers a dualist view of the world, “a Manichean outlook” (Mudde 2004, p. 544), and is characterized by an appeal to the people, who are, in fact, not real but are “an imagined community” (Mudde 2004, p. 546), which Taggart refers to as the “heartland” (Taggart 2000, p. 3). Populism is a major ingredient of what has been UKIP’s winning formula (Tournier-Sol 2015a). Although it has always been part and parcel of the party’s DNA, it was only fully (and decisively) exploited under Nigel Farage’s leadership, the populist charismatic leader par excellence. The populist dimension can also be found in Enoch Powell’s discourse, which has been classified as “reactionary populism” in Canovan’s typology: “Typically, it involves a clash between reactionary, authoritarian, racist, or chauvinistic views at the grass roots, and the progressive, liberal, tolerant cosmopolitanism characteristic of the elite” (Canovan 1981, pp. 228–229; Kazin and Porion 2016). Once more, UKIP’s populist rhetoric shows striking similarities with Powell’s. Enoch Powell had already identified what he called “a deep and dangerous gulf in the nation”, described as “the gulf between the overwhelming majority of people throughout the country on the one side, and on the other side a tiny minority, with almost a monopoly hold upon the channels of communication” (Powell, 1968b). This vision is similar to that of UKIP, which states that “A gulf has opened between the ruling elite and the public” (UKIP 2011). The party thus consistently opposes the people to the elite, which is portrayed as completely disconnected from the people UKIP claims to represent, and isolated in the “Westminster bubble”. UKIP prides itself on being a party of amateurs, in contrast with the professional politicians it denounces in its populist discourse; it claims that it is made up of real people, ordinary people and is, thereby, able to understand their concerns. Indeed, populists traditionally see themselves as champions of the people, voicing their concerns – “vox populi”. Enoch Powell regarded himself as a “prophet” in the Hebrew sense, “who speaks out what is in the hearts of his people” (Time Magazine, 17 January 1969; Porion 2011, p. 5). In the Birmingham speech, he said: I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history … All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal. (Powell 1968a) Similarly, UKIP claims to speak for the people, presenting itself and its activists as “the people’s army”.

Ambivalence of UKIP towards Powell legacy

171

Language is a very important element of populism. Populists often repeat that they speak the language of “real people”, typically appealing to “common sense” and using a straightforward language that is intended to contrast with the supposedly arcane discourse of professional politicians. This aspect is part of Powell’s discourse, which advocates “plain truth and commonsense” (Powell 1970). It is also very present in UKIP’s rhetoric, with asserts that it is “Time for Common Sense Britain”, based on “common sense policies” (UKIP 2010). Moreover, populists promote straight talking. Powell, like UKIP, does not shy away from speaking the truth as he perceives it and assumes a substantial portion of the electorate does too: “I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so” (Powell 1968a). In inchoate form here is a critique of what would become a household phrase, “political correctness”, in the late 1980s and 1990s in the United States. As for UKIP, it is a populist APE party that champions free speech – it is part of its very identity and therefore a major driver of electoral support. The party thus regularly causes scandal, as for instance during the 2015 general election campaign, when Nigel Farage played the provocative card in a TV debate, refusing that foreigners with HIV be treated in the UK, within the NHS system. The first sentence sounds as a striking echo to Powell’s “chorus of execration”: Here’s a fact, and I’m sure other people will be mortified that I dare to talk about it. There are 7000 diagnoses in this country every year for people who are HIV positive, which is not a good place for any of them to be, I know, but 60% of them are not British nationals. You can come into Britain, from anywhere in the world, and get diagnosed with HIV, and get the anti-retroviral drugs which cost up to £25,000 per year per patient. I know there are some horrible things happening in many parts of the world, but what we need to do is to put the NHS for British people and families who, in many cases, have paid into this system for decades. (ITV, 2 April 2015) Finally, UKIP’s discourse aims to transcend traditional political cleavages, so as to reach out to voters from all persuasions and backgrounds, in a catch-all strategy which is typical of populism. This strategy proved successful as the party managed to reach beyond its conservative support base and to appeal to Labour voters. Similarly, Enoch Powell attracted the support of many traditional Labour voters, some of whom demonstrated against his dismissal from the shadow cabinet following the Birmingham speech (Schofield 2013, p. 243). The Tory politician was seen as articulating the concerns of many Labour voters, who felt ignored by the political elite. Yet, it is difficult not to notice some kind of irony here, even a paradox: that of the very elite purporting to embody the people. Populist leaders are rarely drawn from the people they claim to represent. It is true for Enoch Powell as well as for Nigel Farage, who are not at all “populist in

172

Karine Tournier-Sol

background” (Canovan 1981, p. 228). Another common point between the two men is that they are both controversial, divisive, even toxic figures in British politics. The “Rivers of Blood” speech led to the demonization of Powell – the same kind of demonization that Nigel Farage considers that he and his party have also been the victim of (Farage 2015, p. 181). This may somehow account for the fact that Farage is sometimes described as Enoch Powell’s political heir (International Business Times, 21 May 2014).

Conclusion There are therefore many connections between Powell’s and UKIP’s discourses, testifying to a robust form of political continuity. Whether it is the result of a direct ideological influence or not is obviously harder to assess, although such an influence was explicitly acknowledged by Nigel Farage himself, the former but emblematic leader of UKIP. But this is not really the point here. The fact that many echoes between Powell and UKIP’s discourses stem from their belonging to the same political traditions, namely Eurosceptic and Tory, does not make those echoes less genuine and relevant. This is precisely why Powell and UKIP are frequently associated: they do share common ideological ground. Beyond this, what is particularly interesting is that UKIP’s position regarding this legacy is highly ambivalent. Powell’s very controversial image in British public opinion makes his legacy hard to endorse for UKIP as it seeks credibility and respectability on its way towards professionalization. Yet, the party does not reject it entirely. It is clearly much easier to acknowledge on Europe, as it is part of a more respectable Eurosceptic tradition and also of the “organic patriotic Toryism” mentioned earlier. By contrast, Powell’s legacy is very toxic on the question of immigration, part of it having been taken up by the far right, from which UKIP is eager to distance itself. Yet, this analysis has demonstrated that there are definitely some echoes on this issue as well – possibly a kind of subtext aimed at voters who are nostalgic of Powell or whose parents were Powell supporters some 50 years ago. As far as the populist dimension is concerned, it appears that Enoch Powell can be considered as a forerunner of populist radical right parties – a category into which UKIP has gradually been turning into over the years (Goodwin and Dennison 2018, p. 535). However, Powell is not the only one: according to Kitschelt, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party “became the model according to which emerging new radical right parties elsewhere in Europe could learn to fashion their appeals” (Kitschelt 1995, p. 254). UKIP and Powell’s populist discourses identify similar enemies of the nation (Kazin and Porion 2016, p. 247), which can be classified according to the typology provided by Mudde (Mudde 2007, pp. 64–78) in his study of populist radical right parties: an external enemy, embodied by the European Union (outside the state, outside the nation), and internal enemies, represented by the elite (within the state, within the nation) and the immigrants (within the state, outside the nation).

Ambivalence of UKIP towards Powell legacy

173

In fact, the ambivalence of UKIP’s position regarding Powell is symptomatic of the dilemma faced by the party on its way towards professionalization, of the difficulty to strike a balance between two diverging necessities: introduce a new discipline and retain the party’s core identity which has made its success (Tournier-Sol 2015b). Finally, another significant common point between Enoch Powell and UKIP is that both arguably played a role in framing politics. Just as pressure from Powell was decisive in calling for the first referendum on the EEC in 1975, pressure from UKIP contributed to David Cameron’s pledge for an in/ out referendum in his Bloomberg speech in January 2013. The impact of the party on political debate was further demonstrated by the adoption of elements of UKIP’s discourse, as well as some of its ideas and policies, by the mainstream Vote Leave during the referendum campaign – while officially distancing itself from the toxicity of the UKIP brand. There was definitely a UKIP effect, just as there had been a Powell effect back in the 1970s.

Notes 1 Speeches taken from http://www.enochpowell.info/speeches/, or Hansard. 2 Derek Walker-Smith was one of the first conservatives to oppose EEC membership on sovereignty grounds. See Hansard, 2 August 1961, vol. 645, vol. 1507–1514: “It is not just a debate about economics, important as they are. It is acknowledged that it raises great political issues: issues which concern our constitutional practices, our national institutions and our future as a sovereign State.” 3 The majority of UKIP’s elected representatives are concentrated in England, but at its peak between 2013 and 2016, the party gained representation in the other three nations as well, at various levels: in the 2014 European elections, for the first time a UKIP MEP was elected in Scotland, David Coburn; the party also entered the Welsh Assembly in 2016 with the election of seven Assembly Members (AMs); in Northern Ireland, the party has had up to four local councillors. Following the Brexit vote, the party has been losing ground everywhere. 4 With, for instance, persistent rumours of a pact between UKIP and the Conservative party before 2015. See the leaked discussion document drafted by Michael Fabricant (Tory vice-chairman and chief of campaigning) for David Cameron in 2012, urging for a pact to limit the damage UKIP could inflict on the Tories at the following general election. Fabricant M. (2012) The Pact? The Conservative Party, UKIP and the EU, A Discussion Paper, November, http://thepactreport.wordpress.com/. 5 The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania were not included in the list. 6 Interestingly enough, Romania itself was not part of the A8 countries, having joined later in 2007 together with Bulgaria. EU restrictions on migration were lifted on 1 January 2014 for those two countries.

References Abedi, A. (2004), Anti-Political Establishment Parties: A Comparative Analysis, London: Routledge. Bevir, M. and Rhodes, R.A.W. (2003), Interpreting British Governance, London: Routledge.

174

Karine Tournier-Sol

Canovan, M. (1981), Populism, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. CanovanM. (1999), “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy”, Political Studies, 47(1), pp. 2–16. Daddow, O. (2013), “Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and the Eurosceptic Tradition in Britain”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 15(2), pp. 210–227. Evans, S. (2014), Why Vote UKIP 2015: The Essential Guide, London: Biteback Publishing. FabricantM. (2012), The Pact? The Conservative Party, UKIP and the EU, A Discussion Paper, November, http://thepactreport.wordpress.com/. Farage, N. (2011), Flying Free, London: Biteback Publishing. Farage, N. (2013a), Spring conference speech in Exeter, 23 March. Farage, N. (2013b), Speech in Hove, 14 June. Farage, N. (2014), Spring conference speech in Torquay, 28 February. Farage, N. (2015), The Purple Revolution: the Year that Changed Everything, London: Biteback Publishing. Ford, R. and Goodwin, M. (2014), Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain, Abingdon: Routledge. Forster, A. (2002), “Anti-Europeans, Anti-Marketeers and Eurosceptics: The Evolution and Influence of Labour and Conservative Opposition to Europe”, Political Quarterly, 73(3), pp. 299–308. Goodwin, M. and Dennison, J. (2018), “The Radical Right in the United Kingdom”, in Rydgren, J. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (eds.) (1983), The Politics of Thatcherism, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hayton, R. (2016), “The UK Independence Party and the Politics of Englishness”, Political Studies Review, 14(3), pp. 400–410. Kazin, M. and Porion, S. (2016), “George Wallace et Enoch Powell: comparaison des politiques de deux conservateurs populistes aux Etats-Unis et au Royaume-Uni”, in Berthezène, C. and Vinel, J.C. (eds.), Conservatismes en mouvement: une approche transnationale au XXe siècle, Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. Kitschelt, H. (1995), The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Perspective, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. Kopecký, P. and Mudde, C. (2002), “The Two Sides of Euroscepticism: Party Positions on European Integration in East Central Europe”, European Union Politics, 3(3), pp. 297–326. Leconte, C. (2010), Understanding Euroscepticism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mudde, C. (2004), “The Populist Zeitgeist”, Government and Opposition, 39(4), pp. 541–563. Mudde, C. (2007), Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porion, S. (2011), “Enoch Powell et le powellisme: entre tradition disraélienne et anticipation néo- libérale, 1946–1968”, University of Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, unpublished PhD thesis. Powell, E. (1968a), Speech in Birmingham, 20 April. Powell, E. (1968b), Speech to the London Rotary Club, Eastbourne, 16 November. Powell, E. (1970), “The Enemy Within”, Speech at Turves Green Girls School, Northfield, Birmingham, 13 June. Powell, E. (1971), Speech to the Association des Chefs d’Entreprises Libres, Lyon, 12 February.

Ambivalence of UKIP towards Powell legacy

175

Powell, E. (1973) Speech to the Stockport Luncheon Club, 8 June. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sørensen, C. (2008), “Love Me, Love Me Not: A Typology of Public Euroscepticism”, Working Paper 101, Brighton: Sussex European Institute. Spiering, M. (2004), ‘British Euroscepticism’, European Studies : A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics, Vol 20 (1), pp. 127–149. Taggart, P. (2000), Populism, Buckingham: Open University Press. Taggart, P. and Szczerbiak, A. (2004), ‘Contemporary Euroscepticism in the Party Systems of the EU Candidate States of Central and Eastern Europe’, European Journal of Political Research, 43(1), pp. 1–27. Tournier-Sol, K. (2015a), ‘Reworking the Eurosceptic and Conservative Traditions into a Populist Narrative: UKIP’s Winning Formula?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 53(1), pp. 140–156. Tournier-Sol, K. (2015b), “The UKIP Challenge”, in Tournier-Sol, K. and Gifford, C. (eds.), The UK Challenge to Europeanization: The Persistence of British Euroscepticism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tournier-Sol, K. (2017), Prendre le large: le UKIP et le choix du Brexit, Paris: Vendémiaire. UKIP (2001), General Election Manifesto. UKIP (2005), We Want Our Country Back, General Election Manifesto. UKIP (2010), Empowering the People, General Election Manifesto. UKIP (2011), “What We Stand For”, 28 November. UKIP (2014a), Create an Earthquake, European Election Manifesto. UKIP (2014b), Open-door Immigration Is Crippling Local Services in the UK, Local Election Manifesto. UKIP (2015), Believe in Britain, General Election Manifesto. Usherwood, S. (2008), “The Dilemmas of a Single-issue Party: The UK Independence Party”, Representation, 44(3), pp. 255–264. Wellings, B. (2010), “Losing the Peace: Euroscepticism and the Foundations of Contemporary English Nationalism”, Nations and Nationalism, 16(3), pp. 488–505.

Conclusion Stéphane Porion UNIVERSITY OF TOURS

Enoch Powell has always been depicted by his obituaries or biographies as “a political enigma”, “a politician full of contradictions”, or “a political maverick epitomizing great complexity”. According to Shrapnel and Phillips: The word most people settled for in trying to describe Enoch Powell, who has died aged 85, was enigmatic … He was indeed a hard man to understand, and harder still to fit into current political categories. The contradiction clamoured … Nevertheless he regarded himself – and persuaded some admirers to regard him – as a model of logical consistency. (The Guardian, 9 February 1998) Most studies have thus attempted to unravel “the Powell enigma”. Yet, as Michael Cockerell put it in his documentary “Odd Man Out: A Portrait of Enoch Powell” in 1995: “It is far from easy to distil his essence. He has never written his autobiography” (Cockerell 11 November 1995, POLL 3/2/5/11). Powell never did so as he thought that the narcissistic act of writing one’s autobiography was “like a dog returning to its vomit” (Heffer 1992, p. 18; Shepherd 1997, p. 498; Heffer 1999, p. xiii). Since Simon Heffer’s biography, published just after Powell’s death in 1998, and due to an agreement made by the two men, no further analyses had been released on the man’s ideas and legacy for a while. Powellism seemed thus to have been reduced to the April 1968 speech and this political figure to “a racist pig of the most despicable variety” in the very words of his staunchest detractor (Paul Foot) (Foot 1998, p. 12). How was Powell going to be remembered in the 21st century? Was he going to remain a ghost in British politics, with a toxic legacy on the issues of race and immigration? Was his name going to mean “rivers of blood” forever? For some, like Michael White, “Powell would be one of those ‘exotic footnotes’ in the history of Britain” (White quoted in Vestey 1998). Even though Powell had always refused to write his memoirs or his autobiography, it is worth noticing that he certainly played an ambiguous role on establishing the legacy of his April 1968 speech after his death. In a 1990 article called “Theory and Practice” (POLL 6/2/2), which could be considered to be a short autobiography, Powell sums up the main political events that shaped his

Conclusion

177

career. What is striking is that he steps back from the April 1968 speech and looks back instead over “the intellectual job he did” in formulating the “doctrine of the market” both well before Thatcherism came into existence and a short time after the Bible of Thatcherism was published, i.e. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty (1960). He simply says: “I am going to skip over 1968 – 1968 was not really important” (Powell quoted in Collings 1991, pp. 58–59). Powell deliberately overlooks the whole controversy that the speech aroused, as well as the fact that it actually put an end to his ambition of becoming the leader of the Conservative Party, in order to focus instead on the benefit it brought to him: “What 1968 did for me was that it relieved me of a prospect of future office, or honours, which liberates a man to do the other half of the job in politics – the nonconformist part. 1968 may have been a relief for Ted Heath. It was certainly a liberation for me. I became, dare I say it, my own man” (Heffer 1992, p. 17). In his eyes, his April 1968 speech gave him the necessary freedom to address the question of the homogeneous nation and become the prophet of the nation: “It was because I had become identified with that question that after 1968 I enjoyed a freedom of expression pretty well unique in the politics of my time” (Collings 1991, p. 60). Twenty years after the Birmingham speech, Powell claimed that he had never regretted delivering such a speech: “Re-read after 20 years, I am struck by its sobriety” (Heffer 1999, p. 918). At the end of his life, Powell went as far as to ask: “What’s wrong with racism? Racism is the basis of nationality” (Powell quoted in Cockerell, 11 November 1995, POLL 3/2/5/11). He contended that he “had to prepare the mind of the country and to educate the party” (Powell quoted in Cockerell 1995, POLL 5/69). Since the furore of 1968, Powell had expected the Birmingham speech to be part of his legacy. He had succeeded in breaking the post-war consensus on immigration through a populist strategy. In other words, “by preparing the mind of the country”, Powell took it on himself to prepare his own legacy: his Birmingham speech was actually one of the cornerstones of Powellism, like a free-market economy and society and Euroscepticism. In this book, we have deliberately chosen not to refer to the Birmingham speech as the “Rivers of Blood” speech so as to tackle Powell’s thought with hindsight and less passion, as some others, such as Randall Hansen, have done. Powell himself was responsible for the whole hysteria that the speech stirred, then the media gave it its apocalyptic flavour by calling it the “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell explained that he had made “the fatal decision” to translate the Latin phrase into English “not to be pedantic” and “not to have it lost in Latin” (Times, 6 August 1993). But in fact, beyond this so-called didactic aim towards his audience, it is well known that Powell craved the publicity that the speech would attract. The outcome of the speech reached far beyond what he expected. Nicholas Jones has shown the behind-the-scenes role that his father played in promoting Powell’s ideas through an efficient media strategy. Yet, however efficient the rhetorical ploy, it remains that Powell’s quote of Virgil was erroneous, as is argued here by Labour Baroness Lena M. Jeger:

178

Stéphane Porion If [Powell] had quoted fairly from Virgil Book 6 – bella horrida bella, et thybrim multo spunantem sanguine cerno – he would surely have had to put it in context by making clear that the words were spoken by the Sybil, raving in her cave, “her foaming mouth attentive to control”. So instead of Mr Powell saying he felt like the Roman who saw the River Tiber etc., he should have checked his text in the original and said: “I feel like that crazy, wretched maddened female in her haunted cave with a foamy mouth who said she saw etc.” The emotive phrase might then have gained less currency than when attributed wrongly by an ex-professor to a Roman citizen. (Jeger quoted in The Times, 20 October 1972)

Controversy was reignited a decade after his death, showing that Powell had not actually been reduced to “an exotic footnote” in British political history. In 2007, Conservative candidate Nigel Hastilow learnt the hard way during a by-election in the West Midlands seat of Halesowen and Rowley that it was lethal to conjure up Powell’s ghost again. He should never have said: “Enoch Powell was right.” Above all, it was in 2008 for the 40th anniversary of Powell’s Birmingham speech that Powell haunted British politics again. In March of that year, the BBC decided to broadcast a program called “Rivers of Blood”, as part of White Season, to shed fresh light on the speech. The documentary sounded very biased and was viewed as an attempt to rehabilitate Powell. It ended on footage from the 2005 London bombings, mixed with scenes of the English capital city’s multicultural society, accompanied with a voiceover, relentlessly quoting the most famous lines from Powell’s Birmingham speech. Martin O’Neill, a professor of political philosophy, made a strong indictment of the way Denys Blakeway (the director of the documentary) tried to legitimize Powell’s nightmarish vision of a multicultural society: “Blakeway’s film juxtaposed the use of the word ‘multiculturalism’ with footage of the 7/7 bombings. Are we supposed to think 7/7 was an inevitable consequence of not following Powell’s advice?” (New Statesman, 10 March 2018). In doing so, the BBC was both silencing the crucial role of British foreign policy – the Iraq war – in bringing about 7/7 as well as reversing its approach to Powellism. In the late 1960s indeed, hundreds of Powellites had been issuing many complaints about the BBC, but for wholly contrary reasons: what was exposed back then was its “woolly” or “out-of-touch” slant in favour of immigration. Some researchers, such as Jenny Bourne, condemned “the beginnings of [Powell’s] rehabilitation as an authoritative political figure” (Bourne 2008, p. 82). Powell’s April 1968 speech seemed to have created a new “thermonuclear political explosion” 40 years later (Cosgrave 1989, p. 1). Robert Shepherd, who wrote a biography on Powell in the mid-1990s, set out to account for Powell’s motives to deliver the Birmingham speech in a documentary for BBC Radio 4 recalling the main events of 1968. He based his answers on the work by Peter Brooke, the historian, with the help of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, who argued that the real source of the speech could be traced

Conclusion

179

to Powell’s 1943–1946 experience in his beloved India and his fear of “communalism”. As Robert Shepherd put it: As his beloved India descended into communal violence, Powell received leaked, confidential reports via his contacts, including a former Indian civil servant, Frank Brayne, detailing the bloodshed. At the foot of a report from Lahore dated March 1947, Brayne scrawled, “Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat” — the chilling phrase intoned in translation by Powell in 1968, “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” … For Powell, India’s bloodbath and America’s race riots confirmed where communalism led. This nightmare was the real source of his “rivers of blood” speech. (Shepherd 2008) In his Walsall speech in February 1968, Powell foreshadowed his Birmingham speech and his fear of “communalism”, for he had warned against the danger of communalism, couched as the “curse of India”. Furthermore, it was also in 2008 that Nicholas Hillman offered fresh analysis on the Birmingham speech and Powell’s motives. He attempted to go beyond the existing literature to show that Powell’s incentives had not just been opportunistic: “The reality was more complex. Powell had a genuine concern about the impact of mass migration” (Hillman 2008, p. 104). What is striking is that 10 years after his death, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of the April 1968 speech, Powell was still remembered for his racist ideas and his outright rejection of a multicultural society, back then called “multiracial”. In addition to academic research, the many afterlives of Powell were kindled anew by politicians and parties. For example, Trevor Philips, the then head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, decided to deliver a speech on the 40th anniversary of his Birmingham speech in the very same Burlington Hotel in Birmingham in which Enoch Powell had spoken. What he intended to do was not to celebrate Powellism, but instead to bury Powell’s legacy by offering a sharp indictment of his central views (The Guardian, 23 April 2008). At the same time, in another small room of the same hotel, Nick Griffin decided to celebrate Powell for being so inspiring for his party. The leader of the BNP had already paraphrased Powell’s words before in The Voice of Freedom (the BNP’s newspaper) to insist that UKIP was not competent to deal with immigration: “Farage must be mad, literally mad” (The Voice of Freedom, number 134, p. 6). In addition, the BNP had regularly published articles or letters to the editor, which used the “Enoch was right” mantra to justify the need for the BNP to flourish and fight for the British nation (The Voice of Freedom, number 101, p. 12; number 94, p. 15). To complete its electoral strategy, the BNP had created Billy Brit – the official mascot of the youth wing of the BNP that glorifies Powell. This puppet would play a crucial role a year later. During a campaigning video for the 2009 European elections, Billy Brit sang:

180

Stéphane Porion In 1912 a lion was born./Enoch was his name./A gentleman. A British hero./Through truth, the man found fame./He gave a speech called “Rivers of Blood”./And never gave up the fight./Enoch Powell spoke for me and Enoch Powell was white. (The Independent, 22 October 2009)

Aimed at children as young as eight, the flame-haired puppet features in videos posted on YouTube and the BNP website reciting a series of “educational poems”. In a speech in late March 2008, Griffin explained why Powell failed to achieve high office and refused to create a new party, while, after his Birmingham speech, he was enjoying massive support from the working class on his ideas of immigration: Powell was so obsessed with the constitution and the perfection of the parliamentary system … He wasn’t a political street fighter, but a fantastic constitutionalist … He refused to organise the party, that is why there wasn’t a party … He could have broken away, left the party, and set up his own party. All the Tory activists in the country would have followed him. He would have attracted members from the Labour Party and the trade unions. He did not do it as he did not want to upset the balance of the parliamentary system. (Griffin, 20 March 2018) Powell did not want to challenge the two-party system and create unrest in the House of Commons should MPs from different political parties have decided to join his newly created one. As Powell said, he was “thickly parliamentarian” (Schofield 2013, p. 311) and loved the House of Commons the way it was. On 20 April 2008, Griffin commemorated Powell’s speech and argued that thanks to Powell the BNP could close the gap between what the elites presented as reality and what everyone else experienced as the real world, unable to speak out their fears. Unlike Powell, he declared that the BNP was a nationwide organization, with a sense of real purpose, flourishing local branches and skilled people. He also put forward the idea of white backlash to attack the multicultural state doctrine. What is interesting is that he suggested that in the very first place, the old BNP with John Bean in 1958 had already carried out this mission to warn British people of the dangers of mass immigration: And again this is the BBC which has spent forty years attacking Enoch Powell for a start and even before Powell dared to speak out it was attacking people who were putting across the same message, because Enoch Powell was not the first person to make this warning. One of the first people to make this warning and do so effectively was John Bean who now edits our magazine Identity. And in 1958, ten years before Powell, John Bean and his colleagues in the first version of the British

Conclusion

181

National Party were saying this is all gonna end in disaster. And Powell came to it late; but at least he came to it. And to say that therefore he was responsible for it is an unbelievable piece of nonsense. (https://www. dailymotion.com/video/x5ebor?collectionXid=xhhzd) Nick Griffin went back again on the typical question: was Powell wrong? He said that the BNP went looking and searched in many local newspapers to produce a list of people from 1999 to 2006 of 163 white British who had been the victims of racist homicides in Britain. The leader of the BNP wondered: “How much blood would the Liberal Left need before they would admit that it’s a river. How much more?” (Ibid.). At the end of his speech, Griffin also proclaimed himself a prophet with foreboding in a Powellite vein, vindicating Powell’s solutions: “a total halt to immigration” and “a human and generous policy of voluntary repatriation”: They should listen to Powell’s warning now. I predict that within three years, this combination of economic catastrophe and the racial, ethnic and religious problem will create an explosion of communal racist and religious violence in this country … My prediction record in these fields is better than Enoch Powell’s, partly because we are close to the event; he was looking through a glass darkly at something 50 years hence, we are much closer to it and we can see what’s going to happen. (Ibid.) In June 2009, the BNP won its first ever two seats in the European parliament. Thanks to the PR system, Nick Griffin was elected in the northwest with 8% and Andrew Brons won a seat in Yorkshire and the Humber with 9.8%. As a matter of fact, Nick Griffin was for the first time invited to BBC “Question Time” in October of that same year. His ideas sounded once again so racist and xenophobic that a man from the audience declared: “Mister Powell’s views were identical to those of Mr Griffin” (BBC “Question Time”, 23 October 2009). Chris Huhne (Liberal Democrat MP) accused Griffin of harnessing Powell’s rhetoric and ideas. In his eyes, this strategy pursued by this nativist Radical Right party was morally reprehensible and its ideas lacked accuracy: What we are dealing here with Nick Griffin and the BNP is a politics of finding people to blame to scapegoat. This is exactly what Enoch Powell did in his “Rivers of Blood” speech. I don’t think he would recognize this country today. One in two of all Afro-Caribbean children under the age of sixteen either have a white mother or a white father. That’s how far this country has changed since Enoch Powell made that speech. We had this in the 1930s against the Jews, in the 1960s against the Blacks and now Nick Griffin is playing the same old game hatred and fear peddling hatred and fear against the minority that has actually to defend itself. It’s outrageous and it is completely against the traditions of this country. (Ibid.)

182

Stéphane Porion

Historiographical debates have evolved again since the 40th anniversary of Powell’s Birmingham speech. A couple of new studies have brought challenging perspectives on the Birmingham speech. For example, Bill Schwarz has defined it as “Britain’s first postcolonial moment when decolonization and its ethic consequences were first publicly recognized as a popular issue, of historical significance for white as well as black” (Schwarz quoted in Schofield 2013, p. 318). The speech “had instantly entered the popular imagination” and it lingered on more than 40 years later (Schwarz 2011, p. 34). Camilla Schofield’s 2013 book has shown how Powell’s Second World War experience constructed his own vision of Conservatism throughout his life. But more generally, one should agree with her verdict on Powell’s April 1968 speech: Powell’s warnings of national dissolution have continued to serve as a way of understanding social unrest and political violence in Britain. Whether it be in the context of the London bombings of 2005, or the urban riots of 2011, Powell’s racialized picture of a lost nation is never far from the television analyst’s lips. In this sense, he remains the patron saint of lost causes. (Schofield 2013, p. 318) Five years later, in 2018 – the year of Powell’s 50th anniversary of his Birmingham speech – what has become of Powell’s legacy? Why would this particular occasion lead to new and stimulating academic analyses, showing a renewed interest in Powellism and his April 1968 speech? How would these fill a gap in the historiography, when so much has been written on the man and his thinking? That was the ambitious objective of the conference that we held at Sciences Po Lille in January 2018. This book has hopefully further unravelled the “Powell enigma” and set his Birmingham speech into fresh perspective. First, with hindsight, it is possible to demonstrate to what extent the Powell effect and Powell’s populist race card in the late 1960s and early 1970s had an impact on British voters, especially in the 1979 general election, and the way constituents responded to Powell’s April 1968 speech through the close study of a bulk of letters of support that he received. Another section of this book focuses on the way Powell manipulated the British media and, in turn, how the Powell moment (1968– 1973) was depicted by the international press. Another path that this book has taken is to reterritorialize Powell by examining how the creation of the Runnymede Trust, as “an indirect legacy of the Powell moment”, led to “an attempt to negate the influence of Enoch Powell on the media and the prominent position he assumed in speaking on race and immigration policy” in Britain. Reterritorializing Powell also meant studying an area that has previously been underresearched – that is, Enoch Powell’s ideas on the Irish question. Finally, studying the impact of his Birmingham speech from a new perspective has led us not only to look at the relationship or the impact of Powellism on Conservative politics through the analysis of Julian Amery’s and Alfred Sherman’s ideas, but also the Powell effect on nativist right politics through the analysis of the National Front in the 1970s and that of UKIP in the 21st century.

Conclusion

183

Other paths of Powellite or anti-Powellite territories will possibly be trodden in the future. These are a few suggestions for further research: how was the Powellite threat countered by the schooling administration in the classrooms, if at all? Owing to the local governance of schools in the late 1960s, was the response, say, in Birmingham different from London, Brent, Bradford? How did the police forces respond to Powell’s campaign on the ground? How did trade-unions, nationally and locally, apprehend the populist upsurge in the late 1960s? How did Scotland and Wales respond to Powell? In 2018, a lot of parties from the nativist right in Britain tried again to harness Powell’s toxic legacy. As this book has shown, that was the case with the National Front, while UKIP was eager to distance itself from it. As for the BNP, Chairman Adam Walker explained in a video that his party had decided to grant Enoch Powell a BNP gold membership card “for [Powell] to be proud of our organisation” and to ward off anti-Powell campaigning in Wolverhampton: “In his Rivers of Blood speech, Powell predicted that there would be a lot of trouble if the immigration in our country carried on. What a man he was! What a visionary! … In his constituency, … they are campaigning vigorously for a plaque not to be erected in his memory,1 which is absolutely disgusting” (Walker, 19 April 2018). The BNP reasserted that Powell had been “an inspiration for all true patriots”. In 2018, according to BNP party members, “Powell’s rivers of blood speech retains its potency” as he epitomized the fight against the political establishment (https://bnp. org.uk/video-enoch-powell-awarded-honorary-bnp-gold-membership/). Therefore, exploiting Powell’s figure and ideas was a means for the BNP to fuel its populist strategy. The BNP implicitly hammered anew the popular motto “Enoch was right” and presented Powell once again as a national hero. Besides, its official website includes a section called “[Powell] legacy”. This shows once again that the BNP has always tried to harness the legacy of Conservative figures, as was the case when Nick Griffin tried to exploit the figure of Winston Churchill in his 2009 European election campaign broadcast. Part of its mainstreaming strategy consists in putting an end to the demonizing of the party, which usually has to cope with a fascist past – the French have called it “dédiabolisation” regarding the Front National (Dezé 2016). Finally, it could be argued that Powell’s mythical foreboding came to be true on 23 June 2016 when a large majority of British voters supported Brexit. At the end of his life, Powell was critical of the significance of his political career, which had ended in failure. His comment at the time could certainly illuminate the outcome of the Brexit referendum: I have lived into an age in which my ideas are now part of common intuition, part of a common fashion. It has been a great experience, having given up so much, to find that there is now this range of opinion in all classes, that an agreement with the EEC is totally incompatible with normal parliamentary government … The nation has returned to haunt us. (Powell quoted in The Guardian, 16 April 2018)

184

Stéphane Porion

However, Powell’s apocalyptic prophecy of bloodshed, chaos and immolation failed to materialize. What was achieved instead was Powell’s longstanding Eurosceptic fight, since the turn of the 1970s, to get back British parliamentary sovereignty. One may be tempted, as Matthew d’Ancona has recently been, to raise the question of the Conservative Party having become “Powellised”. He has thus wondered about the emergence of “neo-Powellism”. Indeed, the journalist highlights that since June 2016, “we have heard Tory ministers suggesting that companies should keep lists of foreign workers, that doctors born overseas were elbowing aside British teenagers who might otherwise read medicine, that foreign students should not aspire to settle here” (The Guardian, 16 April 2018). Ken Clarke also warned in January 2017: “Powell himself would probably find it amazing to believe that his party had become Eurosceptic and rather mildly anti-immigrant in a strange way” (Ibid.). As the year 2018 was marked by the 50th anniversary of his Birmingham speech, there was a flow of editorials, articles, TV and radio programmes, protests and debates. Therefore, Powell enjoyed an impressive afterlife and the ghost of Powellism once again loomed over the British nation.

Note 1 See the introduction to this book, which tackles the issue of commemorative plaques.

References Archives Cambridge Archives Centre Churchill College, Powell papers, files POLL 3/2/5/11, POLL 6/2/2 and POLL 5/69.

Political speeches Collings, R. (ed.) (1991), Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, London: Bellew. Griffin, N., speech, 20 March1968, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgPo9t1v4CU. Griffin, N., speech, 20 April2008, https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5ebor?col lectionXid=xhhzd. Walker, A., speech, 19 April2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awo3vLl HYC8&t=3s.

The BNP Official website https://bnp.org.uk/video-enoch-powell-awarded-honorary-bnp-gold-membership/.

Official newspaper The Voice of Freedom

Conclusion

185

Secondary sources Bourne, J. (2008), “The Beatification of Enoch Powell”, Race & Class, 49(4), pp. 82–87. Cosgrave, P. (1990), The Lives of Enoch Powell, London: Pan Books. Deedes, W.F. (2001), “The Real Trouble with Enoch”, The Spectator, 18 August, p. 20. Dezé, A. (2015), “La ‘Dédiabolisation’: une nouvelle stratégie ? ”, in Dezé, A., Mayer, N. and Crépon, S., Les Faux semblants du Front National: Sociologie d’un parti politique, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Foot, P. (1998), “Beyond the Powell”, obituary of Enoch Powell, Socialist Review, 217, p .12, http://www.marxists.org/archive/foot-paul/1998/03/powell.htm. Hansen, R. (2000), Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heffer, S. (1992), “‘No Autobiography, No Vomit’”, The Spectator, 6 June 6, pp. 16–20. Heffer, S. (1999), Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, London: Phoenix. Hillman, N. (2008), “A ‘Chorus of Execration’? Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Forty Years on”, Patterns of Prejudice, 42(1), pp. 83–104. O’Neill, M. (2008), “Echoes of Enoch Powell”, New Statesman, 10 March, http:// www.newstatesman.com/200803100005. Schofield, C. (2013), Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Schwarz, B. (2011), The White Man’s World: Memories of Empire(Vol. 1), New York and London: Oxford University Press. Shepherd, R. (1997), Enoch Powell: A Biography, London: Pimlico. Shepherd, R. (2008), “The Real Tributaries of Enoch’s ‘Rivers of Blood’”, The Spectator, 27 February, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2008/02/the-real-tributaries-of-e nochandx2019s-andx2018rivers-of-bloodandx2019/. Vestey, M. (1998), “Powell’s Legacy”, The Spectator, 4 April, http://findarticles. com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is199804/ai_n8805594?tag=content;coll.

TV programmes BBC “Question Time”, 23 October, 2009, https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=nick+griffin+compared+to+enoch+powell+ques tion+time&&view=detail&mid=475DF099F663C731509845DF099F663C7315098&& FORM=VDRVRV.

Press New Statesman The Guardian The Independent The Times

Index

Amery, J. 5, 113–122 Amin, I. 17, 59 Anglocentric view of Britain (confusion England / Britain) 4, 39, 165–6 Anti-Catholicism 10, 36, 72 Anti-Communism 10 Anti-Federalist League 163 Anti-Powell demonstrations 3, 77–78 Anti-Semitism 36, 37, 86, 148, 151, 159 Apartheid 71, 106 Australia 37–8, 93, 116 Autochthony 5–10, 135–6 Banal nationalism 1 Beacon Radio 57 Bean, J. 149, 180 Belfast 76 Beveridge, W. 42 Bindman, G. 85 Bipartisan consensus on immigration and citizenship legislation 16–7, 71 Birmingham speech (Enoch Powell, 20. 04. 1968), see Powell Black People’s Alliance 4, 77–8 Black Power (in England) 86 Blackburn 43 Blair, T. 60 Blue plaque controversy around Powell 1–4 Bourdieu, P. 10 Boyle, E. 85 Bradford 62 Breitbart News 147, 159 Brexit 10, 44, 110–111, 173 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 56, 59, 60, 89, 92, 137, 180, 181 British Election Study Survey 19–29 British Empire 4, 5, 65, 85, 101, 115–119

British Nationality Act (1948) 13–15, 100, 101, 141 British Nationality Act (1981) 14, 15, 19, 141 British National Party (BNP) 169, 179, 180 Burnley 62 Callaghan, J. 39, 41 Cameron, D. 63, 145, 173 Campaign Against Racism and Discrimination (C.A.R.D) 83, 84, 85 Campbell, A. 60, 61 Canada 37–8, 93 Candour 147, 149, 154, 155 Capital punishment 70, 71, 106, 111, 159 Carson, E. 104 Census (of 1971) 93 Census (of 1981) 135 Centre for Policy Studies 126–7, 128 Chamberlain, J. 115 Chesterton, A. K. 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155 Chicago Democratic Convention (1968) 6–7 Chomsky, N. 70 Churchill, W. 35–36, 41, 118 Citizenship 98, 150–1; culturalization of, 10, 42–3, 135 Cockburn, C. 68–9 Cold War context 116–9 Cologne, New Year’s Eve assaults in (2015–6) 169 Colour and Citizenship, A Report on British Race Relations (1969) 82, 89 Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) 57 Common-sense 32, 132, 171 Commonwealth 5, 14, 75, 116–8, 119, 120, 140

Index Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) 14, 16, 131 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1968) 81, 131 Commonwealth Press Union 57 Communalism (among Indians) 72, 75, 133, 179 Community Relations Commission 86, 87, 93 Conservative Party : being influenced by Powell on immigration 8; dismissing Powell from shadow cabinet 8, 17; hypocrisy towards Powell 8, 75; perceived as strong on immigration control, 18–9, 20–21, 22–23; policies on immigration and citizenship, 15–6; policies on Europe, 18 Conspiracy theories 68 Cotterill, D. 56 Croix de Feu 157, 159 Daily Mail (The) 56, 136 Daily Telegraph (The) 34, 63, 126 Deakin, N. 82, 86, 89 Declinism 5, 6, 36, 41, 43, 115 De Gaulle, C. 68, 69–70, 120 Democratic Unionist Party 110 Devlin, P. A. (Lord) 58 Discrimination 73, 75–6, 94 Dockers (demonstrating in support of Powell) 9, 78 Dominions 93, 116 Domopolitics 10 Douglas, M. 4 Dunkirk 35, 43 Ealing 59, 74, 77 Eastbourne speech (Enoch Powell, 16. 11. 1968) See Powell Economic Planning 131 Eddo-Lodge, R. 5 Elections : general elections of 1964 16; 1970 8, 23–25, 82, 150, 153; 1974, 23–25; 1979, 18–20, 25, 128, 137, 141 Emotions (in political movements) 4, 44–45 Empire Windrush (1948) (see Windrush) English Defence League (EDL) 44 “Enoch was right” slogan 1, 5, 145–7, 168, 178, 179 Equality and Human Rights Commission (E.H.R.C) 179 Eugenics 152 European Coal and Steel Community (E.C.S.C) 119–120

187

European Economic Community (E.E.C.) 4, 18, 82, 98, 102, 103, 109, 147, 163; British sovereignty and 98, 163–4; 1975 U.K. referendum on joining 128, 139, 173 European Union : A-8 countries 167, 173; Schengen Space 167 Euroscepticism 63, 102, 138–40, 163–7 Evans, H. 90, 91 Extreme Right : 69, 145–59; and charismatic leadership 5, 154; controversies on the phrase, 9; and supply-side factors 153 Fabian Society 83 Farage, N. : 62–3, 162–73; praising Powell 162, 167–8 Faulkner, B. 104–5 Five Power Defence Arrangements (1971) 119 Fleet Street 86 Foot, M. 121 Foot, P. 3, 176 Foreign policy (Britain’s) 10, 14, 69–70, 116–7, 178 Fountaine, A. 159 France 32 Front National (France) 183 Germany 13, 33, 38 Gestapo 41 Ghettoes (formation of in Britain) 58, 74, 76 Gilroy, P. 32, 34 Glasgow 75 Goldwater, B. 67, 68, 69, 71 Good Friday Agreement (1998) 109–110 Griffin, N. 180, 181 Griffiths, P. 16, 29 Halbwachs, M. 32, 34 Hannan, C. 61 Hansen, R. 29, 177 Harland, P. 90 Hastilow, N. 145, 178 Hayek, F. 177 Healey, D. 113 Heath, E. 8, 17–8, 23, 26, 29, 48, 52, 54, 103, 119, 121, 126, 128, 141, 150, 152, 153, 177. Heathrow Airport (immigration officers in) 73–4, 77 Heffer, S. 57, 163, 176 Hillyard, P. 106 Hitler, A. 32, 68, 77, 137, 146

188

Index

Hoggart, R. 67 Homosexuality 70 Howarth, G. 146 Huddleston, T. 71 Huhne, C. 181 Imagined community 1, 36, 42, 43, 170 Immigrants : British voters attitudes to 13–29; dispersal of 74; from the New Commonwealth 2, 9, 16, 17, 18, 19, 32, 40, 42, 74–5, 77–8, 83, 91, 92, 129, 130, 137, 138, 140, 151; integration of 66, 76–7, 82, 86, 88, 92, 93; Irish 29, 65–66, 75–6, 99–103, 110; and the job market 36–7, 130–1, 151; Kenyan Asians 16–17, 24, 29, 51, 77; Labour party perceived as ‘soft’ on 23–24; as a lumpenproletariat 133; number of 36; perceived as a cultural menace 36–7, 40, 42–3, 132, 168–9; ‘peaceful penetration’ of 36; perceived as a demographic menace 36, 37–8, 72–3, 78, 134–5; perceived as a new invasion 2–3, 32–33, 35–6, 37–8, 40–1, 78, 81; Polish 29; repatriation of 23, 29, 30, 89, 110, 132, 150, 151; statistics of 36, 91–4, 134–5; Ugandan Asians 17–8, 23–24, 57–8, 77, 147, 158; and welfare services 42–3, 74, 130–1, 151, 168–9, 171 Immigration Act (1971) 17, 75, 82, 131, 150 India (partition and independence of) 75, 116 Indian Workers Association (I.W.A.) 77, 79 Independent Broadcasting Authority 58 Industry (British) 38, 131 Institute of Economic Affairs (I.E.A.) 126–7 Institute of Race Relations (I.R.R) 82, 83, 84, 85, 93 International Press Institute 57 Intersectionality 33–34 Ireland : Ireland Act (1949) 100, 101, 107; ‘Irish question’, 72, 75–6; Irish citizens and immigration to Britain 99–103; Irish voting rights 107–110 Irish Free State 101 Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) 103, 105, 106, 109; provisional 106 Islamophobia 10 Italy 74 Jay, D. 121 Jewish Chronicle (The) 126

Jews (persecution of) 33, 37 Johnson, B. 5 Jones, Clement 47–63, 90, 91 Jones, Marjorie 54, 61 Jones, Nick 47–63 Joseph, K. 126, 127, 128, 138, 141 Kerner, O. 90, 94 Keynesianism 4, 127, 131 King Jr, M.L. 66, 83 Kinnock, N. 60 Kureishi, H. 158 Labour Party : 83, New Labour 60–1; limitation-integration policy 82; perceived as ‘soft’ on immigration 23–24; reluctance towards the E. E. C., 121 League of Empire Loyalists 148 Leicester 59 Leicester Campaign for Racial Equality 84 Lester, A. 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, Little England(er) 139, 152, 164 Liverpool 75 London Bombings (7/7) 178, 182 London School of Economics 166 Maastricht Treaty (1992) 163, 164 McCarthy, J. 68, 134 Macmillan, H. 38, 113, 120 Major, J. 26 Manchester 92 Mandelson, P. 60, 61 March for Dignity (16. 01. 1969) 4, 77 Marr, A. 58 Marshall, T. H. 42 Mason, P. 85 Memory 1–4, 2–45, 165 Merridale Road (Wolverhampton) 3, 56 Molyneaux, J. 107 Monday Club (The) 113, 115, 138, 153, 158 Mosley, O. 68–9, 71 Mudde, C. 7, 8, 9 Multiracial society : Britain as 9, 14, 41, 151, 168, 179 Myrdal, G. 42, 82 Nandy, D. 81, 84–5, 86, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94 Nasser, G. A. 117 National Committee for Commonweath Immigrants (N.C.C.I) 83, 85, 87, 88 National Front, 5, 18, 51, 128, 135, 137, 141, 145–159, 169; in Greater London Council 148

Index National Health Service (NHS) : 70, 130, 171; immigrant employment in 14, 29, 130 National suicide 36 National Union of Journalists 60 Nativism 5, 9–10 N.A.T.O 138 Nazi propaganda 55, 169 Neo-liberalism 70, 126–7, 150–2, 177 Neo-nazism 151, 154 Netherlands (The) 10, 66, 74, 120 New-Commonwealth : see immigrants New-Zealand 37–8, 93, 116 1968 : as a year of radical movements 6–7; as the onset of the conservative revolution 6–7, 68–9; May rebellion in France 77 Northern Ireland 97–112 Nostalgia 10, 41, 43 Notting Hill : 1958 riots 14, 16, 49; 1976 carnival riots 135, 140 Nottingham 16 O’Brien, J. 147, 157, 158 Oldham 62 Orange Order 97 Orwell, G. 67 Oxford 49, 66 Painter, R. 158 Paisley, I. 97, 110 Performative discourse 5–6 Phenotype 93 Phillips, T. 60, 61, 179 Pilkington, H. 44, 45 Political Correctness 171 Populism 5–11, 130–1, 132–3, 141, 151, 169–72; ethnography of 6, 32–46; sovereignty-based type of 163–4 Portsmouth 49 Post-colonialism 4, 69–70, 72, 75, 78 Poujade, P. 67, 68 Powell, E. : blue plaque controversy 1–4; breach of party protocol, 8; and the conservative party, 8, 17, 21, 26–7, demonstrations against 3; dockers demonstration in support 9, 74, 78; effect of his campaign on immigrants and ethnic minorities 28–9, 76–8; Empire views 115–9; and Europe 119–121, 138–40; family 2–3, 48–56; family background 113–4; foreign policy views 114;

189

free trade advocacy 48, 70, 114, 150–2; house in Wolverhampton 2–3, 52–3; house in Belgravia (London) 2–3, 55; and journalism 4, 48, 52–56; lasting effect on British politics 3, 5, 8–9, 28–9, 69, 145–7; letters against 33; letters in support 6, 9, 32–45, 53, 54–55, 73; Manichaeism around 4; as minister of Health (1930–63), 48, 68, 130; and the media 4, 54; M.P for South Down 97–112; and the National Front 145–59; quitting the Conservative Party 157; being dismissed from shadow cabinet 8, 114, 118, 158; see also speeches, Ulster Unionist Party. Prashar, U. 87 Prendergast, N. 76–7 Press Association 55 Press Council 57, 58 Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974) 105–7 Primary Purpose Rule 30, 141 Putting Britain Right Ahead (White paper, 1965) 117 Race Relations : 87; as concept 76, 89; coverage of by the media 49–50, 56–7, 81–94 Race Relations Act (1968) 79, 81 Race Relations Act (1976) 135 Race Relations Bill (1968) 9, 35, 38, 39, 40–1, 79 Race Relations Board (R.R.B) 85 Racial Preservation Society 148 Racism : 13–14, 37, 42–3, 67, 70, 71, 73, 76–7, 130–1, 141, 145–59, 176; accusations of 32–33, 44–45, 133–4, 167; biological racism ; Britain’s self-image and 72–3, 74–5, 136; “New racism” 138–40; social classes and 9, 33–34, 41, 67, 73, 74–5, 150 Read, J. K. 158 Referendum : populism and 9; Brexit referendum (2016), 44, 139; referendum on British membership of the E.E.C (1975) 128, 139, 173 “Reverse discrimination” 40–1, 79, 84 Rhodesia 4, 70, 75, 98 Riots : 1958 14, 16, 49; 2001 62; 2011 182 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (on challenging the phrase) 1–2, 177

190

Index

Rose, J. 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89 Runnymede Trust 4, 47, 57, 60, 69, 81–94 Russell, B. 69 Salisbury Review (The) 126, 132 Sayad, A. 45 Schofield, C. 8, 32, 44, 182 Schuman Plan (1950) 119 Schwarz, B. 6, 32, 182 Schwarzenbach, J. 68 Selsdon Group (The) 129, 141 Sherman, A. 5, 126–142 Shore, P. 121 Sikhs 10, 72, 76–7, 78, 133 Silbert, R. 61 “Silent majority” 7, 9, 133 Sked, A. 162, 166, 167 Smethwick 16 Smith, Andrew (The Speech) 62 Smith, Ian 4, 70 Smith, Eleanor (M.P) 4 Society of Friends (Quakers) 51 South Africa 4, 75, 106 Southall 10, 74 South Down (N.I.) 3, 8, 97–112; Sovereignty (Britain’s) 69–70, 138–40; in Northern Ireland 97–112 Spearhead 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155 Speeches by Enoch Powell : Belfast speech (02. 06. 1972) 105; Birmingham speech (20. 04. 1968) 1–2, 8, 14, 17, 18, 34–5, 37, 54–5, 60, 61–2, 65–78, 81, 129–30, 148–50, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182; Bridgnorth speech (27. 08. 1969), 101; Eastbourne speech (16. 11. 1968), 34, 81; Enniskillen speech (03. 06. 1970) 98, 101, 102; Omagh speech (11. 09. 1971) 104; Penzance speech (13. 11. 1971) ; Walsall speech (09. 02. 1968) 34, 51, 52, 53, 78, 81, 179 Stagflation 26 Stormont (abolition of, 1972) 104, 105 Suez Crisis (1956) 116–7 Suez Group (The) 115, 116, 117 Sun (The) 137 Sunday Times (The) 55–6, 90 Switzerland 66, 68 Tebbit, N. 166 Telegraph & Argus (Bradford) 90

Thatcher, M. : 25, 26, 27, 60, 141, 159, 166, 177 being influenced by Powell 5, 18, 21, 127–8, 135–7; Dublin speech (1979) 140; and immigration issues, 28–9, 30; neoliberal ideology ; and Northern Ireland 108–9; policies on Europe 122; recycling of Powellite vocabulary 18; “World in Action” (1978) interview 18–9, 136 Times (The), “Dark Million series of articles (1965)” 36, 72, 78 Treaty of Rome (1957) 120 Tyndall, J. 147, 152, 153, 154, 155, 159 Urban Programme 81–2 Ulster Unionist Party (U.U.P.) 8, 97–112, 155, 157 UNESCO 57 “Unfairness to Whites” 32–46, 67, 79 Unionism 97–112 United Kingdom Independence Party (U.K.I.P) 5, 62–3, 162–73, 179; and Europe 163–7; and immigration 167–9; and populism 169–72 United States : Americanization of British politics 77, 134; Anti-racism in 86; Black underclass debate in, 42; civil rights movement serving as inspiration in England 84–5; conservative revolution in 6–7, 68–9; Kerner commission 90, 94; nativism in 10; party identity in 20; Special Relationship with Britain 121–2; urban ghettoes as a racial foil to Britain 4, 65–66, 72, 77–8; urban riots 65–66, 90, 98; White backlash discourses in 6–7, 43, 65–66; “White ethnics” in 43 Vickers, E. 59 Vietnam War 69–70, 104, 117–8, 119 Virgil’s Aeneid 6, 7, 177, 178 Walker, P. G. 16 Wallace, G. 8, 65, 66–7, 68 Walsall speech (Enoch Powell, 09. 02. 1968), see speeches Weber, M. 8 Webster, M. 155, 156 Welfare chauvinism 10, 39, 42–3, 76–7 Welfare State 4, 6–7, 38, 41, 42–3, 130, 187 West Midlands 10, 16, 49, 65, 145 White Flight 3–4, 50 White Season (BBC, 2008) 5, 178 Wilson, H. Labour government of (1964–70), 15–17, 18, 38, 120, 122

Index Windrush immigrant crisis of 2018–9 75, 110–111, 145 Wolverhampton 48, 74 turban controversy in 76 Wolverhampton Express and Star (The) : 48–9, 57, 58, 90; Powell support mail sent to 54–5

191

Working-class(es) 9, 73–4, 78, 84, 131, 150 World War I 32, 33 World War II 2, 14, 32–45, 72, 165, 182 Young, H. 90, 91 Zimbabwe 4