Enoch Powell - A Review of his Biography 'Like The Roman'

Enoch Powell is arguably the most important British politician of the twentieth century never to be Prime Minister.  His ideas are still thought about and debated and of course the thing that he is most famous for is the so called 'rivers of blood' speech that he gave against mass immigration. The books title 'Like the Roman' is a phrase from that speech.

Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer took me 11 months to read, it's a massive book at 1024 pages. It's not a hard read but it is an exhaustive one, this is as complete as any one volume biography is likely to get. 

Most men are referred to by their surname, but most people referred to Powell as Enoch, which was his middle name, his Christian name was John, which he didn't like and stopped using in his early teens. So I shall also refer to his as Enoch. Enoch was an only child and was quite academically gifted. He became the youngest Professor in the British Empire and even taught at Sydney University in the late 1930's, where he taught Ancient Greek. At the start of the Second World War he joined the British Army and left in 1945 after 6 years service, leaving as a Brigadier. That means that he was promoted every year and twice in two of those years. He didn't see any combat as he worked in staff and intelligence roles in North Africa and India. In 1945 he was 33 years old.

In 1950 he became a Member of Parliament, which he would continue to be for 36 years. From 1950-1974 as a Conservative and from 1974-1987 as a Member of Parliament for Northern Ireland. Between 1960-1963 he reached his highest level of office when he was Minister of Health.

So why is he still important?

Because in 1968 he gave a speech that a large portion of the British voting public was ready to hear, but that the British Establishment was in no way ready to to hear. In fact the Establishment started condemning him right away and that condemnation has continued to this day. In his speech he talked about how

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

But this madness is something that the political establishment all around the world don't want us talking about. I sometimes read on the internet that everything used to good but in the 1990's things started to go wrong. The rot has been going on longer than most people have been alive. Enoch said that civil war because of mass immigration was inevitable and every year it looks more and more likely. Certainly things aren't getting better. 

Enoch was the only main stream politician in the Western World, not just Britain to openly and loudly oppose mass immigration. Which he opposed until his death thirty years later.   

The other major issue that he contributed to was the fight against inflation. From the 1950's to the 1980's inflation was a major economic issue. Governments put the blame on high wage demands, which increased prices which lead to inflation. Enoch argued, when it was very unfashionable to do so, that inflation was caused by the Government. That Government could print money and when it printed too much, normally to cover overspending, the value of each pound was diluted and that that was the real cause of inflation. 

Today basically everyone agrees, but when he made these arguments he was in a very small minority. It wasn't until the 1980's that the Monetarist policies that he advocated would enter the mainstream of politics. Today we have Modern Monetarist policies, which are quite different to Monetarism.

Enoch liked to be different and some of his critics and even some of his friends said that this trait was his downfall. He was very academically minded and wrote articles and books on many subjects. Which sometimes meant that people praised him for making the argument even though they thought that he had said the very opposite to what he had actually said. This was particularly true when he spoke or wrote about economics.

The third subject that he sacrificed for was in keeping Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. He was very critical of every British Government after 1969, believing that their actions and muddle through approach encouraged the IRA and their terrorist campaign. Because it gave the IRA hope that if they kept up the pressure then they could succeed. However the IRA had already won a war against the British Government in 1922 and I think that played as big a part in them thinking that they could win as any misstep in London. 

The fourth issue was that Britain should not be in the EEC, the European Economic Community, today known as the EU or European Community. He said that joining would strip Britain of it's sovereignty, so Enoch would have been very happy with Brexit. However it should be remembered, and it was by his critics, that when Britain first tried to join the EEC in the early 1960's he was a cabinet minister and he voted in favour of joining and spoke out publicly in favour of it. Within 5 years he changed his mind and when the Conservative Government decided to try again to join he advised people to vote for Labor, which is why he stopped being a Conservative Member of Parliament.

However there were three issues that Enoch supported, not with the energy that he supported the issues above, but none the less that he did support. He supported the ending of capital punishment and he supported the legalising of homosexuality. Maybe if he could see the consequences that both have wrought he would regret his decision, maybe not. 

He was also very anti-American and was against Britain having an independent nuclear deterrent. He did support Britain having large conventional forces and thought that the United States should not be involved in world affairs to the degree that it was. In 1967 he publicly said that US strategy in Vietnam would fail, nearly a decade before South Vietnam fell. 

Enoch said that he was a born Tory, but in many ways he was a 19th century Liberal. His views on every subject above could comfortably have been held by a 19th century Liberal. However in the 20th century he was a political oddity. 

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"Never Shall An Enemy' - Extract of a Speech to the Australian Parliament by John Curtin

16th December 1941, Australia's Prime Minister gave this speech to the Australian Parliament, of which this is a short extract. Japan had attacked us on the 8th December 1941. Japan attacked the British Empire hours before it attacked the United States but because of the International Date Line it wasn't the same date.

The third thing is that more than 150 years this country has stood. Never shall an enemy set food upon the soil of this country without having at once arrayed against it the whole of the manhood of this nation with such strength and quality that this nation will remain for ever the home of sons of Britishers who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race. Our laws have proclaimed the standard of a White Australia. We did not intend that to be and it never was an affront to other races. It was devised for economic and sound humane reasons. It was not challenged for 40 years. We intend to keep it, because we know it to be desirable. If we were to depart from it we should do so only as the result of free consent, not because it was sought to be taken from us by armed aggression..

When people wrote, spoke and thought of a White Australia, they meant a British Australia. 

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My Response To Replies to 'Arthur Calwell and his Memoirs'

My last article, Arthur Calwell and his Memoirs 'be just and fear not' received two replies. 

The first from Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative fame who basically gave some more information on Calwell's views before WWII.

Calwell's deep concern for social justice was invariably linked with the creation in Australia of an ethnically mixed society through large-scale immigration.

The second comment was from the world's most prolific author 'Anonymous', who gave a very reasonable and intelligent response. However I think that it is wrong and I will outline why after his comment.

I will attempt to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory positions of Calwell supporting both mass immigration and White Australia.

Calwell (along with many other Australian leaders during World War 2) felt that Australia was precariously vulnerable to being overwhelmed by Imperial Japan due to Australia's small population relative to Australia's land size.
Calwell (along with other Australian leaders at the time) concluded that Australia (for national defence reasons) needed a quick and massive population boost above and beyond what increased birth rates or importing Anglo-Celts from the British Isles was likely to achieve.
So Calwell (and other Australian leaders) expanded the White Australia Policy from English-speaking Anglo-Celts to include the near similar Europeans in general.
Which means that the Calwell era immigration following World War II until the mid-1970s was not in fact the first stage of multiculturalism, but more accurately a continuation of the White Australia Policy with a pan-European population base rather than being limited to mostly Anglo-Celts.

I was surprised when reading Calwell's book, which I have since found out was ghost written by Graham Freudenberg, that not once was the phrase 'populate or perish' used. In the post-war period this was a well worn phrase that was trotted out. It meant that Australia's population was too small to defend it and that we needed more people if we were to do so. 

But that phrase and the mass immigration policy that it supported don't really make sense. By the end of WWII Australia's population was about 8 million, Japans was about 80 million. Exactly how many people we needed to 'populate' wasn't talked about and I have never heard a number. What number would allow us to survive?

 It was all very abstract, what was never discussed was when would enough be enough?

If our enemy has a population of 80 million, how big does our population need to be to successfully defend it?

140 million, 80 million, 40 million, 20 million?

Our most likely enemy today has a population of over 1,000 million, how many people do we need to defend ourselves against that?

Defending Australia was never the reason mass immigration was started because there was never a population target to reach and it was never designed to be turned off, only started.

The second point that I would like to make is that the term 'White Australia' was always a misnomer. The truth is that the word white did not mean to most people in the English speaking world, European. It meant a particular type of European, someone from Northern Europe. In other words White people were WASP's, White Anglo Saxon Protestants. While this term wasn't used in Australia, it's an American term, it comes closest to what the word White meant when people spoke about the 'White Australia' policy.

Even countries with similar backgrounds and histories are not exactly the same. Unlike America, Australia has always had a high proportion of Catholics. So Catholics from the British Isles were included as White. In the United States people still ask are Italians White?

Similar concepts but not quite the same.

When the 'White Australia' policy was put forward it wasn't just to stop a million Chinese from arriving in Australia. It existed just as much to stop a million French people from turning up. Under the policy non-Whites did immigrate to Australia, but numbers were in the thousands over decades. The purpose was to keep Australia a bastion for the British peoples with other people in smaller numbers also being allowed in. Numbers matter.

Mass immigration after WWII was a half way house between the 'White Australia' policy and multiculturalism. It most certainly wasn't a continuation of that policy, it was it's replacement.  

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Arthur Calwell and his Memoirs - 'be just and fear not'

Sunday night 27 October 2024 just before midnight I'm reading an article in Quadrant when a writer casually mentions Arthur Calwells memoirs. I thought " Arthur Calwell wrote a memoir!". So I get out of bed and get on the computer and it took me about half an hour to find an actual copy of the book. There are a lot of pages that talk about the book but I only found one copy for sale. So I bought it, over $60 for a nearly 50 year old paperback. 

By the end of the week I had it in my hands.

Why read a nearly 50 year old book? 

Published in 1978 about a man who has been dead for over 50 years, he died in 1973.

Because Arthur Calwell was a quite peculiar man, the man who campaigned for mass immigration into Australia and the last main stream politician to openly support a White Australia. 

How do you reconcile those two things?

I hoped that the book might give some insight, while it does give some insight into other areas, it sadly does not explain at all why he supported mass immigration even though there is an entire chapter on immigration. 

Chapter 12. The immigration saga

It starts with Prime Minister Curtin stating that Australia needs a Ministry of Immigration and Calwell being appointed by Curtins replacement, Chifley as the first Minister for Immigration on July 13 1945, before the war was even over. But it does not say anything at all of the policies prehistory, it just starts fully formed, with no discussion, no debate, nothing. In that sense nothing has changed.

Sir Robert Menzies in his book 'Afternoon Delight' writes on page 59 "It was in the face of these difficulties that Arthur Calwell convinced not only his colleagues but also the Trade Unions that a large immigration programme should be taken in hand. This was a bold and courageous action. It could have been taken successfully only by a Minister who was known as a life-time Labour man of the strictest orthodoxy, and was both well-known and extremely popular at the centres of unionism, the Trades Hall."

Thats more information then Calwell gives, but he does write on what happened once he was Minister. On August 2, 1945 he gave his first Ministerial statement to Parliament of which I have selected the most relevant parts, page 97-98

"If Australians have learned one lesson from the Pacific war....it is surely that we cannot continue to hold our island continent for ourselves and our descents unless we greatly increase our numbers.

...Immigration is, atbest, only the counterpart of the most important phase of population building, natural increase. Any immigration policy, therefore, must be intimately related to those phases of government policy that are directed towards stimulating the birth rate, and lowering the infant mortality rate in Australia itself. It must, further, be related to the whole social service program of creating greater economic economic security and a higher standard of living, as an inducement to young Australian couples to have larger families."

....In view of the alarming fall in the birth rate, and the decline of the average Australian family from six children in 1875 to three children in 1925, and then to slightly over two children at present, our immediate problem will be to hold our population figures without some migration."

Calwell writes about the wish for British migrants, but then he moves seamlessly onto Europe, page 100.

"In forming our immigration policy, we were lucky to obtain the services of an outstanding six-man fact-finding committee which toured Europe on our behalf in November and December 1945. In fact. the mission consisted of representatives of the Commonwealth Parliament and of employers and employees organisations, who went to Paris for an International Labour Office conference."   

So right from the start, the political parties the unions and the employers groups were in. The Australian people were never asked and have never been asked. 

Chapter 14. Black Power and a multi-racial society

Page 117

"Anybody who is not proud of his race is not a man at all. And any man who tries to stigmatize the Australian community as racist because they want to preserve this country for the white race is doing our nation great harm. Those who talk about a multi-racial society are really talking about a polygot nation. Some people talk about a multi-racial society without knowing what the term really means, while others talk about it because they are anxious to change our society. No matter where the pressures come from, Australian people will continue to resist all attempts to destroy our white society."

Chapter 27 Permissiveness destroys society

Page 244

"But the hedonistic doctrine now being popularised is that a women has the sole right over her own body and can alone decide on an abortion for some reason, or no reason. Even's her husbands consent, and he is the father of the child, will not be required, and neither will the opinions of qualified specialists. All this adds up to infanticide, and every nation in history that has practised infanticide, whether with or without the connivance of the authorities, has been destroyed and deserved to be destroyed. God is not mocked. Race suicide does not pay. Those who advocate abortions on demand should not be tolerated in any civilized community."

Obviously in a book by a politician who served for over 30 years in the Australian Parliament there is a lot on politics, events and personalities. Was it worth reading?

Yes but I found it quite frustrating, the central reason I bought the book wasn't addressed. However I did realise that like Menzies who I've also criticised for his failure to see the consequences of his actions, Calwell is guilty of exactly the same thing. He could not see that a policy of mass immigration could neither be turned off or kept small. That instead it forms it's own economy that must be fed. Government and business are now dependent upon immigration.