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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