In praise of Enoch Powell

In Praise of Enoch

Mention Enoch Powell and most if not all politicians will recoil in horror. Many members of the public, probably without knowing why, will do the same. Why should this be so?

The truth is that in the period after the Second World War the establishment was set on a number of courses of which he was an opponent. He was also at odds with the Marxist flavour of politics then and since. He was also an eloquent advocate and had the ear of the public. So he had to be discredited and destroyed.

The chosen weapon, which in a sense he presented to them, was to brand him as a racist; the ultimate condemnation in Marxist eyes. Enoch never spoke of rivers of blood. That was a construction maliciously placed upon a quotation from his beloved classics. However that we do not now have rivers of blood is not for lack of will on the part of certain elements which have been invited into this country.

He knew more about the Indian subcontinent than most of his detractors. He had served in India during the war and had gone to the trouble of learning URDU to interpreter level. He could talk to his Pakistani constituents in their own tongue and via their language to some extent could get into their minds. They had no complaints about him as their MP. He had no problem with foreigners in our midst or with their languages. He could and did address French and German audiences credibly in their own tongues explaining his position during the anti common market campaign. Time and again he insisted that numbers were the essence of the problem. He pointed out that trouble would arise when immigrants were in sufficient numbers to form their own communities. Anybody living in London or Birmingham or Bradford or Blackburn or many other towns and cities will know that the situation he warned against had come to pass before the end of the 20^th century.

His was the quality which all statesmen should have but few possess today; clear foresight. He had three main concerns; immigration, monetary policy and membership of the Common Market. In every one of these fields he was at odds with government policy and political thought generally. He warned of the consequences of immigration but could have had no inkling of the numbers which would be permitted. On Newsnight recently a Labour MP for a London constituency gave as the reason for a need for greater funding for local govt that an authority in her area had to cope with 130 languages. That is the politics of Bedlam.

Perhaps most wounding for his own Party, especially the Prime Minister Edward Heath, in speech after speech Enoch exposed fundamental dishonesty in monetary policy. The great bug bear of the time was inflation. The currently accepted narrative was that inflation was some extraneous monster from which politicians struggled to protect the public. He pointed out that on the contrary it was a consequence of Government policy. Governments were in charge of the printing presses and to put it bluntly they were printing money to pay bills thus increasing the amount of currency in circulation and thereby reducing its value. As there was a gap of about 18 months between the act and its consequence the connection could be disguised.

After a while Industry came to realise what was happening and took to raising prices to compensate. Worse still the Trade Unions also became wise to the procedure and the annual wage round came into being which was to compensate for loss of purchasing power plus a genuine increase. Dennis Healey was referring to this whole dishonest business when he spoke of confetti money.

It took Margaret Thatcher and a savage recession to get deliberate inflation out of the system but not entirely. The ‘independent' Bank of England has as its main task today to see that inflation does not rise above 2%.That is still inflation but at such a low rate that it is hoped that people will not notice. Many of them do. If 2% per annum is calculated over a lifetime it is still a frightening figure. The wise take steps to guard against it There is another problem however. A number of measures of inflation exist ‘preferred' and otherwise. It is doubtful if any one of them is accurate and you can be sure that the 'preferred' measure is advantageous to government.

Enoch's greatest concern however was the European Project, the Common Market as it was then called. As he and others of a historical bent clearly saw this was a plan which Hitler had recently failed to achieve to bind the struggling states of Europe into one political entity. Since almost all of those states were Roman Catholic the spectre of a revived Holy Roman Empire reared its hoary head.

To my knowledge Enoch, who from a position of healthy scepticism, had become deeply religious dismissed the religious motivation and insisted on the political.

In continental Europe the real aim was no problem. Only in Britain did the true nature of the project have to be concealed. The political establishment conspired with the Press and the BBC to misrepresent the grand design as merely a cooperation of sovereign states for mutual economic benefit.

In speech after speech Enoch declared from the beginning that the Common Market was not about the price of butter but about the survival of the nation itself. Nobody at that time could conceive of their government lying to them and so Enoch, who was out of step, was not believed by the great mass although he had a considerable following and always spoke to packed meetings. From that time onwards it became the norm to lie. The Government's whole position was a pretence that it was in charge and that nothing fundamental had changed. The Queen still opened Parliament which progressively became a rubber stamp as inter governmental treaty followed treaty - the Single European Treaty, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and now the treaty signed by PM Blair in Berlin in 2007. Again the blatant lie is on parade in the assertion that this treaty is not the rejected Constitution renamed.

Of the three dangers against which Enoch Powell warned from the middle of the century until his death only inflation has been addressed and that in a typically weasel way not completely. Immigration is out of control and is now an area of policy in which the UK government does not have competence. It does not know how many people are in the country illegally and lacks either the means or the will to find out. Its basic philosophy is against taking effective steps to solve the problem.

The European Project is one which politicians now refuse to discuss and therefore the electorate is disfranchised. The project itself is close to completion and still British politicians are in denial. They dare not admit that for half a century they have been conspiring with our erstwhile enemies to destroy the state they were elected to serve.

Had Enoch been heeded Britain today would have been a different place. It would be a sovereign independent state. It would not be a European Province. It would not have large areas of its towns and cities unrecognisable as English. In particular it would not have 2000 plots to cause mayhem in the streets known to the security authorities. It would not have had the reintroduction of TB and other diseases previously unknown. It would still be a homogeneous, well educated, law abiding community.

At least we should have the grace to recognise that he was right. A statue of the greatest leader we never had would grace that vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square more appropriately than some of the monstrosities we have seen there in recent times.