Enoch Powell
2,202 words
The following is being published in commemoration of Enoch Powell’s 111th birthday today.
Like the Roman, I seem to see “the Tiber foaming with much blood.” — from a speech by Enoch Powell
Enoch was the best parliamentarian I ever knew. — Margaret Thatcher
Enoch Powell was arguably the greatest Prime Minister Great Britain never had. He looms large in the national consciousness largely because of a speech he gave in 1968 at a hotel in his home town of Birmingham to an audience of Conservative Party members. There were no crowds outside attempting to cancel or deplatform him; that would come later. The address, misleadingly known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech, is both famously misquoted and led to Powell’s dismissal from the Conservative Party. Powell’s name today is as toxic to the Left as those of Sir Oswald Mosley and David Irving. Today this speech is increasingly seen by those, shall we say, not on the political Left — which does not necessarily place them on the Right — as both prophetic and exemplary of Powell’s love of country.
John Enoch Powell was born, apparently during a thunderstorm, in the English Midlands town of Birmingham on June 16, 1912. Such a preternaturally intelligent child that he was nick-named “the professor” by his parents at the age of three, it was no surprise when he later gained a scholarship and went on to Trinity College, Cambridge to read Classics.
Powell would remain a classicist all of his long life, and took his notes in the House of Commons not in shorthand, as many ministers did, but in ancient Greek, the language of Homer and Thucydides. His absorption of languages — he also spoke several living languages — led to military assignments during the Second World War, and was doubtless aided by his being a loner at university. Although he noticed the presence of women, he preferred not to associate with them as he found their “analytical power under-developed.”
In 1937 Powell took a professorship in Greek at the University of Sydney, and relocated to Australia. Pessimistic about the coming war, he nevertheless volunteered and counted his days in the army as among the happiest of his life. Powell’s mental ability, mingled with ambition, took him to a top intelligence job, and he was posted to North Africa to join the campaign against Rommel, the much-feared tank commander. Success led to a further posting, one which would show that Powell was not the “little Englander” his posthumous critics have portrayed him as. Arriving in India as a Brigadier — which rank Powell was the only private soldier during the war to attain — Powell slept rough at Delhi railway station. When he awoke, he recalled, “I discovered that I had fallen in love with India.” His love for the country and its culture — he spoke Hindi and Urdu — he credits with taking him into British politics. He had noticed that standing in British political life was highly approved of in India, and he saw Parliament as a stepping-stone to his ambition: to become Viceroy of India or, at the very least, a provincial governor. But, as far as the British Empire and the Raj were concerned, Powell had arrived late to the party.
Back in Blighty, Powell worked as a Conservative researcher before being put forward for the seat of Wolverhampton South-West, which he won. Classicist, codebreaker, poet (some of his love poetry verged on the erotic), and soldier of the Raj, Powell was now a member of the mother of all parliaments. Powell took up fox-hunting and married a Colonel’s daughter, and seemed to be slipping comfortably into the upper classes. His wife Pamela told her mother that marrying Powell would be “like going to university every day for the rest of my life.”
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Powell climbed the political ladder effortlessly, his intellectual capability landing him a key job at the Treasury. Then, in 1958, he resigned from Harold Macmillan’s government in protest over increased public spending. Today, with the money-presses whirring day and night, MPs are as likely to resign in protest against gravity than the ever-growing national debt.
However, back in government two years later, Powell seemed to have allied himself with the high tax-high spend mania of a government in the middle of an economic boom. By 1965, however, the Tories were back in opposition, the leadership was open, and Powell was among the front-runners, along with Ted Heath and Reginald Maudling. Heath won the leadership, but was aware of Powell’s popularity among the party faithful. They would come to blows.
Powell had found his feet and was interested in seeing how far they would take him. He was ambitious, but that was entry-level for politicians, then as now. Chat show host Melvyn Bragg asked Powell whether he had ambitions to become Prime Minister in 1973, with Bragg building up the point and not expecting the “yes or no” answer he requested. “Well, you needn’t have made all that fuss,” the hawkish but jovial Powell replied. “Of course!”
Powell went about his parliamentary career the way he went about everything: coldly assessing and seeing the reality of what he was dealing with, then following it with nationalist zeal. He became interested in race relations and immigration, saying in a later interview that “a man can have a love for India without wishing to see India on the streets of Birmingham.” A colleague saw that this inclination could, under the relentless Powellite intellectualization of practical problems, lead to trouble. “Poor Enoch,” said a colleague. “Driven mad by the remorselessness of his own logic.” This remorselessness would lead him to a fateful night in Birmingham, his home town, on April 12, 1968.
The full text of Powell’s (in)famous speech can be found here, and can be seen here, although it should be noted that not all of the speech was captured on film, including its most famous line. Its first line could have been translated from almost any of the classical political texts Powell had always immersed himself in: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
This has been horribly mutated today. Now, the Western political class believe the supreme function of statesmanship is to instruct us that the preventable evil of mass, unvetted immigration is not only inevitable, but beneficial. Enoch Powell would have been very familiar with the story of Cassandra, although perhaps surprised that a quarter of a century after his death he himself would be fulfilling the role of the soothsayer no one heeded.
The contentious lines were, in fact, supplied by two of Powell’s constituents in Wolverhampton, and the Roman poet Virgil, whom Dante famously led through the circles of heaven and hell and whose Aeneid Powell quoted. A woman in Powell’s ward had told him nervously that she couldn’t go out at night, and had had windows smashed and excreta pushed through her letter-box. She told Powell that children jeered at her in the street, and spoke no English but the word “racialist.” Another man told Powell that “in ten or 15 years’ time, the black man will have the whip-hand over the white man.” This was the phrase that really riled the Left who, then as now, despise the working-class for their actual, untutored opinion.
But the line that gave the speech its soubriquet was – inevitably, since it was spoken by Enoch Powell — a classical reference. The entire transcribed paragraph is worth repeating in full in order to understand just how much Powell got right:
For these dangerous and divisive elements, the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with legal weapons which the ignorant and ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”
This paragraph of prophecies led immediately to Powell becoming a prophet without honor in his own land. Heath fired him from the Conservative Party the next day, and it was not simply personal chagrin. Margaret Thatcher, by then very much on the Conservative scene, said that there would have been many resignations if Powell was not ejected.
Powell imagined in the speech he could already hear the “chorus of execration” which would inevitably follow. He would be, he supposed, asked what gave him the right to say these things. Powell replied, “I don’t have the right not to.” One of the immediate chorus was that old fraud Tony Benn, who was careful, as a Labour man of the people, never to use his full name of Anthony Wedgwood Benn. He showed that Leftist hyperbole was, as it is today, alive and well by comparing Powell’s speech to Nazi flags fluttering “over Dachau and Belsen.”
The political class, as now, had no interest in public opinion except on voting day, but the public gave its opinion on Powell, who received tens of thousands of letters of support from the public, sometimes 50,000 a day. It is odd to see the sacks of mail being emptied onto the Powell family’s dinner table in this age of electronic messaging. As today, charges of racism were made by a powerful few and transmitted by government. As soon as the cage was open, the rabid animals were out and free. Powell’s university speeches were heavily barracked by students.
Note that the name chanted at Powell’s constituent by the children in the street, “racialist,” then meant to be prejudiced against someone by virtue of their ethnicity or skin color. This is the meaning that has been smuggled into “racism,” which used to mean a simple awareness of racial difference. Powell is speaking before this semantic shift when he asks in an interview:
“What’s wrong with racism? Racism is the basis of nationality.”
In 1969, on The Dick Cavett Show, Enoch Powell told Cavett that the word “racist . . . is a term of abuse, and it works best the less defined it is.” This is the point at which language and meaning have been subject to ideological gain of function, and “racism” takes on a more poisonous aspect.
The animosity between Powell and Heath smoldered on. The 1970 General Election victory for the Tories ended any chance Powell might have had for the premiership, and Heath’s decision to take Britain into Europe caused the final rift. Powell even told the electorate to vote Labour in the 1974 election, as at least they had promised a referendum on Europe. How different things could have been. At a campaign speech Powell was heckled by a member of the audience, who shouted that he was “Judas!” Powell’s response was both witty and self-revealing: “Judas was paid! I’m making a sacrifice.”
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When the Conservatives lost narrowly in 1974, letting in Harold Wilson’s minority government, Heath resigned. Powell was concise in his commentary: “I had my revenge on the man who had destroyed the self-government of the United Kingdom.”
Powell also famously said that “all political careers end in failure,” and his own went fairly quietly into the shadows. He was never a showman, as so many politicians attempt to be. “I’ve no patience with the political appeal,” he told an interviewer.
He became an Ulster Unionist MP, but again was chasing a lost cause as passionately as he ever did a fox. He remained connected with politics in later life, but as a curio, a relic, a man whose time had come and gone and was hated by some just as he was honored by others. Powell’s retirement was given over to studies of the gospel, including a new (re-)translation of the Bible into Greek. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 1992, and died four years later. Powell’s prognostications, on the other hand, had a much longer life.
Enoch Powell correctly predicted the future of the United Kingdom in terms of the effects of immigration, much of which has had catastrophic effects on British culture. As always, when immigration is the subject, “the UK” means England. New arrivals want to go to London, not Gwent or Stranraer, towns in counties that are still around 95% white.
London has been rendered unlivable and, I suspect in the seven years I have been away, has become unvisitable. I was born in London and have lived in the north, south, east, and west of the city. The last time I lived there the city was already dirty, noisy, and with a constant undertow of ethnic aggression and violence which rose or fell depending on the postcode. Immigration has been a monumental success if you happen to be an immigrant, an unmitigated disaster if you are unfortunate enough to be a white Englishman. With the help of his white liberal trainers, the black man certainly does have the whip-hand over the white man.
In an interview before the 1968 speech, Powell said, “This speech is going to fizz like a rocket. But whereas all rockets fall to earth, this one is going to stay up.” It is still up there, just, twinkling in a night sky which, for Powell’s beloved England, is getting ever darker and more threatening.
Visit Mark Gullick’s blog: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know.
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23 comments
Some years ago, as I was surfing a local online bookstore, I came across Mr. Powell’s books, namely Still to Decide, Freedom & Reality, and The Common Market: The Case Against.
I ordered all three.
It turned out that one of them (Still to Decide) had the late Mr. Powell’s signature on it. The copy belonged to some Tory party member who attended a Party dinner in January 1973.
It somehow ended up in a bookstore located in my city (Karachi).
What a strange occurrence !!
-Enoch Powell was a great man.
-On Italian tv as guests are interviewed I noticed that behind the guest & to their right there is a picture of Bob Marley (the globalists are relentless with indoctrination). Bit by bit, decade by decade (unless Italians wake-up) globalists will destroy Italy, it will no longer be Italian, Italy will be unrecognizable. As London, Paris, Detroit, Malmo, Frankfurt, etc. are unrecognizable.
This is an extremely well written article. It is beautiful even as it covers a great foreboding. There is a great beauty in having the courage to speak of imminent, self inflicted, existential danger.
“Although he noticed the presence of women, he preferred not to associate with them as he found their “analytical power under-developed.””
I knew there was more than one important reason I chose this great man’s name as my pen name.
What could have been achieved if he had ‘assumed the purple’? Professor of Classics at Sydney University at the age of twenty-five, then private to brigadier-general in the space of one war! If I remember aright, searching for information on Powell first led me to discover Counter-Currents.
Welcome reminder of a very great man, though far from a perfect white nationalist. Powell never, in my knowledge, called for the involuntary repatriation of alien colonizers. He had even played a small role in importing nonwhite nurses into the UK (though perhaps his later warnings about the insanity and heedlessness of immigration atone for that). What Powell seems to have been was a moderate race realist and a genuine patriot, someone who loved England and wished to preserve it, while recognizing the many discrete harms that racially distinctive immigration would needlessly introduce into the UK.
Powell’s views overall are my own (he was excellent in many ways unrelated to race: a national sovereigntist, a free marketist, a moral traditionalist, an obvious devotee of Western High Culture), with this exception: he could never bring himself to condemn the colonizers themselves, to recognize that, by coming unbidden to someone else’s long settled, built and storied land, they were committing aggression against Britain. The very presence of nonwhites on UK soil is intolerable – a passive act portending the eventual doom of the English people (not necessarily as individuals, but as a people – a people with an exceptionally ‘thick’ and admirable culture whose preservation infinitely exceeds any worth attaching to the mere desires of aliens to partake of it). While immigration, especially to a small island nation like Britain, can be a problem in itself apart from race, the primary problem is always race. Powell occasionally seemed to overlook or insufficiently stress this.
Britain is being (or has been) destroyed, and the actual English people are being (passively) genocided. Expatriation of nonwhite colonizers from Europe is the only acceptable solution to halt the destruction of the English (and all other European peoples). The actual method of expatriation can and should be made as humane as possible, but indigenous Europeans must be unflinching in their understanding and assertion of what is required for their ethnonations to endure.
“Restoring White Homelands” by Greg Johnson.
‘condemn the colonizers themselves, to recognize that, by coming unbidden to someone else’s long settled, built and storied land, they were committing aggression against Britain.’
Surely most post-war non-white migrants to Britain were not conservative political philosophers; the blame for the invasion rests with the national leadership who, to this day, ushers them in or, more accurately, the intellectuals and their backers who, putting lipstick on a pig, made the idea of protracted national suicide seem like virtue.
While I agree with the general sentiments that underpin Mr Gullick’s appreciation of Enoch Powell, there are a number of serious factual errors in his article that cry out for correction, as well as some matters over which reasonable men can differ.
First, Powell was not the only private soldier to reach the rank of brigadier in the Second World War. His contemporary and bitter political enemy, Edward Heath did the same.
Secondly, Enoch Powell was never knighted, though he was made a Privy Counsellor and so was entitled to use the style of the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell, but never Sir Enoch Powell.
Personally I care nothing for the titles and decorations that mean so much to our worthless, degenerate ruling class, despising them for the same reason that the Emperor Julian declined the consulate, as empty forms from which the inner meaning has gone out, Christmas tree baubles of brittle glass covered with gilt to counterfeit gold. Mr Gullick’s subject was however precise and careful in his own use of language and excessively reverent of British institutions (a subject to which I shall return) and would himself have deplored the confusion.
Thirdly, Powell was not “dismissed” from the Conservative party following his speech at Birmingham, which he made not, as Mr Gullick mistakenly says, on 12th April 1968 but on 20th April, a strange date to choose when you think about it (or did the date choose the speech?) but not, I think, an anniversary of which Powell was even aware, though some on the left thought otherwise! The vile Edward Heath quickly dismissed Powell from the shadow cabinet, that was all.
For American readers not familiar with the significant differences between British and US practice, it is customary for the leader of the opposition to appoint “shadow” ministers to his or her “shadow cabinet”, who have no official standing whatsoever but “shadow” the ministers who hold office, critiquing government policy and ready to step into their shoes if there is a change of government. Rows over policy and personality lead to fairly frequent comings and goings in the shadow cabinet, as in the real cabinet.
So far from being expelled from the Conservative party following the misnamed “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell remained a Conservative Member of Parliament until February 1974. Because of his fervent opposition to British membership of what was then called the Common Market, which Heath championed, Powell then left the Conservative party voluntarily to join the Ulster Unionist Party and returned to the House of Commons in October 1974 as Unionist M. P. for South Down.
Mr Gullick rather oddly refers to the move as “chasing a lost cause”. Fifty years on South Down remains part of the United Kingdom, so I am struggling to see how the Unionist cause in Northern Ireland has been lost.
In honourable contrast to most British “Conservative” politicians, who are either utterly unprincipled careerist cynics, liberals posing as conservatives, or mad libertarians who pretend to have read Adam Smith, but really have only skimmed some Ayn Rand, Powell really did care about our country and its indigenous people.
Despite his exemplary patriotism and personal integrity and his exceptional gifts as a thinker and a speaker, he suffered from one besetting fault and one serious failure of imagination that together made him ultimately ineffective as a politician.
In this respect, Mr Gullick, whom I have criticised in many respects, hits the nail on the head when he describes Powell “in later life . . . as a curio, a relic, a man whose time had come and gone and was hated by some just as he was honoured by others.”
The besetting fault was quite bizarre for a biographer of Joseph Chamberlain, a Londoner turned Brummie (Birmingham man) who, unlike the unworldly Birmingham native Powell, really was the greatest prime minister we never had.
Powell placed almost no value upon a well oiled political machine, which was a ridiculous error. The famous Chamberlain machine ran Birmingham politics for two, arguably three generations, and anticipated a famous saying of “the little doctor” (if you know, you know), namely “know every door”.
Powell believed that he enjoyed a mystical bond with the British people. As the sacks of letters to which Mr Gullick refers showed, up to a point he was right, but Powell had no interest in creating an organisation to harness the energy that he galvanised by his famous speech. It is as if an engineer built a powerful engine for a fine motor car but disdained the idea of a transmission!
The failure of imagination was more forgivable in his generation than the besetting fault, but still in the end disastrous. Powell had a misplaced belief in our national institutions, whereas I have always preferred the late Ted Budden’s description of the House of Commons as the House of Liars and Fools.
I remember hearing Powell speak to the Bow & Poplar Conservative Association almost forty years ago (I still have a copy of his speech somewhere!) and asking him afterwards why he held Parliament in such high regard, when our parliamentarians had failed the British people so consistently since 1945 (I should have said 1939, but I did not wish to be too provocative!).
He answered that the people could always turn the rascals out at the next general election, but that struck me as an unsatisfactory response from a man who declined to lead a new party (admittedly, a hugely difficult endeavour under our first past the post electoral system).
Moving on from matters of fact to matters of opinion, as almost a lifelong resident of the metropolis, I am not impressed with modern London in many ways, but to describe it as unlivable is absurd hyperbole.
London is hideously expensive (but certainly not more so than Manhattan, LA or SF, perhaps less) and has its share of violent crime (much of it black on black) but is nowhere near so dangerous or disagreeable as most big cities in the USA.
I can think of many places that I would not go, especially at night, but contrary to myth there are no Shari’a patrols and unlike, say, Philadelphia, nor are there zombiefied Fentanyl addicts roaming the streets, overall public transport in particular and government services in general are good when not on strike, and the city’s cultural life remains impressive.
Here I pray in aid Greg Johnson’s own reaction when he came to speak to the London Forum a few years ago, and sagely remarked that British comrades do exaggerate how bad things are compared with the far less dire reality!
Thanks for your fascinating retrospective on British politics.
‘I am not impressed with modern London in many ways, but to describe it as unlivable is absurd hyperbole.’ My impression is that around the globe the situation of the moderately well-off middle class remains quite acceptable, especially for the majority of this group who don’t have any aesthetic or moral objections to the replacement of their compatriots with racial aliens. It’s hard to get people this comfortable to contemplate the medium term implications of annual immigration rates equal to 2% of the existing population.
Much truth in what you say, though as one of the few relatively affluent bourgeois openly sympathetic to the movement, I get to hear some interesting comments “off the record”! As has been shown in Europe, populist/rightist parties that present well rather than stomping around the streets in big boots can garner votes from more than the white working class, though that will be the bedrock of any such party.
A very interesting and appreciated comment, though I think YOU are wrong wrt Heath. It was Fitzroy Maclean, like Enoch, also an extremely impressive Englishman (less brilliant but braver, and who was knighted), who was the other WW2 vet who started as a private and ended a brigadier.
And what was so great in your opinion about Joseph Chamberlain? Wasn’t he the guy mostly responsible for the evil Boer War?
Finally, did you happen to read my comment above? What is the truth about Powell’s racial views? I learned from an intelligent [if self-educated] Far Right (National Front, BNP) activist a couple of decades ago, when I was praising Powell (and he was still alive) in his presence, that Powell was actually rather weak on race: “certainly never a racial nationalist”, in his words. He went on to compare him to America’s Pat Buchanan, a true conservative who opposed mass immigration for various (correct) reasons, but was never especially attuned to white survivalism.
[I’m not sure that’s completely fair to Buchanan, though it’s tough to say. I actually worked for Pat, at a slight remove, a few years later on his 1995-6 campaign, and had several chances to talk to him personally. He understood the racial threat of immigration, yet utterly failed to grasp similarly why HUD {the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development – the funder and distributor of America’s horrible public hosing ‘projects’} needed to be abolished, and for white racio-geographic as well as libertarian anti-socialist reasons.]
I would be interested in hearing your further thoughts. I’ve never been to Britain, but I’ve had many wonderful opportunities to talk to Englishmen (mostly), and I’ve been a long time reader of various British publications, both mainstream (Economist, Spectator, Standpoint) and Hard Right (and now also websites). I’ve also read a lot of classic English literature as well as modern fictional works, from Iris Murdoch to both Amis’s, and crime novels, both gentle and sophisticated, like Agatha Christie and P.D James, respectively, and ‘proletarian’, like Get Carter and the “Factory” series of Derek Raymond. So I feel like I have some acquaintance with Britain (more than with any other foreign country, except Canada), but always enjoy learning more.
Fitzroy Maclean was Scottish. I know a certain commentator does not like Scots but hard though it might be to accept he was Scottish not English.
He had a Scottish surname, but his parents married in London, his mother’s maiden name sounds English, he was born in Egypt, raised in Italy then educated at Eton and Cambridge. In other words He may have been a scion of the Scottish aristocracy but he was thoroughly British and probably more than a bit English.
You seem to equate Britain with England. Great Britain is Scotland, Wales and England and the United Kingdom is Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Not at all. But I don’t think I’ve ever known any Brits who were not English. So my knowledge of things British stems exclusively from Englishmen.
Anyway, my point was that Maclean (OK, Scottish, that makes sense) was the other man who started as a private and ended as a brigadier, not Heath.
Who’s the commentator who doesn’t like Scots? Me? I do think that England would have been better off had Scotland gained its independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Fitzroy_Maclean,_1st_Baronet
https://www.rsgs.org/blog/sir-fitzroy-maclean-escape-to-adventure
https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/past-times/3882082/winston-churchill-dundee-election/
No your not the commentator I was referring to. I have attached some links about Sir Fitzroy Maclean who was a member of the Aristocracy.
And I have also enclosed an article about Winston Churchill who was more than happy to be elected as an MP for city in Scotland..but it wasn’t the ‘safe seat’ he hoped for.
Basing your knowledge of UK on some englishmen is like me basing my knowledge of US on some people from Kansas.
The UK Government have to give the Scottish Government permission to hold Referendum and they are not going to do so in the near future. I by the way am not a separatist.
Small point of interest – during much of the Nineteenth Century and into the early Twentieth, mail sent to addresses in Scotland quite frequently used the name North Britain as this was considered a sign of good breeding.
I always enjoy reading your comments, indeed, you are perhaps my favourite commentator on Counter-currents! You are right, Heath did not rise so high as Brigadier. Fitzroy Maclean, who did, was an interesting character (most definitely a Scotsman). His books are very readable. Joseph Chamberlain was wrong about the Boers but right about everything else. He was a very early advocate of immigration restriction on racial grounds and of economic protectionism, anticipating many of the ideas of the corporate state.
Here is part of his speech at Limehouse in the East End of London (15th December 1904), quoted in The Times (16th December 1904), p. 8, opposing the immigration of Russian Jews said to be fleeing from pogroms (I make no comment of my own, I merely repeat what The Times reported):
“You are suffering from the unrestricted imports of cheaper goods. You are suffering also from the unrestricted immigration of the people who make these goods. (loud and prolonged cheers.)… The evils of immigration have increased during recent years. And behind those people who have already reached these shores, remember there are millions of the same kind who, under easily conceivable circumstances, might follow in their track, and might invade this country in a way and to an extent of which few people have at present any conception. The same causes that brought 10,000 and 20,000, and tens of thousands, may bring hundreds of thousands, or even millions. (Hear, hear.) If that would be an evil, surely he is a statesman who would deal with it in the beginning. (Hear, hear.)… When it began we were told it was so small that it would not matter to us. Now it has been growing with great rapidity, it has already affected a whole district, it is spreading into other parts of the country… Will you take it in time (hear, hear), or will you wait, hoping for something to turn up which will preserve you from what you all see to be the natural consequences of such an invasion? … [I]t is a fact that when these aliens come here they are answerable for a larger amount of crime and disease and hopeless poverty than are proportionate to their numbers. (Cheers.) They come here—I do not blame them, I am speaking of the results—they come here and change the whole character of a district. (Cheers.) The speech, the nationality of whole streets has been altered; and British workmen have been driven by the fierce competition of famished men from trades which they previously followed. (Cheers.)… But the party of free importers is against any reform. How could they be otherwise?…they are perfectly consistent. If sweated goods are to be allowed in this country without restriction, why not the people who make them? Where is the difference? There is no difference either in the principle or in the results. It all comes to the same thing—less labour for the British working man. (Cheers.)”
Thank you for your encouraging words. Alas, I suspect this will be my last comment for the summer, as I have a lot going on. I hope I can return to this always stimulating website in the Fall.
And thanks for that excellent quote from Chamberlain. I’ve copied it to my hard drive. I need to learn more about this admirable statesman from what seems like an “ancient” past (though all of my grandparents were already adults at the time of his death, and both of my parents were born fewer than two decades after it).
The study of ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages seems to make good white nationalists. Revilo Oliver was a professor of Classics too.
Powell and the USA
United States[edit]
Powell believed that the US was against Northern Ireland being part of the UK because it wanted a united Ireland within NATO to help combat the Soviet Union.[citation needed] Powell thought that Northern Ireland should be integrated with the rest of the UK and treated no differently from the rest of it.[citation needed] He also blamed the US for the dissolution of the British Empire and for the British decline of influence in international affairs.[24]
See page three of Shivaji Sondhi’s review of Simon Heffer’s biography Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell.https://www.princeton.edu/~sondhi/nonphysics/writings/powell.pdf
The above was taken from a Wikipedia ‘powellism’ posting
The mighty Irish lobby in the US, incl. Kennedies Clan, could easily support Ulster separatism, but I do not know if it really did.
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