On the 20th April 1968 the Conservative statesman Enoch Powell spoke in Birmingham on the subject of non-White immigration from the Commonwealth, and although the current transformation of our country had at that time barely begun, this was already the subject of great public concern. He spoke of the rapid increase in the numbers of immigrants, of the soaring immigrant birth rate, of the harassment of White people in the inner cities, of the conspiracy of silence and the Home Office’s concealment of the true figures. He spoke of his fear for the future in which immigrants and their descendants would dominate the inner cities bringing civil strife in their wake, and above all he demanded the introduction of a scheme for the voluntary and subsidised repatriation of immigrants and their descendants.

Here are some extracts from the speech:-

(speaking of an encounter with a constituent) “here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children”

“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some fifty thousand 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 or fiancés whom they have never seen.”

“But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. 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.”

The country was electrified to hear truths seldom articulated by any mainstream politician, and never by one so close to power as the Opposition Defence spokesman. When the Leader of the Opposition, Edward Heath, dismissed Powell from his position, the public reaction was immediate and intense with strikes and marches by dockers and building workers throughout England, and in London by Smithfield, Billingsgate and Covent Garden porters. It was a working class uprising, but of a kind rather different from that expected by those left-wing ideologues who adore the working class from a safe distance.

Nor was it only a working class reaction: opinion polls conducted in the aftermath showed that Powell enjoyed the support of three quarters of the population.

Over the next decade Powell’s influence worked itself out in several ways. The unexpected victory of the Conservatives in the 1970 General Election was certainly due to his urging while, conversely, the partial victories of Labour in the two General Elections of 1974 (neither yielded an overall majority but they did unseat the Conservatives) were also due to his prompting. Powell wanted a Labour government because the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, had promised that his government would hold a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Economic Community. We had joined that community in 1973 against the bitter opposition of Powell but in the event, when the referendum was held in 1975, the electorate voted to remain by a margin of two to one.

So where did that leave Powell? His urging of a vote for Labour at the 1974 general elections disqualified him from any further role in the Conservative party and his last years in Parliament were spent as an Ulster Unionist MP . It was argued then, and it has been argued ever since, that such was his popularity that he should have started his own party. The problem is that it is extremely difficult for a third party to break through, and to sustain any breakthrough it might make, against the big parties with their established support bases and sources of funds; it is not impossible – as we know from the emergence of the Labour party itself a century ago, and more recently the Scottish National Party – but as the story of UKIP should tell us, it is very difficult. Perhaps a Powellite party might have succeeded, but the failure of the “Out” campaign in the 1975 referendum in which he had played such a prominent role, indicates that even his popularity had its limits.

It is an accepted “what if” that if he had not urged a vote for Labour in 1974, the Conservative Party leadership would have been his for the asking when Heath was forced out in 1975. It would then have been Powell, not Margaret Thatcher, who took the Conservatives to power in the general election of 1979. But what then? Mrs Thatcher was from the Powellite wing of the party and her manifesto for the election included a pledge to introduce the very scheme for voluntary repatriation which Powell had urged eleven years before. It never happened – no doubt at least in part because of the continued dominance of liberal elements in the Cabinet.

There can be little doubt that had Powell, and not Thatcher, been Prime Minister such a scheme would indeed have been enacted and the controls introduced by the 1971 Immigration Act would have been tighter. Because of the still recent result of the 1975 referendum it is unlikely that he would have been able to be any tougher on the EEC than Mrs. Thatcher.

Anyway, there was no new party, no Prime Minister Powell. There was the rise throughout the 1970s of the National Front which unquestionably received a great boost from the Great Speech – until Mrs. Thatcher brought its progress to a juddering halt in 1979. Perhaps the Front was that new party? But it was one in which Powell – a racial integrationist and free marketeer would have found himself in uncomfortable company. Moreover it is often argued, even by commentators on the Right, that such were the emotions aroused by the speech that immigration became an untouchable subject for decades.

In time, of course, even had he become Prime Minister all of his work to reduce immigration and partially reverse it would have been undone by Blair. It is perhaps fortunate that he is not able to witness what has become of his England – an England where English people are not permitted to apply for traineeships with English Heritage (of all organisations!) because they are reserved for ethnic minorities; an England where Conservative supporting newspapers gush over the “Windrush children”, the very people of whom Powell spoke in his speech; an England where the BBC devotes three hours of prime time viewing to the murder of Stephen Lawrence but has never mentioned the murder of fifteen year old white boy, Richard Everett, which occurred at about the same time.

I could go on and on with countless examples of the same kind, and no doubt readers could add many more – but the fact remains that Enoch Powell was the greatest Prime Minister our country never had. And there is one great consolation in all of this – the Euroscepticism of which he was the prime begetter has at last, after so long, borne fruit. How he would have relished Brexit – it wouldn’t have happened without him!

By Frederick Dixon © 2018

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