Every nation, to live healthily and to live happily, needs a patriotism. Britain today, after all the changes of the last decades, needs a new kind of patriotism and is feeling its way towards it . . . Enoch Powell, Speech at Louth, 1963. In certain respects, the Right Honourable John Enoch Powell has long seemed the most original of Britain’s bourgeois politicians—a figure whose every speech is awaited with eager interest and anxiety, who may be adored or hated but is universally felt to be important. Powell represents something new in British politics. If this something new is also something very old—nevertheless,in the present situation its impact, meaning, and possible results are all novel. Powell rose to this doubtful eminence mainly on the impact of his celebrated Birmingham address of April 20th, 1968. This was the speech in which he met ‘a quite ordinary working man’ who suddenly told him ‘If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country . . . In this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ After a scarifying catalogue of further such revelations, Powell concluded: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”’. The message was that Britain’s coloured immigrant population does indeed present a mortal threat to the British (or rather, to the English—for he pointed out that ‘in practice only England is concerned’) and must be got to return home whence they came. As Powell has modestly stated himself, the speech ‘provoked a political furore without precedent since the end of the war’. Naturally, he came to be regarded as the champion and chief spokesman of the various racist and anti-immigrant movements. He has also been widely accused of inconsistency (vis-á-vis his earlier statements on the issue) and of rabid demagoguery.footnote1 However, both the inconsistencies (which Powell of course presents as the natural evolution of his views) and the blatant demagoguery serve a deeper, and perfectly consistent, purpose. This underlying purpose has been obscured by too narrow a concentration on the question of race and immigration. The narrow focus itself serves Powell’s purpose very well, by turning what is really only a right-wing tactic into an obsession for left-wing and liberal opponents—while in fact, there are wider and far more dangerous trends at work. Referring back to England’s last bout of immigrationmania, against the Jewish immigrants of the period 1890–1905, Paul Foot remarks that in 1970 ‘all that has changed is that new scapegoats must be found for the homelessness, the bad hospital conditions, and the overcrowded schools . . .’footnote2 But in reality, though England’s coloured population has of course become a scapegoat for capitalism’s ills, very much more has changed than the scapegoat itself. Powell knows this. Indeed, it is his sense of these profounder historical changes which supplies the real bite to his attack on the immigration question. The ‘New Right’ he represents is rooted in such changes, as both symptom and aggravation of the historical decline of English conservatism, and so must be regarded in longer historical perspective.

1. The Old English From Guilsboro’ to Northampton, all the way

Under a full red August moon,

I wandered down . . . Yet the air

Seemed thronged and teeming, as if hosts

Of living presences were everywhere;

And I imagined they were ghosts

Of the old English, who by tower and spire,

Wherever priest and sexton’s spade

In church or graveyard round about the shire

Their unremembered bones had laid,

Now in the warm still night arising, filled

The broad air with their company,

And hovering in the fields that once they tilled,

Brooded on England’s destiny.

(Enoch Powell, Poem XXVI, Dancer’s End, 1951; written 1940–45)

Powell’s basic concern is with England and the—as he sees it—half-submerged nationalism of the English. His real aspiration is to redefine this national identity in terms appropriate to the times—and in particular, appropriate to the end of empire. England’s destiny was once an imperial one; now it has to be something else. Powell is not really sure what it is. But he feels that he, Enoch Powell, carries some intimation of it within his own breast, and he has consistently striven to construe this sense of fate. In 1964, speaking to the Royal Society of St. George,footnote3 he returned to the theme of the ‘old English’: ‘There was this deep, this providential difference between our empire and others, that the nationhood of the mother country remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her . . . England underwent no organic change as the mistress of a world empire. So the continuity of her existence was unbroken . . . Thus, our generation is like one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English, who feel no country but this to be their own. . . We find ourselves once more akin to the old English. . . . From brass and stone, from line and effigy their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their inscrutable silence. “Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we may in our time know how to hold it fast.” What would they say . . . ?’ In 1964, when the post-war Conservative régime ended, Powell still did not know what they would say. Twenty years of brooding on England’s destiny had availed him little. By April 1968 the ancestors had, finally, said something: approximately, ‘Go home, wogs, and leave us in peace!’ This prodigious clue to a thousand years of history has, however, a meaning beyond its absurd manifest content. For the dilemma to which it appeals is a real one. It is quite true that the English need to rediscover who and what they are, to re-invent an identity of some sort better than the battered cliché-ridden hulk which the retreating tide of imperialism has left them—and true also (for reasons described below) that the politics of the last 20 years have been entirely futile in this respect. Powell’s recipe for the growing vacuum is the—at first sight—incredible patchwork of nostrums expounded in his recent speeches: economic laissez-faire, Little England, social discipline, trade before aid, loyalty to Ulster, and racism. But no critique of such incoherence can afford to ignore the need upon which it works: in relationship to reality, it may possess a driving-force which it lacks when considered simply as a set of ideas. After all, very few past Conservative heroes have been noticeably ‘coherent’ in this sense: compared to those of Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain, or Disraeli, Powell’s career so far is an epitome of logical sobriety. Only in the context of the twilit conservatism of the 1960’s does his cynical opportunism appear startling, or even unusual. British conservatism has always been profoundly ‘illogical’ since the time of Edmund Burke, by an instinct rooted in the great historical conditions of its existence. It has been only too happy to rule, and leave logic to the ‘opposition’. The odd ingredients of Powellism are held and fused together by a romantic nationalism with quite distinctive cultural origins. Powell worked his way up from the lower middle-class (both parents were elementary school teachers) via a Birmingham grammar school to Cambridge. Thus early in life this solitary and rigid bourgeois industriously acquired the traditional culture of the English ruling élite: Greek and Latin. He became Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney at the age of 26, a remarkable tribute to ungentlemanly energy and self-discipline.footnote4 At the same time, he wrote verse in an appropriately archaic romantic mode derived mainly from A. E. Housman and the Georgians. The theme is usually death, or else the passing of youth, innocence, and love: Oh, sweet it is, where grass is deep

And swifts are overhead,

To lie and watch the clouds, and weep

For friends already dead.footnote5

These wholly sentimental reveries and sighing dramas tend to go on in the rustic English limbo first popularized by Housman: I dreamt I was in England

And heard the cuckoo call,

And watched an English summer

From spring to latest fall,

And understood it all . . .

And I lay there in England

Beneath a broad yew-tree,

Contented there to be.footnote6

This tradition of abstract upper-class kitsch arose in the same epoch which witnessed England’s attempt at the Higher Imperialism, the Boer War, the Syndicalist Revolt, the Constitutional Crisis of 1911, and the Aliens Act.footnote7 It gives sublime expression to the hopelessly rentier mentality into which a large part of the English intelligentsia had now lapsed, to the despair of militarists like Lord Roberts, imperial administrators like Curzon and Milner, national-efficiency zealots like Sidney Webb, and such ‘committed’ intellectuals of the day as Rudyard Kipling and Henry Rider Haggard. As if knowing instinctively how impossible it would prove to save British imperialism from its own ramshackle self, the poets turned towards a safer past. This movement of involution led them—in a pattern which has also characterized other intellectual trends of the English 20th-century—to a conservative dream-world founded on an insular vein of English romanticism. Powell revelled in it. It never occurred to him that this week-end landscape was far more synthetic than the most plastic products of Hollywood. ‘Ours is an age when the engines of bad taste possess great force,’ he declared in his Inaugural Lecture at Sydney in 1938, ‘With rare exceptions, the cinema, the newspaper and the wireless tend powerfully to promote vulgarity, by day and by night in our cities the eye and the ear are continually assaulted by objects of bad taste . . . I once heard Housman, when referring in a lecture to a certain corrupt epithet in Lucretius, remark that “a modern poet, I suppose, might write such a phrase as that and fancy that it was good, but Lucretius could never have done so”. The words echo in my mind today; and whenever I have achieved a daring adjective in a poem “and fancy that it is good”, my conscience asks me whether Lucretius and Housman would have thought the same or not. That illustrates exactly what I mean by the cultivation of taste. . . .’footnote8 It goes without saying that he mastered the techniques of Georgianism, and produced suitably ‘tasteful’ rhymes. The same Prussian assiduity which took him to the Sydney Chair saw to that. Later in life, he even learned to fox-hunt, and penned a Housmanesque jingle on this important political experience. With this background, it was quite natural that the ‘old English’ should materialize to Powell primarily ‘by tower or spire’ or in old country churches—rather than, say, in a sooty Wolverhampton cemetery or the ruins of a factory. He still partially inhabits this Disney-like English world where the Saxon ploughs his fields and the sun sets to strains by Vaughan Williams. This is, in fact, a romantic nationalism which retains nothing of the original energy of either romanticism or nationalism. In England, a country of ancient and settled nationality, romanticism did not serve as the instrument of national liberation, it could not help forge a new national-popular consciousness. It could not even function as substitute for a real national being and consciousness—as, for instance, it did in Scotland. All too easily, it turned into an escapist or conservative dream-world, negating the Victorian bourgeois régime at one level only to confirm it at another. By the time of Housman and the Georgians it has become a sickly parody of itself, expressive only of the historic stalemate into which the English bourgeoisie was falling. Powell’s poetic nationalism, in turn, is nothing but a pallid echo of the parody, incongruously surviving into the later 20th century. However, the very absurdity and archaism of this re-heated romanticism poses a problem. If English nationalism can still be identified with such inadequate symbols, it is because of an odd weakness at its heart. The saccharine countryside of the Old English is a reflection of something persistently missing, something absent from English national identity itself. In part, this void is clearly associated with the positive and distracting presence of something else, for so long: English imperialism.

2. The Imperial Crown Still the black narrow band of shimmering road,

A thousand miles the same . . .

. . . Then on the Eastern hand

The skyline suddenly fell sheer away

And showed the smoky Delta; to the right

Rose sharp and blue against the desert’s brown

The pyramids; and to our astonished sight

Descried, above it all, the Imperial Crown.

(Enoch Powell, Poem XXXIII, Dancer’s End)

Powell was once the most passionate of imperialists. When he left Sydney for the Indian Army at the outbreak of war, India burst upon him like a revelation.footnote9 He admitted recently: ‘I fell head over heels in love with India. If I’d gone there 100 years ago, I’d have left my bones there.’ (The Times, Feb. 12th, 1968.) Here, surely, was the true sense and purpose of England’s being. That the grandeur had been fatally undermined half a century previously, that England’s imperialism was more and more of a theatrical charade, that the Imperial Crown was now held up by the dollar-sign—all this meant nothing. His enclosed imagination saw ‘Edward the First, Plantagenet’ as having held the imperial destiny in one hand already (in the 13th century): The rod thou holdest in thy right

Is raised thy enemies to smite

And shatter their impuissant hate,

But in thy left already lies

The image of the earth and skies,

lForeboding universal power . . .

(Poem L, Dancer’s End)

But in this imperial fervour there lay a basic uncertainty, an ambiguity which marks every facet of English imperialist culture in the era from the 1870’s—when England began to become self-consciously imperial—up to the evident decline of the 1920’s and ’30’s. On the one hand, English imperialism could scarcely avoid the most soaring ambition: it possessed so much, and had dominated so much of the world for so long, that its power could not help looking ‘universal’. Yet on the other, the English were always uneasily conscious of the great discrepancy between this appearance and the substance behind it. The old days of informal, economic empire were over, in the teeth of German and French competition; yet England’s ‘empire’ remained a heterogenous assemblage of units belonging to this bygone era, approximately held together by her navy. On one hand there was the boundless delirium of Rhodes and the music-hall: ‘His Majesty rules over one continent, a hundred peninsulas, five hundred promontories, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers and ten thousand islands . . . The Queen found the revenues of the Empire at £75 million; she left them at £225 million. . . . The Empire to which Victoria acceded in 1837 covered one-sixth of the land of the world; that of King Edward covers nearly one fourth. The Union Jack has unfolded itself, so to speak, over two acres of new territory every time the clock has ticked since 1800. . . .’footnote10 But on the other hand, the English universal power was incapable even of governing the British Isles, as the Irish proved every few years. The immensity was also empty. If the English had ever taken their imperial delusion seriously, it would have required the largest army in the world as well as their navy, a new and quite different English State, and a total reform of English society away from the lazy conservatism into which it subsided. Whatever imperialist zealots like Kipling, Webb or Joseph Chamberlain said, there was never any real chance of such reform taking place. The great weight of English conservatism was against it. And if that were not enough, so was the pressure of the City of London, lender-in-chief to the world and—on the whole—happy with the slack old ways: there were as good profits to be had investing outside the English territorial ‘empire’ as inside it (in the usa or South America, for instance). The first issue of The English Race contained an appropriately vigorous article by the Duke of Gloucester on ‘The Value of Pageantry’. There was, indeed, little behind the pompous pageantry of Edwardian imperialism which had not been there some decades before, when the governing philosophy had been that colonies were a political nuisance to be got rid of as soon as the march of Progress would allow. The hollowness sounds through the English imperialist mind in a thousand forms: in Rider Haggard’s necrophilia, in Kipling’s moments of gloomy doubt, in the self-pitying pessimism of Housman, in the sadness of Elgar, or in the gloomy cosmic truth of Forster’s Marabar caves. For Powell, however, it was all good as new a generation later. In this narrow, rigidly-focused sensibility, imperialism had joined forces with the English pastoral mode. He devoted his disciplined energy to crazy schemes for the retention of India by military force and, later, even to plans for its re-conquest when the Conservative Party came back to power in 1951.footnote11 This was, in fact, the main motive which had driven him into political life in the first place. The world was unthinkable without the British Empire. That is, Powell’s imaginary world was unthinkable without it—the world where, now, Old English and grateful brown-skinned multitudes jostled bizarrely together.footnote12 The unthinkable happened. Independence was conceded to India and Pakistan by the Labour government of 1945, and after 1951 it became clear that even under Churchill it would not be undone. Powell’s fantasia was rudely jarred by the fact: it took him some years to recover from the blow. England’s destiny had received a mortal wound. When he did recover, it was by a familiar machinery of over-compensation. The most truly remarkable speech of Powell’s career has not been on immigration, or the virtues of capitalism, or the social services which he administered for three years as a Minister in the Macmillan government, from 1960 to 1963. It was on the British Empire. It was delivered, not to an audience of ravening Conservative militants, but in the academic detachment of Trinity College, Dublin, and is easily the most interesting comment on imperialism by a Conservative spokesman in this century—at least, since Joseph Chamberlain’s famous ‘Tariff Reform’ address of 1903.footnote13 ‘The life of nations’—he begins—‘no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.’ Consequently, what really matters in national life is the nation’s ‘corporate imagination’. Within ‘that mysterious composite being, the nation’, nothing can be more important than ‘the picture of its own nature, its past and future, its place among other nations in the world, which it carries in its imagination. The matter of this imagining is nearly all historical. . . .’ The form of such imagining, however, is myth. The politician’s task—as Plato stated in The Republic, that bible of the English élite—is to ‘offer his people good myths and to save them from harmful myths’. And (the point is) the current myths of the English corporate imagination are bad ones. The most important of such myths is the delusion that ‘Britain was once a great imperial power, which built up a mighty empire over generations and then . . . lost or gave it up’. It is only because of the presence of this pernicious myth that the English believe they are in decline: they imagine they once stood upon a great height, hence they cannot help feeling in the shade today. But the conclusion (and by implication the whole of British politics since around 1918) is as mistaken as the premise. ‘The myth of the British Empire is one of the most extraordinary paradoxes in political history,’ continues Powell. Everyone believes it existed, but it never did: ‘Until very nearly the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (1897) if you mentioned “the Empire” to a man in the street in London, he would think you meant the United Kingdom, with its three capitals, London, Edinburgh and Dublin . . .’.footnote14 But what of India, Powell’s old love, a British political dependency since the 18th century? Easy: ‘India is the exception which proves the rule’. Otherwise, ‘imperialism’ was largely invented by the Conservative government of 1895–1905, for narrowly political reasons (‘because one could make stirring speeches about Empire without needing actually to alter anything’) and the particular culprit was his own predecessor from the West Midlands, Joseph Chamberlain (then Colonial Secretary). ‘And so it was’—he concludes—‘that just in the very last years when Britain’s relationship with her overseas possessions could by any stretch of fiction be represented as imperial, the Conservative Party first, and then the British people, came to believe instinctively, implicitly, that they had an empire—a belief that was to colour their thoughts, emotions and actions for the next 70 years and to set a gulf between them and the rest of the world, the same gulf which exists between a man in the grip of a hallucination and those around him who do not share it.’ How familiar are these particular tones of disenchantment! In the 1950’s the whole western world rang to them—the lugubrious exvotaries of Stalin who, unable to bear what their idol had become, turned to denounce the god that had failed them. Powell reacted in the same way towards the political collapse of imperialism. Given that the failure, the disenchantment, had occurred, what was once the all embracing, seductive truth could only be a tissue of lies. There is in Powell’s anti-imperialism exactly that weird mixture of sharpened perception and utter lunacy which one finds in ex-communist tirades on communism. It is true indeed that England’s high imperial moment was largely compounded of myth and pretence, that Chamberlainism was a practical impossibility, and that the Conservative Party had a strong vested interest in the charade. It is also quite true that the experience has left a deep subjective mark upon English national consciousness and culture (as Powell’s own previous career had made abundantly clear). But it is grotesque to suggest that there was, literally, ‘nothing’ behind the theatricality of Edwardian imperialism. The reality behind it was, of course, the varied nexus of economic relationships built up by English trade and industry since the 17th century, which had made the English Industrial Revolution possible in the first place, and then been enormously extended by England’s manufacturing primacy. There was all too little relationship between this mainly economic reality and the new pretentions aroused by military challenge and the desire to emulate Germany. It was impossible to systematize the conglomeration into an ‘empire’ in the Roman, French or German sense, except in fantasy. Yet this does not signify that such economic power (a different, more ‘informal’ empire than any other in history till then) did not exist. This is, however, precisely what Powell is driven to maintain. He can allow no degree of truth or reality whatever to the cause which disappointed him. After the imperial myth, the second most notorious legend still gripping England’s imagination is that England was once ‘the workshop of the world’. In truth, it never was: this is no more than the ‘identical twin’ to the empire myth, and ‘the characteristics of British industry which are supposed today to account for loss of ground to other nations were just as evident in the Victorian hey-day, when Britain enjoyed the preponderant share of the world trade in manufactured goods.’ The very words belie the intended meaning. If Britain enjoyed ‘the preponderant share of world trade in manufactured goods’ at that time, it could not possibly have been for any other reason than that she enjoyed a preponderancy in world manufacture, which is all that was meant by calling her the ‘workshop of the world’. England’s decline into ‘her own private hell’ has been—consequently—a dream process, just as the myth of empire was ‘our own private heaven’. To cure herself, all England need do is wake up: ‘If Britain could free herself from the long servitude of her 70-year-old dreams, how much that now seems impossible might be within her power. But that is another story, which has not yet begun. . . .’ That was in 1964. One can scarcely resist the thought that, for Powell, the awakening must have begun at last, with his racist speech of April, 1968. By May 1967, he already had some intimations. Referring with admiration to General de Gaulle (one of his heroes), he commented: ‘The face which we see in de Gaulle’s mirror is our own, and we had better look at it firmly and steadily . . . What sort of people do we think we are? We have been hovering over the answer for years . . . a nation of ditherers who refuse to make up our minds.’footnote15 After a brisk review of the ‘schizophrenia’ which has long characterized British policy (the Pound, ‘peace-keeping’, the growth fetish, and so on) he returned to the question: ‘What sort of people do we think we are? The question waits for its answer. In psychiatry a sign of convalescence is what is called “insight”—when the patient begins to regain a self-knowledge hitherto rejected. . . . How is Britain to fulfil the Delphic command “Know thyself”? How can you and I and the Tory Party help in resolving the national dilemma, reuniting the split personality and banishing delusion?’ The reply was still cloudy, though. Powell concluded somewhat feebly, not in the tones of the Delphi Oracle: ‘The politician is a voice . . . We do not stand outside the nation’s predicament: we are ourselves part of it . . . All we can do is to speak out what we feel, to try and identify and describe the contradictions, and the phobias which we see around us, in the hope that . . . we may wake a chord that will reverberate.’ Less than a year later, the Oracle had spoken, and the chords had finally begun reverberating to his satisfaction. The intimations of destiny in the Powell ego had at last found national ‘contradictions and phobias’ to identify with. The English had begun to know themselves once more. In the obscene form of racism, English nationalism had been re-born.

3. The Settled View Conservatism is a settled view of the nature of human society in general and our own society in particular, which each succeeding generation does but re-express. (Enoch Powell, ‘Conservatism and the Social Services’, The Political-Quarterly,1953) English nationalism has been travestied by romanticism and confused by imperialism. But no account of its calvary would be complete which failed to perceive how it has also been weighed down by conservatism. The ‘matter of its imagining’ (in Powell’s phrase) is almost wholly conservative. This is not a question of the political Conservative Party but of that profounder, ambient conservatism which has marked the structure of English society for several centuries. The English national identity sags with the accumulated weight of its symbols and traditions, and is in consequence perhaps the least popular nationalism of any major country except that other island, Japan. This is in fact why the nationalism of the English appears so ‘dormant’ and ‘unaggressive’ (as The English Race put it): simply because the ‘people’ had so little positive part in creating it, or have forgotten the part they did play. On the whole, they have been forced into the stereotype of the plucky servant who ‘knows his place’ and, when the trumpet sounds, fights with the best of them. The fact poses a grave problem to would-be leaders of English national revival.footnote16 An unintentionally comic clue to the problem is provided by Powell’s own history of England, Biography of a Nation.footnote17 The ‘Introduction’ is a familiar, puzzled rumination on the subject: ‘There is no objective definition of what constitutes a nation. It is that which thinks it is a nation . . . self-consciousness is the essence of nationhood . . . National consciousness is a sense of difference from the rest of the world, of having something in common which is not shared beyond the limits of the nation . . . This phenomenon of national consciousness remains almost as mysterious as that of life in the individual organism . . . This living thing, mysterious in its origins and nature, is perhaps the most difficult subject of purely human enquiry . . .’; and so forth. But, turning from this Idealist prologue to the text, the inscrutable secret reveals itself at once as all too simple: the shallowest imaginable montage of school-book clichés, wholly concentrated around the conventional symbols of conservative nationality (the Crown, Parliament, the Constitution, etc.). These are the unsurprising content of the national self-consciousness. It is difficult to exaggerate the degree of Powell’s symbol-fetishism. He literally worships every sacred icon of the great conservative past. Hence, for instance, his enraged opposition to the Royal Titles Bill of 1953, which did away with Elizabeth II’s queenship of the Commonwealth. Faced with such desecration Powell was forced—to the dismay of his fellow-Conservatives in parliament—to identify himself with England’s soul. Destiny had struck again: ‘We in this House . . . have a meaning only in so far as in our time and in our generation we represent great principles, great elements in our national being . . . Sometimes elements which are essential to the life, growth and existence of Britain seem for a time to be cast into shadow, and even destroyed. Yet in the past they have remained alive; they have survived; they have come to the surface again and . . . been the means of a great flowering which no-one had suspected. It is because I believe that, in a sense, for a brief moment, I represent and speak for an indispensable element in the British Constitution that I have spoken.’footnote18 He was both right and (in a sense important for understanding his whole political line) quite wrong. In one respect he does indeed represent very well an indispensable feature of English Constitutionalism—its obsession with the safe, fossilized forms of past authority and legitimacy. Yet of course the obsession must never be given free rein: its whole point, in England’s traditional consensus-politics, was its function as an instrument of adaptation, a way of absorbing and neutralizing change. When it becomes absolute, it becomes useless. But Powell has a taste for absolutes. His destiny-filled solitude often blinds him to the wider logic of the Party, and the historic cause, which he wishes to serve. Utterly devoted to English conservatism, he is nevertheless also driven by a blinkered fervour which is alien to its way of working. Hence—as on the occasion in question—he easily finds himself far to the right of political conservatism. By a revealing paradox, this ultra-English bigot is compelled to feel and act in the most surprisingly ‘un-English’ fashion—that is, in a fashion which contradicts the real essence of the conservative political hegemony. The mainstream of English conservative consensus has always effectively captured or suppressed left-wing disruption. The left, painfully conscious of its own dilemma, has not noticed how conservatism also had to control the right. Now, a retrospective penumbra of false consciousness eliminates them both. Not only does it politely pretend that the conservative hegemony has survived without difficulty (a fact of English nature), and quietly bury the history of the left, like syndicalism, the workers’ control movement, and the other forces beaten in the great defeat of 1926. With almost equal effect, it expunges the grisly history of the English right. Mosley (like the British Communist Party) serves merely to underline the message: ‘extremism’ and foreign ideas never find a toehold here. When, finally, nemesis returns in the shape of Powellism, England is convulsed with astonishment: is it possible to be ‘English’, and extreme? Yet the miracle of this long-lived conservatism lies, after all, in one word: war. Modern English conservatism was forged out of its 22-year war against the French Revolution and Napoleon. This was no war of popular nationalism, having as its stake the casting of English society in a new form: it was the opposite, a patriotic war of counter-revolution which reinforced the conservative social structure, and channelled and moulded popular forces in a fashion which made society able to bear the immense stresses of industrialization. It aimed to eliminate the people from history as other than a subordinate force, and fathered precisely that non-popular nationalism which, now, Powellism is endeavouring to inject life into from the right. In old age, the imperialist system erected on this original basis has received two massive infusions of vitality from the two farther patriotic wars of the 20th century. Official legends regale the reader with tearful accounts of the tragic economic ‘sacrifices’ and ‘losses’ of 1914–18 and 1939–45. In fact, the First World War providentially saved Old England from collapse and civil war, and prepared the terrain for crushing the proletariat in 1926; while the Second World War furnished the perfect restorative, in the form of a victorious patriot drama where English conservatism could hardly avoid looking, and feeling, like a St. George with one shining foot on the Nazi dragon’s tail. Fortunately, the feet of the usa and ussr were on its neck. In both wars, England was on the right side, pursuing her long-established strategy of alliance with us imperialism. It is true that the war effort of 1939–45 produced much more social egalitarianism in England than any other event in her recent history, enough to result in the electoral defeat of Churchill in 1945. Yet—paradoxically—it also contained the social upheaval more firmly than ever in a renewed ‘national’ ideology of unity, a sense of patriotic purpose and regeneration. Hence (given the Labour Party’s subordination to these myths) it led inevitably to the stifling new conservatism of the 1950’s and 1960’s. So Powell’s inheritance as an English nationalist is a very strange one. This stale, romantic, middle-class nationalism has survived on the surrogates of imperialism and foreign war for nearly a century. It is at the same time curiously under-developed (or ‘submerged’) because of its conservative, non-popular nature, and a living anachronism in a Europe from which nationalism has begun to pass away. How can it be made to live again?

4. The Logic of Prejudice The music sounded, and in my breast

The ghosts of my fathers arose from rest . . .

Like the priests in Aïda they danced on my head

And sang savage hymns to the gods that are dead.

(Enoch Powell, Poem XIX, Casting Off, 1939)

England needs another war. This alone would recreate the peculiar spirit of her nationalism, rally her renegade intelligentsia (as in the 1930’s), and reconcile the workers to their lot. Unfortunately, war of that sort—like her empire—is a lost cause. Her patriotic symbols are unlikely to receive any farther transfusions of blood. Nelson, Wellington, Haig and Churchill will—with any luck—never arise from rest to dance on our heads again. The true-blue nationalist’s dilemma is a serious one, therefore. His sacred traditions are visibly withering. There is a new generation which finds them meaningless, or comic. Even the school-teachers—once high-priests of national conservatism—are out on strike. When it is not an international bore, England has become an international joke: her only claim to distinction of any sort is a mainly anti-national pop culture and a (largely unmerited) reputation for dolce vita. How can England’s silent majority be got to return to the fold, before it is too late? War was the great social experience of England in this century—yet war served only to confirm and re-validate the value of the past, to affirm the essential continuity of the national tradition. The only new experience, going sharply counter to tradition, has been that of the coloured immigration of the 1950’s and ’6o’s. Hence, as Powell realized, it has become possible to define Englishness vis-`-vis this internal ‘enemy’, this ‘foreign body’ in our own streets. This is exactly what he tried to do in the speech of April, 1968. It was more than a case of locating a new scapegoat: this scapegoat was to have the honour of restoring a popular content to English national self-consciousness, of stirring the English ‘corporate imagination’ into life once more, by providing a concrete way of focussing its vague but powerful sense of superiority. How strong the force is which Powell began to tap in this way has been demonstrated by the rapid series of rightward steps which the Establishment took to deal with it. At each successive phase of the racial storm in the 1960’s, more strict immigration controls were imposed. Writing in Crossbow, the organ of ‘liberal’ young Conservatism, N. Scott remarks that these were no more than fearful ‘reactions to public opinion’ which ‘rendered respectable racially-prejudiced reactions to fears of unemployment and over-population’. But the same writer can only end his plea for tolerance and ‘constructive race relations’ by conjuring up precisely the phoney, old-style nationalism which Powellism goes beyond: ‘Intolerance and racialism present Britain with a challenge to the values upon which life in these islands have been built . . . It is not, I hope, unfashionably nationalistic to recall Milton’s words: “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live”.’footnote19 The fact is that intolerance and racialism did not present any challenge to national values, as long as (like military violence) they were comfortably located abroad; located at home, they represent a new situation to which rhetoric of this kind is irrelevant. As for the Miltonian precedent, it embodies very well a bourgeois moral highmindedness which the English masses have never been particularly fond of. Their sense of superiority does not need them to pose as ethical models to an admiring universe.footnote20 Six months after his April, 1968, speech, Powell told the London Rotary Club (enjoying a week-end in all-white Eastbourne) that his words had ‘revealed a deep and dangerous gulf in the nation . . . a gulf between the overwhelming majority of people throughout the country on the one side, and on the other side a tiny majority with a monopoly hold upon the channels of communication, who seem determined . . . not to face realities’.footnote21 The populist intention is unmistakable: the new national spirit is of and for the overwhelmingly and decently prejudiced majority of English men and women, opposed by the ‘aberrant reason’ of a tiny minority who think they know best (and which actually included, as Powell knew very well, most members of both parliamentary parties and virtually the whole politico-cultural élite of conservative England). In another sense, however, England’s coloured minority is not such a fruitful choice for the New Right. It is quite a good scapegoat, and served to achieve a preliminary mobilization of popular sentiment in the right direction. Yet there are inescapable limits to its farther development. In this way, the English coloured population contrasts oddly with the traditional victim of European right-wing nationalism, the Jews. It is, in fact, almost entirely proletarian in character, and unlikely to be anything else for some time to come—hence, it is impossible to pretend plausibly (as one could with the Jews) that it is the oppressive ‘tiny minority’, or at least is in league with it. England’s Indians and West Indians can scarcely be identified with ‘the system’ by which the majority feels obscurely oppressed. They do not measure up to the task of re-defining England’s destiny, as it were. In addition, they present the defect of being geographically concentrated in a few areas (whereas it hardly mattered where the Jews were, since they could so easily be imagined as everywhere). Above all, it should not be overlooked how vital immigrant labour has become to the British economy, as to the other West European economies, as Andre Gorz shows elsewhere in these pages. The Confederation of British Industries itself has always opposed restrictions on immigration and talk of repatriation. Powell tried to extend the area and effect of the racial storm-area, first by his ‘repatriation’ proposals (offering himself, with characteristic moral integrity, as future Minister of Repatriation), and then by his new fantasy of a burgeoning, prolifically fertile coloured horde forcing the—evidently dried-up—native stock off the island altogether. But these did not repeat his initial shock-success. The new destiny was not emerging with the hoped-for speed. He turned to Ireland. He showed evidence of stirring interest in England’s most ancient problem only a week after the Londonderry riots of 1969. A letter of elevated moral tone appeared in The Times in August, rebuking the British Army commander in Ulster, General Freeland, for his ‘political’ comments during the crisis. Then in February 1970, Powell addressed an Ulster Unionist rally at Enniskillen. He declared that ‘The ultimate fact in human society, and in the world of states and nations, is belonging or not belonging. . . . The belonging of Northern Ireland and the not-belonging of the Republic are at present obscured by the condition of the law . . . The fiction of the Ireland Act, 1949, must go . . . (and) . . . the entry, the residence, the settlement and the franchise of the citizen of the Republic of Ireland will have to be determined exactly as those of a Frenchman, a Russian or an Australian are determined . . . Nothing, in my judgement, would conduce so much to banish strife and disorder as the plain and open assertion, in legal and constitutional terms, that the people of these countries belong, uniquely and solely, to the United Kingdom and are part and parcel of this nation, which is in process of defining and recognizing itself anew . . . ’footnote22 This statement was made (it must be remembered) in a situation again approaching civil war, where a British army was supposedly ‘keeping order’ and in fact maintaining the Protestant police-state of Northern Ireland, because the Catholic ‘people of these counties’ objected with their lives to ‘belonging’ to this vestigial limb of Anglo-Scots imperialism. Not surprisingly, Powell ‘received a standing ovation from the audience’. The Rev. Paisley and his Calvinist desperadoes had just been welcomed into England’s destiny. But to build destiny on such a basis is even more desperate than anticoloured racism. If England was ready to risk civil war for Protestant Ireland in 1914, it was because of the Empire and imperial prestige. Since these have disappeared, it will be somewhat difficult to turn Ulster into a popular cause again. Paisley and Major Chichester-Clark are not ideal heroes for the new national self-recognition. It might be possible to whip up some anti-Irish (or even some anti-Scots or anti-Welsh) feeling, given the right worsening conditions in any of these places, but this would not carry the national soul far either. It needs more serious fodder. In English conditions, therefore, the logic of prejudice has its limits. Beyond race and Ireland, what would the main social content of the revived national mind be?

5. The Oak Tree’s Roots ‘Often, when I am kneeling down in church,

I think to myself how much we should thank

God, the Holy Ghost, for the gift of capitalism’.

(Enoch Powell, quoted in T. E. Utley.)footnote23

Powell has indicated clearly what England’s social future should be, in any number of perorations: ‘Whatever else the Conservative Party stands for, unless—I am not afraid of the word—it is the party of capitalism, then it has no function in the contemporary world, then it has nothing to say to modern Britain. . . . ,’footnote24 The capitalist market-place is another of the traditional fetishes Powell worships with total devotion, alongside the Crown and the Constitution. His view is a curious inversion of Fabian Socialism: the Webbs identified socialism with State ownership, control, and planning, while he identifies any form of State economic intervention (except currency issue and control) with ‘socialism’. He cannot forgive his own party its corruption by ‘socialism’ in this sense. The modern Conservative Party has become a party of the State, it tolerates or even favours State power and bureaucracy almost as much as Labour. Powell even occasionally compares this State power to fascism: it represents, he claims, the true threat to our freedom—the inhumane, corporative dominance from above, from which only capitalism can preserve us. Hence, England must return as far as possible to the conditions of laissez-faire. Two aspects of this odd rhetoric go some way to making it comprehensible, and help distinguish it from the ancient, over-familiar Conservative ideology of ‘free enterprise’ (a pedal which the Tories have had to lean on heavily ever since the Liberal Party died off, and they found themselves the main industrialists’ party). Firstly, Powell’s diatribes are not so much defences of the ‘free market’ as envenomed attacks on the mainstream of political consensus: the ‘State power’ against which he inveighs is no less than the tacit basis of agreement informing English political life, which (as always in the past) enables the two-party system to function smoothly and guarantees the peaceful evolution which is supposed to be the essence of English Constitutionalism. The slogan of ‘laissez-faire’ is the only economic one which distances his position sufficiently from the prevailing ‘bad myths’. And, naturally, it appeals to at least one sector of the ‘people’ he is trying to galvanize into political life—the small business-man (still important in the West Midlands he represents) or the small rentier who feels oppressed and helpless in the face of today’s great concentrations of economic power. This petty bourgeoisie is, after all, part of that historically absent or repressed English populism remarked on above—part of the historical ‘people’ kept in social servitude by the conservative hegemony. Secondly, Powell’s conception of the laissez-faire economy emphatically does not signify a weak or merely marginal State power—the State of classical English liberalism which was meant to do no more than ‘hold the ring’ for competing economic forces. Given what has happened in the past, a modern free-enterprise State must be strong (if only to cope with the much greater strength of business and financial organization today). Hence, Powell’s economics are more compatible than they seem with his evident authoritarianism. The ‘freedom’ which his capitalist State would foster includes, quite logically, the ‘repeal of the Trade Disputes Act of 1906’.footnote25 No less naturally, it includes repression of student agitation and of such infamous national scandals as the school-teachers’ strike of 1969–70. To let capitalism off the leash again in the way Powell envisages would need, in fact, the strongest State action against workers, students, and intellectuals (the ‘tiny minority who control communications’, etc.) And obviously this face of Powellism appeals to an even wider stratum of discontented middle-class and lower-middle-class natives, like the Conservative Party militants he travels the country addressing. Both these facets of Powell’s ideology are very much the daily bread of nationalist, right-wing reaction in the past. They represent no more than the classical formula established succinctly by Charles Maurras long ago: ‘Authority at the top, liberty below’.footnote26 If the nation is ill and led astray, then it follows that the prevailing political force must be corrupt and incompetent. It cannot be cleansed or put to rights except by a strong, decisive leadership able to express the true national will. By definition, the nation is always being betrayed. It must, therefore, be redeemed. Powell has always been riveted by the notion of the national destiny re-emerging from betrayal and ruin. One of his early poems is about the Portuguese national poet Camões (Camoëns), who was shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta in the 16th century: Black the mountains of Timor

Sweeping from the sea

Watched Camoëns drift ashore,

Rags and misery . . .

But the poet was to be saved from death, to compose the great national epic Os Lusíadas, and even in the depths of his degradation held in one battered hand ‘a jointed fennel-stalk’— Hidden in that hollow rod

Slept, like heavenly flame

Titan-stolen from a god,

Lusitania’s flame.footnote27

In 1953, amid the humiliation of the Royal Titles Bill, he imagined ‘a great flowering’ that might still come forth from destruction. In 1964, at the Royal Society of St. George, he compared England to Greece: ‘Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burned by Xerxes . . . were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the midst of the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country. So we today at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself . . .’. Even now England must not despair: in spite of Heath, Wilson, and the Rolling Stones—’we know not what branches yet that wonderful tree will have the power to put forth.’ In spite of all these classical features of right-wing destiny-mongering, however, Powellism still contains a glaring weakness at its heart: a far too overt identification with capitalism. This may appeal to capitalists, and particularly small entrepreneurs, but there is evidently a far larger area of the national soul to which it will never appeal at all. Most successful past brands of reaction have at least had the sense to conceal their links with capital from the public gaze. Powellism, by contrast, has its trousers down from the start: capitalism is nudely exposed as another cherished institution of Old England. When reminded by J. K. Galbraith at a Cambridge University Union debate that ‘the competitive system was now an illusion, that the market was dominated by large monopolistic or semi-monopolistic concerns which have many of the attributes of the State and which . . . create rather than obey public taste,’ Powell merely admitted that there was, indeed, much truth in this statement.footnote28 He knows perfectly well that his apologia for capitalist freedom are in practice justifications of existing, large-scale finance-capital. It is all very well to say that ‘capitalism is now the revolutionary cause’, as Powell does. The English masses are not likely to see their destiny there—on the contrary. What odd naivete is it that prevents Powell from perceiving the vital necessity to any counter-revolution of disguising its true nature, of pretending to be some kind of revolt against capitalism? As regards the prejudices Powellism works on, its power is (as we noticed) limited. Now, in its central social doctrine, it seems to present an inexplicable weakness, and to be manifestly incapable of furnishing the void of English nationalism. Why is this?