Andrew Gimson

Prophet of doom

Enoch Powell was defeated. He condemned Edward Heath for being

the first prime minister in 300 years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country.

But Heath was victorious: in 1972 he led the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, and in 1975 the British people ratified this decision by a majority of two to one in a referendum.

Powell thought this was a disaster. As he put it in 1976, with characteristic lack of understatement: ‘It is the nation that is dying, it is dying politically — or rather, perhaps, it is committing suicide politically — and the mark of death upon it is that it has lost the will to live.’

Great novelists exaggerate or caricature reality with the aim of being more truthful, and so did Powell. He used his brilliant intellect to push political arguments to an extreme. With grim and inexorable logic, he gazed into the future and identified the horrendous consequences which would flow from what seemed to many ordinary, pragmatic Englishmen like quite modest surrenders of the right to run our own affairs.  Powell was not a man to die in the last ditch: for him the only honourable course was to die in the first ditch, regardless of whether the rest of us were prepared to share it with him, though he advanced with ferocious clarity the arguments which showed us why we should.

As Powell himself put it: ‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.’ That was the opening sentence of his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered in Birmingham on 20 April 1968, surely the most famous (or to many people infamous) speech by a British politician in the second half of the 20th century.

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