A prophet yet an outcast: 100 years after his birth Enoch Powell has been vindicated on a host of crucial issues
When most people hear the words ‘Enoch Powell’ they think of the phrase ‘rivers of blood’. It was Powell’s misfortune — partly self-inflicted — that his monumental contribution to political ideas should still be eclipsed by a phrase that he never uttered, misquoted from the speech that still defines him.
Powell was born 100 years ago this Saturday, in a terrace house by a railway line in a suburb of Birmingham, the only child of two teachers.
In time, he would become the most brilliant classical scholar of his generation at Cambridge, the youngest professor in the British Empire, the youngest Brigadier in the Army, an MP, a Cabinet Minister and, in his re-invention as a tribune of the people, one of the most loved and hated men in Britain.
He was, in own words, ‘born a Tory’ — by which he meant he was born with a natural reverence for the institutions of this country, notably its constitution.
Yet he would fight a war with that party that was partly responsible for it losing two general elections in 1974, because his highly intellectual view of what a Tory was, and what a Tory should believe in, was at odds with the pragmatic, centre-left doctrine of Ted Heath, whose nemesis Powell became.
Because of his famous — or notorious — speech on immigration, delivered in Birmingham in April 1968, Powell’s wider achievements have been largely ignored. He served in the Cabinet for just 15 months, but his influence on politics and political thought is greater than that of any other Member of Parliament in the past century.
It was Powell who, in 1957, predicted that excessive State borrowing would bring economic decline. Long before Milton Friedman, the free-market champion who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for demonstrating the link between an expansion in the supply of money and higher inflation, Powell explicitly outlined that argument.
In the Sixties, he mocked the use of prices and incomes policies (with which the government tried to control inflation by limiting increases in wages and prices). He also ridiculed the scape-goating of trades unions for ‘causing’ inflation by demanding big pay rises.
He deplored the waste of public money on nationalised industries and urged what he called their ‘denationalisation’, using the funds freed to pay for tax cuts to encourage economic growth. He also understood that if Scotland had a separate parliament, it would inevitably soon become a separate country.
plenty more:
Enoch Powell: A prophet yet an outcast | Mail Online
h/t small dead animals
When most people hear the words ‘Enoch Powell’ they think of the phrase ‘rivers of blood’. It was Powell’s misfortune — partly self-inflicted — that his monumental contribution to political ideas should still be eclipsed by a phrase that he never uttered, misquoted from the speech that still defines him.
Powell was born 100 years ago this Saturday, in a terrace house by a railway line in a suburb of Birmingham, the only child of two teachers.
In time, he would become the most brilliant classical scholar of his generation at Cambridge, the youngest professor in the British Empire, the youngest Brigadier in the Army, an MP, a Cabinet Minister and, in his re-invention as a tribune of the people, one of the most loved and hated men in Britain.
He was, in own words, ‘born a Tory’ — by which he meant he was born with a natural reverence for the institutions of this country, notably its constitution.
Yet he would fight a war with that party that was partly responsible for it losing two general elections in 1974, because his highly intellectual view of what a Tory was, and what a Tory should believe in, was at odds with the pragmatic, centre-left doctrine of Ted Heath, whose nemesis Powell became.
Because of his famous — or notorious — speech on immigration, delivered in Birmingham in April 1968, Powell’s wider achievements have been largely ignored. He served in the Cabinet for just 15 months, but his influence on politics and political thought is greater than that of any other Member of Parliament in the past century.
It was Powell who, in 1957, predicted that excessive State borrowing would bring economic decline. Long before Milton Friedman, the free-market champion who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for demonstrating the link between an expansion in the supply of money and higher inflation, Powell explicitly outlined that argument.
In the Sixties, he mocked the use of prices and incomes policies (with which the government tried to control inflation by limiting increases in wages and prices). He also ridiculed the scape-goating of trades unions for ‘causing’ inflation by demanding big pay rises.
He deplored the waste of public money on nationalised industries and urged what he called their ‘denationalisation’, using the funds freed to pay for tax cuts to encourage economic growth. He also understood that if Scotland had a separate parliament, it would inevitably soon become a separate country.
plenty more:
Enoch Powell: A prophet yet an outcast | Mail Online
h/t small dead animals
