1959 And All That

There is, I think we can safely assume, very little chance that the Mau Mau will win their case before the High Court. They were in any case a thoroughly obnoxious lot, the huge majority of whose victims was drawn from their own Kikuyu people. (Incidentally, the Mau Mau has nothing to do with why Barack Obama is anti-British. All Presidents of the United States are anti-British by definition. It is part of the job description.) However, there are lessons to be learned here about counter-insurrgency generally, although the most obvious lessons in relation to Afghanistan, Iraq, and doubtless Libya soon enough, are drawn from those interventions themselves: stay out of them. But at least when it comes to the Hola atrocities, Kenya is an important example of where Enoch Powell was right.

He was, of course, wrong about an awful lot. Wrong about immigration, at the time. Wrong about economics, although his followers were and are much worse than he was. Wrong in his inability to see that the implementation of his economic views was impossible without the huge-scale importation of people as much as of anything else, as part of that system’s overall corrosion of everything that conservatives exist in order to conserve. Wrong to scorn the Commonwealth. Wrong in the bitterness of his anti-Americanism. Wrong to support easier divorce.

Wrong to give aid and succour to the Monday Club, although he never joined it, when it was supporting the Boer Republic set up as an explicit act of anti-British revenge in a former Dominion of the Crown (a move fiercely opposed by Nelson Mandela and the ANC, for all their other faults), and that Republic’s satellite, which first committed treason against Her Majesty and then very rapidly purported to depose her, removing the Union Flag from its own, something that even the Boer Republic never did. Wrong in his insistence on the utter otherworldliness of Christianity, a position which, as must wait for another time, was wholly incompatible with his vigorous pulpit defence of bodily resurrection.

But he was also right. Right to line up with Tony Benn and against Margaret Thatcher on Europe. Right to oppose both capital punishment and nuclear weapons, the two ultimate expressions of statism as idolatry, on which latter he again correctly sided with Benn against Thatcher, and on both of which he in fact shared the views of many High Tories. Right about the normalisation of Northern Ireland, conventionally known as total integration, which will almost certainly never now happen, since the place has been carved up between a bizarre fundamentalist sect and a fully armed Marxist terrorist organisation. Right to use the full panoply of central government planning to make significant additions to the National Health Service, and always to remain a stalwart defender of it.

Right to warn against importing the communal politics of the Indian Subcontinent. Right to oppose the subordination of our foreign policy to a foreign power. Right to denounce the atrocities at Hola. Right to support Britain’s non-intervention in Vietnam. Right to oppose the first Gulf War, which we fought as if buying oil from Saddam Hussein would somehow have been worse than buying it from the al-Sabahs (or the al-Sauds). Right to reprimand Thatcher that “A Tory believes that there is no such thing as an individual who exists without society”, pointedly referring to Tories, an age-old culture or series of subcultures, rather than to the Conservative Party, a late and strictly conditional vehicle for Toryism. Right to oppose abortion, and experimentation on embryonic human beings, unlike Thatcher. Right to support the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. Right to predict that the Soviet Union would collapse anyway, and to see Russia as our natural ally. Right to fight against grotesque erosions of our liberties, such as reversals of the burden of proof in certain cases.

His present-day admirers and detractors alike should learn the lessons.