One Hundred Years On

Enoch Powell, who would have been 100 today, was right. Right to line up with Tony Benn and Peter Shore, but against Margaret Thatcher, on Europe. Right to oppose both capital punishment and nuclear weapons, the two ultimate expression of statism as idolatry. On the latter, he again correctly sided with Benn and Shore against Thatcher. On both, he articulated what were in fact 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. 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; when he sought to outlaw such experimentation, he was supported by John Smith, the subsequent Labour Leader whose death not only paved the way for Blair, but alone persuaded Blair not to leave Parliament at the subsequent General Election as had been his intention. 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.

But he was also wrong. Wrong about immigration at the time, in specific relation to British passport-holding East African Asians, although like a lot of people who had served in the Raj he had a great deal of respect for Islam, and he was in fact a fluent Urdu-speaker; those attempting to recruit him to that present debate should count  themselves lucky that he is no longer alive to correct them.

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 when it was supporting 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 was wholly incompatible with his vigorous pulpit defence of bodily resurrection.

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