The BBC has decided to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood Speech with a dramatised reading. It's a curious decision. The speech's main claim to significance is that it initiated a political discourse that conflated immigration with racism, though that probably wasn't Powell's aim. The speech ended his hopes of office. What is more, it was wrong. Not just morally, but in its predictive powers. It is an historical curiosity, a testament of failure.
It is claimed by some that the speech was not racist. I find that unconvincing. It used the tropes and language that we would easily identify today as central to much racist ideology. But was that Powell's intention? That is a different question. Powell was not expressing a philosophy of racial superiority, instead he was coming from his theory of the state. If there is one consistent strand in his thought, it is the sense that Britain should be a unitary sovereign state under the Crown. He took this further to see it as essentially an ethnically homogenous nation - white and Protestant. He found his final political home as an Ulster Unionist.
Powell argued that if the state embodied the nation, immigration undermined its essence. Powell was first and foremost a nationalist, with an idealist concept of the state that is perilously close to that of Giovanni Gentile, though he rejected corporatism in favour of the free market. And so he vigorously opposed any constraint on state sovereignty, especially through membership of the European Union. In that sense, he should be remembered as one of the fathers of Brexit, more than as the legitimiser of racism.
Powell always opposed entry into what was then the EEC. When the referendum of 1975 confirmed Britain's membership with a two thirds majority, he refused to accept the legitimacy of the result and immediately began to campaign for the UK's exit. He was joined in an unlikely alliance by the Bennite left, who were then taking the lead in the Eurosceptic movement and who held similar views on sovereignty (though for different purposes). After mouthing a few pieties towards the 'people having spoken,' they started to agitate for withdrawal and finally got it adopted as Labour Party policy in the 1983 election manifesto. (I find it hugely ironic that today's leavers insist that everyone should 'respect the referendum result' regardless.)
After Labour's defeat in 1983, the marginalisation of the Eurosceptics in the party was completed by the EU's adoption of social democratic rights in the Social Chapter of the Maastrict Treaty. With Labour firmly pro-European, anti-EU agitation was led by the right of the Conservative Party. Though Powell was now outside the Party, it was Powellism that informed the campaign that undermined successive leaderships and that Cameron thought he could silence with a referendum. It was a disastrous mistake. The focus on sovereignty and immigration was critical to the narrow victory by Leave.
I find nothing attractive, or even anything much interesting, in Powell's ideology. He was a formidable classical scholar, but a failed politician. If you must honour him, it shouldn't be for the "Rivers of Blood" speech, but for the disaster of Brexit. It would also be appropriate to use Latin.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. It's Christopher Wren's epitaph in St Paul's Cathedral. If you seek a monument, look around you. Look around at today's shambles and you will see the product of the life of an erudite classicist and political mediocrity.
It is claimed by some that the speech was not racist. I find that unconvincing. It used the tropes and language that we would easily identify today as central to much racist ideology. But was that Powell's intention? That is a different question. Powell was not expressing a philosophy of racial superiority, instead he was coming from his theory of the state. If there is one consistent strand in his thought, it is the sense that Britain should be a unitary sovereign state under the Crown. He took this further to see it as essentially an ethnically homogenous nation - white and Protestant. He found his final political home as an Ulster Unionist.
Powell argued that if the state embodied the nation, immigration undermined its essence. Powell was first and foremost a nationalist, with an idealist concept of the state that is perilously close to that of Giovanni Gentile, though he rejected corporatism in favour of the free market. And so he vigorously opposed any constraint on state sovereignty, especially through membership of the European Union. In that sense, he should be remembered as one of the fathers of Brexit, more than as the legitimiser of racism.
Powell always opposed entry into what was then the EEC. When the referendum of 1975 confirmed Britain's membership with a two thirds majority, he refused to accept the legitimacy of the result and immediately began to campaign for the UK's exit. He was joined in an unlikely alliance by the Bennite left, who were then taking the lead in the Eurosceptic movement and who held similar views on sovereignty (though for different purposes). After mouthing a few pieties towards the 'people having spoken,' they started to agitate for withdrawal and finally got it adopted as Labour Party policy in the 1983 election manifesto. (I find it hugely ironic that today's leavers insist that everyone should 'respect the referendum result' regardless.)
After Labour's defeat in 1983, the marginalisation of the Eurosceptics in the party was completed by the EU's adoption of social democratic rights in the Social Chapter of the Maastrict Treaty. With Labour firmly pro-European, anti-EU agitation was led by the right of the Conservative Party. Though Powell was now outside the Party, it was Powellism that informed the campaign that undermined successive leaderships and that Cameron thought he could silence with a referendum. It was a disastrous mistake. The focus on sovereignty and immigration was critical to the narrow victory by Leave.
I find nothing attractive, or even anything much interesting, in Powell's ideology. He was a formidable classical scholar, but a failed politician. If you must honour him, it shouldn't be for the "Rivers of Blood" speech, but for the disaster of Brexit. It would also be appropriate to use Latin.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. It's Christopher Wren's epitaph in St Paul's Cathedral. If you seek a monument, look around you. Look around at today's shambles and you will see the product of the life of an erudite classicist and political mediocrity.
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