"the people whom the Government must help are the people who do things: the developers, the people who create wealth, whether they are humble or exalted In 1953 the system of building licences went the same way as taxation: and the scramble was on. "The Golden Fifties" saw the rise of the legendary names in tycoonery: Charles Clore, Sir Harold Samuels (whose company has recently been buying up all the other giants in developed by a company called the Paternoster Development Co.: this was a money-making liaison of builders, Trollope & Colls, Wimpey, Jones Laing and the Church Commissioners.
Some 750,000 sq. ft. of office space was created, and just before the Office Ban was introduced, the ungodly consortium agreed to let the whole block (bar 50,000 sq. ft.) to the Central Electricity Generating Board for 24s. 6d. per square foot per annum. (Penguin: 4/-)
Even before I read this book I believed that Paul Foot is the most valuable journalist to surface in the past twenty years and I hated Enoch Powell. Both still apply. Foot has followed his masterly and prophetic Immigration and Race in British Politics with its historical sequel, The Rise of Enoch Powell. As a book it makes a good cosh.
Foot isn't an experimental journalist, he's in the great tradition of fighting pamphleteers which goes back through Tom Paine to Milton. in his exposure of Powell's conversion from a kind of wacky integrity to raging opportunism, he uses wide-focus, medium-focus and narrowrocus techmiques. exampies.
Wide-focus: "As long as black men worked loyally in the sugar and tea plantations, as long as they loaded the citrus and banana fruits for ninepence a day, as long as they turned out neatly on Sundays for church and every five years or so to cheer the relevant member of the Royal Family, they were equal. When, however, they appeared in the flesh in the street or town next door, not merely taking tickets on the buses or maintaining the dwindling profits of some of the quick returns which Powell is after. But I doubt, like Foot, that Powell will get the leadership of the Tory Party. He's too cranky, too caddish in his attacks on Heath, too cold in his dealings with other Tories. It's more likely that, following the pattern of Fascism's increasing respectability, which Foot traces clearly through Colin Jordan to Peter Griffiths to Enoch Powell, Powellism will continue to push both the Tory and Labour parties to the Right, and that we'll be confronted by the Prime Ministerial smile of a more gentlemanly version. Paul Foot's book should be used by all revolutionaries to smash that smile.
This is his final paragraph: "Enoch Powell may well be defeated by his own pedantic foibles. But Powellism and worse to follow it has a good chance of victory as long as its opponents restrict the argument to the corridors of impotence. It can only be decisively and permanently defeated when its opponents seek to mobilise the masses, as Powell has done. Such a mobilisation is quite possible. For the real reason for the widespread insecurity and dis trust of politics, for the shortages which cramp the lives of all but a tiny minority, can be found - not in the immigration of black and brown workers, but in the mean, ugly, elitist capitalism of which Enoch Powell as much as anyone is a champion." Now we need another book from Foot to map the routes towards that
out that the explosion had in effect been spontaneous and that the reason was real dissatisfaction in the 6th form. Complaints of victimisation• were dismissed as "shop-floor talk" and words need for a unified opposition to world imperialism, not polycentrism. A democratically and not bureaucratically centralised international represented the ideas of Leninism and sociaThe Black Dwarf 26th November 1969 Page 5 relations and free the peasantry. Only because of this failure was the October revolution possible (for the working class was very small). He had not said that he thought May 1968 was the
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I'm all uh e Jack
Then se chi man. *She thanks to God