THE RISE OF ENOCH POWELL by Paul Foot
(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
decent white stock, their claim to equal citizenship was a shocking impertinence. Suddenly the florid rhetoric about the 'open door' turns into equally florid rhetoric about the desecration of "England's green and pleasant land'."
Medium-focus: " ... Powell's speech on the Royal Titles Bill represented the first public demonstration of his most consistent abilitv. te construct out of reactionary prejudice (in this case, a love of Empire) an empty pyramid of formalistic logic, and to identify the whole with a Higher Destiny.
Narrow-focus: Foot takes a quote from a 1964 article in which Powell claimed that Britain had an "inescapable obligation of humanity" to admit the dependents of immigrants already here. Foot takes the phrase "inescapable obligation" and sticks it, irremovably, up Powell's arse. This is the pay-off: "The words "inescapable obligation' tend to give the impression of an obligation which cannot be escaped. The words of politicians, however, must not always be taken glibly at face value. 'Inescapable obligation', in modern politicians language, can be taken, m nonal cu cumstances, to mean: an obligation to humanity which cannot be escaped unless there are a large number of votes to be gained by escaping it. From now on, demonstrators at Powell meetings are under an inescapable obligation to chant "Inescapable Obligation". It's got a good swing Two things I missed from the book. One, the argument would have been more graphic if Foot had collected statements from immigrants about how the behaviour of whites had been altered by Powell's Birmingham speech. My impression is that racialism became far more open. (e.g. A group of men, in their thirties, wearing suits, not really drunk, at the corner of one of Manchester's most respectable streets, at ten in the evening, singing to the tune of "Pick A Bale of Cotton' - "We're gonna jump down, turn around, kill a Pakistani/ Gonna jump down, turn around, kill a wog a day./ Me and my buddy gonna kill a Pakistani ... - singing their filth proudly. Barring fascist meetings and riots, that kind of defiant and deliberately public racialism has spread ince the British National Party and Union Movement's line was taken up by Powell.)
Two, I wish Foot had gone through Powell's recent speeches on race, underlined every word and phrase which carried connotations of fear and listed them — not as an academic exercise in linguistics, but to expose even more clearly how Powell manipulates the terrors and superstitions of the ignorant and how Powell, to the extent that he believes his own vivid words, is. • very scared man indeed Towards the end of the book Foot points out the contradictions of Powell in his new-found role as a "populist" politician. There's a difference in kind between the support which Wilson and Heath obtain in public opinion polls and those who give Powell his fluctuating rating rating. Wilson and Heath's supporters are comparatively impersonal, their loyalty is usually the straight class ticket (which is bent) and the plump for whoever's king of the friendliestseeming party. And there's no embarrassment in telling the liberal-looking girl from Gallup that you prefer Humpty to bloody Dumpty.
Powell's a different matter. His supporters are deeply attached to him as the man who not only expressed their racial terrors but who also made race hatred respectable in Britain. Around the country, including all-white areas like the Yorkshire Dales, you'll see painted slogans saying "Four Cheers for Enoch". Nobody ever bothered to paint up even two cheers for Wilson or Heath. Granted that the bugger's popularity isn't always widespread. But it goes deep.
Powell's next move may well be based on Nixon's "Law and Order" campaign. In an increasingly restless Britain, that could bring 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