The Rise of Enoch Powell - Paul Foot

 A Penguin Special from 1969 - I just had to have it when I saw it - by the legendary left wing journalist Paul Foot.  It has been easy to forget how influential and politically important Powell was back in the day.  My first memories of him date from my early childhood when he was Minister of Health for (I think) Sir Alec Douglas-Home.  In contrast to the likes of Sir Alec, Powell was considered modern and down-to-earth.  He was also considered principled, which is something he had in common with Sir Alec, who was a genuine war hero and an opponent of appeasement in 1936 and '39 (i.e. not one of the 'Guilty Men' in Foot's uncle Michael's celebrated 'Cato' book).  In fact, of course, Powell was not what he seemed.  His principles, such as they were, were electoral self-interest and a rose-hued nostalgia for the Indian Raj.  As for modern, he was an early advocate of all the things that have brought Britain to its knees - free market, anti-union, and contempt for anyone lower down the food chain.  He made a point, Foot's research shows, of not consulting his electors: he argued that they had different views from each other, which is true, but the job of the elected member is to listen first, sift later.  As a result Powell came to occupy a world of his own.  He made up statistics and even lied about his own pronouncements.  The speech bubble on the front cover is Powell's famous quote: "I have set and will always set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on the grounds of his origin."  However, from the early Sixties on (and remember, this book is from 1969 - before the notorious 'Rivers of Blood' speech), he discriminated in exactly that way.  He doesn't give two hoots about white immigrants from Canada or South Africa, it's the black and later brown people he objects to, coming over here, filling up our schools and hospitals, interfering with our Aryan bloodline.

Powell was scum - he betrayed his own party every five minutes - and a raving loony.  But Foot reminds us, he might not have been the worst.  There was Duncan Sandys, whom I vaguely recall (mainly because he was one of Churchill's sons-in-law), and a rancid hater of any sort of difference (he hated homosexuals as well as people of colour) called Sir Cyril Osborne,  who I had I had not heard of.

A good book - a necessary reminder that in one area at least, the political discourse has moved on in a good way.  I wonder if Foot revised it after Powell really lost it in the Seventies?