Camilla Schofield - Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain
Camilla Schofield - Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. x + 371, ISBN 978-1-107-00794-9 (hardback)
Camilla Schofield has written an impressive book about the political thought of Enoch Powell, particularly re-examining the roots of his notorious April 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech. Schofield endorses those who trace Powell's motivation to the collapse of British imperial power, especially the loss of India where he had served from 1943 to 1946, which disturbed him deeply. However, she contends that this is only half the story. By the 1960s, Powell was equally driven by his felt need to resist the undermining of domestic structures of authority, preaching the imperative of strengthening the state in the face of perceived "anarchy". Schofield persuasively grounds Powell's thinking in a concept of nation and the experience of the second world war -- particularly his own interpretation that it was fought for survival and empire. The contextual limitation of previous studies, she argues, lies in their failure to integrate "postwar" with "postcolonial" -- hence the coupling in her title.
This challenging book confidently handles a broad range of contextual allusion, both intellectual and political. Although it traces Powell's ideas chronologically, it does not aspire to be a conventional biography. Hence, one down side is the relative lack of emphasis upon his political career. After thirteen months as a junior minister, Powell became Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1957, resigning in 1958 with Chancellor Thorneycroft in protest against Macmillan's refusal to curb government spending. A three-year term as Minister of Health ended when he refused to serve under Douglas-Home in 1963, a stance that clearly aimed at a bounce-back to the party leadership, an office he unsuccessfully contested in 1965. Few politicians are so unimportant as an under-secretary for Housing: Powell was even forced to defend the government's refusal to control immigration. Yet to achieve the post of Financial Secretary, the government's chief accountant, within seven years of entering parliament was a tribute to his ability, and an education in the running of the machinery of state. There is a echo here of Stanley Baldwin, who rose to leadership from the same office. Baldwin, a Black Country industrialist, also used the rhetoric of rustic nostalgia, but his appeals to a mythic "England" were designed to manage change that he could not prevent. Factoring in Powell's political career reminds us that his ideas were not formed in isolation. (He was dismissed from the Tory front bench in 1968 because his "Rivers of Blood" blatantly violated Shadow Cabinet solidarity.) Thus throughout the traumatic years that began with Suez and rushed into decolonisation, Powell was either gagged in office or positioning himself for a come-back, making it difficult to determine the boundary between high principles and high politics. As Powell showed in a series of thinly anonymous newspaper articles in 1964, philosophy was a weapon in the acquisition of power.
Schofield argues persuasively that Powell made possible the 1970 Conservative victory by detaching a section of traditional Labour supporters from their allegiance, thus leading, if indirectly, to Thatcherism. The impact of Powellism is undeniable, but was there a complete equation of attitudes between the begetter and his myriad admirers? Schofield emphasises that he never rebuked any correspondent for racist views, but Powell did not see his role as a moraliser. There was some motivational mismatch. As Schofield demonstrates, those who supported Powell believed their wartime sacrifices entitled them to the welfare state. War was fundamental to Powell's sense of identity, but in the sense of tempering national will, the exercise of power in the pursuit of survival. He had spent his war mainly overseas: even when he was training in Britain in 1940, he suspected that Churchill exaggerated the invasion threat for political effect. British populist outbursts invariably seek to correct those in authority for failing to take actions seen as vital by the masses. Generally, the outcry is articulated by a marginal and renegade member of the elite. Powellism conformed to the pattern, and its leader resembled Lord George Gordon in 1780, or Gladstone over Bulgaria. Yet Powell also resembled the Russian populists of late Tsarist days, the narodniks, urban reformers who sought to educate the people. "He went round to shopkeepers and others and talked to them in an intellectual way," observed Tony Benn, Powell's counterpart on the Left. (222) It was here that Powell made one crucial error. Although eternally tagged with the hateful phrase, he never spoke of "rivers of blood". Rather, and wholly unnecessarily, he intruded a Virgilian image of the spurned prophet into his speech, an allusion to the Tiber flowing with blood. More Up Pompeii! than Nuremberg, it belonged to the common room not the platform.
We need to be more specific about the influence of "empire" upon Powell. In India, he believed that the British formed part of an organic unity with the sub-continent's peoples, a structure he was not prepared to see replicated in Wolverhampton. By contrast, he felt no identification either with Australia, where he was fleetingly professor of Classics at Sydney University in 1938-9, or with Egypt, where he was based from 1941 to 1943. White settlers seemed peripheral to his world view. His 1964 dismissal of the Commonwealth as "humbug" and "gigantic farce" (172) might have been modified had he appreciated the importance of the association to Canadians, not least as a barrier against Americanisation which, as Schofield shows, was another major thread in his thinking. Powell objected to the grafting of Commonwealth symbolism on to the United Kingdom crown, but Canada's internalisation of the institution as a key element in its own governmental structure showed that this essentially British symbol could be creatively adapted. Canadian constitutional evolution pivoted on the precise concept of responsible government. Powell's 1959 Commons speech on the Hola massacre remains a great parliamentary event, but -- career politics again -- its defence of colonial secretary Lennox-Boyd was also an attempt to mend political fences. Running through the speech was one of Powell's Humpty-Dumpty words, whose shifting meaning only he was permitted to define: responsibility. The blame for what happened at Hola, he insisted, lay with officials in Nairobi, and "the assignment of responsibility" was "the very essence of responsible government." (Hansard, 610, 27 July 1959, 237) But in Canadian terms, indeed in the whole Commonwealth constitutional tradition, Kenya certainly did not possess "responsible government". Yet six years later, he opposed involving the United Nations in the UDI crisis because "the responsibility lies directly on this country". (195)
My major reservation about Schofield's cogent analysis is that she risks presenting too integrated a portrait of Powell's ideas. Rather, and disturbingly often, for every dictum there was a countervailing contradiction. Authority stemmed from long-matured institutions, but it also rested upon opinion and acceptance. Empire, once fundamental to national power and identity, he flippantly dismissed in 1966 as something that "never existed". (149) He praised Wolverhampton's Jewish community for combining their loyalty to Britain with their support for Israel, but refused to contemplate the duality of being Black and British. Often, he sought to escape through wordplay, for instance when he denied that his opposition to immigration had anything to do with race. In 1968, I debated against Powell in the Cambridge Union, on a motion condemning the power of the state. I claim no influence on the intellectual climate, and it was undeniably a historical privilege to have encountered his almost Martian charm. But reading his pronouncements about the scope of government, I perceived a paradox. When nasty things had to be done, such as taxation and regulation, the culprit was the "state"; but cuddly activities, like caring for the old and sick, were outcomes willed by the "community". But how, I asked, did the community act, at national level, if not through the state? Interestingly, he echoed the point himself two years later, defining the state as "the agency by which the community discharges its responsibility to ensure a tolerable livelihood" for the people. However, Powell's objection was that the state also determined which needs it "chooses to recognise", although how it took on this decision-making life of its own remained unexplained. (275) By the late 1960s, he was wrapping all these contradictions -- in his personal files if not in public pronouncements -- into a categorisation called "The Thing". (272) Cobbett had used the term for the conspiracy of greed and stupidity that paralysed the system of government. For Powell, The Thing manifested itself both from above, in bureaucratic arrogance, and from without, in the challenge of nihilistic anarchy. Only through paranoia could he integrate his own perceptions.
I have an intellectual fantasy of Enoch Powell walking Southend Pier (unlikely, I accept, for a Midlander who was moved to tears by Housman's invocation of Shropshire). From the boardwalk, he perceives the land as an unfamiliar jumble of contours, while he trembles as he reflects how easily the stormy sea could smash the fragile structure. Ultimately, he must retrace his steps, but he repeats the exhilarating experience at Brighton, Blackpool, even -- as the Common Market looms -- at Clacton. Much mileage is clocked, but the journeys are never integrated -- authority, empire, community, markets remain separate explorations, internally contradictory, externally unrelated. I wrote to him after "Rivers of Blood", if only to balance the correspondence score. He advocated voluntary repatriation to rid Britain of its immigrants: what, I asked, would he do next, when voluntary schemes failed to dislodge the coloured community? As Callaghan pointed out, his logic pointed to compulsory deportation, creating precisely the totalitarian state that he claimed to abhor. But Powell had reached the end of that particular pier, without perceiving that it was no bridge to the future. Nobody seriously attempted to pay Black people to leave, so he could continue to preach an unworkable panacea.
Since I reside in an authorial glasshouse myself, I comment carefully on presentation issues. We are all fallible, and major publishers should provide robust editorial support. In a thematic study, occasional overlaps are to be expected, but material on one of Powell's minor correspondents (not listed in the index) seems needlessly repeated . (250, 311) A few points grate. Alas, Dunkirk was not a battle. (44) The Queen confers MBEs, but she does not "award" them. (127) Just as an American Senator is not a Congressman, so a British officer is not a "serviceman". (56) Eric Lubbock was a Liberal MP, not Labour. (282) The popular 1972-75 Australian immigration minister, Al Grasby, was no more "Albert" than Blair or Hancock were "Anthony". (322) The editorial process should have corrected "aggravated" (for "infuriated", 254), "forcibly" (for "forcefully", 12), the preservation of archives for "prosperity" (145) and "far more unanimous" (109).
In Australia in the 1970s, I discovered that a senior colleague had begun his career as a lecturer in Classics at Sydney University. Testing the ground, I observed that, whatever one thought of Powell's policies, his quixotic decision to fly back to Britain and enlist in September 1939 seemed admirable. A third of a century of resentment flared in the indignant response: "I had to mark Enoch's examination papers!" People of principles often leave a trail of destruction. As collateral damage goes, a burdensome marking load is mild compared with the fate of British-born Black children, spat at in the streets after Powell had characterised them as "piccaninnies". This distinguished book illuminates the origins and complexity of Powellism. However, my overwhelming impression remains not, as Schofield wishes to convey, the toxicity of Powell's ideas, but rather their ultimate incoherence.
Ged Martin
National University of Ireland Galway