Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell [ ˌd͡ʒɒn iːnɒk ˈpaʊəl ] (born June 16, 1912 in Stechford, Birmingham , † February 8, 1998 in London ), MBE , was a British classical philologist and politician . His polemic and public speaking skills garnered public support for his controversial views on issues such as immigration and Britain's accession to the European Community, and sparked national debates that continue to this day.
Life
Early years
Powell was born in 1912 to Albert Enoch Powell and Ellen Mary Breese, two teachers from Wales . His great intelligence became evident very early on. After King Edward's School, Birmingham, he continued his education at Trinity College , Cambridge, where he came under the influence of his tutor Alfred Edward Housman and, in his freshman year , won all the major classical competitions in which undergraduates could participate. At the age of 25, he was appointed Professor of Classical Greek at Sydney University in New South Wales, Australia . Gough Whitlam , who later became Prime Minister of Australia, was one of his students . His edition of Thucydides ' History of the Peloponnesian War , published by Oxford University Press in 1938, became the standard edition. He learned the Welsh language self-taught .
While studying at Cambridge , Powell took courses in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, now the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London, in order to increase his later chances of a later appointment as Viceroy of India . He also learned Hindi for the same reason .
During his professorship in Australia, his anger increased at the Chamberlain's government appeasement policy towards Germany , which he viewed as a betrayal of British interests. In a letter to his parents in June 1939 before the outbreak of World War II , he wrote: “It is the English, not their government; for if they weren't blind cowards they'd be lynching Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other creepy traitors. ”Immediately after the outbreak of war, Powell returned to England, not without buying a Russian dictionary, believing that“ Russia should be the key to our survival and have victory, as was the case in 1812 and 1916 ”.
War years
Upon his return, Enoch Powell volunteered for military service. Most of the drafting positions turned him down, however, and it was only over a month after his arrival that he was accepted into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, with which Powell had enrolled as an Australian. Powell also fought in the Desert Rats (7th British Armored Division) in Africa. It was here in Algiers that Powell's aversion to the United States was planted. After a few conversations with senior American officials, he became more and more convinced that an important American war goal was the destruction of the British Empire . In a letter dated February 16, 1943, he wrote: "On the horizon I see a greater threat than Germany or Japan ever were [...] our terrible enemy, America [...]"
His idea of US anti-Britishism persisted during the war. Powell cut an article by the American Clare Booth Luce from the Statesman of November 13, 1943, which he kept for the rest of his life, in which she declared in a speech that Indian independence meant that “America is the greatest world war for democracy won “. Powell desperately tried to get to the Far East to take part in the battle against Japan because "the war is won in Europe and I want to see the Union Jack back in Singapore " before the Americans would force the British to leave. At the end of the war he was the youngest brigadier in the British Army to enter service as a private . Powell, however, felt guilty at the end of the war because he had survived while many soldiers of various ranks whom he had met during the war died.
Conservative Party
After the war, he joined the Conservative Party and worked in the Conservative Research Department, the party's strategy center, where Iain Macleod was one of his colleagues. In the general election in 1950 he was elected MP in the Wolverhampton South West constituency.
Within his faction, Powell belonged to the Suez group. This group of parliamentarians opposed the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal because, in their opinion, Great Britain would permanently give up its right to be present on the Suez Canal through such a withdrawal. Nevertheless, when after the British withdrawal in 1954 the Egyptians nationalized the canal in 1956, he was against the British attempt to recapture the canal because, in his opinion, the British no longer had the resources of a world power .
He worked as Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Housing and from 1957 to 1958 as Parliamentary State Secretary for Finance, but resigned with Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and Nigel Birch in protest against the government's plans for increasing spending. In the heyday of Keynesianism , he believed in market forces as a staunch monetarist . Growing government spending, which the government financed by printing new money, was a major cause of inflation, Powell believed . The inflation rate rose to 2.5%, a high value for the time, especially in times of peace. He condemned the myth of the supposedly overly powerful unions claiming to be demanding too high wages, and repeatedly declared the government's decision to spend in excess of its revenues the cause of inflation. In particular , he castigated housing programs that created high-rise estates in which violence and anonymity were rampant, leading to the buildings being demolished before the mortgages for their construction had been removed.
Powell returned to government in 1960 when he was appointed Minister of Health , but did not serve in the cabinet until 1962. In this role he was responsible for an ambitious ten-year hospital construction program and for starting the liquidation of the major psychiatric institutions . In his famous "Water Tower" speech in 1961, he said his goal was "the elimination of the vast majority of the psychiatric hospitals in this country as they exist today" and characterized the fortress-like effect of closed institutions:
“There they stand: isolated, majestic, imperious, above them the gigantic water tower, which rises unmistakably and intimidatingly over the country with the chimney - the homes that our forefathers built so solidly to express the ideas of their time. Do not underestimate their ability to resist our attack for a moment. "
The speech was one of several discussion threads on the initiative care within the community ( Care in the Community led) in the 1980s.
Together with Iain Macleod , he turned down a position in the cabinet after the appointment of Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister. After the Conservatives were defeated in the general election in 1964, he returned to the front row of his parliamentary group as Shadow Transport Minister. In his party's first election for party leadership in 1965, he ran as a candidate, but only reached third place behind Edward Heath , which, despite his anti-American sentiments, earned him the appointment of shadow defense minister.
In a controversial speech on May 26, 1967, Powell criticized Britain's role in the post-war world: “The vanishing traces of Britain's once vast Indian empire have been transformed in our imagination into a peacekeeping role for which the sun never sets. Under God's good care and in partnership with the United States, we are protecting world peace and rushing this way and that to push back communism , put out flashes in the pan, and suppress coups. It is difficult to describe an idea that has so little contact with reality without resorting to psychiatric terms. "
"Rivers-of-Blood" speech
Known for his public speaking skills, Powell was a loner who cared little about subordinating his beliefs to a party line. On April 20, 1968, he gave a controversial speech in Birmingham in which he warned his audience of the consequences of unchecked immigration from the Commonwealth to Great Britain. Because he saw, because of the immigration, in allusion to Virgil , "that the Tiber foams with much blood", the press christened it "rivers of blood" speech.
One of the subjects of his speech was an extensive quotation from a letter from one of his constituents in Wolverhampton , an elderly lady who reported her experience as probably the last white man on her street. As a landlady, she had repeatedly rejected applications from black people, which was why she was notorious as a racist and found excrement in her mailbox. Despite combining the electoral roll with other sources, the editor of the local paper, Clem Jones (a close friend of Powell's who broke off his friendship with Powell over the controversy), and his journalists were unable to identify the woman. Powell declined to give her name because he felt it was right to keep her identity confidential. After Powell's death, Kenneth Nock, a lawyer from Wolverhampton, wrote to the Express and Star in April 1998 that his firm had acted for the lady in question and that she existed but he could not identify her for reasons of client confidentiality. The speech was given in 1968 when the Racial Relations Act was being debated in Parliament, which made racial discrimination illegal in rental.
Powell only noticed later that he had given the speech on Adolf Hitler's birthday, of all things, which in the eyes of many put him even closer to racists. Back then, many British fascists like Colin Jordan and John Tyndall (who later became the leader of the National Front and founder of the British National Party ) held birthday celebrations in honor of Hitler.
Heath kicked Powell from his shadow cabinet the day after the speech and Powell never returned to a senior position in his party. However, a Gallup poll in late April showed that 74% of those polled agreed with the theses expressed in Powell's speech. Powell received over one hundred thousand mostly positive responses from the population. When the Sunday Times described his speech as "racist", Powell had the editors served an injunction including a court confirmation of the number and existence of the aforementioned letters.
Three days after his speech, when the racial relations bill was debated in the House of Commons, 1,000 dock workers marched to Westminster to protest Powell's apparent victimization. The next day, 400 butchers from Smithfield Market presented a ninety-two page petition in support of Powell.
By contrast, as a result of Powell's speech, immigrants from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent found themselves in a tense atmosphere of fear - they were exposed to a wave of suspicion and resentment . Powell's speech, which was initially a call for the preservation of British identity, provoked an outcry. Immigrant rights activists viewed Powell as the one who appealed to the lowest instincts in British politics.
The background to the dispute was that until 1962 Great Britain allowed every resident of the Commonwealth with a British passport to immigrate. Even after the establishment of the Irish Free State, it had never occurred to anyone to regard Irish people as foreigners, to impose restrictions on their right of establishment, employment or the right to vote. British industry supported this policy for a long time because of the large influx of cheap labor in the former textile industry metropolises . Immigration led to ghetto-like social structures in many run-down suburbs that grew into an explosive mixture. By the late 1960s, the labor-intensive old British industries had collapsed and growing numbers of immigrants and Britons became unemployed.
Powell had distributed the text of his speech to the media in advance; the presence of press representatives may be due to the fact that they realized how explosive its content was. Even the television was there, although it never covered any meetings of the West Midland region of the Conservative Political Center. Some suspected Powell of a rigged game, suggesting that Heath Powell, instead of his party, was going to take the beating that the more restrictive line on immigrants would bring them later this year. The Conservatives had found in nationwide studies that in the wake of the general election ( Peter Griffiths had captured the safe Labor constituency of Smethwick, later Secretary of State Patrick Gordon Walker ), a hard line on the immigration question could win around twenty lower house seats from Labor, but it only took their defeat in the 1966 general election to convince the Conservatives to play the “race card”.
Unusual conservative
Powell made a vain attempt to become party chairman in 1965. He received only 5% of the vote of the Conservative MPs. Powell's popularity contributed to the surprise Conservative victory in the 1970 general election, which was favored by a swing in favor of the Conservatives in the West Midlands near Powell's constituency. A survey by the Daily Express in 1972 showed him to be the most popular politician in the country; this popularity remained with him during his lifetime.
When MP Nicholas Ridley founded the twelve-person Economic Diners Club , Enoch Powell was one of them thanks to his keen intellect and his decidedly free-market orientation. Even Margaret Thatcher was a member of the club, after its ascent to the party chairman, however.
Powell was an ardent supporter of British sovereignty , which he saw represented in the House of Commons at Westminster, in law and currency, and not least in the British military. For this he was ready to make great sacrifices. He went back to Churchill's concept of the United States of Europe , which had found its institutional framework in the Council of Europe . Laws that were passed by an unelected European Commission and waved through to a European Parliament that was not yet elected were anathema to him. So Powell left the Conservative Party in February 1974 a few days before the general election and, to everyone's surprise, called for the election of the Labor Party, which had announced a referendum on Britain's stay in the EEC as the only way to secure Britain's sovereignty. He reiterated this line in the general election in October 1974 - the referendum was finally held in 1975. The result was a clear vote in favor of remaining “in the common market” (as it was called on the ballot). The Conservatives never forgave Powell's call to vote for Labor.
Powell's Euro-skepticism was based on the assessment that the Soviet Union, regardless of various exhibition confrontations during the Cold War, ultimately did not want to and would not invade the West - in his opinion, the USSR was far too dependent on the European and US grain surpluses, which it received almost free of charge. [Proof?] So there is no reason to expand the Western military alliance. The "independent nuclear deterrence of Great Britain" was also viewed negatively by him because it could not be used rationally and was therefore irrelevant. He believed that American interest in Britain was an attempt to undermine Britain in order to give the US greater international standing. Powell also argued that the Americans advised European states, including Great Britain, to join the EEC because it was the "political arm" of NATO and therefore would fit into the great American strategy against the Soviet Union.
Ulster Unionist Party
After he was no longer a member of the House of Commons after his revolt before the February 1974 election, he allowed the Northern Irish Unionist Party ( Ulster Unionist Party ), an offer from the far-right National Front , to run for it before the early general election in late 1974 he refused. Powell returned to Parliament as a MP for the South Down constituency . He refused to join the Orange Order , which mainly controlled the UUP after its split from the Conservative Party, making him the first Ulster Unionists MP in Westminster to never become a member. He was an outspoken opponent of the extremist unionists supported by Reverend Ian Paisley and his supporters. Powell stated that Northern Ireland could only stop the IRA by integrating itself fully into the United Kingdom and relinquishing any special status, giving up Northern Ireland's recently suspended self-government. In his view, this special status of the province of Ulster, with its own parliament and prime minister, was a constant source of hope for the IRA that Ulster could be resolved by the United Kingdom: "Any word or act that suggests the hope of negotiating unity with the rest of the United Kingdom, consciously or unconsciously, contributes to the continuation of violence in Northern Ireland. "
In his opinion, the origin of the clashes in Northern Ireland was not religious but national: While the Protestants saw themselves as British and wanted to remain British, the Catholics saw themselves as a deviant nation of the Irish. However, because the British Parliament failed to define the British identity, the IRA took this as hesitation: "Another bomb and the British will be fed up with it, will withdraw and we will take over everything," said Powell, summarizing his view of the IRA -View together.
During his late career as a Member of Parliament for the Ulster Unionists, Powell continued to criticize the US and suspect the Americans of persuading the British to create an Ulster in a whole of Ireland because the condition for Irish membership in NATO was the island's unity. The Americans wanted to close the huge gap in NATO defense that existed between Ireland's south coast and northern Spain. Powell said he had a copy of a US State Department policy paper dated August 15, 1950, allegedly in which the American government deplored the usefulness of Ireland in international organizations, which the partition of Ireland would limit, making strategic planning for Europe difficult. The document went on: "It is desirable that Ireland would become an integral part of the defense planning of the North Atlantic region because of its strategic position and its current lack of defense capacity".
In 1984 Powell declared the CIA to be responsible for the murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten and the deaths of MPs Airey Neave and Robert Bradford because the Americans wanted to stop Neave's policy of integrating Northern Ireland. In 1986 he argued that " MI6 and its friends" were not responsible for the death of Airey Neave , not INLA .
After the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Powell declared that since Britain was not in the "formal sense" an ally of Kuwait and that the balance of power in the Middle East was no longer a task for Britain after the end of the British Empire, Great Britain should not take part in the war. He noted that Saddam Hussein would have a long way to go before his troops could storm up the beaches of Kent or Sussex . After Britain told small nations to defend them against attack, Powell said, "Sometimes I wonder if when we gave up our power we forgot to give up our arrogance."
In view of German unification in 1990, Powell urged Great Britain to establish an alliance with Russia to offset the German effect on the balance of power in Europe. This part of his analysis was taken more seriously by the Atlantic Prime Minister Thatcher, who tried in vain to convince Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to prevent German unification.
Although he reportedly had a good relationship with Margaret Thatcher (she noted that her own monetarist policy was Powell's, which he countered with the dry remark, "What a pity she didn't understand"), he came along in 1985 during his protest against her support for the Anglo-Irish treaty with her in conflict, in the course of which he resigned his mandate in protest, but reacquired it in the subsequent by-election. In the 1987 general election , he lost his mandate to SDLP MP Eddie McGrady , mainly due to demographic changes and changes in the layout of his constituency, so that significantly more Catholics belonged to the South Down constituency than before. Ironically, the constituency changes were due to Powell's campaign for a higher number of Northern Irish MPs to represent Northern Ireland on an equal footing with the rest of the UK and with the intention of taking further steps towards integration to do.
His unionism, however, did not block his ability to think independently; he was critical of the shooting of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988.
death
Enoch Powell died of Parkinson's disease in 1998 at the age of 85 and was buried in his war uniform in Warwick Regimental Cemetery in Warwickshire. His wife Pamela, with whom he had been married since 1952, and their daughters survived him. Margaret Thatcher, who owed him a lot, stayed away from his funeral - unlike her husband.
Personal views and controversies
Powell declared in 1964: “I have and will always stand my face like flint against making a distinction between a national of this country and another because of his origin.” He repeatedly declared immigration to be a question of head count (“a question of numbers ”), with which he pointed to the quantitative limits of integration. Many journalists, commentators, and politicians (whom Powell liked to disparagingly summarize as the "chattering class") called him a " racist ". The public, however, sympathized with Powell's views: a poll after his "rivers of blood" speech found 74% support, and on a television broadcast marking the thirtieth anniversary of his speech in Birmingham (and two months after his death) the studio audience voted 64 % for believing Powell is “not a racist”.
Powell's critics often referred to him as "far right", " proto-fascist ". In terms of social policy, however, he was more liberal: in 1965 he voted for a simpler divorce law and a more liberal abortion law because he believed that this question concerns the individual and not the state. He also supported the decriminalization of homosexuality and the abolition of the death penalty , both liberal reforms of the Labor government, which enjoyed little support in the Conservative Party. Though he was a strict monetarist on government spending, his views were socially tempered, so he advocated government health care.
His speeches and television interviews during his political life testified to his suspicion of the " establishment ." It was widely believed that he deliberately and repeatedly offended the incumbent government so that they would not offer him a lifetime of nobility Moving to the House of Lords would have been connected - he wanted to keep his seat in the House of Commons. He had also voted against the Life Peerages Act in 1958 , so he found it hypocritical to accept such an honor on his part. However, he was denied elevation to the traditional, hereditary nobility.
Private citizen and poet
Although initially an atheist , Powell later became a staunch supporter of the Anglican Church because he believed in 1949 on the way to his apartment in his later constituency, "heard the church bells of St. Peters's Wolverhampton" to have. He later became an elder of St Margaret's , Westminster. He spent much of his later life trying to prove that, if read strictly, Christ was not crucified but hanged.
Powell learned to read ancient Greek from his mother when he was five. At the age of 70 he learned his twelfth and final language, Hebrew . He was fluent in eight languages.
In 2002 Powell appeared on the list of the "100 Greatest Brits" (a BBC sponsored and publicly decided competition). Powell noted that "all political careers end in failure" and added that this was particularly true of himself. Tony Benn (a personal friend from the Labor Party whom Powell had supported in the struggle to lose his title of nobility ( Peerage Act 1963 )) described him as one of the last politicians to make commitment to his constituents before loyalty to his party or the security of his career.
Powell also demonstrated rhetorical skills beyond politics. He was a poet of remarkable maturity who published four collections of poetry: "First Poems", "Casting Off", "Dancer's End" and "The Wedding Gift". His "Gesammelte Gedichte" appeared in 1990. He translated Herodotus and published many other works on ancient literature. He also wrote a biography on Joseph Chamberlain . Powell has also published many books on political subjects and collections of his speeches. His political publications were often as critical of his own party as they were of the opposing Labor Party, and he often made fun of impaling what he saw as a logical error or a contradiction between claim and reality. His book "Freedom & Reality" contained many, in his opinion, nonsensical quotes from Labor resolutions or from Harold Wilson .
bibliography
- Foot, Paul: The Rise of Enoch Powell, Cornmarket Press (hb) / Penguin (pb), 1969
- Roth, Andrew: Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune, Macdonald, 1970
- Stacey, Tom: Immigration and Enoch Powell, London, 1970, ISBN 0854680130
- Shepherd, Robert: Enoch Powell, Hutchinson, London, 1998, ISBN 0-09-179208-8
- The Daily Telegraph: Obituary of Enoch Powell, February 9th, 1998
- Heffer, Simon: Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998, ISBN 0-297-84286-2
- Altmann, Gerhard: Farewell to the Empire. The internal decolonization of Great Britain 1945–1985, Göttingen 2005.
Single receipts
- ↑ Simon Heffer: Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell . 1998 London p. 53.
- ^ The Churchill Society: A few notes about Enoch Powell and why he was the greatest British Statesman since Churchill. online (accessed September 19, 2019)
- ↑ Some ministers in the UK are not members of the cabinet, i.e. the government i. e. S., but rather comparable to the state secretaries of the federal German political system.
- ↑ Enoch Powell's Water Tower Speech 1961, online at studymore
- ^ "Like the Roman, I seem to see the Tiber foaming with much blood". Compare Virgil, Aeneis 8, 86–87: "Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno"
Works
- Enoch Powell (1969 [1999]): Freedom and Reality, Eliot Rightwat Books, ISBN 0-7160-0541-7 (this volume contains the text of his rivers-of-blood speech)
- J. Enoch Powell (1977): Joseph Chamberlain, London, ISBN 0-500-01185-0
- Enoch Powell (1977): Wrestling with the Angel, London, ISBN 0-85969-127-6
- Enoch Powell (1989) (Richard Ritchie editor): Enoch Powell on 1992, London, ISBN 1-85470-008-1
- Enoch Powell (1991) (Rex Collings editor): Reflections of a Statesman, London, ISBN 0-947792-88-0
Web links
- Obituary in the Guardian (English)
- Publications by Enoch Powell (English)
- www.enochpowell.net (English)
- Portrait of Enoch Powell in the NZZ Folio magazine
- Enoch Powell Documentary , video documentation with original Powell recordings (English, YouTube)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Powell, Enoch |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Powell, John Enoch (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 16, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Stechford, Birmingham |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 8, 1998 |
| Place of death | London , England |