Enoch Powell's controversial ending

National Review, March 23, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 17

It is not widely noticed in America, let alone resented, that a couple of conspicuous British divines protested mightily that the body of Enoch Powell would rest for one day in Westminster Abbey. The decision to place him there wasn't an Act of Parliament confirmed by the House of Lords confirmed by the Crown. It was as straightforward as that he had been a warden of St. Margaret's Church, which is an appendage of Westminster Abbey, and the conventional arrangements have always been just that simple: worship at St. Margaret's and earn a day at Westminster Abbey before you go underground.

But of course the death of Mr. Powell was an opportunity for bishops too busy to mourn the dead to engage in a little multiculturalism. "Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge," said the Bishop of Croydon. His reference was to a speech by Enoch Powell in 1968, dubbed the "Rivers of Blood" speech. We should give that speech a little more perspective.

What Powell said that had political heft was that someone carrying a British passport ought no longer to assume that he had an inalienable right to immigrate to the British Isles. There was indeed some sense of it, when the talk was given, that Great Britain was going back on a trust: the assumption, for generations, had been that a resident of any country in the Empire was, in effect, British-born. "What that would mean," Mr. Powell explained on a Firing Line program, "is that several hundred million people would have a right of entry into the British Isles." Manifestly, the right of entry had to graduate from civil to ceremonial application; and indeed Parliament in due course made the necessary clarification.

But the issue was complicated by inflammatory predictions. Powell's speech projected that "in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." The current Economist comments that the projection proved to be "a nonsense. Today, non-whites, lumped together in official statistics as 'ethnic minorities,' amount to only 6 per cent of the population." The editors neatly finessed an opportunity to pass judgment on whether, if Powell's prediction had proved correct, England would have suffered.

The Bishop of Croydon (there were others, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury) feels the constraint similarly felt so widely in the United States, where any talk about immigration reform, so clearly needed, runs into multiculturalists who espy anti-black or anti-Hispanic prejudice in proposals for restriction, or libertarians who espy a statist assault on freedom of movement. Enoch Powell was prepared to evaluate the cultural level of ten thousand Indians in 1968 and ten thousand Brits in the same year and insist that disparities in education and culture and tradition made them less than entirely, or immediately, fungible. He was right, but to make that point was so risky as probably to have cost him the political ascendancy he had reason to expect.

Because he was one of the truly brilliant political figures in modern British history. A classicist profoundly learned, a man of withering intelligence who at age seventy, for the sake of research he was engaged in, mastered Hebrew. He resigned from the Tory Party because of his dissatisfaction with Tory leader Edward Heath (who declined to mourn his death last week), and took a seat with the Unionist Party in Ireland. Through it all he opposed Europeanism and preached the value of the free-market economy, supporting the reforms of Mrs. Thatcher, who, notwithstanding, denied Powell the hereditary seat in the House of Lords he was said to covet. This deprivation had a domestic impact on his wife. "Pamela was especially keen for her husband to find employment," an observer reported in the London Times. "'She was fed up with him mooching around the house,' says a friend. 'Pam married him in sickness and in health, but not for lunch."'

Amusing, but not really apt for someone never idle, busy with research on the Bible, which at a large dinner party in London a few years ago he described privately to his host as fulfilling a lifelong ambition. He had been to Russia, and when he addressed the assembly from the lectern he said that everywhere he went in Russia he heard three words, "Ivan bil pravi." He spoke about his long fight for a free market and for the need for a country to control its own borders and against Europeanization. What was the translation of those words he heard spoken everywhere? He gave his tight smile, "Why," he said, "that's Russian for 'Enoch Was Right."' Evidently the Russians know things a lot of British bishops don't know. o

(Universal Press Syndicate)