Short Cuts

James Butler: Labour’s Failure, 21 May 2026

... one candidate in Blackburn (which she described as ‘the biggest shithole in the UK’) eulogised Enoch Powell as ‘prophetic’; another said that ‘Oswald Mosley was right 100 per cent.’ A white supremacist candidate in Essex declared ‘Muslims are dirt,’ and described the genocide in Gaza as ‘self-defence’. All three are now ...

Sixtysomethings

Paul Addison, 11 May 1995

True Blues: The Politics of Conservative Party Membership 
by Paul Whiteley, Patrick Seyd and Jeremy Richardson.
Oxford, 303 pp., £35, October 1994, 0 19 827786 5
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Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks: Writings on Biography, History and Politics 
by Ben Pimlott.
HarperCollins, 417 pp., £20, August 1994, 9780002554954
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... in favour of capital punishment and against a federal Europe. Seventy per cent are disciples of Enoch Powell and believe that a future Conservative government should encourage the repatriation of immigrants. But as elderly people who depend on the welfare state they do not share the rugged individualism of the free marketeers. Eighty per cent believe ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Dining Out, 4 June 1998

... and we hadn’t even seen the famous ‘Teacher’ ad on TV.9 February. News of the death of Enoch Powell brings back memories of my only two meetings with that remarkable man. On the first occasion he came to talk to an academic dining club at the LSE and (as I recollect it) trounced his left-leaning discussants pretty decisively. When he ...

‘We’ and ‘You’

Owen Bennett-Jones: Suburban Jihadis, 27 August 2015

‘We Love Death as You Love Life’: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists 
by Raffaello Pantucci.
Hurst, 377 pp., £15.99, March 2015, 978 1 84904 165 2
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... radicalisation process. Advocates of this view cite other factors, arguing that the speeches of Enoch Powell in years gone by and the current actions of the EDL have left Muslims fearful and defensive. Many non-believing cultural Muslims in the UK, the Middle East and South Asia strongly share the view that the West is hostile to Muslim majority ...

Radical Democrats

Ross McKibbin, 7 March 1991

Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-80 
by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone.
Hutchinson, 675 pp., £20, September 1990, 0 09 174321 4
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Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980-1990 
by Paul Foot.
Verso, 281 pp., £29.95, November 1990, 0 86091 310 4
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... that Benn has the same sentimental attitude to Parliament that we associate with Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. But ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’ is one of the polite fictions of modern Britain: it permits the executive, judiciary and bureaucracy to do whatever they wish – usually in secret – precisely in the manner that these diaries spend so much ...

Mrs Thatcher’s Admirer

Ian Aitken, 21 November 1991

Time to declare 
by David Owen.
Joseph, 822 pp., £20, September 1991, 0 7181 3514 8
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... And that, of course, is what all these eight hundred-odd pages are really about. It was, I think, Enoch Powell who once remarked that all political careers by their very nature end in failure. One is nevertheless entitled to ask what was achieved on the way to the inevitable failure. In Dr Owen’s case there is a simple but very substantial answer: he ...

Why we go to war

Ferdinand Mount, 6 June 2019

... blithe or indifferent to this problem. I did, though, once come across a surprising admission from Enoch Powell, just as Mrs Thatcher’s labours on the European Single Market were coming towards fruition. Powell told the readers of the Spectator in July 1990: If a distinction is now to be drawn, as a matter of settled ...

Coalition Monsters

Colin Kidd, 6 March 2014

In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government 
by Matthew D’Ancona.
Penguin, 414 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 670 91993 2
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... Cledwyn Hughes. On the other side of the argument were the bogeymen of British politics – from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on ...

What’s going on, Eric?

David Renton: Rock Against Racism, 22 November 2018

Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge 
by Daniel Rachel.
Picador, 589 pp., £12.99, May 2017, 978 1 4472 7268 7
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... don’t want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man. I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man … We should send them all back.’ Among those troubled by Clapton’s remarks was the photographer David (‘Red’) Saunders. A great bear of a man with a red rockabilly quiff, a veteran ...

People Like You

David Edgar: In Burnley, 23 September 2021

On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town 
by Mike Makin-Waite.
Lawrence and Wishart, 274 pp., £17, May, 978 1 913546 02 1
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... these actors, but they share the fundamental belief – crucial to nationalist politics back to Enoch Powell and beyond – that cosmopolitan globalist elites are mobilising sections of the population against national majorities. Although this narrative is being pushed hard by the populist media, it’s patronising to assume, as Makin-Waite ...

‘We prefer their company’

Sadiah Qureshi: Black British History, 15 June 2017

Black and British: A Forgotten History 
by David Olusoga.
Pan Macmillan, 624 pp., £25, November 2016, 978 1 4472 9973 8
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... basis of race. It was as amendments to the Race Relations Act were being discussed in 1968 that Enoch Powell delivered his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. His call for drastic immigration controls, including repatriation, to avoid violence did not lead to his indictment for ‘incitement’ to racial hatred.Many aspects of this complex and lengthy ...

A Slight Dash of the Tiresome

Brian Harrison, 9 November 1989

The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism 
edited by Lawrence Goldman.
Cambridge, 199 pp., £25, August 1989, 0 521 35032 8
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... of his day, though without the humour. In carrying his beliefs to their logical extreme he is the Enoch Powell of his times, though without the creative imagination and forcefulness of phrase. As for his combination of political economy with intense moralism – his enthusiasm for ‘Victorian values’ – the parallel hardly needs spelling ...

Tam, Dick and Harold

Ian Aitken, 26 October 1989

Dick Crossman: A Portrait 
by Tam Dalyell.
Weidenfeld, 253 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 297 79670 4
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... have known it didn’t stand a chance when his old friend Michael Foot (an abolitionist) and Enoch Powell (a hereditarist) joined forces to scupper it. Even his one partial success – the establishment of an embryonic system of select committees – has been credited largely to Norman St John Stevas. So the diaries must remain his monument. But ...

Lady Thatcher’s Bastards

Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992

Class War: A Decade of Disorder 
edited by Ian Bone, Alan Pullen and Tim Scargill.
Verso, 113 pp., £7.95, November 1991, 0 86091 558 1
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... The tired phrases playback in loops of hate. Once they were given an apocalyptic spin by Enoch Powell, and now they are smoothed by the in-flight rhetoric of hatchet-headed Essex men. The original keyholders of these terraces parroted the same sentiments, word for word, before decamping to the fringes of Epping Forest. An incoming tide of ...

In the bright autumn of my senescence

Christopher Hitchens, 6 January 1994

In the Heat of the Struggle: Twenty-Five Years of ‘Socialist Worker’ 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 288 pp., £12.50, November 1993, 0 906224 94 2
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Why You Should Join the Socialists 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 70 pp., £1.90, November 1993, 0 906224 80 2
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... time with especial pride. After some London dockers and meat-porters had turned out to support Enoch Powell, thus convincing many fastidious snobs that the proles were beyond all help or consideration, we organised a ‘Confront the racists’ mass meeting where the main address was given by Terry Barrett, a Tilbury stevedore with a voice like a ...