Enoch Powell - Political Beliefs

Political Beliefs

Powell stated, "I have and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origins". In The Trial of Enoch Powell, a Channel 4 television broadcast in April 1998, on the thirtieth anniversary of his Birmingham speech (and two months after his death), 64% of the studio audience voted that Powell was not a racist. Some in the Church of England took a different view. Upon Powell's death, Wilfred Wood, then Bishop of Croydon, stated, "Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge".

Conservative commentator Bruce Anderson has claimed that the "Rivers of Blood" speech would have come as a complete surprise to anyone who had studied his record: he had been a West Midlands MP for 18 years but had said hardly anything about immigration. On this view, the speech was merely part of a badly miscalculated strategy to become party leader if Heath fell. Anderson adds that the speech had no effect on immigration, except to make it more difficult for the subject to be discussed rationally in polite society.

Powell's detractors often assert that he was 'far-right', 'proto-fascist' or 'racist'. His supporters claim that the first two charges clash with his voting record on most social issues, such as homosexual law reform (he was actually a co-sponsor of a bill on this issue in May 1965 and opposed the death penalty, both reforms unpopular among Conservatives at the time, but he kept a low profile to his stance on these non-party "issues of conscience". Powell voted against the reinstitution of the death penalty in 1969, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1983 and 1987. It was not until the late 1960s that he made speeches on immigration and nationality.

Powell's speeches and TV interviews throughout his political life displayed a suspicion towards "the Establishment" in general, and by the 1980s there was a regular expectation that he would make some sort of speech or act in a way designed to upset the government and ensure he would not be offered a life peerage (and thus be transferred to the House of Lords), which, some believe, had not any intention of accepting so long as Edward Heath sat in the Commons. (Heath remained in the Commons until after Powell's death.) He had opposed the Life Peerages Act and felt it would be hypocritical to accept a life peerage himself since no prime minister ever offered him a hereditary peerage.