Elegy for a contrarian.

After Enoch Powell's death in February, at the age of eighty-five, he received the kind of broad-based acclaim from the British establishment never offered during the key battles of his lifetime, and denied him most particularly during the pivotal half dozen years after 1968, when he was expelled from the Tory leadership only to emerge as Britain's foremost "nationalist" politician. Thirty years later Paul Johnson wrote that save for Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, Powell would be the most remembered British political figure of the century. He probably has no equal in capacity to provoke argument. Barely two months after his death, the BBC's Channel Four put on the screen "The Trial of Enoch Powell" - a disparaging program whose very production nonetheless signaled the extent of Powell's pull on the public imagination.

Since he held no office higher than a minor ministry in an unremarkable Harold Macmillan cabinet, such appreciation was testament, certainly, to the extraordinary influence Powell accumulated entirely through the spoken and written expression of his ideas. But it was also an acknowledgment, more tacit than openly stated, that the issues for which Powell stood and fought - ones revolving around Britain's sovereignty and identity - remain as unsettled, vital, and potentially explosive as ever.

He was brilliant, a rare intellectual in politics. A scholarship boy from Birmingham who won all the classics prizes at Cambridge, Powell was named to a full professorship at the University of Sydney at the unprecedented age of twenty-five. During the war, which he spent mainly in North Africa and India doing intelligence work, he rose from the rank of private to brigadier general, the only soldier to make such a progression. Out of the army he entered politics as a Conservative and in 1950 won a seat in Wolverhampton, a largely lower-middle class city in the industrial midlands, not far from his birthplace. In Parliament he soon made his mark as his party's most forceful advocate of free markets, always ready to heap pointed derision on economic planning and escalating levels of public spending: a position quite at odds with the bipartisan Tory/Labour consensus - the socalled Butskellism - of the 1950s and 1960s.(1)

Powell's character was unusual for a politician. He was very much a loner, and had more than his share of quirkiness. He also possessed unmatched powers of concentration and a will to pursue matters to their ends. (His work in 1949 on a research brief on House of Lords reform, for example, culminated in his co-authorship, eighteen years later, of a massive scholarly tome, The House of Lords in the Middle Ages.) Though deeply patriotic, Powell was never a conservative jingoist, and early in his career became one of Parliament's voices of conscience against British mistreatment of prisoners suspected of terrorism during Kenya's Mau Mau uprising.

With his great talents, Powell progressed rapidly upward through his party's ranks, and his principled resignation as a junior minister in 1958 over a matter of budget policy did him little harm. By the beginning of 1968, he was firmly established in the small circle of Tory leaders, the defense spokesman in Edward Heath's shadow cabinet. Had he stayed on course and played the game in orthodox fashion, it is quite likely that the party would have turned to him rather than the little-known Margaret Thatcher after Heath's defeat in 1974. But orthodoxy was not his forte.

A single powell speech, delivered before eighty-five members of a Birmingham Conservative club on a Saturday afternoon in April 1968, changed everything. In taking up the question of "colored immigration", Powell plunged into an issue that most politicians were careful to ignore. Evasiveness had begun as early as 1948, after the Labour Party's British Nationality Act gave 800 million former subjects of the dissolving empire (renamed the "New Commonwealth") the right of residence in the United Kingdom. When a steamer with 492 West Indians arrived that summer, it began to dawn on some British politicians that reduced transportation costs had opened up entirely new vistas of migration. As the flow picked up speed through the 1950s, a handful of Tory ministers grumbled and tried to prod the government to action. Churchill said measures would be taken when popular opinion was sufficiently aroused - which meant that nothing would be done while the immigrant totals were relatively small.

In 1953 a Civil Service report was commissioned, drafted (with a bluntness about perceived racial and cultural differences unimaginable in the present day), and circulated in the Cabinet, but it underestimated the future immigrant flow, and cautioned against any restriction that might "antagonize liberal opinion." The Conservative governments of the 1950s, committed to what has been described as a "Peace at any Price" policy of accommodation toward the trade unions, remained allergic to strong stands in nearly all policy realms, and immigration in those years was limited by nothing more than the expense of travel from the former colonies. By the mid-1950s, the burgeoning civil rights movements in the United States and South Africa had begun to loom over race-related discussions in Britain - one more reason for hesitation. The annual New Commonwealth immigrant flow surpassed 50,000, then 100,000, and was approaching 200,000 by 1962, when the Tories finally pushed through a significant modification against Labour Party opposition, giving entry rights only to immigrants with specific job offers or needed skills, together with their dependents.

The new law still allowed a considerable influx, mainly from the West Indies and the Indian subcontinent. By 1968 total postwar immigration numbered roughly 1.25 million, and was concentrated in a few urban districts (including Powell's). They were little noticed in the rest of the country. Still, by the mid-1960s, back benchers representing affected areas were beginning to complain. They got no support from party leaders: immigration was still not felt to be a pressing national issue, a perception that would now be undone by a single speech.

Powell began that speech quietly enough:

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. . . . [But] people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even desiring troubles. . . . The discussion of future grave but with effort now avoidable evils is the most necessary occupation for the politician.

Then Powell proceeded to launch a bomb. He started by relating a conversation with a constituent who voiced the stark (and quite unrealistic) racial fear that in a generation "the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

"How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble by repeating such a conversation?" Powell asked.

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent ordinary fellow Englishman who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that this country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else.

He then went on to numbers. Both then and subsequently, Powell insisted that Britain could assimilate immigrants from any race or creed, provided their levels were manageable. But at then current rates of entry, by 1988 there would be 3.5 million New Commonwealth immigrants and they would be concentrated in several urban areas. Powell then read from a letter sent by relatives of an elderly English landlady tormented by immigrant toughs in a Birmingham neighborhood that had undergone a rapid demographic transformation, and noted that the Race Relations Act pushed by the Labour government of the day would give the new peoples tools to "organize and consolidate their members, agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens."

To see Britain take in 50,000 immigrant dependents annually, he maintained, "is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre." Then, in a passage that was to become perhaps the most controversial uttered by any politician in the second half of the twentieth century, he concluded,

As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman I seem to see 'the river Tiber foaming with much blood.' The tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic, which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming here by our own volition and our neglect. . . . All I know is that to see and not to speak would be the great betrayal.

Powell's Birmingham audience was not in the least shocked. But the national press, with an advance copy of the text, recognized that such words from a figure of Powell's eminence were political dynamite. By the next day, a Sunday, reports of the "rivers of blood" speech ran on every front page and led every television news bulletin. That evening, Heath consulted with Tory leaders and then curtly dismissed Powell from the shadow cabinet. On Monday an editorial in the Times denounced "An Evil Speech" and most other papers followed suit.

Then something remarkable happened: While the political and journalistic elite were closing ranks against Powell, a great section of the people rallied to him. By Tuesday he had received 45,000 letters from every part of Great Britain. The overwhelming majority lauded Powell (generally in temperate and non-racist language); many swore that he was the only politician in Britain willing to tell the truth. Every immigration officer at Heathrow signed a petition backing Powell. On Tuesday, thousands of dock workers rallied outside Parliament in his support, and national opinion polls began to record landslide margins (between 67 and 82 percent) favoring him.

Thus was born "Powellism" - the phenomenon of a man stripped of his party post, kept at a distance by most Tory colleagues in Parliament, vilified by the prestige press, but who nevertheless emerged for a time as Britain's most popular political figure. The tumultuous aftermath of a single speech demonstrated beyond any doubt that the establishment consensus on New Commonwealth immigration was not even remotely shared by the British people, who had suddenly found the most eloquent man in Parliament to voice their feelings.

Powell resisted entreaties (and offers of funds) to form his own party or Tory faction; indeed, he seldom returned to the immigration issue though he would be linked to it for the rest of his life. When he did, in several speeches and televised forums in the next few years, he did not retreat an inch, and as a result the issue got the kind of thorough intellectual going over that it hadn't received before or since in any Western country. Powell mocked the Times editors who denounced as "fantasies of racial purity" the idea that a child born of English parents in Beijing was not Chinese but English, and that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham was not English but Indian. He sparred with Anglican bishops who maintained that only by allowing a generous flow of immigrants could white Britons have the chance to become true Christians. He heard a candidly elitist formulation (from Auberon Waugh) that New Commonwealth immigrants should be welcomed because they would make Britain a less egalitarian society. And he never flinched from drawing on all the power latent in the English language to drive home his points.

He could, at times, go too far. Commenting in the early 1970s on the growing immigrant stream produced by arranged marriages between British Indians and families on the Subcontinent, Powell said:

It is by 'black power' that the headlines are caught and under the shape of the Negro that the consequences for Britain of immigration and what is miscalled 'race' are popularly depicted. Yet it is more truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who will dispute with him possession of his native land.

Given the size of Asian immigration at the time Powell spoke these words, such a statement was belligerent to the point of recklessness.

Due in great part to Powell, immigration to Britain was to stay relatively small. Powellism put Britain's political class on notice about popular attitudes, and while Heath and other leading Tories regularly derided Powell for his "tone", they edged toward his positions. Speaking the next year before the same Birmingham political club as Powell had addressed, Heath talked of getting down to "brass tacks" on immigration - and proceeded to spell out proposals that made it sound as if in the future a native of Bombay would be able to get more easily to the moon than to Birmingham. In 1973 a Heath-led Parliament tightened the laws of entry. In 1978 a still untried opposition leader Margaret Thatcher spoke of the need for yet more restrictions, telling a radio audience that without reforms Britain would have four million people - "an awful lot" - from the New Commonwealth and Pakistan. She added, "the British character has historically done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world" and it was understandable that people feared it might be "swamped by people with a different culture." She was condemned, of course, but rose in the polls, and in 1981 her government did pass further restrictions. Because of Powellism, contemporary Britain is less multiracial and multicultural than it would have been otherwise. Powell always maintained that smaller numbers would facilitate assimilation, and Britain today, while hardly free of racial strife, is more residentially integrated and has more intermarriage between people of different groups than the United States.

Powell did not win his other great battle with the Tory leadership, the one over British entry into "Europe." After 1968 he was skirmishing with Heath along a wide front, endorsing the Tories in 1970, breaking with them in 1974 and refusing to run for his seat. (Such was Powell's influence that, in the opinion of some good judges, his words probably swung both elections; he later returned to Parliament to represent a Northern Ireland district as an Ulster Unionist.) In the early 1970s he lambasted Heath's management of the economy and his drawing Britain into the European Economic Community. He frequently traveled to the Continent to speak against Britain's entry into the EEC, doing so in fluent French, German, and Italian (while most of the "pro-Europe" British politicians could only mangle a few strangled phrases in those languages). He stressed that British sovereignty could be expressed only through its Parliament: joining Europe would render Britain subject to bureaucrats who "know nothing of the political rights and liberties that we have so long taken for granted."

But despite considerable Labour Party support, the anti-EEC campaign tended to veer off into arcane issues of tariffs and agricultural prices, and never penetrated the popular consciousness the way immigration had done. Powell worried that the British middle classes were rallying to the EEC because it was pro-capitalist, a buffer against Britain's left-wing unions. He dreaded a Tory party that was becoming "a party of class and not of nation", and in his last decades in Parliament his nationalism took clear precedence over the free market advocacy that had been a feature of his earlier political life (characteristically, when it had been very unpopular).

This overriding concern with the idea of the nation was hardly typical of political leaders of the postwar West. De Gaulle (whom Powell admired) was perhaps the only other major figure who shared it. When this French statesman said that the nation-state and democracy were the same thing, he was making the fundamental point that people who do not feel themselves part of the same nation as their fellow citizens will not readily accept the verdicts of democracy when majorities go against them. Such an idea underlay Powell's arguments against Britain's entry into "Europe"; but there is much in it for Americans to ponder as their country becomes increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural.

To an American who finds Powell more right than wrong on the "national questions", his long-held disdain for the United States is a bitter pill. It arose first in the Second World War, when Powell was shocked at what he perceived as America's wasteful (in terms of military resources) way of warfare. The "rivers of blood" speech owed much to the racial strife Powell witnessed in the United States during a 1967 visit. In the last decade of the Cold War he would argue that however unpleasant the Soviet system, it posed little threat to Britain. When American conservatives warned against Europe's "self-Finlandization" vis-a-vis Moscow, Powell retorted that Britain had already Finlandized itself in relation to Washington. Such thoughts were then rare (or at least seldom voiced) among European conservatives, but they may be a harbinger: even in the democratic West, the United States is not loved so automatically as Americans sometimes assume.

Powell saw Margaret Thatcher turn into policy - and then into bipartisan orthodoxy - the respect for the free market he had advocated in his early days in Parliament; on immigration he changed the political climate almost single-handedly. Yet it is still not clear how much of his influence was durable. He lost on the key issue of Britain's entry into Europe; more generally, Powellism is out of fashion in all the major Western conservative parties, where free market concerns now take clear precedence over national ones. If these parties become (as Powell might have put it) parties of class and not of nation, he would not be surprised to see them flounder - and indeed, they are either out of power or lagging severely in the polls in all the Western democracies. It may be that what the Tories - and indeed all of the conservative parties of the West - need most is another dose of Powellism.

1 The term referred to that compromising, evasive, and muddled approach to political affairs, adopted by both parties in the 1950s and 1960s, and described by an elision of the names of the Conservative Rab Butler and Labour's Hugh Gaitskell. It implied a corporatist approach to economic and social problems.

Scott McConnell is a writer based in New York City.