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John Enoch Powell ( June 16, 1912 - February 8, 1998) was a controversial British politician, the controversy mainly stemming (with some irony) from a speech he made on immigration in 1968. Even before his death, Powell had long been treated as an icon by the far right and as a
Powell's only major cabinet post was as Minister for Health, in which he was responsible for promoting an ambitious ten year programme of general hospital building and for commencing the run down of the huge psychiatric institutions. In his famous 1961 "Water Tower" speech, he said:
"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside - the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault. Let me describe some of the defences which we have to storm."
Middlesex University
Later he encouraged a large number of Commonwealth immigrants into the understaffed National Health Service. Prior to this, many non-white immigrants were often obliged to take the jobs that no one else wanted (eg. street cleansing, night-shift assembly production lines), often paid considerably less than their white counterparts. Powell was vehemently opposed by the Trade Union movement (who feared that immigrants were being used by capitalists to keep wages low by artificially increasing competition for jobs), but there is no doubt that in easing non-white immigrants into what was considered a prestigious form of career, he boosted the confidence of the immigrant population and helped lay the foundations of a future immigrant-descended permanent Afro-Caribbean and Asian middle class in Britain.
1 Later life
Powell was noted for his oratorical skills, and for being a maverick who cared little about what harm he did to his party - or himself. In April 1968 he made a controversial speech in Birmingham, in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain. Because of its allusion to Virgil saying that the Tiber would foam with blood, Powell's warning was christened the Rivers of Blood Speech by the press, and the name stuck.
With appalling timing, Powell only realised later that of all the days he could have made a speech that some regarded as racist, it was on the anniversary of Hitler's birth - during a period of Britain's history when it was known that various notorious neo-Nazis such as Colin JordanColin Jordan (born 1923) was a leading representative of postwar National Socialism in Britain and around the world. As a student at Cambridge, Jordan had formed a "Nationalist Club", from where he was invited to join the short-lived British Peoples Party and John TyndallJohn Hutchyns Tyndall (born July 14 1934), nationalist British politician. Tyndall was first politically active in the League of Empire Loyalists (a right-wing pressure group) headed by A. Chesterton. In 1957, feeling that the League was not sufficiently (the latter a future leader of the National Front and founder of the British National PartyThe British National Party BNP is a United Kingdom political party, and is the largest political party of the far-right in the United Kingdom. History and overview The modern BNP was founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, a former chairman of the National Front) held birthday parties in the Nazi leader's honour.
Edward HeathThe Right Honourable Sir Edward Richard George Heath KG, MBE (born July 9, 1916) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. His spell in office represented a transition between the tr sacked Powell from his Shadow CabinetThe Shadow Cabinet (also called the Opposition Front Bench is a senior group of opposition spokespeople in the Westminster System of government who together under the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition (or the leader of other smaller opposition pa and Powell never held another senior political post. However, Powell gained considerable support from the public, receiving over 100,000 letters, and his popularity contributed to the Tories' surprise General Election win in 1970The United Kingdom general election of 1970 was held on June 18, 1970, and resulted in a surprise loss of power for Labour under Harold Wilson, who was replaced as Prime Minister by the Conservative leader, Edward Heath. The election was also a setback fo.
More to the point, some suspected that Powell was set up – TV cameras were not known to turn up at Conservative branch AGMs before, and some believe that Heath wanted Powell to take the rap for his party taking a tougher line on immigration later that year. Conversely, Powell had issued an advance copy of his speech to the media and their appearance at the speech may have been due to the fact that they realised the content was explosive. The Conservatives had discovered in nationwide studies in the wake of the notorious General Election result in Birmingham Smethwick in 1964 (where Peter Griffiths took the safe seat of Labour's pending Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker) that a hard line on immigration would win them up to twenty Labour seats, but it took their defeat in the 1966 general election to push the Tories into deciding to "play the race card".
In February 1974 Powell quit the Conservative Party, mainly because it had taken the UK into the European Common Market, and advised the electorate to vote Labour, who promised a referendum on whether or not the UK should remain in the EEC, as the only way to save the UK's sovereignty. He repeated this line in the October 1974 General Election, and the referendum was held in 1975. However the result was a clear vote to remain in "the Common Market" (as it was called on the ballot paper). Powell's Euroscepticism was fuelled by a belief that the Cold War was a sham because the Soviet Union was not intent on invading the West - so dependent was the USSR on receiving US and European grain surpluses for next to nothing - and so he did not see the need to maintain the Western alliance as other Conservatives did. He was also immensely suspicious of American foreign policy after what he deemed to be the American betrayal of British interests during the Suez Crisis.
