Abstract
A biography meets social history, Camilla Schofield’s Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain is a well-researched and necessary corrective to the usual hagiographies, and thankfully does not ponder whether the infamous anti-immigrant British MP ‘was right’.
For Schofield, attempts either to humanise or dehumanise Powell ‘fail as history’. Perhaps, but a cool and critical distance is what Powell’s defenders past and present call for. This is not to say that this book is sympathetic towards Powell, and there are advantages to Schofield’s approach. Powell emerges not just as a personally repellent individual, whose deference to authority and hierarchy trumped real political principle, but as a man who was forged by the decline of Empire; the scared Englishman trying to reassert his place in the world. In this, much more than just the life of Enoch Powell is discussed.
As the publisher’s endorsement says, ‘through Powell’, the author ‘illuminates the complex relationship between British social democracy, racism and the politics of imperial decline in Britain’. The book certainly does this, but the emphasis on using Powell as vector has its limitations. Schofield’s mastery of Powell’s extensive archives is apparent, but some readers may find extended exposure to Powell’s opinions and those of his letter-writers unappealing. Further, the relationship between ‘post-colonial’ Britain and popular racism could benefit from an extended consideration of Britain as a neocolonial power. While Schofield considers the links between migrant communities and independence struggles elsewhere, those between post-war British foreign policy and popular racism are less developed.
Nonetheless, this book provides a definitive and corrective account of Enoch Powell the man. Powell’s years spent in Egypt and India during the second world war are shown to have left a lasting impression. While many of those who experienced the horrors of war came away with quite different views, it embedded in Powell a love of war as the ultimate sacrifice to the nation, and a profound belief in the superior place of the English(man). In 1947, for example, Powell tried to persuade Churchill to impose martial law in India. Powell was convinced the ‘unique and necessary’ presence of colonial rule would be forever welcome. Though rebuffed by Churchill, Schofield shows that Powell’s influence in British politics began before and extended well beyond the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
In 1959, Powell spoke in a Commons debate on the Hola massacre. Hola was a detention centre in use during the ‘Kenyan emergency’ and was the site of the beating to death of eleven Mau Mau prisoners. Powell broke with the Conservative Party line by condemning the treatment of the Mau Mau prisoners, arguing that the responsibility for the deaths at Hola lay with the Kenyan colonial ministers. Ever since, and still today, Powell’s ‘Hola speech’ is used by his supporters as the counterpoint to any accusation that Powell was racist. How could he be – he said the merciless beating to death of unarmed prisoners was the wrong way to govern a colonial subject! Even Michael Foot would conclude ‘I do not think he was ever a racist’, in light of the Hola speech. Schofield shows that ‘for all the drama surrounding the debate … little is actually made of the contents of his argument’. Powell’s response to the Hola massacre was to retell it as ‘essentially un-British … the actions of colonial forces without British leadership’. Powell’s line of argument was to be adopted wholesale in the years to come, easing the way for the British state to deflect ongoing responsibility for the manifold crimes of empire. As late as 2013, the British government would argue in court it had no case to answer to elderly Kenyan torture survivors because responsibility lay not with the British state but with the colonial administration, a responsibility passed on to the Republic of Kenya at independence. That a speech that precipitated such a profoundly racist policy can be trotted out in support of Powell-the-non-racist is rather dispiriting.
The Hola camp speech stood as Powell’s most significant political intervention until 1968 when he spoke at the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. Appearing in a small hotel room with ample press in attendance (he had informed them in advance of the ‘fizz’ he planned to make), what came to be known as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech is remembered for its violently anti-immigrant content, backed up with dubious anecdotes from his constituents. It was a level of race-baiting not seen before from a mainstream politician.
The speech, ‘despite all [its] intellectualism’, as Schofield puts it, ‘sounded definitively fascist’. What happened next is well known. Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Edward Heath and roundly condemned by the mainstream parties (and even Oswald Mosley) for the speech’s tone. Immediately, the argument, that Powell’s style was misguided but he reflected genuine fears, was put forth, as it still is today. He was disciplined by his Conservative colleagues not for his views, but for how he went about airing them.
The distinction between content and style mattered little. It took only ten days after the speech for the consequences to be reported in Wolverhampton, where fourteen young whites attacked and stabbed West Indian partygoers at a christening, chanting ‘Powell’ as they did so.
The true substance of Powell’s address was to create a bridge between the Tory Right and the fascist fringe, both of which were able to recruit and expand in its wake. Dockworkers famously struck in support of Powell, but were actually joined in protests by workers across England, including immigration officers at Heathrow. On May Day 1968, some of those same workers would end the day fighting with anti-Powell student demonstrators. The majority of his supporters stayed indoors, however, where Powell’s middle- and upper-middle class support base preferred to write letters. By 1970, Powell even had his own supporters’ magazine, the Powellite, its name a pun on the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. The magazine was edited from the home of close Powell confidante Beryl ‘Bee’ Carthew, who joined the National Front in 1975. Powell wrote to her saying he would never condemn her abandoning the Conservatives, his only objection appearing to be that he was ‘obstinately … parliamentarian’, and saw no future in the smaller parties.
Britain’s black communities and new migrants did not take the explosion in popular racism Powell caused lying down, and if there can be any positive element to his legacy, it is this. As the dockers marched in support of Powell, fifty separate organisations joined forces under the banner of the Black People’s Alliance. A year later, in 1969, 8,000 demonstrated in a ‘March for Dignity’ against racism and the 1968 Immigration Act, a turning point in Britain’s burgeoning black power movement. Outside 10 Downing Street, as Schofield recounts, an effigy of Powell was ripped from a coffin and set alight. One half of the coffin was painted black, labelled Common, the other, white, was marked Wealth.
An anti-racist, anti-imperialist resistance flourished in the face of Enoch Powell. Inspiration for the fight against those who would revive his ideas can surely be found in the history of struggle that emerged against him in life.