Powell power Sir: May I register some surprise at your
coverage (31 July) of the article on Powellism by Douglas Schoen and myself in New Society? The article (whose evidence is greatly amplified in Schoen's Enoch Powell and the Powellites, forthcoming from Macmillan) showed fairly conclusively how considerable Powell's impact on the elections of 1970 and February 1974 actually was. This central finding, which makes no little difference to an understanding of our recent political history, you dismiss as unoriginal, citing John Wood's useful work, Enoch Powell and the 1970 General Election. In fact Wood's book includes one article of eight pages, anonymously contributed, on Powell's actual effect on voting behaviour. It concludes (p. 91) by suggesting that the Conservative victory could be explained by the release of bad trade figures, England's World Cup defeat, Powell's speeches, or Labour's soft-sell campaign, commenting that 'No one knows whether any or none of these explanations is particularly important'. It then appeals to 'commonsense judgment' in deciding that Powell and the World
Cup result were of (apparently equal?) importance.
Far be it from me to question the commonsense judgment of Wood's anonymous contributor—he was guessing shrewdly enough. What we hoped our article would do would be to remove the question from precisely this sort of world of guesswork. The entire point of our exhaustive study of virtually all the extant poll and survey data was to do just that. This in itself was an original enterprise as was (surely you would admit) the finding on February 1974. We certainly did not believe ourselves to be re-stating the obvious but, rather, were conscious of how our findings contradicted a considerable body of academic and journalistic writing, perhaps most notably the Nuffield election studies. Your dismissal of our findings as unoriginal would, in fact, have been more merited had we concluded on the side of this conventional wisdom, rather than against it. R. W. Johnson Magdalen College, Oxford
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