POLITICS
How John the Baptist lost his head
NOEL MALCOLM
April was the cruellest month, in 1968, for the career of one of this country's most extraordinary politicians. For next Wednesday will be the 20th anniversary of the notorious 'rivers of blood' speech delivered in Birmingham by Enoch Powell. 'Rivers of blood' is a paraphrase rather than a quotation: the actual words were, 'As I look ahead, I am filled with forebod- ing. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood".' But the paraphrase is a forgivable one. The quotation is from the Sybil's prophecy in Book VI of the Aeneid, and the Sybil's imagery was not a mere metaphor but a reference to real blood, shed in the fighting between an indigenous population and an invading one.
In later speeches, Mr Powell insisted that the point he was making was essential- ly about numbers. The presence of a single black person, his argument ran, was in no sense a problem. The integration of several hundred thousand into the population was a problem which would solve itself gradual- ly over time; but the assimilation of several million, with their number being added to by a large and continual influx, was a problem so insoluble that it could only lead in the end to disorder and violence.
The numerical part of Mr Powell's pre- diction was fairly accurate: he claimed that by 1988 roughly four per cent of the population would be coloured, as in fact it is. Yet the rest of his prophecy is a dead letter. No doubt racial hostilities did play a part in the inner-city riots of 1981 and 1985; but the main problem highlighted by those riots was the existence of a poorly educated underclass of disaffected youths, both black and white. Mr Hurd's comment on the ransacking of shop windows in Handsworth can hardly be gainsaid: 'not so much a cry for help, as a cry for loot'.
Does the failure of Mr Powell's prophe- cy mean, then, that the indigenous popula- tion can congratulate itself on the degree of tolerance which it has shown in adjusting to such a major social change? I don't see why not — though self-congratulation is of course always invidious, and the idea that no one could have done better is a false one. Asian families in East London are still suffering revolting attacks, with excrement or fire-bombs being put through their letter-boxes. And old-fashioned racial pre- judice is, it seems, alive and well in Bristol, where the BBC's latest piece of investiga- tive journalism suggests (on a thin statistic- al basis) that one third of the bed-and- breakfast landladies will tell black appli- cants, untruthfully, that they have no vacancies.
Mr Powell explained in 1968 that he was simply giving voice to the feelings and the experiences of ordinary individuals in his constituency. There is some conflict, perhaps, between that claim and the claim that he was talking only about numbers: no individual actually experiences the pre- sence of a million coloured people or (except in very general, impressionistic terms) the difference between one million and three. Individual experience is particu- lar, local and personal. And most people know that in all their personal dealings with other individuals they should apply the same rules of morality and common decency.
That, rather than legislation or the bullying of the race relations industry, is the essential reason why Mr Powell's san- guinary prophecy remains unfulfilled.
In one sense, Mr Powell's raising of the immigration issue in 1968 was simply a particular application of a much more general principle: the principle of attacking the assumption that governments know better. He was indeed trying to stir up resentment — not against black or Asian people, but against the attitude of succes- sive governments which had brought about a major social change without showing any willingness to discuss its effects, beyond telling the population that it was somehow good for them to become multicultural and multi-racial. This was the principle which had governed all his political thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. As he explained over the over again, governments cannot be assumed to be more wise or more virtuous than their citizens. Whether running indus- tries, or making 'national plans' for the economy, or setting exchange rates, or fixing fair rents, or deciding the price of cheese — Governments Do Not Know Better.
So much of this has become common- place now among Conservatives that we can easily forget just how especially Powel- lite it was at the time. Long before Mrs Thatcher started reading von Hayek (or having it read to her by Sir Keith Joseph), Mr Powell was insisting that the 'ratchet' of socialism could be turned back, and was expounding the intrinsic connection be- tween the twin virtues of a free market: efficiency and freedom. His speeches from this period stand out head and shoulders above those of his Conservative colleagues and rivals, and it is a matter of historical regret that one special controversy should have shunted him into a political siding from which he could never be hauled back. But could anyone so hostile to the comfort- able 'consensus' ever have become party leader? There is an answer to that ques- tion. She did. Ah, but could anyone who was such a stickler, so awkward, so meticu- lous, so abrasive? There is an answer to that question too. . . .
In October 1968, while the Conservative Party Conference was in session at Black- pool, Mr Powell addressed a meeting in Morecambe at which he set out a possible 'budget' of radical change in fiscal and economics policies. His general proposal was to cut public expenditure and slash income tax: the standard rate of tax, he argued, could be brought down from 8s 3d to 4s 3d in the pound (approximately 21p). In order to pay for this, he proposed cutting quangos, investment grants and foreign aid, 'returning housing to private enterprise', and, above all, selling most of the nationalised industries back to the private sector.
No one who reads Mr Powell's More- cambe budget can deny that he did, after all, possess prophetic powers of a high order. And, like all good prophets, he was duly dishonoured in his own country. The Observer printed an article by an econo- mics professor, entitled 'Why Enoch's budget is such utter rubbish', which ex- plained, in the tones of someone addres- sing a mentally retarded 12-year-old, that nationalised industries could never be sold off because the private sector would never be able to pay for a sufficient level of investment in them.
But there was at least one publication which did justice to Mr Powell's fun- damental aims. A forceful editorial in The Spectator asserted: 'Total denationalisation is manifestly an impracticable objective. . . . But what really matters is whether this is the general direction in which the policy of the Conservative party ought to move. . . . We believe 'that the answer is "yes".' It all seems like a long time ago now — a time when the price of a copy of The Spectator was 2s, and the editor's name was Nigel Lawson.
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