Enoch Powell
By IA IN MACLEOD
ENOCE! POWEl.L has the finest mind in the House"of Commons. The best trained, and the most exciting. There is an attitude of mind Which can be called 'Powellism' and it is ex- Cellent that now we have the evidence collected In a book.* Powellism is not wholly or even a mainly a right-wing creed: by those rather absurd touchstones that 'progressives' delight to Ilse—abolition of corporal and capital punish- ment, implementation of the Wolfenden Report, )1I the humanising of penal and mental health re- rPrm' --Powell is a progressive. Typically, Powell declines to be typed. He does not fit • into any Pulitical slot. He is just Enoch Powell.
John Wood has arranged this collection of
rowell's speeches and articles (mainly from October 1963, when the Macmillan government ended, to the spring of this year) with care and With an obvious affection both for the man and for his work. Yet Wood is too faithful a disciple. Powell's thought over the years has not been as remorselessly consistent as it is pre- sented. When he was Financial Secretary to the it TreasurY, under Peter .Thorneycroft as Chan- eellor, Powell was advocating with passion and conviction a sort of incomes policy. In spite of his scorn for planners and their plans. Powell as Minister of Health produced the two ten-year Plans for hospitals and for health and welfare. 'A foolish consistency,' said Emerson, 'is the hob- en of Little minds.' And surely John Wood's th°ngUe must have been wedged in his check when e wrote in the preface that Powell's ideas might fulfil Keynes's hope 'that the day is not far off When the Economic Problem will take the back sreat where it belongs. . . No one could be far- ther away than Powell from the philosophy of keYnes. It is, indeed, one of the main reasons Why Powell is always challenging and stimulating to listen to or to read. Enoch Powell is abrupt and shy, gruff and gentle. There is still much of the professor in ItIhim, and his speeches, carefully drafted and usualiV written out in full before delivery, are Meant to provoke and irritate. They have, then, an element of overstatement in them. This is not accident. It is the professor of Greek driving his t_students into realms beyond the textbooks in the "Pe that he will stir a spirit of adventurous research in those who listen. Sometimes he seems to take great pains, almost delight, in hiding the fact that he h a kind and generous person. Because, he detests the cult of the personality, he will sit, arms folded, at a Party conference, while One of his colleagues is given a standing ovation, but he will (sometimes) Seek Out the orator afterwards and explain that 7, thought it an excellent speech, but that he VsaPproved of demonstrations. And I remem- „,er 'Very well in June 1952 sitting in my room `1 the House of Commons and wondering ` desperately how to cope with a situation that had. crashed upon me. My wife was gravely ill With polio, I was trying to learn the job of Minister of Health, to which I had been appointed a month earlier, and to conjure up a hundred .olutions for all our family worries. Enoch strode ,1.11I,to the room and threw a key on my desk. here's a room ready in my flat,' he said. 'Come and go as you wish.' And the door banged behind him. If there is a key to Enoch Powell it lies in * N toN NOT AFRAID. The Thinking of Enoch Edited by John Wood. (Batsford. 30s.) his religion. One of his poems begins: 'I do believe in body's resurrection,' and it is easy to hear his faith in his words. The faith some- times of a martyr, sometimes of a fanatic. Powell is a Tory, a romantic, a poet and a mystic. He is also a man who rejoices in his family. He is, I imagine, a happy man—but he is also restless.
Enoch arrived at the Conservative parliamen- tary secretariat a few weeks ahead of me. He was already something of a legend. He used to travel from Earls Court on a workman's ticket at some unearthly hour of the morning and in full hunt- ing pink, to revel in a day's hunting. We were appointed jointly to be head of the home affairs section, when the secretariat was reorganised, and for fifteen years our paths have run together, diverged and come together again.
1 admire Powell's work. I can best describe the affinity between us by concentrating on the difference. I am a fellow-traveller, but sometimes 1 leave Powell's train a few stations down the line, before it reaches, and sometimes crashes into, the terminal buffers. I am certainly less logical in my political approach, but I would argue that Powell suffers sometimes from an excess of logic. There is much in common, for example, in the speeches we have been making recenly on the trade unions. The difference between us is, I think, that I believe (was it Theodore Roosevelt who first.used the phrase?) that 'human labour is not a commodity': Powell believes that for all practical purposes it is. So his logical train of thought carries him beyond the implications of the Rookes v. Barnard case to a devastating indictment of collective bargain- ing, and to something very near to an obsession against what he constantly calls 'private coer- cion.' I do not share these views, although I find it difficult to explain why. It may be, of course, in part because I was Minister of Labour for nearly four years, but I like to think that there is a more rational explanation, and that it lies in a difference of definition.
'If ever the history of economic hallucinations comes to be written, the idea that governments possess the knowledge and power positively to determine the rate of economic growth through the technique of central economic planning will be revealed as one of the most widespread, tenacious and harmful of errors.' This assertion is the first commandment of Powellism, but, in fact, it is the first sentence of Professor Jewkes's article on 'The Perils of Planning' in the June issue of the Three Banks Review. Powell is the political prophet of the Institute of Economic Affairs. With his views on the "market' I find myself again in substantial agreement, but again with at least one key point of disagreement. I believe in regional planning: Powell does not. I do not believe that in an affluent society the laws of supply and demand are as inexorable as Powell holds them to be. This time 'the difference is one of degree.
In the rethinking of policy that is now being pursued in the Tory party, Powellism gams con- verts every day. Much of our programme when the general election comes will be based on the ideas in this book. As Jong as we are wise enough not to swallow it all. Powell's medicine will do us a power of good.
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