BETWEEN ENOCH AND IAIN

Robert Shepherd on how a notorious

speech affected the friendship of two renowned Tories

THE DEBATE about Enoch Powell's `River Tiber' speech was revived when he died in February, but the drama has obscured an important story that can be pieced together from Cabinet papers and the pages of The Spectator. It illuminates Britain's attempt to balance the hon- ourable discharge of its imperial legacy with the exigencies of immigration control. And it closes the chapter on Powell's estrangement from Lain Macleod, his old friend and former editor of The Spectator, that began in 1968.

The speech was prompted by Labour's Race Relations Bill, which was due to be debated in the Commons after the Easter recess. This legislation had been long promised, but its eventual introduction in April 1968 was — like Powell's bombshell — part of the reaction to the immigration of thousands of Kenyan Asians since the previous summer.

After Kenyatta's government stepped up its Kenyanisation policy in 1967, increasing numbers of Kenyan Asians entered the United Kingdom, despite the controls on Commonwealth immigration imposed by the Conservatives in 1962. In October 1967, Powell alleged that the Kenyan Asians enjoyed the right to enter Britain because of an 'unforeseen loophole' in the 1962 legislation.

In January 1968, Duncan Sandys, who had been colonial and Commonwealth sec- retary when Kenya became independent, planned to introduce a private member's bill to stop the influx. According to Sandys, the safeguards granted to Kenyan minori- ties were never intended to provide 'a priv- ileged back-door entry into the United Kingdom'. Powell boosted the emotional voltage on 9 February by speaking in Wal- sall of 'the sense of hopelessness and help- lessness' that people felt 'in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns'. On Thursday, 22 February, the Labour home secretary, James Callaghan, respond- ed to this highly charged atmosphere by announcing emergency legislation to extend the 1962 Act to cover UK passport- holders not connected by birth or descent with the United Kingdom. As a result, Kenyan Asians lost the right of entry. On the day of Callaghan's statement, early copies of the latest issue of The Spectator arrived at Westminster containing an open letter to Sandys from lain Macleod, the then shadow chancellor.

As colonial secretary from 1959 to 1961, Macleod had launched decolonisation in East Africa. In a crushing riposte to Sandys's talk of 'a privileged back-door entry', he wrote: 'Leaving aside the emotive words, that is exactly what was proposed: special entry in certain circumstances which have now arisen. We did it. We meant to do it. And in the event we had no other choice.'

Macleod did not refer specifically to Powell, but he implicitly rejected the lat- ter's claim that there was an 'unforeseen loophole' in the 1962 Act. Recalling that although this legislation had ended the days when 'anyone anywhere from our Commonwealth or colonies could come to Britain', Macleod emphasised that 'it did not change the special citizenship provi- sions in half a dozen countries' for whose independence he and Sandys were largely responsible.

The circumstances during 1961 when the first immigration controls were drafted are critical. The legislation was primarily intended to curb immigration by West Indi- ans, but ministers were also anxious to allow white settlers in East and Central Africa unrestricted entry. The bloody chaos of the Congo after Belgium's hasty flight in 1960 was an object lesson. It was hoped that if white settlers in British colonies knew that they could obtain a UK passport after independence, they would not quit as soon as the union flag was lowered.

This factor was uppermost in Macleod's mind at the Colonial Office, but it did not register with Powell. In April 1961, when he was minister of health, he proposed to the Cabinet committee on Commonwealth migrants that the existing citizenship of the United Kingdom and colonies should be divided into a 'citizenship of the United Kingdom' and a separate 'citizenship of the colonies'. Citizens of Commonwealth coun- tries and the colonies would thereby lose their right of entry. But officials warned that groups such as Europeans in Kenya `might resent being deprived of their citi- zenship'. Powell's plan was shelved.

However, the new citizenship provisions in East Africa meant that exempting white settlers from immigration control also necessitated exempting many Asians. Despite British efforts, African nationalist leaders insisted on qualifications that would deny automatic citizenship on inde- pendence to many non-Africans. As a result, large numbers of Asians remained citizens of the UK and colonies and, as such, were eligible for UK passports, but nobody assumed that many East African Asians would want to come to Britain.

This assumption changed during 1963 and triggered an event to which Powell alluded during the passage of Heath's 1971 Immigration Act. Seizing on comments by Monty Woodhouse, who had been a Home Office minister in 1963, Powell alleged that it was only in the run-up to Kenyan independence that the Home Office alert- ed others in government to the problem.

The story then moves on to 1994 and The Spectator. Reviewing my biography of Macleod, Powell wrote that it enabled him to close the breach between them. Powell accepted that there was a commitment that nobody would become stateless as a result of Kenyan independence, but argued that this was misconstrued as a right of unrestricted entry to Britain. 'Thus did the equation of "statelessness" with lack of unconditional admission to the United Kingdom', he wrote, 'become the cause of Macleod attributing to me opin- ions and attitudes which he had good rea- son to know I did not hold, as one who had enthusiastically supported his African Policies as Colonial Secretary.' But it was only later, when I was writing my biography of Powell, that the relevant Cabinet papers for 1963 were released. They show that a key meeting of the Cabi- net's Commonwealth immigration commit- tee was held on 30 October 1963, less than a fortnight after Powell and Macleod had left office, having refused to serve under Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Had Powell been able to attend this meeting, to which he had alluded in 1971, instead of detecting a conspiracy he might have spoken of minis- ters' concern to act honourably. Henry Brooke, the then home secretary, explained that the Kenyan Asians were starting to think of coming to Britain. They could enter without restriction because `there has been no alternative but for us to agree that they should retain their United Kingdom citizenship'. Withdrawing their citizenship and rendering them stateless was 'out of the question'. It was 'equally out of the question' not to accord normal passports to United Kingdom citizens of Asian origin, with the aim of rendering them subject to the immigration controls. `Such action would be, and would be seen to be', he declared, 'a discrimination based on racial origin.' Ministers at the meeting included Sandys and a junior minister for national insurance and pensions, Margaret Thatcher. None of them demurred.

Powell's notion that the problem would have been avoided by detaching the right of entry from citizenship was as impracti- cal as his belief in large-scale repatriation. The 1968 Act removed the Asians' right of entry. But it was soon nullified when the government accepted that because those with British citizenship had no right of entry to anywhere else, Britain would admit them if they were expelled from Kenya and had nowhere else to go. Macleod was more practical when he sug- gested postponing other immigration until the Kenyan Asian crisis was resolved.

The truth is that Powell's breach with Macleod was a chasm. His post-imperialist conversion to English nationalism and dis- dain for the Commonwealth put him at odds with the Tory who espoused the `brotherhood of man'. But whereas Powell postured as the people's champion, Macleod was the practical politician.

Robert Shepherd's biographies of lain Macleod and Enoch Powell are published by Pimlico.