Another voice
Alas, poor Enoch!
Auberon Waugh
Few Englishmen outside the racing fraternity. I imagine, ever go to Doncaster. It is said to have a fine mansion house, built in 1748. The Corn Exchange (1873) might be worth a visit. It is built on a coalfield, which might make more sensitive visitors nervous. There is only one hotel there listed in Michelin's Guide to Great Britain, and that is of the fourth class: 'Good Average Hotel'. For all that, it is a town of some 83,000 souls — or at any rate bodies — of whom 43,260 voted in the last election, returning someone called Mr Harold Walker (whom I do not think I have had the pleasure of meeting) in the Labour interest with a respectable 51 per cent of votes cast. Mr Walker, who has been returned to Parliament from Doncaster ever since he first stood there in 1964, has actually been a Minister of State in the Department of Employment since 1976, although one might never have guessed. He is undoubtedly one of Manchester Technical College's success stories. A salary of £8,250 plus parliamentary allowances with, no doubt, a couple of quangoes waiting for him.
None of which really explains what Enoch was doing there on Saturday, or why. the United Ulster Unionist Member for South Down chose Doncaster to deliver his blood-curdling prophecy that by the end of the century Britain would be allied with Russia and Japan against China, Europe and the United States.
'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times. . . Here hung those lips that I have kist I know not how oft.
One does not wish to overdo the anguish, of course, but there is a general feeling among Enoch fanciers that in these troubled times their man is not rising to the occasion. He conceded at Doncaster — an important concession, and a significant place to make it — that his views were not usual. He surmised that they might be damaging to a politician, 'albeit one exiled from office or the prospect of office'. But he saw it as his duty to remind the British that 'nationhood was about independence', and argued from our refusal to join the European Monetary System that we would return to Russia as our 'ultimate guarantee of the survival of Britain as an independent nation'.
Oh dear. Alas, alas poor Enoch. Has he nothing to say about the state of Britain today where the hospitals and schools are closed, the water is poisoned, corpses lie unburied, food shops are empty, victims of car crashes and street accidents are littered on the roads? Reading lurid accounts of contemporary Britain — I confess that Combe Florey seems much the same as usual — one is reminded of the recent report from Spanish Equatorial Guinea, where life President Macias Nguema has just celebrated ten years of his country's independence. Before independence, Equatorial Guinea had the highest per capita income in Africa, there was only 11 per cent illiteracy, and commerce thrived. Since _independence (or nationhood) ships calling at ports in Equatorial Guinea have fallen from 633 a year to ten; cocoa exports, on which the country depended, have fallen by ninety per cent; the fishing industry has collapsed; the post office is closed and so is the national bank since its last director was publicly tortured to death.
This is all the work of Macias Nguema, who describes himself as El Unico Miraglo (The Unique Miracle). But has our own Unique Miracle, Mr James Callaghan, done so very much better? Steel, shipbuilding and motor manufacturing — the greater part of our heavy industry — have collapsed; food and petrol are virtually unobtainable and then at exorbitant prices; schools and hospitals are closed, corpses lying unattended . . . well, perhaps, our Ingles Miraglo isn't quite so Unico as that of Equatorial Guinea, but surely it is striking enough to convince people who compare our performance with that of other members of the Economic Community that words like 'nationhood' and 'national sovereignty' are scarcely the main hurrah-noises of the moment. At present it would seem that anything which reduces our national sovereignty and takes power away from the unscrupulous national leadership is to be commended.
Never mind that Enoch's historical vision of Russia as the traditional guarantee of British independence is drivel. Few people even knew that Russia existed before the eighteenth century. It joined the Great War as an ally of France, not Britain, while its participation in the Napoleonic and Hitler wars, as everyone knows, was at best involuntary. But the reason for his dabbling in these preposterous visions is crucial to his predicament, and that is the predicament of a politician exiled from the prospect of office.
There is nothing so pathetic or absurd as the spectacle of a politician who has been exiled from all prospect of office fretting, about the dimunution of the powers he might have enjoyed if he had not been exiled. It is now fifteen years since Enoch last stepped out of an official car or parked his bottom on the Treasury Bench, and his dreams of power are beginning to lose their focus. He refuses to address himself to the burning issue of the day — and the only one which might ever restore him to glory — because he is frightened of compromising his political support, which is almost entirely among the industrial working class.
Yet it is precisely because of the nature of his support that he is the only person who can help the Conservatives. He is the only Conservative trusted by a significant proportion of the working class, and the only one who might be believed when he says that the battle is not against the working class but against the union power-structure and the socialists within the unions. The main issue of British politics is how to reimpose a sufficient degree of industrial discipline to ensure the country's survival as a manufacturing and trading nation. One discipline already offers itself— and it is the one which we will have to accept eventually under Labour—which is the discipline of the closed shop. It will mean that all power — political as well as industrial — eventually resides in trade union leaders. The alternative discipline, of industrial laissez-faire under monetary sanctions, is a non-starter because, as was proved by Heath, no democratically elected government will dare let it run its course. If it did, it would be voted out too soon for the policy to work. But there is another way of beating the unions, too complicated and too boring to set out here, and Mr Powell is the only man who could bring it off. I would happily supply him with a blueprint but I refuse to believe that the man who drew up exactly such a plan for the invasion and re-conquest of India after Labour's granting of independence would be unable to devise one for himself.
He vacillates because of a half-baked theory that the unions will one day turn to him as their leader. The Conservative establishment vacillates because it distrusts him — with reason — and fears that he would use his appointment as Secretary of State for Employment at best as a useful platform to resign from, at worst as a means of securing the leadership for himself and his crazy ideas about national sovereignty and the disciplines of the free market. Against these doubts, I have three assertions to make: 1. The unions will never turn to Enoch as their leader; 2. Enoch is at a low ebb at the moment; and 3. as Paul Foot's book The Rev Enoch Powell, demonstrated, he is no ideological diehard: like most politicians,he is inspired by a healthy personal ambition. As a romantic, he would probably welcome the idea of some act of homage and reconciliation in which Mrs Thatcher would lay her hands on his head or moustache or whatever. No political leader can count on personal loyalty for very long, nor can any political underling count on the support of his leader. It is of no great moment to speculate which might succeed in knifing the other in the back eventually, but for the next four and a half years Mrs Thatcher and Mr Powell may well be essential to each other. They ignore this at their peril.
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