Used without national qualification as an abbreviation of the formal title ''National Health Service'':
Used without national qualification as an abbreviation of the descriptive ''national health service'' but NOT as a formal title; commonly for:
de:NHS it:NHS nl:NHS
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Coordinates | 45°30′″N73°40′″N |
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birth name | Michael Francis Moore |
birth date | April 23, 1954 |
birth place | Flint, Michigan, United States |
years active | 1972–present |
occupation | Actor, director, screenwriter, producer |
spouse | Kathleen Glynn (1991–present) |
alma mater | University of Michigan–Flint (dropped out) |
website | http://michaelmoore.com/ }} |
Moore criticizes globalization, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the Iraq War, the American health care system, and capitalism in his written and cinematic works.
Moore was brought up Roman Catholic, attended parochial St. John's Elementary School for primary school and originally intended to join the seminary. He then attended Davison High School, where he was active in both drama and debate, graduating in 1972. As a member of the Boy Scouts of America, he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. At the age of 18, he was elected to the Davison school board.
After four months at ''Mother Jones'', Moore was fired. Matt Labash of ''The Weekly Standard'' reported this was for refusing to print an article by Paul Berman that was critical of the Sandinista human rights record in Nicaragua. Moore refused to run the article, believing it to be inaccurate. "The article was flatly wrong and the worst kind of patronizing bullshit. You would scarcely know from it that the United States had been at war with Nicaragua for the last five years." Berman described Moore as a "very ideological guy and not a very well-educated guy" when asked about the incident. Moore believes that ''Mother Jones'' fired him because of the publisher's refusal to allow him to cover a story on the GM plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He responded by putting laid-off GM worker Ben Hamper (who was also writing for the same magazine at the time) on the magazine's cover, leading to his termination. Moore sued for wrongful dismissal, and settled out of court for $58,000, providing him with seed money for his first film, ''Roger & Me.''
; ''Roger & Me'': Moore first became famous for his 1989 film, ''Roger & Me'', a documentary about what happened to Flint, Michigan after General Motors closed its factories and opened new ones in Mexico, where the workers were paid much less. Since then Moore has been known as a critic of the neoliberal view of globalization. "Roger" is Roger B. Smith, former CEO and president of General Motors.
; ''Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint'': (1992) is a short (23-minute) documentary film that was aired on PBS. It is based on the feature-length film ''Roger & Me'' (1989) by Michael Moore. The film's title refers to Rhonda Britton, a Flint, Michigan, resident featured in both the 1989 and 1992 films who sells rabbits as either pets or meat.
; ''Canadian Bacon'': In 1995, Moore released a satirical film, ''Canadian Bacon'', which features a fictional US president (played by Alan Alda) engineering a fake war with Canada in order to boost his popularity. It is noted for containing a number of Canadian and American stereotypes, and for being Moore's only non-documentary film. The film is also one of the last featuring Canadian-born actor John Candy, and also features a number of cameos by other Canadian actors. In the film, several potential enemies for America's next great campaign are discussed by the president and his cabinet. (The scene was strongly influenced by the Stanley Kubrick film ''Dr. Strangelove.'') The President comments that declaring war on Canada was as ridiculous as declaring war on international terrorism. His military adviser, played by Rip Torn, quickly rebuffs this idea, saying that no one would care about "... a bunch of guys driving around blowing up rent-a-cars."
; ''The Big One'': In 1997, Moore directed ''The Big One'', which documents the tour publicizing his book ''Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American'', in which he criticizes mass layoffs despite record corporate profits. Among others, he targets Nike for outsourcing shoe production to Indonesia.
; ''Bowling for Columbine'': Moore's 2002 film, ''Bowling for Columbine'', probes the culture of guns and violence in the United States, taking as a starting point the Columbine High School massacre of 1999. ''Bowling for Columbine'' won the Anniversary Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and France's César Award as the Best Foreign Film. In the United States, it won the 2002 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. It also enjoyed great commercial and critical success for a film of its type and became, at the time, the highest-grossing mainstream-released documentary (a record now held by Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11''). It was praised by some for illuminating a subject slighted by the mainstream media.
; ''Fahrenheit 9/11'': ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' examines America in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, particularly the record of the Bush administration and alleged links between the families of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. ''Fahrenheit'' was awarded the ''Palme d'Or'', the top honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival; it was the first documentary film to win the prize since 1956. Moore later announced that ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' would not be in consideration for the 2005 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, but instead for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He stated he wanted the movie to be seen by a few million more people via a television broadcast prior to election day. According to Moore, "Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release", and since the November 2 election was fewer than nine months after the film's release it would have been disqualified for the Documentary Oscar. However, Fahrenheit received no Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The title of the film alludes to the classic book ''Fahrenheit 451'' about a future totalitarian state in which books are banned; according to the book, paper begins to burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. The pre-release subtitle of the film confirms the allusion: "The temperature at which freedom burns." At the box office, as of 2010 ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' is the highest-grossing documentary of all time, taking in over US$200 million worldwide, including United States box office revenue of almost US$120 million. In February 2011, Moore sued producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein for US$2.7 million in unpaid profits from the film, claiming they used "Hollywood accounting tricks" to avoid paying him the money.
; ''Sicko'': Moore directed this film about the American health care system, focusing particularly on the managed-care and pharmaceutical industries. At least four major pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline—ordered their employees not to grant any interviews to Moore. According to Moore on a letter at his website, "roads that often surprise us and lead us to new ideas—and challenge us to reconsider the ones we began with have caused some minor delays." The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 19 May 2007, receiving a lengthy standing ovation, and was released in the U.S. and Canada on 29 June 2007. The film was the subject of some controversy when it became known that Moore went to Cuba with chronically ill September 11th rescue workers to shoot parts of the film. The United States is looking into whether this violates the trade embargo. The film is currently ranked the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
; ''Captain Mike Across America'':Moore takes a look at the politics of college students in what he calls "Bush Administration America" with this film shot during Moore's 60-city college campus tour in the months leading up to the 2004 election. The film was later re-edited by Moore into ''Slacker Uprising''.
; ''Capitalism: A Love Story'': On September 23, 2009, Moore released a new movie titled ''Capitalism: A Love Story'', which looks at the late-2000s financial crisis and the U.S. economy during the transition between the incoming Obama Administration and the outgoing Bush Administration. Addressing a press conference at its release, Moore said, "Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event. If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him."
His other major series was ''The Awful Truth'', which satirized actions by big corporations and politicians. It aired on Channel 4 in the UK, and the Bravo network in the US, in 1999 and 2000.
Another 1999 series, ''Michael Moore Live'', was aired in the UK only on Channel 4, though it was broadcast from New York. This show had a similar format to ''The Awful Truth'', but also incorporated phone-ins and a live stunt each week.
In 1999 Moore won the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award in Arts and Entertainment, for being the executive producer and host of ''The Awful Truth'', where he was also described as "muckraker, author and documentary filmmaker".
He also directed the videos for R.E.M. single "All the Way to Reno (You're Gonna Be a Star)" in 2001 and the System of a Down song "Boom!".
Moore was a high-profile guest at both the 2004 Democratic National Convention and the 2004 Republican National Convention, chronicling his impressions in ''USA Today''. He was criticized in a speech by Republican Senator John McCain as "a disingenuous film-maker." Moore laughed and waved as Republican attendees jeered, later chanting "four more years." Moore gestured his thumb and finger at the crowd, which translates into "loser."
During September and October 2004, Moore spoke at universities and colleges in swing states during his "Slacker Uprising Tour". The tour gave away ramen and underwear to young people who promised to vote. This provoked public denunciations from the Michigan Republican Party and attempts to convince the government that Moore should be arrested for buying votes, but since Moore did not tell the "slackers" involved for ''whom'' to vote, just to vote, district attorneys refused to get involved. Quite possibly the most controversial stop during the tour was Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah. A fight for his right to speak ensued and resulted in massive public debates and a media blitz. Death threats, bribes and lawsuits followed. The event was chronicled in the documentary film ''This Divided State''.
Despite having supported Ralph Nader in 2000, Moore urged Nader not to run in the 2004 election so as not to split the left vote. On ''Real Time with Bill Maher'', Moore and Maher knelt before Nader to plead with him to stay out of the race. In June 2004, Moore stated that he is not a member of the Democratic party. Although Moore endorsed General Wesley Clark for the Democratic nomination on January 14, Clark withdrew from the primary race on February 11.
Moore drew attention when charging publicly that Bush was AWOL during his service in the National Guard, describing Bush as "The Deserter" (see George W. Bush military service controversy).
On April 21, 2008, Moore endorsed Barack Obama for President, stating that Hillary Clinton's recent actions had been "disgusting."
In December 2010, Moore publicly offered to contribute $20,000 to the bail of Julian Assange, then held in custody in Britain after Swedish prosecutors sent a European Arrest Warrant, wanting to question Assange for alleged sex crimes. Moore also wrote an open letter to the Swedish government, citing statistics on the increasing number of reported rape cases in Sweden. Some of these statistics appear to have been misinterpreted.
Moore is a Catholic, but has said he disagrees with church teaching on subjects such as abortion and same-sex marriage. He acquired a life membership to the National Rifle Association following the Columbine massacre.
In 2005 ''Time'' magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people. Also in 2005, Moore started the annual Traverse City Film Festival in Traverse City, Michigan.
Moore's net worth has been estimated at "8 figures".
Moore was criticized by Sean Hannity for criticizing capitalism while benefiting from it himself.
Category:1954 births Category:Living people Category:People from Flint, Michigan Category:Actors from Michigan Category:American alternative journalists Category:American anti–Iraq War activists Category:American anti-war activists Category:American documentary filmmakers Category:American film actors Category:American film directors Category:American health activists Category:American political writers Category:American social commentators Category:American writers of Irish descent Category:César Award winners Category:Documentary film directors Category:Eagle Scouts Category:Emmy Award winners Category:National Rifle Association members Category:University of Michigan alumni Category:Writers from Michigan Category:Writers Guild of America Award winners Category:Youth empowerment individuals Category:Youth rights individuals Category:Roman Catholic activists Category:Academy Award winners
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This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Coordinates | 45°30′″N73°40′″N |
---|---|
Honorific-prefix | The Right Honourable |
Name | Andrew Lansley |
Honorific-suffix | CBE MP |
Office | Secretary of State for Health |
Primeminister | David Cameron |
Term start | 12 May 2010 |
Predecessor | Andy Burnham |
Office2 | Shadow Secretary of State for Health |
Leader2 | Michael HowardDavid Cameron |
Term start2 | 19 June 2004 |
Term end2 | 11 May 2010 |
Predecessor2 | Tim Yeo |
Successor2 | Andy Burnham |
Office3 | Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office |
Term start3 | 15 June 1999 |
Term end3 | 18 September 2001 |
Leader3 | William Hague |
Preceded3 | New Position |
Succeeded3 | Tim Collins |
Office4 | Member of Parliament for South Cambridgeshire |
Term start4 | 1 May 1997 |
Predecessor4 | Constituency Created |
Majority4 | 7,838 (13.3%) |
Birth date | December 11, 1956 |
Birth place | Hornchurch, Essex, England |
Party | Conservative |
Alma mater | University of Exeter |
Religion | Church of England |
Website | andrewlansley.co.uk |
Nickname | Angela Lansbury }} |
Before entering politics, Lansley had "a promising career in the civil service". Lansley worked for Norman Tebbit for three years as his principal private secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry. This encompassed the period of the IRA's 1984 Brighton hotel bombing at the Conservative Party Conference in which Tebbit was seriously injured. Lansley and others are praised by Tebbit for their support at that time.
Lansley went on to become more fully involved in politics. In 1990 was appointed to run the Conservative Research Department. He ran the Conservative campaign for the 1992 General Election, which he describes as one of "his proudest career achievements" and for which he was awarded a CBE. He suffered a minor stroke in 1992, initially misdiagnosed as an ear infection, but made a full recovery save from permanently losing his sense of "fine balance".
At the 2001 election he again took on a strategy role as a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party. As part of his duties Shadow Ministers had to clear the timing of their announcements with Lansley. He fitted them into a timetable known as the 'Stalingrid'. The 2001 election was not a success for the Conservative Party and party leader, William Hague, resigned in its wake. Iain Duncan Smith, the new leader, offered Lansley a position after the election but was turned down and, until Michael Howard became leader, Lansley was a backbencher.
He was appointed as a Privy Counsellor on 13 May 2010.
In January 2011 Ministers published the Health and Social Care Bill, detailing planned reforms that will pave the way for GP consortia to take over management of the NHS from Primary Care Trusts. Prime minister David Cameron said "fundamental changes" are needed in the NHS. But doctors leaders believe that GPs could simply have taken charge of PCTs instead—and achieved the same results. The reforms will pave the way for groups of GPs to take control of the NHS budget. The consortia will take charge of about 80% of the funding, and will be in charge of planning and buying everything from community health centres to hospital services. However, some specialist services such as neurosurgery will be provided by the national board. The consortia will take charge from 2013, although pilots are beginning to start.
In a letter to ''The Times'', BMA chairman Hamish Meldrum, Royal College of Nursing chief executive Peter Carter and the heads of Unison, Unite and others said the speed and scale of the reforms proposed risked undermining the care of patients by putting cost before quality. Criticism of the reform had been mounting ahead of the publication of the Health and Social Care Bill on 19 January 2011.
Lansley’s white paper on the NHS has led to him being the subject of an unflattering hip hop track and video by rapper NxtGen with the chorus "Andrew Lansley, greedy / Andrew Lansley, tosser / the NHS is not for sale, you grey-haired manky codger," which has now been viewed over 400,000 times on YouTube and which was picked up as one of the theme tunes to the anti cuts movement and spawned several placards at the March for the Alternative in March 2011. The video, partly paid for by Unison features NxtGen rapping about Lansley's proposed GP commissioning policy, his relation to the expenses scandal and the controversial donation he received from private health company Care UK. Lansley has responded with the statement he was "impressed that he's managed to get lyrics about GP commissioning into a rap", but "We will never privatise the NHS".
Following the widespread criticism, on 4 April 2011, the Government announced a "pause" in the progress of the Health and Social Care Bill to allow the government to 'listen, reflect and improve' the proposals.
On 13 April 2011, 96% of 497 delegates at the Royal College of Nursing conference backed a motion of no confidence questioning Andrew Lansley's handling of NHS reforms in England. Later that day, Lansley met with 65 nurses at the same conference, and apologized by saying "I am sorry if what I'm setting out to do hasn't communicated itself."
In 1997 Lansley left his first wife, Dr Marilyn Biggs, with whom he had three children. He has two children with his second wife Sally Low. He is a member of the Church of England.
|- |- |- |- ! colspan="3" style="background:#cfc;" | Order of precedence in Northern Ireland
Category:1956 births Category:Alumni of the University of Exeter Category:English people of Scottish descent Category:English Anglicans Category:Civil servants in the Department of Trade and Industry Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:Conservative Party (UK) MPs Category:Living people Category:Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom Category:Members of the United Kingdom Parliament for English constituencies Category:Old Brentwoods Category:Private secretaries in the British Civil Service Category:People from Hornchurch Category:UK MPs 1997–2001 Category:UK MPs 2001–2005 Category:UK MPs 2005–2010 Category:UK MPs 2010–
de:Andrew Lansley la:Andreas Lansley pl:Andrew Lansley sco:Andrew Lansley simple:Andrew LansleyThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Coordinates | 45°30′″N73°40′″N |
---|---|
honorific-suffix | MEP |
constituency mp1 | South East England |
parliament1 | European |
term start1 | 14 July 1999 |
birth date | September 01, 1971 |
birth place | Lima, Peru |
nationality | British |
spouse | Sara Hannan |
party | Conservative |
children | 2 |
alma mater | Oriel College, Oxford |
profession | JournalistPolitician |
religion | Christian |
website | www.hannan.co.uk Conservative Party website |
footnotes | }} |
Hannan was first elected to the European Parliament at the 1999 election. He was expelled from the EPP–ED group in 2008, after which he sat with the Non-Inscrits. Hannan joined the ECR with his Conservative colleagues when it was formed in 2009 and became Secretary-General of its sister Europarty, the AECR. Hannan is a Eurosceptic and a Unionist, and he is strongly critical of European integration. He currently serves on the Committee on Legal Affairs and the delegation to the ACP–EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly.
Hannan is also a journalist, having written leaders and currently authoring a blog for ''The Daily Telegraph''. He has also published several books arguing for democratic reform.
After spending his childhood in Peru, Hannan was educated at Marlborough College and by Oriel College, Oxford, where he studied Modern History. He speaks English, French and Spanish.
Through the CIB he became involved with the Bruges Group, and after he graduated he became, in 1994, director of a Eurosceptic political think-tank, the European Research Group. In 1996 he was hired by the ''Daily Telegraph'' as a leader-writer, and has since contributed to ''The Spectator'' and many other newspapers and magazines around the world. In 1997 he became an adviser and speechwriter to Michael Howard, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, and in 1998 he was given a place on the Conservative candidates' list for the following year's European Parliament election. He later became a speechwriter for party leader William Hague. In 1999 he stood down from his posts at the European Research Group and Conservative Graduates.
A year after his first election, Hannan courted controversy when he appeared to be using the Conservative Party's central office as headquarters for a campaign to persuade Danish voters to block the introduction of the European Single Currency; however, he was able to show that the campaign was actually being run from his Westminster flat.
In his first term, he served on the Committee on Fisheries and the Delegation for Relations with Afghanistan.
Pöttering is a German national and a member of the same political group (EPP-ED) as Hannan. Hannan's remarks were attacked by other MEPs from the EPP-ED. The head of EPP-ED, Joseph Daul, responded by initiating proceedings to expel Hannan immediately from their Group. Daniel Hannan left the EPP-ED on 19 February 2008. He sat, for the remainder of the five-year term as a Conservative without pan-European affiliation (''Non-Inscrit''). Following his 2009 re-election, he sits with the new eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists along with his Conservative Party colleagues.
The final phrase, "the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government", was a quote from a speech by Labour Party leader John Smith criticising then-Prime Minister John Major in 1992.
A video clip of the speech went viral on YouTube that evening, attracting more than 630,000 views in 24 hours. It became the 'most viewed today' YouTube video worldwide two consecutive days. Hannan was invited to appear on several shows on American cable news channels, including Fox News and MSNBC: he appeared on television program ''Hannity'' via video link at 9pm EST on the same day, and on the ''Glenn Beck Program'' the following day. He also appeared on ''Your World with Neil Cavuto'', where he stated he would have voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential election had he been an American citizen. The main British television channels, particularly the BBC and ITV, gave the speech fairly limited coverage, for which they faced some criticism from Conservative MPs and "a handful of viewers"; Conservative MP Nigel Evans stated that their lack of coverage rendered YouTube the 'ultimate in public service broadcasting'. As of July 2010, there have been 2.7 million views of the clip. Nearly all of the hits are from the UK and US.
He opposed the Invasion of Iraq undertaken by the Premiership of Tony Blair.
On 14 June 2010, Hannan took back his endorsement, which he called his "single most unpopular post" in his blogging career. He argued, "Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I’m working in your future and, believe me, you won’t like it." He also accused the Obama administration of straining the special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K., particularly over the Falkland Islands.
Hannan has responded to Iceland’s crisis by writing that the country "would be mad to join the EU"; if they'd adopted the euro, their currency would have been unable to fall to cushion the blow. He continues to praise "the enterprise of your people. You understand that independence is the natural condition of a free-standing citizenry." Iceland formally applied to join the EU in July 2009 after a narrow vote in the Icelandic parliament. On his blog Hannan reacted to the news of the Icelandic EU application by claiming again that Iceland would never join the EU and pointing out that so far it had only "voted to start discussing terms, not to accept them". After all the issue would at the end be decided by the people in a referendum and they would never accept membership.
In July 2010, Hannan wrote while on a visit in Iceland, "Reading the British press, you might have the impression that Iceland has collapsed... as in Mad Max." He wrote that, in contrast, "[l]ife there is better than in most EU states" and "[a]fter two decades of phenomenal growth, there has been a correction, and Icelanders are now living like Danes". Thus, he concluded that Iceland's status proved that other European nations did not have to bailout their banking systems to avoid economic chaos. In December the same year Hannan wrote on his blog that "[b]eing outside the euro, Iceland has been able to devalue, and is now exporting its way back to growth." Referring to a recent article in The Economist he wrote: "No less a Euro-integrationist organ than The Economist has now come round to the view that Iceland was spared Ireland’s fate for two reasons: it refused to bail out its banks, and it was outside the euro."
Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Hannan said of the media storm around his comments: ''On a visit to the US, I was asked by an interviewer whether I would recommend a British-style health-care model, paid for out of general taxation. I replied that all three parties were devoted to the NHS, and that it had public support (although I added that this was at least partly the result of the inaccurate belief that free health care for the poor is a unique attribute of the British system). But I didn't want to dissemble: I have for years argued that Britain would be better off with a Singapore-style system of personal health-care accounts. So I cautioned against nationalisation, citing international league tables on survival rates and waiting times.''
Also making the wider point that: "we seem to have lost the notion that a backbencher speaks for himself. I like David Cameron, and want him to be Prime Minister, not least so that Britain stops racking up debt. But the idea that I therefore agree with him on every issue is, when you think about it, silly."
However, he is also on record as saying "For what it’s worth, I think Enoch Powell was wrong on immigration. The civil unrest that he forecast, and that many feared in 1968, didn’t materialise. Britain assimilated a large population with an ease that few countries have matched. Being an immigrant myself, I have particular cause to be grateful for Britain’s understated cosmopolitanism."
''The Times''' associate editor Daniel Finkelstein said that "many immigrant families would find Dan's endorsement of Powell threatening and unpleasant, even though I am sure that was not his intent."
Writing in on The Telegraph website, Mr Hannan said: "I’m surprised that no one has picked up on the thing that I most admire about Enoch Powell, namely his tendency to ignore conventional wisdom and think things through from first principles. Like Rowan Williams, he always did his hearers the courtesy of addressing them as intelligent adults. Both men regularly got into trouble in consequence, either because they were genuinely misunderstood or because their detractors affected to misunderstand them. Neither responded by dumbing down. That, in politics, takes a special kind of integrity."
He is the author of ''Time for a Fresh Start in Europe'' (1993) ''A Guide to the Amsterdam Treaty'' (1997), ''The Euro: Bad for Business'' (1998), ''The Challenge of the East'' (1999), ''What if Britain Votes No?'' (2002), ''The Case for EFTA'' (2004), and ''The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America'' (2010) and contributed to ''Treason at Maastricht'' (1994), by Rodney Atkinson and Norris McWhirter.
He was the co-founder of Direct Democracy and co-author, along with 27 Conservative MPs elected in 2005, of ''Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party'', which proposes the wholesale devolution of power and the direct election of decision-makers. These ideas were developed further in a series of six pamphlets, ''The Localist Papers'', serialised in ''The Daily Telegraph'' in 2007. In 2008, he published the book ''The Plan: Twelve Months to Renew Britain'' together with Douglas Carswell.
Category:1971 births Category:Alumni of Oriel College, Oxford Category:British libertarians Category:Conservative Party (UK) MEPs Category:Critics of the European Union Category:Direct democracy activists Category:English people of Irish descent Category:Living people Category:Members of the European Parliament for English constituencies Category:Old Marlburians Category:People from Lima Category:Peruvian people of British descent Category:MEPs for the United Kingdom 1999–2004 Category:MEPs for the United Kingdom 2004–2009 Category:MEPs for the United Kingdom 2009–2014 Category:Bastiat Prize winners
de:Daniel Hannan es:Daniel Hannan fr:Daniel Hannan nl:Daniel Hannan pl:Daniel Hannan ro:Daniel Hannan sv:Daniel HannanThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Coordinates | 45°30′″N73°40′″N |
---|---|
honorific-prefix | The Right Honourable |
name | John Enoch Powell |
honorific-suffix | MBE |
office | Minister of Health |
term start | 27 July 1960 |
term end | 18 October 1963 |
primeminister | Harold Macmillan |
predecessor | Derek Walker-Smith |
successor | Anthony Barber |
office2 | Financial Secretary to the Treasury |
term start2 | 1957 |
term end2 | 1958 |
primeminister2 | Harold Macmillan |
predecessor2 | Henry Brooke |
successor2 | Jack Simon |
office3 | Shadow Defence Secretary |
term start3 | July 1965 |
term end3 | 21 April 1968 |
leader3 | Edward Heath |
predecessor3 | Peter Thorneycroft |
successor3 | Reginald Maudling |
constituency mp6 | Wolverhampton South West |
term start6 | 23 February 1950 |
term end6 | 28 February 1974 |
predecessor6 | ''New constituency'' |
successor6 | Nicholas Budgen |
constituency mp5 | South Down |
term start5 | 10 October 1974 |
term end5 | 11 June 1987 |
predecessor5 | Lawrence Orr |
successor5 | Eddie McGrady |
birth place | Birmingham, England |
death date | (aged 85) |
death place | London, England |
nationality | British |
spouse | Miss Pamela Wilson, from 1952 to 1998 (46 years) |
party | Conservative (1950–1974)Ulster Unionist (1974–1987) |
children | 2 Girls |
alma mater | Trinity College, CambridgeSOAS |
occupation | • Member of Parliament 1950–1987 • Conservative Research Department 1945–50 • Professor of Greek at Sydney University 1937–39 |
profession | • Politician • Classical scholar, • Poet published works, 1937, 1939, 1951. |
religion | Anglican |
allegiance | |
branch | |
serviceyears | 1939–1945 |
rank | • Private in 1939 • Brigadier by 1945 |
battles | World War II• North African Campaign• India |
awards | }} |
However, his supporters claim that the large public following which Powell attracted may have helped the Conservatives to win the 1970 General Election, at which Powell endorsed a vote for Labour. He returned to the House of Commons in October 1974 as the Ulster Unionist Party MP for the Northern Irish constituency of South Down until he was defeated in the 1987 General Election.
Before entering politics he had been an outstanding classical scholar, becoming a full Professor of Ancient Greek at the age of twenty-five. During the Second World War he served in staff and intelligence positions, reaching the rank of Brigadier in his early thirties. He also wrote poetry, and many books on classical and political subjects.
Powell was a pupil at King's Norton Boys' School before moving to King Edward's School, Birmingham, where he studied classics (which would later influence his 'Rivers of Blood' speech), and was one of the few pupils in the school's history to attain 100% in an end-of-year English examination. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1930 to 1933, during which time he fell under the influence both of the poet A. E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at the university, and of the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He took no part in politics at university.
It was while at Cambridge Powell is recorded as having enjoyed one of his first close relationships. Indeed, according to John Evans, Chaplain of Trinity and Extra Preacher to the Queen, instructions were left with him to reveal after Powell's death that at least one of the romantic affairs of his life had been homosexual. Powell had particularly drawn the Chaplain's attention to lines in his First Poems (published 1937). Biographers such as Simon Heffer dispute this however, and have argued that this did not mean that he was homosexual; merely that he had not yet met any girls.
Whilst at University, in one Greek prose examination lasting three hours, he was asked to translate a passage into Greek. Powell walked out after one and a half hours, having produced translations in the styles of Plato and Thucydides. For his efforts, he was awarded a double starred first in Latin and Greek, this grade being the best possible and extremely rare. As well as his education at Cambridge, Powell took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, now the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, because he felt that his long-cherished ambition of becoming Viceroy of India would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language.
Soon after arrival in Australia, he was appointed Curator of the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University. He stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon begin in Europe, and that when it did he would be heading home to enlist in the army. By the time Powell left King Edward's School in 1930 he had confirmed his instinctive belief that the Armistice was merely temporary and that Britain would be at war with Germany again. During his time in Australia as a professor, he grew increasingly angry at the appeasement of Nazi Germany and what he saw as a betrayal of British national interests. After Neville Chamberlain's first visit to Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Powell wrote in a letter to his parents of 18 September 1938:
for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy to which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable.}}
In another letter to his parents in June 1939, before the beginning of war, Powell wrote: "It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors". At the outbreak of war, Powell immediately returned to Britain, although not before buying a Russian dictionary, since he thought "Russia would hold the key to our survival and victory, as it had in 1812 and 1916".
During later years he recorded his appointment from private to lance-corporal in his ''Who's Who'' entry, on other occasions describing it as a greater promotion than entering the Cabinet . Early in 1940 he was trained for a commission after, whilst working in a kitchen, answering the question of an inspecting brigadier with a Greek proverb; on several occasions he told colleagues that he expected to be at least a major-general by the end of the war. He passed out top from his officer training .
He was commissioned on the General List in 1940, but almost immediately transferred to the Intelligence Corps. He was almost immediately promoted to captain, and posted as GSO3 (Intelligence) to the 1st (later 9th) Armoured Division. During this time he taught himself Russian as he was convinced that Hitler would eventually invade the USSR. On one occasion he was arrested as a suspected German spy for singing the Horst Wessel song. He was sent to the Staff College at Camberley.
During October 1941 Powell was posted to Cairo and transferred back to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. As Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee, Middle East, he was soon doing work which would normally have been done by a more senior officer and was (May 1942, backdated to December 1941) promoted to major. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in August 1942, telling his parents that he was doing the work of three people and expected to be a brigadier within a year or two, and in that role helped plan the Second Battle of El Alamein, having previously helped plan the attack on Rommel's supply lines. Powell and his team began work at 0400 each day to digest radio intercepts and other intelligence data (e.g. estimating how many tanks Rommel currently had, and what his likely plans were) ready to present to the Chiefs of Staff at 0900. The following year, he was honoured as a member of the Order of the British Empire for his military service.
It was in Algiers that the beginning of Powell's dislike of the United States was planted. After talking with some senior American officials, he became convinced that one of America's main war aims was to destroy the British Empire. Writing home on 16 February 1943, Powell stated: "I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were... our terrible enemy, America...." Powell's conviction of the anti-British attitude of the Americans continued during the war. Powell cut out and retained all his life an article from the ''New Statesman'' newspaper of 13 November 1943, in which the American Clare Boothe Luce said in a speech that Indian independence would mean that the "USA will really have won the greatest war in the world for democracy".
Powell desperately wanted to go to the Far East to help the fight against Japan because "the war in Europe is won now, and I want to see the Union Flag back in Singapore" before, Powell thought, the Americans beat Britain to it. He attempted to join the Chindits, and jumped into a taxicab in Cairo to bring the matter up with Orde Wingate, but his duties and rank precluded the assignment. He was eventually posted to Delhi in India as a Lieutenant-Colonel in Military Intelligence in August 1943, having declined at least two jobs carrying the rank of full Colonel in the now-moribund North African theatre and having offered to drop in rank to Major in order to get a posting to the Far East.
Powell soon became Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Mountbatten's South East Asia Command, involved in planning an amphibious offensive against Akyab, an island off the coast of Burma. Orde Wingate, also involved in planning that operation, had taken such a dislike to Powell that he asked a colleague to restrain him if he was tempted to "beat his brains in". On one occasion Powell's yellow skin (he was recovering from jaundice), overly formal dress and strange manner caused him to be mistaken for a Japanese spy. During this period he declined to meet a Cambridge academic colleague, Glyn Daniel, for a drink or dinner as he was devoting his limited leisure time to studying the poet John Donne. Powell had learned Urdu and when Mountbatten transferred his staff to Kandy in Ceylon Powell chose to remain in Delhi – he had now acquired the ambition of becoming Viceroy of India. He was promoted to full colonel at the end of March 1944, as Assistant Director of Military Intelligence in India, giving intelligence support to the Burma campaign of General Slim.
Having begun the war as the youngest professor in the Commonwealth, Powell ended it as a brigadier. He was given the promotion to serve on a committee of generals and brigadiers to plan the postwar defence of India: the resulting 470-page report was almost entirely written by Powell. For a few weeks he was the youngest Brigadier in the British Army, and he was one of the very few men of the entire war to rise from private to brigadier (another being Fitzroy Maclean). He was offered a regular commission as a brigadier in the Indian Army, and the post of Assistant Commandant of an Indian Officers' Training Academy, which he declined. He told a colleague that he expected to be Head of all Military Intelligence in "the next war" .
Powell never experienced combat and felt guilty for having survived, writing that soldiers who did so carried "a sort of shame with them to the grave" and referring to the Second Battle of El Alamein as a "separating flame" between the living and the dead. When once asked how he would like to be remembered, he at first answered "Others will remember me as they will remember me", but when pressed he replied "I should like to have been killed in the war."
Powell's ambition to be Governor-General of India crumbled in February 1947, when Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced that Indian independence was imminent. Powell was so shocked by the change of policy that he spent the whole night after it was announced walking the streets of London. He came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that once India had gone the whole empire should follow it. This logical absolutism explained his later indifference to the Suez crisis, his contempt for the Commonwealth, and his urging that Britain should end any remaining pretence that it was a world power.
On 3 March 1953 Powell spoke against the Royal Titles Bill in the House of Commons. He said he found three major changes to the style of the United Kingdom, "all of which seem to me to be evil". The first one was "that in this title, for the first time, will be recognised a principle hitherto never admitted in this country, namely, the divisibility of the crown". Powell said that the unity of the realm had evolved over centuries and included the British Empire: "It was a unit because it had one Sovereign. There was one Sovereign: one realm". He feared that by "recognising the division of the realm into separate realms, are we not opening the way for that other remaining unity – the last unity of all – that of the person, to go the way of the rest?"
The second change he objected to was "the suppression of the word 'British', both from before the words 'Realms and Territories' where it is replaced by the words 'her other' and from before the word 'Commonwealth', which, in the Statute of Westminster, is described as the 'British Commonwealth of Nations'":
Powell claimed that the answer was that because the British Nationality Act 1948 had removed allegiance to the crown as the basis of citizenship and replaced that with nine separate citizenships combined together by statute. Therefore if any of these nine countries became republics the law would not change, as happened with India when it became a republic. Furthermore, Powell went on, the essence of unity was "that all the parts recognise they would sacrifice themselves to the interests of the whole". He denied that there was in India that "recognition of belonging to a greater whole which involves the ultimate consequence in certain circumstances of self-sacrifice in the interests of the whole". Therefore the title 'Head of the Commonwealth', the third major change, was "essentially a sham. They are essentially something which we have invented to blind ourselves to the reality of the position".
These changes were "greatly repugnant" to Powell but:
For the rest of his life Powell regarded this speech as the finest he ever delivered.
In mid-November 1953 Powell secured a place on the 1922 Committee's executive after the third time of trying. Rab Butler also invited him onto the committee which reviewed party policy for the general election, which he attended until 1955. Powell was a member of the Suez Group of MPs who were against the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal because such a move would demonstrate, Powell argued, that Britain could no longer maintain a position there and that any claim to the Suez Canal would therefore be illogical. However, after the troops had left in 1954 and the Egyptians nationalised the Canal in 1956, Powell opposed the British attempts to retake the Canal in the Suez Crisis because he thought the British no longer had the resources to be a world power.
But in January 1958 he resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury colleague Nigel Birch, in protest at government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch advocate of disinflation, or in modern terms a monetarist, and a believer in market forces. (Powell was also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.) The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all, which Powell believed to be the cause of inflation, and in effect a form of taxation, as the holders of money find their money is worth less. Inflation rose to 2.5% – a high figure for the era, especially in peacetime.
During the late 1950s Powell promoted control of the money supply to prevent inflation and during the 1960s was an advocate of free market policies which at the time were seen as extreme and unworkable, as well as unpopular. Powell advocated the privatisation of the Post Office and the telephone network as early as 1964, over 20 years before the latter actually took place; and he both scorned the idea of "consensus politics" and wanted the Conservative Party to become a modern businesslike party, freed from its old aristocratic and "old boy network" associations. Perhaps most notably of all, in his 1958 resignation over public spending and what he saw as an inflationary economic policy, he anticipated almost exactly the views that during the 1980s came to be described as "monetarism".
Denis Healey, MP from 1952 to 1992, later said this speech was "the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard...it had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes". ''The Daily Telegraph'' report of the speech said that "as Mr Powell sat down, he put his hand across his eyes. His emotion was justified, for he had made a great and sincere speech".
In this job he was responsible for promoting an ambitious ten-year programme of general hospital building and for beginning the neglect of the huge psychiatric institutions. In his famous 1961 "Water Tower" speech, he said:
The speech catalysed a debate that was one of several strands leading to the Care in the Community initiative of the 1980s. In 1993 however Powell claimed that his policy could have worked but had not. He claimed the criminally insane should have never been released and that the problem was one of funding. He said the new way of caring for the mentally ill would cost more, not less, than the old way because community care was decentralised and intimate as well as being "more human". His successors had not, Powell claimed, provided the money for local authorities to spend on mental health care and therefore institutional care had been neglected whilst at the same time there was not any investment in community care.
Later, he oversaw the employment of a large number of Commonwealth immigrants by the understaffed National Health Service. Prior to this, many non-white immigrants who held full rights of citizenship in Britain were obliged to take the jobs that no one else wanted (e.g. street cleaning, night-shift assembly production lines), often paid considerably less than their white counterparts.
During the 1964 general election Powell said in his election address that "in my opinion it was essential, for the sake not only of our own people but of the immigrants themselves, to introduce control over the numbers allowed in. I am convinced that strict control must continue if we are to avoid the evils of a “colour question” in this country, for ourselves and for our children". Norman Fowler, then a reporter for ''The Times'', interviewed Powell during the election and asked him what the biggest issue was: "I expected to be told something about the cost of living but not a bit of it. “Immigration,” replied Enoch. I duly phoned in my piece but it was never used. After all, who in 1964 had ever heard of a former Conservative cabinet minister thinking that immigration was an important political issue?"
Following the Conservatives' defeat in the election, he agreed to return to the front bench as Transport spokesman. In 1965 he stood in the first-ever party leadership election, but came a distant third to Edward Heath, who appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Defence.
The ''Daily Telegraph'' journalist David Howell remarked to Andrew Alexander that Powell had "just withdrawn us from East of Suez, and received an enormous ovation because no-one understood what he was talking about". However the Americans were worried by Powell's speech as they wanted British military commitments in South-East Asia as they were still fighting in Vietnam. A transcript of the speech was sent to Washington and the American embassy requested to talk to Heath about the "Powell doctrine". The ''New York Times'' said Powell's speech was "a potential declaration of independence from American policy". During the election campaign of 1966 Powell claimed that the British government had contingency plans to send at least a token British force to Vietnam and that, under Labour, Britain "has behaved perfectly clearly and perfectly recognisably as an American satellite". President Johnson had indeed asked Wilson for some British forces for Vietnam, and when it was later suggested to Powell that the view in Washington—that the public reaction to Powell's allegations had made Wilson realise he would not have favourable public opinion and so could not go through with it—Powell responded: "The greatest service I have performed for my country, if that is so". Labour was returned with a large majority, and Powell was retained by Heath as Shadow Defence Secretary as he believed Powell "was too dangerous to leave out".
In a controversial speech on 26 May 1967, Powell criticised Britain's post-war world role:
In 1967, Powell spoke of his opposition to the influx of Kenyan Asians to the United Kingdom after the African country's leader Jomo Kenyatta's discriminatory policies led to the flight of Asians from that country. The biggest argument Powell and Heath had during his time in the Shadow Cabinet was over a dispute on Black Rod. Black Rod would go to the Commons to summon them to the Lords to hear the Royal Assent of Bills. In November 1967 he arrived during a debate on the EEC and was met with cries of "Shame" to "’Op it". At the next Shadow Cabinet meeting Heath said this "nonsense" must be stopped. Powell replied that Heath did not mean it should be ended, surely? He added that did not he realise that the words Black Rod used went back to the 1307 Parliament of Carlisle and were ancient even then? Heath reacted furiously, saying that the British people "were tired of this nonsense and ceremonial and mummery. He would not stand for the perpetuation of this ridiculous business etc.".
''The Times newspaper'' declared it "an evil speech", stating "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history."
The main political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was the introduction by the Labour Government of the Race Relations Act 1968, which Powell found offensive and immoral. The Act would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain areas of British life, particularly housing, where many local authorities had been refusing to provide houses for immigrant families until they had lived in the country for a certain number of years.
One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he claimed to have received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in Wolverhampton. The writer described the fate of an elderly woman who was supposedly the last white person living in her street. She had repeatedly refused applications from non-whites requiring rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a racist outside her home and receiving excrement through her letterbox.
Heath sacked Powell from his Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech, and he never held another senior political post. Powell received almost 120,000 (predominantly positive) letters and a Gallup poll at the end of April showed that 74% of those asked agreed with his speech. After ''The Sunday Times'' branded his speeches "racialist", Powell sued it for libel, but withdrew when he was required to provide the letters he had quoted from.
Powell had issued an advance copy of his speech to media personnel and their appearance at the speech may have been because they realised the content was explosive.
During July 1965 he had come third in the Conservative Party leadership contest, obtaining only 15 votes, just below the result Hugh Fraser gained in the 1975 contest. After the 'Rivers of Blood' speech, however, Powell was transformed into a national public figure and won huge support across Britain. Three days after the speech, on 23 April, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the House of Commons, 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting against Powell's "victimisation", and the next day 400 meat porters from Smithfield market handed in a 92-page petition in support of Powell.
Powell spoke in the debate, opposing these plans. He said the reforms were "unnecessary and undesirable" and that there was no weight in the claim that the Lords could "check or frustrate the firm intentions" of the Commons. He claimed that only election or nomination could replace the hereditary nature of the Lords. If they were elected it would pose the dilemma of which House was truly representative of the electorate. He also had another objection: "How can the same electorate be represented in two ways so that the two sets of representatives can conflict and disagree with one another?" Those nominated would be bound to the Chief Whip of their party through a sort of oath and Powell asked "what sort of men and women are they to be who would submit to be nominated to another chamber upon condition that they will be mere dummies, automatic parts of a voting machine?" The inclusion of 30 cross-benchers was "a grand absurdity" because they would have been chosen "upon the very basis that they have no strong views of principle on the way in which the country ought to be governed". Powell claimed the Lords derived their authority not from a strict hereditary system but from its prescriptive nature: "It has long been so, and it works". He then added that there was not any widespread desire for reform: he indicated a recent survey of working-class voters which showed only a third of them wanted to reform or abolish the Lords, with another third believing the Lords were an "intrinsic part of the national traditions of Britain". Powell deduced from this that "As so often the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people – the underlying value of that which is traditional, that which is prescriptive".
After more speeches against the Bill during early 1969, and with left-wing Labour MPs against Lords reform as well (they wanted abolition), Harold Wilson announced on 17 April that the Bill was being rescinded. Wilson's statement was brief, with Powell intervening: "Don't eat them too quickly", which provoked much laughter in the House. Later that day Powell said in a speech to the Primrose League:
Powell's biographer Simon Heffer has described the defeat of Lords reform as "perhaps the greatest triumph of Powell's political career".
During 1969, when it was first suggested that the United Kingdom would join the European Economic Community, Powell spoke openly of his opposition to such a move.
In a defence debate in March 1970 he claimed that "the whole theory of the tactical nuclear weapon, or the tactical use of nuclear weapons, is an unmitigated absurdity" and that it was "remotely improbable" that any group of nations engaged in war would "decide upon general and mutual suicide", and advocated enlargement of Britain's continental army. However when fellow Conservative Julian Amery later in the debate criticised Powell for his anti-nuclear pronouncements, Powell responded: "I have always regarded the possession of the nuclear capability as a protection against nuclear blackmail. It is a protection against being threatened with nuclear weapons. What it is not a protection against is war". However, Powell would later criticise this theory of nuclear deterrence.
Powell had voted against the Schuman plan during 1950 and had supported entry only because he believed that the Common Market was simply a means to secure free trade. During March 1969 he opposed Britain's joining the European Economic Community. Opposition to entry had hitherto been confined largely to the Labour Party but now, he said, it was clear to him that the sovereignty of Parliament was in question, as was Britain's very survival as a nation. This nationalist analysis attracted millions of middle-class Conservatives and others, and as much as anything else made Powell the implacable enemy of Heath, a fervent pro-European, but there was already enmity between the two.
The Conservatives had promised at the 1970 election that in relation to the Common Market "Our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more, no less". When Heath signed an accession treaty before Parliament had even debated the issue, when the second reading of the Bill to put the Treaty into law passed by just eight votes on second reading, and when it became clear that the British people would have no further say in the matter, he declared hostility to his party's line. He voted against the government on every one of the 104 divisions in the course of the European Communities Bill. When finally he lost this struggle, he decided he could no longer sit in a parliament that he believed was no longer sovereign. During the summer of 1972 he prepared to resign, and changed his mind only because of fears of a renewed wave of immigration from Uganda after the accession of Idi Amin, who had expelled Uganda's Asian residents.
During 1972, the same year that he spoke publicly of his opposition to the immigration of Ugandan Asians, Powell was also defeated in his struggle against the European Communities Bill, which helped prepare the United Kingdom to join the common market, which he had spent three years campaigning to prevent from happening.
However, during February 1974 Powell left the Conservative Party, mainly because it had taken the UK into the EEC and because it abandoned its manifesto commitments and he therefore could not advocate it at the election. The monetarist economist Milton Friedman sent Powell a letter praising him as principled. Powell had his friend Andrew Alexander talk with Labour Party leader Harold Wilson's press secretary, Joe Haines, on Powell's timing of his speeches against Heath. Powell had been talking with Wilson irregularly since June 1973 during chance meetings in the gentlemen's toilets of the aye lobby in the House of Commons. Wilson and Haines had ensured that Powell would dominate the newspapers of the Sunday and Monday before election day by having no Labour front bencher give a major speech on 23 February, the day of Powell's speech. Powell gave this speech at the Mecca Dance Hall in the Bull Ring, Birmingham to an audience of 1,500, with some press reports estimating that 7,000 had to be turned away. Powell said the issue of British membership of the EEC was one where "if there be a conflict between the call of country and that of party, the call of country must come first":
Powell went on to criticise the Conservative Party for obtaining British membership despite promising at the general election that they would "negotiate: no more, no less" and that Britain needed "the full-hearted consent of Parliament and people" if Britain were to join. He also denounced Heath for accusing his political opponents of lacking respect for Parliament whilst being "the first Prime Minister in three hundred years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country". He then advocated a vote for the Labour Party:
This call to vote Labour surprised some of Powell's supporters who were more concerned with beating socialism than the loss of national independence. On 25 February he made another speech at Shipley urging a vote for Labour and saying he did not believe the claim that Wilson would renege his commitment to renegotiation, which to Powell was ironic considering Heath's premiership: "In acrobatics Harold Wilson, for all his nimbleness and skill, is simply no match for the breathtaking, thoroughgoing efficiency of the present Prime Minister". At this moment a heckler shouted "Judas!" Powell responded: "Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!" Later in the speech Powell said: "I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me... it is something I cannot alter". During 1987 Powell said there was no contradiction between urging people to vote Labour whilst proclaiming to be a Tory: "Many Labour members are quite good Tories".
Powell, in an interview on 26 February, said he would be voting for Helene Middleweek, the Labour candidate, rather than the Conservative Nicholas Budgen. Powell did not stay up on election night to watch the results on television and when on 1 March Powell picked up his copy of ''The Times'' from his letterbox and saw the headline "Mr Heath's general election gamble fails", he reacted by singing the Te Deum. He later said: "I had had my revenge on the man who had destroyed the self-government of the United Kingdom". The election result was a "hung parliament". Although the Tories had won the most votes, Labour finished five seats ahead of the Conservatives. The national swing to Labour was 1 per cent; 4 per cent in Powell's heartland, the West Midlands conurbation; and 16 per cent in his old constituency (although Budgen won the seat). According to Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer, Both Powell and Heath believed that Powell was responsible for the Conservatives losing the election.
Since 1968 Powell had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom. From early 1971 he opposed, with increasing vehemence, Heath's approach to Northern Ireland, the greatest breach with his party coming over the imposition of direct rule in 1972. He was a strong believer in the United Kingdom, and he believed that it would survive only if the Unionists strove to integrate completely with the United Kingdom by abandoning devolved rule in Northern Ireland. He refused to join the Orange Institution – the first Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster never to be a member (and to date only one of three, the others being Ken Maginnis and Lady Hermon), and he was an outspoken opponent of the more extremist Unionism espoused by the Reverend Ian Paisley and his supporters.
In the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) on 21 November 1974, the government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. During its second reading Powell warned of passing legislation "in haste and under the immediate pressure of indignation on matters which touch the fundamental liberties of the subject; for both haste and anger are ill counsellors, especially when one is legislating for the rights of the subject". He said terrorism was a form of warfare which could not be prevented by laws and punishments but by the aggressor's certainty that the war was impossible to win.
When Heath called a leadership election at the end of 1974, Powell claimed they would have to find someone who was not a member of the Cabinet "which, without a single resignation or public dissent, not merely swallowed but advocated every single reversal of election pledge or party principle". During February 1975, after winning the leadership election, Margaret Thatcher refused to offer Powell a Shadow Cabinet place because "he turned his back on his own people" by leaving the Conservative Party exactly 12 months earlier and telling the electorate to vote Labour. Powell replied she was correct to exclude him because, "In the first place I am not a member of the Conservative Party and secondly, until the Conservative Party has worked its passage a very long way it will not be rejoining me". Powell also attributed Thatcher's success to luck, saying that she was faced with "supremely unattractive opponents at the time".
During the 1975 referendum on British membership of the EEC, Powell campaigned for a 'No' vote. However, the electorate voted 'Yes' by a margin of more than two to one. Powell was the second most prominent supporter of the 'No' camp, after Tony Benn.
On 23 March 1977, in a vote of confidence against the minority Labour government, Powell, along with a few other Ulster Unionists, abstained. The government won by 322 votes to 298, and remained in power for another two years.
Powell claimed that the only way to stop the PIRA was for Northern Ireland to be an integral part of the United Kingdom, treated no differently from any other of its constituent parts. He claimed the ambiguous nature of the province's status, with its own parliament and prime minister, gave hope to the PIRA that it could be detached from the rest of the UK:
Nonetheless in the 1987 general election which he lost, Powell campaigned in Bangor for James Kilfedder, the devolutionist North Down Popular Unionist Party MP, and against Robert McCartney who was standing as a Real Unionist on a policy of integration and equal citizenship for Northern Ireland.
In Powell's later career as an Ulster Unionist MP he continued to criticise the United States, and claimed that the Americans were trying to persuade the British to surrender Northern Ireland into an all-Irish state because the condition for Irish membership of NATO, Powell claimed, was Northern Ireland. The Americans wanted to close the 'yawning gap' in NATO defence that was the southern Irish coast to northern Spain. Powell had a copy of a State Department Policy Statement from 15 August 1950 in which the American government said that the 'agitation' caused by partition in Ireland "lessens the usefulness of Ireland in international organisations and complicates strategic planning for Europe". "It is desirable", the document continued, "that Ireland should be integrated into the defence planning of the North Atlantic area, for its strategic position and present lack of defensive capacity are matters of significance.
Though he voted with the Conservatives in a vote of confidence that brought down the Labour government on 28 March, Powell did not welcome the victory of Margaret Thatcher in the May 1979 election. "Grim" was Powell's response when he was asked what he thought of Thatcher's victory, because he believed she would renege like Heath did in 1972. During the election campaign, Thatcher, when questioned, again repeated her vow that there would be no position for Powell in her cabinet if the Conservatives won the forthcoming general election. Powell wrote to Callaghan after the general election, expressing his sincere sorrow.
After a riot in Bristol in 1980, Powell claimed the media of ignoring similar events in south London and Birmingham and claimed that "Far less than the foreseeable New Commonwealth and Pakistan ethnic proportion would be sufficient to constitute a dominant political force in the United Kingdom able to extract from a government and the main parties terms calculated to render its influence still more impregnable. Far less than this proportion would provide the bases and citadels for urban terrorism, which would in turn reinforce the overt political leverage of simple numbers". He attacked "the false nostrums and promises of those who apparently monopolise the channels of communication. Who then is likely to listen, let alone to respond, to the proof that nothing short of major movements of population can shift the lines along which we are being carried towards disaster?"
In 1980 Powell described the boycott of the Moscow Olympics – following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan – as 'pathetic to the point of farce'. In the 1980s Powell began espousing the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In a debate on the nuclear deterrent on 3 March 1981 Powell claimed that the debate was now more political than military; that Britain did not possess an independent deterrent and that through NATO Britain was tied to the nuclear deterrence theory of the United States. In the debate on the address shortly after the general election of 1983, Powell picked up on Thatcher's willingness, when asked, to use nuclear weapons as a "last resort". Powell presented a scenario of what he thought the last resort would be, namely that the Soviet Union would be ready to invade Britain and had used a nuclear weapon on somewhere such as Rockall to demonstrate their willingness to use it:
Powell went on to say that if the Soviet invasion had already begun and Britain resorted to a retaliatory strike the results would be the same: "We should be condemning, not merely to death, but as near as may be the non-existence of our population". To Powell an invasion would take place with or without Britain's nuclear weapons and therefore there was no point in retaining them. He said that after years of consideration he had come to the conclusion that there were no "rational grounds on which the deformation of our defence preparations in the United Kingdom by our determination to maintain a current independent nuclear deterrent can be justified".
On 28 March 1981 Powell gave a speech to Ashton-under-Lyne Young Conservatives where he attacked the "conspiracy of silence" between the government and the opposition over the prospective growth through births of the immigration population and added: "‘We have seen nothing yet’ is a phrase that we could with advantage repeat to ourselves whenever we try to form a picture of that future". He also criticised those who believed it was "too late to do anything" and that "there lies the certainty of violence on a scale which can only adequately be described as civil war". He also said that the solution was "a reduction in prospective numbers as would represent re-emigration hardly less massive than the immigration which occurred in the first place". The Shadow Home Secretary, Labour MP Roy Hattersley, criticised Powell for using "Munich beer-hall language". Then on 11 April occurred a riot in Brixton and when on 13 April Thatcher was quoted Powell's remark that "We have seen nothing yet" by an interviewer she replied: "I heard him say that and I thought it was a very very alarming remark. And I hope with all my heart that it isn't true".
In July a riot took place in Toxteth, Liverpool. On 16 July Powell gave a speech in the Commons in which he said the riots could not be understood unless one takes into consideration the fact that in some large cities between a quarter and a half of those under 25 were immigrant or descended from immigrants. He read out a letter he had received from a member of the public about immigration which included the line: "As they continue to multiply and as we can't retreat further there must be conflict". A Labour MP Martin Flannery intervened, saying Powell was making "a National Front speech". Powell predicted "inner London becoming ungovernable or violence which could only effectively be described as civil war" and Flannery intervened again to ask what Powell knew about inner cities. He replied: "I was a Member for Wolverhampton for a quarter of a century. What I saw in those early years of the development of this problem in Wolverhampton has made it impossible for me ever to dissociate myself from this gigantic and tragic problem". He also criticised the view that the causes of the riots were economic: "Are we seriously saying that so long as there is poverty, unemployment and deprivation our cities will be torn to pieces, that the police in them will be the objects of attack and that we shall destroy our own environment? Of course not". Dame Judith Hart attacked his speech as "an evil incitement to riot". Powell replied: "I am within the judgment of the House, as I am within the judgment of the people of this country, and I am content to stand before either tribunal". After the Scarman Report on the riots was published, Powell gave a speech on 10 December in the Commons. Powell disagreed with Scarman when he said that the black community was alienated because it was economically disadvantaged: the black community was alienated because it was alien. He claimed tensions would worsen because the non-white population was growing: whereas in Lambeth it was 25%, of those of secondary school age it was 40%. Powell said that the government should be honest to the people by telling them in thirty years time the black population of Lambeth would have doubled in size.
John Casey records an exchange between Powell and Thatcher during a meeting of the Conservative Philosophy Group:
Edward Norman (then Dean of Peterhouse) had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons. The discussion moved on to ‘Western values’. Mrs Thatcher said (in effect) that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values. Powell: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.’ Thatcher (it was just before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.’ ‘No, Prime Minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.’ Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism.
When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982 Powell was given secret briefings on Privy Councillor terms on behalf of his party. On 3 April Powell said in the Commons that the time for inquests on the government's failure to protect the Falkland Islands would come later and that although it was right to put the issue before the United Nations, Britain should wait upon that organisation to deliberate but use forceful action now. He then turned to face Thatcher: "The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the “Iron Lady”. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made". According to Thatcher's friends this had a "devastating impact" on her and encouraged her resolve.
On 14 April in the Commons Powell claimed "it is difficult to fault the military and especially the naval measures which the Government have taken". He added: "We are in some danger of resting our position too exclusively upon the existence, the nature and the wishes of the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands...if the population of the Falkland Islands did not desire to be British, the principle that the Queen wishes no unwilling subjects would long ago have prevailed; but we should create great difficulties for ourselves in other contexts, as well as in this context, if we rested our action purely and exclusively on the notion of restoring tolerable, acceptable conditions and self-determination to our fellow Britons on the Falkland Islands...I do not think that we need be too nice about saying that we defend our territory as well as our people. There is nothing irrational, nothing to be ashamed of, in doing that. Indeed, it is impossible in the last resort to distinguish between the defence of territory and the defence of people". Powell also criticised the United Nations Security Council's resolution calling for a "peaceful solution". He said whilst he wanted a peaceful solution the resolution's meaning "seems to be of a negotiated settlement or compromise between two incompatible positions—between the position which exists in international law, that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies are British sovereign territory and some other position altogether...It cannot be meant that one country has only to seize the territory of another country for the nations of the world to say that some middle position must be found...If that were the meaning of the resolution of the Security Council, the charter of the United Nations would not be a charter of peace; it would be a pirates' charter. It would mean that any claim anywhere in the world had only to be pursued by force, and points would immediately be gained and a bargaining position established by the aggressor".
On 28 April Powell spoke in the Commons against the Northern Ireland Secretary's (Jim Prior) plans for devolution to a power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland: "We assured the people of the Falkland Islands that there should be no change in their status without their agreement. Yet at the very same time that those assurances were being repeated, the actions of the Government and their representatives elsewhere were belying or contradicting those assurances and showing that part at any rate of the Government was looking to a very different outcome that could not be approved by the people of the islands. Essentially, exactly the same has happened over the years to Northern Ireland". He further claimed that power-sharing was a negation of democracy.
The next day Powell disagreed with the Labour Party leader Michael Foot's claim that the British government was acting under the authority of the United Nations: "The right of self-defence—to repel aggression and to expel an invader from one's territory and one's people whom he has occupied and taken captive—is, as the Government have said, an inherent right. It is one which existed before the United Nations was dreamt of".
On 13 May Powell said the task force was sent "to repossess the Falkland Islands, to restore British administration of the islands and to ensure that the decisive factor in the future of the islands should be the wishes of the inhabitants" but the Foreign Secretary (Francis Pym) desired an "interim agreement": "So far as I understand that interim agreement, it is in breach, if not in contradiction, of each of the three objects with which the task force was dispatched to the South Atlantic. There was to be a complete and supervised withdrawal of Argentine forces...matched by corresponding withdrawal of British forces. There is no withdrawal of British force that “corresponds” to the withdrawal from the territory of the islands of those who have unlawfully occupied them. We have a right to be there; those are our waters, the territory is ours and we have the right to sail the oceans with our fleets whenever we think fit. So the whole notion of a “corresponding withdrawal”, a withdrawal of the only force which can possibly restore the position, which can possibly ensure any of the objectives which have been talked about on either side of the House, is in contradiction of the determination to repossess the Falklands".
After British forces successfully recaptured the Falklands, Powell asked Thatcher in the Commons on 17 June, recalling his statement to her of 3 April: "Is the right hon. Lady aware that the report has now been received from the public analyst on a certain substance recently subjected to analysis and that I have obtained a copy of the report? It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes?" She replied that "I think that I am very grateful indeed to the right hon. Gentleman. I agree with every word that he said". Their mutual friend Ian Gow printed and framed this and the original question and presented it to Thatcher, who hung it in her office.
Powell wrote an article for ''The Times'' on 29 June in which he said: "The Falklands have brought to he surface of the British mind our latent perception of ourselves as a sea animal...No assault on a landward possession would have evoked the same automatic defiance, tinged with a touch of that self sufficiency which belongs to all nations". The United States' response was "very different but just as deep an instinctual reaction...the United States have an almost neurotic sense of vulnerability...its two coastlines, its two theatres, its two navies are separated by the entire length of the New World...she lives with...the nightmare of having one day to fight a decisive sea battle without the benefit of concentration, the perpetual spectre of naval “war on two fronts”." Powell added: "The Panama Canal from 1914 onwards could never quite exorcise the spectre...It was the position of the Falkland Islands in relation to that route which gave and gives them their significance—for the United States above all. The British people have become uneasily aware that their American allies would prefer the Falkland Islands to pass out of Britain's possession into hands which, if not wholly American, might be amenable to American control. In fact, the American struggle to wrest the islands from Britain has only commenced in earnest now that the fighting is over". Powell then said there was "the Hispanic factor": "If we could gather together all the anxieties for the future which in Britain cluster around race relations...and then attribute them, translated into Hispanic terms, to the Americans, we would have something of the phobias which haunt the United States and addressed itself to the aftermath of the Falklands campaign".
Writing in ''The Guardian'' on 18 October Powell asserted that due to the Falklands War "Britain no longer looked upon itself and the world through American spectacles" and the view was "more rational; and it was more congenial; for, after all, it was our own view". He quoted an observation that Americans thought their country was "a unique society...where God has put together all nationalities, races and interests of the globe for one purpose – to show the rest of the world how to live". He denounced the "manic exaltation of the American illusion" and compared it to the "American nightmare". Powell also disliked the American belief that "they are authorised, possibly by the deity, to intervene, openly or covertly, in the internal affairs of other countries anywhere in the world". Britain should dissociate herself from American intervention in the Lebanon: "It is not in Britain's self-interest alone that Britain should once again assert her own position. A world in which the American myth and the American nightmare go unchallenged by question or by contradiction is not a world as safe or as peaceable as human reason, prudence and realism can make it".
Speaking to the Aldershot and North Hants Conservative Association on 4 February 1983, Powell blamed the United Nations for the Falklands War due to the General Assembly resolution of December 1967 which stated "its gratitude for the continuous efforts made by the Government of Argentina to facilitate the process of decolonisation" and further called on Britain and Argentina to negotiate. Powell said "it would be difficult to imagine a more cynically wicked or criminally absurd or insultingly provocative action". As 102 had voted for this resolution with only Britain voting against it (with 32 abstentions), he claimed it was not surprising that Argentina had continually threatened Britain until this threatening turned into aggression: "It is with the United Nations that the guilt lies for the breach of the peace and the bloodshed". The UN knew that no international forum had ruled against British possession of the Falklands but had voted its gratitude to Argentina who wanted to annexe the Islands from their rightful owners. It was therefore "disgraceful" for Britain to belong to such a body that engaged in "pure spite for spite's sake against the United Kingdom": "We were, and are, the victims of our own insincerity. For over thirty years we have sanctimoniously and dishonestly pretended respect, if not awe, for an organisation which all the time we knew was a monstrous and farcical humbug...The moral is to cease to engage in humbug, which almost all have happily and self-righteously engaged in for a generation".
In an article for the ''Sunday Telegraph'' on 3 April Powell expressed his opposition to the Labour Party's manifesto pledge to outlaw fox hunting. He claimed that angling was much more cruel and that it was just as logical to ban the boiling of live lobsters or eating live oysters. The ceremonial part of fox hunting was "a side of our national character which is deeply anti-pathetic to the Labour party". In the 1983 general election Powell had to face a DUP candidate in his constituency and Ian Paisley denounced Powell as "a foreigner and an Anglo-Catholic".
On 31 May Powell gave a speech at Downpatrick against nuclear weapons. Powell claimed that war could not banished because "War is implicit in the human condition". The "true case against the nuclear weapon is the nightmarish unreality and criminal levity of the grounds upon which its acquisition and multiplication are advocated and defended". Thatcher had claimed nuclear weapons were our defence "of last resort". Powell said he supposed this to mean "that the Soviet Union, which seems always to be assumed to be the enemy in question, proved so victorious in a war of aggression in Europe as to stand upon the verge of invading these islands...Suppose further, because this is necessary to the alleged case for our nuclear weapon as the defence of last resort, that, as in 1940, the United States was standing aloof from the contest but that, in contrast with 1940, Britain and the Warsaw Pact respectively possessed the nuclear weaponry which they do today. Such must surely be the sort of scene in which the Prime Minister is asserting that Britain would be saved by possession of her present nuclear armament. I can only say: “One must be mad to think it”." Powell pointed out that Britain's nuclear weaponry "is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide – the extinction of our race – in the literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. Would anybody in their senses contemplate that this ought to be our choice or would be our choice?"
Powell further stated that Continental nations held the nuclear weapon in such esteem that they had conventional forces "manifestly inadequate to impose more than brief delay upon an assault from the East. The theory of nuclear deterrence states that, should Warsaw Pact forces score substantial military successes or make substantial advances this side of the Iron Curtain, the United States would initiate the suicidal duel of strategic nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. One can only greet this idea with an even more emphatic “One must be mad to think of it”. That a nation staring ultimate military defeat in the face would choose self-extermination is unbelievable enough; but that the United States, separated from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean, would regard the loss of the first pawn in the long game as necessitating hara kari is not describable by the ordinary resources of language". The reason why governments, including in the US, supported nuclear weapons was that "enormous economic and financial interests are vested in the continuation and elaboration of nuclear armaments. I believe, however, that the crucial explanation lies in another direction: the nuclear hypothesis provides governments with an excuse for not doing what they have no intention of doing anyhow, but for reasons which they find it inconvenient to specify".
On 2 June Powell spoke against the stationing of American Cruise missiles in Britain and claimed the United States had an obsessive sense of mission and a hallucinatory view of international relations: "The American nation, as we have watched their proceedings during these last 25 years, will not, when another Atlantic crisis, another Middle East crisis or another European crisis comes, wait upon the deliberations of the British Cabinet, whose point of view and appreciation of the situation will be so different from their own".
During 1983 his local agent was Jeffrey Donaldson, later an Ulster Unionist MP before defecting to the DUP.
In 1984, Powell claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had murdered Earl Mountbatten of Burma and that the deaths of the MPs Airey Neave and Robert Bradford were carried out by the USA in order to stop Neave's policy of integration for Northern Ireland. Then in 1986 he again argued that Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) had not killed Airey Neave but that "MI6 and their friends" were responsible instead, claiming to have been told so by RUC officers. Margaret Thatcher however, both rejected and dismissed these claims.
In autumn 1985 riots broke out in London and Birmingham and Powell repeated his belief that civil war would be the result of immigration and called for massive repatriation. Hattersley in response called him "the Alf Garnett of British politics". At a meeting of the Monday Club Powell said in response when someone compared him to Garnett: "Garnett, Alf Garnett? Who's he? One of the new ministers?"
Powell later came into conflict with Thatcher during November 1985 because of her support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement. On the day it was signed, 14 November, Powell asked her in the Commons: "Does the right hon. Lady understand—if she does not yet understand she soon will—that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?" Thatcher replied that she found his remarks "deeply offensive".
Along with other Unionist MPs, Powell resigned his seat in protest and then regaining it at the ensuing by-election.
In 1987 Thatcher visited the Soviet Union which signified to Powell a "radical transformation which is in progress in both the foreign policy and the defence policy of the United Kingdom". In a speech in the Commons on 7 April Powell claimed the nuclear hypothesis had been shook by two events. The first was the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars": "Star wars raised the terrible prospect that there might be an effective means of neutralising the inter-continental ballistic missile, whereby the two great giants who held what had become to be seen as the balance of terror would contract out of the game altogether: the deterrent would be switched off by the invulnerability of the two providers of the mutual terror". The United States' "European allies were brought along to acquiesce in the United States engaging in the rational activity of discovering whether there was after all some defence against nuclear attack...by the apparent assurance obtained from the United States that it was only engaged in experiment and research, and that, if there were any danger of effective protection being devised, of course the United States would not avail itself of that protection without the agreement of its European allies. That was the first recent event which shook to its foundations the nuclear deterrent with which we had lived these last 30 years". The second event was Gorbachev's offer of both the Soviet Union and the United States agreeing to abolish intermediate ballistic missiles. Powell said that Thatcher's "most significant point was when she went on to say that we must aim at a conventional forces balance. So, after all our journeys of the last 30 or 40 years, the disappearance of the intermediate range ballistic missile revived the old question of the supposed conventional imbalance between the Russian alliance and the North Atlantic Alliance".
Powell further claimed that even if nuclear weapons had not existed the Russians would still not have invaded Western Europe: "What has prevented that from happening was...the fact that the Soviet Union knew...that such an action on its part would have led to a third world war—a long war, bitterly fought, a war which in the end the Soviet Union would have been likely to lose on the same basis and in the same way as the corresponding war was lost by Napoleon, by the Emperor Wilhelm and by Adolf Hitler. It was that fear, that caution, that understanding, that perception on the part of Russia and its leaders that was the real deterrent against Russia committing the utterly irrational and suicidal act of plunging into a third world war in which the Soviet Union would be likely to find itself confronting a combination of the greatest industrial and economic powers in the world". Powell said "In the minds of the Russians the inevitable commitment of the United States in such a war would have come not directly or necessarily from the stationing of American marines in Germany, but, as it came in the previous two struggles, from the ultimate involvement of the United States in any war determining the future of Europe". Thatcher's belief in the nuclear hypothesis "in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was “inconceivable” that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States. The Prime Minister supplied the reason why: she said it was because we depend for our liberty and freedom upon the United States. Once let the nuclear hypothesis be questioned or destroyed, once allow it to break down, and from that moment the American imperative in this country's policies disappears with it".
At the start of 1987 general election Powell claimed the Conservatives' prospects did not look good: "I have the feeling of 1945". During the final weekend of the election campaign Powell gave a speech in London reiterating his opposition to the nuclear hypothesis, calling it "barmy", and advocating a vote for the Labour Party, which had unilateral nuclear disarmament as a policy. He claimed Chernobyl had strengthened "a growing impulse to escape from the nightmare of peace being dependent upon the contemplation of horrific and mutual carnage. Events have now so developed that this aspiration can at last be rationally, logically and – I dare to add – patriotically seized by the people of the United Kingdom if they will use their votes to do so".
However Powell lost his seat in the election by 731 votes to the Social Democratic and Labour Party's Eddie McGrady, mainly due to demographic and boundary changes which resulted in there being many more Irish Nationalists in the constituency than before. Ironically, the boundary changes had arisen due to his own campaign for the number of MPs representing Northern Ireland to be increased to the equivalent proportion for the rest of the United Kingdom, as part of the steps towards greater integration. McGrady paid tribute to Powell, recognising the respect he was held by both Unionists and Nationalists in the constituency. Powell said: "For the rest of my life when I look back on the 13 years I shall be filled with affection for the Province and its people, and their fortunes will never be out of my heart". He received a warm ovation from the mostly Nationalist audience and as he walked off the platform he said the words Edmund Burke used on the death of another candidate: "What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue". When a BBC reporter asked Powell to explain his defeat, he replied: "My opponent polled more votes than me".
He was offered a life peerage, which was regarded as his right as a former cabinet minister, but declined it. He argued that, as he had opposed the Life Peerages Act 1958, it would be hypocritical for him to take one, but while he was willing to accept a hereditary peerage (which would be extinct upon his death as he had no male heir), Mrs Thatcher was unwilling to court the controversy which might have arisen as a result.
Powell claimed in an article for ''The Guardian'' on 7 December 1988 that the new Western-friendly foreign policy of Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev heralded "the death and burial of the American empire". The Chancellor of West Germany had decided to visit Moscow to negotiate German reunification, signalling to Powell the last gasp of American power in Europe to be replaced by a new balance of power not resting on military force but on the "recognition of the restraints which the ultimate certainty of failure places upon the ambitions of the respective national states. In an interview for the ''Sunday People'' that same month he claimed the Conservative Party was "rejoining Enoch" on the EC but repeated his warning of civil war as the consequence of immigration: "I still cannot forsee how a country can be peaceably governed in which the composition of the population is progressively going to change. I am talking about violence on a scale which can only be described as civil war. I cannot see there can be any other outcome". It would not be a race war but "about people who revolt against being trapped in a situation where they feel at the mercy of a built-in racial majority, whatever its colour" and claimed that the government had made contingency plans for such an event. The solution he claimed was repatriation on a large scale and the cost of doing this in welfare payments and pensions was well worth paying.
In spring 1989 he made a programme (broadcast in July) on his visit to Russia and his impressions on that country. The BBC originally wanted him to do a programme on India but the Indian high commission in London refused him a visa. When he visited Russia, Powell went to the graves of 600,000 people who died during the siege of Leningrad and saying that he could not believe a people who had suffered so much would willingly start another war. He also went to a veterans' parade (wearing his own medals) and talked with Russian soldiers with the aid of an interpreter. However the programme was criticised by those who believed that Powell had dismissed the Soviet Union's threat to the West since 1945, so impressed had he been with Russia's sense of national identity. When German reunification was on the agenda in summer 1989, Powell claimed that Britain urgently needed to create an alliance with the Soviet Union in view of Germany's effect on the balance of power in Europe.
After Thatcher's Bruges speech in September 1988 and her increasing hostility to the abolition of the pound sterling in the last years of her premiership, Powell made many speeches publicly supporting her attitude to Europe. When Heath attacked Thatcher's speech in May 1989 Powell called him "the old virtuoso of the U-turn". When inflation crept up that year he blamed the Chancellor Nigel Lawson's policy of printing money so sterling would shadow the German Deutschmark so it could in turn join European Monetary System. During early September 1989 a collection of Powell's speeches on Europe was published titled ''Enoch Powell on 1992'' (1992 being the year set for the European Single Market). In a speech at Chatham House for the launch of the book on 6 September, he advised Thatcher to fight the next general election on a nationalist theme as many Eastern European nations previously under Russian rule were gaining their freedom. At the Conservative Party conference in October he told a fringe meeting: "I find myself today less on the fringe of that party than I have done for 20 years". After Thatcher resisted further European integration at a meeting at Strasbourg in November Powell asked her parliamentary private secretary Mark Lennox-Boyd to pass to her "my respectful congratulations on her stand...she both spoke for Britain and gave a lead to Europe – in the line of succession of Winston Churchill and William Pitt. Those who lead are always out in front, alone". Thatcher replied: "I am deeply touched by your words. They give me the greatest possible encouragement".
On 5 January 1990, addressing Conservatives in Liverpool, Powell claimed that if the Conservatives played the "British card" at the next general election they could win; that the new mood in Britain for "self-determination" had given the newly independent nations of Eastern Europe a "beacon", adding that Britain should stand alone, if necessary, for European freedom, adding: "We are taunted – by the French, by the Italians, by the Spaniards – for refusing to worship at the shrine of a common government superimposed upon them all...where were the European unity merchants in 1940? I will tell you. They were either writhing under a hideous oppression or they were aiding and abetting that oppression. Lucky for Europe that Britain was alone in 1940". The Conservative Party would have to, preferably at the next election, ask: "Do you intend still to control the laws which you obey, the taxes you pay and the policies of your government?" Five days after this speech, in an interview for ''The Daily Telegraph'', Thatcher praised Powell: "I have always read Enoch Powell's speeches and articles very carefully... I always think it was a tragedy that he left. He is a very, very able politician. I say that even though he has sometimes said vitriolic things against me". On the day of the Mid-Staffordshire by-election Powell claimed that the government should admit the poll tax was "a disaster" and that what mattered most to the people of Mid-Staffordshire was the question of who should govern Britain and that only the Conservative Party was advocating that the British should govern themselves. Thatcher had been labelled "dictatorial" for wanting to "go it alone" in Europe: "Well, I do not mind somebody being dictatorial in defending my own rights and those of my fellow countrymen...lose self-government, and I have lost everything, and for good". This was the first election since 1970 that Powell was advocating a vote for the Conservative Party.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, Powell claimed that, because Britain was not an ally of Kuwait in the "formal sense" and because the balance of power in the Middle East had ceased to be a British concern after the end of the British Empire, Britain should not go to war. Powell claimed that "Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops come storming up the beaches of Kent or Sussex". On 21 October he wrote: "The world is full of evil men engaged in doing evil things. That does not make us policemen to round them up nor judges to find them guilty and to sentence them. What is so special about the ruler of Iraq that we suddenly discover that we are to be his jailers and his judges?...we as a nation have no interest in the existence or non-existence of Kuwait or, for that matter, Saudi Arabia as an independent state. I sometimes wonder if, when we shed our power, we omitted to shed our arrogance".
When Thatcher was challenged by Michael Heseltine for the leadership of the Conservative Party during November 1990, Powell said he would rejoin the party – which he had left in February 1974 over the issue of Europe – if Thatcher won, and would urge the public to support both her and, in Powell's view, national independence. He wrote to one of Thatcher's supporters, Norman Tebbit, on 16 November telling him Thatcher was entitled to use his name and his support in any way she saw fit. As it turned out she resigned, and Powell never rejoined the Conservative party. On 22 November Thatcher announced her intention to resign. Powell wrote on the following Sunday: "Good news is seldom so good, nor bad news so bad, as at first sight it appears". Her downfall was due to having so few like-minded people on European integration amongst her colleagues and that as she had adopted a line that would improve her party's popularity it was foolish of them to force her out. However he added: "The battle has been lost, but not the war. The fact abides that, outside the magic circle at the top, a deep rooted opposition has been disclosed in Britain to surrendering to others the right to make our laws, fix our taxes, or decide our policies. Running deep beneath the overlay of years of indifference is still the attachment of the British public to their tradition of democracy. Their resentment on learning that their own decisions can be overruled from outside remains as obstinate as ever". Thatcher had relit the flame of independence and "what has happened once can happen again...sooner or later those who aspire to govern...will have to listen".
In December 1991 Powell claimed that "Whether Yugoslavia dissolves into two states or half a dozen states or does not dissolve at all makes no difference to the safety and well being of the United Kingdom". Britain's national interests determined that the country should have "a foreign policy which befits the sole insular and oceanic state in Europe". During the 1992 general election Powell spoke for Nicholas Budgen in his old seat of Wolverhampton South-West. He praised Budgen for his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty but condemned the rest of the Conservative Party for supporting it.
On 16 May 1994 Powell spoke at the Bruges Group and said Europe had "destroyed one Prime Minister and will destroy another Prime Minister yet" and demanded powers surrendered to the European Court of Justice be repatriated. In June he wrote an article for the ''Daily Mail'' where he stated that "Britain is waking from the nightmare of being part of the continental bloc, to rediscover that these offshore islands belong to the outside world and lie open to its oceans". Innovations in contemporary society did not worry him: "When exploration has run its course, we shall revert to the normal type of living to which nature and instinct predispose us. the decline will not have been permanent. The deterioration will not have been irreversible".
After his death Powell's friend Richard Ritchie recorded in 1998 that "during one of the habitual coal crises of recent years he told me that he had no objection to supporting the coal industry, either through the restriction of cheap coal imports or subsidy, if it were the country's wish to preserve local coal communities".
In April 1995 he claimed in an interview that for the Conservatives "defeat [at the next election] would help. It helps one to change one's tune". The Party was just "slithering around". The same month he took part at a debate on Europe at the Cambridge Union and was on the winning side. In July 1995 took place a leadership election for the Conservative Party in which Major resigned as leader of the Party and stood in the election. Powell wrote: "He says to the Sovereign: I no longer am leader of the majority party in the House of Commons; but I am carrying on as your Prime Minister. Now I don't think anybody can say that – at least without inflicting damage on the constitution". to seek to offer advice to the Queen whilst unable to feel they could command a majority in the Commons was "tantamount to treating the monarch herself with disrespect and denying the very principle in which our parliamentary democracy is founded". After Major's challenger, John Redwood, was defeated, Powell wrote to him: "Dear Redwood, you will never regret the events of the last week or two. Patience will evidently have to be exercised – and patience is the greatest of the political virtues – by those of us who want to keep Britain independent and self-governed".
During the final years of his life he managed occasional pieces of journalism and co-operated in a BBC documentary about his life in 1995 (entitled ‘Odd Man Out’ and broadcast on 11 November). In April 1996 he wrote an article for the ''Daily Express'' where he said: "Those who consented to the surrender made in 1972 will have to think again. thinking again means that activity most unthinkable for politicians – unsaying what has been said. The surrender...we have made is not irrevocable. Parliament still has the power (thank God) to reclaim what has been surrendered by treaty. It is time we told the other European nations what we mean by being self-governed". In October he gave his last interview, to Matthew d'Ancona in the ''Sunday Telegraph''. He said: "I have lived into an age in which my ideas are now part of common intuition, part of a common fashion. It has been a great experience, having given up so much to find that there is now this range of opinion in all classes, that an agreement with the EEC is totally incompatible with normal parliamentary government...The nation has returned to haunt us". When Labour won the 1997 general election, Powell was asked by his wife what he thought the election meant: "They have voted to break up the United Kingdom", was Powell's reply. His wife rejoined the Conservative Party the day after the defeat but Powell refused to do so. By this time Powell had been hospitalised several times as a result of a succession of falls.
Powell began, but did not complete, work on a study of the Gospel of John. It was unfinished at the time of his death, aged 85, at 4:30 a.m. on 8 February 1998 at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in the City of Westminster, London. Powell's final words were a few hours after being admitted to hospital, he asked where his lunch was. On being told that he was being fed intravenously he remarked "I don't call that much of a lunch".
Dressed in his brigadier's uniform, Enoch Powell was buried in his regiment's plot in Warwick Cemetery, Warwickshire, ten days later, after a family funeral service at Westminster Abbey and a public service at St. Margaret's, Westminster. He was survived by his wife and two daughters.
Despite his earlier atheism Powell became a devout Anglican, having thought in 1949 "that he heard the bells of St Peter's Wolverhampton calling him" while walking to his flat in his (then future) constituency. Subsequently, he became a churchwarden of St Margaret's, Westminster. He spent much of his later life trying to prove, with close textual reading, that Christ had not been crucified but stoned to death.
Powell was reading Ancient Greek by the age of five, learning it from his mother. At the age of 70 he began learning his 12th and final language, Hebrew.
In August 2002 Powell appeared in the List of 100 Greatest Britons of all time (voted for by the public in a BBC nationwide poll).
Powell had remarked that "all political lives end in failure" and did not hesitate to agree that this maxim applied to his own. Like Tony Benn (a personal friend from a different political background, whom Powell had helped to renounce his peerage and so remain an elected Member of Parliament), he was seen by supporters as putting conscience and duty to his constituents before loyalty to his party or the sake of his career.
Powell's rhetorical gifts were also employed, with success, beyond politics. He was a poet of some accomplishment, with four published collections to his name: ''First Poems''; ''Casting Off''; ''Dancer's End''; and ''The Wedding Gift''. His ''Collected Poems'' appeared in 1990. He translated Herodotus' ''Histories'' and published many other works of classical scholarship. He published a biography of Joseph Chamberlain, which treated the split with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886 as the pivotal point of his career, rather than the adoption of Tariff Reform, and which contained the famous line that "all political careers, unless they are cut off at some happy juncture, end in failure". Powell published many books on political matters too, which were often annotated collections of his speeches. His political publications were often as critical of his own party as they were of Labour, often making fun of what he saw as logical fallacies in reasoning or action. His book ''Freedom & Reality'' contained many quotes from Labour party manifestos or by Harold Wilson which he regarded as nonsensical.
One Young Conservative got up in a private meeting at the House of Commons to express his support for Mr Powell, "Mr Powell, I am a great supporter of your views......" he was interrupted by Powell. "I do not get letters of support from you, I do not get financial rewards for your support, what is the nature of your support?" he said in his monotone voice. The youth blushed and sat down.
Powell stated: ''"I have and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origins."'' In ''The Trial of Enoch Powell'', a Channel 4 television broadcast in April 1998, on the thirtieth anniversary of his Birmingham speech (and two months after his death), 64% of the studio audience voted that Powell was not a racist. Some in the Church of England took a different view. Upon Powell's death, the Wilfred Wood, then-Bishop of Croydon stated ''"Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge."''
The conservative commentator Bruce Anderson has claimed that the "Rivers of Blood" speech would have come as a complete surprise to anyone who had studied his record: he had been a West Midlands MP for 18 years but had said hardly anything about immigration. On this view, the speech was merely part of a badly miscalculated strategy to become party leader if Ted Heath should fall. Anderson adds that the speech had no effect on immigration, except to make it more difficult for the subject to be discussed rationally in polite society.
Powell's detractors often assert that he was 'far-right', 'proto-fascist' or 'racist'. His supporters claim that the first two charges clash with his voting record on most social issues, such as homosexual law reform—he was actually co-sponsor of a Bill on this issue during May 1965—and the abolition of the death penalty, both liberal reforms which had limited support in the Conservative Party at the time, although he did little to call public attention to his stance on these non-party "issues of conscience". Powell voted against the reinstitution of the death penalty in 1969, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1983 and 1987. It was not until the late 1960s that he made speeches on immigration and nationality.
Powell's speeches and TV interviews throughout his political life displayed a suspicion towards "the Establishment" in general, and by the 1980s there was a regular expectation that he would make some sort of speech or act in a way designed to upset the government and ensure he would not be offered a life peerage (and thus be transferred to the House of Lords), which he had not any intention of accepting so long as Edward Heath sat in the Commons. (Heath remained in the Commons until after Powell's death.) He had opposed the 1958 Life Peerages Act and felt it would be hypocritical to accept a life peerage himself, while no Prime Minister was ever willing to offer him a hereditary peerage.
There are 24 images of Powell in the National Portrait Gallery Collection including work by Bassano and Anne-Katrin Purkiss
The NPG collection includes a 1971 cartoon by Gerald Scarfe.
Date of election !! Constituency !! Party !! Votes !! % !! Result | |||||
Normanton by-election, 1947 | Normanton (UK Parliament constituency)>Normanton | Conservative Party (UK)Conservative || | 4,258 | 17.9 | Not elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1950 | Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)Wolverhampton South West || | Conservative Party (UK)>Conservative | 20,239 | 46.0 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1951 | Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)Wolverhampton South West || | Conservative Party (UK)>Conservative | 23,660 | 53.6 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1955 | Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)Wolverhampton South West || | Conservative Party (UK)>Conservative | 25,318 | 60.0 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1959 | Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)Wolverhampton South West || | Conservative Party (UK)>Conservative | 25,696 | 63.9 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1964 | Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)Wolverhampton South West || | Conservative Party (UK)>Conservative | 21,736 | 57.4 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1966 | Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)Wolverhampton South West || | Conservative Party (UK)>Conservative | 21,466 | 59.1 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1970 | Wolverhampton South West (UK Parliament constituency)Wolverhampton South West || | Conservative Party (UK)>Conservative | 26,220 | 64.3 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, October 1974 | South Down (UK Parliament constituency)South Down || | Ulster Unionist Party>Ulster Unionist | 33,614 | 50.8 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1979 | South Down (UK Parliament constituency)South Down || | Ulster Unionist Party>Ulster Unionist | 32,254 | 50.0 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1983 | South Down (UK Parliament constituency)South Down || | Ulster Unionist Party>Ulster Unionist | 20,693 | 40.3 | Elected |
Northern Ireland by-elections, 1986 | South Down (UK Parliament constituency)South Down || | Ulster Unionist Party>Ulster Unionist | 24,963 | 48.4 | Elected |
United Kingdom general election, 1987 | South Down (UK Parliament constituency)South Down || | Ulster Unionist Party>Ulster Unionist | 25,848 | 45.7 | Not elected |
Category:1912 births Category:1998 deaths Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Category:Alumni of the School of Oriental and African Studies Category:British Army personnel of World War II Category:Conservative Party (UK) MPs Category:Converts to Anglicanism from atheism or agnosticism Category:Critics of the European Union Category:English anti-communists Category:English Anglicans Category:English classical scholars Category:English people of Welsh descent Category:Intelligence Corps officers Category:Members of the Order of the British Empire Category:Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom Category:Members of the United Kingdom Parliament for English constituencies Category:Members of the United Kingdom Parliament for Northern Irish constituencies Category:Mont Pelerin Society members Category:People educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham Category:People from Birmingham, West Midlands Category:People from Wolverhampton Category:People with Parkinson's disease Category:Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers officers Category:UK MPs 1950–1951 Category:UK MPs 1951–1955 Category:UK MPs 1955–1959 Category:UK MPs 1959–1964 Category:UK MPs 1964–1966 Category:UK MPs 1966–1970 Category:UK MPs 1970–1974 Category:UK MPs 1974–1979 Category:UK MPs 1979–1983 Category:UK MPs 1983–1987 Category:Ulster Unionist Party politicians Category:University of Sydney faculty
cs:Enoch Powell cy:Enoch Powell de:Enoch Powell fr:Enoch Powell ga:Enoch Powell it:Enoch Powell nl:Enoch Powell no:Enoch Powell nn:Enoch Powell pl:Enoch Powell pt:Enoch Powell simple:Enoch Powell sk:Enoch PowellThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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