Thread: Was Enoch Powell wrong?

Originally Posted by Charlemagne

It never does. The liberal element in society can only be oppressed by a dictatorship. Democracy to a leftist is like sunshine and water to a flower. Without it the liberal will shrivel up and die.

Democracy simply gives power to those who shout the loudest.

Once elected to office by "democratic" vote the political scum do as they wish. 90% of the public are too stupid and selfish to have political views of any value and as Hegel says "The people never knows what it wills."

Did not Rousseau observe that the only difference between France and England was that the one country was tyrannised by a single despot while the other was tyrannised by a parliament full of despots?

david H: Enoch Powell did a good job in projecting himself as the heavyweight intellectual in a wide range of subjects; he was no such thing and certainly was not entitled to be considered a polymath. If I remember correctly he took a second-class degree in Greek, and then disappeared to Australia as a professor. In any other subject but ancient Greek, he would have needed a Ph.D for a professorial chair. Not a criticism but a mere statement of fact. While being people of different generations, the present Prime Minister took what was considered to be one of the best degrees from Edinburgh in the post-war years. This was subsequently consolidated with a Ph.D. but we don't get sycophantic postings about the clever Dr Brown.

In the 1950s' Powell was concerned with economics and resigned aa a junior Treasury minister along with Peter Thorneycroft due to their mutual concern about public spending. In the 1960' he hesitantly gravitated towards the issue of immigration, but was then distracted by monetarism, and became a fervent advocate of a free economy regulated by the government control of the production of money. In a sense he was re-inventing himself as a relevant contemporary politician. Thatcher was virtually elected as Conservative leader with this kind of support; and taking a hardline with trade unions and this new fangled-thing called monetarism became prime minister. The problem was, actual money in the economy was of dimishing importance; loans, credit agreements, debt, mortgages hire purchase were now the problems. There was, however a reluctance by the monetarists to interfere with these things by direct government control. When the regulations controlling the free movement of finance internationally were repealed, and company borrowing could be made as easily from German or French banks, as the one up the street, monetarism disappeared from our daily vocabulary as rapidly as it had appeared. By the end of Thatcher's first term as P.M. concern for defending the Falklands (quite rightly in my opinion) was the new justification for re-election.

Powell justified monetarism on the grounds that only inflation can be produced by government (untrue, actually). If governemnt controlled the production of money, trade unions could only 'scramble' for that money which the government had permitted. Therefore, Powell argued, monetarism would be central in controlling strikes. In a curious way, powell was using monetarism as the economic absolute, in much the same way that Churchill was justifying a return to the Gold Standard under the tution of Montague Norman in the 1920's. Both were absolutely wrong; this must now be beyond doubt.

As you say David, Powell was not the 'lone voice' warning about the dangers of immmigration. He was one of the late-comers to the awkward squad. Having said all that, I don't think that Powell was a nasty or unpleasant person. Essentially, he was a political romantic, believing that emotional issues could be settled by reason. Should that be possible, many of the problems would have never existed in the first place.

Brown's PhD was something as lightweight as 'The History of the Labour Party in Western Scotland 1918 -1932' or something. Not REALLY much of an accolade. The man himself seems embarrassed by it, hence his being known as 'Mr' Brown.