The Phenomenon of Powellism

I REGARD the politician as a prophet in the Hebrew sense--not the man who prophesies the future but that man who speaks out what is in the hearts of his people." The words are those of Enoch Powell, and he is talking about himself. In less than a year Powell, the Conservative M.P. who looks like a tensed-up Terry-Thomas and sprinkles his speeches with allusions to classical history, has emerged as his own kind of politician-prophet. In the process, he has stirred a furor both in Britain and abroad. For what Powell sees--and speaks for--is the alarm, fear and resentment of the white British toward the African and Asian peoples of the Commonwealth who have emigrated to Britain.

Powell's pronouncements--and the British sentiment that they reflect--intruded into last week's London meeting of leaders from the 28 Commonwealth nations, of which 22 have predominantly nonwhite populations. Offended by articles in the British press that portrayed the behavior of Asian immigrants as uncouth and unclean, Pakistani Foreign Minister Arshad Husain rapped Britain for practicing discrimination. Rising in Britain's defense, Prime Minister Harold Wilson pointed to the "fiercely penal" anti-discrimination laws that his Labor Government has sponsored. Beyond that, Wilson could do little except plead: "Do not hold me responsible for the phenomenon known as Enoch Powell."

Pungent Odors. Britain's racial troubles are a hangover from its Imperial past. For generations, British colonizers told their subjects in an empire that in those days of glory stretched around the world that they, too, were British citizens. Taking Britain at its word, a continuing stream of immigrants, mainly Indians and Pakistanis from Asia and Negroes from the West Indies and Africa, in recent years have sought jobs and new homes in Britain. Though they constitute only 2% of the population, their tendency to huddle together has created pockets, often ghettos, of nonwhite residents in London and the industrial Midlands.

Particularly among Britain's lower-class whites, this influx has aroused the full range of reactions that accompany any major wave of immigration anywhere. Cockney housewives grimace at pungent cooking odors wafting from Indian kitchens, and early-to-bed British workingmen complain of being kept awake all night by twanging West Indian music. Since immigrant shopkeepers are willing to keep longer hours, white merchants resent the competition. More seriously, the immigrants vie for low-cost housing, which is scarce in Britain. Unwelcome in many localities, the new minority groups cluster together and overcrowd their neighborhoods, forcing out white families. Since most immigrants are raising families themselves, they overburden the schools, maternity hospitals and welfare clinics in areas where they have congregated.

Simplistic Judgment. Such friction might be better tolerated if this were not a time of profound frustration for Britain. Continuing sterling crises, the harshest austerity budget ever, constantly shrinking power abroad, combined with an unpopular and unresponsive government at home--all help to create a mood of anxiety. Powell has given the frustrated British a scapegoat for their rage: "the colored." He predicts that within a generation "we shall have succeeded in reproducing 'in England's green and pleasant land' the haunting tragedy of the United States." He offers the simplistic judgment that "the people of England will not endure it." He offers an equally simplistic solution: start sending "the colored" home.

Powell achieved notoriety last April, when he declared in a now famous speech that immigrants have made Britons "feel like strangers in their own country" and spoke of a vision of Britain "foaming with much blood." It was the first time that Powell--or any other politician in recent British history--had made such a major issue of the delicate question of race. The results horrified moderates. Rank-and-file workingmen, normally Labor Party stalwarts, downed tools to demonstrate their support for Tory Powell. Nearly 100,000 letters poured into his office, the vast majority in hearty agreement with his speech. Political leaders of both parties quickly declared Powell to be irresponsible and the press denounced him. Unfazed, Powell asserted: "I've been heard, heard as no man in this country has been heard in 30 years."

Powell disavows the label of racist, or racialist as some Britons say. "What I would take 'racialist' to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief," he explains. "So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is no." Moreover, he scoffs at the claims of his critics that his volatile choice of words encourages racist reactions in his listeners. Instead, he argues, "I am a safety valve." Powell has even conceded that immigrants are "no more malevolent or more prone to wrongdoing" than white Britons. His argument is merely that Britain has enough to do in keeping law and order among its own. It has neither the skill nor resources to cope with the immigrants, whose case, in Powell's words, is "totally different." The only way to cope with their problems, he says, is to make them go home "voluntarily."

In stating his case, he is not above resorting to the most blatant loaded language. One example is his use of a story about one British couple who were driven from their flat by their West Indian landlord "by verbal abuse and filth smeared in and around their toilet."

Eleven Languages. Despite its excesses, Powell's campaign does make one legitimate point. Today's overcrowded, economically laggard Britain can no longer afford to make good on the old colonial "myth that we wrote into law" and grant entrance to every Commonwealth emigrant who seeks to settle there. It is a realization that both major British parties share; in fact, under a 1962 law, immigration is already severely limited. It is restricted mainly to persons whose relatives already reside in Britain and to those who have received official work permits, which are issued at the rate of about 160 a week. In addition, there is a special quota for Pakistani and Indian refugees from East Africa, where black racist regimes are discriminating cruelly against residents of Asian ancestry. Commonwealth immigration has dropped from a total of 471,400 between 1955 and mid-1962 to 271,200 during the following five and a half years.

A less prophetically gifted politician might have failed to exploit the race problem in a country that prides itself on its tolerance of eccentricity and sense of fair play. The Sunday Observer, for example, has commented on "the fanaticism, the patience, the nationalism, the extremeness, the realism and the romanticism" that he exhibits by turns. Powell is a 56-year-old M.P. from a district in the sooty Midlands city of Wolverhampton, which he has represented since 1950; he is also a former professor of Greek at Australia's Sydney University, at age 27 was the author of four scholarly books, and speaks eleven languages with varying degrees of proficiency. Powell argues his case with a formidable intellect.

His academic elegance is traceable to his schoolteacher parents in the Midlands, who provided him with a solid academic background. He performed brilliantly at Birmingham's King Edward's Grammar School and Cambridge's Trinity College. Classmates and buddies from his World War II army service remember Powell as a fearful grind who studied over holidays and insisted on wearing tie, jacket and Sam Browne belt during the hottest days in India. He has grown more relaxed in middle age, having traded the atheism of his schoolboy idol, Nietzsche, for High Anglicanism. He has also exchanged his old spartan regimen for a warm family life with his wife and two children in a Regency-style house in Belgravia.

Well of Feeling. On political issues he is the essence of what Britons call bloody-mindedness--the trait of holding to one's own convictions, no matter how wrongheaded they may seem to others. He is the delight of right-wing Tories in money matters, demanding the abolition of government fiscal controls and proposing to cut income taxes in half and reduce government spending drastically. On foreign policy issues, he is a devout "Little Englander," who would end all of Britain's commitments beyond Europe, dissolve the Commonwealth and cut loose Rhodesia to go the route of former colonies in America. On a few domestic questions he is mildly progressive: Powell was among those Tories who voted with Labor M.P.s to abolish capital punishment and liberalize laws on homosexuality.

Powell has never got on well with the "squirearchy" that rules Conservative politics. In 1965, when he made his only attempt so far to take over the leadership, he was counted out in the first round of voting with a minuscule 15 votes out of 298. Even now Powell possesses no organized following within the Tory party. But Powell has clearly seized on a ready-made issue of enormous appeal that cuts across class and party lines. Though he is a much more thoughtful man than George Wallace, to whom he is often compared in Britain, Powell stands to profit from the same well of vitriolic racial feelings--and could, like Wallace, influence the shape and direction of Britain's future elections.

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