Enoch Powell Quotes

If, on the other hand, the Conservative party invites the electorate to link national independence in its mind with Bennery and all things 'left' and to discern in membership of the Community a bulwark against the dangers of socialism, the implications are still more disreputable; for this is nothing other than saying that one would rather live under the tutelage of foreigners than incur the risk of one's fellow countrymen being free to make up their own minds. That would be to stamp the Conservative party as a class party with a vengeance, a slur the more damaging because there were in fact, at the time of the original debates, Conservatives inside and outside Parliament who did advocate membership on precisely that ground—blood brothers, no doubt, of those who in an earlier generation viewed the rise of Hitler with equanimity or approval as a safeguard against Communism.

We were dragged into folly by the Americans over Iran. We were dragged into folly by the Americans over Afghanistan. Neither national interest nor moral obligation requires us to be dragged by them into folly over Poland.

I do not believe that this nation, which has maintained and defended its independence for a thousand years, will now submit to see it merged or lost; nor did I become a member of our sovereign Parliament in order to consent to that sovereignty being abated or transferred. Come what may, I cannot and will not.

The prospect of a Russian conquest of Western Europe is one for which history affords no material. The theory that the Russians have not advanced from the Elbe to the Atlantic because of the nuclear deterrent is not more convincing than the theory that they have not done so because they do not want to do so and have never envisaged, unless perhaps in terms of world revolution, a Russian hegemony in Western Europe... Of all the nations of Europe, Britain and Russia are the only ones, though for opposite reasons, which have this thing in common: that they can be defeated in the decisive land battle and still survive. This characteristic, which Russia owes to her immensity, Britain owes to her moat.

A victorious continental enemy, determined to absorb this United Kingdom into its dominions, could not have dictated at Westminster a more comprehensively humiliating surrender than the Act which Parliament passed in 1972 in order that this country should become part of the European Economic Community. It enacted that the laws of an external authority should prevail over our domestic laws, it gave an external authority the power to legislate and tax without the consent of Parliament, it placed in the hands of that external authority the whole control of Britain's trade. Moreover, those who counselled it did so on the express ground that Britain was obsolete as a nation state. Wilhelm II could not have demanded so much; I doubt if Hitler would have demanded more. I can still only half believe that I was myself an unwilling witness to my country's abnegation of its own national independence... I can only say that I will never accept as fait accompli the renunciation of our national independence and the destruction of our parliamentary sovereignty which took place in 1972.

While yesteryear I tarried
In a garden in the south,
I met a youth who carried
A rose-bud in his mouth.<p>I gave him chase and caught him,
And would not set him free,
But held him and besought him
To give the flower to me.<p>He smiled, and broke a petal
And laid it in my hand—
It seared like molten metal,
And here is yet the brand.

As I watch and listen to the voices that are raised to persuade electors to surrender their own birthright because they fear their fellow subjects, I think I discern ahead the shape of a Conservative Party that is the party of a class, and not of a nation – and thus doomed to extinction.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

The English state was the only one which finally resolved the great debate of the Middle Ages by the principle of supremacy, that is, by refusing to recognise that there could be any power or right of human compulsion over its members which derived from a source outside the realm, or that there could be concurrent sources of compulsion within the realm. This solution reflects, and no doubt emphasises, a characteristic of this nation which differentiates it from other European nations on either side of the Atlantic more than we or they commonly recognise. On the European mainland and in America concurrence of powers and limitation of sovereignty are taken for granted; in Britain we simply do not imagine them... In the United Kingdom the ultimate sovereignty resides in one person, upon whose authority when in Parliament the law knows no limitations.

The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions...for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it...Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading...In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful...[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state.

Until the synodical revolution of the Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974, the language of the Book of Common Prayer was distinguished by being uniquely authoritative, established and fixed by the Crown in Parliament, the supreme source of authority in this realm... The Tractarians were doubly right when they acclaimed the Book of Common Prayer as the proof of the catholicism of the Anglican Church: right because the words and formulae, being themselves impregnable, were susceptible of an interpretation which bridged the gulf of the Reformation; and right because the essential mark of catholicism, uniformity imposed by universal authority, was placed upon it by the untrammelled imperium of the English nation state. Without the authoritative fixity of its liturgy, the unique comprehensiveness and broadmindedness of the Church of England would not have been possible.

The collective wisdom and the collective will of the nation resides not in any little Whitehall clique but in the whole mass of the people—in the producers, listening to the voice of the customer at home and abroad; in the savers and investors, using their eyes and their brains to lay out their resources to best advantage; in the consumers themselves, expressing through all the complex nervous system of the market their wishes, their needs, their expectations. In short, the true national economic plan is being made all the time by the very people and institutions which the intellectual arrogance of the Socialist affects to despise. "Under Tory free enterprise" says Labour's policy, "no limit is set to the amount of our national resources and intellectual talent consumed by the popular newspaper, the glossy magazine, the cinema, commercial television and the advertising industry." What a world of contempt for the ordinary man and woman breathes in that haughty sentence!

Lord Scarman found that what he calls "the black community" was alienated. He found also that the black community suffered a number of disadvantages: in a period and in areas of special difficulties—economic, occupational, environmental—it had more than its fair share. The assumption—it is not argued; it is not even explicitly stated: it is an assumption—is that the black community is alienated because it is disadvantaged. That is a dangerous gap in the reasoning; for it is by no means self-evident, and by no means necessary, that the two facts should be connected as cause and effect. There is another possible explanation of the alienation. It is that the community, being of that size and composition and in those circumstances, is alien: alienation can be a manifestation of being alien. It can be the self-perception and the being perceived by others as different and distinct; and, in the case of a black community...it is a difference which is instantly and mutually visible and which produces mutual coherence or repulsion.

Those who catch faint glimpses, in Birmingham or Notting Hill, of what others have dreaded for years, those who find themselves strangers and aliens in one familiar area after another of an English town or city, those who hear from others' lips with diminishing incredulity the circumstances in which less fortunate fellow-citizens live, should repeat to themselves over and over again one single sentence, sad, simple and true: "You have seen nothing yet". Then let them give to those who presume to represent and govern them no peace and no respite until they have led the nation from under the shadow of the disaster which overhangs it.

The Tory principle is the opposite: to trust the people. This has been expressed in practical terms in our actions in the last twelve years. We dismantled and abolished the economic controls, licensing, rationing and powers of direction inherited from the war and post-war Socialism; we restored a market for savings and abandoned the rigging of artificial rates of interest, which had been a fruitful cause of inflation; we imposed on the nationalised industries, apart from those restored to the free economy, the discipline of making comparable profits with what similar investments elsewhere would produce, and we undertook a major surgical operation on the railways to enable them also to earn profits; in our trade policy we sought the widest and most competitive markets for our exports... in taxation policy we have aimed at leaving to the individual earner and the individual firm the free disposal of as large a proportion as possible of their income or profits; finally there is our determined and increasingly successful effort to keep for our money that stability of value which enables people to take their own decisions about spending and saving in terms which have a meaning.