Enoch Powell Quotes

If the activities of the health services are thus neither justifiable by economic calculation, nor assessable in comparative statistical terms, these are characteristics which they share with all the highest activities of man.

Society is much more than a collection of individuals acting together, even through the complex and subtle mechanisms of the free economy, for material advantage. It has an existence of its own; it thinks and feels; it looks inwards, as a community to its own members; it looks outwards as a nation, into a world populated by other societies, like or unlike itself. The Tory Party, with its deep sense of history, has always concerned itself especially with these two aspects of society, and I believe that the British people would instinctively and rightly reject a philosophy which offered them just an economic machine, however efficient and successful.

Through my childhood and adolescence the land and the buildings of England and Wales were perceived by me always somehow in a fourth dimension, the dimension of time, as if they were the stage and scenery of the long epic of the English kings. The predominant role of the monarchy and its bearers was as unifiers: they seemed to be the nation-creators, and later the empire-creators, both actively, by force and policy, and passively, as the unifying focus of sentiment and the source of lawful authority.

The explosion in productive energy which capitalism unleashed in the nineteenth century was accompanied by social evils and hardships which have since been outgrown and abolished. It has been possible to do so by means of that very increase in production itself, just as future social improvement will depend on the rate of our future economic advance. What tragic folly it would be if modern Britain were to cast away the subtlest and most efficient system mankind has yet devised for setting effort and resources to their best economic use, and were to go right back to the clumsy methods and crude fallacies which our forefathers thought they had left behind for ever.

When we speak of the pride and self-confidence of our nation, the Crown—the Monarchy—is absolutely central; nor do I know how better one would gauge the state of this nation's psychological health, of its national morale, than by its attitude towards its greatest, its unique, institution... Of all the sources of true and proper pride to a British person none is greater than the common possession of the Crown. I use the word "possession" advisedly, in its full and most literal sense. Because our Crown is the product of the history of this nation, because it grows like an oak in the soil of these islands, it is therefore the personal possession of every citizen and subject, however humble, however poor. It is a total misconception...to suppose that there is anything of class, anything which is restrictive or destricted, about the Crown. Whatever may be said of any other institution, the Crown is the common, precious and hereditary jewel of all British subjects and of all the people of this country. To approach that common possession, that symbol and personification, with the attitude, "How ungenerous can we be? How little can we contrive to spend upon it? How much can we clip?"—not of its magnificence, for it has ever been the pride of English greatness not to be magnificent through lavishness, but in more fundamental ways—"How much can we restrict the outward signs and manifestations of what the Crown is to this country?" is a sign that we are still divorced from the pride and self-confidence without which a nation cannot face the world and without which this nation cannot learn to face the world again.

[W]ith a floating rate we should still have to cope with our own domestic inflation. Of course, with a floating rate we cannot guarantee this or that rate of increase in our domestic product. But, with a floating rate, of this we can be sure, that we shall not artificially, for the sake of a shibboleth and a fetish, impose upon this country alternately the evils of deflation and of inflation, that we shall not go on repeating the bad film seen so often during the last 25 years.

I hope those who shouted "Fascist" and "Nazi" are aware that before they were born I was fighting against Fascism and Nazism.

Robin Day: So you would say, would you – I hope I am not misrepresenting you – that the question of parliamentary sovereignty and national sovereignty as affected by our membership of the EEC, is the issue on which you would like to see most people have as their reason for voting one way or the other?
Enoch Powell: Yes, for – in peace as in war, it is the great, the ultimate, question for any nation. If we still are a nation. So really I am inviting the British people and have been these many years, to say whether or not they intend still to be a nation.

There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response. This is the kind of feeling which you in Walsall and we in Wolverhampton are experiencing in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns. We are of course in a minority – make no mistake about that. Out of over 600 parliamentary constituencies perhaps less than 60 are affected in any way like ourselves. The rest know little or nothing and, we might sometimes be tempted to feel, care little or nothing. Only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school. He looked at me as if I were a Member of Parliament for central Africa, who had suddenly dropped from the sky into Westminster. So far as most people in the British Isles are concerned, you and I might as well be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances.

It is no accident that the Labour Party of 1964 should share this craving for autarchy, for economic self-sufficiency, with the pre-war Fascist régimes and the present-day Communist states. They are all at heart totalitarian.

It obliges one to think with a particular kind of logic and severity. If it is nonsense, it will not go into Latin...I regard it as cruelty to the young to deprive them of that insight into language...Who would have thought Thatcher would be responsible for introducing the Prussian system, of dictating from central government the content of education in the supposed interest of the state? Translation into Latin was the great stamp and mark of English classical scholarship...My fatal decision was not to be pedantic and leave it in Latin. I had written Et Tiberim multo spumantem sanguine cerno: from Virgil in the Aeneid. And at the last minute I said, 'I can't put that out in Latin, that's pedantic'...In Latin, it would have been lost.

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.

"Parliament" is a word of magic and power in this country. We refer to "parliamentary sovereignty." We live under the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament. Our history and political life would be unintelligible if Parliament were removed from that history. There is no other European nation of which the same can be said. There is no other European nation at the heart of whose identity and history lies its parliamentary assembly.

I was born ambitious, I suppose I shall die ambitious. I can no more change it than the colour of my eyes.

The relevant fact about the history of the British Isles and above all of England is its separateness in a political sense from the history of continental Europe. The English have never belonged to it and have always known that they did not belong. The assertion contains no element of paradox. The Angevin Empire contradicts it as little as the English claim to the throne of France; neither the possession of Gascony nor the inheritance of Hanover made Edward I or George III anything but English sovereigns. When Henry VIII declared that 'this realm of England is an empire (imperium) of itself', he was making not a new claim but a very old one; but he was making it at a very significant point of time. He meant—as Edward I had meant, when he said the same over two hundred years before—that there is an imperium on the continent, but that England is another imperium outside its orbit and is endowed with the plenitude of its own sovereignty. The moment at which Henry VIII repeated this assertion was that of what is misleadingly called 'the reformation'—misleadingly, because it was, and is, essentially a political and not a religious event. The whole subsequent history of Britain and the political character of the British people have taken their colour and trace their unique quality from that moment and that assertion. It was the final decision that no authority, no law, no court outside the realm would be recognised within the realm. When Cardinal Wolsey fell, the last attempt had failed to bring or keep the English nation within the ambit of any external jurisdiction or political power: since then no law has been made for England outside England, and no taxation has been levied in England by or for an authority outside England—or not at least until the proposition that Britain should accede to the Common Market.