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" "What I have learned and what I fervently believe is that neither high and stable levels of employment nor prosperity nor anything that a nation can desire is to be obtained by debauching its currency; that the mere manufacture of additional money, the mere process of inflation, though it may create temporary euphoria, is no basis upon which, for any class in the community, security or prosperity can be built. It is in that belief and in the belief that it is demonstrated by history that I speak as I do.
John Enoch Powell (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).
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I believe a second factor which has weighed heavily in this matter is the attitude, or supposed attitude, of the United States. I confess that I am not greatly moved by this. Whatever may be the attitude of the American Government and public to the United Kingdom as such, my view of American policy over the last decade has been that it has been steadily and relentlessly directed towards the weakening and the destruction of the links which bind the British Empire together. [Cyril Osborne: "No!"] We can watch the events as they unfold and place our own interpretation on them. My interpretation is that the United States has for this country, considered separately, a very considerable economic and strategic use but that she sees little or no strategic use or economic value in the British Empire or the British Commonwealth as it has existed and as it still exists. Against the background I ask the House to consider the evidence of advancing American imperialism in this area from which they are helping to eliminate us.
The first rule of German statecraft is the maintenance of the Common Market link with France... Germany and France are the Siamese twins of the European Community. Britain, we ought clearly to understand, all humbug set aside, is expendable. Her function in the Community is to provide the continent with a captive market for dear food, and to place at the disposal of the Community for common use Britain's assets, whether they be the seas around her coasts (the ‘Community's fish stocks’) or her sources of power (the ‘Community's energy stocks’). It is not by accident that Britain finds herself the milch cow of Europe: that was the idea of it from the start... [T]he capture of the United Kingdom by the Common Market represented the reversal of Britain's successful maintenance of her independence since the 16th century: the counter-attack in a new, non-military form had at last succeeded and reduced the historic arbiter of Europe, at least temporarily, to the disarmed status of another European state. The combination of Germany and France, that eventuality dreaded and always frustrated by our forefathers, has produced, albeit under an expected guise, the outcome they foresaw.
The omnipotence of Parliament is for the British what for other nations is represented by the constitution, the declaration of independence and the law of human rights all rolled into one. That division of powers which was wrongly deduced from observation of Britain in the eighteenth century is unknown to Britain: just because we have no written constitution, the control of Parliament over both law and government has to be unlimited. In order for Britain to join the Community, the House of Commons has to be told, and to accept, that it will progressively lose its exclusive power to control legislation and government.