Mr Powell bucks the 'system'
The SPECTATOR agrees with many of the opinions of Mr Enoch Powell. We wel- come his exposure of the absurdities of incomes policy and, indeed, of most forms of economic planning; his attacks upon the distortions and miseries caused by obsession with fixed prices, whether they be fixed rents or fixed exchange rates; and his strictures against the follies of business- men who collaborate with the present Government in its sillier attempts at inter- ference with industry. Further afield, while we cannot share his new-found hostility to the idea of British membership of the Common Market, we warmly endorse his scepticism about the wisdom of Mr Heath's vision of Britain East of Suez.
But it is precisely because we value the eloquence and forcefulness of his voice of dissent on most of these issues that we find his willingness to destroy his own influence by the dissemination of dangerous and potentially evil nonsense on the colour problem so hard to forgive.
For this is what he is doing. Among his parliamentary colleagues, his periodic jeremiads on the subject of immigration and race, from the opening salvo at Birmingham in April 1968, which earned him dismissal from the shadow cabinet, to last week-end's hellfire sermon at Scar- borough which Mr Heath aptly described as 'an example of man's inhumanity to man', have forfeited him the respect which his views on other topics might have earned—indeed, have damaged by associa- tion the other causes he espouses. As for the general public, the publicity his speeches on race and immigration inevit- ably attract totally eclipses anything else he may say on any other subject.
His latest contribution to the debate has been to condemn 'measures of financial and other alleviation to the administration of the areas especially effected [by col- oured immigration] and, still more, measures to promote and facilitate the absorption or integration of that part of the coloured population which will eventu- ally make a permanent home here', unless such measures are 'an integral part of a policy of voluntary and assisted repatria- tion' of the immigrants and their children. Considering the proposition literally, it would seem that the logic for which Mr Powell is frequently commended has on this occasion deserted him. The two ap- proaches he has outlined are conflicting alternatives, rather than one being 'an integral part' of the other: the more that policies of 'alleviation', 'absorption' and `integration' make life in Britain tolerable for the immigrant, the less likely he is to want to be repatriated. And for this very reason Mr Powell's latest speech was bound to be seen as an implied plea to encourage repatriation by refraining from doing anything to make the lot of the coloured immigrant in Britain a tolerable one. If this is not what he intended, then let him say so.
It is perfectly true that the governmental inertia and misplaced principle that origin- ally allowed hundreds of thousands of coloured Commonwealth citizens, many of them lacking even a knowledge of the English language, to come and make their homes in this country was one of the grossest follies of post-war British politics. But neither Mr Powell nor anyone else can reverse it now. Repatriation, so long as it is genuinely voluntary (and nothing else is acceptable), can never make a numerically significant impact on the problem. There are only two constructive ways now to limit the consequences of the errors com- mitted in the 'fifties and 'sixties: to reduce new immigration still further by banning all save the immediate and genuine de- pendants of those already here—and to allow those who are here to merge as quietly as possible into the communities in which they dwell.
There is room for argument over the best way of achieving this. Financial assist- ance (with education and other services) for the areas of immigrant concentration. which Mr Powell attacked and in the pro- vision of which the present Government has been notably parsimonious. can be justified above all by the need to help the hard-pressed indigenous inhabitants. But it can also be argued that the money might be better spent on policies that would encourage the dispersal of coloured immi- grants outside the areas of concentration. Again. advocates of policies to encourage `integration' should stop to consider whether the majority of coloured immi- grants might not actually prefer to keep themselves to themselves (as. say, in many countries the overseas Chinese do). want- ing only to live at peace with the host community. Certainly, what our coloured fellow- citizens need now, above all, is to be left in peace. And that peace is threatened from two directions. On one side, there is the growing corps of professional race relations do-gooders, those who fan the flames of resentment by campaigning for distinctive protection for the coloured minority, people who have a vested inter- est in raising the temperature, since their own self-importance depends on the im- portance attached to the job they arc doing. And on the other side there is Mr Powell. and the encouragement his pro- nouncements give to behaviour (whether on the part of white men or black) that has no place in a decent. civilised society. The best hope is that Mr Powell will. before going any further, pause to consider the damage he is doing to his own political ambitions. Mr Quintin Hogg is reported as warning that Mr Powell might lose the Tories the next election. This is. on two counts, a dubious threat : in the first place Mr Powell's sentiments are likely to gain more votes among the working classes than they lose among the middle classes: and in the second place there is no reason to suppose Mr Powell would be heart- broken by a Conservative defeat anyhow. For increasingly Mr Powell seems to be casting himself. as General de Gaulle used to. as the candidate of the people against the 'system' as a whole. Hence the (un- founded) suggestion, in his latest speech. that the `system' is suppressing reports of English race riots, and his declaration that his 'appeal lies even beyond the Conserva- tive party. even beyond Parliament.' Hence. too, his espousal of the anti- Common Market cause—protecting the people against a conspiracy of the two parties.
As usual. Mr Powell's political antennae do not fail him. There is, at present. an unhealthy and partially justified popular alienation from the 'system' which is in many ways in need of reform. But what he does underrate is the political stability —part genuine tolerance, part common- sense hypocrisy—that is our national characteristic. The 'system' has survived crises in the past: it will survive the chal- lenge of Mr Powell and a million coloured immigrants. By pitting himself against it Mr Powell merely condemns himself to the political wilderness.
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