I
On 20 April 1968 Enoch Powell made his most famous speech, known incorrectly as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.Footnote 1 Its effect was astounding. In the fortnight after the speech, East End dockers and Smithfield meat porters marched to Westminster in protest at Heath's dismissal of Powell from the shadow cabinet. He also received over 100,000 letters, and about 700 telegrams.Footnote 2 Making a fascinating comment on British society in the 1960s, an analysis of the letters estimated that a mere 800 took issue with Powell.Footnote 3 His stinging criticism of Britain's liberal attitude to immigration forced Edward Heath to steer the Conservative party to the right in the hope of accommodating the popular feeling that Powell unleashed. This culminated in the passing of a more stringent Immigration Act by the Heath government in 1971, which set the trend for subsequent legislation on nationality.Footnote 4
Much print has since been devoted to establishing what prompted the radicalization of Powell's views, most profitably in the case of Robert Shepherd's biography. Historians argue that Powell's verbal detonation in early 1968 was the result of a long-established post-imperialism.Footnote 5 It was his rejection of empire and its colonial subjects that racialized his vigorous nationalism.Footnote 6 Powell's theoretical objection to immigration was fuelled by the convergence of events in 1967 and especially early 1968, namely racial violence in the United States, the Kenyan Asians and Race Relations Bill debates at Westminster, the Sikh bus drivers' controversy in his constituency of Wolverhampton, and Powell's ambitious struggle with Heath. This context gave Powell unprecedented cause to be thinking about immigration and nationality. The literature about Powell recognizes these factors. However it lacks detail. For this reason it also fails to give appropriate weighting to each. This weakness became pronounced in John Ramsden's history of the Conservative party, which omits the events in the United States and Wolverhampton.Footnote 7
More importantly, historians have also made a critical omission in ignoring the prominent role of seemingly liberal ideas and language. It has been assumed that the end of empire was the key to understanding Powell's ideas on immigration. This assumption is deeply misleading. ‘Rivers of Blood’ was not a pioneering expression of English ethnic nationalism.Footnote 8 In fact Powell was repackaging a colonial apology for racial inequality rooted in the language of liberalism. In 1946, 1955, and 1968 Powell stated that coloured immigration to Britain would cause problems. In each of these years he argued that it could lead to rigid communal divisions and therefore threaten the future of Britain's democratic system.
Powell based his fears on the example of India, a country in which he believed democracy had fallen foul of communalism. He was no stranger to the colonial world, having worked for military intelligence in India between 1943 and 1946. In 1946 Powell was a fervent imperialist. His fear of immigration to Britain – both then and after – was rooted in assumptions typical of liberal colonial governors. In asking why Powell made the Birmingham speech it is necessary to consider ideas established long before the end of empire. The events in the United States, Westminster, and Wolverhampton in early 1968 were meaningful for Powell because he saw what he had long believed to be the ‘curse of India’.Footnote 9
II
In 1946 Powell drew up detailed plans for India's future within the empire for the benefit of the Conservative Research Department. Recently opened to the public, they shed critical light on his opposition to immigration. In December 1946, Powell submitted his most developed analysis of India's problems and future as an imperial possession. The report was largely economic in subject. In a paragraph ignored by Simon Heffer (the only biographer to have seen the report), Powell commented on international trade and flow of labour. ‘That division of labour and specialization of production should be bounded by national frontiers is to some extent inevitable because men have differences other than economic ones, such as political and racial, and value certain other aims more highly then economic aims.’Footnote 10 Compared with ‘nations as closely connected politically and racially as the British Dominions’ Powell believed these differences to be greatest ‘between European and Asiatic nations … Applied to the case of India, it is clear that no economic policy can be adopted for India which by treating it as an integral part of a larger area would tend towards redistribution of population between it and other nations, especially European nations.’Footnote 11 Thus in 1946, with red-blooded imperialism running untempered in his veins, Powell was deeply unhappy about the idea of Indians migrating to Britain.
The ‘obstacles to redistribution’ of labour between India and Britain proved to be the focus of Powell's political plans for India. Having established that immigration was problematic, because of men's ‘political and racial’ differences, he proceeded to explain in detail the nature of those differences. Powell's goal was the granting of self-government to an imperial India. Since the ‘self-governing’ concept was essentially the Westminster model of parliamentary government, Powell was effectively asking himself what would need to be done to make Indians behave like the British. This exercise started from the premise that Indians were not yet sufficiently ‘British’ for self-government to work. In explaining why this was, Powell revealed exactly why he thought Indian immigration would be problematic.
Writing in Delhi in November 1945, Powell considered the difficulties of granting self-government. Like many nineteenth-century liberal theorists and the colonial administrators they influenced, Powell concluded that ‘the essence of the problem lies in the rigid and inelastic nature of a communal vote and the absence of a public opinion directed to political issues properly so-called’.Footnote 12 What India lacked was a ‘spontaneous, genuine and reasonably informed public opinion and national sentiment’. His characteristically Tory concern was for the political homogeneity of the nation, expressed as a collective sentiment of belonging. This was, in turn, a prerequisite for democracy, or self-government – a concept central to Powell's thought in general.Footnote 13 Powell believed that Indians did not think as a nation, but as groups, which was why their political parties were ‘communal’. Powell thought this also meant that Indians did not think as rational individuals. Democracy therefore could not operate in India. Using the example of voting for independence, Powell explained that ‘the issues involved and the factors upon which alone they can rationally be decided are alike inaccessible to their experience and their reason’.Footnote 14
In 1946 Powell developed his plans for the creation of a truly national community in India, composed of rational individuals. In an undated note from early 1946, he proposed the means to this end: ‘It is only by bringing social and economic motives into the lives of the Indian masses that the existing religious and racial factions can eventually be replaced by true political parties without which democracy, and therefore self-government within the Empire, is impossible.’Footnote 15 Powell added greater detail in his reports of May and December. He stated that ‘to create conditions in which the self-government of a united India will become possible is the very object, in its political aspect, of the plan for rapid economic and social advance which has been put forward’.Footnote 16 Powell's argument ran that
rapid economic development would in itself contribute substantially towards this [democratic] end by rendering the effects of alternative policies a matter of direct and obvious concern to a larger and larger proportion of the electorate. It would also provide the economic basis for that spread of literacy and education without which the political vote cannot be exercized rationally.
Without such a programme, ‘the fact that the so-called Indian political parties are with unimportant exceptions fixed and unchanging communal bodies would render any system of self-government unworkable’.Footnote 17
Thus the idea of Indian migration to Britain offended Powell because he believed that communalism threatened the future of any self-governing nation, whether India or Britain. His experience of the Raj had convinced him that the root of India's political troubles was indeed communalism, which he later described as ‘the curse of India’.Footnote 18 Since his antidote was the fostering of economic freedom for the individual, Powell's plans for India suggest the origins of his career-long fascination with the free market, which started in 1946.Footnote 19 He always claimed that Powellism was a coherent whole.Footnote 20 That fear of communalism should have initiated Powell's interest in the free market may explain his comment to a friend in March 1968 that ‘it had not occurred to me that you, or anyone, could think’ that his opposition to immigration ‘was inconsistent with my general [liberal economic] thought as set out in “A Nation Not Afraid [1965]”.’Footnote 21
In 1946, Powell's dream was to create the conditions necessary to export self-government from Britain to the empire, namely national unity of sentiment. His nightmare was that self-government might be granted to colonies before that unity had been fostered. Even more, Powell feared that the empire might inject communalism into the self-governing metropole, and thereby undermine its existing sentimental unity. If either situation were to arise he predicted that democratic political liberty would be strangled.
Powell believed that his fears were realized in India in 1947, and in Britain itself in the 1960s. In 1947, he was fully aware of the communal violence that was attendant on the granting of independence in India.Footnote 22 Powell had two regular correspondents alerting him to the situation in India at the time, namely Gordon Thompson (commander of Calcutta sub-area)Footnote 23 and Frank ‘Socrates’ Brayne. While Thompson mostly sent his own opinions, Brayne sent Powell confidential government reports on the situation in the Punjab, as they were written.Footnote 24 It was evident from the reports that the British government's promise of imminent independence and democracy had prompted mass violence.Footnote 25 One observer provided a lengthy catalogue of atrocities, then concluded that
All this happened when His Majesty's Government was busy transferring power to Indian hands. The administrative machinery broke down completely. People died like flies but nobody took any notice of them. Whitehall forgot to carry out its pledges to the minorities and to the dumb and driven millions … On the 15th of August came freedom – the freedom to burn, loot and murder.Footnote 26
Although Powell was undoubtedly much shaken by the loss of India and its attendant conflagration, he cannot have been surprised by the events. Over a year before, he had predicted the effect of granting self-government to an artificial nation riven by communalism: ‘an outbreak of violence in India such as will dwarf 1857 is not only likely but certain’.Footnote 27 It can only be assumed that Powell perceived the theoretical assumptions of his reports of 1946 to have been confirmed during the bloody summer of 1947.
During the early 1950s Powell translated the lessons that he had learnt in India into policy, both for the empire and Britain. He believed that democracy could not be introduced or maintained if an electorate suffered from rigid divisions, an observation prompted by post-war colonial political development.Footnote 28 The point was made most forcefully in 1955. In his words, ‘no elective assembly can survive and function unless its “constituency”, to use the word in the old sense of population represented, has sufficient homogeneity’. This he had learnt from India: ‘in 1947 the population of India declared itself emphatically not to be a constituency, and sealed the declaration with civil bloodshed’. Elaborating, Powell argued that
the principle of majority decision is divisive: it splits a society along its natural lines of fission into the sections sufficiently homogeneous for all their members to accept the will of the majority of their own. The line of fission may be linguistic … Or again, the line of fission may be racial, provided that difference of race, in the absence of religious or linguistic differences, is marked by plain and visible distinctions, such as colour; for men assume that those who look differently from themselves have different interests – there could scarcely be anti-Semitism as we have known it unless Jews were recognisable at sight.
Applying the principle to Britain, Powell repeated a point made in a speech at Hanover in December 1953, suggesting that ‘there is no such thing as an Anglo-Irish electorate’.Footnote 29
In the mid-1950s Powell also applied his thoughts on national homogeneity to the new issue of colonial immigration to Britain. In 1954, he commented that the differences between colonial peoples and the British precluded a unified imperial democracy, because it implied ‘greater homogeneity in the electorate than can subsist between a European and a non-European territory’.Footnote 30 Then in February 1955 he registered his private opposition to immigration from the Colonies to Britain, giving a detailed justification.Footnote 31 Finally in 1956 he touched on the issue in public.Footnote 32 An analysis of these responses to the beginnings of mass immigration, in particular that of 1955, reveals a consistency with his hypothetical response in 1946, a point ignored by Heffer.
The occasion for Powell's concern in 1955 was a strike of bus workers in West Bromwich, in protest against the employment of a single Indian conductor. The bishops of Birmingham and Lichfield had been appalled and spoken out, believing that ‘efforts to enforce a colour bar are not reconcilable with Christianity’.Footnote 33 Two days later, Powell wrote to his bishop:
It appears to me that there are two issues involved. The immediate question is the employment by the Corporation of a single British subject of Indian origin. But it is impossible to separate that narrow issue from the wider one of the influx of British subjects not of European race into the United Kingdom during recent months. I feel sure that it is only because of this background that the employment of an individual non-European by West Bromwich had assumed such importance in the eyes of those on strike … It appears to me that in any democratic country, (by which I mean a country where counting heads has practical importance), any readily visible differences between human beings inevitably result in political frictions. Where such differences are very slight or where the sector of the population so distinguishable is very small, no harm results; but where any considerable part of a population has distinctive characteristics, I believe that the working of institutions such as ours cannot fail to be endangered. However wrong-headedly and gropingly, I believe the strikers in West Bromwich to have apprehended the dangers for this country of any appreciable coloured population becoming domiciled here.Footnote 34
Powell's rejection of the colonial empire in 1954Footnote 35 was the context of his concerns in 1955. But although it contributed to his conviction, it was not the cause, since he had shown an identical concern for national homogeneity in relation to immigration in 1946. Powell did not make his political theory conditional upon the ending of empire. In fact his ideas on the nature of nations and democracy had been established whilst imagining the future of the empire, not its end. In writing to his bishop in 1955, Powell was expressing a principle that had been born in the mind of an ardent imperialist.
III
Between 1955 and 1968 Powell showed a sporadic and growing interest in immigration. However it was not until 1968 that he publicly explained why it upset him so much, revealing a striking continuity with his ideas of 1946 and 1955. Having criticized the ‘open door’ immigration policy in private in 1955,Footnote 36 Powell expressed reservations to the cabinet sub-committee dealing with immigration control and to the local press in 1956.Footnote 37 In 1960, Powell again took up the issue, lobbying in November to join the Commonwealth Migrants Committee, chaired by Lord Kilmuir.Footnote 38 It was this Committee that drew up the Commonwealth Immigration Bill that became law in 1962. Between 1960 and 1963 as a health minister, he was involved with recruitment of doctors and nurses from overseas. Despite later accusations of hypocrisy,Footnote 39 Powell argued that the recruits ‘are not immigrants: they are here for one or two years as part of their training and experience’.Footnote 40
In April and June 1964 Powell made his first comments in the press since 1956, following Peter Griffiths's successful exploitation of immigration in a by-election in nearby Smethwick.Footnote 41 Powell also highlighted the issue in the election of October 1964.Footnote 42 The essence of his policy was a tightening of the Commonwealth Immigration Act, with the aim of fostering integration of those immigrants already resident in the UK. To this he added, in 1965, the proposal that the government should assist voluntary repatriation of immigrants.Footnote 43 His ideas were concurrent with the developing policies of his party leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.Footnote 44 Powell mentioned immigration in a speech just before the election of March 1966,Footnote 45 then made periodic public reference to the issue throughout 1967, dropping all mention of integration as a goal.Footnote 46 Powell seemed to have come to the conclusion by 1967 that immigrant ‘colonies, in certain areas and cities’ were now a permanent feature of the British demographic landscape.Footnote 47
Before 1968 Powell's approach to the problem of immigration was subject to some change. However in 1968 it underwent a revolution that marked a distinct departure. Several of Powell's biographers concur that this was made manifest in the famous Birmingham speech of April.Footnote 48 John Ramsden also presents April 1968 as a dramatic departure in his history of the Conservative party, and likewise Paul Gilroy in his history of race discourse.Footnote 49 Undeniably the Birmingham speech excited an unprecedented response from the nation, and also Edward Heath, who promptly sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet. However in February he had made a markedly similar speech, in Walsall, which happened to attract far less press interest.Footnote 50 In tracing Powell's developing thought it is appropriate to see February 1968 as the critical departure.Footnote 51
Historians rightly identify a marked change in Powell's rhetorical style in 1968.Footnote 52 Although his tone did vary before that year, most notably in February 1967,Footnote 53 Powell's speeches of February and April 1968 constituted a stark contrast with what had gone before. This was recognized in February by the general public who sent Powell an unprecedented number of letters – around 1,000 – and Edward Heath who curtly censored him shortly afterwards at a shadow cabinet meeting.Footnote 54
What was new about Powell's rhetoric in 1968? In February, anecdotal evidence from his constituency was presented for the first time as fact, namely the existence of a class of school children, all black save one. Never before had he caused reporters to scurry around the streets of Wolverhampton seeking verification.Footnote 55 In April, Powell developed this new rhetorical device by quoting constituents directly, using emotive phrases such as ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’, and words like ‘excreta’. Powell's use of constituency anecdotes was made all the more potent by his exploitation of the image of the defenceless white female.Footnote 56 Revealing a marked parallel with the propaganda of segregationists in the American South and the South African Nationalist party, he told his audience at Walsall of ‘a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school’. At Birmingham, the ‘one white’ in a street ‘gone black’ was ‘a woman old-age pensioner’. Significantly at Eastbourne in November 1968 Powell continued the theme, describing the case of an ‘elderly [white] widow of eighty-plus’ and a ‘widow with two young children’.Footnote 57 The image of the white female was part of a broader theme of the ‘violation of domestic sanctuaries’, which has been identified by Wendy Webster as a feature common to representations of immigration and also decolonization.Footnote 58
Powell raised the temperature of his speeches by making uncharacteristically frequent reference to extreme emotions. At Walsall he talked of ‘hopelessness and helplessness’, and of problems that were ‘enough to make one weep’ and ‘drive one to despair’. Current policy was ‘crazy’, and politicians were ‘stark, staring bonkers’. At Birmingham, Powell flared that ‘we must be mad’ and again, ‘insane’. The British watched the USA with ‘horror’; the Race Relations Bill was ‘throwing a match onto gunpowder’; and the Tiber was famously ‘foaming with much blood’.
The change in Powell's tone in 1968 has been widely recognized. This was inescapable since Heath had sacked Powell in April because his speech had been ‘racialist in tone’.Footnote 59 What commentators failed to highlight was the change in the content of his speeches. Powell's statements prior to 1968 had been concerned with persuading the electorate that Britain had an immigration problem, and that it was of a greater magnitude than many thought. Immigration figures and resident immigrant birth rates therefore featured highly. However, until 1968 Powell was less clear on why immigration was undesirable.
Believing on principle that the formerly colonial New Commonwealth was a ‘sham’,Footnote 60 Powell deemed it irrational for Britain to grant its citizens privileged access.Footnote 61 However, he maintained that once immigrants had arrived, they should be integrated.Footnote 62 By 1955 Powell's hopes for integration had become conditional on a numerical limit,Footnote 63 and after 1965 he made no mention of integration, accepting publicly in 1967 that immigrant blocs had become permanent features.Footnote 64
It was not until his speeches of 1968 that Powell publicly revealed why he had thought integration was important, and why he was so upset when he came to the conclusion in 1967 that it was no longer a possibility. Revealing a striking parallel with his thinking of 1946 and 1955, Powell suggested that the future of Britain's democratic political system was at risk. The specific threat posed by immigration was ‘communalism’. At Walsall, Powell finished his speech thus:
We have just been seeing in Wolverhampton the cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the shape of communalism. Communalism has been the curse of India and we need to be able to recognize when it rears its head here. Large numbers of Sikhs, who had been serving the Wolverhampton Corporation voluntarily and contentedly, have found themselves against their will made the material for communal agitation. The issue in this instance, and I fear it will not be the last of its kind, is not racial or religious discrimination: it is communalism.Footnote 65
This was a new theme in February 1968, and its positioning at the end of Powell's speech lent it the greatest significance. At Birmingham, in April, Powell again claimed that:
We are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man's hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly.
Powell then quoted a local Labour MP: ‘To claim special rights (or should they say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker.’Footnote 66
The new tone of Powell's speeches in 1968 reveals that immigration had become of profound and unprecedented importance to him. The content of these speeches also revealed a new departure, namely the same fear of communalism that had characterized his private comments on immigration in 1946 and 1955. The change proved to be lasting. Thereafter, the collapse of political unity and civil strife characterized Powell's public comments.Footnote 67 The prominence of the theme of communalism in 1968 is thus critical to understanding why immigration assumed such importance in Powell's mind.
IV
What prompted Powell to think about communalism and India in 1968? In the United States, Westminster, and Wolverhampton rising tensions coincided, lending questions of immigration and nationality unprecedented pertinence. In October and November 1967 Powell's fear of racial violence was agitated by his first visit to the United States. Having been much disquieted by the evident racial tension in Chicago and Detroit,Footnote 68 he commented to a journalist on his return that, ‘Integration of races of totally disparate origins and culture is one of the great myths of our time.’Footnote 69 Subsequently he compared Britain's future to the American present in November 1967, and prominently in February and April 1968.Footnote 70
Powell was also influenced by events in America before and after his visit.Footnote 71 July 1967 saw the most serious racial violence for two years, prompting Powell to express his fears of the American situation for the first time.Footnote 72 Then in April 1968, 3,500 people were injured and 46 killed in the racial strife that followed the death of Martin Luther King.Footnote 73 Powell left no doubt as to the importance of the American conflagration to his thinking. At the end of that month he used the Birmingham speech to publicize his fear that ‘that tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic … is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect’.Footnote 74
Powell's heightened sensitivity to immigration issues in 1968 also reflected events at Westminster, namely the debates on the status of Kenyan Asians and the Race Relations Bill. After a shot across the government's bows in October 1967, Powell did not comment on the Kenyan Asians until February 1968. It seemed that the sudden influx that had followed Jomo Kenyatta's introduction of ‘Africanization’ was tailing off over the second half of 1967. Then, at the beginning of February, it was revealed that the rate had again increased during the previous month. Heath suggested that the shadow cabinet discuss the matter.Footnote 75 Just before the meeting was due, Powell made his first explosive speech on immigration at Walsall, in which he dealt prominently with the Kenyan controversy.
Events at Westminster also weighed on Powell's mind in early 1968, thanks to the progress of a new Race Relations Bill. A largely ineffective act had been passed in 1965, but in April 1968 James Callaghan introduced a second bill to give it teeth. The act of 1965 had outlawed racial discrimination in places of public entertainment and recreation. In 1968, Labour proposed to extend its attack on the colour bar to employment and housing. At Walsall, Powell argued that such measures would undermine British liberty as ‘the opposite to the equal treatment of all persons within the realm’.Footnote 76 There is no doubt that the bill was also at the fore of Powell's mind in making his Birmingham speech.Footnote 77 Not only was the parliament due to debate the bill's second reading on 23 April, but Powell also made direct reference to it, describing the bill as ‘the very pabulum’ needed to ignite racial tension.
The third critical factor feeding into Powell's thought on immigration in 1968 was constituency politics. As early as 1955, local events had prompted Powell to express concerns about immigration, as outlined above.Footnote 78 The same pattern was apparent in May 1965,Footnote 79 and most pronounced in February and April 1968. In February Powell showed concern for the first time about the number of immigrant children in local schools, echoing a prolonged debate amongst councillors in January.Footnote 80 But it was a controversy over the rights of Sikh bus drivers that dominated the council's debates on immigration at this time, to an unprecedented degree.Footnote 81 The same controversy prompted Powell to make his first public accusations of communalism. Ignoring Frank Reeves's study of Race and borough politics in Wolverhampton, historians have only made passing reference to the Sikhs.Footnote 82
In Wolverhampton, bus drivers were not permitted to wear beards. The sacking of a Sikh driver for violating this regulation led to strike action and a major demonstration on 4 February.Footnote 83 Around 5,000–6,000 Sikhs came to the town from all over the country to march from the gurdwara to the town hall in protest. Powell highlighted the controversy five days later, at Walsall.Footnote 84 The Sikhs' campaign continued through the spring, an ongoing threat of self-immolation made by Sohan Singh Jolly – a former Kenyan police officer – winning international attention. On 9 April the Transport Committee reluctantly agreed to relax the restrictions on beards and turbans for bus drivers, while making it clear that it was only doing so under the pressure of the death threat.Footnote 85 Eleven days later Powell referred to the whole affair in his Birmingham speech, presenting it as an example of ‘communalism’, and an attempt to achieve ‘the exercise of actual domination … over the rest of the population’. In a macabre echo of Jolly's threat, Powell also used the unusual image of a ‘nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre’.Footnote 86
V
Why did these events cause Powell to radicalize his stance on immigration in 1968? Arthur Marwick, amongst others, has argued that the events of 1968 were of interest to Powell because they presented an opportunity for personal advancement.Footnote 87 Powell was an ambitious and political man.Footnote 88 His desire to rise to pre-eminence in politics, rather than academia or the army, appears to have been born in India, where Powell dreamt of becoming viceroy.Footnote 89 In 1965 he ran for leadership of the Conservative party, a year in which he gave immigration noticeable attention. Marwick argues that Powell ‘took up the race issue in the most mischievous and unscrupulous manner’.Footnote 90 By 1968, Powell's frustration with Edward Heath's leadership was becoming acute. Shortly before the Birmingham speech, Powell himself revealed that ‘I deliberately include at least one startling assertion in every speech in order to attract enough attention to give me a power base within the Conservative party’.Footnote 91
The unusually dramatic tone of Powell's speeches in 1968 certainly suggests a populist concern. However, Powell's fear of immigration was real and had been articulated privately in 1946 and 1955, in similar terms. Opportunism alone cannot explain why and how he spoke out in 1968. Powell was also acting on principles, which had been first articulated in the context of imperial India. In February 1947 Powell scrawled at the bottom of a recent report of communal violence in the Punjab, ‘Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat.’ In April 1968, at Birmingham, Powell attacked the ongoing flow of immigrants to Britain declaring that ‘those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad’.Footnote 92 Why did he see parallels between contemporary Britain and India at the time of partition?
As mentioned above, Powell concluded his Walsall speech by claiming that his constituency was afflicted by ‘the curse of India’.Footnote 93 Immediately afterwards, an interviewer from The Times found that
Although Mr Enoch Powell, as he recently made clear, is strongly opposed to Commonwealth immigrants in their present numbers being allowed into this country, he has very happy memories of two and a half years he spent in India from 1943 to 1946. ‘I fell head over heels in love with it’, he says nostalgically. ‘If I'd gone there 100 years earlier, I'd have left my bones there.’Footnote 94
While racial violence in the United States and the presence of West Indian communities in Britain clearly worried Powell, Indian immigration was his greatest concern. Powell's archivist Richard Ritchie judged from his comments after 1969 that ‘India made an enormous impression on him’ and was ‘a really important part of his life’.Footnote 95 Although Powell was concerned about West Indians in Britain, he told both his wife and his archivist on several separate occasions that he ‘thought Indian immigration was much more worrying than West Indian’. Powell ‘thought it was easier to integrate the West Indian immigrants than the Indian’. As his archivist pointed out, ‘that definitely would go back to his Indian experience’.Footnote 96 Being concerned about national unity, Powell would no doubt have been aware that Indian immigrants had less in common with the British than West Indians in regard to first language, religion, and recently shared sovereignty.
In responding to supposedly communal tensions in 1968, Powell drew directly on his response to India's problems in 1946–7. The India report of December 1946 had attacked Indian communalism on the grounds of a seemingly liberal concern for democracy.Footnote 97 That same agenda lay at the heart of the Birmingham speech's general attack on the concept of race relations, which immediately followed the borough council's decision to relax the rules on bus drivers' uniform. The council had been at pains to point out that the decision was made not on democratic grounds, but under pressure from the Sikh minority, notably Sohan Sing Jolly's threat of self-violence.Footnote 98
Alongside its concern for democracy, the report of 1946 also made a liberal case for the economic and legal rights of the individual. The Race Relations Bill of 1968 was concerned with protecting minority rights in the economy, as well the courts. Powell's opposition to the bill echoed his India report, since the bill sought to curtail the liberty of discrimination (or the freedom of the market, in Powell's conception) in housing and employment. The link between economic freedom and national homogeneity was suggested most forcefully by an article that he wrote in 1964: ‘money is colour-blind and economic forces will help the work of integration which must be done if a homogeneous community, local and national, is to be restored’.Footnote 99 As mentioned above, Powell made a markedly similar comment in 1946 about India: ‘it is only by bringing social and economic motives into the lives of the Indian masses that the existing religious and racial factions can eventually be replaced by true political parties without which democracy … is impossible’.Footnote 100
Powell's private correspondence in 1967–8 also served to remind him of his concerns in the India report of 1946. His papers reveal that at times his public statements were markedly reflective of correspondents' letters received immediately before. A particularly influential correspondent was R. M. Du Plessis, an elderly barrister of Gray's Inn. His letters stand out as being uniquely long and well-informed. It appears that it was Du Plessis who inspired Powell to write his article on immigration in July 1967.Footnote 101 The barrister also wrote at the end of January 1968, a deeply formative time for Powell as it immediately preceded his first verbal detonation, at Walsall. Therein he drew Powell's attention to the weaknesses of the government's proposed independence package for Mauritius. In so doing, Du Plessis presented a similar argument to that of Powell's 1946 report on India. With self-governing independence approaching on 12 March, he pointed out that racial violence was erupting in Mauritus between Hindus and Creoles. Du Plessis observed that
The fact which strikes one from the most cursory observation and stands out from all statistics is that Mauritius is multi-racial. Under such conditions government cannot be on the same lines as for a uniform people, the only suitable one must be under a strong metropolitan power … Race rivalry would then be softened. The material advantage of the whole country would then be the prime consideration, clashes being avoided from spiritual questions being represented in and therefore to the [local Legislative] Council where business people would form the majority.Footnote 102
Providing striking echoes of 1946, the letter assumed that national homogeneity was necessary for democracy; that in its place strong government was necessary; and that the solution was to inject economic, rather than communal, considerations into politics. Powell promptly thanked Du Plessis for his ‘long and interesting letter’.Footnote 103
A few months before, Powell had even greater reason to be reminded of his ideas of 1946 as a friend asked to see a copy of the final India report itself. James Wickenden had been close to Powell during the later war years in India. In September 1967, he wrote to Pam Powell requesting a copy of ‘a paper [Powell] wrote on India shortly after returning home from the war. It was mainly about the reorganization that might be envisaged there should we again be responsible for the subcontinent, and concerned mainly with land reform.’Footnote 104 Wickenden's original had apparently been destroyed. Pam replied that she could not find the paper.Footnote 105 In searching, she would have had good reason to ask her husband about its whereabouts, thus giving Powell cause to think about the report.Footnote 106
Powell found reason to oppose immigration on post-imperial grounds, and this he did sporadically. However, freeing Britain from its empire was not his primary concern in 1968. The radicalization of Powell's approach to immigration in that year was characterized by the prominent use of a new theme – ‘communalism’. In early 1968, he looked at Britain and the United States, and thought he saw ‘the curse of India’ at play. Memories of his deeply formative time in India struck him with full force. Powell was filled with the same fears and responded with the same ideas in both 1946 and 1968.
VI
Powell's experience of imperial India prompted him to formulate a theoretical definition of the nation. Its foundations were democracy and homogeneity. Translated into a lasting political philosophy it underpinned his opposition to immigration and race relations legislation. The influence of empire on Powell's ideas is also of wider significance as it sheds light on Britain's changing national identity in the post-war period. Historians have traced a new emphasis on a racial rather than civic national identity since 1945.Footnote 107 Kathleen Paul claimed that Powell had a negligible effect on the established racism of the British public and political elite.Footnote 108 However, she does not deny that Powell's thinking typified the newer, more primordial, conception of identity, and several historians including Paul Gilroy and Paul Rich argue that in fact Powell contributed to or even dominated this process from the 1960s.Footnote 109
Historians have been unanimous in locating the origins of Powell's thought in the conditions of post-war Britain, perceiving him to be a post-imperialist or ethnic nationalist.Footnote 110 This assumption begs reassessment. By contrast, the evidence of the Powell Archive suggests that he drew actively on an imperial ideological tradition in addressing issues of nationality in the 1960s. The experience of empire shaped the identities of colonizers as well as the colonized,Footnote 111 both before and long after decolonization.Footnote 112 Wendy Webster has recognized the importance of the British imperial experience in shaping the response to mass immigration in the 1960s, noting that the theme of ‘violation of domestic sanctuaries’ was also present in the response to colonial wars in the 1950s.Footnote 113 Zig Layton-Henry similarly identified racism with the slaver mentality associated strongly with the West Indies.Footnote 114 However, Powell's thought bears closest resemblance to the more characteristically Indian imperial project of providing a liberal apologia for racial subjugation. In his opinion immigrant communities were ‘colonies’ within Britain, and he approached the problem of their governance in the same way as he had that of India in 1945–6, perpetuating common assumptions made by colonial administrators.Footnote 115
The British approach to governance in India was never systematized. Thomas Metcalf helpfully described it as a dynamic tension between a liberal belief in the universal equality of man, and a racist conception of Indian difference, exemplified respectively by Lords Ripon and Curzon.Footnote 116 This tension contained a common assumption that dominated debate in New Delhi and Simla, namely that communalism was inimical to the desirable end of self-government. Drawing on the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Macaulay, and J. S. Mill, administrators believed that India did not yet constitute a nation because it was lacking in all but geographical unity.Footnote 117 Thus the concept of a democratic nation was predicated upon a unified electorate of rational individuals.
In Powell's thought, the liberal sahib's assumptions were explicitly brought to bear on post-war Britain. Before 1947 he had wished to see imperial India given full democracy, free of communal considerations. This liberal desire for universal equality before the law was manifested in his criticisms of the abuse of Kenyan Mau Mau prisoners at Hola Camp in 1959,Footnote 118 and his talk of racial integration in 1964–5. However, Powell was willing to accept that the cost of legal equality might be social inequality. He opposed multicultural race relations legislation in the name of liberalism, and as a result endorsed a situation of racial inequality. In Richard Ritchie's opinion, Powell felt that ‘to deny people this “freedom” (in their private dealings, relating to their own property – he never approved of apartheid) was a greater evil than allowing people to discriminate on racial grounds. Provided everyone was “equal before the law”, he was satisfied.’Footnote 119 Like colonial liberals such as Lord Ripon, Powell also believed that Indians were as yet different from the British, again lending a racist taint to his thought. Although he denied that those differences were inherent or biological, he still felt in the 1940s that India was not yet ready for self-government. His liberalism was made conditional upon time, necessary for the development of rational individualism. Likewise in the 1960s he thought that Indian immigrants living in Britain should be equal citizens and integrated, but that it would take several generations and a numerical limit for them to break free from their apparently communal political paradigm, and become rational individuals.
Powell sought to defend a situation of racial inequality by using the language of liberalism. His concern was to preserve British citizens' freedom to discriminate against their black fellow citizens, since he believed that the protection of minority identities was inimical to democracy. To this end Powell sought from 1946 onwards to exclude black citizens of the Colonies, and then the New Commonwealth, from Britain. In so doing Powell made race an element of his national identity. However, he presented the project as part of a distinctive liberal philosophy, the origins of which lay in imperial India, not in the post-imperialist resurgence of English ethnic nationalism.
