{"id":43097,"date":"2026-05-17T21:14:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T20:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=43097"},"modified":"2026-05-17T21:14:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T20:14:23","slug":"enoch-powell-was-never-an-unperson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2026\/05\/17\/enoch-powell-was-never-an-unperson","title":{"rendered":"Enoch Powell was never an ‘Unperson’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last week Simon Heffer wrote a piece for the Spectator<\/em><\/a>, a British Tory-associated news and opinion magazine, alleging that the politician Enoch Powell, an MP from 1950 to 1987 (with a break in 1974, at which he switched from the Tories to the Ulster Unionists and took a seat in Northern Ireland) who is best known for an inflammatory, racist speech against the admission of family members of Asian immigrant workers in the late 1960s although he had been responsible for some progressive policies and speeches including one in 1961 advocating reform of Britain’s mental health services which set in train the move away from asylums. Heffer claims that Powell came to be associated with “one utterance” and that “long after his death he found himself, in contemporary parlance, cancelled”, noting that his own biography of Powell was withdrawn from publication after the death of George Floyd in the US. He then compares the rejection of Powell with the erasure from history of people deemed to be “Unpersons” in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> by George Orwell. Having read the book, I can say that the comparison is ludicrous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1984<\/em>, an Unperson was someone who had been killed by the regime and whose name and deeds were erased from the records. The central character, Winston Smith, worked in the records department, rewriting history by simply making up stories to overwrite the real stories of people he had been informed were ‘Unpersons’. This could be because of a trivial faux pas<\/em> — some expression of dissent that could have been said in his sleep, as happened to one of Smith’s colleagues. It was the Stalinist practice of airbrushing out of official pictures politicians who had fallen victim to Stalin’s purges taken to its logical conclusion. The comparison of Powell with this treatment is consistent with the way right-wingers claim to have been ‘cancelled’ despite enjoying columns in national newspapers and even seats in parliament. Enoch Powell remained a Tory MP for six years after this incident, and then secured a seat with the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland, and remained in parliament until being defeated by the nationalist SDLP in 1987, declining a life peerage because he had opposed their introduction in 1958.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s true that Powell’s career was more than the 1968 Rivers of Blood speech (reproduced as a PDF here<\/a>), and he supported some liberal positions and others commonly associated with the Left (such as unilateral nuclear disarmament) and criticised MPs who justified abuses of Kenyans during the so-called Mau-Mau uprising and called them subhuman, but that speech was heinous. He repeated claims from an anonymous letter about a woman in Wolverhampton, in a street that had declined from the moment the first Black person (or ‘Negro’ as he called them) moved in (a common racist trope), who had impoverished herself by refusing to rent rooms to immigrants and was told by the council “racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere”. When she went out, she was followed by the immigrants’ children, who taunted her with the only word of English the anonymous writer claimed they knew: “racialist”. He quoted a comment from a constituent who told him that he was making sure his children would resettle overseas because immigration made the UK not worth living in; “in this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. The speech was blamed for a rise in violent attacks on Black and Asian people, but decades later the phrase “Enoch was right” was heard when a Black or Asian person appeared anywhere that was not one of “their areas”. When the Radio 4 soap opera The Archers<\/em> began to feature an Asian family, I heard a letter being read out on the same station’s Feedback<\/em> programme, expressing scepticism that an Asian family would actually be so warmly received; when Asian families dared enter village pubs, the writer said, it was common for them to hear “Enoch was right”. Even in the 2000s, Muslim women commented on this blog that they did not feel safe walking in the English countryside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not uncommon for a politician to be remembered for one ugly speech or one bad policy if its effects on people were particularly bad. Tony Blair introduced many progressive pieces of legislation, especially in his first term in office, such as the Freedom of Information Act, the Human Rights Act and various anti-discrimination bills, but he is generally reviled in many quarters for getting us involved in the Iraq war. He still makes a good living from his think-tank and his services to politicians, including many dictators, the world over. He is in no sense ‘cancelled’ nor an ‘Unperson’ and neither was Powell. His Water Tower speech, for example, is often mentioned in articles about British mental health care and has been played in documentaries about it. But anyone who’s ever walked into a shop or pub and heard people say “Enoch was right” will remember him for one thing and that’s only to be expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image source: Bill Peloquin, via Wikimedia<\/a>. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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