Enoch powell brief biography of prophet

Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. History Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps Powell, Enoch — Powell, Enoch — gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia.

More From encyclopedia. About this article Powell, Enoch — Updated About encyclopedia. Powell, Eleanor — Powell, Eleanor. Powell, Edward, Bl. Powell, E. Sandy Powell, Drew —. Powell, Dilys — Powell, Dick Powell, Dick. Powell, Debra A. Powell, Dawn ? Powell, Dawn — Powell, Dawn. Powell, David Powell, Dannye Romine. The consequence would not be that we should survive, that we should repel our antagonist—nor would it be that we should escape defeat.

The consequence would be that we would make certain, as far as is humanly possible, the virtual destruction and elimination of the hope of the future in these islands. I would much sooner that the power to use it was not in the hands of any individual in this country at all. Powell went on to say that if the Soviet invasion had already begun and the UK resorted to a retaliatory strike the results would be the same: "We should be condemning, not merely to death, but as near as may be the non-existence of our population".

To Powell, an invasion would take place with or without the UK's nuclear weapons and therefore there was no point in retaining them. He said that after years of consideration, he had come to the conclusion that there were no "rational grounds on which the deformation of our defence preparations in the United Kingdom by our determination to maintain a current independent nuclear deterrent can be justified".

On 28 MarchPowell gave a speech to Ashton-under-Lyne Young Conservatives where he criticised the "conspiracy of silence" between the government and the opposition over the prospective growth through births of the immigration population, and added, " 'We have seen nothing yet' is a phrase that we could with advantage repeat to ourselves whenever we try to form a picture of that future".

He also criticised those who believed it was "too late to do anything" and that "there lies the certainty of violence on a scale which can only adequately be described as civil war". And I hope with all my heart that it isn't true". In July, a riot took place in ToxtethLiverpool. On 16 JulyPowell gave a speech in the Commons in which he said the riots could not be understood unless one takes into consideration the fact that in some large cities between a quarter and a half of those under 25 were immigrant or descended from immigrants.

He read out a letter he had received from a member of the public about immigration that included the line: "As they continue to multiply and as we can't retreat further there must be conflict". Powell predicted "inner London becoming ungovernable or violence which could only effectively be described as civil war", and Flannery intervened again to ask what Powell knew about inner cities.

Powell replied: "I was a Member for Wolverhampton for a quarter of a century. What I saw in those early years of the development of this problem in Wolverhampton has made it impossible for me ever to dissociate myself from this gigantic and tragic problem". He also criticised the view that the causes of the riots were economic: "Are we seriously saying that so long as there is poverty, unemployment and deprivation our cities will be torn to pieces, that the police in them will be the objects of attack and that we shall destroy our own enoch powell brief biography of prophet Of course not".

Dame Judith Hart attacked his speech as "an evil incitement to riot". Powell replied: "I am within the judgment of the House, as I am within the judgment of the people of this country, and I am content to stand before either tribunal". After the Scarman Report on the riots was published, Powell gave a speech on 10 December in the Commons.

Powell disagreed with Scarman, as the report stated that the black community was alienated because it was economically disadvantaged. Powell instead argued that the black community was alienated because it was alien. He said tensions would worsen because the non-white population was growing: whereas in Lambeth it was 25 per cent, of those of secondary school age it was 40 per cent.

Powell said that the government should be honest to the people by telling them that in thirty years' time, the black population of Lambeth would have doubled in size. Edward Norman then Dean of Peterhouse had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons. The discussion moved on to "Western values". Mrs Thatcher said in effect that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our enoches powell brief biography of prophet.

Powell: "No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in AprilPowell was given secret briefings on Privy Counsellor terms on behalf of his party.

On 3 April, Powell said in the Commons that the time for inquests on the government's failure to protect the Falkland Islands would come later and that although it was right to put the issue before the United Nations, the UK should not wait upon that organisation to deliberate but use forceful action now. He then turned to face Thatcher: "The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a sobriquet as the 'Iron Lady'.

It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made".

On 14 April, in the Commons, Powell said: "it is difficult to fault the military and especially the naval measures which the Government have taken". He added: "We are in some danger of resting our position too exclusively upon the existence, the nature and the wishes of the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands I do not think that we need be too nice about saying that we defend our territory as well as our people.

There is nothing irrational, nothing to be ashamed of, in doing that. Indeed, it is impossible in the last resort to distinguish between the defence of territory and the defence of people". Powell also criticised the United Nations Security Council's resolution calling for a "peaceful solution". He said while he wanted a peaceful solution, the resolution's meaning "seems to be of a negotiated settlement or compromise between two incompatible positions—between the position which exists in international law, that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies are British sovereign territory and some other position altogether It cannot be meant that one country has only to seize the territory of another country for the nations of the world to say that some middle position must be found.

If that were the meaning of the resolution of the Security Council, the charter of the United Nations would not be a charter of peace; it would be a pirates' charter. It would mean that any claim anywhere in the world had only to be pursued by force, and points would immediately be gained and a bargaining position established by the aggressor".

On 28 April, Powell spoke in the Commons against the Northern Ireland Secretary's Jim Prior plans for devolution to a power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland: "We assured the people of the Falkland Islands that there should be no enoch powell brief biography of prophet in their status without their agreement. Yet at the very same time that those assurances were being repeated, the actions of the Government and their representatives elsewhere were belying or contradicting those assurances and showing that part at any rate of the Government was looking to a very different outcome that could not be approved by the people of the islands.

Essentially, exactly the same has happened over the years to Northern Ireland". He further said that power-sharing was a negation of democracy. The next day Powell disagreed with the Labour Party leader Michael Foot 's claim that the British government was acting under the authority of the United Nations: "The right of self-defence—to repel aggression and to expel an invader from one's territory and one's people whom he has occupied and taken captive—is, as the Government have said, an inherent right.

It is one which existed before the United Nations was dreamt of". On 13 May Powell said the task force was sent "to repossess the Falkland Islands, to restore British administration of the islands and to ensure that the decisive factor in the future of the islands should be the wishes of the inhabitants" but the Foreign Secretary Francis Pym desired an "interim agreement": "So far as I understand that interim agreement, it is in breach, if not in contradiction, of each of the three objects with which the task force was dispatched to the South Atlantic.

There was to be a complete and supervised withdrawal of Argentine forces There is no withdrawal of British force that 'corresponds' to the withdrawal from the territory of the islands of those who have unlawfully occupied them. We have a right to be there; those are our waters, the territory is ours and we have the right to sail the oceans with our fleets whenever we think fit.

So the whole notion of a 'corresponding withdrawal', a withdrawal of the only force which can possibly restore the position, which can possibly ensure any of the objectives which have been talked about on either side of the House, is in contradiction of the determination to repossess the Falklands". After British forces successfully recaptured the Falklands, Powell asked Thatcher in the Commons on 17 June, recalling his statement to her of 3 April: "Is the right hon.

Lady aware that the report has now been received from the public analyst on a certain substance recently subjected to analysis and that I have obtained a copy of the report? It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes?

I agree with every word that he said". Powell wrote an article for The Times on 29 June, in which he said: "The Falklands have brought to the surface of the British mind our latent perception of ourselves as a sea animal. No assault on a landward possession would have evoked the same automatic defiance, tinged with a touch of that self sufficiency which belongs to all nations".

The United States' response was "very different but just as deep an instinctual reaction It was the position of the Falkland Islands in relation to that route which gave and gives them their significance—for the United States above all. The British people have become uneasily aware that their American allies would prefer the Falkland Islands to pass out of Britain's possession into hands which, if not wholly American, might be amenable to American control.

In fact, the American struggle to wrest the islands from Britain has only commenced in earnest now that the fighting is over". Powell then said there was "the Hispanic factor": "If we could gather together all the anxieties for the future which in Britain cluster around race relations Writing in The Guardian on 18 October, Powell said that due to the Falklands War, "Britain no longer looked upon itself and the world through American spectacles" and the view was "more rational; and it was more congenial; for, after all, it was our own view".

He quoted an observation that Americans thought their country was "a unique society He denounced the "manic exaltation of the American illusion" and compared it to the "American nightmare". Powell also disliked the American belief that "they are authorised, possibly by the deity, to intervene, openly or covertly, in the internal affairs of other countries anywhere in the world".

The UK should dissociate herself from American intervention in the Lebanon: "It is not in Britain's self-interest alone that Britain should once again assert her own position. A world in which the American myth and the American nightmare go unchallenged by question or by contradiction is not a world as safe or as peaceable as human reason, prudence and realism can make it".

Speaking to the Aldershot and North Hants Conservative Association on 4 FebruaryPowell blamed the United Nations for the Falklands War by the General Assembly resolution of December that stated "its gratitude for the continuous efforts made by the Government of Argentina to facilitate the process of decolonisation" and further called on the UK and Argentina to negotiate.

Powell said that "it would be difficult to imagine a more cynically wicked or criminally absurd or insultingly provocative action". As had voted for this resolution, with only the UK voting against it with 32 abstentionshe said it was not surprising that Argentina had continually threatened the UK until this threatening turned into aggression: "It is with the United Nations that the guilt lies for the breach of the peace and the bloodshed".

The UN knew that no international forum had ruled against British possession of the Falklands but had voted its gratitude to Argentina who wanted to annexe the Islands from their rightful owners. It was therefore "disgraceful" for the UK to belong to such a body that engaged in "pure spite for spite's sake against the United Kingdom": "We were, and are, the victims of our own insincerity.

For over thirty years we have sanctimoniously and dishonestly pretended respect, if not awe, for an organisation which all the time we knew was a monstrous and farcical humbug. The moral is to cease to engage in humbug, which almost all have happily and self-righteously engaged in for a generation". In an article for the Sunday Telegraph on 3 April, Powell expressed his opposition to the Labour Party's manifesto pledge to outlaw fox hunting.

He claimed that angling was much crueller and that it was just as logical to ban the boiling of live lobsters or eating live oysters. The ceremonial part of fox hunting was "a side of our national character which is deeply antipathetic to the Labour party". On 31 May Powell gave a speech at Downpatrick against nuclear weapons. Powell said that war could not be banished because "War is implicit in the human condition".

Enoch powell brief biography of prophet

The "true case against the nuclear weapon is the nightmarish unreality and criminal levity of the grounds upon which its acquisition and multiplication are advocated and defended". Thatcher had claimed nuclear weapons were our defence "of last resort". Powell said he supposed this to mean "that the Soviet Unionwhich seems always to be assumed to be the enemy in question, proved so victorious in a war of aggression in Europe as to stand upon the verge of invading these islands.

Suppose further, because this is necessary to the alleged case for our nuclear weapon as the defence of last resort, that, as inthe United States was standing aloof from the contest but that, in contrast withBritain and the Warsaw Pact respectively possessed the nuclear weaponry which they do today. Such must surely be the sort of scene in which the Prime Minister is asserting that Britain would be saved by possession of her present nuclear armament.

I can only say: 'One must be mad to think it'. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide—the extinction of our race—in the literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. Would anybody in their senses contemplate that this ought to be our choice or would be our choice? Powell further stated that the continental nations held the nuclear weapon in such esteem that they had conventional forces "manifestly inadequate to impose more than brief delay upon an assault from the East.

The theory of nuclear deterrence states that, should Warsaw Pact forces score substantial military successes or make substantial advances this side of the Iron Curtainthe United States would initiate the suicidal duel of strategic nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. One can only greet this idea with an even more emphatic 'One must be mad to think of it'.

That a nation staring ultimate military defeat in the face would choose self-extermination is unbelievable enough; but that the United States, separated from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean, would regard the loss of the first pawn in the long game as necessitating harakiri is not describable by the ordinary resources of language".

The reason why governments, including in the US, supported nuclear weapons was that "enormous economic and financial interests are vested in the continuation and elaboration of nuclear armaments. I believe, however, that the crucial explanation lies in another direction: the nuclear hypothesis provides governments with an excuse for not doing what they have no intention of doing anyhow, but for reasons which they find it inconvenient to specify".

On 2 June, Powell spoke against the stationing of US cruise missiles in the UK and asserted that the United States had an obsessive sense of mission and a hallucinatory view of international relations: "The American nation, as we have watched their proceedings during these last 25 years, will not, when another Atlantic crisis, another Middle East crisis or another European crisis comes, wait upon the deliberations of the British Cabinet, whose point of view and appreciation of the situation will be so different from their own".

Inrace riots between the black community and the police broke out in London and in Birminghamleading Powell to repeat his warning that ethnic civil conflict would be the ultimate outcome of foreign mass migration into the British Islesand re-issue his call for a government sponsored programme of repatriation. Powell later came into conflict with Thatcher in November over her support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Lady understand — if she does not yet understand she soon will — that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt? Along with other Unionist MPsPowell resigned his seat in protest and then narrowly regained it at the ensuing by-election. During his maiden speech, Mallon quoted the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinozasaying "Peace is not an absence of war.

It is … a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. When Mallon enquired why, Powell said that he had misquoted Spinoza. Mallon stated he had not and, to reconcile the standoff between them, they both proceeded to the library to verify the quote. InThatcher visited the Soviet Union, which signified to Powell a "radical transformation which is in progress in both the foreign policy and the defence policy of the United Kingdom".

The first was the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars": "Star wars raised the terrible prospect that there might be an effective means of neutralising the inter-continental ballistic missile, whereby the two great giants who held what had become to be seen as the balance of terror would contract out of the enoch powell brief biography of prophet altogether: the deterrent would be switched off by the invulnerability of the two providers of the mutual terror".

America's "European allies were brought along to acquiesce in the United States engaging in the rational activity of discovering whether there was after all some defence against nuclear attack That was the first recent event which shook to its foundations the nuclear deterrent with which we had lived these last 30 years". The second event was Mikhail Gorbachev 's offer of both the Soviet Union and the United States agreeing to abolish intermediate-range ballistic enoches powell brief biography of prophet. Powell said that Thatcher's "most significant point was when she went on to say that we must aim at a conventional forces balance.

So, after all our journeys of the last 30 or 40 years, the disappearance of the intermediate range ballistic missile revived the old question of the supposed conventional imbalance between the Russian alliance and the North Atlantic Alliance". Powell further said that even if nuclear weapons had not existed, the Russians would still not have invaded Western Europe: "What has prevented that from happening was It was that fear, that caution, that understanding, that perception on the part of Russia and its leaders that was the real deterrent against Russia committing the utterly irrational and suicidal act of plunging into a third world war in which the Soviet Union would be likely to find itself confronting a combination of the greatest industrial and economic powers in the world".

Powell said, "In the minds of the Russians the inevitable commitment of the United States in such a war would have come not directly or necessarily from the stationing of American marines in Germany, but, as it came in the previous two struggles, from the ultimate involvement of the United States in any war determining the future of Europe".

Thatcher's belief in the nuclear hypothesis "in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was 'inconceivable' that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States. The Prime Minister supplied the reason why: she said it was because we depend for our liberty and freedom upon the United States.

Once let the nuclear hypothesis be questioned or destroyed, once allow it to break down, and from that moment the American imperative in this country's policies disappears with it". At the start of general electionPowell claimed the Conservatives' prospects did not look good: "I have the feeling of ". He claimed that Chernobyl had strengthened "a growing impulse to escape from the nightmare of peace being dependent upon the contemplation of horrific and mutual carnage.

Events have now so developed that this aspiration can at last be rationally, logically and—I dare to add—patriotically seized by the people of the United Kingdom if they will use their votes to do so". However, Powell lost his seat in the election by votes to the SDLP 's Eddie McGradymainly because of demographic and boundary changes that resulted in there being many more Irish Nationalists in the constituency than before.

The boundary changes had arisen due to his own campaign for the number of MPs representing Northern Ireland to be increased to the equivalent proportion for the rest of the United Kingdom, as part of the steps towards greater integration. McGrady paid tribute to Powell, recognising the respect he was held in by both Unionists and Nationalists in the constituency.

Powell said, "For the rest of my life when I look back on the 13 years I shall be filled with affection for the Province and its people, and their fortunes will never be out of my heart". He received a warm ovation from the mostly Nationalist audience and as he walked off the platform, he said the words Edmund Burke used on the death of candidate Richard Coombe: "What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue".

When a BBC reporter asked Powell to explain his defeat, he replied: "My opponent polled more votes than me". He was offered a life peeragewhich was regarded as his right as a former Cabinet minister, but declined it. He argued that as he had opposed the Life Peerages Actit would be hypocritical for him to take one. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany had decided to visit Moscow to negotiate German reunificationsignalling to Powell that the last gasp of American power in Europe to be replaced by a new balance of power not resting on military force but on the "recognition of the restraints which the ultimate certainty of failure places upon the ambitions of the respective national states".

In an interview for the Sunday People in DecemberPowell said the Conservative Party was "rejoining Enoch" on the European Community but repeated his warning of civil war as the consequence of immigration: "I still cannot forsee how a country can be peaceably governed in which the composition of the population is progressively going to change.

I am talking about violence on a scale which can only be described as civil war. I cannot see there can be any other outcome". It would not be a race war but "about people who revolt against being trapped in a situation where they feel at the mercy of a built-in racial majority, whatever its colour" and claimed that the government had made contingency plans for such an event.

The solution, he said, was repatriation on a large scale and the cost of doing this in welfare payments and pensions was well worth paying. In earlyhe made a programme broadcast in July on his visit to Russia and his impressions on that country. When he visited Russia, Powell went to the enoches powell brief biography of prophet ofpeople who died during the Siege of Leningradsaying that he could not believe a people who had suffered so much would willingly start another war.

He also went to a veterans' parade wearing his own medals and talked with Russian soldiers with the aid of an interpreter. However, the programme was criticised by those who believed that Powell had dismissed the Soviet Union's threat to the West since and that he had been too impressed with Russia's sense of national identity. Following Thatcher's Bruges speech [ ] in September and her increasing hostility to a European currency in the last years of her premiership, Powell made many speeches publicly supporting her attitude to Europe.

When Heath criticised Thatcher's speech in MayPowell called him "the old virtuoso of the U-turn". In early Septembera collection of Powell's speeches on Europe was published titled Enoch Powell on being the year set for the creation of the Single Market by the Single European Act of In a speech at Chatham House for the launch of the book on 6 September, he advised Thatcher to fight the next general election on a nationalist theme as many Eastern European nations previously under Russian rule were gaining their freedom.

Those who lead are always out in front, alone". Thatcher replied, "I am deeply touched by your words. They give me the greatest possible encouragement". On 5 Januaryaddressing Conservatives in Liverpool, Powell said that if the Conservatives played the "British card" at the next general election, they could win; the new mood in the UK for "self-determination" had given the newly independent nations of Eastern Europe a "beacon", adding that the UK should stand alone, if necessary, for European freedom, adding: "We are taunted—by the French, by the Italians, by the Spaniards—for refusing to worship at the shrine of a common government superimposed upon them all I will tell you.

They were either writhing under a hideous oppression or they were aiding and abetting that oppression. Lucky for Europe that Britain was alone in ". The Conservative Party would have to ask, preferably at the next election: "Do you intend still to control the laws which you obey, the taxes you pay and the policies of your government? I always think it was a tragedy that he left.

He is a very, very able politician. I say that even though he has sometimes said vitriolic things against me". Thatcher had been labelled "dictatorial" for wanting to "go it alone" in Europe: "Well, I do not mind somebody being dictatorial in defending my own rights and those of my fellow countrymen This was the first election since in which Powell was advocating a vote for the Conservative Party.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 AugustPowell said that since the UK was not an ally of Kuwait in the "formal sense" and because the balance of power in the Middle East had ceased to be a British concern after the end of the British Empire, the UK should not go to war. Powell said that " Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops come storming up the beaches of Kent or Sussex ".

On 21 October, he wrote, "The world is full of evil men engaged in doing evil things. That does not make us policemen to round them up nor judges to find them guilty and to sentence them. What is so special about the ruler of Iraq that we suddenly discover that we are to be his jailers and his judges? I sometimes wonder if, when we shed our power, we omitted to shed our arrogance".

When Thatcher was challenged by Michael Heseltine for the leadership of the Conservative Party during NovemberPowell said he would rejoin the party, which he had left in February over the issue of Europe, if Thatcher won, and would urge the public to support both her and, in Powell's view, national independence. He wrote to one of Thatcher's supporters, Norman Tebbiton 16 November, telling him Thatcher was entitled to use his name and his support in any way she saw fit.

Since she resigned on 22 November, Powell never rejoined the Conservatives. Powell wrote the following Sunday: "Good news is seldom so good, nor bad news so bad, as at first sight it appears. Her downfall was due to having so few like-minded people on European integration amongst her colleagues and that as she had adopted a line that would improve her party's popularity, it was foolish of them to force her out.

The fact abides that, outside the magic circle at the top, a deep rooted opposition has been disclosed in the UK to surrendering to others the right to make our laws, fix our taxes, or decide our policies. Running deep beneath the overlay of years of indifference is still the attachment of the British public to their tradition of democracy.

Their resentment on learning that their own decisions can be overruled from outside remains as obstinate as ever". Thatcher had relit the flame of independence and "what has happened once can happen again In DecemberPowell said that "Whether Yugoslavia dissolves into two states or half a dozen states or does not dissolve at all makes no difference to the safety and well being of the United Kingdom".

The UK's national interests determined that the country should have "a foreign policy which befits the sole insular and oceanic state in Europe". He praised Budgen for his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty and condemned the rest of the Conservative Party for supporting it. In lateaged 80, Powell was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

On 5 November, the European printed an article by Powell in which he said he did not expect the European Communities Act to be amended or repealed but added, "Still, something has happened. There has been an explosion. Politicians, political parties, the public itself have looked into the abyss Inthe twenty-fifth anniversary of Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, Powell wrote an article for The Timesin which he claimed the concentration of immigrant communities in inner cities would lead to " communalism ", which would have grave effects on the electoral system: "communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible".

Sked went on to lose his deposit at the by-election, polling only votes 1. At Michael Portillo 's 40th birthday party the same month, Thatcher greeted him enthusiastically and asked him: "Enoch, I haven't seen you since your eightieth-birthday dinner. How are you? Powell's opinion of Thatcher had declined after she endorsed John Major at the general election, which he believed to be a repudiation of her fight against European integration following the Bruges speech.

On 16 MayPowell spoke at the Bruges Group and said Europe had "destroyed one Prime Minister and will destroy another Prime Minister yet" and demanded powers surrendered to the European Court of Justice to be repatriated. In Junehe wrote an article for the Daily Mailwhere he stated that "Britain is waking from the nightmare of being part of the continental bloc, to rediscover that these offshore islands belong to the outside world and lie open to its oceans".

Innovations in contemporary society did not worry him: "When exploration has run its course, we shall revert to the normal type of living to which nature and instinct predispose us. The decline will not have been permanent. The deterioration will not have been irreversible". Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Powell, J. Enoch oxford. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Powell, John Enoch oxford. Powell, John Enoch —98 British politician. He entered Parliament as a Conservative inand was minister of health — Powell later served as an Ulster Unionist MP — However, the speech did make him arguably the most popular politician in the UK.

It is widely accepted that Powell helped the Conservatives to unexpectedly win the General election. He argued he was merely expressing the reality of the situation for his constituents. He was certainly a conviction politician who spoke his mind. In defence of Powell, it could be pointed out other situations where he defended the equality of people regardless of race.

For example, inhe made a passionate speech in the House of Commons against the pejorative labelling of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya. On some issues, Powell was liberal in sentiment. He voted against the death penalty and supported homosexual law reform. Inhe was asked by David Frost if he considered himself a racialist. Powell replied:. He was a supporter of Milton Friedman.

Powell became one of the leading anti-Europeans from the Conservative side. As an Ulster Unionist, Powell continued in his criticism of American foreign policy.