Enoch Powell

I mean, we're also like describing trajectories of political life.

You know, all political lives end in failure is to misquote Enoch Powell.

But like that, that is, you know, maybe we're just sort of thinking about that bit where they're popular and successful and they haven't started to receive the kind of critique that can eat away at how we perceive a particular person.

But

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, this is Enoch Powell's worst nightmare.

And also, you want to say, like, you've never seen anything like it.

Do you remember the murder a week ago?

Well, I'm in my own lifetime now, which is strange because my 90s is like Spice Girls and that kind of thing.

And I do increasingly think that although we have the One Nation group in 1950 and afterwards, that contained Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph.

It wasn't a homogenous kind of tradition.

And I do think that in some sense, the idea of like one nation conservatism that has Disraeli as founder rather than midwife, which is, you know, Disraeli wasn't just seen as a founder for most of the 20th century.

And anybody should have been able to predict what is now happening.

Indeed, it was predicted 60 years ago when Enoch Powell made a speech in Wolverhampton in 1968, warning of the dangers of communalism, which by which he meant birds of a feather flocking together and in different ethnic groups living in effectively ghettos and with their own minority interests being a majority in their own communities.

That was bound to lead to the kind of violence ultimately on the streets that we've seen and which was seen even in those days, of course, in big cities in America.

And it was that example that gave rise to that speech.

Did you have a sensible, like a palpable sense of fear at all? Like did it, was it? you know, their neighborhoods you just didn't want to be in or department stores that you didn't want to be around? Was it that? Did you have that feeling?

Yeah, the Rivers of Blood speech was by Enoch Powell, just for reference.

And the way it was, where our school was, we were kind of divided.

On one side, we had what they call themselves at that time, the National Front.

The UK had its own anti-immigrant activists.

His name was Enoch Powell in particular.

Enoch Powell was the Donald Trump of the 1970s in Britain.

He campaigned against immigrants.

He argued that Britain ought to by right belong to white British people and that we don't want any of these Indians from the colonies or Ugandan Asians from the colonies to come to the UK.