Freedom and Reality

"These are the Dead Sea Scrolls of Powellism. This is Powellism, red in tooth and claw. It’s got the Birmingham speech in it and other speeches on immigration which, by the way, are really worth reading for people who believe Powell was a racist, because Powell doesn’t talk about race once. All he talks about is immigration and he doesn’t specify who’s doing the immigrating. So, it’s useful for that reason. But this, if you like, was the blueprint of Thatcherism and that is important for two reasons. First of all it’s got his arguments against the George Brown National Plan of 1964-65, in which he says there’s an indissoluble link between a free country and a free market and that, if you write to people who are running enterprises, and ask them what they will be doing in five years time, they’re going to write back to you and say that they haven’t got a clue because it depends how the market moves between now and then. And so he said the plan was fundamentally ignorant of business and the way money is made. “Powell’s Freedom and Reality was the blueprint of Thatcherism” He also says things like, ‘You don’t tax a loss, you can only tax a profit, so we need rich people. We need to create money. If you are a Labour adherent and you want to welfare state, then you have to accept that that welfare state has to be paid for and, it’s only paid for by rich people and rich companies.’ He also talks extensively about monetarism in this book. He says it’s no good governments blaming trade unions for inflation. Inflation is caused by printing money and, if the growth in the supply of money exceeds the growth in GDP , we’re going to have inflation, because there will be too much money chasing too few goods. It’s as simple as that. And, of course, this was all proven very quickly when Heath grew the money supply by, I think, 30% in 1971-72. In 1974-75 we had inflation of nearly 25%. So Powell was proved right. The IMF agreed with him, which is why they stopped Healey spending money in 1976 and introduced massive spending cuts. So, I would go back to the John the Baptist analogy. Virtually anything that Mrs Thatcher did is in Enoch Powell’s Freedom and Reality . He advocates privatisation and monetarism. He advocates an end to incomes policies. He repudiated planning. He repudiates the state, in fact. She was hugely influenced by this. The day that my book on Powell came out in 1998, Charles Moore, very kindly, got her to write a review of it on the leader page of the Telegraph , which was a wonderful thing of him to do, because I think it sold about 10,000 copies just on the back of her writing that. And she said, ‘I learned it all from him’. It was Powell who, in 1964 after the defeat of the Home government, took Keith Joseph into the Institute of Economic Affairs, the IEA, and introduced him to Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, who were very close to Enoch, and said, ‘Give him some of your pamphlets. He’s a clever man with a mind that is tilting towards us.’ “He was the greatest political influence on her, probably, apart from her father” And Keith Joseph, on Enoch’s suggestion, took all these IEA pamphlets home, read them, and realized that Powellism, as it was then known, was the way forward. By the time you get to 1974, Powell had left the Conservative Party, but Mrs Thatcher remained in awe of him, not least because she knew that when she and Keith Joseph set up the Centre for Policy Studies, they were doing it based on a Powellite platform. And, of course, in the end, she became completely Powellite. At the very end of that book is a speech he made in the spring of 1969 at Clacton-on-Sea, about why Britain shouldn’t join the European Economic Community, as it then was. If you’d read that speech out during the referendum campaign in 2016 you would have hardly have had to change a single word, because it was a semi-religious statement of the case against Britain joining the Common Market and it was the argument for leaving the EU, once we’d joined. It dealt purely with sovereignty, with the issue of the lack of democracy, and the inability of people to vote in a general election and thereby to affect the future of their country in matters connected to Europe. These are the arguments that Mrs Thatcher set out in her Bruges speech . I went to Bruges with her that day. I read the speech on the plane going over and I remember just saying to the journalist next to me, ‘Enoch wrote this 20 years ago. This is Enoch.’ Anyway, he was the greatest political influence on her, probably, apart from her father. She was very sympathetic. She was working in the shadow government in the 1960s with Keith Joseph and Keith had introduced her to Enoch’s thought. I know that. And she didn’t get on with Enoch very well. It wasn’t her fault. Enoch didn’t think women belonged in politics . I remember him saying this to me in the early years that I knew him—I met him first in 1980. I remember him saying to me in about 1985, when she was still prime minister, ‘Well, I still find it so hard to believe. It’s not a job for a woman. She shouldn’t be doing it.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He reluctantly came round. He was hugely impressed by her response to the Falkland Islands crisis. And they had a sort of love-in at that stage. But then she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement and he was livid. They didn’t reconcile after that until she was in retirement. When Enoch died, Pam, his widow, used to go around and see Mrs T about once every three or four months for a cup of tea or lunch together. Mrs T talked about Enoch a lot and she didn’t bear grudges. She knew he’d be very unhelpful to her on a number of occasions, but she would always say what a great man he was and what a terrible loss to the party his departure had been and, ‘if only he’d stayed.’ I’m sure if he’d stayed in the Tory Party, she’d have had him back in the shadow cabinet and would have made him Chancellor of the Exchequer or something. But Freedom and Reality is a Powellite blueprint for Thatcherism and, if you want to understand where she came from, she came from Keith Joseph, but he came directly from the ideas in this book. She picked them up—denationalisation, monetarism, leaving things to the market. That’s exactly what she did. No, she was. He made that speech when he was shadow defence minister. He says that there was no point in Britain being east of Suez. The point of being east of Suez was India . He took the view that, once India had gone, we should be realistic about where we were. This also ties in with his anti-Americanism. He believed, with some justification, that one of the main aims of American foreign policy from Versailles onwards had been to dismantle the British Empire. He first came across Americans at the Casablanca Conference in 1943. And he was horrified by the Americans he met because he thought they acted like they owned the world. But he thought, ‘But we own the world—what’s going on?’ The catastrophic moment for him was 20 February 1947, the night that Clement Attlee got up in the House of Commons and said that Britain would be leaving India on 15 August. Enoch was horrified because he wanted to be Viceroy. That was his principal ambition. He told me, ‘I walked the streets of London. I couldn’t sleep. I kept walking around Westminster, thinking ‘what has he done?’ And at that moment I realised that, if that was what was going to happen, then the whole British Empire was over. All our pretensions to be a world power were gone.’ It was a delusion. “Enoch wanted Britain to be strongly defended, but to exist in Lord Salisbury-style ‘splendid isolation’” Obviously Mrs Thatcher was old enough to remember when we had had an empire, but because she wasn’t anti-American she had a different view about co-operating with America. Enoch didn’t want to co-operate with America. He wanted Britain to be strongly defended, but to exist in Lord Salisbury-style ‘splendid isolation,’ not getting involved in other peoples’ fights. That was why he was always quite keen on being friends with the Soviet Union . Not because he shared their ideology, but because they were a bulwark for stability in the world, which I suppose, to an extent, they were. But Mrs T very much took the view that, with the Americans, we could do anything. Enver Hoxha used to say, when things were getting rough in Tirana, ‘Never forget that, together with the Chinese, we Albanians have a quarter of the world’s population.’ And I always think that, to an extent, that’s the way Mrs T saw us and the Americans, but that’s probably being very unfair."