The Speeches of JohnEnoch Powell

POLL 4/1/22Speeches, January-December 1990, 3

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POLL 4/1/22 File 2, July-October 1990

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6/7/1990 The European Union Common Market North Salop Cons. Assoc., Albrighton July-Oct 1990 Page 51

27/7/1990 The European Union Common Market Warrington South and Tatton Cons Assoc., Daresbury July-Oct 1990 Page 47

22/9/1990 Education and Literature Rasselas Johnson Society Presidential Address, Lichfield July-Oct 1990 Page 34

23/9/1990 Constitutional Reform Dr Johnson And The Church Of England Lichfield Cathedral July-Oct 1990 Page 29

2/10/1990 The European Union E.E.C. Birmingham Chamber of Commerce July-Oct 1990 Page 26

6/10/1990 Memorial Speech/Toasts Memorial Service Jasper Rootham Memorial Service, Wimborne Minister July-Oct 1990 Page 23

9/10/1990 The European Union E.E.C. And Free Trade Selsdon Group, Bournemouth July-Oct 1990 Page 19

10/10/1990 The European Union E.E.C.: Break The Spell Bournemouth East YCs, Bournemouth July-Oct 1990 Page 15

15/10/1990 The Economy/Industry Free Trade Institute of Export Annual Luncheon, Liverpool July-Oct 1990 Page 11

19/10/1990 The European Union E.C.C. And Agriculture North Norfolk Cons. Assoc., N. Walsham July-Oct 1990 Page 5

26/10/1990 Northern Ireland Stand Firm South Down Unionist Assoc., Newcastle, Co. Down July-Oct 1990 Page 3

S.

NOT FOR PUBLICATION CR REFERENCETO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY

Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to theConference Dinner of the Ulster Unionist Party atthe Slieve Donard Hotel, Newcastle, Co. Down, at

8.30 pm, Friday, 26 October 1990.

At the recent Conference of the Conservative Party at

Bournemouth there was one horrific moment in the closing session.

The Prime Minister welcomed on to the platform the widow of Ian Gow,

whom the IRA murdered because of his loyalty to this province of the

United Kingdom. As she did so, the Prime Minister declared amid

cheers: "We will never give in to terrorism .

Listening and watching, one's blood ran cold. "But", one th6LLht,

“she - must know //five years now she, she personally, has been assuring

the Iiiithat Her Majesty's Government is on the IRA's side, one with

them in purpose and objective, sworn and committed to help them on

to their goal"? Is it not her signature, her ink, upon the Anglo-

Irish Agreement, which conceded a privileged position in this part

qf the United Kingdom to the state whose very constitution enshrines

the claim which the IRA are prosecuting through violence and murder?

What awful insensitivity - ignorance it cannot be - to stand u after

all that in the aftermath ef mureer and announce: "We will

never give in to terrorism"!

Why else would the IRA imagine that the Government of the United

Kingdom persists in attempting to hand Ulster over into the control

of the Irish Republic? Why else would they see the British Govern-

ment, .044€n, by a stroke of the pen, It could treat Ulster as veritably

a part of the United Kingdom like any other, obstinately refusinE to

do so? For what other purpose than to achieve a single all-Ireland

state does one Stormont Castle administration after another toil

aw,y laboriously, if hitherto unsuccessfully, to push Northern

Ireland into isolation from Great Britain? "The Brits are on our

side", the IRA mutter to themselves as they watch - nct too loud,

mind you, for what glcry would it be to the successors of P-arse

and Collins to be handed their prey on a plate by Britain, like a

• -2-

trencher-fed cur? But they say all the same, "The Brits are on

our side", and there is no encouragement to terrorism to compare

with that encouragement.

You and I these last twenty years have been watching the

self-same scene from the opposite side to the IRA and drawing the

same conclusion. But one question might puzzle and mislead us.

Why, if Britain has been in the business of getting rid of Ulster,

did they not do it directly? Why, if that was the purpose, spend

all this time, spend twenty years,on tortuous and indirect devices,

when they could have moved straight to their object? It is infinite-

ly important to Ulster to get the answer to that question right -

infinitely important, because it concerns our resolve, our safety

and our survival. t-/i/A AA TiVIA,

Admittedly the British do temperamentally prefer indirectness

to directness, guile to open dealing, contrivance to plain behaviour;

but the answer cannot simply lie there in that quirk of the national

character - net after all those years of endeavour crowned only with

disappointment. There must be, and there is, one single, simple,

grand explanation. Britain can not, because it dare not, openly get

rid of Ulster out of United Kingdom aginst the manifest will

of its people. The deed/can only be done by deceit: it can only

be done if the British can say to themselves, can say to the world:

"It is the people of Ulster themselves who have asked for it, we are

II/ 'giving them only what they want. jtJ

All the endeavour, all the contrivance, of the British Government

down through the years has been to construct an Ulster which could be

represented as desiring no longer to be,part of the United Kingdom°4,ry /-;1 'That was the purpose of repeated legislationfso conorted and unwork-

able that any other part of the country would have rejected it as a

mockery. That was the purpose of the twists and turns of negotiatien

with the Republic in one summit conference after another.

That is still to-day the meaning of the labyrinthine but disingenuous

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eperations in which, with baby-faced innocence, the Secretary of

State pretends to have been engaged. That was the reason why never,

by any mischance, would a British government - I alnost said, a

British whips office - be caught governing Ulster as the rest of

the United Kingdom is governed. "Push those Ulster people on to

one side, poke them, provoke them, cozen them, corrupt them, and -

you will see - one day they will say exactly what we want them to

say". 01 ftd., 1Vi1-'r Nvi,/v I'vt/- [ /

It hasn't worked out. Alas for the practitioners et' guile,

the people of Ulster simply said No, and kept on saying No,

when they got a chance to vote, they voted by sixteen seats to one -

illand that one seat the gerrymandered seat of West Belfast - to be

governed under the Parliament of the United Kingdom. There is one

reason, and one reason only, why Britain so far has failed to shop

Ulster. It is because the people of Ulster, Protestant and Catholic

alike, continue to say Nc. Nobody else has kept plstpr safe all

these years, not its English friends and wellewiShers/, not the

411-enemy gives up at last. When that time arrives, it arrives suddenly,

when it is least expected, least predicted, when the enemy seemed

most determined. It is the moment when the British say to one

anoth-r: "Here, this is a mug's game; let's chuck it". Let

Ulster but stand its ground, claim its right and say No, and I

will tell you where that moment is. It is just round the corner.

You are nearer to winning, and the IRA nearer to losing, than you

dare imagine.

Conservative Party, not the deeply insincere protestations cf the

British Government. Nobody else saved Ulster except the people of

Ulster. They stood their ground; they were n)t moved; they

said No.

There is their watchword, their inspiration and their hope.

Stand, and there comes a time when the most persistent and cynical

NOT POR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCETO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY

Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to theNorth Norfolk Conservative Association constituencydinner at North Walsham Community Centre at 8 p.m.,

19th October 1990.

Great changes have been taking place in the prospective

relations between Britain and her European neighbours since the

epoch-making announcement of the Prime Minister at Bruges just over

two years ago. Those changes will, of course, affect everyone;

but there is an aspect which is of special concern to a farming

_community like that of North Norfolk.

The Royal Show at Stoneleigh was opened this year by the

Governor of the Bank of England. In the course of doing so, he

castigated the trade protectionism of the European Community's

Common Agricultural Policy, observing that "there can hardly be any

other system in the Community which so comprehensively undermines

the Community's credentials as an open and free market. I hope",

he continued, "we will see a gradual but sustained return to an

agricultural industry where prices and production closely reflect

market forces and market needs". Phew! thought I, times have

indeed changed when such a prestigious pillar of responsibility as

the Governor of the Bank of England talks publicly like that.

Nor was I mistaken. In recent weeks 'Auntie' Times, which is

• 411as good a weathercock as you can get, has referred in its leadingarticles to "the much criticised Common Agricultural Policy", which,

"for all the prospd-ity it has brought them has never" - "never",.

mind you! - "been popular among British farmers, who dislike the

Brussels bureaucracy and are uncomfortably aware that the 'food

mountains' have done nothing to enhance their popularity". Within

the last fortnight, under the heading SET FARMERS FREE, the same

source castigated the "political cowardice" of Brussels and des-

cribed it as 'matched only by the economic illiteracy" - I wonder

from whom that expression was cribbed! - 'of the Common Agricultural

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Policy.

If I dared to quote Latin - I am trying hard to break myself

of the habit - I should exclaim tempora mutantur et _nos mutamur in

illis, "the times are changing, and we are changing with them".

I remember how, when some of us were struggling to warn our fellow

countrymen against surrendering their sovereignty to join the

Community in those early days in 1972, the National Farmers Unionc

line was "Hold your noise about sovereignty and self-government:

We farmers will be in the money". They were right enough at first;

in the long run they. were disastrously wrong. The Common Agricul-

tural Policy, which it is now safe and even respectable to stigma-

tise as "illiterate", has proved ruinous for British farming.

This was predictable. I am entitled to say that, because it

was predicted. The economy of the United Kingdom, unlike those of

our Continental neighbours, was built during the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries upon a massive flow of trade across the oceans,

based on the huge food production of the New World, the Antipodes

and what is nowadays called the Third World.

Indeed, that trade proved to be the great stimulus to the

development of countries in North and South America and in our

overseas dominions. It was not a trade which Britain after the

middle of the nineteenth century made any attempt tO imgJ ,J

.411the contrary, here in Britain agriculture adjusted itself to apattern of production which would not be vulnerable to that sort of

competition, and whenever policies to protect our farming industry

were considered neceasary, they were policies which, instead of

endeavouring to fight against world trade, assisted our own producers.

to confront the prices and the competition established by world

markets.

All this history we threw overboard in 1972 to adopt the

philosophy and conform to the mentality of Continental nations

whose economies and whose historical traditions were profoundly

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different. The European Economic Community started off with a

great song and dance about free trade and the abolition of barriers

to competition. When it came to agricultural products, all that

went out of the window. In its place was erected a mechanism to

defeat and prevent free trade and competition and to create against

the outside world a high ring-fence within which the countries of

Western Europe could pursue the aim of self-sufficiency. It was

natural that this should be so. There were strong psychological

and political reasons at work. To quote once again the same

leader-writer, "Europe with memories of near starvation during war

wanted to be able to feed itself from its own resource That was

- IIIthe psychology; it was reinforced by the politics: "The last thing

they wanted was the depopulation of rural areas and a mass exodus

to the cities of people with only rudimentary skills - in other

words, of 'peasants'."

Britain therefore in the words of Johnny-come-lately "was

forced to abandon its cheap food policy, under which farmers'

incomes were supported by so-called deficiency payments, and to

adapt to a completely different system where they were maintained

by artificially high prices, protectionary tariffs against imports

from countries outside the Community, and a complex system of inter-

vention purchases to take surpluses off the market". Now, after

'Britain has undergone nearly twenty years of that enforced regime,

. 0 it is all collapsing, and British agriculture faces with dismay

the unwinding of the distortions to which it has been subjected.

Subsidised prices anc production are to be slashed and protection

to be dismantled. What is more, Britain has aligned itself with the

United States in demanding that the European Community shall put

its0f in a position to comply with the General Agreement cn

Tariffs and Trade, the GATT.

The ironical piquancy of this whole story is heightened by

what has been happening in Central and Eastern Europe, where nations

have re-emerged which want - and how badly they need iti - to

-4-• achieve freedcm of internal and external markets and discard the

Communist straitjacket from which they have escaped. It is

pertinent to recall that before the Communist Revolution of 1917

diverted the course of history, Russia and Eastern Europe were a

great and growing source of food trade for the United Kingdom. In

fact before 1914 Russia was at the top of the league in grain and

in sugar. So what are we going to do now? There was a sharp

debate in the fringes of the Conservative Party Conference at

Bournemouth last week. "Keep them out" cried some; ° Let them ini°

cried others.

IIIture are only a part, though an important and an instructive part,What we have begun to perceive is that the problems of agricul- 1(

of the sreat Jebate which the Prime Minister has been instrumental

in opening up and which this country has now to resolve. The

alternatives are either to acquiesce in giving up the right to

make cur own laws and frame our own policies or else to regain and

assert that right while standing firm on the principles of freedom

of trade and of competition which were held out to us when we joined

the European Ecencmic Community originally.

There is no doubt upon which side in that debate British

agriculture finds itself. British farmers know now from harsh

. experience the unwisdem of tranireTring the power t, eciee eur own

affairs into the hands of ethers whose circumstances and ideas are 2,

widely different. There is nothing xene)phobic, ncthing 'little

England', about such a conclusion. The very losic of democracy

is that what affects us particularly ought to be decided by those

who represent us and by no one else. That is the meaning of the

werd "self" in "self-government". It is the rational basis ef that

representative self-government which Britain uniquely has been the

means of diffusing around the world and which the nations of Eastern

Europe are now stretching out their hands to grasp.

The concept which Her Majesty's Gevernment has propounded to

411 -5-

Europe of voluntary c -operati-,n between independent soverei--

nations is the only formula for reconciling democratic freedom

with whatever measure of freedom of trade and exchange is available.

That Europe will extend free trade to agricultural products and

to a world-wide perspective is hardly a realistic expectation; but

this is no reason why the requirements of Britain's unique circum-

stances should be forced down cur neighbours throats or theirs

down ours. Still less is it any reason why overall political and

economic amalgamation should be imposed upon units so disparate in

all relevant respects as those of which Europe is composed. To enjoy

'rational opportunities for trade and exchange with their inhabitants,

410it is not necessary - indeed, it is counter-productive - that all

should be made to regulate every aspect of their internal affairs

through common institutions nor, for that matter, that they should

obey the same demands and expectations in their political relation-

ships with the rest of the world from the Middle East to the Far

East. Coercion is the converse of co-operation, and it produces

the opposite results.

The farming communities of such parts of Britain as this have

understood that they have a deep vested interest in preferring a

Europe organised by co-operation and not by coercion. The prospect

is that they will have the opportunity to delcare that preference

'and tc make it effective whenever a new House of Commons next comes

to be elected.

(.3

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCETO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY

Address by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MEE, to theInstitute of Export at its Autumn Luncheon at theBradford Hotel, Liverpool, at 12.30 p.m., Monday,

15th October 1990.

There used to be a proverb: "Never dine from home if you

can dine better at home". It is a good sound saying and commends—

itself to our common sense. The equivalent epigram might be:

'Never get by exchange abroad what you can get better by exchange

at home". Put brutally, there's no use in exporting and importing

for the sake of exporting and importing. "But, Mr Powell, this

is an institute of export ...". Oh, I know, I know; I mentioned

41/ importing because only a fool would export unless he got something

which he wanted in return. By itself, in isolation from importing,

exporting makes no sort of sense at all.

"But, Mr Powell, the balance of payments ...? What about our

balance of payments?" All right, if I must, I will talk about our

balance of payments surplus. "Surplus! He must have made a mistake.

He must mean deficit". I promise you, I have net made a mistake.

I referred to our surplus, our capital surplus, on the balance of

payments; and a corking big one it is. So, as somebcy said when

we retook South Georgia, "Rejoice, rejoic What are you all so

glum about? Don't you like it if the rest of the world is keen to

41,invest in Britain? I do, if you don't; and the werld can't investaccount

in Britain unless we have a current/deficit, which the ignorant

call just a deficit, on the balance of payments.

Give me a drink, and I'll explain. Every year, every month in

fact, a certain number of pounds change hands: some people are

getting rid of them, others are getting h ld of them. How many

pounds exactly change hands we don't know, because the statisticians

keep getting the sum wrong and coming back to correct it afterwards,

tut it is a powerful lot of peunds, billi ns e;f them, anyhow. Some

of the people getting rid of pounds de it in order to buy geods,

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others to make investments kbroad. Some of the people getting

hold of pounds do it tc buy British goods, others to invest in

Britain. How keen the twe parties, the getters-rid and the getters-

hold, are determines the price at which pounds exchange for the

various foreign currencies on offer.

Plain sailing se far, nothing that is the least bit contro-

versial; but the statisticians have not finished with us yet.

They make a stab at estimating how many pounds change hands to

purchase goods and how many change hands to make investments. Guess

what; surprise, surprise it turns out that the two figues are

different and that more pounds were got hold cf to make investmentsAWL&qlpthan -are got rid of and fewer consequently got hold of to purchase

uocds than are get rid of. That's what I just told yeu, because

the world is investing in Britain - investing nett, mind you. When

people however see the figures the statisticians produce, and par-

ticularly when the politicians (an ignorant breed of men) see the

figures, they start to run around like scalded cats, screaming cut:

° We got a deficit on our balance of payments"; and Messrs Smith

and Brown come on television with faces as long as boots, saying

how godawful Mrs Thatcher is, and start talking lug briously about

some animal which they call "the economy". Actually, there isn't a

deficit, there can't be; the number of pounds got rid of is the

same as the number got hold offor the simple reason that they are

411the same pounds, and everything in this world is the same as itself.What they really mean or ought to mean - "don't go misrepresenting

us, now, Enochi" - 1; that we have a current deficit but a. capital

surplus.

Then these people go on to accuse their fellew countrymen of

"not exporting enough", sometimes adding "because you aren , educ-

ated enough", though rarely going on to mention not enough Latin

being taught. If there were no current deficit, there would be no

capital surplus; that is simple arithmetic. An(-] I do not know

• -3- '7

what voice from heaven has told Messrs Smith and Brewn that too

much is being invested in Britain. Perhaps ene day they will be

pleased to divulge to us the nature and the source of this revela-

tion. Until then they ought to cease tradinY upon the gullibility

ef those who do nct understand - perhaps they do not understand

themselves - the true nature of that statistical presentation of

reality which is called "the balance of payments .

In that presentation the figures /of the current account

are represented as if they were the totalsof individual exsort and

import payments. That is what they are, but only in the sense

that they have to be made to add up to the total amounts estimated

to have been acquired or relinquished for current purposes; but

the total magnitudes are nit caused by the summation of the indivi-

dual purchases and sales. The amounts are parts of a complete

picture of the transactions which occur given the totality Gf

ecoromic conditions throughout the world and consistent with the

exchange rates prevailing between sterling ard other countries.

Were those exchange rates to be compulsorily altered, or were the

propensity of the rest of the world to invest in Britain to decline,

a different picture would of course emerc-.e. In other words there is

a whole vast complex equilibrated by the rates of exchange, which

brin,7s into balance the propensity ef the outside world to invest

in Britain with the perceived opportunities for profitable trade• between the United Kingdom and the outside worl:l. In this process

the individual entrepreneurs, weighing the advantages and disadvan-

tages of ex-ort and import, are performing a humble but useful

functien. Their contribution to the general good is the skill and

accuracy with which they assess the prespects of profit ane loss

and (may I add?) the determination with which they refuse to be

bullied er diverted by these who want the pattern of internatienal

trade and investment to be different from what it turns out to be.

Tn thus exherting y u te 'de your ewn thing unswayed and

• 41i -4- 10

undistracted by the misrepresentations of media presentation and

of members of my own profession, there is one residual question

which I may have left open in your minds and which you have the

right to address to me. It is this:

"Why, if the complaints )f.' their political and public critics

and opponents are, as you, Mr Powell, have demonstrated, based upcn

crude fallacies, do not the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the

Prime Minister accoalpany the trade figures with gusts of cheerful

laughter instead of beinq so lamely apologetic?"

it is a fair question, and I owe you an answer. Statistics

which can be used, however fallaciously, to attack one's political

• *opponents are the brick-ends of political combat Those in public

life have been throwing them at one another time cut of mind. It

would be demanding superhuman candour tc expect them suddenly to

turn around and declare that all they said about one another in the

past was a lot of nonsense. Much better hang on to the brick-ends:

you n-ver know hew soon you might want to use them again yourself.

It is not that the Chancellor of the Exchequee and his advisers,

even without the assitance of Professor Walters and myself, do not

understand perfectly well what I have detained you here this after-

noon by explaining; but there is a tacit understanding between

politicians not to ruin the ammunition or spoil the dame. That is_

nc reason wny a member of their profession should not do a bit of

. 41, blacklegging and expose it all to critical examina..ion here in

Liverpool.

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCETO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY

Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to theBournemouth East Young Conservatives at the PinehurstHotel at 12.45 hours, Wednesday, 10th October, 1990.

It is a common situation in traditional folktales that the

hero or heroine lies under a spell which only a special person has

the power to break. There is an analo y here to the relationship

between the Government and the electorate.

The last two years have seen the United Kingdom - largely but

not solely to the leadership of the Prime Minister - asserting the

right of this country to govern itself through its Parliament and

repudiating amalgamation into a larger political and economic unit

which would override our Parliament. The ideal has re-emerged and

been re-erect d of a Europe where independent sovereign nations

co-operate freely; and Britain has taken the lead in holding that

ideal out to those nations in Eastern Europe which have surely not

shaken off the yoke of one tyranny to submit to the dictation of

another.

Why, then, the public wonders, is the action not suited to

the words? Why does law continue to be made for this country and

financial and economic burdens imposed upon us by unelected exter-

nal authorities? Why does the slide into servitude appear to con-

' tinue? It is because the Government is bound hand and foot, like

the heroes and heroines in the folktales, by a spell woven in the

past. In 1972, while public opinion watched unmoved and uncompre-

hendinp, Parliament expressly and comprehensively divestet itself

of everything which makes a nation independent. The final authorty

in legislation, taxation, expenditure, was surrendered to the organs

of tno European Economic Community. Above all, as if all that were

not enough, as recently as 1986 the courts of that Community were

declared to be supreme over the courts of this country, the represen-

tatives of the United Kingdom were stripped of their veto and

subjected to the decisions of bodies in which they would be in a

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permanent minority.

Sc the very law of the United Kingdom has become the Thstrumen

of our pregressiie deprivation cf parliamentary self-government.

A Minister of the Crown or Parliament itself, if they attempted to

resist and to re-assert the right cf an independent sovereign state

to make its own lawfand frame its own policies, would be struck. .4/kt4triicrAt.

down at once by the European Court, which cur cwn .=.aia has declared

to be paramount above the courts of this kingdom. Little wonder

if Ministers talk and behave like zombies and tremble at the nod of

the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. They are helpless in the

toils of that spell which many of them not so long ago helped to

A' ea./vt.. The declarations and aspirations of Her Majesty's Covernment

remain unfulfilled and apparently unfulfillable, while the Press

speculatespublicly how and when Britain and its leaders will be

brought to heel by the Germans or the French or the Italians, not

to mention a Monsieur Jacques Delers.

There is a remedy. There is a power by which the spell can be

broken. The political parties in this country are preparing them-

selves for the General Election, when once again the electorate of

the United Kingdom will re-make its House of Commons. The pelitician.

the Government and the Government's opponents will then have to

meet their masters. But an amazing sceHLreets our eyes as we watoh.

One of the contending parties is going solemnly to inform the sovereign

peopic that it is not sovereign at ail and ought not to be sovereign.

"ioe. are not the masters; be off with yeu" will be the refrain cfLabour

the addreeses of th:e/party to the electors. The Conservative Party

will confront at the hustings a Labour Opposition which proclaims

thpt the laws of Britain and the policies of Britoin ought ne longerMe=lnwhile

to be determined by the elected Parliament of Britain. /on its own

banners the Conservative Party will Iber inscribed the words "An

independent sovereign nation" - which is the same as tc say, an

eependent sovereign electorate.

-3- 7

I myself would not care to be the candidate who has to

stand up at a General Election and say to the electers "You

aru not the masters; I repudiate you; I snap my fingers at your

claim to decide". He would be a brave candidate; but he would be

an unsuccessful candidate, and so would be his party,

It is, and always has been, the nature ef a sovereign parlia-

ment that by logical necessity it has the power to alter cr repeal

what any previous parliament has enacted. That is a principle

which all parties in the state acknowledge: indeed, if it were not

so, there would be no point in h-lding general elections at all cr

in Opposition politicians going on the television te attack legis-

lation which has been passed. Once the proposition has been put

to the electorate that the making of the laws and the determination

of the policies of the United Kingdom ought to be restored to the

control of Parliament the decisive word will have been spoken. There

is ne lawful power that can gainsay it. To the European Community

and te the world at large Her Majesty's Government would say,

would be obliged to say: "A force majeure, a greater authority than

ourselves, is binding upon us; we have ric choice but te comply'.

The spell would have been broken.

Is that so strange a doctrine to propound? Who is going to

dispute it? Are the countries of the European Community in a

position to repudiate the democratic principle which they assert to

be the teuchstone and preconditicn of membership? Will that trans-

Atlantic republic demur, which cannet even sign the United Nations

Declaratien of Human Flights because to do so would infringe the

legislative supremacy of its Congressil We cannot in Eritain ccn--

tinne to dwell in a twilight between what stands en cur statute book

and the principle and policy which our Government has asserted, once

that principle and policy have been authorised by submission to the

eeple cf the United Kingdem at the moment ef the electian of a new

Heuse et' Commens. The contradiction has to be resolved; the spell

L. /0

has to be snapped.

One fact has been beaten out upon the anvil of events in the

last two years. There is one party only in the state which can do

what has tc be done; and that has come to bo the C nservative Part14

447.41,5' )1,1411.-L-0-Cv),(4,At4lv.v4^./.07,44A44,2,

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCETO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY

Speech by the Rt hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to theSelsdon Group at the Connaught Hotel, Bournemouth,at 1 p.m., Tuesday, 9th October, 1990.

The Selsdon Group meets this year in circumstances which are

•

charged for it with high emotion. It was members and supporters

of the Selsdon Group who before the Conservative electoral victory

of 1979 paved the way by demonstrating that inflation is caused by

governments and not by the governed - or the misgoverned: We recal:

together the early years of the present administration when the

Prime Minister was habitually announcing that inflation is due to

. "printing money" and that she firmly intended to do no such thin..

That was pure "Selsdon-speak", which identified, vigorously if444:$/a4V-

crudely, the monetization of debt by government as the v=1;t1rf gene-

rator of7inflation.

Alas, now that year-on-year inflation is running higher than

in 1979,nobody seems to want to talk that sort of language. You

and I understand, of course, why they do not tt would only invite

p-ople to say to the Government: "You must have caused the inflation:

so you must have started to print money again, why and when did

you do that?"

That is -apparently a question about the past J.&-eelae. once

surplus money has been put into circulation, it has the nasty habit

of washing around and arounu until it has all been translated again

into final prices - a consummation devoutly to be hoped but one

which nothing on earth can speed up nor, I may add, delay. The

Selsdon Group will not make itself popular by enquiring what went

wrong and why. Selsdon has never been popular. But they had a

duty to do, they did it before, and now they must do it again. I

am afraid there is no prospect of the crucial question being put -

or, for that matter, understood - the Official Opposition who

arc congenital lovers of inflation. Actually, the question "What

caused you to print the surplus money?" is neither historical nor

-2-

academic. It will be found to bear directly upon present contro-

versies and decisions.

Governments usually print money, that is to say, run them-

selves into debt and convert the debt into new money, when they

arc spending more than they care to raise from the public in revenue.

So far, so good. But under a Conservative government that practice

has been stopped. Accompanied by the virtual disappearance of in-

flation, there was a series of years which saw revenue exceeding

expenditure and debt consequently being paid cff. So hcw come that,

surplus money got printed? Let me take you gently by the hand into

the devil's kitchen.

There are twe ways, and not just one, in which money comes to

Al be printed. Besides the Government itself monetizing its own debt,

money is printed by the banking system when it overexpands credit.

But mark the difference. The banking system does what the Government

tells it. If you doubt that, listen to John Major announcing what

he - yes, he - will do or will not do to the rate of interest. In

the vpdA.. 1980's this Government printed extra money when it ordered

the banking system to expand credit, thus making money ever cheaper

to borrow.

Why then did a government which had signally triumphed over

eftwK '&4,444,

inflation by bringing its/expenditure and its revenue back into fftel'e

than balance throw all the cards up in the air again and re-start

inflation by creating a flood of new money? Not, I promise you,

di because they did not know what they were doing. Mr Lawson and the

Treasury are nut so stupid. It is that which makes the answer to

the question more significant.(rPv

When holders of other currencies want to change them 411.444,

pounds, they have to get hold of existing pounds. As with everything

else, the more plentiful pounds are, the lower will be their price -

in other words, the rate of exchange. In 1987 the American dollar

was falling on the exchanges because of the huge budget deficit

/34‘./0( gerve,-*--•<-4t4rAihir,t)64d44/4 rn-4.14.47ye-v ‘1/14/3,1 414,1 .

which the Feagan government wat content'to run, Thereupon the USA

4

You may be thinking I h ve overlooked tht, Government's decision,

announced last week, to enter the European Exchange Aate Idechanismho

and peg the exchange rate of the/la-and to a band on either side

of the German mark. I have not overlooked it.

There were in fact two eecisions _,nnounced, the one not connected

with the other. One decision was to instruct the Bank of flngland to

lower the interest rate by 1 per cent. That riecision w-s eholly to be

7e1comed, though not for the reasons trumpeted by the C.B.I. It

marked the first stage in dropping a disingenuous and damaging policy

based upon a fallacy. The fallacy is to imagine that 4because a flood

of money can be creat-d by forcibly expandin credit 4there#ore that

flood of money can be mopped up again by tightening credit. It cannot

no more than the horse can be brought back to the stable bolting

the door after him. The whole saga olt- interest at 15 per cent, was a

ploy on the Chancellor's part to pretend that he was donr somethi-

to "flpht inflation". In real political life he could rot announce

that all he - arie: we - could do was to yait patiently until the in-

flation created by his predecessor evelitually found its way into final

prices. So he staged the pantomime act of "fighting inflation" with

high rgtes of interest. For all it matters, he can knock another I

per cene, off to-ni ht and another tomorrow.

ERY i$ a different matter altogether. To peg the exchangc erate of

the pound sterling to a band on eithei si e of the ..erman mark it an

act of folly which we h y e had to rep.ent of in t'nre past and ehall,in

alas, repent of again/he futurw. Still there are grounds not to

despait. Thy Government has not yet torn up its winning card a* the

next Election: to offer the Ji•t- ier electorate continuing reponei-

bility for the economy of this country when the Oppooition is com-

mitted to take it away.

The promise to join the ERM was made before the, oclicy n'd

achieved its present acceptance by th- lcvernment- an its eepart-

mental servants. Her woree at the drie Sumeit hun7 like e ollietone

round the Prime Minister's neck. Well, Ehe is free of it now.

Thether a deal was done with the Commission an,3 a quid pro quo ob-

tained, that we may never know. At worst, she is free of the mill-

stone now, free an-: untrammelled to raise the nation's resentment

the demand cr7the Opposition to submerge its democratic

7721vernment in a -Holitic. I L_n• economic union of the luyopean Com-

munity.

JASPER ROOTHAM MEMORIAL SERVICE

Wimborne Minister, Noon, Saturday, 6 October 1990

Among the undergraduates who went up to Cambridge in 1930

to read for the Classical Tripos, as they migrated from one lecture

hall to the next, my attention was caught by a fellow student wearing

a Johnian gown. His features were aquiline; his eyes had a gimlet-

like quality; his whole personality was striking. I learnt that he

was the son of a distinguished musician at St John's College; but

there was nothing to tell me that fate would weave together our ex-•periences and our opinions down to this day when I stand in this place

to evoke his memory.

Jasper Rootham was a public servant, in one form or another,

all his life. He is one of those by whom the public interest has

been essentially served through the candour and independence of judg-

ment which they brought to bear upon the events of their time. Indepen-

dence and a penetrating and uninhibited candour were the distinctive

marks of Jasper's character.

It was in keeping with that character that in 1940 he made

his own decision to break with convention and with the rules of his

career. He resigned from his civil service post to join the Army._

As for so many others who answered the same call, it turned out to be

411the determinant event of his whole lifetime. His distinguished war

service was destined to give him that soecialised knowledge and sym-

pathetic understanding of Russia and the other nations of Eastern

Europe which he never laid aside and which caused him to follow the

events of recent years in that region with an unsurprised but absorbeC

interest.

Our acquaintance was renewed and our intellectual intimacy

was established after the war when we both confronted, with similar

instincts and beliefs but from different angles, I from politics and

-2-

he from the congenial home he had found in the Bank of England, the

tormented and often misguided attempts of post-war Britain to cope

with the predicament of a nation disorientated by the ending of its

ofworld-wide empire and/its former industrial, commercial and economic

primacy. "Lunch with Jasper, review the economic situation", was a

recurrent entry in my diary in those days.

Jasper's love and admiration for his country fuelled the

savage indignation with which he contemplated what he - and I -

regarded as the follies that added to Britain's dejection and some-

times humiliation. Jasper was patriotic to a fault. Amongst other

411channels, his patriotism found its expression, and its delight, in awarm attachment to the several parts of England -/the Home Counties,

the North, and latterly/the South-West - where he made a series of

beautiful and welcoming homes, created by the magic wand of Joan, ,o41.11/*A-10-

In the environment of Jasper's homes many friendships among

like-minded people sprang up; and he was happy to know how often they

lasted and bore good fruit, inside Britain and beyond.. -

Like many economists, Jasper had a deeply emotional and

sensitive side to his nature. Mu6ic, of course, ran in the blood;

but at poetry he worked with passionate addiction and not without

success. It was an activity which still cheered and sustained him

when the time came to encounter and triumphantly to overcome "the last

enemy that shall be destroyed, which is death". "I have to finish

that poem", said he the last time I saw him, "before I go".

Once known, Jasper Rootham was impossible to forget. Those

who came in contact with him knew from the first glint of those un-

compromising eyes and the first tones of that affirmative voice that

friei/4cak.e44/.0-1,4ná/31-40;Al

apart from whom, and from t-e4r beloved Dan and Tutu;/-/

always be impossible to think of Jasper. I recall our surprise and

r")sense of something wholly appropriate when Ate- discovered accidentally

from a silver mark/that those we had married were distant cousins.

-3- 7

they were in the presence of a unique and unquenchable personality.

A country which is devotedly served by such as Jasper Rootham can

come to no lasting harm nor suffer permanent eclipse. He would wish

me to lay no other wreath than that upon his grave.

Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to aLuncheon of the Midlands Committee of the Anglo-GermanChemb.erof Industry and Commerce at the Grand Hotel,Birmingham, at 1 p.m., Tuesday, 2nd October, 1990.

You cannot be living and working in Britain without having

become aware that in the last year or two both official and pub-

lic opinion here have overtly turned against the idea of the

United Kingdom being drawn into economic and political unification

with its neighbours on the Continent. Indeed, there is a real

prospect that the forthcoming General Election will confirm this

rejection as the majority and mandatory sentiment of the country.

• It is one of those shifts of opinion which take external observers

by surprise and have earned for Britain the resented epithet of

"perfidious". Actually, anybody who really knew the BritiSh could

have predicted that they never would, once it came to realities,

give up their right to be governed exclusively by and through their

own Parliament, any more than a man can take off his own skin.

Unfortunately, this predictable and remarkable reversal

has been treated in some quarters as if it were associated with

anti-German sentiment and betrayed political antagonism towards the

size and importance of a re-united Germany. That notion is as

mistaken as it is illogical; and I want to use this opportunity

to assert that a self-governing parliamentary Britain, co-operatingo

freely and voluntarily with her European neighbours, is not only

compatible with the most friendly relationship between Britain and

Germany but the surest guarantee of such a relationship-47

For Britain the European Economic Community has always been

about freedom of trade, based upon confidence that the benefits of

freedom of trade are indisputable and mutual. One of the great

virtues of trade is that it promotes progress and the international

division of labour between citizens of countries which remain free

to govern themselves according to their own lights and in their

own fashin. For governments to refrain from impeding trade between

-2-

their respective subjects, it is by no means necessary that

they should pursue identical policies in taxation, in legislation

or in foreign affairs. To benefit from the mutual exchange of

their products, the inhabitants of different countries do not have

to pay the same rates of tax or observe the same standards of

health and social provision or belong to the same external allianc

OtWnviitAid/ijprovided of course that 4iffcro4,44. requirements or burdens are not

imposed upon indigenous and upon imported goods and services.

/Naturally, if you want to export to another country ypu must ob-

serve the laws by which its inhabitants are bound just as much as

you must pay regard to their tastes, their habits and their languae;

but you do not need to govern them or to alter them

Trade in fact is an alternative to imposing your laws and

standards upon other people as it is an alternative te invadinE

their countries and settling down there to exploit their resources.

The whole beauty of freedom of trade is that it is tolerant of

human differences and variety and intolerant of mutual duress.

What has gone wrong with the European Community is thnt freedom

of trade has been made a stalking-horse for something very different

and indeed contradictory, that is to say, for common government and

enforced uniformity. Threaten to impose upon other people standard 9

laws and forms of government which they have not chosen themselves,-

and the process becomes a prescription for antagcnism and resentment.

Citizens begin to ask, as the British have recentiy weken up and

begun to ask: by whom are we going to be overb,rne and •utvoted?

Te be free to choose and purchase what is produced in a neighbouring

ccuntry, near or far, is not to be subjected or suberdinated to the

government of that country.

These, you may complain, are elementary truths. So they are;

but they are truths which have been deliberately obscured. To trade

freely in goods and services with another country's inhabitants,

it is necessary that there be freedom of exchange between the

-4-

a small country is as "strong" - if you insist upon using in-

applicable vocabulary - as a large country. The seller in the

large country exerts no compulaLn upon the seller or the buyer in

the small country: they both must secure equality cf advantage on

both sides, without which trade does not take place. That picture

changes only if freedom 3f trade is broken down by political power

being used to fix prices or to regulate exchanges or to interfere

with the citizens' choicus.

If anyone questions what I am saying he need only observe how

a group cf nations are today using interference with trade as a sub-

stitute for military force in constraining Iraq: sancticns, which• are only an extreme form of political interference with the freedom

of trade, are indeed the exertion of "economic power”.

All this would be too obvious to be worth saying, if we had nut

unf rtunately got used to treating the statistics of trade as a sort

of Olympic Games, as if the nations whose citizens engage in mutual

trade were rivals, breathing defiance at one another and issuing

envious threats. Those accursed international "league tables" have

a great deal to answer for. Politicians play a dangerous game when

they step in to prevent free movement of goods, services and capital

from taking place and attempt instead, as politicians will, to en-

force their own ideas, however altruistically expressed. The re-,

.ow.. united Germany which at this moment is re-joining the sovereign

nation states of Europe has nothing to gain and mu2h ta lose if it

lends itself to the endeavour, which Brussels and Strasbourg are

making, to replace European free trade by a European managed economy.

Force feeds upon force; duress breeds duress; interference

demands more interference. If there is a nation in Europe today which

has all to lose and nothing to gain from European monetary and poi ti-

cal union, that nation is Germany. Take heed in time.

Address, Lichfield Cathedral, 10.30 a.m. Sunday, 23rd September 1990.

"Then he came trembling and fell down before Paul and Silas,

and brought them out and said, 'Sirs, what must I do to be saved?'

and they said, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt

be saved, and thy house'-:" (Acts 16.3)4

My second text is an entry in Boswell's Life of Johnson.

"On June 3rd, 1781, we all went to Southill Church. It being

the first Sunday of the month, the Holy Sacrament was being

administered and I [Bogen, that is] stayed to partake of it.

When I came afterwards into Dr Johnson's room, he said, 'You did

right to stay and receive the Communion; I had not thought of

This seemed to imply that he did not choose to approach

the altar without.a previous preparation, as to which good men

entei.tain different opinions, some holding that it is irreverent

to partake of that ordinance without considerable premeditation".

We are in a place to which Samuel Johnson never failed to

come when he returned to the place of his early youth. He was

less than voluble in his utterances on the subject of religion

but students of his life can be under no doubt as to the depthof his attachment to the Church of England or his reverence and

gratitude for its teaching and its ministrations.

From our distant standpoint at the end of the 20th century

we are apt to be unfair and correspondingly ungrateful towards

the Church of England in the 18th century. The words and the

demeanour of Samuel Johnson are a stanaing corrective to the

conventional assumption that it was a fossilised_and rigidified044

institution, prim and self-satisfied ,ZawaitingLawakening andof

rescue at the hands of the Evangelicals ̀ -e14-el the Tractarians

of a later generation .Thatis a picture hard to reconcile with

the perceptions of such a member as Samuel Johnson continued

-2-

throughout his life. As we listen to the Food doctor, weA—kW AAA/

begin to understand howjthe Church of England could preserveintact

and deliver/to the 19th century . the inheritance

=_fromwhich sprang up those wonderfulo-reyiVifyiile movements

by which we are still tzedaar,

nourished and sustainedi0&41.was

It was not till 1850 that Convocation/revived; but who44remembers Boswell mentioning as a joke that Johnsohan/ said he

would stand before a battery of cannon to restore the Convocation

to its full powers"? "And would I not, sir?" thundered Johnson;

"Shall the Presbyterian kirk of Scotland have its General

Assembly and the Church of England be denied its Convocation?"

"I bowed to the storm", Boswell continues, "by leading him to

expatiate on the.influence which religion derived from maintain-

ing,the church with great external respectabil.ty". But Johnson

was in deadly earnest. "James the SecondLwas a very Food king

but unhappily believed that it was necessary for the salvation

of his' subjects that they should be Roman Catholics: we, who

thought that we should not be saved if we were Roman Catholics,

had the merit of maintaining our religion at the expense of

subjectinF ourselves to the government of King William".

This was the Dr Johnson who "talkedAvthe Roman Catholic

religion and how little dicff,erence there was in essential matters

between ours and it":

"True, sir; all denominations of Christians have reallylittle difference in'point of doctrine though they maydiffer widely in external forms. There is a prodigiousdifference between the external form of one of yourPresbyterian churches in SOotland and a church in Italy;yet the doctrine taught is essentially the same".

What for Samuel Johnson this essential doctrine we are

never directly told, but we can glean. In a moving letter of

advice to "a young clergyman in the country" Johnson wrote that

-3-

my learned friend, Dr Wheeler of Oxford, when he was a

young man, had the'care of a neighbouring parish for

fifteen pounds a year, which he was never paid; but he

counted it a convenience that it compelled him to make a

sermon weekly. One woman he could not bring to the

Communion; and, when he reproved or exhorted her, she

only answered that she was no scholar. He was advised

to set soTe Food woman or man of the parish, a little

wiser than herself, to talk to her in a language level to

her mind. Such honest, I may call them, holy artifices,

must be practised by every clergyman; for all means must

be tried by which souls may be saved".

Those are not the words of an intellectual snob. They are the

words of a man who has addressed himself with deep humility to

the question of St Paul's jailor "What must I do to be saved?".

In..the last year of his life Johnsonl"talking of the fear of

death", said:

"Some people are not afraid because they look upon

salvation as the effect of an absolute decree and think

they feel in themselves the marks of sanctification.

• thers, and those the most rational in my opinion, look

upon salvation as conditional; and as they can never be

sure that they have complied with the conditions, they are

afraid".

They are words which go deep into Johnson's character and„,

his religion: he could "never be sure", and he was "afraid". '

The reply of St Paul to the jailor was "believe"; but the content

of that word for Samuel Johnson would never be complete. The case

of the woman in the advice to the young clergyman confirms that

Johnson's understanding of'the faith and of salvation was

sacramental.

Of a young lady who left the Church of England to become

a Quaker he angrily asserted: "She knew no more of the church

which she left and that which she ambraced than she did of the

difference between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems". To the

objection that "she had tne New Testament before her" Johnson's

-14-

.pe-evors-ewas, "Madam, she could not understand the New Testament,

the most difficult book in the world". That the sacramental

Asp e c t of the Church of England's doctrine was really

integral in the mid 18th century to the thought of so strong

and faithful a member is demonstrated by a long and remarkableaAv

conversation, reported by Boswell. It begin-s by Boswell saying

"So, sir, you are no great enemy to the Roman Catholic religion".

Johnson. 'No more, sir, than to the Presbyterian religion'.

'Boswell. 'You are joking'.Johnson. 'No sir, I really think so. Nay, sir, of the two,

I prefer the Popish'.Boswell. 'How so)sir?''Johnson. 'Why, sir, the Presbyterians have no Church, no

apostolic ordination'.Boswell. 'And do you think that absolutely essential, sir?'oi'Johnson. 'Why, sir, as it was an aposcal institution,

I think it is dangerous to be without it. And,sir, the Presbyterians have no public worship:they have no form of prayer in which they know they

are to join'."

As the discussion, by which Johnson was evidently nettled, proceeded,

it included such an interchange as: "Boswell. 'The idolatry of the

Mass?' Johnson. 'Sir, there is no idolatry in the Mass. They

believe Gpd to be there, and they adore Him'." "I thus ventured';,

concludes Boswell, "all the common objections against the Roman

Cabliolic Church, that I migh't *hear so great a man upon them. What

he said is here accurately reported". Where Boswell Foes wrong,

is when he adds: "But it is ,not improbable that if one had taken

the other side, he might have reasoned differently".

Boswell is surely mistaken VT041\1 and probably not without

self-interest. A thinker who had found his way from the established

ritual of the Church of England to an.,.understanding of the Mass,

however conditionally, as not id9latrous had made a deliberate and bo difficult journey, especially for/exacting a reader as one to whom

the New Testament was "the most difficult book in the world".

á

JOHNSON SOCIETY PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, Guildhall, Lichfield, Saturday 22 September 1990.

There is a kind of astonishment which overtakes the visitor,

a member no doubt of the National Trust, to one of those great

houses and parks erected by the wealth and taste cf noble or opulent

families in the eighteenth century. The pleasurable sensations

which are created by their splendour are soon overlaid by bewilder-

ment at the visitor's inability to reconstruct for himself the

mental and emotional world of those who lavished so much thought

and wealth upon the creation of such palaces. The visitor to a

Castle Howard finds himself wandering from one stupendous apartment

of the human mind (or is it of social history?) into another.

Baroque, Palladian or Grecian - he can in some measure master the

styles and fit what he is examining into the iargerjigsaw of

European architecture and taste. Yet no degree of familiarity

with the contemporary palaces of France, Germany or Italy enlightens

him upon the question by which he is oppressed at every step: for

what manner of people, for people with what manner of thoughts

and ideas, could these huge elegances have been created?

The literary traveller who approaches Lichfield and constrains

himself to appraise the work of its most famous son shoulders an

obligation comparable with that of the enquiring tourist in the

vicinity of England's great baroque, Palladian or Grecian edifices.

He must expose himself to the demands and the dangers of what he

has come to see. There is no safety in flight, no remedy in dere-

liction. Thus it fares with a pilgrim to the memory of Samuel

Johnson. I will be plain and confess all: he simply has got to

face reading Rasseias),74rj4 (;/. 739.

The path to it was well beaten in Johnson's own time. Success,

and money, attended it. After fifteen years there had been five

editions. Translations have been supplied in at least nine languages,

modern Greek and Bengali included. vrlat seeker after Samuel

-2-

Johnson at the end of the twentieth century dare turn upon

his heels and run away? Where else is Johnson to be found if not

here - all the more because this was a work poured out almost

impromptu in the incredible space of a few weeks? It must have

been there all the time - there, and waiting. This was no work

of laborious compilation, no essay in the estimation or biography

of another writer. It stands free, dominating the landscape around

it, impossible to ignore or to pass by.

Of course, if we demand a context, we can find one; but does

it help us? "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia". Well, Abyssinia,

if not in the news, was in the booksellers' shops. My own book

shelves produce for me a leather bound Travels between the years

1765 and 1773 through part of Africa, Syria, Egypt and Arabia

into Abyssinia, by the late James Bruce, Esquire. Johnson himself

in his early,more struggling years had published in 1735 a trans-

lation of the French version of Father Jeronimo Lobo's Voyage t

Abyssinia; but that was a quarter of a century back, and there is

little that is specifically Ethiopic in the book, whose hero prince

might equally well hail from Erewhon as from Abyssinia. It is no

more than a concession to the implicit need for local colour thatAdaat

the action of the book (if action it can be calied)7 follows the

hero's escape from the confinement of the Happy Valley is mainly

located in and around Cairo. There is no aid to be had from that4he

quarter as to the author's intention or/way in which he means his

book to be taken.

The hero's appalling optimism and invincible ignorance of

human nature provides the one motif which runs consistently through

the book. Impenetrable at first to the lessonsof experience and

observation, Rasselas clings to the belief and the determination

that he can "choose his life" upon rational groundScalculated to

result in his "happiness". Indeed, "choice of life", an expression

•

- 3 -

which recurs repeatedly throughout the book, was originally

intended to have been its title. What Johnson himself thought about

this ambitious hope of his Abyssinian prince is reported by Boswell:

"To prefer one future mode of life to another upon just reasons

requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us".

Voltaire the previous year, as it happened, had published

Candide, a fantastical tale designed to ridicule and rebut the

philosophic optimism which was the prevalent tone in the Europe

of his time: its herowho undergoes a painful practical education

in the course of travels not dissimilar from those of Rasselas,

though more startling, was a pupil of Dr Fangloss, disciple of

Leibnitz, who declares this to be the best of all possible worlds but

ende4. by finding the secret of happiness in "cultivating his garden".

Could it be that Rasselas was Johnson's Candide? The explorer

of its architectdure might be tempted to conclude so. It wouid be

a satirical retort to the cocksureness of the Age of Enlightenment,

so distasteful to a congenital Tory, who had drawn the conclusions

of a philosophical mind from the harsh experiences of fifty years

of life. We might recall that France and the Continent were all/u4e'ora

a-rave during the 1750's with the doctrines of humanity.eiIlt. to

live its life in the state of nature inculcated by J. J. Rousseau.

Few better specimens of Johnson's robust dismissal of nonsense

exist than in the chapter of Rassejas. entitled "the happiness of

a life led according to nature".

"The time is already come", says a philosopher who hag listened

to Rasselas"with tokens of great impatience "when none are wretched

but by their own fault".

11 Nothing is more idle, than to enquire after happiness, which

nature has kindly placed within our reach. The way to be

happy is to live according to nature, in obedience to that

universal and unalterable law with which every heart is

7

originally impressed; which is not written on it by precept,

but engraven by destiny, not instilled by education, butinfused at our nativity. He that lives according to naturewill suffer nothing from the delusions of hope, or im-portun-ities of desire: he will receive and reject with equabilityof temper; and act or suffer as the reason of things shallalternately prescribe. Other men may amuse themselves withsubtle definitions, or intricate raLocination. Let themlearn to be wise by easier means: let them observe the hindof tne forest, and the linnet of the grove: let them considerthe life of animals, whose motions are regulated by instinct;they obey their guide and are happy. Let us therefore, atlength, cease to dispute, and learn to live; throw away theincumbrance of precepts, which they who utter them with so

much pride and pomp do not understand, and carry with us thissimple and intelligible maxim, That deviation from nature isdeviation from happiness.'

"When he had spoken, he looked round him with a placid air,and enjoyed the consciousness of his own beneficence. 'Sir,said the prince, with great modesty, as I, like all the restof mankind, am desirous of felicity, my closest attentionhas been fixed upon your discourse: I doubt nct the truth of

a position which a man so learned has so confidently advanced.,Let me know what it is to live according to nature.'

"'When I find young men so humble and so docile, said thephilosopher, I can deny them no information which my studies

have enabled me to afford. To live according to nature, isto act aiways with due regard to the fitness arising from therelations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur withthe great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; toco-operate with the general disposition and tendency of thepresent system of things.'

"The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whomhe should understand less as he heard him longer. He there-fore bowed and was silent, and the philosopher supposing him

satisfied, and the rest vanquished, rose up and departed withthe air of a man that had co-operated with the present system."

Tnil. expectation, however, that will resolve itself into

a satirical critique of a prevalent popular philosophy finds itself

disappointed What the reader finds instead is a series of critical

-5-

essays and reflections tending to discourage optimism as to the

possibility of rational social progress or rational conduct of

the individual's life. If the essays, thus given narrative and

conversational form, have a common characteristic other than their

critical and sceptical tone, it is that of a profoundly pessimis-

tic cast of mind as though the author, impelled as he was into

the distasteful business of writing by the • Fro — g financial

demands of his mother's funeral and his own situation, had resolved

to erect his own idiosyncratic monument and to compress into a

few days of enforced composition the bitter fruits of experience

in the life which his mother nad given him.

It would be unfair to the subtlety of the work as a whole

to suppose that it lacks a deliberate shape or that the wr-ter,

sitting down to work on the first day, had no notion that his con-

cluding line was going to be Chapter 49, entitled "The Conclusion,

amia4in which nothing is concluded". The Iile flood risesA the

characters, knowing that the wishes they had formed could in no /0

wise be fulfilled, "deliberated a while what was to be done and

resolved, when the inundation should cease, to return to Abyssinia".

It was scarcely by accident either that the quest for a rational

organisation of life, alternatively for happiness began with a

brilliant and astonishingly percipient critique of the limitations

of technology, entitled "A Dissertation on the Art of Flying".

"The labour of rising from the ground will be great, as we

see it in the heavier domestic fowls; but, as we mount

higher, the earth's attraction and the body's gravity will

be gradually diminished, till we shall arrive at a region

where the man will float in the air without any tendency to

fall: no care will then be necessary but to move forwards,

which the gentlest impulse will effect. You, sir, whose

curiosity is so extensive, will easily conceive with what

pleasure a philosopher, furnished with wings and hovering

in the sky, would see the earth and all its inhabitants

roiling beneath him and presenting to him successively,

by its diurnal motion., all the countries within the same

-b-

parallel. how must it amuse the pendend spectatorto see the moving scene of land and ocean, cities anddeserts, to survey with equal security the marts oftrade and the fields of battle, mountains infested bybarbarians and fruitful regions gladdened by plenty andlulled by peace! how easily shall we then trace the Nilethrough all his passage, pass over to distant regions andexamine the face of nature from one extremity of the earthto the other!"All this, said the prince, is much to be desired, but I amafraid that no man will be able to breathe in these regionsof speculation and tranquillity. I have been told thatrespiration is difficult upon lofty mountains. Yet fromthese precipices, though so high as to produce great tenuityof the air, it is very easy to fall. Therefore I suspect thatfrom any 'neigh* where life can be supported, there may bedanger of too quick descent".

Rasselas finds himself drawn to contemplate a sort of nch-

proliferation treaty; for

"what would be the security of the good, if the bad couldat pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an armysailing through the clouds neither walls nor mountains norseas could afford any security. A flight of northern savagesmight hover in the wind and light at once with irresistibleviolence upon the capital of a fruitful region that wasrolling under tnem. Even this valley, the retreat ofprinces, the abode cf happiness, might be violated by thesudden descent of some of the naked nations that swarm onthe coasts of the southern sea."The prince promised secrecy and waited for the performance,not wholly hopeless of success. He visited the work fromtime to time, observed its progress and remarked manyingenious contrivances to facilitate motion and unite levitywith strength. The artist was every day more certain thathe should leave vultures and eagles behind him, and thecontagion of his confidence seized upon the prince."In a year the wings were finished and, on a morning appointed,the maker appeared furnished for flight on a little promontory.He waved nis pinions a while to gather air, then leaped fromhis stand, and in an instant oroptiec into the lake. His wings, which were cf no use in the air, sustained him in the water,and the prince drew nim to land, nalf dead with terror andvexation".

-7-/3

It is to the poet and wandering scholar, Imlac, who becomes

a confidant of Rasselas, that the duty is entrusted of enunciating.

the central thesis which repudiates the presumption that happiness

is to be ratimally discovered.

"Said the prince,'whatever be the general infelicity of man,one condition is more happy than another and wisdom surelydirects us to take the least evil in the choice of life.7

*The causes of good and evil; answered Imlac,tare so variousand uncertain, so often entangled with each other, so diversi-fied by various relations and so much subject to accidentswhich cannot be foreseen, that he who would fix his conditionupon incontestable reasons of preference must live and dieenquiring and deliberating!

*But surely; said Rasselas,tthe wise men to whom we listenwith reverence and wonder chose that mode of life for them-selves which they thought most likely to make them happy?'*Very few; said the poet,c-iive by choice. Every man is placedin his present condition by causes which acted without hisforesight and with which he did not always willingly co-operate".

One boundary and outer limit beyond which pessimism, cynicism

and satire were not permitted to trespass Johnson maintained intact

in Rasselas as he did with unbroken determination throughout his own

life. This was the existence of another and better world, wnich the

soul would inhabit after death. Never would he allow himself to

join or indulge in any questioning of that hypothesis: it was the

point on which he took his stand and from which the darts of his

doubt and questioning could be safely launched in every other direc-

tion. It is the one hypothesis in which the characters in his tale

are allowed to indulge without query or remonstrance; and as the bock

reaches its end, the prince's sister is credited with the assertion,

"To me the choice of iife" - that, after all, has teen the object of

the book's critique - "to me the c,oice cf life is become less

important. I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity".

Her meaning she has made clear just before: "the being whom I fear

to name, the Being wnich made the soul, can destroy it", assertions

-8-/ 5-

following what has been a closely reasoned "discourse on the

nature of the soul" deducing the existence of "mind" from its

immateriality; "for all the conclusions of reason enforce the

immateriality of mind and all the notions of sense and invest-

igations of science concur to prove the unconsciousness of matter".

The expressions may be cumbrc s, but Johnson is in the way to

relate the perceived world to the characteristics of the perceiver,

with no possibility of knowledge of the underlying reality. On

the other side of Europe one Immanuel Kant was lecturing in 1759

at the University of Königsberg. His philosophy, extended in the

19th century by Schopenhauer and in the 20th by Wittgenstein,

would not have been unintelligible to Samuel Johns but the

world in which revealed truth was the antithesis to the deism and

rationalism which Johnson pilloried in Rasselas is no longer in cur

power to reconstruct. The poet is made to reply to the princess:

"That Being surely can destroy the soul. That it will. nct be

annihilated by him that made it, we must humbly learn from higher ICauthority".

The Samuel Johnson who at the age of 26 had married a widow

many years older than himself, to whom he remained deeply devoted

until her death 17 years later, inserted in Rasselas a full length

disquisition on the relative advantages and consequences of marry-

ing young or marrying in maturer life. It is, significantly,

attached to the tneme of the possiblity of a rational conduct

life, opened by the opinion of the unquenchably optimistic prince

that "whenever I shall seek a wife, it shall be my first question

whether she be willing to be led by reason". It is his sister who

retorts

"There it is tnat philosophers are deceived. There are a

thousand familiar disputes which reason never can decide;

questions that elude investigation and make logic ridiculous:

cases where something must be done and where little can be

said. Consider the state cf mankind, and enquire how few can

-9- /7

be supposed to act upon any occasions, whether small or

great, with all the reasons of action present to their

minds. Wretched would be tne pair, above all names of

wretctedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason

every morning all the minute detail of a domestic day".

The alternative advantages and disadvantages of late or early

marriage are weighed with a profound and humane judgement. On

the one handAnd

"a youth a. maiden meeting by chance, or brought together

by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities,

go home, and dream of one another. Having little to

divert attention or diversify thought, they find them-

slives uneasy when they are apart and therefore conclude

that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover

what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed:

they wear out life in altercations and charge nature with

cruelty. From those early marriages proceeds likewise

the rivalry of parents and children: the son is eager to

enjoy the world before the father is willing to foresake

it, and there is hardly room at once for two generations.

The daughter begins to bloom before the mother can be con- /69

tent to fade, and neither can forbear to wish for the absence

of the cther.

"Surely all these evils may be avoided by that deliberation

and delay which prudence prescribes to irrevocable choice.

In the variety and jollity of youthful pleasures life may ue

well enough supported without the help of a partner. Longer

time will increase experience, and wider views will allow

better opportunities of enquiry and selection. One advantage,

at least, will be certain: the parents will be visibly older

than tneir children."

On the other hand,

"it is dangerous for a man and woman to suspend their fate

upon each other at a time when opinions are fixed and habits

are established, when friendships have been contracted on

both sides, when life has been planned into method and the

mind has long enjoyed the contemplation of its own prospects.

It is scarcely possible that two travelling through the world

under the conduct of chance should have been both directed to

the same oath, and it will not often happen that either will

-10-

quit the track which custom has made pleasing. When thedesultory levity of youth has settled into regularity,it is soon succeeded by pride ashamed to yield or obstinacydelighting to contend. And even though mutual esteem pro-duces mutual desire to please, time itself, as it modifiesunchangeably the external mjn, determines likewise thedirection of the passions and gives an inflexible rigidityto the manners. Long customs are not easily broken. Hethat attempts to change the course of his own life very oftenlabours in vain. And how shall we do that for others whichwe are seldom able to do for ourselves?"

Whichever side has the better of the argument, it is not the

rationalist and optimist. la-$*4'04-1Zert-e-h6d1-4:

"The good of the whole is the same with the good of ali itsparts. If marriage be best for mankind, it must beevidently best for individuals; or a permanent and necessaryduty must be the cause of evil, and some must be inevitablysacrificed to the convenience of others. In the estimatewhich you have made of the twc states, it appears that theincommodities of a single life are in a great measure necessary and certain but those of the conjugal state 20

accidental and unavoidable. I cannot forbear to flattermyself that prudence and benevolence will make marriagehappy. The general folly of mankind is the cause of generalcomplaint".

The reader cannotfeeling that the edge of a curtain hasr _

been lifted. The seventeen years of married life cf Samuel Johnson

and Elizabeth Porter have been distilled into that serene acce tance

of the human condition which is the mark of Johnson's philosophy and

religion. "how the world is to be peopled", concludes the prince's

sister, "is not my care and need nct be yours. I see nc danger

that the present generation should omit to leave successors behind

them: we are not now enquiring for the world but for ourselves".

Johnson long. had a close friend who kaexperienced - from

the ante-chamber, be it admitted, rather than the cabinet - the

behaviour of human nature in the governance of men. "Perhaps",

muses Rasselas, "command and authority may be the supreme blessings,

as they afford most opportunities of doing good". He makes the

acquaintance of the viceroy of Egypt, and is admitted into situations

where he can observe that individual's predicament. The outcome

is disappointing.

"He was at first inclined to believe that the man must bepleased with his own condition whom ail approached withreverence and heard with obedience and who had the power toextend his edicts to a whole kingdom. 'There can be nopleasure', said Rasselas, 'equal to that of feeling at oncethe joy of thousands all made happy by wise administration.Yet, since, by the law of subordination, this sublimedelight can be in one nation but the lot of one, it issurely reasonable to think that there is some satisfactionmore popular and accessible and that millions can hardly besubjected to the will of a single man, only to fill hisparticular breast with incommunicable content'."These thoughts were often in the mind of Rasseias, and hefound no solution of the difficulty. But as presents andcivilities gained him more familiarity, he found that almostevery man who stood high in employment hated all the restand was hated by them, and that their lives were a continual 92„succession of plots and detections, stratagems and escapes,faction and treachery. Many of those who surrounded thePasha were sent only to watch and report his conduct: everytongue was muttering censure and every eye was searchingfor a fault."

The conclusion was grim and it was sudden:

"At last the ietters of revocation arrived, the Pasha wascarried in chains to Constantinople, and his name wasmentioned no more".

Perhaps, thinks Rasselas in the last throe of disappointment,

the Pasha was toc "subordinate", and "only the supreme degree is

safe and glorious". But nc -

"In a short time the second Pasha was deposed. The Sultanthat had advanced him was murdered by the janissaries andhis successor had other views and different favourites".

The savagery of the satire is not misleading. That it conveys Johnson's judgement upon the delusion of the happiness-seekers

vi`i‘4/4.z,/erand the worid-improvers is confirmed cy the concluding episode -t3-t-'

-12- 23

the wisest, cleverest and most learned of all the specimens in the

human museum - the astronomer. He is splendid; there is no doubt

or cavil about the extent and depth of his acquirements; and yet

there is something wrong about him somewhere. Imlac, the prince's

friend, discovers what it is. The astronomer has convinced himself -

scientifically, of course, and logically - that he can control the

world's weather. Without his contrivance the Nile would not inun-

date and half mankind would perish. He is, to put tne matter brutally,/

quite mad. to il5e.4410 /.0y1

“1,1"Ladies,) to mock the heaviest of human afflictions is neither

charitable nor wise. Few can attain this man's knowledge and few

practise his virtues; but all may suffer his calamity'.

Disorders of intellect happen much more often than super-ficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if wespeak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its rightstate. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimespredominate over his reason, who can regulate his attentionwholly by his will and whose ideas will come and go at hiscommand. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions don:t sometimes tyrannise and force him to hope or fear beyondthe limits of sober probability. Al power of fancy overreason is a degree of insanity; but while this power issuch as we can control and repress, it is not visible to others.It is not pronounced madness but when it becomes ungovernableand apparently influences speech or action".

That is the penultimate episode before the travellers return

nome to the "conclusion in which nctning is conclude The last

scene is that of tne immensely old man under the tree beside the

Nile, who has "ceased to take much delight in physical truth, for

what ha\,e I to do with those things which I am soon to leave?"

It was not so much a sustained satire that Johnson created in

hasselas, though one understands how those who bougnt and appreciated

it in the 1760's may well have taken it for such. It was, albeit

- 13-

prematurely by a quarter of a century, a sort of last will and

testament, in which, as authentically as anywhere, we can still

hear the voice and contemplate the lineaments of the figure whom

Lichfield commemorates today.

25-

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCETO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY

Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to a

joint meeting of the Warrington South and Tatton

Conservative Associations at the Lord Daresbury Hotel,

at 8 p.m., Friday, 27th July, 1990.

•

We are assembled here this evening to perform for our fellow

citizens the most important service possible. Political associa-

tions exist in this country for one single purpose - to win elect-

ions. There is nothing to be ashamed of about that. In fact,

there is everything to be proud of. The sovereign people of Brita.:'.-

exercise their,power not by answering the enquiries of opinion poll

.2sters nor by going to vote, as some other countries do, i

n referenC,r)

They rule by electing a House of Commons of a particular party com-

position; and they do so the better the more clear the alternatives

which the political parties are pla,cing before them.

When this parliament is dissolved in or before 1992 the

British people will have in front of them a question which has not

presented itself to them in so sharp a form for precisely three

hundred years. It is no less nor more than the decision whether

or not they intend to go on electing parliaments through which they

will be governed. The issue has arisen with the suddenness of a

clap of thunder out of a clear sky. All the more incumbent is it

upon the political parties to ensure that the electors are under no'

110misunderstanding about the gravity of the decision they will be

taking.

Eighteen years ago the Parliament of the United Kingdom,

without so much as a by-your-leave to the electorate, passed an

Act in which it divested itself of its/right to legislate and tax

and stripped the courts of this country of their right to interpret

the laws. These overriding sovereiEn powers that parliament then

proceeded to vest in the institutions or the European Economic

Community. So breathtaking was the surrender that the British

public in general absolutely declined to believe that any such thing

-2-

'had happened or to take the matter seriously at all. Attempts to

tell them were as unavailing as attempts to warn the countries of

Europe - attempts which I myself made at the time - that the

British couldrot possibly intend what they seemed to be doing.

The yeals passed, the British public slumbered and continued

not tire worried about the loss of their own self-government.

Then all at once in the recent past they woke up, rubbed their

eyes, and realised thatin veritable fact their laws were no longer

going to be made or their taxes imposed in their own Parliament,

and that what Rarliament decided was going to be reviewed or

qUashed on the orders of an external court. This startling dis-

4106very evoked two opposite responses, the two responses between

which the electors will shortly be able to make their choice.

The Labour Party said: "That's perfectly all right, and

very zoo.d for you too. So take your medicine, and don't complain.

Vote Labour, and henceforward your laws will be made and your taxes

imposed by bodies outside Britain in which the British will be in

a permanent minority'. Admittedly this was not the policy of the

old Labour Party; but this is what the modern Labour Party stands

for now. The Conservative government said the opposite. It

declared, and has continued to declare, that it would defend

the historiC powers of the British Parliament and that furthermore

411he European Community ought not.at all to be about being over-

ruled by other nations but about co-operation between nations

each of them sovereign and independent.

It is a fearsome alternative, a decision which can be put off

no longer. With the European Community bent upon fcrcing a crisis,

failure to settle the issue now will Tlean that Britain's right to

decide will have gene by default forever. The struggle to obtain

a decision from the British people will be no push-over. During

the locust years of public indifference, huge vested interests

have been built up in the surrender of self-government. Commitments

-3-

have been entered into which now have to be called in question.•

Whole European mythologies, and the vocabulary to match them,

have iccen manufactured and exploited by many of those active in

political life. Such obstacles are not easily overturned. T.herr-1-e#

44 high premium persuading the electorate that a decision

no longer exists fur it to take. The electorate finds itself in tiwhen he

predicament of Gulliver/was tied down by the Lilliputians with a

multiplicity of insubstantial threads.

art.t. 4ety

Those who rc]:.Y Lporl ti".70

deyices, The first device is to pretend that Parliament's powers 7_

meaning,that is, the powers of the pritish electorate 7 have been

.. .revocably renounced. There is no substance in thq-pretense.

What one parliapent enacts anether parliament can amend or revoke.

\141V.tthe leaP94r P.art:Y. jAPO7f. 14 2,1, be goi,ne intfo

Election with a Phoppl-ng list of Acts Of Farliall7ent wtlich it pro7

mises to repeal or amend. No treaty can bind Parliament except by

the will of Parliament itself; and that will is the electorate's

will. Otherwise the electorate could not have been promised in

1975 that the United Kingdom's continuing memebership of the

European Community was l!dependent on the continuing assent of

parliament''. Otherwise, such an authority as Lord Denning could

hArK;,notL..be calling in so many words for the amendment of the European ,

4Ikommunities Act)1972 so that _decisions of the European Court are

not binding on the U.K. and directives of the Comunity cannot be

s4Airvi7A-1•NA4-kti.,-; tu,1,42-14,-) 0-41,frimposed in the U.K. except upon -Pre-t4

I?ct the electorate not be bamboozled, They and the parlia-

pent which their votes createhave undiminished powers, powers

which nothing can impugn, to recall the decisims of past parliapents.

The field is open; the way is elm

The second device designed to gag.the Britishelectorate is

the allegation that the stance cf the conservative government is

divided and therefore insinare. Obviously those who are wedded,

•

-4-

for whatever motives, to the objective of surrendering Britains

self7goyernment are likely to endeavour to diffuse this allegation 4.tr It is -1,Tcrwe inherently unconstituticnal, since it conflicts with

the undisputed principle of collective government responsibility:

the policy formulated by the head of any government is ipso facto

the policy of that guvernment accepted by all who remain members

of it. The government!s decision to respond to the national awakee-

ing of concern over the surrender of British selfegovernment -w.ersui

not something which could be implemented in mid course of events

b the flick of a switch. The ship of state changes course like

an ocean liner by a series of co-ordinated acts on the part of

110the great departments of state, which bring the vessel round andset it in the intended new direction. It would be silly on that

account to deny that.a decision has been taken en the bridge; and

an observer would need to be deaf and blind to fail to see that in

the chancelleries of a rapidly evolving Europe the message has been

received and understood that the British people are no longer minded

tp be parted from the parliamentary self-government which has teen

the histcric characteristic of this nation,/4"-t-91-4

In the end it is the mood and the mind of this flat±-men which

will be the deciding factors. They make and mould parties as

well as parliaments. If it is the British eeop-is determination

411to continue to be -s-e-ver-e-i-enin their own affairs, they will reward the party in the state which affords them the means of expressing

that determination. What we who serve them in politics have no

rightt- do is to write them off in advance and to take upon our-

selves the ignominy of deciding that the British people of 1991 or1/1/4

1992 are no longer the same people Ae snatched back their freedom

in 1940 out of the jaws of defeat and daunting odds. The mantleof

responsibility has fallen upon the shoulders of the Conservative

Party, as that Party is represented in such a gathering as this,

to enable the British electors to speak for Britain,

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCETO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY

Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to the

Annual Dinner of the North Shropshire Conservative

Association at the Albrighton Hall Hotel at 815 p.m.on Friday, 6th July 1990.

In this year of 1990 the British people are recalling how

fifty years ago this nation was saved by the extrication of its

Army from Dunkirk and by the repulse of impending invasion through

victory in the Battle of Britain. In 1940 th(p4nation suddenly

found itself on the edge of an abyss, to which policies it had

acquiesced in or even demanded during the previous decades had brouz.

it. Thpkabyss was the surrender and destruction of its_inee'enclent

410existence as a free self-governing people. From thatttheBritish were

saved by an exertion of their national will: they said NO, No to

surrender - NO; since all options have their representatives, to

Lord Halifax. Without that act of will the most inspired leader-

ship would have been in vain. It was the British people who spoke,

though the Words with which they spoke were Churchill's, and the

voice with which they spoke was the voice of their Parliament.

Fifty years later the nation stands again upon the edge of

the same abyss of self-surrender. I cannot describe it better than

in words used to this Party last month by the Prime Minister:

"Britain has lost sovereignty over agriculture and trade policy,

but will not give up economic control to those accountable to no

one. If you lose sovereignty over monetary and budgetary policy,

you have not got much sovereignty left, I am not prepared', she

concluded, "to hand the powers of Europe's oldest parliament over

to other people". The British public indeed have suddenly discover-

ed in the last two years that they are no longer going to be allowed

to make their laws and fix their taxes or decide the policies of

their government in their own parliament. They have been startled

learn that a foreign court has the power to strike down or to

prohibit in advance the decisions of their parliament.

-2-

Now, there is something very curious about this sudden

awakening. In 1972, albeit by the narrow majority of eight,

the House of Commons passed a Bill, the European Communities Bill,

which in the most comprehensive terms repudiated and renounced the

entire sovereignty of the United Kingdom and its Parliament in

favour of the institutions of the European Community, as being

the necessary and indispensable preliminary to British membership,

and expressly subordinated the courts of the United Kingdom to

the Community's Court. Some of us were so outraged at the time

by this incredible abdication that we preferred exile from our own

.political allegiance of a lifetime to even tacitly acquiescin in

410what had been done. To all appearance however the nation at large

remained supremely uninterested and barely vouchsafed the acknow-

ledgement of a yawn to all our agony.

Yet here is the old lion, if fr lion it still is, apparently

wide awake, and roaring: "Is this really what those people think

they can do to me?" The abyss is there all right, even though its

existence has been ignored for all of eighteen years But lot the

nation be under no misapprehension as to with whom the resbonsibility

for exerting its will to pull back from the fatal edge has come home

tc rest. As in 1940, there is nothing to be fzained by .unc:.ersta-

ting the act of national will for which this government and4,44is

Party have resolved tc call. We are concerned not merely with the

drawing of a line underneath the total of freedoms which have been

surrendered already and declaring "Thus far and ne, farther", but

with recalling and reclaiming a position and a possession which

has been eroded and formally renounce . Churchill did not arouse

toe nation's spirit in 1940 by belittling the difficulties and

underestimating the odds which he was summoning Britain to face.

To recall and re-establish lost powers and freedoms, lost

safeguards and securities, is something which nothing loss than

the nation itself has the power to do. That it has that power is

- -7

undeniable. The right to alter past decisions ne less than

the right to make new decisions for the future has always belonged

to Parliament: indeed, it is an essential attribute of sovereignty.

Even the nation itself, however, can only exert this power success-

fully upon two conditions; and here again our own past of fifty

years ago is a guide and an inspiration. It has to be a nation

united, and it has to be a nation making in its own way its own

deliberate decision.

Half a generation lies behind us during which most of those

in political life vied with one another to commend and to promote

the demolition of British sovereignty. What is net reeded now is

recrimination and witch-hunting,any more than in 1940 we w-sted

effort attacking the representatives of those who had so recently

applauded Munich. If ways and means can be adopted - and politicians

are adept at devising such wheezes - whereby the ranks can be re-

united without red faces or embarrassment, then so be it. This is

no time for dealing in charges or counter-charges of insincerity

or tergiversation.

As for a deliberate national decision, the means for that

leek to be almost providentially ,,rovided. Th LoJ •ur Party,

with its determination to seek votes by embracing causes whose

time has passed, promisesto provide the electorate with a straight

decision, whenever the p esent House of Commons comes to be re-made,

11/ between those who offer them the restoration of their right to be

governed, taxed and legislated for in their own Parliament and

those who wish that power to pass to bodies where Britain's

r presentatives will be in a permanent minority. To be brutally

plain, what the Labour Party will be offerine the electorate is

to turn that and every subsequent General Election into a charade,

where decisions are taken and policies endorsed which an external

body will be able to reverse and annul afterwards with a snap of

the fingers. Th(3 issue could not be put before the electors more

plainly or more starkly.

We are seeing verified before our eyes today the old saying

that nothing is so irresistible as an idea whose time has come.

Europe, and not Britain only, is re-discoverinE the idea of the

self-governing - and many would add, the 'democratically' self-

Eovernin - natio7. We have watched the march of that idea

throuCri the countries of Central and Eastern Europe with approval

and enthusiasm. We have seen it dispel from Europe the ni,htmare

of two mutually menacinE blocs which has held us all in its thrall

since the end of the Second World War. It is not to be supposed_

that we and the other nations of the European Community have

11, nothing better to offer to our newly self-liberatod fellows in

the rest of the Continent than to surrender the freedom they have

chosen in order to fall under alien and bureaucratically centralised

domination a ain.

The Prime Minister in the speech which I recalled earlier

reminded us that curs is the oldest national parliament of them

all, The very name of "parliament", used to denote an instrument

of democratic self-government, has been derived from the political

history of Britain. The resurence cf cur national will fifty

years aro to defend our parliamentary independence was a beacon

and inspiration& the time te other nations which had been deprived

of that possession themselves by brute military force. The re- /2_

newed determination of this country now to recover and entrench

its right to parliamentary self-government will once again set

the example to othe-s. Events have brou ht it to pass that

responsibility for voicing that determination and brin.;ing it

through to triumph has come to rest upon your 1?arty here in this

con:Aituency and throuLhput Britain.