The following is an EXCLUSIVE and never been seen/heard before interview with The Rt Hon J Enoch Powell.  It is highly revealing and adds to the legend and history that is Enoch Powell.  As ever Powell is forthright in his views and denunciation of European issues…..

The interview was conducted at Enoch’s home in South Eaton Place on Wednesday 31^st July 1991 and since has been sitting in my loft gathering dust…until today that is.  At the time I was a student, working on my University Dissertation on the Future Evolution of Europe: A Federal Europe or Sovereign States?  I requested Enoch’s advice and help and this forms the bedrock of this interview aired for the first time ever today!

Enoch Powell even today creates passionate reactions amongst people when his name is mentioned.  Dan Hannan recently stated that Enoch was a political hero of his…immediately this created shockwaves throughout the political community, such is the power of the name Enoch Powell….and the infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech.  Dan Hannan will certainly enjoy this interview….as I am sure that Enoch would have enjoyed Dan Hannan’s denunciation of Gordon brown…however Enoch would never have stood for election to the treacherous European Parliament!

To listen to the interview in full, (41 mins), please click here.  http://tiny.cc/6r0cF  Please note that this is a recording on pretty inferior recording equipment at the time, hence some distortion.  It is worth taking a look at the transcribe below.

My recollections of that day are still crystal clear.  As a student I was apprehensive at interviewing a political heavyweight and renown intellectual.  I was fortunate to go to his home in South Eaton Place.  Enoch opened the door, and he was of course a slight man, frail due to age, but he shook my hand with a firm handshake.  He took me straight to his study.  I can remember his study was full of cartoons and satire involving Powell over his many years.  He took me through some of his favourites.  He warmly made a cup of tea and provided generous amounts of biscuits.  I asked him whether he minded me recording the interview, to which he replied yes but he asked me to put all my notes and prepared questions to one side.  He wanted a natural interview and as a student, I should be intelligent enough to hold court with him, without the need for notes.  Powell never one broke eye contact.  Despite his advancing years his eyes were strong and his intellect was razor sharp.  We kept the interview short but he spent a good 3 hours with me.  I walked away impressed with the passion, intellect and the hospitality of the man.  We met several times post this event and he always made time to discuss latest issues.  I cannot speak highly enough of his compassion and courtesy shown to supporting a mere student!  Powell died in 1998.

TBB: Enoch Powell starts the interview with some views on European Integration.  In the present day debate over greater integration, Enoch has been somewhat puzzled over how the original EC, supposedly a free trade area, suddenly had greater connotations….and give his views on Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech……

Enoch Powell:“My point one is take the 1972 Act terribly seriously and also its repealability.  My second suggestion, something which hasn’t been adequately explored was the slip across from freedom of trade and intercourse, 1992 and all that, to common legislation, the extraordinary lack of analysis which was based on the hypothesis that in order to enjoy freedom of trade with another country you must have common law.  Now obviously you must have common law, at least there must be reciprocal law, which is not the same as common law, where that effects trade…..stick on trade for the moment, let intercourse go because that’s a separate point…. and there’s been a kind of sleight of hand whereby the necessity of reciprocity for the enjoyment of freedom of trade has been replaced by the assumed indispensability of identity of legislation, so that we have the extraordinary phenomenon that the common standard of bathing beaches…..there are a few things that can be less tradeable than a bathing beach. The point about intercourse is that another assumption has been left unexamined, namely the freedom of intercourse is part of freedom of trade, now it is not, indeed freedom of trade is an alternative to freedom of intercourse, the international division of labour is achieved by trade in the absence of non-trade intercourse, you don’t have to actually walk into the other man’s country in order to enjoy the fruits and the advantages of his particular situation or his productive capacity, so that the removal of frontiers was another illogical and extraordinarily unexamined supposed deduction from freedom of trade.  Freedom of trade has been taken without serious debate to involve freedom of movement…which it doesn’t.  And secondly, identity of legislation, now of course it is perfectly true that all legislative provisions effect economic behaviour, so that if A in country X and B in country Y are to be in relationships of totally unimpeded economic intercourse, they must live under the same laws, but this is an unauthorised extension of a concept of freedom of trade, so that I think if I were, I’m putting myself in your position as it were, enquiring what under explored aspects I would want to be pursuing, the manner in which this sleight of hand was achieved would be amongst them.  There is a third and curious political facet. Events since 1988 of course have in some way been dominated by Bruges.  Now Bruges was very remarkable, Bruges was remarkable in at least two respects.  Firstly, it was contrary to everything to which the person who spoke at Bruges had been a consenting party, now everyone can repent but as an example of repentance to all generations, as it says in ecclesiastical, Bruges takes some beating, and connected with that is a curious background to Bruges.  It was by its nature very visibly an official speech, not only was it delivered and distributed and handled in an official manner, as an official statement by the head of the Government, but the crafting of it and its contents were extraordinarily, well not to put too fine a point upon it, Foreign Office.  It isn’t as though the then Prime Minister had had a pencil and said’ Here I’ll write a speech’.  The reference to Gengis Khan is not one which would come naturally to Margaret Thatcher, nor would she have been someone who lay awake at night saying, ‘Of course Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, those too are great European cities’.  So it has the marks of Officialdom, and yet paradoxical for an official act it did not, it had not gone through the Cabinet machine which was the detonator of the explosion which blew Margaret Thatcher out of office two and half years, no two and a quarter years later.  Of course there’s another side to this, the counterpart to this, which was raised by recent statements made by Lawson, was that members of the Cabinet, in relevant departments, the Treasury, the Foreign office, were apparently content not to seek a Government view on the subject.  So it’s a very remarkable constitutional event which took place in 1988, and I’d even go as far to say that if one doesn’t understand the motivation and the background to Bruges, one is groping in the dark”

TBB: I asked Enoch what benefits he could see to standing outside the Community?

Enoch Powell: “What benefits do you want”?

TBB: I replied economic benefits.  And again asked if we could stand outside the EC when 50% of our trade is within Europe.

Enoch Powell: “But our trade with the other countries of the Community is not dependent upon our membership of the EEC and there’re as likely as bamboozled as we are by the fact that they have a trade surplus with the United Kingdom, so that it is an unjustified assumption, that outside of the EEC, though of course free from the constraints of the EEC, trade would no doubt develop or re-develop in other directions in other parts of the world, and no doubt the percentage would gradually be modified, but there’s no justification for equating membership of the EEC with the existence of mutual trade between the United Kingdom and those countries”.

TBB: I countered that there could be benefits in terms of Foreign & Defence policy having a common policy between the member states.  Also the benefit financially from deploying forces from pooled budgets.

Enoch Powell: “It depends who you think you are.  Defending what?

TBB: The country…..

Enoch Powell:“Well the defence of the United Kingdom has always depended upon alliance, upon a balance of power but it has never been assumed until recently that a balance of power and an alliance implied amalgamation with potential enemies.  So it’s the same, it’s this extraordinary slide from that which is taken from granted to that which is by no means relied upon and I think the two questions that you asked illiustrate the way that sleight of hand has been managed”.

TBB:  We then turned to a Single Currency, which Powell was well known to be opposed to.  I started by stating there were 3 main perceived advantages to a single Currency….

Enoch Powell:  “There are lots of advantages which flow from being a slave…free food, you don’t have to take decisions, and if you use somebody else’s currency, you can dispense with having an economic policy.  So I ask the question…who are we?…..

TBB: An Independent Nation….

Enoch Powell:  “Which is the prior and overriding question’!

TBB: I came back that we were an independent nation but not independent enough and asked him whether he agreed?

Enoch Powell: “But independence is not the same as omnipotence.  Iceland is independent but Iceland is not omnipotent.  The United States is independent but the United States is not omnipotent.  This is another of those slides which has been in use, indeed there’s almost a slide pattern which is visible, whereby something which is taken for granted is replaced by a sleight of hand with something quite different.  The desirability of independence is replaced by the desirability of omnipotence, it is never previously been assumed that a nation, in order to be independent, that is to say not overruled by other nations, had to be of unlimited power, and yet the one has been substituted for the other”.

TBB: I asked Enoch whether he was saddened that current developments were leading to what he had opposed all his life ie a federal Europe?

Enoch Powell: “Well my impression is that the wind is veering, maybe this is an old man’s delusion.  But compared with the sum of an indifference of the later seventies and earlier eighties, I think there’s a big contrast now in the rise of consciousness and criticism of the implications of being absorbed into a European political entity.  Anyhow never despair of one’s countrymen”. 

TBB:  In Powell’s Book ‘1992′, he states that the British people will awake from their slumber on Europe.  But they put off making a decision..until they reach the last point.

Enoch Powell: “Which is dangerous to foreigners”!

TBB:  Is this the case on Europe?

Enoch Powell:  “Well certainly they have been slow to believe what was being done to them and that is what makes the English so difficult to deal with.  That they appear to agree to things with which in reality they do not agree.  This sort of deference  and uncritical behaviour is extremely misleading to the innocent foreigner.  It was for this purpose I conducted my own little campaign in 1971 in the main countries of the EEC to tell them that the British couldn’t possibly mean it.  ‘You wait, you’ll see they don’t mean it ‘!  Now I had no proof of what I was saying except the general presumption of reversion to type.  That’s the way the British have always behaved, likely to be the way they go on behaving. 

TBB:  I asked Enoch why he thought the British people would prevent further integration now, compared to the 1970’s?  What’s the difference?

Enoch Powell: “They didn’t believe it, they didn’t believe anybody would attempt such a thing”!

TBB: And they do now?

Enoch Powell: “And now they are starting to wonder after all it wasn’t for real”!

TBB: Does national Sovereignty still exist in the hearts and minds of the British people?

Enoch Powell: “Dislike of foreigners exists”.

TBB: I asked him to clarify this and produce evidence.

Enoch Powell:“Well recently the injured astonishment at discovering that Parliamentary Legislation was capable of being overturned by a foreign court”.  (Referring to the European Parliament overturning British law which prevented foreign fishing vessels off our shores).  “Something which we have disliked since Henry VIII and which is indeed incompatible with having general elections at all, because if general elections are about the legislation which ought to be repealed, amended or introduced, then there’s no point in having general elections if one’s laws can be made, repealed and amended by others, so you might almost say that the propensity to indulge in general elections is of prima facie evidence of a desire to keep the law making power within the hands of the electorate”.

TBB: I asked Enoch whether the poor turnout at European parliamentary elections highlighted people’s discontent in Europe.

Enoch Powell:“Yes I suppose this could be treated as evidence that they don’t yet believe that the institutions of the EEC have become the effective legislative authority.  I think it’s a bit subtle.  I think the low turnout is a sign of not thinking that it matters rather than of being conscious of the supacession of our own institutions by those of the EEC.

TBB: We then turned to discussing the extension of powers to the democratically elected European Parliament?

Enoch Powell: “It’s elected by whom?  Not by an electorate.  This is the question of whether…. this goes the route of the representative principle, we accept that when we have a elected House of Commons, it can make law by a majority of one, but we accept this because we assume the unity of the electorate from which we deduce that if we don’t like the consequences we should change them because the rest of the electorate are like you and me.  A mere aggregation of two hundred and fifty million people is not an electorate as the basis for a legislative assembly, the legislative authority does not derive—-it’s a very important point, it does not derive from the ballot box, it derives from the identity of the electorate.  Because they are self-identified, because they regard themselves as an entity, they accept a majority verdict and regard a majority verdict as temporary… because since upon the whole they are all the same, and since generally speaking they have the same interests, the result of experience will be the same for you as for me.  It is therefore another of these tricks to say the House of Commons is elected, the European Assembly is elected therefore we can substitute the European Assembly for the House of Commons and nothing else will be altered.  If Ireland as a whole were still part of the United Kingdom, the people of what is now the Irish Republic will not regard a majority in an elected House of Commons as being valid for Ireland because they do not regard the Irish as the same people as the English, so that the validity of a majority vote and the authority of an elected Assembly derives from the homogeneity of the elected body”.

TBB: We then discussed why Enoch was opposed to a Single European Currency.

Enoch Powell: “Government’s print money ever since Midas, Government’s have mad money.  Now the power of Government to make money is a power, which like other powers of Government ought to be under our control.  If you passed the power to make money elsewhere, then you pass that power elsewhere and there is no point in having an election at which inflation, and so on, is an issue.  If you have a common curreny then you dont have general elections about the economy.  In fact you’re beyond general elections.  You’re beyond statehood.

TBB:  We then turned to the issue of a Central European Independent Bank. 

Enoch Powell: “The Emperor”!

TBB:  And whether an Independent Central Bank would remove politics from economics and possess economic benefits from the sudden lurch of free market economic to Keynesian demand management…..

Enoch Powell: “Well there are those who would wish not to be self governed, there are those who would wish the electorate not to take the decisions which the electorate takes….”

TBB:  I interrupted Enoch stating that well informed commentators would say decisions on the economy were affected by short term political /electoral considerations rather than longer term economic stability, which the Central Bank would not be affected by:

Enoch Powell: “So the Central Bank is wiser and better morally?  So we ought to have a dictator because we are not fit to govern ourselves?  We are not fit to control our government?  Well this point was raised with me at a meeting a few weeks ago, and I said simply, in answer to the person who raised the question, ‘Well you go and tell them’! and the laughter which followed…that was the answer of course.  It is a possible contention that we would be better governed if we were not governed, as we prefer to be governed, but you go and tell them”!

TBB:  We then turned to the ERM, (which would go on to spectacularly fail for the UK), given attempts to control exchange rates had failed in the past eg Bretton Woods, Gold Standard, Plaza & Louvre agreements, the ‘Snake’ & ‘Crawling Peg’, was it inevitable the ERM would fail?

Enoch Powell:“Nothing’s inevitable until its happened.  But there is one essential difference between the ERM and Bretton Woods.  Bretton Woods was not the creation, was not an aspect of an institution to which we had in 1972 transferred a superior authority in the United Kingdom, it was not part of a new states set up.  But it proved impracticable because there wasn’t a single state.  Because many of the factors by which the respective value of currencies is affected were outside control or prediction.  Of course there’s  lot to be said for an Empire, there’s a lot to be said for a Caesar or Napoleon, except that I’m not in the business of making the case for Napoleon or Wilhelm, but if you’re inclined to make the case, quite a good case can be made”.

TBB: I then informed Enoch that Mrs Thatcher supported the ERM because of the 6% fluctuation either way allowed for sterling, to which he replied:

Enoch Powell:“Well I suppose if you made it twenty percent you needn’t worry at all.  If you have an ERM where the permissible fluctuation is infinity you don’t have an ERM, and when we joined the ERM with a six percent permissible fluctuation, we did, I understand, give some sort of an undertaking that it would be our intention to narrow that.  Of course if fluctuation is possible, then you’re not subject to an agreed equation are you?  So it’s a fudge like so much else in life and no doubt, and this is tended to be confirmed by what has come out since, for reasons we don’t fully understand, the then Prime Minister was fudging.  Always beware of fudge.  The quantity of fudging in public presentation is enormous”.

 TBB: I then asked Enoch if we were discussing theories rather than reality….could such devierse nations converge economically & politically?

Enoch Powell: “Well that’s the fundamental question.  Making it local, will the Brits put up with it?  Well I don’t think the Brits will put up with it when they are confronted with what it is like not to govern oneself, anymore than I think the Hungarians will…would…did!  This raises the question of what is meant, or what is peculiar about Europe, and what is peculiar about Europe is that it is composed of Nations, contrasting, interacting, often mutually hostile nations and a case can be made, I’ve chosen the phrase carefully, to argue that the achievements intellectually and culturally of Europe would have been impossible without that mutual and internal friction and contrast, living cheek by jowl with a different society”.

TBB:  Vogue at the time was discussion of a two-speed or a multi track Europe……

Enoch Powell: “But if there are two tracks, the tracks go somewhere and this is simply fudge.  If you say you’re going there but you’re going there slowly, you still have accepted the demolition of national independence as the destination and the two speeds are merely a matter of the presentation of a journey to that destination.  It is another fudge”.

TBB:  Like so much of the European issue…..

Enoch Powell: “Like so much in any dangerous…potentially dangerous political question”.

TBB: Could Enoch see the complete separation of monetary & fiscal policy in a Federal Europe?

Enoch Powell:  “I find difficulty in imaging a federal Europe, which is a Europe in which the electorate of the United Kingdom has accepted that the United Kingdom’s Government is not controlled by it or its representatives”.

TBB: Jacques Delors stated 2 years back that 80% of our economic and legislation would be decided in Brussels by the end of this century.

Enoch Powell: “It was a useful quote”!

TBB:  Delors had proposed subsidiarity…..

Enoch Powell:  “This is another fudge because subsidiarity is the exercise by the permission of a higher authority of certain functions by a subordinate authority……but a prior implication is that the supreme authority has been centralised so that subsidiarity already implies unification.  It implies devolution in the sense in which local government in the United Kingdom is devolved.  It is the transfer of powers resident in Parliament, subject to certain conditions, to certain elected bodies, for certain purposes, that’s subsidiarity, being a local government is subsidiarity.

TBB:  The new Eastern European democracies…whether they were being overlooked and what benefits could they bring?

Enoch Powell: “When you say does the European Community overlook this or overlook that you are imputing to the EEC an identity, and a unitary identity and a personality which I do not believe it has.  I think France, the United Kingdom and Germany, being in a different place…different places…view the countries of Eastern Europe differently. 

TBB:  How do you see the future of the new eastern European Democracies?

Enoch Powell:  “I have no idea.  It’s not my business!  I didn’t know what was going to happen, I don’t know now what’s going to happen!  Except I suspect that they dislike foreigners too”!

TBB: I asked Enoch that if he were writing an obituary today of the European Community, would he say that it had any successes at all for UK?

Enoch Powell: “Would I say that Phillip II had had any success?!!!! Well he had for a time”!!!! 

TBB: Given this reply, I asked whether it had achieved nothing at all?

Enoch Powell: “Well so far those who have set out to deprive the inhabitants of these islands of self-government haven’t achieved a great success, so perhaps not this time either.  Perhaps this is another addition to be made to the long roll of failures, and not without the assistance, somehow, of that thing the other side of Europe, which we call Eastern Europe, which is potentially as jealous of the arrogation of power by the Emperor, as the English have been.  In the end it’s all politics”.

TBB: Would Powell favour the free trade area brought about by 1992?

Enoch Powell: “I have never been able to persuade myself that there is any advantage in interfering with the freedom of one’s own citizens to exchange their goods and services with the citizens of other countries.  That’s a mere prejudice”!

TBB: I then asked Enoch if we were overlooking our relationship with America?

Enoch Powell:“Well why did the United States favour, indeed help to force, Britain into a trading bloc in Europe so pregnantly incompatible with the freedom of world trade, which is in the interests of the inhabitants of the United states, or which they believe, which is the same thing.  Politics they thought that  for strategic reasons an amalgamated Europe was worth the disadvantages of a protectionist Europe but then all that has collapsed and fallen flat on its face hasn’t it?  So with luck other misconceptions will fall flat on their faces.  It’s always nice when these things fall flat on their faces”!

TBB: I ended by asking Enoch, if he had a crystal ball, how he saw the future evolution of Europe?

Enoch Powell: “Well I don’t have a ball, and in a long and misspent life in politics I’ve at least learnt that I don’t know what’s bloody well going to happen”!

TBB:Re-phrasing I asked him how he would like Europe to evolve.

Enoch Powell: “As a conservative, I like things much as they have been.  It is a matter of national prejudice, it’s a desire to go on conducting the affairs of one’s country in the manner in which you think they have hitherto been conducted, I choose that carefully, and I think in that I’m not very different from the great bulk of my fellow countrymen.  Your Englishmen is a conservative”.

TBB:  I interrupted to see whether he ever saw the day…

Enoch Powell: “I can’t see into the future.  I didn’t promise to and I can’t.  The fact that I can’t is something which has been brought forcibly home to me”.

TBB: Wrapping up, I asked him whether he thought Britain would remain in Europe.  He looked at me and said with a twinkle in his eye and a slight grin….

Enoch Powell: “Not if I know my fellow countrymen.  But perhaps I don’t”!