The Speeches of John Enoch Powell

The Speeches of John
Enoch Powell
POLL 4/1/21
Speeches, January-November 1989, 3
files
POLL 4/1/21 File 2, May-September
1989
Image (0 The Literary Executors of the late Rt. Hon. I Enoch Powell
& content t the copyright owner. 2011.

Index of speeches within archive.
29th September 1989 Untitled Windsor Page 3
22nd September 1989 Untitled Rathfriland Page 8
19th September 1989 Untitled Surrey Page 11
14th July 1989 Exchange Rates & Inflation Nottingham Page 16
5th August 1989 Ulster's just cause Kilkeel Page 19
9th July 1989 Untitled Lincoln's Inn Page 22
2nd July 1989 Untitled Unknown Page 27
23rd June 1989 Who guarantees union? SDUA, Ballynahinch Page 31
12th June 1989 Conventional Oxford Page 35
Forces in Europe
20th May 1989 Untitled Oxford Page 38
18th May 1989 Dionysus & Apollo: National Theatre Page 40
from Aeschylus to
Alfieri & Nietzsche
17th May 1989 Hong Kong Chinese Chelsea Page 53
13th May 1989 Anniversary of 1689 Glasgow Page 58

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCE
TO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY
Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell MBE to the Annual
CPC Supper of the Windsorz,Maidenhead Conservative
Association at the Guild Hall, Windsor, at 8 p.m.,
Friday, 29th September 1989.
Wide sections of the British public have been shocked by the
news that a prosecution is to be brought against the Queen's
Ministers in the European Court for default in the performance of
their duty to safeguard the quality of water supplied to the people
of this country. The shock waves have extended far beyond the
number - and it is not a small number - of those who have always
been opposed to Britain's membership of the European Economic
Community in the form in which it was forced through the House of
Commons in 1972 by a majority of eight votes. The shock was not
rendered less perceptible by the spectacle of one of the Queen's
Ministers prostratinE himself in front of an Italian Commissioner
and begging unsuccessfully to be let off just this once.
People are far from indifferent to the importance for public
health of a supply of pure water. That is nothing new. Their
concern has made the water supply the business of Parliament and
government in Britain for two centuries past. People are also
aware that the over-stimulation of arable production in this
country by the extravagant Common Agricultural Policy of the
European Economic Community has caused damage to the landscape and
to the environment in Britain. Thus it comes as no surprise to us
to learn that the fertilizer regime which the Common AEricultural
Policy encouraged and enforced has contributed in some parts of
this country to pollute rivers and poison drinking water.
What has taken British electors by surprise is to learn that
for preventing and remedying these evils their Government is no
longer responsible to them through Parliament but is the servant
of a European authority whom we do not elect and is called to account
by a court which is neither one of the Queen's courts nor administers
_

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British law. British electors have, they realise, been "taken fot'
a rideh and are no longer the masters in their own house. Ruefully
they enquire how all this can have come about, and scan the horizon
to discern means to recover control of their affairs. The answers,
fortunately, are not far to seek, and in recent months they have
become more than ever a matter of public knowledge, placed beyond
reasonable doubt or dispute. Nobody need any longer be in ignoral:e,
of what happened or of what we have to do about it.
The United Kingdom has committed itself, and in my opinion
rightly committed itself, with general public approval, to freedom
of trade and intercourse with neighbour nations on the continent of
Western Europe. Throughout that area - yes, and further afield t c,
if possible - it wishes to see no obstacles to the right of individuals
to exchange their goods and services with one another and to
invest their savings where they can expect the best return upon them.
That requires from all the governments concerned a self-denying
ordinance to refrain from creating or maintaining such obstacles.
Agreement between them to do so could be put into effect by each
government separately. There is nothing unusual about that: we
have international agreements in many areas - in postal services,
for instance, or the safety of navigation - which national governmerits
accept and implement, each in their cwn jurisdiction. However,
_
in freeing trade between the United Kingdom and Western Europe,
Britain was prepared to go further and join in an arrangement for
common regulation applying uniformly to all concerned.
That was not indispensable; but it had a certain loEic and
common sense, and I believe that successive governments in agreeing
te it were not out of touch with public opinion nor unsupported by
the electorate. What happened, however, was something quite
differert, and something tc which the consent of the British people
was neither sought ncr is available. Freedom of trade and exchange
was made the excuse for amalgamation, for common legislation -

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common government, let us bluntly call it - right across the board,
whether or not it had anything to do with freedom cf trade. The
substitution was accompanied by a change of wordingz free trade
was called a "single market"; and since of course there is a single
market in a single country living under one government and legislature,
the preposterous conclusion was drawn that in order to have
freedom to trade we must all have the same laws and the same authoe
over everything.
The sleight of hand was not unintentional. There were those
all along, on the Continent especially, whose object was to amalgamate
Britain into a new superstate under the cover of creaCing
freedom of trade. It is, of course, the most absolute nonsense and
arrant deception. To trade with the other fellow in a free and open
market, it is not necessary to force him to drink water at home of
a Eiven purity or to bathe off beaches of the same amenity as
yours. It is our business how we look after our drinking water and
our rivers. It makes not a rap of difference to free and equal
competition in the goods and services which we trade. It is our
tusiness, toc, how we raise the revenue for our own Rovernment.
You can trade with equal freedom and equal benefit with those who
pay different levels of tax on their income and those who choose
to tax their newspapers and their children's clothing As for
pretending that they must have the same social security system and
the same trade union law, the absurdity of it is self-evident.
Absurd it is; but that is what we are now faced with and
told we must accept whether we like it or not. It is nothing less
than the demand tc abrogate our right in this country to make our
own laws, grant our own taxes, and choose cur own government. For
compliance with se monstrous a proposition, the censent of the
British people has never been asked or Eivon. Yet we are threatened,
forsooth, that if we fail to comply, we shall be halel before a
ccurt outside this country and judgement will be given against us.

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This business of the European Court is another piece of deceie,
another treacherous sleight of hand. We British take cur courts
of our land
very seriously. The law/, made and unmade with our consent in Parlie
ment, is what the courts of the Queen find it to be in any particular
case brought before them. Theyare the instruments of the rule
of law, and as such are respected and obeyed. To confuse them with
the European Court is ncthing less than a bad pun. The European
Court is a court which makes law itself by deducing itjrom politeie-
‘1--61
cal first principles. To interpret the:,intention of •Fle-r-1--i-erm.e4+t
by
//Ltcareful
consideration in the light ofLprecedents is poles removed
from the procedure of the European Court. We in Britain have not
been accustomed to be ruled by judEes: e judEes apply the law
which Parliament makes and Parliament can correct their interpretation
if it does not like it. In the European Community the Court
is an instrument of political will, and its judges make law over the
heads of elected assemblies.
That may be the Continental way. Ours it is not. Obedience or
compliance is not owed to the European Court by this nation. In
1975 this nation, in so many words, told Europe that we accepted the
Community, its proceedings and its rules only so far as they secured
the consent of our own Parliament. Ministers of the Queen who purport
to submit their stewardship to the judgement of the European
Court are like thc e who 'bow down in the house of Rimmon": they do
obeisance to a false idol.
All of this brings me to the second question. The first question,
you remember, was: hcw did we ret here? That I have answered. I
turn now to the second questicn: what do we de about it? I have
already established that there is no need to go back upon anything
tc which we have knowinFly and deliberately committed ourselves.
In declarinE that henceforward Britain's relations with the European
Community will be based on the principle cf voluntary co-cperation
between independent sovereiFn nations, Her Majesty's Government has

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neither executed a volte face nor declared an act of recrimination
against the Eenuine aims and aspirations of British policy in the
last twenty years. What We have now to do is to appeal unto Caesar.
For this country the supreme arbitrament, the ultimate court of
appeal, is thE voice of the nation as Expressed in the election of
its sovereign parliament. It is the people of Britain, none other,
who are entitled to decide, and who will decide, whether they inton.:':
to continue to call their governments to account for all that
concerns this nation, above all for what concerns its internal
affairs and administration. A bid to deprive th m of that power
is now being starkly and visibly made from across the Channel,
from whence indeed every attempt to separate the British people from
their rights and liberties has historically been l,lunched. They
and they alone can say if they intend to continue tc make their own
laws, settle their own taxes and determine their own government.
I have no doubt that, plainly and sincerely confronted with that
at the ballot box
question, they will as always reply: "Yes, we shall so continue".
That will be the decision which gives the final answer to all the
claims of Courts and Commissions elsewhere, whosoever they may be.

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCE
TO CONTENT BEFORE TINE OF DELIVERY
Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell MBE to the
Central Committee of the South Down Unionist
Association at Rathfriland, Co. Down, at 8 p.m.
Friday, 22nd September 1989.
So there is to be an inter-parliamentary body set up, comprising
an equal number of members from Parliament and the Dail. It
proposed that two places on it should be reserved for Ulster
unionist MPs and one for the SDLP. Quite rightly the two Unionist
parties have refused to participate. Thereupon is immediately hearc,
a silly chorus of ignorant voices in the media and 6lsewhere, condemning
the Unionists for being shortsighted and non-co-operative.
How simple, one wonders, must people imagine it is to get the
Unionist people of Northern Ireland to walk into a trap: In this
case those who laid the trap did not even go to the expenditure of
a piece of cheese.
Now, there is not the slightest objection to members of the
parliaments of two independent countries meeting together to talk
about anything under the sun, including the internal affairs of
their respective nations. If Members elected for UK constituencies
want to air their views on what they believe to be misgovernment in
County Cork or the Gaeltacht, or if Members representing constrituencies
in the Irish Republic wish to discuss Muslim schooling in 2 A
Bradford, there is no reason why they should not do so whenever it
takes their fancy. The House of Commons is competent to arrange
by resolution to participate in that kind of jamboree, and I dare
say it would not make itself more unpopular than it is by refusing
the money for an outing and a nosh-up.
However, the House of Commons wisely and rightly when establishing
a committee or delegation or anything of that kind is
always careful to ensure that it reflects the existing party composition
of the House of Commons. There are to be 25 representatives
of Parliament on the new body, and there are 650 Members of the

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house of Commons. That works out at one place on the new interparliamentary
body for every twenty-six MPs. On my calculation
th.refore the fair representation of Northern Ireland, which has
17 seats in the House of Commons, would be seventeen twenty-sixths
or approximately two-thint of one Member. How then does it come
about that Northern Ireland is offered over six times
the representation to which it is numerically entitled? Why not
Yorkshire, why not London, why not Scotland? Of course we all
know the answer: it rolls pat off the tongue - 'Because the interparliamentary
body is going to talk about Northern Ireland in
• particular and very little else".
So we are going to have a body in which the Dail and Parliament
meet to debate the affairs of just onc particular part of the
United Kingdom. To such an arrangement as that no Unionist can
possibly be a consenting party. The people of Northern Ireland by
a majority of sixteen seats to one decide, and go on deciding, to
be represented in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. That is
the authority under which by their votes they consent to be governed.
The idea is to trick them into admitting that any part of its
responsibility can be shared by Parliament with the legislature of
another country.
They have been here before. They were here in 1921, when
e
Lloyd GeorEe invited Sir James Craig "to send his elected Members
Dublin instead of to Westminster". They are not/going now to to take
part in a show from which the United Kingdom could duck out and
leave Ulster and the Irish Republic in a federal embrace. For
seventy years the agents of the British Government have been tryine
ffrst one wheeze, then another, to get the Ulster Unionists into
that trap. What their representatives and their electorate continue
to say is: "No. Part of the United Kingdom, for better or worse,
we are and we intend to remain."

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If Parliament wants to play footy-footy with the Irish
Republic, so be it. As long as there remains in existence the
Anglo-Irish Agreement, whereby Her Majesty's Government conceded te
a foreign country a visible predominant influence in the government
of Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland's representatives will
have no part in such a farce. We can however make one suggestion -
Dean Swift perhaps would have called it a "Modest Proposal" - to
those who want the United Kingdom Parliament to thrust its fingers
into the pie of the Irish Republic's affairs and the Dail to thrus
its fingers into the United Kingdem's. The proposal is this. As
• a first step, take the Anglo-Irish Agreement and se alter it that
it applies not to one part only cf the United Kingdom but to the
whole. Just do that; and we in Northern Ireland will cease to
regard you as the most arrant humbugs in the world.
(/

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCE
TO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY
Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to the
Stoneleigh and Ewell Young Conservatives at the Bourne
Hall, Ewell, Surrey, at 8.30 p.m., Tuesday, 19 September
1989.
•
been
What a singularly ungrateful people we British ares We have
inherited the priceless blessing of a parliamentary democracy.
Yet we behave sometimes as though we did not understand the first
thing about it. Day by day we observe with approval and goodwill
the fumbling efforts of nations in Eastern Europe to discover the
principles on which parliamentary democracy depends. But all the
time at home we talk and behave as if those principles had never
established for us by the blood and sorrows of our forefathers.
Now, collective responsibility, for example. The Russians and
the Poles would give their eye teeth to understand it. With immense
effort and at immense risk they have discovered elections. They
have discovered, and gone to the verge of proclaiming, that government
must be made to depend on a majority in an elected legislature.
Responsibility of government to the nation through an elected
assembly is what Michael Gorbachev, with the Russian people's
approval, has stumbled into" and it would be tactless and bad
manners on our part to mention that Charles I and II, father and
son, made the discovery 350 years before him that if an elected
assembly is to control the legislation and therefore the policies
of government, government must find its ministers from among those
who can construct and maintain a majority in that elected assembly.
Boris Yeltsin today, like a man who has hit upon Newtonian physics
three centuries after Isaac Newton, has learnt the lesson which
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, used to explain to his Stewart
masters before and after the English Civil War.
So, Lesson One in the primer of parliamentary democracy is
forcing its way into men's minds on the other side of what used to
be the Iron Curtain. The heading of the lesson is Responsible
Government: a government must command a majority in an elected

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legislature and thereby become responsible to that legislature and
through it to the electorate at large. There was that amusing scene.
you remember, in Poland, when Solidarity having won a majority in
the Sejm sat in front of Jaruselski and told him: "We are not the
government; you are the government, and we are the opposition".
Solidarity discovered however in double quick time that, having Woo
the election, they were indeed the government. But after Lesson enc
comes Lesson Two, with which they are still struggling to cope. To
title of Lesson Two is Collective Responsibility. If Solidarity f151'i
known as much British history as they ought, they would be aware
•
that we took most of the 18th century to learn this second lesson,
though fortunately that did not cost us a civil war.
Responsible government is one and indivisible. There cannot be
responsible government if, whenever criticism or complaint arises,
some members of it can say: "Oh but we never agreed with this".
Where has responsibility gone to then? It has either evaporated or,
more strictly speaking, it has returned to the sovereign who theoretically
must have accepted the advice of some of his ministers
against that of the rest of his ministers. Hence the inviolable
necessity for collective responsibility, whereby the advice of the
government as a whole, committing equally all its members, is
received and acted upon by authority. So far from being a musty old
piece of gentlemanly etiquette, therefore, collective responsibility
is thc indispensable key to the functioning of parliamentary democracy.
Solidarity still has to learn in Poland that the assignment
of portfolios, however important, to members of the Communist Party
avails them nothing. All members of the government will remain
equally responsible to the majority in the Sejm and so tc the Polish
electorate for each and every act on the part of the Polish government.
The Poles, you see, have still to master Lesson Two in the
primer of parliamentary democracy.
It is not however for the instruction of the Polish public that
I have dilated on this subject here tonight in Surrey. We are in

-3-
danger nearer home of losing our grip on this essential of any
parliamentary democracy.
It is a knack of news presentation to associate items with an
individual person, whose photograph and caption can be eye-catchinb
slipped into the column. I found out all about this trick for
myself when I was Minister fcr Health and caught sight of the headline:
"Powell swoops on Kentish dentist". Innocent of swooping
upon anybody, let alone a dentish, I enquired within. It transpire:
that, as a result of a disciplinary procedure in which the Minister
quite properly takes no part cr responsibility, a fine had been
imposed upon a dentist who was in contract with thc Health Service.
Hence the projection of my hawklike figure poised above a hapless
victim. The news item,had, in short, been personalised.
We are so used to being fed upon this diet that we cease to be
conscious of its falsity or its pitfalls. Every act and decision
cf government nowadays has to carry a name tag, complete with photograph
and tievision interview. Thereby we come to regard the
actions and policies of the government as being literally personal
to individual members of it: there is, we think, a Clarke policy
in the Health Service, a Baker policy - sorry, a Macgregor policy -
in Education, a Fowler policy in Employment. There is in reality
no such thing. There is a government policy on Health, on Education,
un Employment; and to that policy all members of the government,
great or small, high cr low, are equally committed and equally
responsible.
I do not, cf course, dispute that some ministers expound the
government's policy more effectively - more dramatically, perhaps -
than others. They did not cease to be individuals, with different
individual characteristic; at the moment when the official ministerial
car complete with chauffeur drew up at their residence. They
may even vary in the skill and succemwith which they secure adoption
by the government of any particular policy; but their personal
policy, as opposed to the policy of the government, it does not

4111
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thereby become. Their individual voices and opinions have been
merged in the sole collective advice, which - to use the correct
constitutional formula - is presented in their name to the sovereiu
and by the sovereign duly implemented.
The supreme exponent of the collective policy of a government,
to whom falls naturally the public announcement and exposition of
its most important parts, is the government's head, the Queen2,7
chief minister - so plainly so, that at the moment when he or she
ceases to be chief minister, the rest cannot remain ministers for
one instant longer. That central constitutional fact is not abrogated
by the habit of newspapers and news media to preface statemento
IIIof government policy from the most grave to the most trivial with
the announcement that "Mrs Thatcher says this" or "Mrs Thatcher
says that", or more insidiously, "Mrs Thatcher thinks this" or
"Mrs Thatcher thinks that". Once a joUrnalistic convention is
confused with constitutional reality, we arc in trouble, you and I -
you, I and tne electorate, that is to say - for we are in a fair
way to losing the power to hold the government of cur country
accountable to the electorate.
A year ago tomorrow the Prime Minister made an exceedingly
momentous announcement of government policy. She announced that
henceforward the government would oonduct the relations cf the
United Kingdom with the European Community on the basis of co-operation
between independent sovereign states. Fortawith people began
to run about shouting: "This is what Mrs Thatcher says; but
something else is what Mr Lawson or Sir Geoffrey Howe say'. It
that
cannot be.For all/the insider chit-chat columnists in the world
may write, the Prime Ministees policy is the Chancellor of the
Exchequer's policy and the Foreign Secretary's policy, because it
is the government's policy. By virtue of ministers being ministers
at ail, the policy is theirs, their collective policy; and at the
moment a few weeks ago when Sir Geoffrey Howe magnanimously condescended
tc continue to enjoy an official residence and official

•
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facilities, he declared himself bounden to government pclicy equally
with the newest assistant whip.
Interviewers say to me on television: "So, Mr Powell, the
Prime Minister has adopted the policy you went into the wilderness
fifteen years apJ) for advocating". I reply: "No. Correction,
please. Her Majesty's Government has adopted it". There are those
I suspect they are less numerous than the volume of sound occasionally
suggests - who do not like that policy. For such people
it is convenient to run around saying that the policy they dislike
is not the government's but the personal property of this minister
or that minister. We ought not to let them chip pieces off thc
edifice of our constitutional rights to use as political missiles.
The Conservative Party, in which such operators are not entirely
unknown, if it remains the party of parliamentary democracy, has
a duty to defend the constitutional pillar of con ctive responsibility
against those who would be prepared to undermine it for a
transitory and factional purpose.
I have one footnote to add. In case these observations of mine
should come to notice in Mr Kinnock's office as well as in more
exalted quarters, I owe him perhaps a word of reassurance. There
is no collective responsibility in opposition. There is no constitureason
tional/whatsoever why his cclleagues en the Opposition front bench
_
should not lay personal claim to particular policies and scratch
41/ cut one another's eyes in public dispute about them. They serve
the public interest as well as public entertainment by the performance.
Until the moment, should it ever come,when the accomplishment
of their ambitions inposes upon them the constitutional obligat'on
of collective responsibility, they can carry on just as they are
doing at present.

aUT FOH PUBLICATIOa OR REFERENCE
TO CCNTEaT BEFORE TImE OF DbLIVERY
Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to the
-Nottingham City business Club at the Commodore
Banqueting Suite, aottingham, at 1 p.m., Friday,
14th July, 1989.
111
It is not only dyed-in-the-wool supporters of the Conservative
Party who are disappointed and bewildered by the recrudescence of
industrial disputes carried to the point of economically and socially
disruptive strikes, when we had begun to think these were something
that belonged to an unregretted past.
In this condition of disappointment and irritation many unreasonable
things get said, some of them (I regret to see) by
Ministers of the Crown, who ought to be in a position to know better.
There is one single, simple cause for what has happened. It is not
that quite suddenly the character and morality of trade union leaders
have suffered a severe deterioration. It is not that management in
the industries concerned has quite suddenly become flinty-faced and
irrational. No, there is one single, comprehensive and all-sufficient
cause. That cause is the recrudescence of inflation.
Inflation causes disruption in labour relations because it inherently
involves cheating. If in a given period there has been 8%
inflation, wage-earners have been suffering a progressive diminution
of their real wages during that period, a loss
for which they are not retrospectively compensated when an 8% increase
is offered or negotiated for the future. Consequently those who
negotiate wages on behalf of employees attempt to forestall a
repetition of this cheating by securing an increase which they
believe will pre-empt any further rise in inflation. Tell them that
trey ought to believe the Treasury's assurance that there will be no
further rise in inflation, and they will laugh in your face: they
have heard that one before.
This however is nct the end of the cheating. The adjustment
of wage rates to meet the consequences of inflation commonly gets

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wrapped up with other matters, for instance, with a trade-off
between employers and workers of certain facilities or privileges
which have previously been part of the workers° real remuneration.
The nature of the cheating immediately becomes evident if one contrasts
what would have happened if those practices or special payments
had been negotiated away against the background of a currency
not subject to inflation. The practices and payments would then
have had to be bought out with an appropriate increase in real wages.
On the other hand, when that increase is subsumed into an adjustment
for inflation, the workers are in effect cheated in perpetuity of a
fraction of what has hitherto been their real remuneration.
Unfortunately these forms of cheating which I have just expounded
are rarely exposed to view. In consequence a public unaware
of the general grievances which underlie and explain the ending of
a halcyon period of unprecedented freedom from industrial disruption
is easily gulled with tirades accusing of irresponsibility men and
trade unions who are taking a course of action which is perfectly
lawful.
Why, you may wonder, does no one pin the blame where it
rightfully belongs - upon the recrudescence of inflation? In part,
the answer is that the unions themselves, or at least their spokesmen,
do not adequately understand the causal connection between
inflation and in the industrial action in which they are engaged.
Inarticulate complaints of inadequate remuneration in general terms
obscure the reality and contribute to public irritation.
I am afraid, however, that there is a more worrying explanation.
It is that all political parties have a vested interest in refraining
from exposing inflation as the culprit. In fact, the scene is like
a bullfight in which the toreadors are all tacitly agreed to avcid
annoying the bull. The motive of the Government in this is plain
enough. They themselves - or, more specifically, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer - caused the inflation. You could hardly expect them

-3-
to denounce the consequences of it from the housetops. But why
does everybody else let them get away with it? Why de the brave
bullfighters in the Labour Party or in the other political groupings,
why do even the spokesmen of the celebrated left wing - where are
Messrs Benn and Skinner in all this? - fail to rush forward to plant
their own banderillos in the fleshy neck and shoulders of inflation
To answer that question, a brief preliminary catechism is
necessary.
Q. Who caused the inflation?
A. The Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Q. How did he cause it?
A. By putting a flood of new money into circulation.
Q. Why did he dc that?
A. To prevent the exchange rate of the pound rising last year.
Q. Why did he want to stop it rising?
A. To keep level with the Deutschmark.
Q. What for?
A. To make it easier to join the EMS.
So ends the mini-catechism: the love of the European Monetary
System is the root of all evil. That was the prize for the sake of
which Nigel Lawson sacrificed his party's anti-inflationary
achievement and_plunged the economy into a series of industrial disputes
which are taking the shine off the whole of the Government's
record in the last five years. But the EMS is tae apple of Neil
Kinnock's eye. It is the apple of David Owen's eye. It is the
apple of the eye of the CBI and the rest of that pro-EEC chorus who,
for diverse reasons, are baying for Mrs Thatcher's blood.
So, between them all, between Government and Opposition, betwe'en
Lawson and Delors, the British public is intentionally left in profound
ignorance of what really hit them and allowed to suffer indignity
every Wednesday without the faintest inkling of the reason why.

Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, at the
Ulster Unionist Annual Mourne Fete at Kilkeel,
Co. Down, at 3 p.m., Saturday, 5th August, 1989.
On the other side of the Irish Sea an increasing number of our
fellow citizens in Great Britain are now beginning to understand
more clearly than they have been permitted hitherto the simple
justice of the cause which the people of Ulster maintain with such
indefatigable patience and tenacity.
That cause is as simple as it is just. Northern Ireland is
part of the United Kingdom because its people, in sixteen constituf
encies out of seventeen, elect members to represent them in the
Parliament of the United Kingdom. They do not do that because they
have no choice. The opposite course is there for the choosing if
they wanted it: they could have it from Sinn Fein; they could
have it from the IRA. Instead, they opt overwhelmingly, by a
greater majority than settles any other question in British politics,
to be governed under the Parliament of the United Kingdom and to
share the United Kingdom's laws and its fortunes.
That fact ought to be simple enough for any but the most
corrupt or malevolent observer to understand. And from that simple
fact follows the simple justice of Ulster's claim. Treat us the
same, govern us the same, let the same laws be made for us and in
the same way. That ought to follow as the night follows the day.
What Britain has done instead for twenty years now is to tease and
torment the people of Northern Ireland by treatirg them differently
from the rest of the kingdom, in the vain hope of cheating or sneaking
them out of the birthright which they persist in assertin.
As a climax to the teasing and tormenting, Britain even aEreed to
share with another country itE responsibility for governing this
particular part of the United Kingdom.
All that is discrimination with a vengeance - unjust and
mischievous discrimination. Yet discrimination and sectarian disshould
crimination is what those who/know better are always accusing us of.

-2-
was
There/even an archbishop who not long ago informed the world that
the cause of all Ulster's trouble is Christian fundamentalism.
I want to lift up my voice this afternoon against a piece of
blatant sectarianism and discrimination which is being foisted upon
this province of Northern Ireland by the British Government. I
refer to what are called IntegrateT schools maintained at the
public expense and in preference to all other schools. Now, an
"integrated" school is a school to which admission has to be reEulated
in accordance with the religion of the parents - so many
Catholics, so many Protestants - so as to fulfil the vaunted description
of "integration".
411 This, I say, is absolutely wrong, and the Ulster Unionist
Party was right to set its face against it. The object of the
exercise, we are told, is to induce people in Northern Ireland to
give up exercising a right in education which is accorded to people
in Great Britain. The rights which Roman Catholics have in Great
Britain are the rights which they ought to have in this part of
the United Kingdom too. The rights which Protestants have in Great
Britain are the rights which Protestants ought to have in this
part of the United Kingdom too. That is what belonging to the
United Kingdom ought to mean: the same law for all in Northern
_
Ireland, and the same law in Northern Ireland as in Great Britain
411 That is the justice which twenty years on the Government is
still trying to withhold from Northern Ireland. The longer that
justice is denied, the longer will the IRA remain convinced that
the Government's object is to get rid of Northern Ireland altogether
out of the United Kingdom and the longer will the killing and
counter-killing continue which that prospect encourages and maintains.
The way of peace is the way of justice. The way of justice
is the way to peace. Those who deny us justice are those who deny

-
us peace. To them we say: "How long? You understand by now thL
consequences of what you have been doing and the wickedness of
those consequences. The time is overdue to abandon a policy as
futile as it is criminal, the policy of discrimination against
Northern Ireland, the policy of holding Ulster at arm's length in
the hope of getting rid of it altogether. The folly and futility
of it all cry aloud. In Heaven's name have done

The Warburton Lecture at Lincoln's Inn, 11.30 a.m.
Sunday, 9 July 1989,
By the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE.
The Lecture which the good Bishop of Gloucester established
231 years ago was required to provide proof of the truth of
Christianity from the prophecies. I hope His Lordship's benevolent
spirit will not be offended if I avail myself of his generosity in
order to illustrate instead the importance for Christianity of the
textual criticism of the Gospels.
I begin by asking you to let me read from St Matthew's Gospel
(c. 22) the parable to which belongs the well-worn expression
"highways and hedges" - though that phrase, as a matter of fact,
occurs only in the alternative version in St Luke's Gospel. However,
that is part of another story to which we shall come by and by.
2 The kingdom of heaven is like
unto a certain king, which made
a marriage for his son,
And sent forth his servants to
call them that were bidden to the
wedding: and they would not COMO. r
4 Again, he sent. forth other servants,
saying, Tell them which are
bidden, Behold, I have prepared
my dinner: my oxen and my fat-
Dogs are killed, and all things are
ready: come unto the marriage.
6 But they made light of Li, and
went their ways, one to his farm,
another to his merchandise:
8 And the remnant took his servants,
and entreated them spitefully,
and slew them.
'7 But when the king heard thereof,
be was wroth: and he sent forth
his armies, r.nd destroyed those
murderers, and burned up their
city.
8 Then saith he to his servants,
The wedding Is ready, but they
which were bidden were not
worthy.
9 Go ye therefore Into the highways,
and as many as ye shall Ilnd,
bid to the marriage.
10 So those servants went out
Into the highways, and gathered
together all as many as they
found, both bad and good: and
the wedding was furnished with
guests.
11 And when the king came In
to see the guests, he saw there a
man which had not on a wedding
garment:
12 And he salt h unto him. Friend,
how camest thou in hither not
having a wedding garment? And
he was speechless.
13 Then said the king to the servants,
Bind him hand and foot,
and take him away, and cast htm
Into outer darkness; there shall be
weeping and gnashing ot teeth.
14 For many are called, but few
are chosen.

-2-
There can hardly be anyone following that reading with attention
who did not sustain two shocks in the course of it. The first
shock was when the invited guests, having proffered polite excuses,
suddenly turned homicidal and killed the servants, whereupon the
bridegroom's father sent an army, killed them all and burnt what is
described as "their city". Nothing had prepared us for this violent
interruption in a narrative which then continues blandly with the
bridegroom's father sending out into the highways and inviting in
all and sundry to eat the meal.
The second shock came at the end, when the host turned out of
doors one of the very people whom he had brought in off the street,
and only because that individual, unlike the rest apparently, had
not had time to pop round to Moss Bros and hire himself a tailcoat
and grey waistcoat. It seems so utterly unreasonable, having
fetched him in at the last moment, then to take umbrage at his
dress and not merely turn him out but consign him to everlasting
fire and brimstone. If the sack of the city was an irruption which
did not seem to belong, this is a conclusion which does not seem to
fit.
We are right to be surprised. Here was a consistent and
meaningful story: the invited guests failed to come and so strangers
brought in from the street enjoyed the meal instead. Everything
about that story is natural and logical and makes an obvious point.
Why wreck it with a military campaign and round it off with the
damnation of a harmless beneficiary for not being in a morning
coat?
We do well, I say, to be surprised; for if we suppress our
surprise, we shall fail to see what is staring us in the face all
the time.
First, let us pursue the underlyinE intention of the basic
story a little further. There can be no doubt what it was. The

- 3-
originally invited guests are the Jews, who reject Christ and his
salvation. The people brought in off the street are the Gentiles,
who upon receiving the Gospel have accepted it. Well and good: the
Jews refused the feast; so the Gentiles will be admitted to it
instead. The meal is the victory feast of the Messiah when he comes
in his kingdom; it is also, as no Christian worshipper could fail
to understand, that meal which all Christians have always been
called to share.
Suddenly in the middle of this the bridegroom's father, who
of course is God Almighty, launche:s a military expedition, destroys
the Jews and burns their city. What that means is also not open to
doubt. It refers to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple
by Titus in 70 AD. There is an equally inescapable implication.
Whoever made that devastating insertion into the parable was declaring
that the fall of Jerusalem was the just punishment of the Jews for
having rejected Jesus. The Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus were
the unknowing instruments of divine retribution.
We have learnt something else too. We have learnt that an
original parable, which mildly announced that the Gentiles would
enjoy the inheritance that the Jews had refused, was ruthlessly
altered some time after 70 AD to convey to Jewish survivors the
bleak message: you have been justly punished; the Romans were
only doing God's will. The bleak messaEe was delivered on behalf
of those who, like the servants in the parable, had Eone "into
the highwayJ'of the world and gathered the Gentiles in. The abruptness
of the insertion was softened by attributing improbable homicidal
behaviour to the reluctant Euests.
Re-writing parables however was a game at which two could play;
and we are also privileged to learn how the Jews, or at least the
Jewish Christians, who were under attack hit back. Very well, they
retorted; but what will happen to those who try to enter the kingdom

4.
-4-
and enjoy the feast without being properly dressed? "Many are
called" - called, perhaps, by Paul and Barnabas all over the Roman
world - but "few are chosen". They are the few who will be wearing
the right clothes. There will be no salvation outside the regulations.
What regulations? About the answer to that question, too, there can
be no doubt. The Jewish law. Only a good law-observing Jew - which
includes of course a circumcised Jew - can be a good Christian and
enter the kingdom. For those who do not observe the law, the end
is assuredly fire and brimstone.
We have witnessed therefore not only a parable spoilt by a
piece of anti-Jewish polemic inserted after 70 AD. We have also
witnessed the same parable deliberately expandea to convey the
polemical retort of those attacked. The parable became a battlefield
and was badly torn up in the process, which we, fortunately, are
still permitted to observe. This is our singular good luck; for
only in one way could it come about that the contradictions - the
punitive expedition and the garmentless guest - stand in our text
side by side for everyone to see. First there was a pro-Gentile
edition. Then there was a Judaising edition. Finally there was
edition three, the result of a concordat which conflated the two
previous editions together, regardless of contradictions - and all
this happened in the years after 70 AD. In the Gospel according to
Matthew we have got the third edition.
You and I are not the first people through whose minds these
thoughts have passed. May I now read to you what Luke made of it
all? A cerwirrman
matte a great Supper, and t
bade many:
17 And sent his servant at supper
time to say to them that were
bidden, Come; for all things are
now ready.
18 And they all with one consent
began to make excuse. The first
said unto him, I have bought a
piece of ground, and I must needs
go and see it: I pray thee have me
excused.
19 And another said, I have bought
five yoke of oxen, and I go to
prove them: I pray thee have me
excused.
20 And another said, I have
married a wife, and therefore I
cannot come.
21 So that servant came, and
shewed his lord these things. Then
the master of the house being
angry said to his servant, Go out
quickly Into the streets and lanes
of the city, and bring In hither the
poor, and the maimed, and the
halt, and the blind.
22 And the servant sald, Lord, it
ts done as thou hast commanded,
and yet there Is room.
23 And the lord said unto the
servant, Go out into the highways
and hedges, and compel them to
come In, that my house may be
filled.
24 For I say unto you, That none
of those men which were bidden
shall taste of my supper.

•
-5-
One can hardly believes one's ears. No punitive expedition!
No fire and brimstone for the guest without a morning coat! No
conclusion about "many called but few chosen"! All plain sailing,
such plain sailing, in fact, that it quite reassures us after our
stormy passage with Matthew. What is more, there are lots of jolly
details: the five yoke of oxen, or the invited guest who had just
got a new wife himself - exactly the sort of thing which is called
midrash, the process of intelligent elaboration which enabled the
Talmudists to know precisely for what offences Pharoah's butler and
baker found themselves in prison in Genesis 40.1.
I draw my conclusion. What would be incredible is that
Matthew took the unproblematic and smooth-running story we read in
Luke and deliberately wrecked it by introducing not just one but two
mutually contradictory new features. What happened was the other
way round. Luke saw the problems and difficulties in Matthew, and
he edited them out successfully. In doing so, however, he obliterated
the archaeological evidence which the text of Matthew has
almost miraculously preserved. As a result the textual history of
the parable as we are able to read it in Matthew reveals vivid and
exciting evidence of a critical phase in the history of the Church.
It catches and holds for us the moment when Christianity the worldwide
gospel broke free from Christianity the Jewish sect. The
catastrophe which had decisively liberated the Christian church
from the Old Covenant was the catastrophe which swept away forever
the old Temple and destroyed the city of Jerusalem.

Mathew 5.44:"But I say unto v u, love your enetimis".
41/
The Church of England is going at present through one of its
recurrent bouts of doctrinal uncertainty and discord. These bouts
are endemic in the Church of England because its tradition is to
permit and even encourage its members to &tuey the Bible with open
minds and intellectual integrity, neither treating the letter of
the text as mandatorily authoritative nor submitting its interpretation
to the m gisterial judgment of the Church. In this respect,
as in others, the Church of .'r171.an'' is neither Cttholic nor Protestant
- or both, whichever way you like to look at it! Tolerant
and unexcitable in a characteristically English way, it has long
nurtured a tradition of 13iblical scholership as diligent as that of
Germany and only a shade less radical and adventurous. For a certain
temp2r of mind, there is no home so kindly or congnnial as the Churc
of Engl,nd.
You may finO those introuctory words a curious prelude to examining
one of the .most striking and often quoted sentences in the
Gospel. I hope the reaspn will have become clearer before I finish.
The command to "love your enemies" is a paradox. If they are your
enemies, that is the deecription of a relationship between people
who do not love eech other. One can of course escape from the paradox
by refusing to take the words in their natural meaning, like
the clergyman who explained that we are commanded to love our enemies
tut not to like them-It is also poesible to water down the
'orce o' "ehemy" to include enybody hostile whose hostility we do
not reciprocate. But these dodges are mere evasions. The plain soldier
wants to understand 7:het exactly is meant by "loving" the man
in the tr-nches oppositr: who yill shoot him through thw head if he
raises it above the parapet. What price "love" then?
If
All sentences have a context. we look at the context of this

one, we find other paradoxes. We find ourselves told that to be
angry with Jones Minor is to commit murder and be destined to hell
fire. We find oul.selves told that desiring L. pretty woman is committin:
adultery with her. The natural expostulation is:"but
can't help being angry with Jonee, the way he behaves" or " how can
I help noticing the girl is so pretty?" Ceul:t.iltbe that soMehOw
we are misunderstanding?
It could. Hrom the letters of :t Paul we know that the Church
which Jesus Christ left behind was from its beginning riven by a
deep and often bitter dispute. The dispute broke out as soon ad
the gospel of 7*311S wae7 taken to people who were not Jews; and that
was very early on. When this happened, the leaders - or some of
the leaders-oP the Church who were Jews asserted thet gentile
converts must obey the Jewish Law: they must,. fOr exagiple, be circumcised
and they must conform strictly to the Jewish rules governing
food and cleanliness.
Those who argued in this way had a stron: point. The Law, said
they, is the standard (is it not?) of right and wrong, disobedient
to it ie destruction, obedience to it is rewarded. How then shall
those who flout the Law share everlasting life in God's kingdom?
Thw7e who took the opposite stand were saying something radically
different. They were in fact asserting a whole new interpretation
of whet the death and resurrection of Jesus meant. It had, they said,
put an end to the ole Law, to the form-r compact betweeen Israel and
Jehovah. We know also how they backed up that assertion with argu-
ment. The .1,44 -
Lew was impossible to fulfil absolutely. That
ka.401
was why other mean- hadtto b, provided to offer menkind the hppe of
immortal life. The gentile, it followed, who becomes Christian -
,
yes. and the Jew who becomes Christian - are( free, not eubject to
the Lewean not dependent ny longer on the impossible condition of
fulfilling it.

The dispute was fundamental. It was fought with pertinacity,
even ferocity, and argued from both sideswith great subtlety and
with that sort of unsparing relentless logic which strikes us as
study
strange when we 124ia4 the disputations of Rabbinical Judaism in
the Talmud. The opponent must be driven by his own reasoning into
.41441.a.paa
corner and confuted; nor was there ki from the argumentation
a characteristically Jewish sort of grim ironic humour.
We read one side of the debate in the Pauline epistles and the
Epistle to the Hebrews. In the gospels we read both sides;/re
each side provided itself wit its own supporting version of what
/AL/
Jesus daid and (?i.d. o whentime came to call truce in conflict
A 4
which threatened the Church's very survival in a hostile world where
it was now attracting persecution and was embattled againsticonstituted
authority the roman empires there had to be compromise.
The opposites, though incompatible in logic, were reconciled because
reeonciled they had to be: the two alternative versions of the
gospel were conflated in o a single book.
We hold that book in our hands when we read the earliest surviving
gospel, that called Matthew.In one place we read that "till
heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall no wise pass from
the Law. In another place we rwad the same Jesus saying "come unto
me, all ye that labour 2nd are heavy laden, and I will give you restl
that i5 1will relieve you of the intolerable and impraoticalle ob-
,L
ligations laid upon you by the Law. .
In the passage where we founi: the commandment to "love your anemies",
what is being argued is that the demands of the Law in theie
maximum implicit extent are literally unfulfillable. In the whole
/
debate particular attention ivedIgv,en to the commandment - it is
ti”tort thy tageivert4.4 thit-i&r
not of course in the decaIratevhere the Hebrew expression "each his
neighbour" meaning simply one anether has been translated literally
into Greek anr: the Hebrew term denotine. "beceuse he is like you"
betame in Greek "as (you lov ) yourself". If, the argument ran,
the

"your neighbour" is anybody or everybody, that must include your
enemy, and so tht command is to do the logically contradictory
thing and "love your enemies".
A; it it-
By p4o.o!ing the famous words "love your enemies" back into their
historical context in early Christianity,la have solved one puzzle,
1cl-est/Ant
but raised another • . It is vow which the gentile Church
was forced from the beginning to confront. If Jesus had abolished
/P4di,tt
theldctail and specific requirements of the Jewish Law, what commands,
what stanth:rd of right or wrong conduct remained? Jesus had
brought down no alternative tablet5 of stom.Z complied no substitute
for th detailed regulations of "the scribes and Pharisees". It is
our privilege to be able to watch the authors of the Pauline epistl
and of St John's gospel working out the answer to the question thus
posed by th. conVersion of the gentiles. They did so wtth the aid
of two concept$, "faith" and "love , of which "faith" is distinct-
4r
ively Pauline and "love",distinctively Johannine.
You enter God's kingdom, the doctrine ran, not by your own per-
. 2r*&"
formance of certain reuirements bethrough your convictiorythat
the son of God made it possible for you by dying on your behalf,
because God "so loved" you. To link that death to GOd's love for
man and that love to the individual through his faith in Jesus was
a leap of immense darini; arri inexhaustible consecluences. The new
commandment wasunlike thc: old)neither contrEldictory nor impracticable,
nor was it specific nd tied to detailed observances like the
744 ,A,440e944 4.4.4.19
old Law which it superseded. 44-;:molk the duty to liv as those live
whom God s love has rescued from mortality by their conviction that
He suffered and sacrificed himself for them in man. Upon that commandment
all our study and all our worship are but commentary.

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERENCE
TO CONTENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY
Speech by the Ht Hon. J. Enoch Powell, NEE, to tne
Central Committee of the South Down Unionist Association
at Ballynahinch on Friday, 23rd June 1989, at 8 pm.
For over twenty years now the British state has been engaged,
with characteristically remaseless cynicism, in the operation of
inducinE the people of Northern Ireland to renounce their right to
be an integral part of the United Kingdom.
All the indications are that the operation becomes harder and
not easier as time goes by. The reason for this is that the people
of Northern Ireland have increasingly had their eyes opened to what
is really aoing on. Their initial reluctance to do so did them
410
credit. The barefaced falsity of professing to maintain and
guarantee Ulster's place in the United Kingdom while all the time
working to undermine it is something so foreiEn tc the typical
character of the Ulsterman that he is slow and unwilaine to
acknowledge such behaviour in others. The genuinely British
patriotism of a province that still remembers and honours the
sacrifices it made in the common cause of the United Kingdom
finds it hand to face the fact that successive governments of the
mother country have been coldtloodedly engaged in the business of
cutting Ulster's throat. It came, too, as a shock to realise that
there could be individual Ulstermen here and there who were
0 capable of being suborned and corrupted into co-operating in the
betrayal of their own province.
Insight has been slowly and painfully gained; but gained it
has been, and it will not now be rooted out by repetitions of the
o2d falsehoods and the old deceptive professions of successive
Secretaries of State, which encounter an ever-increasing measure
of public disbelief and incredulity. Huff and puff as Ministers
may, the people of Northern Ireland are less prepared today than
they ever wcre to surrender their British status as part and parcel
or,

-2-
of the United Kingdom.
That status is not one which depends upon wordy declarations,
nor even upon affirmative clauses in Acts of Parliament. Indeed
those very declarations arouse more doubt than they allay. The
inhabitants of Lancashire or of Kent would be dismayed if they
woke up one morning to read that the Government had given them a
solemn promise and undertaking that Lancashire or Kent were to
remain British as long as a majority of th ir people wanted. They
would be neither flattered nor reassured. On the contrary, they
would be alarmed and insulted.
Ulster is part of the United Kingdom for the selfsame reason
41 /as Lancashire or Kent is. The reason is simple and straightforward.
It goes to the heart of the unitary democratic parliamentary state
0
which is the United Kingdom. Lancashire and Kent are part of that
United Kingdom because freely and publicly they opt to belong to it
by electing representatives to sit in the Parliament of the United
Kingdom by which their laws are to be made and under which their
government is to be carried on. It is a decision which they take,
and which nobody else takes or has any right to take. Lancashire
and Kent are not British because the electors of Suffolk,
Northumberland and Cornwall all agree that they shall be so. The
voice and the votes which matter, and the only voice and votes
which matter, are those of the people of Lancashire and Kent
themselves.
The right of Northern Ireland to be part of the United Kingdom
is not conferred upon it by anybody else. It is conferred upcn it
by the will of its own people, who, freely and by the crushing
majority of sixteen constituencies to one, opt to be represented
and governed in the Parliament of the Unit-d Kingdom. Our charter
is the charter of our own electoral decision, continually and
unvaryingly renewed. It is not the votes of tc rest of the Unit d
Kingdom which make us British, any more than our votes make

0
0
Lancashire and Kent British. It is our own vobes, and no one else's.
Beware then when you hear it suggested that we might rest our
right to be British, our right to belong to the United Kingdom,
upon a decision of the electorate of the rest of-the United Kingdom.
That is a trap into which I dare say our enemies would rejoice to
see us blunder. The very notion of it is tantamount to throwing
away the right which we possess in common with all the other parts
of the Union. They do not vete each other in; nor do they vote
each other out. They all belong by the same right as Ourselves,
by freely, openly, lawfully, and all in the same manner declaring
themselves to belong and to intend to continue to belong.
From this right which, in common with the rest of our fellow
citizens we continuously renew and assert, there follows on the
part of the United Kingdom itself a duty which is owed to us. It
is the duty to ensure that we are governed and administered exactly
as the rest of the kingdom is governed and administered.
There is a lot of chatter nowadays about the supposed right of
electors to vote for a Social Democrat or a Green candidate or
whatever candidate might take their fancy; but such talk is
frippery which misses the main point. Those who like ourselves opt
to bo part of the United Kingdom are entitled to hal:e their laws
made in Parliament and their affairs administered under Parliament
exactly on a par with the remainder. That this right has been
withheld from us for so long is the standing proof of the intention
of successive governments to extrude us from the United Kingdom.
When that intention s at last abandoned, as abandoned it will have
to be, the signal that this has happened - a signal unmistakable
to friend and foe alike - will be the end of legislation for
Northern Ireland by Order in Council. There are other things too -
geniune elective local government is one of them - which we lack
and which the rest of the kingdom possesses. To those thinEs also
we are entitled. But on the day - it could just as well be next

- -
week as any other time - when law is no longer made for Northern
Ireland by Order in Council, on that day Ulster's status as an
integral part of the United Kingdom will have been acknowledged by
actions which speak louder than words.

i.OT FOR PUBLICATION OR REFERE1:CL
TO COTEi,IT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY
Speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, to the
Term Dinner of the Oxford University Conservative
Association at 7 p.m., Monday, 12th June, 19b9.
There is a price to be paid for everything. In political life
the price of escaping from one fallacy is often to fall headlong
into another. Future folly becomes the ransom which secures our
release from the prisonhouse of past folly. 'Twas ever so: to repine
over fate's decree is waste of breath. how we can respond is
to rebrm and wage battle with equal courage and equal hopefulness
against the new fallacy.
In 1b8-89 an old fallacy died the death. It was the folly of
supposinE that peace had been kept in Europe these last forty years
because the Soviet Union and its allies dared not overlook the prospect
that America and its allies would re-act to a.E.,gression by
blowing out their own brains in a nuclear duel. The date of death
was the day when the United States and Soviet Russia began to trundle
out of Europe their intermediate-range nuclear weapons, en route for
the scrapheap.
It would be unreasonable to expect the governments which had
claimed those weapons to be indispensable to the nuclear deterrent
to don white sheets and declare to their citizens that "we wuz wronEl.
Without any such auto da fe having been performed, turope knows and
America knows that a nuclear-free Europe is on its way, meaning by
"a nuclear-free Europe" a Europe where peace is understood not to
depend on the fantastic improbability of mutual suicide by the great
powers.
So far, so good. But there is a ransom to be paid for getting
rid of the old fallacy of the nuclear deterrent. The ransom is a new
fallacy, the fallacy of claiming that peace will only be secure if
there is equality of conventional forces in Europe between the two
prospective opponents. So the price-tag on a nuclear-free Europe iE
to be conventional balance.

-2-
Not so. The reason why Soviet Russia has not set out to
conquer, and will not set out to conquer, Western Europe,including
the United Kingdom, is that the Lame is not worth the candle. The
same is the reward of having to control, in addition to its own
federated nationalities and its own Eastern European so-called
satellites, the recalcitrant peoples of West Germany, Italy, France
and - God save the mark! - Britain. The candle is a third world
war, which in the end Russia could not win, even if nuclear weapons
had never been invented.
The size of armed forces which the Soviet Union maintains is
perfectly irrelevant. We had better recognize that a sprawling stat
which extends from the Polish border to Vladivostock and from
Archangel to Bokhara is going to maintain huge land forces anyhow,
and that a state with three seaboards, Baltic, Black Sea and Far
Eastern, separated by large and potentially hostile continents,
is going to maintain huge naval forces with a similar pertinacity
and for a similar reason as the United States interferes in the
internal affairs of Central America. That is the nature of the
bear; and it is perfectly nonsensical to demand an equality
between those forces - net t's mention thc innerent capability
f expansien of those forces - anr.ncn armies, navis and airfcrcce
the countries of western Europe find it logical and convenient
411
to afford.
"Ah , retort the pedlars of the new fallacy, Mut we are not
talkinE about overall, global balance; we arc talking about conventional
forces. in Europe - CFE is the new acronym". "And the more
fools you", I retort. It is not beyond the capability of military
st,affwork - not since railways and the internal combustion engine
were invented - to mass, deploy and concentrate forces on any particular
front during the run-up to an international a
In any case, victory iW3(41-r is to the side which (in the immortal
words of the Duke of Wellington) "pounds longest", raising and
equipping forces which had not existed at the outbreak. Surely the

••
-3-
as
British of all nationsa people who performed that act unfailinEly
in the past, do not need to be reminded of it? Tec slight undulation
known as the Ural Mountains is not so impassable that Russia
cannot switch its forces Westwards and Eastwards virtually at
pleasure, quite apart from tapping her enormous human and industria7
reserves.
Then how come intelligent persons to be discussing so absurd a
concept as "balance of conventional forces in Europe"? There is,
as always, an explanation. The theology of the nuclear deterrent
implied that any war was bound to be very short. Let the aggressor
but score initial advances, and t'flexible response" would run
up the gamut of the nuclear holocaust until Moscow and Lew York
shared the fate to which Warsaw and Frankfurt had already succumbed.
All military thinking for the last forty years has therefore concen-
6..
trated on t44.e. brief preliminary encounter - a matter of days only -
between forces already on the ground in Central Eunopc. Nuclear
deterrent theory h no room for reinforcement, let alone expansion.
The concept of conventional balance in Europe belons in the dustbin
of discarded delusions where the 7-day war and the late unlamented
intermediate-frange nuclear weapons already repose.
The Prime Minister wants a Britain that does not shirk its own
defence. So, in my humbler station, do I; hut I have news for the
Prime kinister. A Britain prepared to defend itself - and thereby
incidentally to defend peace and the balance of power in that Europe
of free nations which she has done so much to coneptualise - is a
Britain whose armed forces in peace are designed to enable us if
necessary to decide the issue of a long stru gle. Elitzkriee
profited the Third Reich nothing in the end. Britain and Russia
wore down and destroyed the greatest military machine or earth. Our
visible ebility and will to do the like again if the balance of
Europe is violently disturbed is our true contribution to the peace
of Europe and of the world.

NOT FOR PUBLICATION OE REFERENCE
TO COi\:TENT BEFORE TIME OF DELIVERY
Extract from speech by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell MBE
to the Oxford Bow Group, at the Oxford Union, Oxford,
4.30 pm Saturday, 20 May 1989.
My former chief, Mr Edward Heath, has, I see, accused the
Prime Minister of talking "absolute rubbish" about Eritain and the
European Economic Community. More serious than thut sort of
generalised abuse is a specific allegation which he levelled against
her. He said that the Government's position, as outlined by her in
her speech at Bruges last September, would involve Britain in break-
--------- -
ing treaties. That is not so, and I am surprised that the old
virtuoso of the U-turn should have been so forgetful as to make
such an allegation.
At the Consultative Referendum in 1975, the offical Government
statement sent to all electors stated, as',Fact No. 37, that in the
event of a Yes majority Britain's "continued membership of the
Community will depend on the continuing assent of Parliament".
The other signatories of the Treaty of Brussels and of the Single
European Act have been under no misapprehension at all: Britain's
commitment is, and was always, dependent upon the assert of Parlia-
Britain
ment. That / had net renounced, nor inteneed tc renource, the
unrestricted sovereignty of its Parliament, was made perfectly
_
clear to all concerned.
The Prime Minister and the Government believe that the British
Parliament and people are unwilling that laws shall be made for
this country or taxes imposeion its citizens except by Parliament,
and moreover that they do not regard freedom of trade and intercourse
with their European neighbours as justifying European legislation
and government in all manner of other areas. They are, in short,
not content to be made part of a European superstate.
That is an opinion which I share and which, I may mention,
as "consistency" seems to be becoming such a valued commodity nowadays,
I have always shared. In any case, it can be tested at any

-2-
time. It can be tested in Parliament. What is more, it can be
tested at a General Election. If the result confirms the
Government's opinion, then no question of "breaking treaties"
arises. The 'continuing assent of Parliament': and thus of the
people has always been a condition attached to all or any obligations
arising, or alleged to arise, out of our membersihp of the
Community. Mr Heath of all people ought to know that and not, if
I may borrow a phrase from him, "seek to mislead the public", for
it was Mr Heath himself who in a famous phrase asserted that
British membership would require "the full-hearted consent of
Parliament and people".
If Parliament and people have given "full-hearted consent"
to freedom of trade with their Continental counterparts, nobody
has the right to assume that therefore they have given "fullhearted
consent" to be governed from Europe economically,
politically or legislatively. Those who advocate political and
economic union with the other states of the Community ought to be
candid with the electors. They ought to go out of doors and tell
the electors that General Elections would in future become a
charade. "Here", a candidate would have to say to the electors
if he were truthful, "here is my election address and the policy
manifesto of my party; but if you give us a majority I cannot
promise that anything of the kind will happen, because (don't you
see?) all these things are now decided by bodies in Brussels or
Strasbourg where Britain is in a minority."
That would mean the end of democracy in this courtry. Unfortunately,
there are those who would like to see an end of it. They
happen to be the same people as the advocates of European economic
and political union.

LECTURE NATIONAL THEATRE, 6 PM THURSDAY 18 MAY 1989
DIONYSUS AND APOLLO:
FROM AESCHYLUS TO ALFIERI AND NIETZSCHE
The Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell,M.B.E.
I have been fortunate, to the extent that any critic can be
described by the adjective "fortunate", that for the Ereater part
of my lifetime I was completely detached and distracted from that
study of Greek literature which had been my profession in early
years. Confrontation with a Greek classic is consequently apt to
produce a peculiar sensation of shock, in which familiarity and
fluency in the language heighten the sense of
_
astonishment produced by the content. I had not anticipated the
emotional immediacy of the impact which this mechanical cause was
going to produce. I am startled by what I read. I am no less
startled by the fact of being able to read it at all.
We are indeed insufficiently surprised that in 1989 we can
read in the original tongue some forty plays or sc which were
written for, and produced upon, the stage in Athens 2500 years ago
in a world unimaginably remote from ours.
Nietzsche once coined the phrase "a retrospective shudder"
to describe the chilling emotion of realising some horrible fate
narrowly escaped. One is shocked not by the horror of the fate
but by the narrowness of the escape. To realise how narrowly we
missed not possessing the Greek tragedies at all produces just that
sensation of "a retrospective shudder".
There were two perilous ulfs, and not merely one, across ,4 ich,
against all calculable pro,a ility, some - though far from all -

-2-
of the works of the greatest Athenian tragic poets landed in our
hands 2500 years later. The first improbability was that the
written textsof those plays were preserved at all as books to be
catalogued and studied in Alexandria in Egypt, one of the urban
monuments left behind by the brief but infinitely fruitful conquest
of the Near, Middle and Far East by Alexander of Macedon. Once the
literature of classical Athens had found its way in book form
(which is to say, in the form of papyrus rolls) into the library
and university of Alexandria, its survival was guaranteed for some
centuries. That was long enough to make possible the subsequent
perilous transition from papyrus rolls to parchment volumes, which
would continue to be preserved in the new Christian centre of
civilization and learninE improbably created by a British-born
Roman emperor at the mouth of the Slack Sea, at Constantinople.
The volumes, however, were bulky, expensive to reproduce and
correspondingly vulnerable. Sy the ninth century AD - let us
•••••
Western Europeans be permitted, for the purpose of orientation,
to say "by the time of Charlemagne in our own half of the Roman
world" - there was sometimes only one copy of an Athenian author's
work that had survived. At that precise moment the script, and
consequently the manner of copying, Greek underwent a change, and
in swiftly written, small but legi le lettering, with plenty of
abbreviations to save space on the precious parchment, the old
manuscripts that had survived began to be copied and re-copied
again.
The mosticritical danger had now been passed. by the time in
the fifteenth century when hundreds of Greek books and their owners
fled westward before tre advancing Turks, the new printing presses
of Ital y and Germany were ready tc multinly and disseminate them
in the Rebirth of Learnin It ban been a narrow squeak. But
just one copy which survives at the crucial moment, we would never

have had Sophocles. It is horrible enough to realise that we should
only have the half of Shakespeare'sblays if it were not for that
manuscript which the owners of it decided to release for publication
in the First Folio. But to have had no Sophocles at all, no
Aptifone, no 9fdipus, no Philoctetes!
It almost happened; and this sense of the providential, almost
the miraculous - this "retrospective shudder" - adds potency to the
astonishment of the works themselves. We open the printed page,
and we begin to read. In Greek words across twenty-five centuries
a voice is heard that speaks directly, unmistakably, to ouorjemotions
and our own thoughts. It comes with the force - with the terror,
even - of a supernatural happening. The owner of that voice knew
how I think, he knew how I feel: his language, the words he
selected, his syntactical structures, the rhythm of the syllables,
place him in as direct communication with me as with his fellow men
on the curving stone Fe,F of the Athenian theatre. All this
he knew introspectively, because those thoughts ana those emotions
were his.
The people whom printing and grammar schools and universities
enabled in Western Europe to read the Athenian tragedies wnich had
survived did not all at once begin to be astonished, as we are
astonished, by what they read, nor consequently to demand and form
their own explanations of it. The story of how Greek tragedy
became astonishing and problematic to Western Europeans is itself
part of the social, moral and philosophical history of Western
Europe since the fifteenth century. In tracing it, we trace t e
mental and emotional vicissitudes of that Europe itself.
Those who in the fifteenth and sixteentr, centuries - first in
Italy a,d then in the rest of Europe - entered into direct communication
with classical Greece after many centuries of profound
estrangement - Graeca sunt, non possum leFere, "it is Greek,

-4-
cannot read it", was the Latin copyist's conventional entry
when confronted with words in Greek - were quite impressively unsurprised.
Had they not, after all, known all about this before
in Latin dress? These were the same "worthies" of epic poetry
with whom they had been familiar in Virailian and later Latin epic.
The 7_atin tragedies of Seneca, were they not part of the
grammarian's traditional study, and were they not imitations, in
metre and in form, of those Athenian models now readable in Greek?
All this had been familiar, even if, so to speak, in distillation.
The English and English education were affected more than
ordinarily by the impact of Greek scholarship. There is a quality
about Greek as a language which, for reasons mysterious because
presumably profound and complex, exercises a special fascination over
the English mind. The writing of Greek prose and verse became in
England as nowhere else in Europe an integral part of humane
education; and the results must have been partly reflected in
-----
the relative excellence of Greek scholarship in this country, where
it used to be said at one time that to have published a new edition
of a Greek tragedy was the surest passport to a bishopric. M.ilton
(a good scholar in Greek as well as Latin) used in Samson A-onistes
the form and the conventions of Athenian tragedy with as great
assurance and familiarity as he had used the forms of classical
epic in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Samson is the work
of a poet imbued by the study of Greek tragedy in Gree : it is not
work a
English drama, but ztill - /of English poetry in
dramatic literary form.
:nad
For the seventeenth century Greek trage .yiremained unprobiematic
r:ev the seort to turn in the lock when
European dramatists the forms of Greek tragedy and
the themes of Grek mythology - ich it had handled fulfil
a modern demand for emotional expression and moral analysis. t

-5-
the implications of the Greek originalsremained unrealised so long
as the baroque spirit reigned, interpreting the Greek phenomenon
through its own aspiration for classic assurance and predictability.
Of this period Racine may stand as the type, claiming
in
that/Hippolytus and Phaedra he had found that "tragedy can still be,
as it had been with the Ancients, a school of virtue". Indeed
"in no other work", it has been said of Racine,"has virtue been given
more emphasis. The slightest faults are punished and vice is painted
motivated, it
in all its horror". Thus/was not likely that the age of Louis XIV
would be tempted to enquire from what social seedbed those products
had sprung which found themselves so miraculously transmitted to it
from classical Athens.
There is already a perceptible shift, not to say advance, in
comprehension and inquisitiveness between the baroque perception
wtich was
of Greek tragedy and the perception/brought to it by the Romantics
as the eighteenth century proceeded. -'is is the reason why I have
chosen, in the title of this lecture, to take Alfieri as
intermediary between the Renaissance and Nietzsche. Alfieri,
along with other forerunners of the Italian Risorgimento, might
be obsessed with the ideals of political and individual liberty;
but when he related the classical trage ies to contemporary life,
he was not in pursuit of virtue and vice as abstractions whose
respective triumph and humiliation were to be displayed. He was
in business as a psychologist, enquiring what happens in human
psychopathology when a Medea avenges her husband's inficelity by
murdering their children.
It is a weird sensation which overtakes a reader fa iliar with
the Greek traedies when the well-known material is re-presented
with so Agamemrcn,
fisr /clinical a passion. ' with a presentiment of the
fate awaiting him at the hands of the adulterer Aegisthus, describes
thus
it/to his daughter Electra:

-6-
"Our savage fathers
Engraved on us in characters of blood
This mutual hate. Yes, rationality in me
Holds it in check, but naught can e'er extinguish it".
Thisuspicion of being genetically programmed,tY confrontation of
the rational and the irrational in human nature - it is as if Alfieri
forward
had leapt/by a kind of intuition into the age of Nietzsche and Freud.
The Romantics had supped full of horrors in the age of revolution and
revolt. The dark downside of human nature was for them not to be
tidied away and banished out of existence by the moralities. Yet
the decisive insight was still to come.
One leg of the divider is planted on Racire's Phedre in 1677,
other
while, pivoting on Alfieri's Agamennone in 1777, the/point
lands in 1872 upon the publication of Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of
Traged.h. An element hitherto neglected had come into play at last.
Thatelement was music. Though its music, unlike its text, is
irrecoverably lost to us, Greek trage y was - to use, by a little
anticipation, an impermissibly Wagnerian word - music drama.
lgnoren at the time, Arthur Schopenhauer, in his World as Will
ano Imagination had already in 1819 announced that through music alone
does man have partial access to the otherwise unfathomable reality
irrational
which underlies the world of phenomena— C to the dark/downside
of human nature, of which the two spheres,' reason and unreason,
are dedicated respectively to Apollo and
The young Professor of Classical Philology at the Universi
of Basle had won his meteoric promotion by an idiosyncratic stu j
of the poems of Theognis in the light of the society and the social
conditions in which tney were coinpoasec On Friedrich Nietzsche
there dawned,consciously for the first time in Western Europe, the
full terror of that improbable event in fifth century Athens when
song and dance in the worship of the god of wine and demonic
possession, Di nysus, gave birth to verba ised song ann drama. It

-7-
was an event like that enacted in toe fourth movement cf
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony when sound breaks into coherent speech.
The sub-title of Nietzsche's book was "The Birth of Tragedy out of
the Spirit of Music". Noting was ever to be the same again in the
European perception of Greek tragedy. Man is a social animal
desperately vulnerable to the conflict between his emotional
structure and his intellectual endowment. The Greeks, as an exceptionally
precocious and sensitive race - Nietzsche described
them as civilised savages - suffered fearfully under this tension.
For coping with it and protecting themselves against being destroyed
by it they evolved a form of art in which music, the Dionysiac in
man,is merged into the ostensibly rational Apollinian in music and
structured language. The music d ama of the Athenians was a
rest content
therapeutic invention of unique potency. We cannot at the
level of inarticulate sound: persons and words, events and intermust
reiationshipsyemerge from it and invest themselves with poetic
- - -
language.
The therapy of the Athenian tragic theatre was an action,
a doing ("drama" means "a doing"), which healed and assuaged
mysteriously by crystallising emotions into human figures and
horrors into interpretable events. The myth, spoken or related,
Is
like Agamemnon/presentiment in Alfieri of the primeval roots of
the family feud of the sons of Atreus, was a vocalisation of t at
which musical sound alone could nct-fl1 intimate or express. How
came, we wonder, our European forefathers to overlook the brutal
fact that Athenian tragedy was acted in mask The actor, his face
invisible, moved, stood, arrive , depa ted, finc spoke his lines as
an articulate voice emerging from the static facial expression of
the mask. He was a persona, as the word occurs in dramatis personae
that is to say)an object which is spoken through.
I have men ioned, unavoidably, Wagner's sikdrama. History
occasionally cuilty of makinF pac nuns. it perretrated one wien

it brougnt young Professor Nietzsche to the Villa Wahnfried under
the misapprehension that Wagner and Bayreuth represente the
re-marriage in Wilhelmine Germany of Dionysus and Apollo. Like
many prodigious and self-assured doers, Wagner longed for an
intellectual rationalisation of his creative activities. He had
already discovered and swallowed Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche's
academic interpretation of Athenian drama as the Birth of Tragedy
from the Spirit of ",usic seemed just the right thing for the inauguration
of Bayreuth, where the performances were to be - were they
not? - a Bdhnenweihfestspiel, a "sacred festival of drama". Nietzsche,
who hao allowed himself to share and encourage the misapprehension,
turned up, took one look at Bayreuth and fled horrified into the
depths of the Black Forest.
The brief and brilliant achievement of Athens in the fifth
century BC remained unique, in its causes and in its context: it
was indeed - and this was a necessary secret in redient
unselfconscious, dependent, during its almost butterfly-brief existence
upon that which the Athenians staged, watched and heard remaining
safe in the twilight between ritual and reason, sacrament and
reality. "Brief" is in fact the essential adjective for the tragic
theatre of fifth century Athens. A nation like our own, with four
centuries of continuity between its present and the outburst of
Elizabethan court drama entitled "Shakespeare", is ill-placed to
assess a meteor which flared for barely a single human lifetime,
born on the morrow of Athens' "patriotic war" against the Persian
invader in 480-479 BC and already cissoiving before the f atric dal
war with Sparta which broke out in ir;': BC had run half its
disastrous course.
Cur handicap in coming to rips with that phenomenon is tt we
have lost all trace of what was evidently an essential componen
alway:E
of the tragic drama - the satyr play, ch/foilowed, complemented

-9-
and (etymology renders use of the word permissible) satirised the
preceding three tragedies which the wealthiestAthenians had vied
with one another to offer for the delectation of their fellow
citizens at the feast of Dionysus.
The fact that comedies - a
different thing from the satyr plays, even if derivative - of one
single playwright, Aristophanes, have come down to us across the
same passage perilous as the handful of a few score tragedies, is
no adequate compensation for the loss. If tragedy was essentially
therapeutic, the re-presentation of its themes in terms of mockery
was surely prophylactic, a kind of in oculation aEainst the inroads
of the fateful virus on which Athenian tragedy was fated to expire,
the virus of self-consciousness or introspection.
It was in those precise years when Sophocle>was staging the
horror dramas of the Houses of Thebes and Argos as the Antigone
or the Electra , and linking them through the figures of Oedipus
andOrestes . . to the cultic ..
life of his native city, that the Athenians
became addicted to the practice of self-examination, to asking
themselves the questions, 'Wry do we do this?' and 'What do we mean
by this?'. It was an addiction destined to have immense reverberation
down the history of the ancient world and of Western Europe;
for
arguably Western man is philosophic man. But for tragedy it was
mortal.
As the arch-destroyer of the tragedy which had been born
out of the spirit of music, Nietzsche i.entified Socrates.
search for selr-iKnowiedge - gnothi seauton, "know thyself" - through
the process of interrogation and definition was incompati"-le with
that naivety essential to the terapeutic function or the tragic
drama, instinctual self-abandonment to the incomprehensibility of
the tragic drama itself. A myth rationally questioned is a myth
destroyed.
By the time the Athenians got around to making Socrates
crink nemlock, it was
too late. The quest ons had been asken, and
tu not get themselves ked again.

In the event, it was the third of those tragic dramatists of
the fifth century whose works have partially reached the modern world,
who first insi ted upon interrogating the traditional tragic myths
as he turned them into drama. Aristophanes, in his play The Frogs,
describes how the god Dionysus, despairing of the decline of the
tragic stage in Athens, descends to the underworld and holds a
competition between Aeschylus and Euripides to decide which of them
to bring back to life again.
Of the intended contrast between the
earlier, unquestioning generation and the later, philosophising
generation the audience - an audience by which it appears the cynicism
of Euripides was widely appreciated - is left in no doubt at the
end of The Frogs. Once questioned, the mythic world, through which
the music and the dance had achieved visibility and vocalisation as
tragedy, was perceived to be irrational and even immoral. It could
no longer a therapeutic, social role. The
411
Athenian tragic theatre, like the equally brief episode of Athenian
artistic and naval hegemony, perished by suicide: the intellectual
side of the Athenians' nature had risen up against the instinctual
and unconscious side and had subdued it. Apollo paid the penalty
of thaténlightenment and departed with Dionysus into the shadows.
The age of the tragt dramatists was succeeded by the age of the
rhetoricians and the philosophers.
The Greeks of the f- th century found themselves addressing
to the fifth century the sort of questions that were not to be
raised again until they were asked in Western Europe in the later
nineteenth century
the relatively commonplace business of
dissecting and discrediting the old mytn logy had been succeeded
by a more profound enquiry.
How came tre irrational to be so
transfigured in tragic drama, and what function did that trans, u-
ration perform for the society and tie state wh ch had created arc
nurturec itl What did the tragic drama do for them; And wmat

accounts for the response which Greek tragedy can still evoke from
its spectators in a twentieth century environment so inconceivably
remote from its original setting under the shadow of the
Parthenon-crowned Acropolis?
I quote from Aristotle's Poetics his celebrated definition
of the Greek tragedy. It is, he wrote, "the imitation of serious
and purposeful action of sufficient maanitude, which achieves
through pity and terror the purgation of passions of that kind.
This is achieved partly with poetry and partly with music, in
lanauage rendered pleasing by its metre and its versification".
In Aristotle's characteristically cramped wording (which I have
been obliged, for the purpose of translation, somewhat to disentangle)
one is astonished to recoEnise what is essentially the
Nietzschean diagnosis. On that word "purgation", katharsis, an
ocean of commentary has been written. Aristotle seems to intend to
1111
say that a kind of orgasm or detumescence of emotions is achieved
by evoking them - in particular, pity and terror - in a controlled -
and formal presentation, enabled to do its work by the power and
beauty of language and music.
In so far as by implication the emotions, unless thus released,
would be harmful, it seems to me impossible to deny that knistotle
had identified the function - and it is a social function of the
Athenian tragic drama as therapeutic. It restored or it protected
emotional health. What seems to me also indisputable is that
Aristotle recognised the essential role of music - that one element
which has failed to reach us across the intervening twenty-three
centuries - in enabling tragedy to performt* social function.
we are thus confronted with the remarkable and ironical phenomenon
that the Greek spirit of self-exami ation and the Greek oassior
for rational definition which had proved destructive to the Atheni
t -t
tragic drama achieved an ihsig k. into tI. nature o/drarna which

eluded the successor culture of Western Europe until almost
yesterday - a therapeutic expedient, which by reconciling the
Dionysiac element in human nature with the verbalising and intellectual
Apollinian, provided relief from the intolerable tension
between the two that is a part of the human condition.
Aristotle was evidently fascinated by the importance of
music for what he called "purgation" or katharsis. He returns to
the subject specifically in his treatise on Politics, to emphasise
that some sorts of music are more powerful than others in inducing
and thus helping to discharge the emotions of "pity" and "terror",
but that, though some personalities are more sensitive to this
influence than others, it is a general characteristic of music.
Strikingly 1wever though the Aristotelian diagnosis resembles
that of the late nineteenth century, thetwo /are not identical. There
is one significant element in t e asto ishment with which the
contemporary European ap-roaches Athenian tragedy that lay outside
the purview of earlier periods. It is a difference due to the rise -
of the biological and human sciences since the mid nineteenth
century, which has concentrated our attention upon man as a social
animal and enormously enlarged the timescale within which we try
to understand the behaviour of man in society. The hidden darker
side of human nature, with which the combination of Dionysus and
Apollo developed as a means of copine, is understood by modern man
in terms of the eiolution and the survival of sue society to . len
the in 'ividual belongs. It was somethinF about the Greeks as a
peo,le which made it possible necessary for them to create
tragedy out of the spirit of music. The decisive insight of
Nietzsche was to identify their primitiveness - their "savaEeryn,
he called it - as the quality which made tra,gic drama necessary
and attainable for them. rler he used to say in his last
incoherent year "Wagner, I hate his music, but I can near no ot'er".

There is something of that sense of alarm in the emotion with which
we suddenly feel the impact upon us of the words - cespoiled even
though they are of the accompanying and seminal music - which
sounded through the archaic masks of the Athenian actors two and
a half millennia ago. It is a revelation not of the Greeks, not
even of ourselves, but of humanity, which evokes by art and discharges
the passions of pity and of dread. There is a well-worn
story of how Galileo refuted the fable that the Assyrians boiled
eggs by whirling them around in slings. Half a dozen of the strongest
n in Italy were conscripted for experiment. When they dro ped
with exhaustion, leaving the egg as raw as when they started,
Galileo remarked, "Evidently we neec Assyrians". The lesson of
Greek tragedy is that we need no Athenians. e are Athenians toc.

ADDRESS by the Rt Hon. J. Enoch Powell, M.B.E.
CHELSEA LUNCHEON CLUB
17 May 1989
Some of the problems and calamities which a nation encounters
are unforeseeable. Others are predictable. The4g Batter appear
to be incurred with open eyes, as if a man were deliberately to
step off the pavement into the path of an oncoming omnibus. This
class of troubles, those which could have been avoided but were not,
present an object of eternal fascination to the observer of politics,
especially in a parliamentary nation like our; where fears and
anticipations can be openly voiced and which has a forum where they
can be brought to public debate.
It was my fate during thirty-seven years of parliamentary life
to have had a grandstand seat and even been a vocal spectator at a
number of these events. I want to interest you in a typical specimen.
There has never been any possible means of avoiding the fact
that when the lease of Kowloon and the New Territories expires in
1997, the entire colony of Hong Kong must revert to Chinese ownership
and sovereignty. Anyone whom it concerned to know this, has known
it for a very long time. Something else was knowable also: when
the colony reverted to Chinese sovereignty, the Chinese would be
content with nothing less than the full plenitude of effective
control. This was knowledge, but it was uncomfortable knowledge
for those to whom the plenitude of effective Chinese control was
likely to be disagreeable. They would prefer, if possible, to go
elsewhere in that event, taking with them the tenacious enterprise
and busyness which is the hallmark of their race.
Once upon a time, when our world was conveniently divided betwee
British subjects and aliens, the people of the Colony, like those
of Britain's other colonies and possessions, were British subjects;
but in 1962 the United Kingdom, by legislation which no political

-2-
party ever ventured to reverse, restricted the right of entry
and abode in Britain to those British subjects alone who had a
certain close defined connection with it, primarily by birth. Since
1962 therefore people from Hong Kong, unless they happened on other
grounds to come within that special definition, have had no right
to be admitted to the United Kingdom.
That large numbers of them would nevertheless, both before
and after the Colony reverts to China, clamour to be allowed to
enter and settle in Britain, was perfectly foreseeable. However,
the government of the day, which happens to be the present
Government, professed to believe that no such clamour would arise
and asserted moreover that they had no intention, if it did, of
giving way to it. On the contrary, they affirmed that the people
of Hong Kong would be so happy and satisfied with life under Chinese
sovereignty that no desire to go elsewhere would cross their minds.
Nevertheless, at the same time as they uttered these remarkable
and improbable expectations, Her Majesty's Government did a most
peculiar thing. They persuaded Parliament to pass a Bill creating
a new citizenship, for which most of the inhabitants of Hong Kong
would be eligible. Hitherto, under the British Nationality Act 1981,
they had been Citizens of a British Overseas Territory. That was
of course a category to which no right of entry or abode in the
United Kingdom attached. The new category which the Bill created
was called - believe it or not - "British Nationals (Overseas)".
In creating it the Government announced that it would carry no
right of entry or abode in the United Kingdom. They claimed,
however, that the innovation would give reassurance and satisfaction
to those concerned.
How on earth anybody was to be gratified by being taken out
of one category which gave him no rights in the UK and put into
another category which also gave him no rights in the UK, remained

-3-
unexplained. As an old-fashioned City banker used to observe,
"There is no taste in nothing". Parliament, however, despite the
efforts of a certain inquisitive individual, swallowed the Government's
assurance and obediently ineacted the new citizenship.
Of course, there had to be an explanation; and ac there was.
At the moment of confirming that it would duly relinquish
BritainUt'v
Hong Kong to China in 1997, / choseAto declare that a large
proportion of the inhabitants would henceforward be "British
nationals". All the protesting and explaining in the world will
convince nobody that "British national" does not mean the same as
"French national" or "German national" - a person with the right
of entry and abode in the country concerned. If it was not intended
to mean that, why invent the category in the first place? It
simply passes all credibility to suppose that HMG did not know
what would be the consequences of what they were doing. The new
invention was calculated to deceive: on the one hand, for home
consumption, it was claimed that Hong Kong people would have no
increased rights in Britain; on the other hand, those Hong Kong
people and probably the Chinese government as well would draw their
own conclusion, namely, that, to put it brutally, British nationality
was being given all of a sudden to 3i million people.
--
The inevitable and foreseeable consequence is now starting
41/ to arrive. "Clamour for Britain to grant rights of residence"
Li
runs the title of a recent article on Hong Kong in The Times.X, 44;3
he 3i million people are now described as "having a British passport".
A spokesman said to be "one of the Governor's top advisers",was
reported to have scaled the heights of Alice in Wonderland by
declaring that "HMG should demonstrate its confidence in the 1984
Declaration by giving the people of Hong Kong an option, knowing
that if things work out they will not leave Hong Kong". In other
words, by offering people free entry into Britain you encourage
them to stay in Hong Kong.

It is impossible that t developments/should not have been
foreseen as recently as only five years ago. It is also impossible
that five years ago it not b4.e-be-e-ri foreseen that the
creation of a new status described in statute as "British nationality"
would enormously increase the pressure, domestic and international,
upon Britain to admit for residence large numbers of persons who
for a whole generation (since 1962) had had no such expectation and
who moreoever had always known that sovereignty over Hong Kong would
revert to China in 1997.
It would be too easy to accuse the Government - indeed, I am
not sure I did not at the time accuse it - of "cheating" the British
public by pretending that control on entry from Hong Kong into the
United Kingdom would be maintained while all the while fuelling in
Hong Kong and China the expectation of eventual relaxation under
pressures whichtheirown actions appeared to encourage and invite.
Today I wonder if it can be appropriate to apply the description of
"cheating" to circumstances where the facts were always so blatant.
The real interest of the event lies elsewhere.
How did the House of Commons (not to mention the revivified
House of Lords), how did our vigilant and critical Press and our
political commentators, how did the public at large manage contentedly
contradictory
to ignore the perpetration of proceedings so palpably/an%threateningly
dangerous? It is not as if they were hole-and-corner. There
was a White Paper, a Bill and parliamentary debates - not, for once,
curtailed by a guillotine! Attention was vocally drawn, inside and
outside Parliament, to the outcome to be expected. Yet no one took
the blindest bit of interest until quite suddenly that outcome now
becomes newsworthy and the subject of remark.
Having asked myself the question, I have the embarrassment of
trying to answer it. Others may be more successful. For myself,
I have to confess that I take refuge in Bagehot's celebrated
description of the English as a "deferential" people. Let those in

-5-
positions of authority talk the most arrant nonsense to them,
and thet say to one another: "Surely there has to be something
wrong about us, if what appears to us nonsensical is talked of as
sense by such respectable folk. We must keep our doubts to ourselves".
So they keep their doubts to themselves until the handle
of the rake comes up and hits them on the back of the head,
whereupon, with the utmost surprise and indignation, they exclaim:
"Why weren't we told? Why didn't somebody foresee all this?"
One could of course, and I occasionally do, accuse the
supine inertness of Her Majesty's Opposition, whose business
after all it is to be constantly on the qui vive. Alas, they too
are "deferential". They too partake of the characteristics of
their fellow countrymen out of doors. So in the end the conclusion
has to be - and is it so surprising, after all? - that the public
gets what it asks for and that what it asks for reflects its own
long-suffering, uncritical and compliant disposition.

Address by the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell to a Tercentenary Tnanksgiving
Rally at the City Hall, Glasgow, 2.30 p.m., Saturday 13 May 1989.
41
It is no sectarian or local commemoration and thanksgiving in
which we are engaged this afternoon.
If in 1b89 James Stuart had succeeded in driving William of
Orange from the thrones of England and Scotland, or if he had even
succeeded in making the kingdom of Ireland into a permanently hostile
base against England under his own effective control, it is as certain
as any of the might-have-beens in history that the people of the United
Kingdom would not have inherited 300 years of unbroken and broadening
parliamentary democracy and religious freedom. The defence and relief
of Londonderry and the battles of the Boyne and Aughrim belong to the
history of England and the history of Scotland. Upon the walls of
Londonderry and along the banks of the Boyne the rights and liberties
of the English and the rights and liberties of the Scots were as surely
at stake as in any of the other epic encounters enshrined in our
national memories.
A Stuart king, victorious in 1689 by force of arms, would have
governed, as his cousins and contemporaries across the English Channel
were governing and continued to govern, by despotic power, dispensing
with the advice and consent of the nation's representatives; and he
0 would have used that despotism to force upon the people of his kingdoms
a church and a religion which they had rejected and which offended their
national pride. A yoke so odious might, indeed, and probably would,
eventually have been thrown off; but that would have been at the price
of a convulsion like that of the French Revolution, which tore legitimate
authority away from its historic moorings and left behind an
enduring legacy of intolerance and hatred.
The men of 1689 fought as they did because they knew that all this
was in the balance. We mingle with our thanksgiving to Providence our

-2-
•
gratitude to those men; but we owe them something more than mere
passive gratitude. Our commemoration of them would be empty and
insulting if we were not ourselves asserting, in our own time and
circumstances, the inheritance which they purchased for us.
A parliamentary nation is a free and unforced association. It is
by a free act of choice that from one end of the nation to the other
young and old, men and women, send to Parliament those who will hold
the government to account and will make or reform the laws by which all'
•
freely consent to be bound. The people do not have to do this. They
do it not because they must but because they so choose, and that act of
choice is what defines the British nation. Its boundaries are confirmed
whenever its people, all its people, renew their decision by electing
a new parliament under which they will all be equally governed in the
same way. Of that principle, however, there is a flagrant blemish
which calls out for remedy. We cannot decently gather here today without
remembering that one part of the United Kingdom, whose electors by
z:
a majority of:-sixteen/to one exercise their free choice to continue
P-
belonging to it,is denied its right to be governed in consequence like
the rest of the kinEdom is governed.
For over three years now the remainder of the United Kingdom has,
looked mutely on, while the government of British citizens in Northern
Ireland was shared with an external country under a treaty such as
James II himself would have blushed to make with Louis of France. To
condone that behaviour while pretending to celebrat.2 the boon of
parliamentary government and of liberty under the law which the forefathers
of those very citizens once won by their valour would be the
very height of humbug.
It is not only in Northern Ireland that the last twenty years have
seen the principle of self-government throu h a freely elected parliament
endangered. In those years the United Kingdom has goneid-arOuSfar
down the road of surrenderin(7 the sovereign independence of its

-3-
own parliament in order to be politically amalgamated with all the
assorted populations on the European continent from Calais to Athens
and from Lisbon to Lombardy. Happily in this tercentenary year,
anxiety and indignation have begun to be tempered with a growing hope.
If words have not lost their natural meaning, Her Majesty's Government
has now declared itself determined at hst to go not a step farther
down that dishonourable road but to assert in the face of the world th
principles which prevailed in 1689.
,
Let us on the three hundredth anniversary repee4 what those
•
principles are. The British people will not submit to be taxed except
with their own consent in their own House of Commons. The British
people will not submit to be bound by laws which have not been made by
themselves in their own parliament. Under those laws alone and in the
courts of their own country will the British people consent to be
judged. They said so in 1689, and they sealed their declaration by
victory on the field of battle. They say so again in 1989,rd they
will not surrender in this generation the rights that were so bravely
won and so long maintained against all comers.