The explanation of Mr. Enoch Powell

For some months Mr. Enoch Powell, who resigned from Macmillan’s government in 1958, along with Mr. Thorneycroft, and refused to serve with the present Prime Minister, Sir Alec Home, has enlivened the political scene with periodic outbursts of a kind most embarrassing to his own party. In January he described the policy of trying to check wages, prices and profits as hocus-pocus, and dangerous nonsense. He attacked the National Incomes Commission and National Economic Development Council and declared that their plans won’t work :

“We don’t know how to make them work. In fact they can’t work in any society which we are prepared to contemplate.”

He ridiculed a pious statement made by employers’ representatives on Neddy about their intention lo keep prices down and told them to get on with their proper job of making as much profit as possible.

“Managements have no business to accept any responsibility for prices. The duty of every management is to conduct business in the way which . . . is likely to maximise the return on the capital invested in the business.”

In February he fired some more broadsides against too much government interference with the activities of private profit seekers and in April went to Glasgow to denounce government schemes to encourage firms to move into that and other areas where unemployment is above the National average level.

The Guardian on 4th April reported him as openly proclaiming that his Party is the Party of capitalism:

“Whatever else the Unionist Party stands for, unless it is the party of free choice, free competition and free enterprise, unless —and I am not afraid of the word—it is the party of capitalism, then it has no function in the contemporary world, then it has nothing to say in modern Britain.”

The leaders of the Labour Party, seeing in this something they could use in the forthcoming election, were delighted and hastened to congratulate him on his courage and candour.

In Conservative circles he got no support, except from odd lots such as the City Press. His own colleagues lost no time in repudiating him and deploring his utterances—they too had an eye on the reactions of voters.

Some of them set themselves to explain the man. The Sunday Telegraph called him “a don with a brilliant analytical mind in the best Cambridge tradition,” and an advocate of “an intellectualist version of the late Sir Waldron Smithers” the same Waldron Smithers who provided evenings of hilarious entertainment in defending capitalism and the New Testament against the SPGB.

Powell certainly has some qualities which set him above most of his fellow conservatives.

When he has an idea he does not at all mind pursuing it logically to its conclusion no matter how distressing this may be to his party. After he resigned in 1958 he roundly attacked the Keynesian doctrines that have for so long been the fashion not only in Labour and Liberal circles but also among the economists in the Tory Party.

But it is true that he suffers, as one critic said, from a certain political innocence—he does not appreciate that as capitalism depends for its continuance on the deception of working class voters, it is expedient that certain dangerous truths should never be stated by those who do not want to end capitalism.

If Powell’s own statements were lucid and straightforward the reactions to them were remarkable, chiefly for contradiction and confusion. The Labour politicians and Peers seized on them as proof that the Tory Party is opposed to “planning,” forgetting that one of his principle criticisms of Macmillan’s and Home’s policies is that there is too much planning. As recently as November last the Labour Party journal, Socialist Commentary, under the title “All Socialists Now,” instanced the action of the Ministry of Housing in planning a large-scale rebuilding plan for Fulham as proof that “no one can any longer oppose that . . . socialist concept—planning.” It was, however, Mr. Thorneycroft (who had resigned with Powell in 1958, but is now back in office) who made the most curious contribution. Declaring Powell’s view—that “ the Conservative party must offer the capitalist system to the public, or nothing,” Thorneycroft answered that “The Tory party is a great deal bigger than the capitalist system.”

Logically this is an absurdity. How can the.party which administers capitalism in order to preserve it, be greater than the system itself? Thorneycroft was not being candid. What he really meant, but could not say, is that those whose purpose it is to persuade the workers to go on accepting capitalism knew very well that they cannot do this in the somewhat odious name of capitalism itself, but have succeeded in doing it by calling on the workers to vote for capitalism’s facade, the Tory party and its so-called “Welfare State.”

But this is not peculiar to the Tory party. It covers all the governing parties all over the world and all the Opposition parties straining to replace them and carry on the same function with minor modifications. In spite of a few Enoch Powell’s here and in other countries, capitalism is now administered over most of the earth’s surface in the name of “Socialism.” Attlee, who was Labour Prime Minister from 1945-51 set the pattern. Having written in 1937 that “a Socialist party cannot hope to make a success of administering the capitalist system because it does not believe in it,” he spent six years trying to do just that while pretending to do something else. Stalin, Krushchev, Mao and the rest followed Attlee’s example though more blatantly and crudely. Home, like Attlee, cannot prevent those in Britain who know what capitalism is when they see it, from saying so: Krushchev and his like can, so far, prevent the embarrassing fact of the existence of capitalism from being given public utterance.

H.

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