title: William Edgar Easton

texts:
<mask> (March 19, 1861January 10, 1936) was an American playwright, journalist, and political activist. He wrote two plays about the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath: Dessalines (1893), a historical drama about Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and Christophe (1911), a drama about Henri Christophe, King of Haiti following the Revolution. Life

Early years (1861–1883)
<mask> was born on March 19, 1861, in New York City, to <mask> and Charles F<mask>. His mother was a native French speaker whose family had immigrated to New Orleans from France; the <mask>s spoke both English and French at home. <mask> was descended from a participant in the Haitian Revolution. On his father's side, he was a descendant of <mask>, the brother of <mask>. James was a veteran of the Revolutionary War—he planned the fortification of Dorchester Heights—and a prominent figure in the Black community of Massachusetts in the early Republic.Although born in New York, <mask> grew up mainly in New Bedford, Massachusetts. His mother died when he was 13 years old. Following her death, he came under the care of his godmother, whom Beasley calls the "Baroness de Hoffman". The Baroness, in turn, put <mask> under the care of an unnamed Catholic priest. Thereafter, <mask> attended school at a number of Catholic institutions: a seminary in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, likely the Séminaire Saint-Joseph de Trois-Rivières; La Salle Academy in Providence, Rhode Island; and in a "college of the Congregation of St Croix". Beasley does not record which college this was, but the use of the French term Sainte Croix for "Holy Cross" suggests that <mask> attended one of the several schools in Quebec organized by the Congregation. Another source claims he attended "St.

masks:
William Edgar Easton
Easton
Marie Antoinette Leggett Easton
. Easton
Easton
Marie Antoinette Leggett Easton
Moses Easton
James Easton
Easton
Easton
Easton
Easton


title: William Edgar Easton

type: original

texts:
 Caesar's College, Canada".This appears to be a reference to Collège Saint-Césaire, in Saint-Césaire, Quebec, which founded in 1869 by a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Texas (1883–1901)
<mask> moved to Texas at age 22. Price notes that was a momentous and somewhat unusual decision for <mask> to have made, given that he was "a young man just out of a Canadian Catholic seminary". He married Mary Elizabeth <mask> in 1888 in Austin. He worked as a teacher from roughly 1882 to 1885. While in Texas, <mask> edited at least three newspapers: the Citizen, the Blade, and the Globe. He later served as the inaugural president of the Colored State Press Association.He also held a number of positions with the state Republican Party, beginning an activist career that would last long after he departed Texas. California (1901–1936)
<mask> appears to have moved to California sometime in 1901: in July 1924, he recorded in a biographical sketch he completed for the California State Library that he been in California for 23 years. At the time he completed that profile, he lived at 1764 West 35th Street, Los Angeles and had three daughters and one son. While in California, he held various positions in journalism and politics. Among many other jobs, he worked for a time as a speechwriter for the Republican and Progressive parties. In 1911, he published an editorial in the Los Angeles Herald, denouncing the assault of Booker T. Washington that year in New York City. He wrote: "[t]he ruthless murder of Dr. Washington (call it by its proper name, for that was what was intended) would not only have been the crowning misfortune of the colored race, but a dreadful menace to the state—to the whole nation, the nation that is at this

masks: Easton Easton Easton Easton Easton


title: William Edgar Easton

texts:
 time so seriously endeavoring to solve a most  problem".During World War I, he was picked by Emmett Jay Scott to serve as a member of the Speakers Bureau of the Department of War. After the war ended, he was "designated by the California Historical Survey Commission as chairman of a sub-committee of the California War History Committee to gather and preserve material and information regarding the activities of the colored race in California in connection with their part in helping to win the war". <mask> died on January 10, 1936, at his home in Los Angeles. He was buried at Calvary Cemetery. Religious views
<mask> was Catholic until "sometime after … 1893", when he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He had previously been active in the Colored Catholic Congress, founded in the late 1880s by Daniel Rudd. In 1893, he delivered a lecture on "The Catholic Church and the Negro Race" at St. Joseph's Hall in New Orleans.Works

<mask> wrote two plays that received wide notice at the time, both about prominent figures in the Haitian Revolution: Dessalines (1893) and Christophe (1911). Henrietta Vinton Davis produced and starred in both. He also wrote two other short plays, Is She a Lady in the Underworld? and Misery in Bohemia, which do not seem to have been staged. Dessalines
Hill and Hatch describe Dessalines as a "romantic melodrama written in blank verse". The titular character and male lead of Dessalines is Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a key figure in Haiti's early military and political history. The plot concerns Dessalines's exploits and his relationship with Clarisse, a (probably) mythical figure who converts him to Christianity.Byrd and Twa note that the play glosses over Dessalines's "massacres" and

masks: Easton Easton Easton


title: William Edgar Easton

texts:
 "despotism" in favor of a focus on religious and romantic themes. Byrd argues that Dessalines should be interpreted in light of late 19th-century views of Black masculinity in America. The ideology of white supremacy painted Black people—and in, particular, Black men—as weak, uncivilized, and incapable of running their own affairs. In the view of a number of contemporary Black intellectuals, the example of Haiti and its revolution provided a counterpoint to this ideological fiction: Haiti was an independent republic, like the United States, which had expelled its colonial governors and created a new nation. In his preface to Dessalines, <mask> lamented what he saw as a failure to properly memorialize the heroic deeds of Black people:The Negro alone fails to immortalize his distinguished dead, and leaves to the prejudiced pen of other races, the office, which, by a proper conception of duty to posterity, very properly becomes his duty. …
… the author of this work hopes to see a happier era inaugurated by the constant production of legitimate drama, written exclusively for Negro players and meeting, he hopes, with the full endorsement of the brother in white. For the reasons, as above enumerated, has the author presumed to lay on the altar of race pride the dramatic tale of the heroic Dessalines.The Chicago premiere of Dessalines was at Freiburg's Opera House, on 22nd Street, in September 1893.It featured "a complete cast of colored characters". Henrietta Vinton Davis played Clarisse. The premiere was scheduled to coincide with the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition, but was not billed officially as part of the Exhibition program. Rather, Twa observes that it was staged in "protest against the Exposition's exclusion


title: William Edgar Easton

texts:
 of African Americans in its planning and the rejection of many proposals for exhibits to display the accomplishments of African Americans". Hill and Hatch count two other runs of Dessalines: one in Pittsburgh in 1909, which Davis directed and starred in; and one in Boston in 1930, in a company led by Maud Cuney Hare. The play was reviewed in the Indianapolis Freeman in April 1893. The reviewer expressed some displeasure that <mask> had not chosen a subject from American history, writing:… we sincerely hope … the splendid inspiring example set by Mr. <mask> being emulated, will yet give us from the pen of some one of our many brilliant and growing crop of race writers, a drama purely American …The Freeman later offered its readers a copy of Dessalines as part of a holiday promotion.Albion W. Tourgée reportedly stated at the time that Dessalines was "the highest evidence of literary culture thus far produced by an American negro". Christophe
Christophe, reportedly written for Davis, was staged in New York and Los Angeles in spring 1912. In New York, it opened at the Lenox Casino in Harlem, at 102 West 116th Street and Lenox Avenue (now known as Malcolm X Boulevard). Besides Davis, cast members included R. Henri Strange, Lawrence Chenault, Frederick Douglass Hogan, Otis Sherman, and Blanche DeForrest. Proceeds from the New York staging went to a provisional Black regiment of the New York National Guard commanded by Charles W. Fillmore. Notes

Sources

Further reading

External links

1861 births
1936 deaths
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
African-American dramatists and playwrights
People from New Bedford, Massachusetts
Writers from Los Angeles
20th-century African-American

masks: Easton Easton


title: Hans Habe

texts:
<mask> (born János Békessy; 12 February 1911, Budapest – 29 September 1977, Locarno) was a Hungarian and American writer and newspaper publisher. From 1941, he held United States citizenship. He was also known by such pseudonyms as Antonio Corte, Frank Richard, Frederick Gert, John Richler, <mask>, and Alexander Holmes. Life

Early years

<mask> was born as János Békessy in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents, Imre Békessy and Bianca Marton, were of Jewish origin but converted to the Christian (Protestant) faith. After World War I the family moved to Vienna where his father published one of the first daily tabloids, Die Stunde (The Hour), from 1923 to 1926. János was educated at the Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium between 1921 and 1929.Afterwards he started to study Law and German Literature at Heidelberg, but returned soon to Vienna due to the rapidly growing extreme anti-Semitism in Germany. Newspaperman

In 1930 he began to work as a reporter for the Wiener Sonn- und Montagspost (Vienna Sunday and Monday Post). In the following year he became Editor of the Österreichische Abendzeitung (Austrian Evening News), one of the youngest newspaper editors ever, at age 20. Around this time he married his first wife, Margit Bloch. Early in 1934 he moved to the Wiener Morgen (Vienna Morning News). From 1935 to 1939 he was a Foreign Correspondent for the Prager Tagblatt (Prague Daily News), stationed mostly at Geneva, covering the League of Nations and was present at the Évian Conference in 1938. Habe described the course of the Conference in his novel The Mission (1965).The focal point of the novel is the infamous offer made

masks:
Hans Habe
Hans Wolfgang
Habe


title: Hans Habe

texts:
 by the German government, and transmitted to the Conference by Neumann von Héthárs, to sell the Austrian Jews to foreign countries at a price of $250 per capita, and the Conference delegates' refusal to accept. At this time <mask> was married to his second wife, Erika Levy, heiress of the Tungsram light bulb company. Soldier in World War II

After the Anschluss, <mask> was expatriated and his books forbidden by the new Nazi government. He went into exile in France and joined the French Foreign Legion. In 1940 he was captured and interned in the Dieuze transit camp. From there he managed to escape with the help of French friends (to Lisbon) and immigrated to the United States. He became a US citizen by naturalization in 1941.Habe married his third wife, Eleanor Post Hutton, heiress of General Foods, in 1942. They had a son, Anthony Niklas <mask>. In 1942 he was drafted into the US Army and trained in psychological warfare at the Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Then he joined the 1st Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company and went in March 1943 to North Africa to participate in Operation Avalanche, the landing in Italy. In 1944 he became an instructor of psychological warfare at Camp Sharpe, near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In autumn 1944 he selected a group of German writers and newspaper editors to prepare for the publishing of new newspapers after the war in Germany. Newspaperman in Germany

In 1945, <mask> returned to Germany in the wake of the occupying US Army.By November 1945 he had created 18 newspapers in the American Occupation Zone. Then he became Editor of the Neue Zeitung in Munich. At this time he was

masks: Habe Habe Habe Habe


title: Hans Habe

texts:
 married for a short time to actress Ali Ghito. In 1949 he moved to the Münchner Illustrierte (Munich Illustrated), and, in 1951, to the Echo der Woche (Echo of the Week). From 1952 to 1953 he wrote the column Outside America for the Los Angeles Daily News. When the Echo der Woche ceased to appear in 1953, he settled in Ascona, Switzerland, and wrote mostly novels. Murder of daughter
In 1948, he married his fifth wife, American actress Eloise Hardt (17 September 1917 – 25 June 2017); the couple had one child, Marina Elizabeth <mask> (23 February 1951 – 30 December 1968), who was murdered at age 17.She was a student at the University of Hawaii home on vacation when she was murdered in Los Angeles. According to the autopsy report, <mask>'s body was found fully clothed, with the exception of one shoe lying nearby. Her throat had been slashed and she had received numerous knife wounds to the chest. She suffered multiple contusions to the face and throat, and had been garrotted. No alcohol or barbiturates were found in her blood. There was no evidence of rape. <mask> was abducted outside the home of her mother in West Hollywood, 8962 Cynthia Avenue.The neighborhood had been the location of a number of rapes in the weeks prior to her murder. A former Manson Family associate claimed members of the Family had known Habe and it was conjectured she had been one of their victims. Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi recorded that the teenager bled to death. Survived by both parents, <mask> was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City following a requiem mass at Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church in Beverly Hills. <mask>'s sixth and last wife

masks:
Habe
Habe
Habe
Marina Habe
Habe


title: Enoch Powell

texts:
<mask>  (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963). Before entering politics, <mask> was a classical scholar. During World War II, he served in both staff and intelligence positions, reaching the rank of brigadier. He also wrote poetry, and many books on classical and political subjects. <mask> attracted widespread attention for his "Rivers of Blood" speech, delivered in April 1968 to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. In it, <mask> criticised the rates of immigration into the UK, especially from the New Commonwealth, and opposed the anti-discrimination legislation Race Relations Bill.The speech drew sharp criticism from <mask>'s own party members and the press, and Conservative Party leader Edward Heath removed <mask> from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary. In the aftermath of the speech, several polls suggested that 67 to 82 per cent of the UK population agreed with <mask>'s opinions. His supporters claimed that the large public following that <mask> attracted helped the Conservatives to win the 1970 general election, and perhaps cost them the February 1974 general election, when <mask> turned his back on the Conservatives by endorsing a vote for Labour, which returned as a minority government. <mask> was returned to the House of Commons in October 1974 as the Ulster Unionist Party MP for the Northern Ireland constituency of South Down. He represented the constituency until he was defeated at the 1987 general election. Early years
<mask> <mask> was

masks:
John Enoch Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
John Enoch
Powell


title: Enoch Powell

texts: born in Stechford, Worcestershire, within the city of Birmingham, on 16 June 1912, and was baptized at Newport, Shropshire, in the church where his parents had married in 1909. He was the only child of <mask> <mask> (1872–1956), a primary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886–1953).Ellen was the daughter of Henry Breese, a Liverpool policeman, and his wife Eliza, who had been a teacher. His mother did not like his name, and as a child he was known as "Jack". At the age of three, <mask> was nicknamed "the Professor" because he used to stand on a chair and describe the stuffed birds his grandfather had shot, which were displayed in his parents' home. In 1918, the family moved to Kings Norton, Birmingham, where <mask> remained until 1930. The <mask>s were of Welsh descent and from Radnorshire (a Welsh border county), having moved to the developing Black Country during the early 19th century. His great-grandfather was a coal miner, and his grandfather had been in the iron trade. <mask> was "almost certainly the best-known Welsh-speaking politician of the last 50 years."<mask> read avidly from a young age; as early as three he could "read reasonably well". Though not wealthy, the <mask>s were financially comfortable, and their home included a library. <mask> was heavily influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; he came to agree with Nietzsche's assertion that God is dead but returned to Christian belief and practice later in life. <mask> was a pupil at King's Norton Grammar School for Boys before moving to King Edward's School, Birmingham, where he studied classics, and was one of the few pupils in the school's history to attain 100 per cent in an end-of-year English examination. He studied at Trinity

masks:
Albert Enoch
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell
Powell


title: Enoch Powell

texts:
 College, Cambridge, from 1930 to 1933, during which time he fell under the influence of the poet A.E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at the university. He also began to study German as many prominent classics scholars were German.He took no part in politics at university. While studying at Cambridge, <mask> became aware that there was another classicist who signed his name as "John U<mask>". <mask> decided to use his middle name and from that moment referred to himself as "<mask> <mask>". While at university, in one Greek prose examination lasting three hours, he was asked to translate a passage into Greek. <mask> walked out after one and a half hours, having produced translations in the styles of Plato and Thucydides. For his efforts, he was awarded a double starred first in Latin and Greek, this grade being the best possible and extremely rare. As well as his education at Cambridge, <mask> took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, now the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, because he felt that his long-cherished ambition of becoming Viceroy of India would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language.Later, during his political career he would speak to his Indian-born constituents in Urdu. <mask> went on to learn other languages, including Welsh (in which he edited jointly with Stephen J. Williams Cyfreithiau Hywel Dda yn ôl Llyfr Blegywryd, a text on Cyfraith Hywel, the medieval Welsh law), modern Greek, and Portuguese. Academic career

After graduating from Cambridge with a double first, and having won several classics prizes, including the Porson Prize and the Browne Medal, <mask> stayed on at Trinity College as a fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient

masks:
Powell
. Powell
Powell
Enoch
Powell
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Powell
Powell
Powell


title: Enoch Powell

texts:
 manuscripts in Latin and producing academic works in Greek and Welsh. In 1937, he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney aged 25 (failing in his aim of beating Nietzsche's record of becoming a professor at 24). Among his students was future Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam, who described his lectures as 'dry as dust'. He revised Stuart-Jones's edition of Thucydides' Historiae for the Oxford University Press in 1938, and his most lasting contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus, published the same year. Soon after arrival in Australia, he was appointed Curator of the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney.He stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon begin in Europe and that when it did, he would be heading home to enlist in the army. By the time <mask> had left King Edward's School in 1930, he had confirmed his instinctive belief that peace was merely temporary and that the UK would be at war with Germany again. During his time in Australia as a professor, he grew increasingly angry at the appeasement of Germany and what he saw as a betrayal of the UK's national interests. After Neville Chamberlain's first visit to Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, <mask> wrote in a letter to his parents of 18 September 1938:

In another letter to his parents in June 1939, before the beginning of war, <mask> wrote: "It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors". At the outbreak of war, <mask> immediately returned to the UK, but not before buying a Russian dictionary, since he thought "Russia would hold the key to our survival and victory, as it had in 1812 and

masks: Powell Powell Powell Powell


title: Enoch Powell

texts:
 1916". Military service

During October 1939, almost a month after returning home from Australia, <mask> enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Rather than waiting to be called up, he claimed to be Australian, as Australians, many of whom had travelled to Britain at great expense to join up, were allowed to enlist straight away.In a poem, he wrote of men joining the army like "bridegrooms going to meet their brides", but his biographer points out that it is unlikely that many other men shared his joy, particularly not those who were leaving actual brides behind. In later years, <mask> recorded his promotion from private to lance-corporal in his Who's Who entry, on other occasions describing it as a greater promotion than entering the Cabinet. Early in 1940, he was trained for a commission after, while working in a kitchen, answering the question of an inspecting brigadier with a Greek proverb; on several occasions, he told colleagues that he expected to be at least a major-general by the end of the war. He passed out top from his officer training. <mask> was commissioned on the General List in 1940 but almost immediately transferred to the Intelligence Corps. He was soon promoted to captain and posted as GSO3 (Intelligence) to the 1st (later 9th) Armoured Division. During this time he taught himself the Portuguese language to read the poet Camões in the original; as insufficient Russian-speaking officers were available at the War Office, his knowledge of the Russian language and textual analysis skills were used to translate a Russian parachute training manual—a task he completed after 11 pm in addition to his normal duties, deducing the meaning of many technical terms from the context; he was convinced that the Soviet Union

masks: Powell Powell Powell


title: Enoch Powell

texts: must eventually enter the war on the Allied side.On one occasion, he was arrested as a suspected German spy for singing the Horst-Wessel-Lied. He was sent to the Staff College, Camberley. In October 1941, <mask> was posted to Cairo and transferred back to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. As secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee, Middle East, he was soon doing work that would normally have been done by a more senior officer and was (May 1942, backdated to December 1941) promoted to major. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in August 1942, telling his parents that he was doing the work of three people and expected to be a brigadier within a year or two, and in that role helped plan the Second Battle of El Alamein, having previously helped plan the attack on Rommel's supply lines. <mask> and his team began work at 0400 each day to digest radio intercepts and other intelligence data (such as estimating how many tanks Rommel currently had and what his likely plans were) ready to present to the chiefs of staff at 0900. The following year, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his military service.It was in Algiers that the beginning of <mask>'s distrust of the United States began. After socially mixing with senior American officers that he met and exploring their cultural views of the world, he became convinced that one of America's war aims was to destroy the British Empire. Writing home on 16 February 1943, <mask> stated: "I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were... our terrible enemy, America". <mask>'s suspicion of the anti-British Empire demeanor of the U.S. Government's foreign policy continued for the remainder of the war and into his subsequent post-war

masks: Powell Powell Powell Powell Powell


title: Enoch Powell

texts: political career. He cut out and retained an article from the New Statesman magazine published on 13 November 1943 in which the American writer and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce said in a speech that Indian independence from the British Empire would mean that the "USA will really have won the greatest war in the world for democracy". After the Axis defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, <mask>'s attention increasingly moved to the Far East theatre, and he wanted to go there to take part in the campaign against the Japanese Imperial Army because: "the war in Europe was won now", and he wanted to see the Union Flag back in Singapore before, <mask> feared, the Americans beat the British Empire to it and secured an imperial domination of their own over the region. He had at this time an ambition to be assigned to the Chindits units operating in Burma, and secured an interview with their Commander Orde Wingate to this end while the latter was on a temporary stop-over in Cairo, but <mask>'s duties and rank precluded the assignment.Having declined two posts carrying the rank of full colonel (in Algiers and Cairo, which would have left him in the now moribund North African theatre "indefinitely"), and despite expecting to have to accept a reduction in rank to major in order to get the transfer, he secured a posting to the British Imperial Indian Army in Delhi as a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence in August 1943. Within a few days of arriving in India, <mask> bought as many books as he could about India and read them avidly. On one occasion, he wrote to his parents in a letter "I soaked up India like a sponge soaks up water." <mask> was appointed Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Louis Mountbatten's


title: Enoch Powell

texts: South East Asia Command, involved in planning an amphibious offensive against Akyab, an island off the coast of Burma. Orde Wingate, also involved in planning that operation, had taken such a dislike to <mask> that he asked a colleague to restrain him if he was tempted to "beat his brains in". On one occasion, <mask>'s yellow skin (he was recovering from jaundice), over-formal dress and strange manner caused him to be mistaken for a Japanese spy. During this period, he declined to meet a Cambridge academic colleague, Glyn Daniel, for a drink or dinner as he was devoting his limited leisure time to studying the poet John Donne.<mask> had continued to learn Urdu, consistent with his ambition of becoming Viceroy of India, and when Mountbatten transferred his staff to Kandy, Ceylon, <mask> chose to remain in Delhi. He was promoted to full colonel at the end of March 1944, as assistant director of military intelligence in India, giving intelligence support to the Burma campaign of William Slim. Having begun the war as the youngest professor in the Commonwealth, <mask> ended it as a brigadier. He was given the promotion to serve on a committee of generals and brigadiers to plan the postwar defence of India: the resulting 470-page report was almost entirely written by <mask>. For a few weeks he was the youngest brigadier in the British Army, and he was one of only two men in the entire war to rise from private to brigadier (the other being Fitzroy Maclean). He was offered a regular commission as a brigadier in the Indian Army, and the post of assistant commandant of an Indian officers' training academy, which he declined. He told a colleague that he expected to be head of all military intelligence in "the next war".<mask> never

masks: Powell Powell Powell Powell Powell Powell Powell


title: Enoch Powell

texts:
 experienced combat and felt guilty for having survived, writing that soldiers who did so carried "a sort of shame with them to the grave" and referring to the Second Battle of El Alamein as a "separating flame" between the living and the dead. When once asked how he would like to be remembered, he at first answered, "Others will remember me as they will remember me", but when pressed he replied, "I should like to have been killed in the war". Entry into politics

Joining the Conservative Party
Though he voted for the Labour Party in their 1945 landslide victory, because he wanted to punish the Conservative Party for the Munich agreement, after the war he joined the Conservatives and worked for the Conservative Research Department under Rab Butler, where his colleagues included Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling. <mask>'s ambition to be Viceroy of India crumbled in February 1947, when Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced that Indian independence was imminent. <mask> was so shocked by the change of policy that he spent the whole night after it was announced walking the streets of London. He came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that once India had gone the whole empire should follow it. This logical absolutism explained his later indifference to the Suez crisis, his contempt for the Commonwealth and his urging that the UK should end any remaining pretence that it was a world power.Election to Parliament
After unsuccessfully contesting the Labour Party's safe seat of Normanton at a by-election in 1947 (when the Labour majority was 62 per cent), he was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West at the 1950 general election. First years as a backbencher
On 16

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title: Enoch Powell

texts:
 March 1950, <mask> made his maiden speech, speaking on a White Paper on Defence and beginning by saying, "There is no need for me to pretend those feelings of awe and hesitation which assail any honourable Member who rises to address this House for the first time." On 3 March 1953, <mask> spoke against the Royal Titles Bill in the House of Commons. He said he found three major changes to the style of the United Kingdom, "all of which seem to me to be evil". The first one was "that in this title, for the first time, will be recognised a principle hitherto never admitted in this country, namely, the divisibility of the crown." <mask> said that the unity of the realm had evolved over centuries and included the British Empire: "It was a unit because it had one Sovereign. There was one Sovereign: one realm."He feared that by "recognising the division of the realm into separate realms, are we not opening the way for that other remaining unity—the last unity of all—that of the person, to go the way of the rest?" The second change he objected to was "the suppression of the word 'British', both from before the words 'Realms and Territories' where it is replaced by the words 'her other' and from before the word 'Commonwealth', which, in the Statute of Westminster, is described as the 'British Commonwealth of Nations:

<mask> claimed that the answer was that because the British Nationality Act 1948 had removed allegiance to the crown as the basis of citizenship and replaced that with nine separate citizenships combined together by statute. Therefore, if any of these nine countries became republics the law would not change, as happened with India when it became a republic. Furthermore, <mask> went on, the essence of unity was "that all the


title: Enoch Powell

texts:
 parts recognise they would sacrifice themselves to the interests of the whole." He denied that there was in India that "recognition of belonging to a greater whole which involves the ultimate consequence in certain circumstances of self-sacrifice in the interests of the whole." Therefore, the title 'Head of the Commonwealth', the third major change, was "essentially a sham. They are essentially something which we have invented to blind ourselves to the reality of the position."These changes were "greatly repugnant" to <mask>:

For the rest of his life, <mask> regarded this speech as the finest he ever delivered (rather than the much more well-known 1968 anti-immigration speech). In mid-November 1953, <mask> secured a place on the 1922 Committee's executive at the third attempt. Rab Butler also invited him onto the committee that reviewed party policy for the general election, which he attended until 1955. <mask> was a member of the Suez Group of MPs who were against the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal, because such a move would demonstrate, <mask> argued, that the UK could no longer maintain a position there, and that any claim to the Suez Canal would therefore be illogical. However, after the troops had left in June 1956 and the Egyptians nationalised the Canal a month later, <mask> opposed the attempt to retake the canal in the Suez Crisis because he thought the British no longer had the resources to be a world power. In and out of office

Junior Housing Minister
On 21 December 1955, <mask> was appointed parliamentary secretary to Duncan Sandys at the Ministry of Housing. He called it "the best ever Christmas box".In early 1956, he spoke for the Housing Subsidies Bill in the Commons and argued for the rejection of


title: Enoch Powell

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 an amendment that would have hindered slum clearances. He also spoke in support of the Slum Clearances Bill, which provided entitlement for full compensation for those who purchased a house after August 1939 and still occupied it in December 1955 if this property would be compulsorily purchased by the government if it was deemed unfit for human habitation. In early 1956, <mask> attended a subcommittee on immigration control as a housing minister and advocated immigration controls. In August, he gave a speech at a meeting of the Institute of Personnel Management and was asked a question about immigration. He answered that limiting immigration would require a change in the law: "There might be circumstances in which such a change of the law might be the lesser of two evils". But he added, "There would be very few people who would say the time had yet come when it was essential that so great a change should be made". <mask> later told Paul Foot that the statement was made "out of loyalty to the Government line".<mask> also spoke for the Rent Bill, which ended wartime rent controls when existing tenants moved out, thereby phasing out regulation. Financial Secretary to the Treasury
At a meeting of the 1922 Committee on 22 November 1956, Rab Butler made a speech appealing for party unity in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. His speech did not go down well and Harold Macmillan, whom Butler had taken along for moral support, addressed them and was a great success. In <mask>'s view this was "one of the most horrible things that I remember in politics ... seeing the way in which Harold Macmillan, with all the skill of the old actor-manager, succeeded in false-footing Rab. The sheer devilry of it verged upon the disgusting". After


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texts: Macmillan's death in 1986 <mask> said "Macmillan was a Whig, not a Tory ... he had no use for the Conservative loyalties and affections; they interfered too much with the Whig's true vocation of detecting trends in events and riding them skilfully so as to preserve the privileges, property and interests of his class". However, when Macmillan replaced Eden as Prime Minister, <mask> was offered the office of Financial Secretary to the Treasury on 14 January 1957.This office was the Chancellor of the Exchequer's deputy and the most important job outside the Cabinet. In January 1958 he resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and his Treasury colleague Nigel Birch, in protest at government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch advocate of disinflation, or, in modern terms, a monetarist, and a believer in market forces. <mask> was also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all, which <mask> believed to be the cause of inflation, and in effect a form of taxation, as the holders of money find their money is worth less. Inflation rose to 2.5 per cent, a high figure for the era, especially in peacetime. During the late 1950s, <mask> promoted control of the money supply to prevent inflation and, during the 1960s, was an advocate of free market policies, which at the time were seen as extreme, unworkable and unpopular. <mask> advocated the privatisation of the Post Office and the telephone network as early as 1964, over 20 years before the latter actually took place; and 47 years before the former occurred.He both scorned the idea of "consensus politics" and wanted the Conservative Party to become a modern business-like

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 party, freed from its old aristocratic and "old boy network" associations. In his 1958 resignation over public spending and what he saw as an inflationary economic policy, he anticipated almost exactly the views that during the 1980s came to be described as "monetarism". Hola Massacre speech
On 27 July 1959, <mask> delivered a speech on the Hola Camp of Kenya, where eleven Mau Mau were killed after refusing work in the camp. <mask> noted that some MPs had described the eleven as "sub-human", but <mask> responded by saying: "In general, I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgement on a fellow human being and to say, 'Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow'." <mask> also disagreed with the notion that because it was in Africa, different methods were acceptable:

Denis Healey, a member of parliament from 1952 to 1992, later said this speech was "the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard ... it had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes". The Daily Telegraph report of the speech said that "as Mr <mask> sat down, he put his hand across his eyes. His emotion was justified, for he had made a great and sincere speech".Minister of Health
<mask> returned to the government in July 1960, when he was appointed Health minister, although he did not become a member of the Cabinet until 1962. During a meeting with parents of babies that had been born with deformities caused by the drug thalidomide, he was unsympathetic to the victims, refusing to meet any babies affected by the drug. <mask> also refused to launch a public inquiry, and resisted calls to issue a warning


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 against any left-over thalidomide pills that might remain in people's medicine cabinets (as US President John F. Kennedy had done). In this job, he developed the 1962 Hospital Plan. He began a debate on the neglect of the huge psychiatric institutions, calling for them to be replaced by wards in general hospitals. In his famous 1961 "Water Tower" speech, he said:

The speech catalysed a debate that was one of several strands leading to the Care in the Community initiative of the 1980s. In 1993, however, <mask> claimed that his policy could have worked.He claimed the criminally insane should have never been released and that the problem was one of funding. He said the new way of caring for the mentally ill would cost more, not less, than the old way because community care was decentralised and intimate as well as being "more human". His successors had not, <mask> claimed, provided the money for local authorities to spend on mental health care and therefore institutional care had been neglected while at the same time there was not any investment in community care. After his speech on immigration in 1968, <mask>'s political opponents sometimes alleged that he had, when Minister of Health, recruited immigrants from the Commonwealth into the National Health Service (NHS). However, the Minister of Health was not responsible for recruitment (this was left to health authorities) and Sir George Godber, Chief Medical Officer for Her Majesty's Government in England from 1960 to 1973, stated that the allegation was "bunk ... absolute rubbish. There was no such policy". <mask>'s biographer Simon Heffer also stated that the claim "is a complete untruth.As <mask>'s biographer I have been thoroughly through the Ministry of Health papers at the


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 Public Record Office and have found no evidence to support this assertion". During the early 1960s, <mask> was asked about the recruitment of immigrant workers for the NHS. He replied by saying "recruitment was in the hands of the hospital authorities, but this was something that happened of its own accord given that there was no bar upon entry and employment in the United Kingdom to those from the West Indies or anywhere else [in the Commonwealth or colonies]." <mask> did welcome immigrant nurses and doctors, under the condition that they were to be temporary workers training in the UK and would then return to their native countries as qualified doctors or nurses. Shortly after becoming Minister of Health, <mask> asked R.A. Butler (the Home Secretary), if he could be appointed to a ministerial committee which monitored immigration and was about to be re-constituted. <mask> was worried about the strain by NHS immigrants, and papers show that he wanted a stronger restriction on Commonwealth immigration than what was passed in 1961. 1960s

Leadership elections
In October 1963, along with Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Lord Hailsham, <mask> tried in vain to persuade Rab Butler not to serve under Alec Douglas-Home, in the belief that the latter would be unable to form a government.<mask> commented that they had given Butler a revolver, which he had refused to use in case it made a noise or hurt anyone. Macleod and <mask> refused to serve in Home's Cabinet. This refusal is not usually attributed to personal antipathy to Douglas-Home but rather to anger at what Macleod and <mask> saw as Macmillan's underhand manipulation of colleagues during the process of choosing a new leader. However, at the meeting at his house on the evening

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 of 17 October, <mask>, who still enjoyed a liberal reputation on racial issues after his Hola Massacre Speech, reportedly said of Home: "How can I serve under a man whose views on Africa are positively Portuguese?" During the 1964 general election, <mask> said in his election address, "it was essential, for the sake not only of our own people but of the immigrants themselves, to introduce control over the numbers allowed in. I am convinced that strict control must continue if we are to avoid the evils of a 'colour question' in this country, for ourselves and for our children". Norman Fowler, then a reporter for The Times, interviewed <mask> during the election and asked him what the biggest issue was: "I expected to be told something about the cost of living but not a bit of it.'Immigration,' replied <mask>. I duly phoned in my piece but it was never used. After all, who in 1964 had ever heard of a former Conservative cabinet minister thinking that immigration was an important political issue?" Following the Conservatives' defeat in the election, he agreed to return to the front bench as Transport Spokesman. In July 1965, he stood in the first-ever party leadership election but came a distant third to Edward Heath, obtaining only 15 votes, just below the result Hugh Fraser would gain in the 1975 contest. Heath appointed him Shadow Secretary of State for Defence. <mask> said that he had "left his visiting card", i.e.demonstrated himself to be a potential future leader, but the immediate effect was to demonstrate his limited support in the Parliamentary Party, enabling Heath to feel more comfortable calling his bluff. Shadow Defence Secretary
In his first speech to the Conservative Party conference as Shadow Secretary of State for


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 Defence on 14 October 1965, <mask> outlined a fresh defence policy, jettisoning what he saw as outdated global military commitments left over from the UK's imperial past and stressing that the UK was a European power and therefore an alliance with Western European states from possible attack from the East was central to the UK's safety. He defended the UK's nuclear weapons and argued that it was "the merest casuistry to argue that if the weapon and the means of using it are purchased in part, or even altogether, from another nation, therefore the independent right to use it has no reality. With a weapon so catastrophic, it is possession and the right to use which count". Also, <mask> called into question Western military commitments East of Suez:

The Daily Telegraph journalist David Howell remarked to Andrew Alexander that <mask> had "just withdrawn us from East of Suez, and received an enormous ovation because no-one understood what he was talking about". However, the Americans were worried by <mask>'s speech as they wanted British military commitments in South-East Asia as they were still fighting in Vietnam. A transcript of the speech was sent to Washington and the American embassy requested to talk to Heath about the "<mask> doctrine".The New York Times said <mask>'s speech was "a potential declaration of independence from American policy". During the election campaign of 1966, <mask> claimed that the British government had contingency plans to send at least a token British force to Vietnam and that, under Labour, "Britain has behaved perfectly clearly and perfectly recognisably as an American satellite". Lyndon B. Johnson had indeed asked Wilson for some British forces for Vietnam, and when it was later suggested to <mask>


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 that Washington understood that the public reaction to <mask>'s allegations had made Wilson realise he would not have favourable public opinion and so could not go through with it, <mask> responded: "The greatest service I have performed for my country, if that is so". Labour was returned with a large majority, and <mask> was retained by Heath as Shadow Defence Secretary as he believed <mask> "was too dangerous to leave out". In a controversial speech on 26 May 1967, <mask> criticised the UK's post-war world role:

In 1967, <mask> spoke of his opposition to the immigration of Kenyan Asians to the United Kingdom after the African country's leader Jomo Kenyatta's discriminatory policies led to the flight of Asians from that country. The biggest argument <mask> and Heath had during <mask>'s time in the Shadow Cabinet was over a dispute over the role of Black Rod, who would go to the Commons to summon them to the Lords to hear the Royal Assent of Bills. In November 1967, Black Rod arrived during a debate on the EEC and was met with cries of "Shame" to Op it".At the next Shadow Cabinet meeting Heath said this "nonsense" must be stopped. <mask> suggested that Heath did not mean it should be ended. He asked whether Heath realised that the words Black Rod used went back to the 1307 Parliament of Carlisle and were ancient even then. Heath reacted furiously, saying that the British people "were tired of this nonsense and ceremonial and mummery. He would not stand for the perpetuation of this ridiculous business etc". National figure

'Rivers of Blood' speech

The Birmingham-based television company ATV saw an advance copy of the speech on the Saturday morning, and its news editor ordered a television crew to go to the venue, where they

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 filmed sections of the speech. Earlier in the week, <mask> said to his friend Clement 'Clem' Jones, a journalist and then editor at the Wolverhampton Express & Star, "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."<mask> was renowned for his oratorical skills and his maverick nature. On 20 April 1968, he gave a speech in Birmingham in which he warned his audience of what he believed would be the consequences of continued unchecked mass immigration from the Commonwealth to the UK. Above all, it is an allusion to the Roman poet Virgil towards the end of the speech which has been remembered, giving the speech its colloquial name:

The Times declared it "an evil speech", stating, "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history." The main political issue addressed by the speech was not immigration as such, however. It was the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1968 (by the Labour Government at the time), which <mask> found offensive and immoral. The Act would prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race in certain areas of British life, particularly housing, where many local authorities had been refusing to provide houses for immigrant families until they had lived in the country for a certain number of years. One feature of his speech was the extensive quotation of a letter he received detailing the experiences of one of his constituents in Wolverhampton.The writer described the fate of an elderly woman who was supposedly the last White person living in her street. She had repeatedly refused applications from non-Whites requiring


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texts: rooms-to-let, which resulted in her being called a "racialist" outside her home and receiving "excreta" through her letterbox. When Heath telephoned Margaret Thatcher to tell her that he was going to sack <mask>, she responded: "I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis". Heath sacked <mask> from his Shadow cabinet the day after the speech and he never held another senior political post again. <mask> received almost 120,000 (predominantly positive) letters and a Gallup poll at the end of April showed that 74 per cent of those asked agreed with his speech and only 15 per cent disagreed, with 11 per cent unsure. One poll concluded that between 61 and 73 per cent disagreed with Heath sacking <mask>. According to George L. Bernstein, many British people felt that <mask> "was the first British politician who was actually listening to them".After The Sunday Times branded his speeches "racialist", <mask> sued it for libel, but withdrew when he was required to provide the letters he had quoted from because he had promised anonymity for the writer, who refused to waive it. <mask> had also expressed his opposition to the Race Relations legislation being put into place by the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson at the time. Following the "Rivers of Blood" speech, <mask> was transformed into a national public figure and won huge support across the UK. Three days after the speech, on 23 April, as the Race Relations Bill was being debated in the House of Commons, 1,000 dockers marched on Westminster protesting against the "victimisation" of <mask>, with slogans such as "we want <mask> <mask>!" and "<mask> here, <mask> there, we want <mask> everywhere". The next day, 400 meat

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 porters from Smithfield market handed in a 92-page petition in support of <mask>, amidst other mass demonstrations of working-class support, much of it from trade unionists, in London and Wolverhampton. Conservative politician Michael Heseltine stated that in the aftermath of the "Rivers of blood" speech, if <mask> <mask> had stood for leadership of the Conservative party he would have won "by a landslide" and if he had stood to be Prime Minister he would have won by a "national landslide".'Morecambe Budget'
<mask> made a speech in Morecambe on 11 October 1968 on the economy, setting out alternative, radical free-market policies that would later be called the 'Morecambe Budget'. <mask> used the financial year of 1968–69 to show how income tax could be halved from 8s 3d to 4s 3d in the pound (basic rate cut from 41 to 21 per cent) and how capital gains tax and Selective Employment Tax could be abolished without reducing expenditure on defence or the social services. These tax reductions required a saving of £2,855,000,000 and this would be funded by eradicating losses in the nationalised industries and privatising the profit-making state concerns; ending all housing subsidies except for those who could not afford their own housing; ending all foreign aid; ending all grants and subsidies in agriculture; ending all assistance to development areas; ending all investment grants; and abolishing the National Economic Development Council and the Prices and Incomes Board. The cuts in taxation would also allow the state to borrow from the public to spend on capital projects such as hospitals and roads and spend on "the firm and humane treatment of criminals". House of Lords reform
In mid-1968, <mask>'s book The House of Lords in the Middle

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 inclusion in the proposals of thirty crossbenchers was "a grand absurdity", because they would have been chosen "upon the very basis that they have no strong views of principle on the way in which the country ought to be governed". <mask> claimed the Lords derived their authority not from a strict hereditary system but from its prescriptive nature: "It has long been so, and it works". He then added that there was not any widespread desire for reform: he indicated a recent survey of working-class voters that showed that only one-third of them wanted to reform or abolish the House of Lords, with another third believing the Lords were an "intrinsic part of the national traditions of Britain". <mask> deduced from this, "As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, that which is prescriptive". Following more speeches against the Bill during early 1969, and faced with the fact a bloc of left-wing Labour members were also against reforming the House of Lords as they desired its abolition altogether, Harold Wilson announced on 17 April that the Bill was being withdrawn. Wilson's statement was brief, with <mask> intervening: "Don't eat them too quickly", which provoked much laughter in the House.Later that day <mask> said in a speech to the Primrose League:

<mask>'s biographer, Simon Heffer, described the defeat of Lords reform as "perhaps the greatest triumph of <mask>'s political career". In 1969, when it was first suggested that the United Kingdom should join the European Economic Community, <mask> spoke openly of his opposition to such a move. Departure from the Conservative Party
A Gallup


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texts: poll in February 1969 showed <mask> to be the "most admired person" in British public opinion. In a defence debate in March 1970, <mask> claimed that "the whole theory of the tactical nuclear weapon, or the tactical use of nuclear weapons, is an unmitigated absurdity" and that it was "remotely improbable" that any group of nations engaged in war would "decide upon general and mutual suicide", and advocated enlargement of the UK's conventional forces. However, when fellow Conservative Julian Amery later in the debate criticised <mask> for his antinuclear pronouncements, <mask> responded: "I have always regarded the possession of the nuclear capability as a protection against nuclear blackmail. It is a protection against being threatened with nuclear weapons. What it is not a protection against is war".The 1970 general election took place on 18 June and was unexpectedly won by the Conservatives, with a late surge in their support. <mask>'s supporters claim that he contributed to this surprise victory. In "exhaustive research" on the election, the American pollster Douglas Schoen and University of Oxford academic R. W. Johnson believed it "beyond dispute" that <mask> had attracted 2.5 million votes to the Conservatives, but the Conservative vote had increased by only 1.7 million since 1966. <mask> had voted against the Schuman Declaration in 1950 and had supported entry into the European Coal and Steel Community only because he believed that it was simply a means to secure free trade. In March 1969, he opposed the UK's joining the European Economic Community. Opposition to entry had hitherto been confined largely to the Labour Party but now, he said, it was clear to him that the sovereignty of Parliament was in question, as was UK's


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texts: very survival as a nation. This nationalist analysis attracted millions of middle-class Conservatives and others, and as much as anything else it made <mask> the implacable enemy of Heath, a fervent pro-European; but there was already enmity between the two.During 1970, <mask> gave speeches about the EEC in Lyons (in French), Frankfurt (in German), Turin (in Italian) and The Hague. The Conservatives had promised at the 1970 general election in relation to the Common Market. "Our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more, no less". When Heath signed an accession treaty before Parliament had even debated the issue, the second reading of the Bill to put the Treaty into law was passed by just eight votes on second reading, and it became clear that the British people would have no further say in the matter, <mask> declared his hostility to his party's line. He voted against the government on every one of the 104 divisions in the course of the European Communities Bill. When finally he lost this struggle, after three years of campaigning on the question, he decided he could no longer sit in a parliament that he believed was no longer sovereign. A Daily Express opinion poll in 1972 showed <mask> to be the most popular politician in the country.In mid-1972, he prepared to resign the Conservative whip and changed his mind only because of fears of a renewed wave of immigration from Uganda after the accession of Idi Amin, who had expelled Uganda's Asian residents. He decided to remain in parliament and in the Conservative Party, and was expected to support the party in Wolverhampton at the snap general election of February 1974 called by Edward Heath. However, on 23 February 1974, with the election only five days away, <mask> dramatically


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 turned his back on his party, giving as the reasons that it had taken the United Kingdom into the EEC without having a mandate to do so, and that it had abandoned other manifesto commitments, so that he could no longer support it at the election. The monetarist economist Milton Friedman sent <mask> a letter praising him as principled. <mask> had arranged for his friend Andrew Alexander to talk to Joe Haines, the press secretary of the Labour leader Harold Wilson, about the timing of <mask>'s speeches against Heath. <mask> had been talking to Wilson irregularly since June 1973 during chance meetings in the gentlemen's lavatories of the "aye" lobby in the House of Commons. Wilson and Haines had ensured that <mask> would dominate the newspapers of the Sunday and Monday before election day by having no Labour frontbencher give a major speech on 23 February, the day of <mask>'s speech.<mask> gave this speech at the Mecca Dance Hall in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, to an audience of 1,500, with some press reports estimating that 7,000 more had to be turned away. <mask> said the issue of British membership of the EEC was one where "if there be a conflict between the call of country and that of party, the call of country must come first":

<mask> went on to criticise the Conservative government for obtaining British membership despite the party having promised at the general election of 1970 that it would "negotiate: no more, no less" and that "the full-hearted consent of Parliament and people" would be needed if the UK were to join. He also denounced Heath for accusing his political opponents of lacking respect for Parliament while also being "the first Prime Minister in three hundred years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention


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 of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country". He then advocated a vote for the Labour Party:

This call to vote Labour surprised some of <mask>'s supporters who were more concerned with beating socialism than the supposed loss of national independence. On 25 February, he made another speech at Shipley, again urging a vote for Labour, saying he did not believe the claim that Wilson would renege on his commitment to renegotiation, which <mask> believed was ironic because of Heath's premiership: "In acrobatics Harold Wilson, for all his nimbleness and skill, is simply no match for the breathtaking, thoroughgoing efficiency of the present Prime Minister". At this moment a heckler shouted "Judas!" <mask> responded: "Judas was paid!Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!" Later in the speech <mask> said, "I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me ... it is something I cannot alter". In 1987, <mask> said there was no contradiction between urging people to vote Labour while proclaiming to be a Tory: "Many Labour members are quite good Tories". <mask>, in an interview on 26 February, said he would be voting for Helene Middleweek, the Labour candidate, rather than the Conservative Nicholas Budgen. <mask> did not stay up on election night to watch the results on television, and when on 1 March he picked up his copy of The Times from his letterbox and saw the headline "Mr Heath's general election gamble fails", he reacted by singing the Te Deum.He later said: "I had had my revenge on the man who had destroyed the self-government of the United Kingdom". The election result was a hung parliament. Although the Tories had won the most votes, Labour finished five seats


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 ahead of the Conservatives. The national swing to Labour was 1 per cent; 4 per cent in <mask>'s heartland, the West Midlands conurbation; and 16 per cent in his old constituency (although Budgen won the seat). According to the Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer, both <mask> and Heath believed that <mask> had been responsible for the Conservatives' losing the election. Ulster Unionist

1974–1979
In a sudden general election in October 1974, <mask> returned to Parliament as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, having rejected an offer to stand as a candidate for the far-right National Front, formed seven years earlier and fiercely opposed to non-white immigration. He repeated his call to vote Labour because of their policy on the EEC.Since 1968, <mask> had been an increasingly frequent visitor to Northern Ireland, and in keeping with his general British nationalist viewpoint, he sided strongly with the Ulster Unionists in their desire to remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom. From early 1971, he opposed, with increasing vehemence, Heath's approach to Northern Ireland, the greatest breach with his party coming over the imposition of direct rule in 1972. He strongly believed that it would survive only if the Unionists strove to integrate completely with the United Kingdom by abandoning devolved rule in Northern Ireland. He refused to join the Orange Order, the first Ulster Unionist MP at Westminster never to be a member (and, to date, one of only four, the others being Ken Maginnis, Danny Kinahan and Sylvia Hermon), and he was an outspoken opponent of the more extremist loyalism espoused by Ian Paisley and his supporters. In the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) on 21


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texts: November 1974, the government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. During its second reading, <mask> warned of passing legislation "in haste and under the immediate pressure of indignation on matters which touch the fundamental liberties of the subject; for both haste and anger are ill counsellors, especially when one is legislating for the rights of the subject". He said terrorism was a form of warfare that could not be prevented by laws and punishments but by the aggressor's certainty that the war was impossible to win.When Heath called a leadership election at the end of 1974, <mask> claimed they would have to find someone who was not a member of the Cabinet that "without a single resignation or public dissent, not merely swallowed but advocated every single reversal of election pledge or party principle". During February 1975, after winning the leadership election, Margaret Thatcher refused to offer <mask> a Shadow Cabinet place because "he turned his back on his own people" by leaving the Conservative Party exactly 12 months earlier and telling the electorate to vote Labour. <mask> replied she was correct to exclude him: "In the first place I am not a member of the Conservative Party and secondly, until the Conservative Party has worked its passage a very long way it will not be rejoining me". <mask> also attributed Thatcher's success to luck, saying that she was faced with "supremely unattractive opponents at the time". During the 1975 referendum on British membership of the EEC, <mask> campaigned for a 'No' vote. <mask> was one of the few prominent supporters of the 'No' camp, with Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and Barbara Castle. The electorate voted 'Yes' by a margin of more than two to one.On 23 March 1977, in


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 a vote of confidence against the minority Labour government, <mask>, along with a few other Ulster Unionists, abstained. The government won by 322 votes to 298, and remained in power for another two years. <mask> said that the only way to stop the Provisional IRA was for Northern Ireland to be an integral part of the United Kingdom, treated the same as any other of its constituent parts. He said the ambiguous nature of the province's status, with its own parliament and prime minister, gave hope to the PIRA that it could be detached from the rest of the UK:

Nonetheless, in the 1987 general election that he lost, <mask> campaigned in Bangor for James Kilfedder, the devolutionist North Down Popular Unionist Party MP and against Robert McCartney, who was standing as a Real Unionist on a policy of integration and equal citizenship for Northern Ireland. In <mask>'s later career as an Ulster Unionist MP he continued to criticise the United States and claimed that the Americans were trying to persuade the British to surrender Northern Ireland into an all-Irish state because the condition for Irish membership of NATO, <mask> claimed, was Northern Ireland. The Americans wanted to close the 'yawning gap' in NATO defence that was the southern Irish coast to northern Spain. <mask> had a copy of a State Department Policy Statement from 15 August 1950, in which the American government said that the "agitation" caused by partition in Ireland "lessens the usefulness of Ireland in international organisations and complicates strategic planning for Europe"."It is desirable", the document continued, "that Ireland should be integrated into the defence planning of the North Atlantic area, for its strategic position and present lack of defensive


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 capacity are matters of significance." Though he voted with the Conservatives in a vote of confidence that brought down the Labour government on 28 March, <mask> did not welcome the victory of Margaret Thatcher in the May 1979 election. "Grim" was <mask>'s response when he was asked what he thought of Thatcher's victory because he believed she would renege like Heath did in 1972. During the election campaign, Thatcher, when questioned, again repeated her vow that there would be no position for <mask> in her cabinet if the Conservatives won the forthcoming general election. In the days after the election, <mask> wrote to Callaghan to commiserate on his defeat, pay tribute to his reign and to wish him well. 1979–1982
After a riot in Bristol in 1980, <mask> asserted that the media were ignoring similar events in south London and Birmingham, and claimed: "Far less than the foreseeable New Commonwealth and Pakistan ethnic proportion would be sufficient to constitute a dominant political force in the United Kingdom able to extract from a government and the main parties terms calculated to render its influence still more impregnable. Far less than this proportion would provide the bases and citadels for urban terrorism, which would in turn reinforce the overt political leverage of simple numbers".He attacked "the false nostrums and promises of those who apparently monopolise the channels of communication. Who then is likely to listen, let alone to respond, to the proof that nothing short of major movements of population can shift the lines along which we are being carried towards disaster?" In the 1980s, <mask> began espousing the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In a debate on the nuclear deterrent on 3 March 1981, <mask>


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 claimed that the debate was now more political than military; that the UK did not possess an independent deterrent and that through NATO the UK was tied to the nuclear deterrence theory of the United States. In the debate on the address shortly after the general election of 1983, <mask> picked up on Thatcher's willingness, when asked, to use nuclear weapons as a "last resort". <mask> presented a scenario of what he thought the last resort would be, namely that the Soviet Union would be ready to invade the UK and had used a nuclear weapon on somewhere such as Rockall to demonstrate their willingness to use it:

<mask> went on to say that if the Soviet invasion had already begun and the UK resorted to a retaliatory strike the results would be the same: "We should be condemning, not merely to death, but as near as may be the non-existence of our population". To <mask>, an invasion would take place with or without the UK's nuclear weapons and therefore there was no point in retaining them.He said that after years of consideration, he had come to the conclusion that there were no "rational grounds on which the deformation of our defence preparations in the United Kingdom by our determination to maintain a current independent nuclear deterrent can be justified". On 28 March 1981, <mask> gave a speech to Ashton-under-Lyne Young Conservatives where he criticised the "conspiracy of silence" between the government and the opposition over the prospective growth through births of the immigration population, and added, We have seen nothing yet' is a phrase that we could with advantage repeat to ourselves whenever we try to form a picture of that future". He also criticised those who believed it was "too late to do anything" and that "there


title: Enoch Powell

texts: lies the certainty of violence on a scale which can only adequately be described as civil war". He also said that the solution was "a reduction in prospective numbers as would represent re-emigration hardly less massive than the immigration which occurred in the first place". The Shadow Home Secretary, Labour MP Roy Hattersley, criticised <mask> for using "Munich beer-hall language". On 11 April, there was a riot in Brixton and when on 13 April an interviewer quoted to <mask>'s remark that "We have seen nothing yet", she replied: "I heard him say that and I thought it was a very very alarming remark. And I hope with all my heart that it isn't true".In July, a riot took place in Toxteth, Liverpool. On 16 July 1981, <mask> gave a speech in the Commons in which he said the riots could not be understood unless one takes into consideration the fact that in some large cities between a quarter and a half of those under 25 were immigrant or descended from immigrants. He read out a letter he had received from a member of the public about immigration that included the line: "As they continue to multiply and as we can't retreat further there must be conflict". A Labour MP, Martin Flannery, intervened, saying <mask> was making "a National Front speech". <mask> predicted "inner London becoming ungovernable or violence which could only effectively be described as civil war", and Flannery intervened again to ask what <mask> knew about inner cities. <mask> replied: "I was a Member for Wolverhampton for a quarter of a century. What I saw in those early years of the development of this problem in Wolverhampton has made it impossible for me ever to dissociate myself from this gigantic and tragic problem".He also criticised the view that the causes

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 of the riots were economic: "Are we seriously saying that so long as there is poverty, unemployment and deprivation our cities will be torn to pieces, that the police in them will be the objects of attack and that we shall destroy our own environment? Of course not". Dame Judith Hart attacked his speech as "an evil incitement to riot". <mask> replied: "I am within the judgment of the House, as I am within the judgment of the people of this country, and I am content to stand before either tribunal". After the Scarman Report on the riots was published, <mask> gave a speech on 10 December in the Commons. <mask> disagreed with Scarman, as the report stated that the black community was alienated because it was economically disadvantaged: the black community was alienated because it was alien. He said tensions would worsen because the non-white population was growing: whereas in Lambeth it was 25 per cent, of those of secondary school age it was 40 per cent.<mask> said that the government should be honest to the people by telling them that in thirty years' time, the black population of Lambeth would have doubled in size. John Casey records an exchange between <mask> and Thatcher during a meeting of the Conservative Philosophy Group:

Falklands conflict
When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, <mask> was given secret briefings on Privy Councillor terms on behalf of his party. On 3 April, <mask> said in the Commons that the time for inquests on the government's failure to protect the Falkland Islands would come later and that although it was right to put the issue before the United Nations, the UK should not wait upon that organisation to deliberate but use forceful action now. He then turned to face Thatcher: "The Prime


title: Enoch Powell

texts: Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a sobriquet as the 'Iron Lady'. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon.Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made". According to Thatcher's friends this had a "devastating impact" on her and encouraged her resolve. On 14 April, in the Commons, <mask> said: "it is difficult to fault the military and especially the naval measures which the Government have taken". He added: "We are in some danger of resting our position too exclusively upon the existence, the nature and the wishes of the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands ... if the population of the Falkland Islands did not desire to be British, the principle that the Queen wishes no unwilling subjects would long ago have prevailed; but we should create great difficulties for ourselves in other contexts, as well as in this context, if we rested our action purely and exclusively on the notion of restoring tolerable, acceptable conditions and self-determination to our fellow Britons on the Falkland Islands. ... I do not think that we need be too nice about saying that we defend our territory as well as our people. There is nothing irrational, nothing to be ashamed of, in doing that.Indeed, it is impossible in the last resort to distinguish between the defence of territory and the defence of people". <mask> also criticised the United Nations Security Council's resolution calling for a "peaceful solution". He said while he wanted a peaceful solution, the resolution's meaning


title: Enoch Powell

texts: "seems to be of a negotiated settlement or compromise between two incompatible positions—between the position which exists in international law, that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies are British sovereign territory and some other position altogether ... It cannot be meant that one country has only to seize the territory of another country for the nations of the world to say that some middle position must be found. ... If that were the meaning of the resolution of the Security Council, the charter of the United Nations would not be a charter of peace; it would be a pirates' charter. It would mean that any claim anywhere in the world had only to be pursued by force, and points would immediately be gained and a bargaining position established by the aggressor".On 28 April, <mask> spoke in the Commons against the Northern Ireland Secretary's (Jim Prior) plans for devolution to a power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland: "We assured the people of the Falkland Islands that there should be no change in their status without their agreement. Yet at the very same time that those assurances were being repeated, the actions of the Government and their representatives elsewhere were belying or contradicting those assurances and showing that part at any rate of the Government was looking to a very different outcome that could not be approved by the people of the islands. Essentially, exactly the same has happened over the years to Northern Ireland". He further claimed that power-sharing was a negation of democracy. The next day <mask> disagreed with the Labour Party leader Michael Foot's claim that the British government was acting under the authority of the United Nations: "The right of self-defence—to repel aggression and to


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texts: expel an invader from one's territory and one's people whom he has occupied and taken captive—is, as the Government have said, an inherent right. It is one which existed before the United Nations was dreamt of". On 13 May <mask> said the task force was sent "to repossess the Falkland Islands, to restore British administration of the islands and to ensure that the decisive factor in the future of the islands should be the wishes of the inhabitants" but the Foreign Secretary (Francis Pym) desired an "interim agreement": "So far as I understand that interim agreement, it is in breach, if not in contradiction, of each of the three objects with which the task force was dispatched to the South Atlantic.There was to be a complete and supervised withdrawal of Argentine forces ... matched by corresponding withdrawal of British forces. There is no withdrawal of British force that 'corresponds' to the withdrawal from the territory of the islands of those who have unlawfully occupied them. We have a right to be there; those are our waters, the territory is ours and we have the right to sail the oceans with our fleets whenever we think fit. So the whole notion of a 'corresponding withdrawal', a withdrawal of the only force which can possibly restore the position, which can possibly ensure any of the objectives which have been talked about on either side of the House, is in contradiction of the determination to repossess the Falklands". After British forces successfully recaptured the Falklands, <mask> asked Thatcher in the Commons on 17 June, recalling his statement to her of 3 April: "Is the right hon. Lady aware that the report has now been received from the public analyst on a certain substance recently subjected to analysis and that I have


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texts: obtained a copy of the report? It shows that the substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes?"She replied, "I think that I am very grateful indeed to the right hon. Gentleman. I agree with every word that he said". Their mutual friend Ian Gow printed and framed this and the original question and presented it to Thatcher, who hung it in her office. <mask> wrote an article for The Times on 29 June, in which he said: "The Falklands have brought to the surface of the British mind our latent perception of ourselves as a sea animal. ... No assault on a landward possession would have evoked the same automatic defiance, tinged with a touch of that self sufficiency which belongs to all nations". The United States' response was "very different but just as deep an instinctual reaction ... the United States have an almost neurotic sense of vulnerability ... its two coastlines, its two theatres, its two navies are separated by the entire length of the New World ... she lives with ... the nightmare of having one day to fight a decisive sea battle without the benefit of concentration, the perpetual spectre of naval 'war on two fronts'."<mask> added: "The Panama Canal from 1914 onwards could never quite exorcise the spectre. ... It was the position of the Falkland Islands in relation to that route which gave and gives them their significance—for the United States above all. The British people have become uneasily aware that their American allies would prefer the Falkland Islands to pass out of Britain's possession into hands which, if not wholly American, might be


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texts: amenable to American control. In fact, the American struggle to wrest the islands from Britain has only commenced in earnest now that the fighting is over". <mask> then said there was "the Hispanic factor": "If we could gather together all the anxieties for the future which in Britain cluster around race relations ... and then attribute them, translated into Hispanic terms, to the Americans, we would have something of the phobias which haunt the United States and addressed itself to the aftermath of the Falklands campaign". Writing in The Guardian on 18 October, <mask> asserted that due to the Falklands War, "Britain no longer looked upon itself and the world through American spectacles" and the view was "more rational; and it was more congenial; for, after all, it was our own view".He quoted an observation that Americans thought their country was "a unique society ... where God has put together all nationalities, races and interests of the globe for one purpose—to show the rest of the world how to live". He denounced the "manic exaltation of the American illusion" and compared it to the "American nightmare". <mask> also disliked the American belief that "they are authorised, possibly by the deity, to intervene, openly or covertly, in the internal affairs of other countries anywhere in the world". The UK should dissociate herself from American intervention in the Lebanon: "It is not in Britain's self-interest alone that Britain should once again assert her own position. A world in which the American myth and the American nightmare go unchallenged by question or by contradiction is not a world as safe or as peaceable as human reason, prudence and realism can make it". Speaking to the Aldershot and North Hants Conservative


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 Association on 4 February 1983, <mask> blamed the United Nations for the Falklands War by the General Assembly resolution of December 1967 that stated "its gratitude for the continuous efforts made by the Government of Argentina to facilitate the process of decolonisation" and further called on the UK and Argentina to negotiate. <mask> said that "it would be difficult to imagine a more cynically wicked or criminally absurd or insultingly provocative action".As 102 had voted for this resolution, with only the UK voting against it (with 32 abstentions), he claimed it was not surprising that Argentina had continually threatened the UK until this threatening turned into aggression: "It is with the United Nations that the guilt lies for the breach of the peace and the bloodshed". The UN knew that no international forum had ruled against British possession of the Falklands but had voted its gratitude to Argentina who wanted to annexe the Islands from their rightful owners. It was therefore "disgraceful" for the UK to belong to such a body that engaged in "pure spite for spite's sake against the United Kingdom": "We were, and are, the victims of our own insincerity. For over thirty years we have sanctimoniously and dishonestly pretended respect, if not awe, for an organisation which all the time we knew was a monstrous and farcical humbug. ... The moral is to cease to engage in humbug, which almost all have happily and self-righteously engaged in for a generation". 1983 general election
In an article for the Sunday Telegraph on 3 April, <mask> expressed his opposition to the Labour Party's manifesto pledge to outlaw fox hunting.He claimed that angling was much crueller and that it was just as logical to ban the boiling of live lobsters


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texts: or eating live oysters. The ceremonial part of fox hunting was "a side of our national character which is deeply antipathetic to the Labour party". In the 1983 general election, <mask> had to face a DUP candidate in his constituency and Ian Paisley denounced <mask> as "a foreigner and an Anglo-Catholic". On 31 May <mask> gave a speech at Downpatrick against nuclear weapons. <mask> claimed that war could not be banished because "War is implicit in the human condition". The "true case against the nuclear weapon is the nightmarish unreality and criminal levity of the grounds upon which its acquisition and multiplication are advocated and defended". Thatcher had claimed nuclear weapons were our defence "of last resort".<mask> said he supposed this to mean "that the Soviet Union, which seems always to be assumed to be the enemy in question, proved so victorious in a war of aggression in Europe as to stand upon the verge of invading these islands. ... Suppose further, because this is necessary to the alleged case for our nuclear weapon as the defence of last resort, that, as in 1940, the United States was standing aloof from the contest but that, in contrast with 1940, Britain and the Warsaw Pact respectively possessed the nuclear weaponry which they do today. Such must surely be the sort of scene in which the Prime Minister is asserting that Britain would be saved by possession of her present nuclear armament. I can only say: 'One must be mad to think it'." <mask> pointed out that the UK's nuclear weaponry "is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent


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texts: to more than suicide: it would be genocide—the extinction of our race—in the literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression.Would anybody in their senses contemplate that this ought to be our choice or would be our choice?" <mask> further stated that the continental nations held the nuclear weapon in such esteem that they had conventional forces "manifestly inadequate to impose more than brief delay upon an assault from the East. The theory of nuclear deterrence states that, should Warsaw Pact forces score substantial military successes or make substantial advances this side of the Iron Curtain, the United States would initiate the suicidal duel of strategic nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. One can only greet this idea with an even more emphatic 'One must be mad to think of it'. That a nation staring ultimate military defeat in the face would choose self-extermination is unbelievable enough; but that the United States, separated from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean, would regard the loss of the first pawn in the long game as necessitating harakiri is not describable by the ordinary resources of language". The reason why governments, including in the US, supported nuclear weapons was that "enormous economic and financial interests are vested in the continuation and elaboration of nuclear armaments. I believe, however, that the crucial explanation lies in another direction: the nuclear hypothesis provides governments with an excuse for not doing what they have no intention of doing anyhow, but for reasons which they find it inconvenient to specify".On 2 June, <mask> spoke against the stationing of US cruise missiles in the UK and asserted that the United States had an obsessive sense of mission and a hallucinatory


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 view of international relations: "The American nation, as we have watched their proceedings during these last 25 years, will not, when another Atlantic crisis, another Middle East crisis or another European crisis comes, wait upon the deliberations of the British Cabinet, whose point of view and appreciation of the situation will be so different from their own". In 1983, his local agent was Jeffrey Donaldson, later an Ulster Unionist MP before defecting to the DUP. 1983–1987
In 1984, <mask> alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency had murdered Earl Mountbatten of Burma and that the assassinations of the MPs Airey Neave and Robert Bradford were carried out at the direction of elements in the Government of the United States of America with the strategic objective of preventing Neave's policy of integration of Ulster fully into the United Kingdom. In 1986, <mask> stated that the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) had not killed Neave but that "MI6 and their friends" were responsible: <mask> cited as his sources information that had been disclosed to him from within the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Margaret Thatcher, however, rejected and dismissed these assertions. In 1985, race riots between the black community and the police broke out in London and in Birmingham, leading <mask> to repeat his warning that ethnic civil conflict would be the ultimate outcome of foreign mass migration into the British Isles, and re-issue his call for a government sponsored programme of repatriation. <mask> later came into conflict with Thatcher in November 1985 over her support for the Anglo-Irish Agreement.On the day it was signed, 14 November, <mask> asked her in the Commons: "Does the Right Hon. Lady understand — if she does not yet understand


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texts: she soon will — that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt? ", the Prime Minister replying that she found his remarks "deeply offensive". Along with other Unionist MPs, <mask> resigned his seat in protest and then narrowly regaining it at the ensuing by-election. Despite once having been the youngest university professor in the entire British Empire, <mask> was upstaged by the former Irish schoolteacher Seamus Mallon who was a new entrant to the House of Commons in 1986. During his maiden speech, Mallon quoted the renowned Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, saying "Peace is not an absence of war. It is … a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."<mask>, sitting close to Mallon, hissed an objection. When Mallon enquired why, <mask> claimed that he had misquoted Spinoza. Mallon insisted he had not and, to reconcile the standoff between two stubborn gentlemen, the supercilious classics professor and the Ulsterman, they both repaired to the library to verify the quote. The Christian Brothers-educated Mallon was found to have been correct. In 1987, Thatcher visited the Soviet Union, which signified to <mask> a "radical transformation which is in progress in both the foreign policy and the defence policy of the United Kingdom". In a speech in the Commons on 7 April, <mask> claimed the nuclear hypothesis had been shaken by two events. The first was the Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars": "Star wars raised the terrible prospect that there might be an effective means of neutralising the inter-continental ballistic missile, whereby the two great giants who held what had become to be seen as the balance of terror would contract out of the game altogether: the deterrent would be switched


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texts: off by the invulnerability of the two providers of the mutual terror".America's "European allies were brought along to acquiesce in the United States engaging in the rational activity of discovering whether there was after all some defence against nuclear attack ... by the apparent assurance obtained from the United States that it was only engaged in experiment and research, and that, if there were any danger of effective protection being devised, of course the United States would not avail itself of that protection without the agreement of its European allies. That was the first recent event which shook to its foundations the nuclear deterrent with which we had lived these last 30 years". The second event was Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of both the Soviet Union and the United States agreeing to abolish intermediate-range ballistic missiles. <mask> said that Thatcher's "most significant point was when she went on to say that we must aim at a conventional forces balance. So, after all our journeys of the last 30 or 40 years, the disappearance of the intermediate range ballistic missile revived the old question of the supposed conventional imbalance between the Russian alliance and the North Atlantic Alliance". <mask> further claimed that even if nuclear weapons had not existed, the Russians would still not have invaded Western Europe: "What has prevented that from happening was ... the fact that the Soviet Union knew ... that such an action on its part would have led to a third world war—a long war, bitterly fought, a war which in the end the Soviet Union would have been likely to lose on the same basis and in the same way as the corresponding war was lost by Napoleon, by the Emperor Wilhelm and by Adolf Hitler. It was that fear,


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texts: that caution, that understanding, that perception on the part of Russia and its leaders that was the real deterrent against Russia committing the utterly irrational and suicidal act of plunging into a third world war in which the Soviet Union would be likely to find itself confronting a combination of the greatest industrial and economic powers in the world".<mask> said, "In the minds of the Russians the inevitable commitment of the United States in such a war would have come not directly or necessarily from the stationing of American marines in Germany, but, as it came in the previous two struggles, from the ultimate involvement of the United States in any war determining the future of Europe". Thatcher's belief in the nuclear hypothesis "in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was 'inconceivable' that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States. The Prime Minister supplied the reason why: she said it was because we depend for our liberty and freedom upon the United States. Once let the nuclear hypothesis be questioned or destroyed, once allow it to break down, and from that moment the American imperative in this country's policies disappears with it". At the start of 1987 general election, <mask> claimed the Conservatives' prospects did not look good: "I have the feeling of 1945". During the final weekend of the election campaign <mask> gave a speech in London reiterating his opposition to the nuclear hypothesis, calling it "barmy", and advocating a vote for the Labour Party, which had unilateral nuclear disarmament as a policy. He claimed that Chernobyl had strengthened "a growing impulse to escape from the nightmare of peace being