Chapter One
“It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is.”
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From – The Encyclopaedia of British Politics (2010)
"CONSERVATIVE LEADERSHIP ELECTION, 1965: The 1965 Conservative Leadership election was held in July of 1965 to find a successor to Sir Alec Douglas-Home. This was the first such contest where the party leader was to be formally elected by the parliamentary Conservative Party.
The initial leading candidates were the Shadow Chancellor Edward Heath, and the Shadow Foreign Secretary Reginald Maudling. Both men were younger figures within the party and considered “modernisers”. Possible contenders who declined to stand were Quintin Hogg, Peter Thorneycroft, and Iain Macleod. Also standing was Shadow Transport Minister Enoch Powell. Powell was considered unlikely to win himself, and more likely to draw support away from Heath.
The result of the first and only ballot, held on 27th July 1965, was as follows:
Edward Heath – 150
Reginald Maudling – 133
Enoch Powell – 15
While Heath had won a narrow majority (50.4%) of the vote, this was considered an insufficient margin for victory under the then rules. However Maudling conceded defeat after this first ballot and Heath was declared elected as party leader[1].
At the time, Powell’s poor showing was considered a setback for his own leadership ambitions. His public profile would however grow considerably under Heath’s leadership. Both Maudling and Powell would be candidates in future leadership elections."
From – The Time of My Life, Denis Healey (1992).
“…Oftentimes the problem with setting defence spending levels was the institutional tendency towards throwing good money after bad. I found that whenever I selected any particular project to axe – and these were typically projects first commissioned by one of my predecessors – I would soon be told that we had already spend many millions of pounds, and that to abandon the project with nothing to show for that spending. Of course the alternative was to keep on spending, with no guarantee that the new jet fighters, or weapons system, or whatever the project may have been, would not be obsolete by the time it delivered. In many ways this was a genuine reflection of the long lead times typical of cutting edge defence development. By the late nineteen sixties state of the art jet fighters and other such military hardware took many years to develop before coming on line. And in turn, because we could never know for certain exactly what our defence priorities would be five, ten, fifteen years hence, multiple simultaneous projects would be run – each based of a different projected future threat. Putting our eggs in more than one basket came at a cost[2].
But on the other hand of course, there were other factors at play. There was inter-service rivalry and the multitude of petty fiefdoms that exist within the MOD are no fewer in number than in any other Whitehall department. Over the course of my six years at Defence, I came to learn of the pet projects of various members of the top brass. Ultimately I outlasted them all, and my political longevity aided considerably in getting the Government’s policy through – here as in many other matters[3].
Throughout our time in office, and most especially in the years 1966-1968, the Labour Government faced the pressures of budget spending cuts. These pressures fell very heavily on Defence – the Labour Party was (and still is) not sentimental about my department, and a million pounds cut for there was a million pounds that didn’t need to be cut from hospitals or pensions. In 1967 alone for instance, I was called upon to make cuts of some £100 million[4]. Already I had made considerable efficiencies in light of our new greatly reduced role ‘East of Suez’, and yet still there was near unrelenting pressure to find savings wherever they could be found.
So it was that more often than not I sharpened the axe and cancelled projects with sunk costs into the tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds. One such occasion came with the cancelling of an order for twenty “state of the art” jet planes from the United States. Here also was a common conflict between two sets of political priorities – between on the one hand supporting our native industry and workers by ordering from British firms, or on the other securing whichever contract could deliver the goods at the lowest cost to my department, and ultimately to Treasury budgets. Earlier in the decade economy had generally won over patriotism, and American firms had filled MOD contacts; now a still greater need for economy would require us to cancel entirely those contracts.
As ever there was grumbling from the hawkish elements in the press, and from my internal critics in the MOD. Our relationship with the Americans was also strained, and we had to resort to promising new orders for after the upcoming election. The Treasury however were satisfied, both for the savings and for the considerable improvement to our balance of payments. I therefore like to think that in some small part I aided the improvement in our economic position towards the end of the nineteen sixties[5].
The Chancellor would of course attribute credit rather differently.”
From – Enoch Powell: The unauthorised biography (1999)
“…Though Powell had served as a Member of Parliament since 1950, and in Cabinet for four years under Macmillan, by the late 1960s his political career appeared to have reached something of a dead end. His leadership ambitions had been shown in 1965 to be embarrassingly ill-supported. Likewise his great political cause up to this time – Empire – was fast becoming an anachronism. Wilson’s “White Heat” had followed Macmillan’s “Winds of Change”, and the pace of decolonisation had only accelerated. The British Empire was as dead as Powell’s beloved Latin; old Imperialists were already an endangered species. Suez too had converted Powell from imperialist to Little Englander, implanting in him a lifelong disdain for the United States.
After his defeat to Heath, Powell remained in the shadow cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Defence. This set him across the Commons from Labour’s avuncular Denis Healey. Nominally in Opposition, Powell made for an unlikely supporter of the Defence Secretary, as the Healey scaling back Britain’s commitments East of Suez[6]. For his part, Powell was articulating a foreign policy and defence doctrine quite distinct from that of his Atlanticist colleagues; one that favoured greater independence from American leadership, though he would never lean towards the opposite Europeanist viewpoint.
Had Powell remained in the Shadow Cabinet, and perhaps followed Heath into government in the 1970s, it is likely that his career would have peaked here; as a middle ranking minister, albeit a great Parliamentarian, respected and well-liked on both sides of the House. That simple, comfortable trajectory was permanently disrupted, on 20th April 1968, by a speech given to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre.”
From – Speech given by Enoch Powell in Birmingham, 1968, commonly referred to as the “Rivers of Blood” speech.
“…We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen…”
“…As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal…”[7]
From – No Blacks, No Dogs: A History of Great British Racism (2014).
“…Before Powell in 1968 no frontline British politician had spoken of immigration in anything approaching such apocalyptic terms. Not since the rabble-rousing of inter-war Oswald Mosley had fears of immigration been stoked up so explicitly. Post-war Tories, exhibiting something of a condescending paternalism towards the citizens of the old Empire – those same citizens who now took advantage of Britain’s relatively liberal immigration and citizenship laws to, in an ironic echo of earlier settler colonialism, move to the “mother country” – treated immigrants with a form of condescending tolerance. The mostly middle class leadership of the post-war Labour Party were also liberal on matters of immigration, though the union movement remained overwhelmingly white and quite deaf to the concerns of Black and Asian workers. The Wilson government had already passed one Race Relations Act (in 1965), while a second Bill was before Parliament in 1968. Though tepid in their language and weak in their protections when compared to subsequent legislation, these Acts afforded the first statutory rights against racial discrimination. Generally then the post war decades were a time of gradual, if frustratingly slow, improvement for immigrant Britons.
Not that there hadn’t been localised incidents of political racism – the 1964 election campaign of one Peter Griffiths in Smethwick[8] is a particularly noxious example – but Powell was the first politician in the post-war era to consciously raise the issue on a national stage, at once pandering to and stoking up the fears of thousands of little Englanders.
Powell had spoken on the record about immigration before – in 1964 to a young Times journalist Norman Fowler[9], he supposedly identified immigration as the most pressing issue affecting Britain. Given the economic issues of the day – with a substantial balance of payments deficit and with devaluation looming – such a priority was undoubtedly myopic. But Fowler’s Editor had not published the remarks, and Powell was denied the oxygen of publicity[10]. Four years later, with his star rapidly falling, Powell would make another bid for notoriety.”
From – Enoch Powel: The unauthorised biography (1999)
“…Of course one of the greatest of ironies is that Powell never quoted the infamous line about “Rivers of Blood” in his Birmingham speech. True to form that line, along with the entire rest of the passage, he quoted from the Aenid in its original Latin[11]. As such it may well have passed over the heads of many of those assembled – though there was otherwise imagery enough in the speech, of hassled war widows and importune coloured children, to convey a sufficiently anti-immigrationist message. Coming just three weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, with cities in the United States enduring race riots the like of which were unseen in Britain, it was not difficult for Powell’s words to be interpreted as prophesy.
That the phrase “Rivers of Blood” has nonetheless entered political history is thanks entirely to a translated press release, helpfully circulated by Powell ahead of the event. Thus, rather than being entirely naïve as to the potential impact of his words (as Powell himself and many Powellite supporters have since claimed) it would appear that Powell was not only fully aware of the likely reaction his speech, but was also knowingly appealing to an audience beyond that in Birmingham. True enough, the journalists attended, with cameras ready to capture Powell’s words for posterity[12].
Before 1968 Powell’s public views on immigration – and by extension on race – were rather more ambiguous (or perhaps, as Paul Foot has argued, quite opportunistic). In the 1950s as a Junior Housing Minister, he had spoken against immigration controls, stating that a time had not yet come where such controls were so essential as to justify a change in the law. In 1959 Powell gave what was probably his most famous speech prior to “Rivers of Blood”; a reaction to the Hola Massacre – the clubbing to death by British guards of detainees at a colonial detention camp in Kenya. Powell’s fiercely moral opposition to the notion that different standards should apply towards African people than those applied towards white Europeans deserves to be quoted in his own words:
“…Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow…”
“…Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, 'We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home'. We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility…” [13]
The Hola Massacre speech for a time earned Powell a liberal reputation on race – something perhaps unthinkable to modern minds, but nevertheless true. Powell’s denunciation of British shame was made with undoubtable sincerity, earning praise from across the political spectrum[14]. But just as Powell was lauded then, so a decade hence would he be condemned.”
From – A History of the Conservative Party, from Churchill to Grant (2015)
“…Heath’s sacking of Powell – urged on by his front bench colleagues Iain Macleod, Edward Boyle, Quintin Hogg, and Robert Carr – came swiftly the following evening. While MPs on the right of the party including Duncan Sandys and Teddy Taylor spoke against Powell’s sacking, Heath was resolute. The day after he would tell the BBCs Robin Day that he “dismissed Mr Powell because [he] believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations”, and “racialist in tone”. Another member of the Shadow Cabinet, the future Cabinet minister and Powellite Margaret Thatcher was more ambivalent, declaring that she thought it “better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis.”[15]
An unconventional source of support for a Conservative MP came from the trades unions. On the 23rd April a thousand London dockworkers had gone on strike to protest Powell’s sacking. The next day more dockworkers followed, along with factory workers and meat porters. Powell himself advised against strike action, characteristically urging his supporters to follow the parliamentary method of writing to their MP. Nonetheless the strong support Powell thereafter engendered among members working class was a premonition of a major political realignment.
Powell himself received some 30,000 letters of support within a week of his speech. A Gallop poll for the Daily Telegraph a fortnight later showed 74% support for his views.”
From – White Heat: Britain under Wilson (2003)
“…By 1967 the pressures for devaluation could be resisted no longer. For three years Wilson had resisted devaluing the pound, haunted by memories of the Attlee government but constrained by the economic realities of the day. Wilson had inherited an unusually large balance of trade deficit in 1964, the result of the previous Conservative government’s expansionary fiscal policy, and a budget deficit of £800 million. Many British economists then advocated devaluation as a positive economic measure, but Wilson for mainly political reasons continued to resist it even as market pressures grew. Wilson’s tiny parliamentary majority from his first election victory in 1964 until his second in 1966 also limited his political room for manoeuvre. Furthermore the Chancellor James Callaghan consistently opposed any proposal for devaluation.
By 1967 devaluation could not be delayed any longer. The Bank of England had spent £200 million from its gold and dollar reserves in one day, in a futile attempt to shore up the value of the pound. The Labour Government had already gone to great lengths to reduce the budget deficit with spending cuts and tax increases, hoping still to avoid the need for devaluation.
But ultimately Wilson would decide to devalue, lowering exchange rates so that the pound fell in value from $2.80 to $2.40, a fall of 14%. The immediate political effect was to provoke the resignation of the Chancellor, whose own reputation was badly damaged. Wilson too would lose credibility, having repeatedly denied over the previous three years any such plans for devaluation. In their parliamentary engagements Edward Heath would quote these past denials back to the Prime Minister, humiliating him further.
Devaluation, combined with further austerity measures, was eventually successful in restoring the balance of payments to surplus by 1969 – a surplus which lasted through the election of the following year and into the 1970s. General economic performance also showed some signs of improvement after devaluation, helping at last to rescue the government from its electoral nadir. Insofar as any personal credit was assigned, it would ultimately be Callaghan’s successor at the Treasury – the erstwhile Home Secretary Roy Jenkins – whose political stock appreciated the most[16].”
From – Waiting On The Shores Of Nowhere: Britain in the 1970s (2007)
“…By 1970 the economy appeared to have turned the corner. The Chancellor Roy Jenkins had delivered the first government surplus since 1937. Painful tax increases – of nearly an extra £1 billion in 1968 alone – had been adjusted to, and had brought some stability to the economy as consumer demand fell, reducing imports and calming inflation. While Labour had lost a total of 16 seats – some of them nominally “safe” seats - in by-elections since the previous general election of 1966, opinion polls had at last begun to show a Labour lead over Heath’s Conservatives.
Wilson, never a man to make a decision without thorough consideration, began to plan an early election. The Parliament elected in 1966 had a year left to run, and the Government still possessed a considerable majority. But Wilson had been successful once before in a snap poll, and with the Conservatives now experiencing their own internal problems, 1970 offered the Prime Minister the opportunity to upstage Heath and to become the first Labour Prime Minister re-elected to three successive terms of office.
In setting the date of the 1970 election, Wilson widened his circle of consultation out from beyond his closest advisers to include his Cabinet colleagues[17]. Every part of the calendar, from Wakes Weeks to Yom Kippur, was taken into account, as Wilson intensively studied the latest marginal constituency polls and cryptically quizzed his Cabinet Ministers as to their holiday plans. The Conservatives were expecting an October election. From inside the Cabinet, ministers including Barbara Castle also pushed for an October election, on the basis that the electorate would by then be feeling the benefit of the latest budget provisions. Transport House too anticipated an autumn election. Wilson ultimately opted for a polling date of 18th June. With Parliament dissolved on 29th May, the first polls of the campaign showed average party support at Labour 47.7%, Conservatives 45.4%, and Liberals 5.1%[18]. It was Labour’s election to lose.”
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[1] This is all as IOTL (In Our Timeline).
[2] This was a problem faced by Healey as Defence Secretary IOTL.
[3] As IOTL. Six years (1964-1970) was an atypically long tenure for a Cabinet Minister to remain in one position. By contrast the Conservative Prime Ministers between 1951 and 1964 had appointed nine different defence ministers. Military leaders on the other hand were typically rotated, with defence chiefs only serving for a couple of years each.
[4] As IOTL.
[5] The balance of payments – the difference between the values of all exports against all imports – was key economic indicator for post-war British Governments. The OTL Wilson government (1964-1970) struggled for several years with trade deficits. Bad balance of payments figures released on the eve of the 1970 General Election are often attributed as part of the reason why the Labour Government lost that election. ITTL (In This Timeline) Healey’s extra cuts eliminate some particularly expensive imports from the 1970 figures. This is our POD (Point of Divergence).
[6] Powell was more pragmatic about defence spending than might have been expected for so romantic an imperialist. In OTL he came to reject a continued role for Britain East of Suez.
[7] These quotes come from Powell’s OTL speech.
[8] Smethwick 1964 is the archetype racist election campaign, from an era before even ‘dogwhistle’ politics. It was in Smethwick that the slogan “If you want a N****r for a neighbour, vote Labour” was coined. The constituency had become home to a number of Sikh Indian immigrants over the previous decade. Griffiths won the seat, defeating Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker. For his efforts Griffiths was described by Harold Wilson as a Parliamentary leper.
[9] IOTL Fowler was subsequently a Cabinet minister in the Thatcher Government.
[10] This happened IOTL, and likewise went unreported.
[11] This is as IOTL.
[12] As is this. Rivers of Blood may have gotten a larger and more polarised reaction than Powell expected or hoped, but it was always intended to get a reaction. This in part is why I have avoided a “no Rivers of Blood speech” POD – it would not be in Powell’s nature to avoid something so conspicuously planned.
[13] These are quotes from Powell’s OTL Hola Massacre speech.
[14] Denis Healey described it as “I think the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard… It had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes,”
[15] “Cautious Margaret” in action.
[16] This is effectivity the same as OTL.
[17] As Healey put it in OTL “Harold wanted to be sure that the blame would be widely shared if he took the wrong decision”.
[18] These polls were, as IOTL: NOP 29/05/1970, ORC 31/05/1970, and Gallup 31/05/1970. Credit to
http://www.markpack.org.uk/opinion-polls/