POTUS Ted Kennedy PM Enoch Powell

some one said that in chat so what POD could get us President Ted Kennedy and Prime Minster Enoch Powell serving at the same time, and what would this do to US-UK relations?
 
You can't have them serve at the same time- it's ASB. In foreign policy Powell was a nationalist/conspiracy nut. A diehard Unionist who would use a full-throated military solution in Ulster. Very anti-American and a conspiracy nut- he believed that the CIA assassinated Mountbatten among other things. He would treat Northern Ireland as an integral part of the UK- no different than any of the others. Economically speaking he founded the neoliberal wing of the Conservative Party in the 1950s and 1960s- long before anyone had heard of Thatcher. US-UK relations would go into a deep freeze- much worse than Heath, Major or Obama.
 
You can't have them serve at the same time- it's ASB. I

how so? Powell fell from grace in 1968, but was in Parliament till 1987, so Rivers of Blood never gets out or he wins the Conservative Party leadership election, 1965 and wins the election of 1970, Teddy in 1972 or 1976
 
Powell is more of a maverick than a leader. Winning the '65 contest is ASB as any UK member will tell you. Rivers of Blood was not just an expression of his repugnant views on race & immigration, it was an unsubtle leadership challenge to the unpopular (even among the Tory rank and file) Heath from both the social and economic right. Relations between those two were about the same as LBJ & RFK circa '68. Gallup polling taken immediately after showed that 74% of Britons agreed with Powell on RoB. A consequence of ROB was that not just his Verwoerdian racial views, but his economic neoliberalism was dismissed as the rantings of a loony nutcase- in other words those views were as credible as the Birthers for most people. Heath himself told the Scottish Tory Conference in the fall of that year, with the Morecambe Budget fresh in their minds that "... seek to dismantle the modern state... 19th century... etc."
 
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