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The Everyone is Bari Weiss Theory
58 Plays29 days ago
Helen introduces Sarah to a classic British racist, and the two of them learn that time is a flat circle.
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Transcript
Surreal Political Discourse and Absurdity
00:00:01
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:16
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you. The right calling name. Let's get. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
Casual Banter with Sarah
00:00:32
Speaker
level of masochism.
00:00:37
Speaker
Okay. How are you doing, Sarah? I'm not too bad. I'm just getting over being sick, so if I sound a little weird, it's probably half my shitty mic and half that.
Foreign Invasion and Societal Themes
00:00:49
Speaker
It's always kind of a weird experience, like like your body has been invaded by little beasts and you have successfully repelled them. But your subjective experience is just that you lay in bed covered in blankets and you feel really cold.
00:01:05
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you know that's right in with one of the main themes of our podcast, you know foreign invasion and you know how it feels to be invaded. um No wonder this theme is so apparently universal.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny.
Controversial NYT Article on Women and Workplace
00:01:22
Speaker
I thought about, I mean, we were talking about, like, obviously in between recording our last episode and recording this one, the New York Times published that, like, are women ruining the workplace or how women ruin the workplace? And then they changed it to how liberal feminism ruined the workplace.
00:01:38
Speaker
And, right, all these things. And we were like, okay, maybe we have to do an episode on these, but we don't want to be just like a discourse rehash podcast. Yeah.
00:01:50
Speaker
But it is really funny to see, yet again, this kind of like women are a foreign invasion
Selective Topic Coverage Strategy
00:01:54
Speaker
that is like corrupting society. It's a good thing we invented the term feminism so that people have a good euphemism to use for women.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and what's funny is we also invented the word misandrist. So we have a euphemism for feminist. Like, it's it's all...
00:02:14
Speaker
I don't know. that there's There's going to be more opportunities to discuss these sorts of things. But I think i think we both, maybe maybe one of us will change our mind, but I think we both kind of landed on the, we're not going to cover the Helen Andrews great feminization thing because it's just rehashing Stuff, you know, it's it's not adding anything super new.
Interactive Guessing Game Introduction
00:02:33
Speaker
And i think maybe we can suggest that um we can leave it as an exercise for our ah for our listeners, right? Like we're giving them all the themes so so they can go out in the world and they can read Helen Andrews' great feminization. Or they can wait for us to cover it in 30 years. That'll work too.
00:02:49
Speaker
Yeah. In 30 years, we can cover it when it becomes history. Right. I don't want to completely dismiss that we might... cover something contemporary, but this this doesn't clear it.
00:03:02
Speaker
There has to be a pretty high bar, I think. We have kind of a lot to go over today. So i want to move on to our main topic.
00:03:13
Speaker
But, you know, you had your opportunity to play with the format a little bit. So I'm going to start this one a little different. I'm not going to tell you when or where this is. We're going to start with an excerpt of a speech.
00:03:27
Speaker
And I want you to try to guess the sort of historical place in time that this might be said. Okay, I'm excited. The pressure's on. I think I can handle it.
00:03:39
Speaker
And I'm kind of curious because I have some guesses about things that would make this identifiable. But obviously, when you go in knowing the context, it's hard to take a step back, forget that context and kind of analyze it again.
00:03:53
Speaker
so i'm going to take advantage of the fact that I can just post this and we can see what you make of it.
Analyzing Political Speeches on Future Challenges
00:04:01
Speaker
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.
00:04:07
Speaker
In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things, such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred.
00:04:18
Speaker
At each stage in their onset, there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing.
00:04:31
Speaker
Whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles, and even for desiring troubles.
00:04:45
Speaker
If only, they love to think. If only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen. Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.
00:04:59
Speaker
At all events, the discussion of future grave, but with effort now avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time, the most necessary occupation for the politician.
00:05:10
Speaker
Those who knowingly shirk it deserve and not infrequently receive the curses of those who come after. Okay, so what are we getting from this so far? Okay, so we've got a little bit of examination of the confusion of map and
Philosophical Nature of Political Speeches
00:05:28
Speaker
territory. It's a very abstract philosophical opening to a speech, right? It's a very...
00:05:35
Speaker
Okay, so this is a speech. I'm not sure if you mentioned that, but... Oh, I did mention, I think, or I meant to mention at least, that this is a speech. It's a political speech. So this person is an elected official giving a speech about a political issue.
00:05:54
Speaker
Okay, okay. I was thinking until you said that, that maybe we were talking about like some kind of eighteen hundreds philosopher. Okay.
00:06:05
Speaker
But now, obviously, I don't think so. Well, that's sort of not, that's an interesting thing. And I think it is a comparison that not this speech in particular, but this person, his speech, one of his other speeches is was compared directly to Demosthenes.
00:06:23
Speaker
he was a known rhetorical philosophizing speech maker. Okay, okay. I see.
Predictions of Societal Collapse
00:06:31
Speaker
Okay, so I would agree that it's it's hard to really get a latch on like exactly where or when this is.
00:06:38
Speaker
I wonder if you have any guesses about what he is going to eventually talk about. Well, I suppose he's going to talk about the incoming collapse of society. Yes, to some extent, yes.
00:06:49
Speaker
And the other things I have noted here are, I think it's interesting to say, you know, 1800s philosopher, I definitely get a huge rationalist bent here.
00:06:59
Speaker
And I think as we think about this guy, Do you mean rationalist in the sense of like ah a modern contemporary rationalist or in the sense of like Baconia something like that? So that's the thing. I don't think he's a contemporary rationalist because he's not a contemporary speaker, but I think he is part of the tradition that eventually becomes for contemporary rationalism through this kind of, right? Contemporary rationalists would say they are continuing the tradition of someone like Descartes and this kind of enlightenment philosophy towards this rational approach to everything.
00:07:33
Speaker
And we, of course, can look at them now and say, that's not true. They have their own ideologies that are completely weird. Okay, well, now I'm cheating because this comparison with contemporary rationalism and the roots that that comes from makes me think that this is going to go in some variation of a long-termist direction.
00:07:56
Speaker
Okay, so let's let's look at the next excerpt. Okay.
National Identity and Immigration Concerns
00:08:00
Speaker
A week or two ago, i fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalized industries. Okay.
00:08:10
Speaker
I just wanted to flag here, he's talking to a constituency that has nationalized industries. This is actually sort of important, although it's not something he wanted to really draw out in the speech.
00:08:21
Speaker
This is, I think, the excerpt that's going to give away... what this speech is about.
Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' Speech
00:08:27
Speaker
after a sentence or two about the weather he suddenly said if i had the money to go i wouldn't stay in this country i made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last forever but he took no notice and continued i have three children all of them have been through grammar school and two of them married now with family i shan't be satisfied till i have seen them all settled overseas In this, oh no, in this country, in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah. So this is a speech about immigration. Right. Okay. So I think I know where the downfall of civilization angle is coming from here. Yes. So the downfall of civilization is coming from immigration. Now, I will flag that this is not, strictly speaking, or at least in the excerpts I've pulled, this isn't really going to be an episode about misogyny.
00:09:25
Speaker
And we talked a bit about starting with misogyny as a main focus for the pod in the first several episodes before moving away to other bigotries. But in particular, I thought, okay, this is an important figure to look at, especially because we've seen that so much misogyny has this kind of foreign invasion character that I wanted to start looking at the way that we are being invaded by foreign immigrants is used in other contexts.
00:09:54
Speaker
And I think... This figure will be sort of a springboard into understanding, let's say, conservatism in the English-speaking world in the second half of the 20th century until the present.
Powell's Background and Views on Race
00:10:08
Speaker
So the guy giving this speech, his name is Enoch Powell, and he's giving this in 1968 in Birmingham. Okay, this is the Rivers of Blood speech, is that right?
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, so we'll see why it gets called that. It is, in fact, what is he's most famous for is the Rivers of Blood speech. But yeah, this is obviously a crazy thing to say. that in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man. this is pretty vile, I would say.
00:10:40
Speaker
Yeah. i mean, it's crazy because of its implausibility, but at the same time, it's in the same vein as things we've seen in, I think, each of our prior episodes. I don't know how much of this made it through the edit, but...
00:10:55
Speaker
We have talked about this fantasy of future victimization that comes up over and over, and it seems to be couched in terms of the slave becoming the master. Exactly. And that was one of the things I thought, okay, I knew I wanted to do an episode on this speech and this guy in particular for a bunch of reasons. Basically, when we started planning the pod and...
00:11:18
Speaker
especially as we started to see in all the other episodes, we saw Leacock talking about this, we saw Peck talking about this, and we saw Cato talking about this, about women taking over and women being in charge and having subjugating men in this way.
00:11:30
Speaker
i thought, okay, we need to sort of address this current. Yeah, we're four for four at this point. The other thing I want to point out here is that this quote that he is quoting here is not him, right? He is saying, I was talking to an ordinary working man and he told me this, and I'm just repeating what one of my constituents said.
00:11:56
Speaker
I think, obviously, there's something cynical about this. He's hiding behind, this is what my constituents are saying. And this is something I think we're going to talk about. Because when I first read this speech, I thought, oh, this is just, he has these opinions. He wants to put them in the mouths of his constituents so that he is doing some rhetorical distancing.
00:12:15
Speaker
But I think the answer is actually more complicated than that. And I think one of the things we're going to see is that who this guy was is sort of a complicated question. And his views on, let's say, race, immigration, race relations are sort of complicated.
00:12:33
Speaker
He's absolutely a racist, but he is a racist that... I think in particular, even like centrist liberals would have a hard time defending a claim of racism without admitting that they share a lot of his views. So I think he manages to find some interesting positions and something that I think explains a lot of contemporary anti-immigrant and racist bias in mainstream liberal society. Okay, so that's kind of my staking things out.
00:12:59
Speaker
And right now it might seem that's implausible. No one is saying something this frothingly racist. So let's sort of see... I want to kind of go back and give you a little bit of his biography and get the journey to him standing in front of Birmingham and saying this insanely racist thing.
00:13:14
Speaker
Okay, hang on. I want to point out that saying that all of this is coming from the common man is a way of selling yourself and your message as having broad appeal and therefore being more likely to appeal to just whoever the random listener is, but it's also a way of demarcating the boundaries of who is and is not the common man. Absolutely. He could be saying with this that to be a common man is to hold these kinds of opinions.
00:13:43
Speaker
Absolutely. And he definitely is saying that. I think part of, I guess what I'm saying is he is much more saying that, well, I think we should hold those ideas and we should see his journey to being that person because he when you learn about his early biography, i think it is a little bit surprising to some extent that he ends up making this speech.
00:14:08
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to let those thoughts rattle around in my head like marbles. So he's born in 1912. Already at the age of three, he gets the nickname from his parents, the Professor.
00:14:22
Speaker
Because he used to, quote, stand on a chair and describe the stuffed birds that his grandfather had shot, which were displayed in his parents' home. As he gets a little bit older, he starts lecturing his parents about what books he read every week.
00:14:36
Speaker
So already from a very young age, he is this weird kind of super erudite, you know, trying to be super intellectual.
00:14:47
Speaker
He goes on to study classics at Cambridge. You know, there's a weird parallel here with Roy Cohn, who engaged in very similar behavior when he was a young child. Interesting.
00:14:58
Speaker
Well, OK, interesting. Let's put a pin in that.
00:15:02
Speaker
OK, I'm excited to circle back around. So he goes on to study classics at Cambridge. While he's at Cambridge, he actually takes a course in Urdu. Because already, I think he starts studying at Cambridge when he's 16. I didn't write it down here, but he was relatively young.
00:15:19
Speaker
He takes a course in Urdu because he already had an ambition to become the viceroy of India. And he thought, oh, I better learn an Indian language so that I can speak to my constituents when I eventually become the viceroy.
00:15:35
Speaker
At 16? Yep. That's astonishing hubris. He also, around this time, starts translating Herodotus. And Enoch is actually his middle name.
00:15:51
Speaker
His first name is John. But there is already a famous classicist named John Powell with whom he does not want to get confused. So as a young teenager, he changes his name to Enoch because he wants to become a renowned classicist as well and does not want to get confused with the other Don Powell. Holy shit.
00:16:14
Speaker
Okay, first off, the narcissism, astonishing. Second, this exact problem was solved by the ancient Romans. We were talking about Cato the Elder last episode.
00:16:24
Speaker
just Yeah, that's actually very funny because obviously is hugely into Greek and Roman culture. And in fact, when we the the name of this speech that we're we're talking about today, this Rivers of Blood speech,
00:16:41
Speaker
is named for a line in the speech that actually is an allusion to the Aeneid. So we'll get there. But he is always bringing in this kind of classics education. His third ambition, Viceroy of India, famous classicist.
00:16:55
Speaker
Actually, it's sort of tied to the second ambition. He's obsessed with Nietzsche. interesting He's already reading, i think at 14, he's already reading Nietzsche and Goethe in German. He wants to beat Nietzsche's record to become a professor. Nietzsche became a professor at the age of 24.
00:17:14
Speaker
Powell loses by one year. He is named full professor of Greek. at the University of Sydney at the age of 25. Remarkable.
00:17:26
Speaker
And yet, it must have really stung. It kind of must have stung.
Powell's Moral and Political Contradictions
00:17:32
Speaker
The other thing that stung... So he talks about in a biography, or he's talked about in interviews, developing an understanding from a young age that there was going to be another war with Germany. He saw the way that all of his teachers in school had been...
00:17:49
Speaker
had fought in the Great War. He had lived through it as a very, very young child. I mean, he was born in 1912, so he was two years old when war broke out. But he had developed this belief that...
00:18:02
Speaker
there would be a war with Germany, but he had at the same time, this kind of reverence for German culture. And I don't know exactly what this looked like at the time, but he describes having suffered a quote, spiritual crisis that shattered his vision of German culture.
00:18:22
Speaker
When he hears about the night of the long knives in 1937, what's interesting is that it's not the Nazis rising to power. It is specifically this turning point in 1937, whereas there is it is a sort of watershed moment of escalating violence. And I don't want to get into a whole history of Nazism and all that stuff. That's very far afield from where we're talking about today.
00:18:43
Speaker
But he has this kind of moment of losing faith in German culture, which he apparently had some significant faith in German culture at that moment.
00:18:54
Speaker
He tells this university that just made him professor at 25. He's the youngest professor in the Commonwealth at the time, that if war breaks out, he's going to go enlist.
00:19:08
Speaker
And of course, war broke out into that two years later. 1939, and he went home to enlist in the army. Okay, I have to ask, without getting too deep into the history of the Nazis, what exactly was his problem with Kristallnacht?
00:19:22
Speaker
Despite seeing how... This is one of the things that I think it's really hard to talk about with Powell, because especially, you know, we're both white people, so I don't want to be trying to excuse him of any kind of racism.
00:19:38
Speaker
Simultaneously, I think he was very racist. He also continued to have a commitment to the sanctity of human life in a way that I think genuinely it was a moral offense. I think he saw this kind of discrimination and violence and said, this is a moral offense.
00:19:55
Speaker
Okay. This is kind of making me think of him as someone with a strong commitment to liberalism in an actual classical liberal sense.
00:20:06
Speaker
I think he has a very, very strong commitment to classical liberalism and some elements of classical like Berkey and conservatism, which we'll talk a little bit about later.
00:20:17
Speaker
The picture I'm already getting of someone who serves as a bridge between old British aristocracy and the current style of British aristocracy is so interesting. You know, the the colonial administrators were deeply educated in the classics. It was an important part of their prestige and way of thinking.
00:20:42
Speaker
And that continues somewhat to today in a different form with, for example, Boris Johnson, who in his pretensions to classical scholarliness definitely reminds me of this guy a little bit.
00:20:58
Speaker
He's coming of age at a time where he really wants to engage in this colonial project and gain power through it. But he has a conflict because he wants to fight in this war. And in the same way, Britain is going to lose a tremendous amount of power over its colonies and ultimately control over those colonies in large part due to engaging in this war.
00:21:26
Speaker
One of his sustained regrets fighting in the war is that he didn't die. So he actually never sees combat. By the end of the war, he is colonel.
00:21:38
Speaker
So he has a pretty good war. He first gets sent to Africa, then he gets sent to India. He manages to maneuver things differently. so that he spends a lot of time doing military intelligence in Delhi. He thinks this is a time to kind of build his reputation and ability to eventually achieve his dream of becoming Viceroy.
00:21:59
Speaker
but he doesn't see combat. And he has this quote later where he says, you know, any soldier who survives the war has this shame at having survived.
00:22:10
Speaker
Like the honorable thing to do would have been to die in this war. That's very Spartan. So... In 1945, he actually votes labor, despite obviously being very conservative politically from all the things we've said.
00:22:24
Speaker
He votes for the labor government. Labor wins in a landslide. So I think this was actually probably a common belief. He votes for labor because he wants to punish the conservatives for the Munich Agreement.
00:22:34
Speaker
Throughout the 30s, he's like very against appeasement, especially in 38 after Night of the Long Knives. He says this ah policy of appeasement is terrible. The conservative government is terrible. So in 1945, he comes back and he says the conservatives can't hold power. We have to vote for labor.
00:22:48
Speaker
Anyway, 45... Huge political changes in the UK. There was a growing understanding of the force that unions were going to have, that England was becoming this kind of welfare state where there was huge government programs. This is sort of begun in this...
00:23:08
Speaker
return Like this landslide victory in 1945, Labour is able to really do a lot to reshape politically how the UK is going to look and capitalize on this sort of boom in industry that was driven by the war, as well as all these other economic forces.
00:23:23
Speaker
The Prime Minister at the time is this guy Clement Attlee, super interesting figure. Again, i went down a whole rabbit hole of reading about him. And then I thought, okay, we got to... still in 1945. The speech is in 1968. There's a lot to get to, but this is a super interesting time politically. And we'll come back to a little bit of of some of these economic things later on. In 1947, Clement Attlee announces, i think it's called the Indian Independence Bill, but basically says, look, India is going to become independent.
00:23:50
Speaker
After the war, all these different things changing politically. There's a huge push for independence in India. Again, sort of complicated story, but... India is going to be independent. This shatters Powell's lifelong ambition to become the Viceroy of India.
00:24:07
Speaker
Right. This is his throne that's being given up. That night, he does not sleep. He wanders the streets of London weeping. I was just imagining all the brown people who could have crushed under his heel.
00:24:23
Speaker
Well, so that's the interesting thing is he, it's not entirely clear to me what he wanted out of the Viceroy position.
00:24:34
Speaker
It's interesting to me that he decided I have to learn Urdu. When he later gets elected to parliament, he does talk to a lot of his constituents who speak Urdu or Hindu in Urdu and you know takes, you know, keeps their notes and stuff. Like he does have this conception for himself that what he's doing is something humanist.
00:24:54
Speaker
And this is one of the things I really can't reconcile. And I think is going to really, i'm actively thinking in a lot of this conversation, where am I going to put him on the gullibility scale? I think in this field, he's quite high because I think he has a vision of, of course, projecting British empire and power, but he's,
00:25:11
Speaker
I think he has this pretension that it's not, he doesn't want to be the kind of violent repressor of colonial uprisings. I think he has this completely bizarre and unconnected to reality vision of this glorious empire where everyone's actually happy and great.
Powell's Extreme Political Ideas
00:25:30
Speaker
I don't know. It's it's a weird thing. That doesn't seem so disconnected from the progressive colonialist view. Yeah, I think he has some kind of progressive colonialist view, except he definitely doesn't think he I think he thinks that these places are places that can benefit from like British values and will be advanced into a more, you know, exactly this notion of progress. He he definitely doesn't think that they will become British by any means.
00:26:01
Speaker
but they can be advanced into a higher age. Exactly. along some temporal timeline that inevitably occurs. I think he has that belief to it to a large extent.
00:26:13
Speaker
Now, part of why it's hard to talk about this belief is that actually he undergoes a huge change in beliefs at this time. In his conception of the British Empire, India was really a fulcrum of the British Empire. Now, in some sense, like just on a bare analysis of power in history, he's kind of correct. Once the UK loses India as a colony, a lot of the colonies after that gain independence relatively quickly.
00:26:37
Speaker
It is a big turning point, maybe. But he really thinks of it as this kind of like cultural and and central part that I think he uses the phrase the crown the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
00:26:49
Speaker
So once India is independent, he actually sends, think he sends a letter to Churchill where he's like, I have this plan. We could use this many battalions. We could retake indian empire or sorry we could retake the Indian colony.
00:27:03
Speaker
Churchill's like, I'm not in power also. This won't work. It's too late. And says, okay, you know what? Other extreme. We should stop pretending we're a world power.
00:27:15
Speaker
We should not try to have all these colonies. We should get rid of all of our colonies and we should become ah like small island England. So he's in favor of one extreme or the other?
00:27:27
Speaker
Yeah, he is definitely someone who follows ideas to their extreme and then just sits there. Okay, I'm not really understanding the sort of black and white thinking here, but Well, I think he was really committed to this notion of intellectualism that he had, which is you think about things and you come to conclusions and then you can change your mind, you can change your beliefs, but it has to be driven by this rigorous intellectual process. And so he just thought, okay, well, if we're not going to have India, we're not a world power. We should not pretend to be a world power. We should be serious about who we are and what we're for and drop all these colonies.
00:28:06
Speaker
Are we allowed to casually accuse historical figures of being autistic? Is that problematic? Remember when I said that at the age of three, he made his parents listen to lectures about stuffed birds on a weekly basis and they called him the professor? There were some other nicknames that his school, school pals had for him. He could make eye contact. So probably not.
00:28:31
Speaker
He also actually, now I wish I had clipped some audio recordings of speeches of his. He had this famously, despite having a lot of rhetorical power in the speeches, he had this famous way of droningly giving a speech.
00:28:44
Speaker
Anyway. All just unconnected observations. So, yeah, so he totally reshapes his vision of what the ah British Empire is and what it's for. Now, I want to do a little bit of wait just vocabulary here for people who might not be aware.
00:28:59
Speaker
we should clarify, ah Helen and I are both Tylenated ourselves. Oh, yeah. We have the APAS. A little bit of just British terminology. So Britain is the United Kingdom of Great Britain includes...
00:29:17
Speaker
England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. When people say England, they're referring to just you know south of Scotland, that chunk of the island. Scotland is the northern chunk, right? And Northern Ireland.
00:29:29
Speaker
I always think of England as southern Scotland. So it actually is a little bit of a question how he sees the role. there's There's people who think, oh, we should really have you know small England. We should just be England, should be its own country. There's people who kind of have this middle, like it's Britain and we should include Ireland. It seemed this is a whole other political fight that gets really complicated. Anyway.
00:29:55
Speaker
Wait, can I make a guess? Yeah. My suspicion is that he's going to be really into the physical boundaries of the island. So he is for a while, but then eventually he actually becomes a member of the Ulster Unionist Party. But it's unclear whether this is only for political expediency reasons because he loses the seat that he originally has.
00:30:18
Speaker
So i think he is really into the physical boundaries of the island, but at the same time, that's not something he was so firmly committed to. Okay, okay. He can waver.
00:30:30
Speaker
Anyway, so in 1947, his dream of becoming viceroy is shattered. He has this total change of heart. He starts to say, okay, I'm going to go in for politics. He managed to become a minister of parliament for Wolverhampton Southwest in 1950. This Wolverhampton is a fairly large town, I guess, city, like right in the middle of England.
00:30:53
Speaker
Like if you looked at a map of England and you pointed at what you guessed was like right in the middle, that would probably be somewhere near Wolverhampton. It's part of what's called the Midlands. There is this kind of sense of, oh, we're in the middle. We're the real England, much like you get in kind of middle America.
00:31:06
Speaker
Sorry, it's never been impressed upon me before just how baby brain that actually is. Oh, we're in the middle. We must be the most important. Yeah, right? It's kind of a funny thing.
00:31:18
Speaker
They have a huge economy at the time, especially based on coal mining and steel production. He actually doesn't have to live there, and he doesn't. He lives in Belgravia in London, which is like the fanciest neighborhood in London.
00:31:30
Speaker
And actually, the speech we started reading at the beginning, this Rivers of Blood speech... isn't the first one that he kind of becomes really known for. So jumping ahead in 1959, there is a... So before 1959, the sort of historical background for this, Britain still has a colony in Kenya.
00:31:49
Speaker
There have been increasing colonial uprisings. They have this, what they call a colonial detention camp. It's basically... A labor camp where they've detained people who have tried to overthrow the British government in Kenya.
00:32:02
Speaker
There is a like horrible, brutal massacre of 11 men who are basically beaten to death by colonial administrators. There's first an attempt at a cover-up. Actually, a lot of details about that came out much later. Eventually, it comes to parliament. There is a public outcry of this is this is terrible. How could we like let this happen? We shouldn't be treating people this way. But a lot of ah members of parliament, and especially in the Conservative Party, which I should say, Powell becomes a prime minister for sorry member of parliament for the Conservative Party. He's never a prime minister. He becomes a member of parliament for the Conservative Party, also known as the Tories,
00:32:37
Speaker
They're saying things like, oh, that's Africa. That's far away. It doesn't really matter. These people are subhuman anyway. And he actually gives the following speech, which I have edited a little bit, but or I've cut stuff out of.
00:32:51
Speaker
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 judgment 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.
00:33:08
Speaker
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.
00:33:23
Speaker
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.
00:33:33
Speaker
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.
00:33:44
Speaker
We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility. So yeah, this is one of the places where I'm saying he's not the caricature of, oh, guy who thinks these people are totally subhuman and thinks he has this in his head, strong commitment to humanism and to treating people fairly and correctly and having moral responsibility.
00:34:16
Speaker
And I think it's very interesting to contrast this with the thing we just read before, that I cut off ah about the the rivers of blood speech where he's talking about how that the black man will have the whip hand over the hand of the white man. Right. And in fact, this speech, which he gives after it's known as the, the whole massacre, that was the whole camp.
00:34:34
Speaker
He gets a lot of praise for a labor MP comes up to him and says, this was, you know, thank you for saying this, this was incredible. and And later says, this was the best speech he ever heard in Parliament and had the, this is what gets is the rhetorical and moral force of Demosthenes. So that was the speech I was referencing earlier. they see.
00:34:59
Speaker
Well, he's making a mix of two different arguments here. Yeah, so I did kind of put together two different excerpts. There's the little ellipsis that I put in there of just, first, everyone deserves...
00:35:11
Speaker
you know You can't say because he was such and such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow. right That's one argument. That's the humanist part right there. And then we have to hold ourselves to our standards no matter where we are.
00:35:25
Speaker
Well, the reason he says we have to hold ourselves to our standards no matter where we are is that we otherwise will lose the consent of people around the world because they'll no longer respect our ability to be consistent.
00:35:38
Speaker
Yeah, so those aren't quite the same. One of them is... one of them is a philosophical point and one of them is a point of strategy.
00:35:49
Speaker
Well, I think it is a mix of a strategical point and a philosophical point in the sense that it's unclear 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. I think you're right. You could read that as a very bare...
00:36:09
Speaker
We cannot in a very like real political sense do this. But I think that there is a certain moral valence, which he is bringing to it, which is saying like we should, and we only have the sort of moral authority as well as the like on the ground political authority to do these things if we hold ourselves to these
Post-War Immigration and British Identity
00:36:28
Speaker
standards.
00:36:28
Speaker
But I think you're right. It is a much more political argument than just the straight like humanist. It is a fearful doctrine. Yeah. I mean, we don't have to read it as totally real politique. It can be important to the British project to be perceived as being moral while also being important to the philosophical British project, whatever that is, to be moral. And I think this is one of the interesting things with him is I want to be able to kind of pick apart and examine his vision of what the British political project is while at the same time realizing that it's kind of
00:37:03
Speaker
wild to think that that's what the British political project is, right? Like I want to, for the purposes of understanding him, understand this doctrine while also understanding that it is pretty baldly like imperialist and used nakedly to exert power over people.
00:37:20
Speaker
Okay. But anyway, I think there is a huge contrast between that and what we read in the, in the opening chunk. So, all right, now we're finally ready to start talking about immigration in particular and how he comes to really be obsessed with immigration as the downfall of society.
00:37:38
Speaker
So in 1948, in this kind of attempt to hold on to power after losing India, but wanting to hold on to other colonies, Parliament passes the British Nationality Act, which which establishes a notion of citizenship called citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies.
00:38:02
Speaker
It is like an equal citizenship that says anyone who is born either in Britain, on the island of Britain proper, or in any of the Commonwealth or colonies is a citizen and has the rights of a British citizen.
00:38:16
Speaker
This was kind of agreed to at a time when mass immigration was considered just not really possible. But this meant that there was nothing legally stopping Commonwealth citizens from going to England.
00:38:32
Speaker
There's this big influx of immigrants, especially from Jamaica, from the Caribbean colonies. That's referred to as the Windrush generation after one of these massive ships, the the HMT Windrush, which starts bringing in lots of people.
00:38:49
Speaker
I'm familiar with the famous scandal involving the... Yeah. yeah um So later it it gets the name... is The Windrush scandal is named for this. People who... Basically, they came in with this generation. And then years later, there have been lots of changes. And there's it's a lot more restricted getting British citizenship and the right to enter Britain. and But of of course, a lot of people who came at this time don't have paperwork because there was no paperwork to have. And the British government massively mismanages trying to do this and ends up telling people, oh, actually, you don't have any pension or no, you're actually not allowed to be in the country despite them having lived their entire lives here. Imagine if America did something like that.
00:39:27
Speaker
Oh, the uproar. Yeah. Now, what's interesting is that actually there are a lot of like economic reasons why you get this kind of migration. You have people who are, they fought in the war and now they want to go see England or they want to maybe even go try to reenlist or...
00:39:47
Speaker
the war simultaneously created like this boom in industry, but also there were a lot of casualties. And so we're talking in 1948, there is a huge open labor market. And especially in places where Britain has decimated people's livelihoods through brutal colonialism, like there is a reason you go to England to try to make a better life for yourself. And people...
00:40:09
Speaker
even went more than thought would, like, people went thinking, oh, I might just go for a little bit just to see it or just to spend some time there or to make some money and come home, and then they end up settling. This, of course, causes a backlash among the, like, white population of Britain who is unhappy seeing hundreds of new immigrants coming off each of these boats.
00:40:31
Speaker
It feels a little bit weird in a way to, like, I want to put a huge asterisk next to the word immigrant because, as we just said, they're British citizens. So I want to say, yes, there is a real sense of migration. There is some like movement of physical bodies of people from one place to another. But this is sort of one of the things we talked about with...
00:40:56
Speaker
or you can see why the British Empire was also on my mind a lot in the last episode. Like, there's a real, I guess, political, philosophical contradiction here, which is that Britain was like, yeah, this is this is all Britain, and we want to have the majesty of saying, this is Britain, and the sun never sets on the British Empire.
00:41:13
Speaker
But then all those people are British. So what do you do with that? And you actually don't like the fact that you, the racist British people who have declared that all of this land is Britain, are now unhappy that all of the people on that land are British.
00:41:28
Speaker
Right. It's already problematic from the point of view of certain British people, let's say the Scotch and Irish or British. Exactly. and Let alone black and brown people. Exactly. So... Not to suggest like you know uniformity of skin tone between any of these regions, but you know what i mean? Of course.
00:41:47
Speaker
So in 1960, Powell is appointed health secretary. So in 1960, the conservatives are in power. He's appointed secretary of health. He's overseeing NHS.
00:42:00
Speaker
Largely, he seems to be an okay health secretary. There's some interesting some interesting stuff there. But especially when he starts to see what he thinks of as strain on the NHS. And of course, already in 1960, some of the boom of post-war 1950s, there is a bit more of a strain on the NHS. And instead of thinking about we should fund this more, right, this is something he's absolutely opposed to.
00:42:24
Speaker
he starts to say, oh, maybe we need some immigration controls. All these people are flooding here and then they're taking our health care. Oh, wow. That is so familiar. This was such a huge part of the Brexit debate. And it's such a huge part of contemporary British politics. And so it's not, I think, maybe the number one driver. And there actually is a suggestion reading the history that this thing he says in the speech of like, I fell into a conversation with a constituent. It does actually seem like he had many constituents who came to him and complained about
00:42:57
Speaker
about immigration. i don't want to, like, while I think what he's saying is pretty racist there, i think he was in fact being told those things by his constituents.
00:43:09
Speaker
specifically It's not like any demagogue rises to and sustains position of power because nobody is actually interested in what
British Political System and Powell's Influence
00:43:17
Speaker
they're saying. Exactly. And so I think He starts to see this strain on the and NHS.
00:43:23
Speaker
He starts to theorize that this is because we need more immigration controls. And then I think it's also something we see now happen when people like radicalize themselves online. I think basically he kind of started posting about the need for immigration controls and then he got popular support.
00:43:46
Speaker
And he was like, oh there must be something there. I see. So you're kind of positing audience capture. Yeah. I think a little bit of audience capture happened. oh that's so interesting.
00:43:57
Speaker
so In 1964, Labour wins the election again. In 1965, the Conservative Party actually holds their first ever leadership election. Powell runs and loses to a man named Edward Heath, who is also super interesting, also has a really interesting history. And also we don't have time to get into who Edward Heath was. But again, if you want to read about the history of Edward Heath, another fascinating rabbit hole.
00:44:18
Speaker
But Edward Heath appoints him the Shadow Secretary of Defense. Are you aware of how the British Shadow Cabinet works? Yes, but just for the sake of our audience, perhaps you can indicate.
00:44:30
Speaker
This is one of my favorite things is that basically British Parliament has an official opposition party. I was reading into the history of how this official opposition party came to be, and it was started as a drunken joke in the eighteen thirty s Okay, this one did not know. Yeah, so I learned this only researching for this pod because I was like, you know, it's weird that there's this officially designated opposition. Like, how did that come to be? It turns out that in this particular fight in 1830, someone made a snarky and probably drunk joke about, oh, it's so hard to do this when I must not only consent with his majesty's ah prime minister, but also his majesty's loyal opposition.
00:45:07
Speaker
And... This has grown into an official thing. There is a His Majesty's Opposition, or it's called Her Majesty's Opposition when there's a queen, so he was part of Her Majesty's Opposition. And the opposition appoints a shadow cabinet. So these are each cabinet members who are specifically placed to like oversee and critique the official cabinet members.
00:45:30
Speaker
So he is the Conservative Party... it rules. who was officially appointed to critique the secretary of defense the labor party put in at the time whose name i forget unfortunately i didn't rate it down but these guys get called the shadow secretaries which sounds way way cooler than the job actually is yeah it rules I really want us to have like an umbral head of HHS.
00:45:56
Speaker
The other funny, the other funny thing here is that there's actually a sort of official way in which the party in power leadership and whips get together with the shadow cabinet and opposition party leadership and opposition party webs to try to negotiate how they're going to run parliament to try to get things done an efficient way. That's not part of the official proceedings of the House of Commons, but it is this sort of institutionalized way to negotiate.
00:46:24
Speaker
And it is officially called the usual channels. So when they say they're going to talk things out in the usual channels, there's this stuff there formalized way doing that. There's actual specific channels that are being referred to. so British parliament is a super interesting thing.
00:46:39
Speaker
We could do a whole, you know, some other podcast that is based on that could do a whole like really long thing about the structure of British Parliament and the British Constitution.
1960s Britain: Immigration Tensions
00:46:48
Speaker
Powell is actually really, really into this, all of these procedures. He loves all these things. There's this one particular tradition.
00:46:59
Speaker
So every year the monarch... gives a speech listing the priorities for Parliament that session. And they give the speech in the House of Lords and Every year, someone with a like a giant rod, who's called Black Rod, runs from the House of Lords to the House of Commons. The House of Commons slams the door in his face. He like slams the rod on the door. He says, come listen to the speech. I forget what's exactly what the line is. He tells him to come listen to the speech.
00:47:27
Speaker
And then the House of Commons goes into the House of Lords. But there's some official rules about like how much the the king is not really allowed to go into the House of Commons past a certain point. right There's all this ritualized thing because of all this history. Some members of the House of Commons actually go to the House of Commons specifically to sit there and not go to the House of Lords to protest the fact that the king still does this. It's a whole ritualized process.
00:47:50
Speaker
At one point, actually, when he's prime minister, Edward Heath makes a comment about this being a ridiculous thing. And Powell just... yells at him that this has been done for hundreds of years and it's, you know, you can't get rid of it. It's it's a crucial part of like Britishness. So he really does have this commitment to British tradition and British cultural identity.
00:48:07
Speaker
Somebody really needed to get this guy into like trains or dinosaurs or something instead of em imperial rule. Yeah, exactly. So, okay. So in 1965, he's Shadow Secretary of Defense.
00:48:20
Speaker
This actually puts him in Shadow Secretary of Defense right in time to vehemently oppose sending any troops to help the U.S. in the Vietnam War. So...
00:48:32
Speaker
There's a whole... Yeah. And he has this to say, which honestly, well, we'll see. I'll i'll let you read it and then we can comment on it. In our imagination, the vanishing last vestiges of Britain's once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets.
00:48:52
Speaker
Under God's good providence and in partnership with the United States, We keep the peace of the world and rush hither and thither, containing communism, putting out brush fires and coping with subversion.
00:49:05
Speaker
It is difficult to describe without using terms derived from psychiatry, a notion having so few points of contact with reality. based. Yeah. So he's basically saying this idea that we have, that there's going to be this special relationship between the US and the UK, which you know there he did believe in... so Actually, he was pretty far against the notion of a special relationship, but this is something that is still talked about today.
00:49:29
Speaker
But this idea that we're going to join US and have this kind of ideological control over the spirit of communism. Now, he was against communism. He just didn't think...
00:49:41
Speaker
this was going to be a ah method that would prevent it from spreading. And the UK wasn't placed to be the kind of world power to do this. so So we're finally ready to basically get back to the speech.
00:49:54
Speaker
Throughout the 1960s, there is growing and growing and growing, let's say, conflict over immigration. There's a huge conversation about what needs to be done, because still the vast majority of the British public is not immigrants.
00:50:10
Speaker
And as we said, like the reason these demagogues come to power, there's a thing that people care about. There are many, many places across England where the white British constituents are saying, you know, things are totally different. Everything's changing. We need to have some controls. We can't have all these people pouring in. So there is this really strong popular support for some kind of control on immigration.
00:50:35
Speaker
In 1968, I guess I should say actually there's one other cultural context here, which is that people in the UK are watching fights over civil rights in the US.
00:50:47
Speaker
And they're seeing what is perceived especially by a lot of conservative British people as a race war. And there's like a lot of anxiety that the... that Britain is headed towards also having, quote unquote, a color question. And there's this weird British pride that they aren't racist in the way the Americans are.
00:51:11
Speaker
And then this incoherent desire to stop more brown people from coming because there's this understanding that that's what's going to lead to British people being racist.
Immigration Laws and the Windrush Scandal
00:51:24
Speaker
I see. yeah I have to expect that that kind of dynamic is replicated all over the world today, especially when we consider our polite friends to the North, the Canadians who- Well, you're North.
00:51:39
Speaker
Right, right. I forgot that you've gone over to the other side, who to some degree take pride in perceiving themselves as less racist, and who also don't have um such relaxed immigration policies, or such is my understanding. So in 1968, the Labour government does pass some pretty strong immigration controls.
00:52:03
Speaker
A lot of Tory members of parliament actually criticized this act. It's the another British Nationality Act. It basically restricts the right to enter the UK, the right to live in the UK, and the right to sorry the right to work, enter, or like receive public services in the UK to people who are, think, have a grandparent born on the actual island of...
00:52:30
Speaker
Britain. So there's this weird thing where you' so they can't really change the citizenship of the United Kingdom and colonies, but they restrict the right to enter the island of Britain to people who have a grandfather who was born there.
00:52:45
Speaker
You can enter for the purposes, like temporarily, but you can't enter for the purposes of settling and working there. I see. You know, if a citizen is someone who has the full rights of the country, then one would expect that the ability to enter Britain would be an integral part of that citizenship. Yeah. So this this is one of the tensions. I mean, this isn't the this bill gets superseded in 1971 and then in 1972 and then a bunch of times and the the law changes radically. But this is one of the things that actually creates the possibility for this Windrush scandal years later is that some real questions over what
00:53:20
Speaker
this means in terms of what citizenship is. This is part of why we have birthright citizenship in the US is an attempt to avoid creating ambiguities in who is a citizen that could be exploited by states or other malefactors in order to create a permanent underclass who are allowed to work here at the pleasure of their employers or their state masters, but who don't have any real belonging.
Conservative Party and Race Relations Act
00:53:50
Speaker
Yeah. it's and And in fact, the UK is now facing a lot of issues exactly with that with exactly that notion. But simultaneously with passing this immigration control,
00:54:07
Speaker
they passed something called the Race Relations Act of 1968, which is a broad anti-discrimination law that makes it illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of race for housing, education, employment, public services.
00:54:28
Speaker
So overall, I would say pretty good bill. Yeah. Seems solid. The conservative party has a conference in which they get together and they say, okay, we can't oppose this bill on principle because then we look like racists.
00:54:48
Speaker
So how can we not look like racists? What we're going to do is make some procedural objections and to the way the bill is written and object on certain abstruse philosophical grounds that one or two things are unenforceable, whatever, right? We're going to try to oppose this, but on the whole, we can't say we would like to retain a right to be racist.
00:55:14
Speaker
Powell is livid. Right. Powell needs to retain the right to be racist. Right. So this... i feel like there's an element of dishonesty to this that's totally in conflict with what we've seen of Powell so far. Exactly.
00:55:31
Speaker
Now, that picture that I painted is sort of cynical. Support as the Conservative Party would say... actually those were real objections and actually they did support the bill and actually i am being cynical by saying they pretended to support the bill and object on philosophical on on these upstairs things because they knew that they didn't want to look racist but i think i'm correct so we'll move forward but if you want to get in the comments and argue with me over that sure i don't care
00:56:02
Speaker
Anyway, the point is... Helen, I have lived on planet Earth for 37 years at this point. And I gotta say, I've experienced enough of conservative people in order to give them zero benefit of the doubt on this.
00:56:14
Speaker
Oh, no, I'm just saying if we're planning to put these on YouTube, then we're gonna have YouTube comments. Okay, well, YouTube commenters, if that's what you feel like typing in, that you really think the conservatives of this era were actually great and not racist, please go fuck yourselves, like and subscribe.
'Rivers of Blood' Speech Impact
00:56:33
Speaker
Anyway, so he tells a journalist friend of his this... I'm going to make a speech at the weekend, and it's going to go up fizz like a rocket.
00:56:45
Speaker
But whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up. So he knows. that this thing is going to blow up, right? He knows that this speech is going to be a flashpoint. this is This is part of his legacy that's developing right here. He actually prints out copies of the speech and sends it to news stations. And in response, they send cameras.
00:57:11
Speaker
Oh, wow. Okay. So he knows what he's doing here from a media standpoint. He's doing everything he can to turn this into part of the history books. Right. So he's like, this Saturday in Birmingham, it's going down.
00:57:26
Speaker
He gets up on stage and he opens with the thing we opened the episode with. you know, the purpose of government is to understand what evils are coming and to to not confuse map and territory to, you know, to do all these things. I was talking to a constituent. The constituent said, here's the things I'm worried about. if if you know, I'm not going to be happy till my kids leave.
00:57:47
Speaker
Okay. Now, so keep in mind, we just left off with the, in 15 or 20 years time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.
00:57:59
Speaker
i can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?
00:58:10
Speaker
The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his member of parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.
00:58:26
Speaker
I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking, not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. Okay, so when he says not throughout Great Britain, I take it he means that there are particular pockets of the UK that are becoming disaster zones.
00:58:59
Speaker
Exactly. mean, what people might refer to down the road as say, no-go zones, that sort of thing. Yes. So he's going to talk about this more explicitly later in the speech. But of course, we talked about he is representing a chunk, the southwest chunk of this district of this town of Wolverhampton, which has a huge coal mining and steel production economy.
00:59:26
Speaker
So places with an industrial economy where the Someone who is coming to England for the opportunity to work and live a better life is going to be.
00:59:39
Speaker
Obviously, he's saying there are certain cities and communities that are springing up. And again, it's one of those things where it's like, okay, if you really want to just talk about like this bare fact of demographics, sure.
00:59:57
Speaker
But there's this menacing undertone to it, right? Like usually in the conservative imagination, I think of problems with immigration, air quotes, as extending outward from the urban centers.
01:00:15
Speaker
Right. All these people they despise go to the city, and then in some way that poisons the atmosphere for the honest working folk of the country. What he's describing, according to you, is people going to, I suppose, the place he represents and directly ruining the country folk first. Is that correct?
01:00:36
Speaker
Well, so this is the interesting thing is the place he represents is fairly urban. It's not quite as big as London, but it is a place where you have a city, right? It is it is something that is not...
01:00:48
Speaker
I see. i was misled by the coal mining rural identification. Oh, yeah. So that's the Yeah, there is a whole other history here of... and And I didn't want to cover this so much because actually we are going to talk about, i think, relatively soon, other figures related to this. But...
01:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, this is a place which is ah a city centered around these industrial manufacturing and production economies. But it's not a real, it's not like a rural or suburban feeling thing. It is very much an urban center. And in fact, you do get, there is something here about a fear over our property values as well, right? There's a lot of the same dynamics that we talk about, I guess we, you know, I learned about in the context of US history, but this kind of white flight, right? Like immigrants are coming to these cities and then they're, you know, buying up houses and then they're quote unquote lowering property values because a lot of the more racist white people want to move out and it changes the face of the the housing market and blah, blah, blah, right? Like there's there's this whole other dynamic going on there. And I think, yeah, I'll put a pin in that. I also, I love the naked invocation of everybody's saying it.
01:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think the other thing here which might not stand out to us as much today is this idea that he has to say it because his constituents are saying it.
01:02:22
Speaker
This is something we might actually think about our representatives. Our representatives should be, in a sense, mouthpieces for the issues we care about, right? If I am a constituent of a representative, I want them to be saying the things that I want them, you know, I have interests and I want them to be kind of a loudspeaker for my interests.
01:02:40
Speaker
This is absolutely not a model that I think we have any reason to believe Powell's invested in. This is not the model of parliament that like the classical conservative thinkers like, you know, Edmund Burke would have thought about.
01:02:53
Speaker
Definitely, he thinks about the role of parliament and government as being leaders and leading the constituents. So when he says, i have to say this because my constituents are saying it, he doesn't just on a bare fact mean my constituents are saying this and so I have to represent it. He does have to actually agree fundamentally in some sense with this concern.
01:03:16
Speaker
He's saying this is a concern that is important, but... He must think it matters. And there isn't this room for him to kind of say, oh, I'm just saying it because other people are saying it. That's really not something that would fly in his it should fly in his conception of a conservative.
01:03:33
Speaker
member of parliament. Well, it's kind of cute that earlier in our discussions, he was compared to Demosthenes, who, as I recall, was um Athenian, right? So he would represent like democracy in the original sense.
01:03:49
Speaker
Yeah. But his actual views don't necessarily reflect those Demosthenes. Demosthenes, but he he feels he can channel them anyway. for Well, the Demosthenes thing was not, was a labor MP commenting on his rhetorical and moral commitments. But I think it's absolutely correct. Like he is not. Well, you're talking about him experiencing audience capture. If people praise him for representing the voice of the common man, you know, perhaps he got a little hooked on that. So I think, yeah, we're going to talk again about all this when we talk about the gullibility rating, which again I'm really, as I've been writing this episode, I've gone all over the place in where I'm going to put it. So, and I'm still not sure. So, but I think this is really a big question with Powell. In 15 or 20 years on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants.
01:04:45
Speaker
That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to Parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar-General's office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of 5 to 7 million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London.
01:05:04
Speaker
Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen, Whole areas, towns, and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
01:05:20
Speaker
As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase.
01:05:31
Speaker
Already, by 1985, the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take.
01:05:45
Speaker
Action where the difficulties lie in the present, but the evils to be prevented or minimized lie several parliaments ahead. Yeah, okay. So we're not doing the conspiratorial aspect, but we're doing great replacement.
01:05:58
Speaker
Yeah. We're going to get replaced. There's, and this is one of the things I think is interesting is he doesn't really ever seem to go in for a kind of conspiratorial belief about some kind of secret plan or congregation of people who is trying to cause the downgrade in some intentional way. You don't get any kind of conspiratorial thing. And he continues to insist throughout his life that he is not a racist. Right.
01:06:30
Speaker
that he doesn't believe in a hierarchy of races. Well, I'm noticing the ostensible colorblindness in all these excerpts. Yeah. What he's talking about is exactly the same thing that people who say the words white genocide are talking about. and yeah Exactly.
01:06:44
Speaker
So he goes on to talk more about numbers. I do note the interesting rhetorical trick here of pointing to an official figure right before you make up a figure.
01:06:58
Speaker
So he says in 15 or 20 years, they're going to be this many. That's not my figure. That's the official figure given by given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's office.
01:07:09
Speaker
We don't have an official figure for 2000, but it must be this much, right? There is a level of interestingly just making stuff up. I will say that is the figure.
01:07:21
Speaker
in the year 2000. He's basically dead on with what the numbers are. i just massively disagree with him about whether that matters, but it is true that both Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants in the UK, as a matter of the census, make up about 10%, which is about 7 million in the year 2000. Oh, that is fascinating for him to be dead on with that.
01:07:46
Speaker
Yeah. And I think this is one of the things that makes him an interesting figure to talk about is he's not making up facts in the way that a lot of just outright racist demagogues do.
01:08:01
Speaker
He is just saying things which are fine with a very menacing undertone.
01:08:08
Speaker
i like Right. Like if you said to me, oh, in this year, this many people will immigrate from this place to this place. And, you know, part of what he's worried here is that, OK, there is this immigration control passed in 1968. But of course, there are carve outs for people who have already settled and then people who have already settled and they have family members they want to bring over. And.
01:08:29
Speaker
And then, of course, they can still have children. And of course, in his view, i mean, this is... Okay, so as far as... Huge asterisk on what I said about him saying facts. Part of his view here is pretty strictly that races exist. He is very much a race realist or what we would now call a racialist. Although usually people used racialist to describe somebody who is racist. Like who believed in races and also hierarchy between them.
01:08:55
Speaker
Because of course, in his mind, and he he says it here... The proportion of the total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us will rapidly increase.
01:09:06
Speaker
He very much sees that somebody who is born in England, but to parents who are from Jamaica is not English and is in fact Jamaican. And they might be English in some legal citizenship way, but there is a very real thing called like capital R race, which is like a biological reality.
01:09:29
Speaker
that has to be paid attention to. And just to be clear, for the benefit of our audience, terms like race realist and racialist, those are all subtypes of racist?
01:09:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. just Just want to be completely explicit about that. Yeah. Yeah. So something puzzling is that he hasn't so far made any attempt to describe specific harms. In fact, he hasn't even made an attempt to describe harms in general terms. When you talk about someone who has extremely similar views to this today, like say David Frum or something, they'll come up with some pseudoscientific gibberish about cultural homogeneity or something like that. there's an implied theory of how we get from immigration to harm, even if that theory is never explicitly described or made clear.
01:10:23
Speaker
I think this is a demonstration of Powell's rhetorical prowess right at this moment where you're saying, okay, you've made this census demographic argument. Where's the harm?
01:10:36
Speaker
He's about to get into exactly what the harms are. Okay. He is very good at structuring an argument. The things he's saying are terrible. But he knows what he's doing here. So, okay, he actually talks about numbers a little bit more. he he All the stuff that i was talking about, family members and all these ways of people still coming, even though we have these controls.
01:10:59
Speaker
um He does actually clarify that he opposes immigration for settlement and has no interest in restricting people coming to Britain to go to school, to get some training, right? Like things or or to to visit, right? All these kind of temporary things he doesn't have to oppose.
01:11:15
Speaker
He opposes immigration. And in fact, he argues we should encourage, we should not only control immigration, but we should assert adopting policies that encourage people to re-migrate back to where they came from.
01:11:27
Speaker
So depressingly familiar. Right? Okay. So he's talked about this... issue So now he's going to get into specifics of the Race Relations Act in particular and the specific harms that it's going to cause in the British in the british population.
01:11:45
Speaker
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation, as they call it, against discrimination. Whether they be leader writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers, which year after year in and the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it,
01:12:05
Speaker
Okay, so...
01:12:08
Speaker
faring delicately with the bed-clothes pulled right up over their heads they have got it exactly and diametrically wrong the discrimination and the deprivation the sensible arm and of resentment lies not with the emigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming okay so
01:12:28
Speaker
Oh, man, this is incredible. There's some real rhetoric happening here. Absolutely. Okay, so the frou-frou archbishops right who live in their palaces. Yeah.
01:12:44
Speaker
The coastal elitist ivory tower limousine liberals. Exactly. Those guys are of the same type as those who in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, which I guess in his conception is not the powerful British fascist element So in his conception, what I believe he's talking about here, although this is basically just reading this and piecing it together with stuff I said earlier and a little bit more reading, but I should say I'm certainly not like a scholarly expert on Powell and there's a lot more people who will probably have would probably have things to correct here. He is talking about the failure to recognize the threat that the Nazis posed
01:13:31
Speaker
and the British press's support for the policy of appeasement that... Okay, so he's talking more about the liberalism of Neville Chamberlain, that sort of thing. Exactly. Exactly.
01:13:43
Speaker
And what's interesting there is one of the things that is hanging over, I think, a lot of these conversations about about immigration. And one of the things that certainly a lot of labor politicians and really hung over Europe was this fear about, like, basically a Holocaust happening again.
01:14:03
Speaker
that they saw this example of horrible genocide against a targeted minority population. And absolutely, I think people were already making comparisons or were seeing comparisons between this populist anti-immigrant rhetoric that was growing in the country at the time and the Nazis. So it's fascinating to me.
01:14:25
Speaker
He's going for this rhetorical comparison, which is you are ignoring the threat of rising immigration the same way you ignored the threat of the Nazis coming to power. Because it exactly takes, I think, this thing that was ambiently in the air and puts it exactly on its head, which is what he's saying. You have it exactly wrong.
01:14:42
Speaker
you were arguing for anti-discrimination on the basis that we don't want to do what the Nazis did, but actually the real threat is from the immigrants, which let me, let me go back here and say, it is difficult to describe without using terms derived from soca psychiatry, a notion having so few points of contact with reality. Just to use his words against him there a little bit. I, this is really, i think he genuinely believes this. Yeah.
01:15:10
Speaker
And yeah, I don't know. i don't know what to make of that. It's really not in keeping with the intellectual rigor we've seen from him. I mean, not that i want to say that I think he is some like intellectual powerhouse, but it's certainly an interesting comparison and a huge step down from what we've seen from him up to now.
01:15:30
Speaker
This is so painful because right here in the same speech, we've got both implicitly the white man is going to get a Holocausted and the white man will be the slave of the black man.
01:15:43
Speaker
And right he's taken the two worst historical atrocities in anything like recent memory and inverted them so casually and so cruelly. It's really disgusting.
01:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, so now we get to a part where he really addresses this anxiety of Britain becoming like the United States. Okay, okay, I'm ready for this. Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro.
01:16:13
Speaker
The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come.
01:16:31
Speaker
Okay.
01:16:34
Speaker
to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen from the vote to free treatment under the national health service okay I was really going to more ask you questions about this and make a coherent point. But earlier we did see him talking about the idea that this this relationship with the United States in which we go about and do lovely things like fighting communism is really just a huge pile of shit.
01:17:08
Speaker
Totally fake. And in that distancing, i it really made me wonder about what his thoughts are or whether he was trying to create a distance from the idea of America as an immigrant nation.
01:17:23
Speaker
which, you know, a lot of what's going on with the U.S. there is really more myth-making than anything. But in having things like the struggle over civil rights, America was very visibly remaking itself in a way that he and other British conservatives apparently viewed as a race war, as something of a localized apocalypse.
01:17:50
Speaker
but in a way that we, from our current point of view, understand as a necessary purging, as a kind of second reconstruction, that sort of thing.
01:18:02
Speaker
And so it seemed to me that he was kind of rejecting that vision as one that could be carried out for Britain as well. And now here we are with him explicitly saying that the American project of enfranchisement is one that we don't even need to deal with.
01:18:20
Speaker
This is one that we don't even need to think about. But the reasoning he's giving is that the British Empire essentially started it out as better and more humane than the American system.
01:18:36
Speaker
So this is one of the really interesting things here, because, again, he wants to point to this moment of, quote unquote, the Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain.
01:18:48
Speaker
And it's this moment of starting history, like right in 1948. or write in, you know, that that this this vision of, okay, as soon as this person stepped off the boat, which is still a rhetorical flourish that people used to think of immigrants today, they have all of these rights, and there's this willful blindness of...
01:19:14
Speaker
the history of the place they came from and its relationship to Britain and what Britain did to those places to create the conditions for this immigration. And I think this is one of the interesting conversations to think about because I think he's correct in a sense that, how do I put this? Is is sort of...
01:19:31
Speaker
Well, this deliberate ignorance of the state of other countries is something that goes way back in British history, including in British racial history.
01:19:42
Speaker
right Slavery was abolished in Britain. long before it was abolished in any sense in the rest of the empire. And to them, that made them more enlightened.
01:19:55
Speaker
Right. And I think he is drawing this material distinction between U.S., which there is something to be said there, that he's correct that you can't read the U.S.
01:20:10
Speaker
struggle for civil rights in the same way because you are not talking about an immigrant population. And in fact, one of the active things that was huge a huge part of discussions at the time in the US over civil rights struggles is like, you know you have this this very wide range of approaches to the like material fact of wanting to know like where you came from and what your culture is and what your ancestors are reclaiming this kind of heritage of coming from Africa while simultaneously being unable to do that because of the brutal legacy of American slavery.
01:20:48
Speaker
It is part of the functioning of the British empire that they were able to make this severing and say, oh, we didn't do that in Britain, pay no attention to what's happening in our colonies, right? Exactly as you say, right? They abolish slavery in Britain, but they don't abolish slavery in the colonies. And when we talk about, oh, people are coming to Britain because there's all these economic opportunities, there is economic opportunities in Britain and a lack of economic opportunities in the British colonies exactly because of brutal colonialism. Right. All the money flowed from the colonies to Britain.
01:21:18
Speaker
That's why Britain has so much money. Exactly. So there's this moment of saying, okay, there are in fact like reasons to talk about this level of immigration from a kind of left-wing perspective and say, this is an effect of massive exploitation of the global South.
01:21:42
Speaker
It is a symptom of brutal colonialism. And we, in fact, the solution should be like returning resources and reparations to these places. That is the thing that is going to I don't know solve these these tensions.
01:21:58
Speaker
But... He is pointing out this kind of difference in the US, but it requires such a blindness about like all the same evils in the British Empire, but just in a different way. They look different enough that he's able to kind of paint this picture of, oh, these people are coming here and they have all the same rights. And it's like, well, no, they are and we're living through the same situation of having their lives materially destroyed.
01:22:25
Speaker
It's just not... in the same methods as American slavery, but in the methods of British colonialism, which you know is just a different manner of exploitation. right I'm not trying to say that these are like the same evil, but it is exactly this moment of just blindness to British imperialism.
01:22:42
Speaker
There also seems to be this subtext in the excerpt that Perhaps the black people in the United States deserve more rights than these immigrants because of their history of exploitation.
01:22:59
Speaker
Whereas this imagined Commonwealth immigrant who is totally unaffected by history has more or less materialized in the country and done nothing, experienced nothing to deserve all these privileges.
01:23:19
Speaker
Yeah. And in particular, when he says, you know, which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, the the country knew no discrimination, he is like specifically talking about discrimination in the law.
01:23:33
Speaker
Now, what's interesting here is that, again, this is said in the context of passage of both this British Nationality Act as well. No, I forgot it was called. It's not the British Nationality Act because that's the 1948 one. But this this Immigration Controls Act and in 1968,
01:23:47
Speaker
as well as the Race Relations Act. And it's later, there's an understanding that, you know, they say, oh, you have to have a grandfather born in, or you know, have a grandparent born in Britain in order to have these rights.
01:24:01
Speaker
And there are explicit conversations about how this was exactly designed to favor like Commonwealth citizens in Australia, et cetera, but prevent the kind of immigration of black and brown people that they were trying to prevent without having to codify like a racial discrimination in the law.
01:24:19
Speaker
So there actually is a record that this was explicitly designed to a racist purpose, but written in terms that could not like textually be called racist. But this is exactly the kind of discrimination that he's saying doesn't exist in the UK.
01:24:33
Speaker
He's okay with private discrimination of individuals against each other, but he's claiming that there is like not this government level discrimination. Well, he seems to think that it's a problem that there isn't.
01:24:46
Speaker
I'm casting a really baleful eye on that reference to free treatment under the National Health Service. Yeah, I mean, it's that's one of the anxieties, certainly.
01:24:57
Speaker
I also wanted to say about that. and And part of this whole thing is I think there's this way that history always comes into these arguments from this conservative position. History can never indict you. It can only ever vindicate you.
01:25:09
Speaker
Right. It can never be the case that, oh, historically, we've like done this thing and now we have to pay for it. But you're allowed to go into history and you're allowed to say, oh, look, we have this great history of not doing this thing the Americans did because the way you did it was very different.
01:25:24
Speaker
And so instead, you know, our history vindicates us, right? Pay no attention to all this other history about the way we treated all these people for decades and the brutal brutality, etc. Right.
01:25:34
Speaker
um History is a method of self valorization. Okay, so actually, before we go on to the next part. So I want to point to this
Resentment and Immigration Impact
01:25:43
Speaker
notion, right? The discrimination, the deprivation ah lies not with the immigrant population, but with those among whom they had come and are still coming. So he's outlined why immigrants have nothing to complain about but because they have this equal treatment. And now he's going to outline why the resentment re lies with and the deprivation lies with the population among whom they are arriving.
01:26:04
Speaker
While to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought. The impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
01:26:25
Speaker
They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds and childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places. Their homes and neighborhoods changed beyond recognition.
01:26:36
Speaker
their plans and prospects for the future defeated. At work, they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born
Conservatism's In-Group Protection
01:26:47
Speaker
worker. Oh, fuck you, Enoch.
01:26:50
Speaker
They began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament.
01:27:01
Speaker
A law which cannot and is not intended to operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur, the power to pillory them for their private actions.
01:27:15
Speaker
Oh man, there's so much going on. Can you believe that under this law, someone might be forced to bake a wedding cake for a black couple?
01:27:27
Speaker
oh This is something you could hear today about like slot ah like slot in other discriminations as well, right? like Yeah, what's that description of conservatism as the belief that there is an in-group which the law must protect but not bind and an out-group which the law must bind for not protect? Exactly.
01:27:49
Speaker
And I think that's why i wanted to get to this, this guy and this speech in particular, because I think as we move forward, I have all these other conservative figures in the 20th century I want to talk about. And I want to kind of talk about them in relation to this. And I think he because he is so good at rhetoric and making an argument and he knew what he was doing here, he has kind of stated this in a very clear way. And we can kind of track his relationship to the development of these ideas.
01:28:14
Speaker
Also, like, yeah, I think this is just such a common racist trope. He's even whipping out proto-cancel culture discourse here. Yeah. Disgruntled in the agent provocateur obtained the power to pillory them for their private actions.
Racism and Proto-Cancel Culture
01:28:30
Speaker
And it's going to get... Like what private actions specifically? So... in the hundreds upon hundreds of letters i received when i last spoke on this subject two or three months ago there was one striking feature which was largely new in which i find ominous all members of parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary decent sensible people writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their own trust because it was so dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a member of parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known one to have done so.
01:29:15
Speaker
The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.
01:29:29
Speaker
Oh, Helen, i'm in the time machine. I'm in the time washing machine. I'm just going in circles over and over. Everything is 2025. Everything 1968. Yeah.
01:29:42
Speaker
yeah And I think part of the reason that I wanted to stress so much leading into this, the amount of popular support he gets, the extent to which this is really a populist movement that he is sort of leading, but also sort of being led by is that I do want to avoid to some extent, subscribing to a kind of great man theory of history where we point to one guy and we're like, this is the guy who is the fulcrum of this historical period.
01:30:16
Speaker
All of that caveat out of the way that I don't think we should understand him quite that way. i think this is, Hugely foundational to a whole kind of politics that we see today.
01:30:30
Speaker
i could go read this article in the free press right now. Exactly. This is this opening. i talked to a constituent and he started complaining about if I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country.
01:30:47
Speaker
Reads like the opening of a Barry Weiss article. It really does. Yeah.
01:30:53
Speaker
This is how this is conservative mainstream politics today in so many ways. And the thing is, he probably was getting a lot of letters.
01:31:05
Speaker
Like, again, I think there's this radicalizing audience capture thing where maybe there's a whole other conversation that I'm not even I don't even have the sources or ability to really get into. about the fact that this was televised and the fact that speeches were starting to be televised and you could get this kind of mass movement by having these demagogic figures that wouldn't work quite the same way in an era where this kind of thing couldn't go out on the TV.
Economic Narratives Twisted by Racism
01:31:35
Speaker
Oh, this is incredible.
01:31:39
Speaker
I'm thinking of Enoch as kind of like this this fungus has just shot out little spores all over the place, and now they're growing in every direction. So he tells you that he's received hundreds of letters.
01:31:54
Speaker
Would you like to see one of them? Because he's going to share one. Eight years ago, in a respectable street in Wolverhampton, a house was sold to a Negro.
01:32:07
Speaker
Now only one white, a woman old age pensioner, lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house.
01:32:23
Speaker
She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over.
01:32:38
Speaker
The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out. The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7 a.m. by two Negroes who wanted to use her phone to contact their employer.
01:32:54
Speaker
when she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour. See, she wasn't racist. She was abused and feared she would have been attacked, but for the chain on her door.
01:33:06
Speaker
Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than two pounds per week.
01:33:19
Speaker
She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl who, on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. when she said the only people she could get were Negroes.
01:33:31
Speaker
The girl said, racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country. so she went home. The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks or at most a few months.
01:33:53
Speaker
She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds Excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children.
01:34:04
Speaker
Charming, wide grinning. ah That is a slur. Yep, it's a slur. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. Racialist, they chant.
01:34:15
Speaker
When the new race relations bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder. oh my god, fuck this dusty old bitch.
01:34:30
Speaker
I'm astonished. she's got a seven bedroom house and she's too racist to be a landlord. Fuck her. Yeah. I think, you know, there's a couple different paths, a couple of things to unpack here. I mean, many things to unpack here.
01:34:48
Speaker
One is exactly this. She has this house. Part of this, if you try to strip away all of the horrible racist nonsense, is a story about, know,
01:35:01
Speaker
The failures of a society where you simultaneously need to manage the place you're living as an asset to keep up your standard of living. i don't think I feel bad that she doesn't get to live alone in a seven-bedroom house, but especially with growing austerity measures and some declining standards of living and a whole other narrative about the economy,
01:35:28
Speaker
Yeah, this is, i think it is bad that her options are become a landlord or sell the house, but basically just because of the way the housing market works, you know, she should be allowed to just retire, right? Like, I think that this is something...
01:35:52
Speaker
We can say, right? so So there is a kind of economic story happening here that is then completely understood as a race problem because she's a racist, right? like Like, if she doesn't want to be a landlord, that's one thing. But it's not that she doesn't want to be a landlord. She doesn't want to be a landlord to anyone except white people.
01:36:17
Speaker
Yeah, she evinces no desire to be... Not a landlord, to be clear. right like but We're kind of projecting that desire onto her because we think that landlording is a job that perhaps should not exist. And like all jobs that should not exist, people should not be compelled to do it.
01:36:37
Speaker
Yeah. And so I wanted to kind of tug at this not early because I think it's going to underpin a lot of stuff, but it's not something I think she really wants. Like, I think she would be happy to be a landlord and wants to be legally allowed to racially discriminate.
01:36:54
Speaker
absolutely I mean, she's apparently willing to starve for the privilege yeah to do so. Now, another question you might wonder is, Does this woman exist?
01:37:05
Speaker
I would be a little surprised if she doesn't. It's not totally clear. Immediately after this speech, there was some attempt to like find this woman that was sort of reported. i forget which newspaper reported that they did an investigation and determined that this woman did not exist.
01:37:21
Speaker
Later, this like law firm came forward and said, oh, we actually represented this woman, and so we know who she is, but because of attorney-client privilege reasons, we can't share. The BBC in 2004 independently did an investigation and determined who the woman was. I forget her name. I didn't write it down, but they said this this woman, and she may or may not have been the woman who is talked about in this letter, but it's a woman who fits this description.
01:37:48
Speaker
old white lady who owned a big house, lived on a street that was, except for her house, mostly an immigrant population, and was made fun of by the local population for being extremely racist to them. Right?
01:38:03
Speaker
So... Yeah, that's about the level of detail that i was that I was committing to when I said that I think she probably exists. I mean, if you if you peer down enough into specific passages, there's stuff that's really not going to happen like for example, the flocks of children that cannot speak English but know the word racialist and only the word racialist. Yeah.
01:38:24
Speaker
I guess there's
Cultural Cohesion vs. Racial Differences
01:38:25
Speaker
nothing really more to say. Like, this is just horribly racist. like I think it's funny is hell that she's fucking herself over like this. Not gonna lie.
01:38:36
Speaker
Yeah. I'm glad she's getting her just desserts on a social level. And again, to go back to this idea of he's saying, oh, I have hundreds of letters and here's one of them.
01:38:46
Speaker
Again, we shouldn't take him at his word that, oh, I'm just reading this this letter. really supports this vision of a problem. And yeah, I guess I'm just going to repeat myself then.
01:39:02
Speaker
We're coming to the end of the speech. He does a little bit more where he talks about this dream of integration. Now... I think when we talk about, if i don't think either of us would really tend to use the word integration to talk about like race relations. like This is sort of an outmoded way of discourse now. But there's this kind of interesting equivocation that happens where you know we would say, okay, yeah, you have people who have different cultural backgrounds who are going to have different cultural and religious practices, whatever. like
01:39:36
Speaker
You need to have a society which is... like a level of multicultural pluralism, right? Which allows people to practice, like live their lives in whatever way they want, not just along cultural backgrounds, but you know, whatever it is.
01:39:50
Speaker
But he rails against this notion that immigration will, or sorry, that integration will happen because of course it's the, know, these, these societies, these immigrants, they don't want to integrate. So actually this belief that I have that,
01:40:02
Speaker
you know, that you know, that he's saying like race is real and the descendants of these immigrants are not English. He also means this very much in a cultural sense. And he says, actually, they have no intention of becoming English, which is something which he thinks simultaneously, like biologically cannot happen, but also could maybe happen culturally if they wanted to become English in certain cultural ways, but they're also not interested in doing that.
01:40:26
Speaker
Right. But I mean, pretty classic. You can kind of fill in the fill in the dots there. so here's sort of close to the end. For these dangerous and divisive elements, the legislation proposed in the race relations bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish.
01:40:42
Speaker
Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overaw and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and ill-informed have provided.
01:40:56
Speaker
As I look ahead, i am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood. So this is the reference to the Aeneid. This is what gives the the speech the name, the Rivers of Blood speech.
01:41:10
Speaker
It's here where his rhetoric really starts to, I think, overtake his... any kind of argumentation, he's really, really running with this vision of, we are destroying our society.
01:41:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. it very much seems like he's recalling his earlier description of people who are in favor of anti-discrimination measures as, and who have no objection to immigration as being like the appeasers of World War Absolutely.
01:41:45
Speaker
Absolutely. Here we have like a hostile army amassing to invade our country. Yeah, the the it seems like he's bringing that parallel back.
01:41:56
Speaker
also don't know what pabulum is. Oh, pabulum here is a Latin word that means something that feeds like an animal or vegetable organism.
01:42:09
Speaker
So it's like fuel. Oh, that's what it's like a really repulsive metaphor. Yeah. So here's how he closes after this kind of rhetorical climax filled with foreboding river of blood.
01:42:23
Speaker
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.
01:42:40
Speaker
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.
01:42:52
Speaker
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.
01:43:03
Speaker
His rejection of the parallel with the United States earlier has now apparently itself been rejected. Yeah. When he talks about immigrant communities organizing to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign, he's trying to suggest a parallel with the American civil rights movement, I suppose. Yeah.
01:43:22
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think, you know, earlier I said, he wasn't necessarily conspiratorial, in a sense. And I still think there's a way in which that is true.
01:43:33
Speaker
But certainly he is seeing growing immigrant communities, they were organizing for their political rights in the way that people will organize for their political rights, right? Like this is something that he was starting to see as in parallel with the US. And i also think it's an interesting thing to note at the beginning, he says, oh, people confuse map and territory, people confuse speaking out against an evil for the evil itself.
01:44:02
Speaker
And i would certainly say that's what he's doing when he looks at the US and analyzes what's happening there and also analyzes what's happening in Britain. And maybe he says, okay, no, in the US, there really is a problem of racial supremacy because they had slavery, but we didn't have that here.
01:44:21
Speaker
Also not true. And these people are getting together and saying, hey, we are facing problems of racism. We need to do political organizing to... advocate for our rights to not be discriminated against. And he's saying, you are inventing those problems by speaking about them. Right? Right. Like, why did you manifest these
British Identity and Racial Complicity
01:44:40
Speaker
issues? And so you're absolutely right. I mean, here's where I want to come back to one of the things you said at the beginning, which is he is saying not only this is something that everyone is saying, this is something that citizens of Britain are saying, but what it means to be a citizen of Britain involves saying this. Right.
01:44:57
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Involves avoiding complicity through silence. People who want to defend him, because there are people who claim he wasn't a racist. Of first course.
01:45:09
Speaker
Including actually Margaret Thatcher, who said that he had largely a correct concerns, even if he had an ill yeah a regrettable way of putting them.
01:45:25
Speaker
But people point to things like he learned all these languages. He tried to speak to his constituents. You know, he he spoke to his his Indian immigrant constituents in Urdu and and all these things. It's like, oh, he really respected people. And there is this sense in an interpersonal way that there aren't a lot of accounts of him doing small-scale interpersonal racism with to a specific person. And in a lot of people's minds, like that's what racism looks like, right? This is something we still see a lot today, which is it's a variant of the, I can't be racist. Well, I have a really, my best friend is black, right? Whatever you want to say, like he's such a fascinating figure because he's so repellent, but he sits right at, I think these fault lines of
01:46:19
Speaker
this like contemporary liberal color blindness that we're that we are seeing today is in in huge numbers as well anyway on the market thatcher point i really love how conservative leaders of the 70s or 80s could just be so frothingly racist by supporting the most frothing sort of racism and they just get a pass for it.
Political Fallout of 'Rivers of Blood' Speech
01:46:45
Speaker
So here's actually where things get really interesting. After this speech, he is fired as shadow secretary defense. Interesting. Edward Heath fires him.
01:46:58
Speaker
At the time, Margaret Thatcher is kind of on the rise, and already there's some grumbling that she's eventually going to be prime minister. There's a conversation that Edward Heath has with her, which she later says she remembers saying she didn't think he should be fired.
01:47:11
Speaker
Not... for any other reason than she thinks that it will escalate a crisis and it will make him into a martyr. That ends up happening. There is huge public outcry in support of him after he is fired.
01:47:25
Speaker
This is like completely unheard of in British history, like before this, and also to a large extent since then. The British public is not in the habit of caring about who the shadow cabinet members are to this extent. Yeah.
01:47:39
Speaker
you do not see rallies supporting shadow ministers as a regular matter, of course, in England. Okay, I don't i don't mean to just reflexively reach for the present day comparison in every instance, but...
01:47:52
Speaker
I am thinking once again about Barry Weiss actually unsuccessfully getting fired from the New York Times, but quitting her job as I think an associate editor of the opinion pages and churning that into a narrative about her cancellation that did so much to fuel her ascent.
01:48:13
Speaker
And People are not in the habit of giving a shit about someone in that position.
Denial of Racism and Public Perception
01:48:19
Speaker
It's really something interesting to think about. He, of course, is called by all of his critics a racist because he's a racist. Right.
01:48:29
Speaker
He continues to deny being Let's settle that question right now. I think Enoch Powell is racist. He continues to be asked in interviews. He's asked in an interview with David Frost in the 60s and then much later on a Desert Island Discs interview.
01:48:45
Speaker
in the 90s what is desert island dis oh it was this fun kind of like pop interview series in the uk where they got famous people on to do an interview structured around picking what i think four discs they would bring with them to listen to if they were stranded on a desert island oh i see like a criterion closet thing kind of yeah okay sort of like a precursor to hot ones yeah I love to bring Enoch Powell on Hot Ones. i
01:49:16
Speaker
honestly, if we could pick, he's he's up there for if I could see historical figure on Hot Ones. He's up there. Helen, I say this with all love and respect.
01:49:28
Speaker
You want Enoch Powell on Hot Ones because you're a total fucking freak. Yeah. he has a bunch of statements about being not a racist, not believing in racial hierarchy of any kind, continuing to insist that he continues to insist that all of this is really about a cultural understanding of Britain and thinking about what's best for Britain as a kind of cultural unit.
01:49:56
Speaker
And one thing that we didn't really point to, but at the beginning, towards the beginning of the speech, he says, there's a transformation that we haven't seen in a thousand years of British history. He's talking about the Norman conquests there.
01:50:07
Speaker
So, In his mind, it really has nothing to do with the color of people's skin. It is entirely a question of cultural change. Now, I think that that's actually something where he is wrong about the thing he thinks he believes.
01:50:26
Speaker
Yeah, i was going to say, I do not trust his opinion of his opinions. right And I think this is something that is, again, bumping up the gullibility score a little bit for me, because I think he genuinely believes that he is not a racist, and he genuinely does not perceive that the extent to which a lot of this comes from a revulsion when he thinks about racism.
01:50:49
Speaker
quote unquote, other races. But this is his basis for saying he's not a racist. I find it entirely unconvincing based on the speech we just read in which he was frothingly racist. i Okay, so back before he presented more or less his theory of how immigration was going to cause harm, I mentioned David Frum talking about cultural homogeneity.
01:51:13
Speaker
And, you know, there are all kinds of variations on that. And I guess in the sort of post-speech description of his views that you just indicated, there's a hint of that cultural change is bad.
01:51:27
Speaker
And then in the speech itself, we see two arguments that I would say are distinct from that. And one of them is just white people having to be around black people is bad.
01:51:38
Speaker
Look at this poor old lady who's suffering from that.
Economic Visions in Conservative Politics
01:51:42
Speaker
And then another one is these people come here and suck up the resources, the hospital beds for children, especially free health care, especially medical stuff. Perhaps he's just switching between rationales as convenient whenever he wants to think of himself as not racist.
01:52:00
Speaker
He can talk about things like hospital beds, ignoring the fact that that of course has its sought its own racist context. When he's happy to speak freely about his revulsion towards black people, he can talk about this old lady who won't let her room and how isn't that bad. This sort of inconsistency, this sort of shifting of rhetoric can be convincing to him.
01:52:22
Speaker
and yet still, it doesn't excuse anything about him. Yeah. so I think one of the big things that ties a lot of this together and something which I was going to try to weave in as a strand throughout this conversation, but there's so much to get into and British politics has so much going on.
01:52:42
Speaker
A big part of this was economic. And I think especially when we come to see the aftermath of this speech and of Powell's political career in general, there's a popular understanding.
01:52:56
Speaker
This kind of ends Powell's political career to a large extent in terms of positions he holds. He continues to be a member of parliament. Eventually, he's he loses Wolverhampton Southwest and becomes a member parliament for the Ulster Unionist Party. he sort of kicked out of the Conservative Party.
01:53:14
Speaker
Not exactly, but close enough. The thing is, he was also hugely involved in an economic reimagining of conservatism that started, that went all the way back to 1945. in with this labor manifesto, as we said,
01:53:29
Speaker
There was this big understanding about what the British state was. The British state is consists of this welfare state with all of these social programs. The National Institute of Health and the National Health Service were sort of started in that post-war boom.
01:53:43
Speaker
And there was an understanding that like trade unions were going to be a larger political force. And to a large extent, the conservative leadership the time even accepted a lot of that. They said, okay, we want to not maybe have that much. so We don't agree so much with labor, but this is what the British state is. it's It consists in, you know, the thing that makes you British is sort of these being a part of this project that pays into and then receives benefits from like the British state and it's like social programs.
01:54:13
Speaker
Along with a bunch of other people, Enoch Powell was very against this and also advocated throughout his career for like free market policies. And there's some really interesting resources on this.
01:54:28
Speaker
didn't write down the name of of some of the books, I should have, but he has a sort of unified vision that... We should completely deregulate the market. We should completely allow the free market. We should fight inflation in this way. We shouldn't have high taxes at all.
Rise of Neoliberalism and Social Impact
01:54:41
Speaker
The thing that makes you British is this cultural buy-in to Britishness and not this kind of economic membership of Britain, right?
01:54:50
Speaker
So there is no such thing as society. So exactly. And the thing is, he is really involved in like the Mont Pelerin Society and all of these other kind of libertarian.
01:55:05
Speaker
so he is one of the earliest, he's sometimes called like the first neoliberal politician. He really believed in this notion of we need this cultural understanding of Britain because that's what Britain is, because we actually should get rid of Britain.
01:55:19
Speaker
all this welfare nonsense. And so it's understood that he loses power and he he is forced out, but his economic vision of Britain is instituted under Thatcher. When Thatcher takes power in the nineteen eighty s the ideas that she uses to remake the economy and remake the way Britain works were to some extent created by Powell among others, there's this feeling that, Oh, okay. She's accepting his economic, but not his social vision, right? She's accepting this economic vision and they're, you know, the conservatives run with this free market thing, but not this kind of social cohesion vision. But from all these conversations, we, from exactly what we've seen, I don't think you can sever those two very easily because these go hand in hand with the question of what it means to be British.
01:56:11
Speaker
And There's a lot of people who like to say, oh, it also actually was counterproductive to the point of view of restricting immigration, because it made it hard for politicians to ever talk about increasing immigration controls without being compared to Powell.
01:56:27
Speaker
It's very hard to analyze this claim, again, because there's so many other factors that go into the
Immigration Control Rhetoric in Politics
01:56:32
Speaker
way things change. And it is true that you get later on several outcries against, you know, a politician says something like, you know, I think Thatcher once during her prime ministership makes a comment about people being worried about immigrants coming and changing the cultural landscape or whatever. And there's like a huge uproar and people are like, oh, you're doing Powell's shit again. Like, don't do that.
01:56:54
Speaker
At the same time, you do get an increasing number of immigration controls. We are now like the UK continues to have this fear of immigration be a driving political force.
01:57:05
Speaker
and Famously, Starmer recently gave a speech titled The Island of Strangers, which is said to... I haven't read the speech myself, but said to reference this quite explicitly.
01:57:19
Speaker
Yeah. So it's not exactly that the speech is trying to reference Powell necessarily, but he says the UK is becoming an island of strangers and people understand that this is sort of in this tradition. And and it was other people who really said, you are doing...
01:57:34
Speaker
rivers of blood, right? You are trying to do this. You were trying to capture this populist movement. Yeah. I mean, how else could you interpret it? It's yeah.
Populism and Rhetorical Strategies
01:57:42
Speaker
And other than Starmer, the other big figure here is Nigel Farage, who I think there have been a lot of comparisons made between Nigel Farage and Powell exactly because he also preyed on this kind of populist rise.
01:57:57
Speaker
While simultaneously not ever being a prime minister, not ever being in charge, but it's understood that sort of from the outside, he drove all these things through his use of rhetoric and through his political campaigning. He was a big force behind Brexit.
01:58:16
Speaker
And the thing is, I guess, a lot of people expect he is going to be the next prime minister. Because the Reform Party has grown massively in popularity.
01:58:27
Speaker
So this is where I think we can get to a really interesting question about what did he get? What did Powell get out of being bigoted? Right. This is something that we sort of wanted to talk more about on each episode. And I think it's something that gets really interesting to talk about here.
01:58:44
Speaker
One, I think he genuinely believed this stuff. He was advocating for a vision of the world that he genuinely believed. I think there is a tendency to dismiss that. Powell as Powell's relevance by saying, oh, he got drummed out after this.
01:58:59
Speaker
But I think he plays this interesting role in British politics where simultaneously people say that's, you know, Enoch Powell, that's Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood as a way to dismiss something, right? And that's what people said about Farage is like, oh, he's like a dime store Powell.
01:59:16
Speaker
Powell would hate that comparison, by the way, because Powell was always about being erudite and and elitist and and having this this cultural thing. And Farage is absolutely like, oh, I'm just down the pub drinking a pint. Like, I'm just a normal guy.
01:59:28
Speaker
This is ah an attitude and a type of guy that Powell would detest.
Speaker's Lasting Influence on Politics
01:59:32
Speaker
But they share views on immigrants. I think he exists as... the person you are able to point to and say, look, we're not doing Powell-ism. I'm not being a racist.
01:59:44
Speaker
And then you go and do all of the things Powell wanted you to do. Right. And I think this is, there's a lot of these guys and I think he's like a shining example of this, but I think that this is something that I think we're going to see again and again as like someone who is dismissed, but the manner of being dismissed kind of involves not really paying attention to what he said. And then we kind of let in all of these other elements of his reactionary politics, right? We know, we notice, okay, Starmer is saying Island of Strangers. That's like rivers of blood. We notice Farage is talking about immigrants destroying the country.
02:00:18
Speaker
and destroying a cultural Britain-ness, that's like rivers of blood. We don't notice, right? Like people aren't usually in the habit of comparing Barry Weiss to Powell, even though as we notice, if we actually read the speech, these tendencies are all there, right? So I think that there's a certain way in which he exists in the conservative mind to be the post that you can point to and say, we're not doing that.
02:00:40
Speaker
So don't worry. We're not crazy. We understand not to be like Powell. And then you go and you do all of his political vision and you just understand that you don't say it in quite such a racist way.
02:00:50
Speaker
If I can indulge in a little bit of alternate history. So in 2016, during the nominating process, i felt that it would be better to have Ted Cruz actually win the presidency than for Trump to merely be nominated and then lose.
02:01:12
Speaker
Now, keep in mind, at the time, i was a different kind of idiot than I am now. But i don't think what I was saying there was without some reasoning behind it, because When you have someone stand up and introduce these concepts and an appealing framing of them into the body politic in a way that is sufficiently extreme as to be deranging, you don't ever really get the poison out of the bloodstream.
02:01:52
Speaker
It continues to resonate and morph, and it continues to expand the boundaries of what is acceptable long beyond the point at which the actual struggle for power has been lost or won.
02:02:07
Speaker
And I perceive something similar is happening here. where Powell loses the fight for power, ah but he wins a cultural victory.
02:02:20
Speaker
Absolutely. And think you know a lot of the more centrist liberals that we would compare Powell to, and with this kind of rhetoric of grievance and you know this proto-cancel culture thing, they would hastily distance themselves from Powell.
02:02:38
Speaker
But one thing that I think would be funny to watch, although I think not politically constructive in any way, all these people who like to kind of make a fetish of debate for debate's sake and fighting things in the battleground of ideas. I think if you put someone who like is a centrist lib, but who styles them themselves as like very pro-immigration and you put them in a debate with Powell,
02:03:04
Speaker
they would lose because i think Powell has managed to find this. So many of the principles he's committed to are just basic liberalism and then taken to this kind of extreme. And I think he allows us to anticipate exactly this antagonism at the heart of this kind of utopian neoliberal vision that, you know, in order to really take the speech and say, here's what's wrong with it, you do have to tackle there was something fundamentally evil about British colonialism, which is not an uncontroversial statement, right? Among centrist liberals. And you talked about his racism supporting his neoliberalism.
02:03:49
Speaker
And there are many ways that you can... become a neoliberal, I suppose. But to me, his evolution from someone one who is deeply racist into a neoliberal makes so much sense. If you have an interest in rules, legalism, ceremony, the letter of the law, rather than the spirit,
02:04:14
Speaker
and you happen to be racist, then creating an economic and social system in which private actions can discriminate and reinforce and extend hierarchies without ever explicitly saying that that's what you're doing is so natural and so perfect.
02:04:38
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think being able to stand up and say, hey, this attempt at talking about, oh, we're just talking about questions of cultural cohesion. i'm really colorblind. That is something you hear from so many different sectors, not just the far right.
02:04:54
Speaker
And that's what I'm saying. He is just going to rhetorical heights, which with what is in many ways this kind of widely accepted view.
Personal Beliefs and Political Rhetoric
02:05:04
Speaker
I mean, there are a lot of people who harbor this feeling that...
02:05:09
Speaker
oh, there is a question of cultural cohesion. We do need to worry about, you know, whether these cultures will get along or cultural clash, right? Or they they paper over these like racist fears of immigration with this kind of abstract talking about culture. And I think it's all racist, but they would think of themselves as not racist in the way Powell was. But really, Powell is just...
02:05:31
Speaker
committed to his principles and is able to stand behind them. and And that's where I think... I think I've found my second least favorite autistic person. no So I got a little postscript for us, and then we can do the FAG rating.
02:05:48
Speaker
Powell was actually a member of parliament in 1967 when the UK decriminalized homosexuality. When Powell comes to power, homosexuality is a criminal act.
02:06:02
Speaker
In 1967, they pass along, they say, actually, consensual sex between men will no longer be ah punishment by imprisonment. Where do you think Powell stood on that? I honestly could see it going in any direction.
02:06:15
Speaker
It would not surprise me if he were if we were in favor of decriminalization, though He was in favor of decriminalization. Here's a little snippet from his Wikipedia page.
02:06:27
Speaker
Following his appointment as professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in 1937, he wrote to his parents that he was repelled by his female students while feeling, quote, an instant and instinctive affection for young Australian males.
02:06:40
Speaker
This, he added, might be deplored, but it cannot be altered, and it therefore had to be endured and, alas, camouflaged. Oh, Enoch. So...
02:06:52
Speaker
There's another little Roy Cohn similarity for you. Yeah, absolutely. Astonishing. But yeah, he opposed not necessarily that being a repressed gay guy that he would have necessarily ah you know opposed ah criminal or or supported decriminalization, but he did support decriminalization. He also opposed the death penalty.
02:07:14
Speaker
And actually, as health secretary, he supported subsidizing access to birth control. Oh, interesting. so For some reason, that's a little bit more surprising to me. He really was not...
02:07:28
Speaker
a typical conservative where you just like fill in all of the conservative bubbles. He largely, I think, to some extent tried to become like a conservative heretic. He wanted to be this kind of outsider, but this largely did lead to him in some ways, socially being more liberal than his colleagues. My other favorite little bit about him, which again, maybe I only care about because I'm weird.
02:07:53
Speaker
He was a staunch, anti-Stratfordian in that he had strong opinions about whether or not Shakespeare was the original author of Shakespeare's plays. And he thought very much, he have a, did he have a specific pet figure or he was like, I figured it out. maybe He had a specific pet figure, but he just felt that the, the, the typical biography quote unquote was ludicrous, which is such an interesting marker of a certain kind of British elitism that,
02:08:25
Speaker
Because I'm not going to necessarily say everybody who has doubts about Shakespearean authorship or whatever is like by definition of an elitist. But this is a belief that shows up because...
02:08:37
Speaker
People can't believe that someone who didn't go to university wrote those plays. So he had these opinions about like culture and like British education. And and this is like an interesting, i to just to me, I don't actually think it's like that explanatory of ah of a contradiction, but it is a contradiction like at the heart of this like fetishization of British culture, which is that This guy who like went to grammar school and then went off to go work in the theater and then wrote some of the best plays in the English language, like didn't go to college. And this is something that this Nietzsche fetishizing professor at 25, like absolutely cannot even like assimilate into his worldview.
02:09:18
Speaker
And I think it is absolutely connected to the rest of his kind of elitism And God, I hate this guy so much. He's so fucking annoying. Did I tell you i was in the doctor's office the other day and there were a bunch of children's books in there and i picked one up and it turned out to be a book about someone who establishes Oh God, establishes some sort of like spiritual contract or communicates astrally with the ghost of the true author of Shakespeare's plays, who is not Shakespeare.
02:10:02
Speaker
And this ghost teaches them all kinds of life lessons and also teaches them that definitely Shakespeare did not write these plays. And... That's amazing. Yeah, I flipped ahead. And at the end, they they've you know told all the teachers and that sort of thing like, no, I know who really wrote the plays. And everyone's like, I respect you more for having grown into your self-confidence.
02:10:28
Speaker
That's so funny. Yeah, it's it's one of my favorite little conspiracy theories because it's there's a certain way in which it really, really deeply does not matter. like Yeah, honestly, I can't imagine giving a fuck. Right.
02:10:45
Speaker
And so part of what's fascinating to me is actually caring deeply about the quote unquote real authorship. And then it is a perfect battleground for really arguing just about elitism and the possibility of someone who's not upper class, like producing art that's worthwhile.
02:11:06
Speaker
Anyway, that's all I have about him. So, okay, we got to do our FAG ratings. Yeah, we have, we have to do our, our analysis here. our FAG rating. So where do we think this guy ranks on ferocity? I'm kind of wavering between what feels like a very gentle three and more likely a four.
02:11:28
Speaker
So we both gave Kato a four. I think I gave, i gave Peck a three, You gave Pekka a two, and we both gave Leacock a four.
02:11:42
Speaker
He feels maybe Leacock level to me. I think so. I think... I'll give him a four. I think Leacock and Cato the Elder, he's like right in that category where it's pretty bad.
02:11:56
Speaker
I could imagine it being worse. And I'm tempted... if you're going much beyond Leacock and so on, then you have to start talking about reestablishing slavery.
02:12:08
Speaker
And... Right. He's not doing that. So I don't think I can quite give him a five. Okay. Okay. arrogance has got to be a five oh easy five easy five easy five for arrogance yeah and so now for me the hardest one is gullibility here okay i want to hear yours first because i don't want to influence your result i have my own firm opinion here okay and i think part of this has to do with gullibility being one of the more difficult things to talk about because it's not that I think being more or less gullible makes you i think you know ferocity and arrogance are both markers of odiousness and gullibility really is a sort of different category I think of this as a for fun category for us if you know what I mean
02:12:55
Speaker
Right. and i And I think it's a way of distinguishing between different types, but I think it's the one that is maybe the hardest to put in a linear ranking. And frankly, the one that offers the least to an analysis, but I would never give it up.
02:13:08
Speaker
My sense of his gullibility is quite high. And the things that bring it down are... Things like where he says, oh I'm going to give this speech and it's going to go off like a rocket, but it's going to stay up.
02:13:23
Speaker
Or the maneuvering to get the TV crew there. Where you understand that, where he seems to understand and is cynically wielding the effects of these things.
02:13:37
Speaker
That being said, I think he is fully in support of a notion of the majesty of England. Yeah. And first as the majesty of the British empire from a young age, wanting to be Viceroy of India.
02:13:51
Speaker
And then of course that changes once that becomes impossible. And of course he has this kind of 180, but the thing that is remains a constant through that huge shift in his political imagining is a commitment to Britain as a cultural idea that is meant for the preservation of British culture and British power as being something which is hugely important and an important project and so I think his gullibility to me is quite high.
02:14:20
Speaker
And I think I'm going to go with a four. Okay. Perhaps later on in the podcast, I would be brave enough to give him a six on gullibility at this moment. I'm not. So I'm giving him five.
02:14:31
Speaker
Everything I have learned about this guy portrays him as a true believer. And those things like talking about the rocket going up and staying up and and inviting the TV crews,
02:14:47
Speaker
I think of those as byproducts of his arrogance. They don't have any reflux on his gullibility for me. He's just like, I'm fucking cooking. Show up and smell it.
02:14:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. Yeah. And I guess the other the other question is something like, you know, when we talk about, okay, what was the point of gullibility as a rating here? How much did he actually have an understanding of power?
02:15:12
Speaker
And I guess this is the other the other aspect that went into thinking about this, that I was thinking about it back and forth. So in this kind of theory of... He is someone who is there to say the things you're not supposed to say so that other politicians can point to him and say, hey, look, you're not supposed to say that before then going on and basically doing his vision anyway.
02:15:30
Speaker
Was he aware that that was his position? And I would have a hard time believing that he was. I don't actually think he conceived of himself as that kind of person. And he continued to try to seek political power in a sort of more traditional sense, I think, throughout his life.
02:15:45
Speaker
I think that's what it would take to bring his gullibility down for. or sorry, to bring his gullibility down from a four for me would be like an understanding of, oh, I'm actually cynically using this kind of thing to just gain personal power, but I understand that this is all a game.
02:16:02
Speaker
This is a guy who was crushed when his dream of being Viceroy of India did not materialize. i don't think he I don't think he's interested in in understanding himself as a foil.
02:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, maybe I have to go to a five. i think I think you're right. I think he just fully, you know what? I'm going to, you've swayed me. I'm going to a five. Okay, I think we're perfectly aligned
Cultural Impact and Contemporary Parallels
02:16:25
Speaker
then.
02:16:25
Speaker
And interestingly, that puts us at 14. So if only he had talked a little bit more about trying to reestablish slavery, we would have had a perfect 15.
02:16:41
Speaker
But yeah, he let us down a little bit. But you know what? I love him the same. All the same. I just find this character so fascinating. Well, now he's been scientifically rated.
02:16:53
Speaker
Dissected. and Yeah, go in the history books. No, that can go at the top of his Wikipedia page. F.A.G. Rating 14. It is It's funny when you listen to or read about people talking about Powell, there is this very traditional narrative, which is very close to maybe the one that we just went over.
02:17:12
Speaker
You talk about his focus on immigration coming out of being first health secretary and then having constituents come to him and complain about immigration. And then you can find like Marxist historians who really tell this story about neoliberal economics and the foundation of things like the Mont Pelerin Society and then the connection between that and racism and this notion of like a cultural identity.
02:17:36
Speaker
And part of the reason I didn't stress that is I don't want us to just straightforwardly be like, oh, we're going to do everything we're going to do it in a Marxist lens. I think that often gets sidelined in a lot of mainstream historical discourse as being, oh, that's just like Marxists turning everything into Marxist theory.
02:17:51
Speaker
But at the same time, it's so fascinating how like we understand today that austerity and free market policies are a huge driver of like the huge anti-immigrant sentiment today.
02:18:04
Speaker
And Yeah, he really just in so many ways like anticipated, and not i mean not just anticipated, created the politics that we are dealing with right now, both in the UK and in the US.
02:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, this was a great pick, Helen. I'm so glad we went through this. I'm kind of losing it. When I was prepping this, I did not make the comparison to Barry Weiss. And now I'm kind of realizing... how much more applicable all of this stuff is.
02:18:33
Speaker
To be fair, I feel like we could just chew more in a comparison with Barry Weiss in every episode, and it would at least feel a little bit illuminating. Well, that's the interesting thing is that this complaint...
02:18:46
Speaker
Hundreds and hundreds of people are writing letters, but that they dare not sign their name or put their address to the ah envelope. it's It's like you said, I'm in the time machine. I'm in the eternal 2025, 1968, know.
Future Focus and Patreon Support
02:19:01
Speaker
just bouncing back and forth forever And actually, i ended up settling on this episode. I originally was thinking of doing a different figure who also has sort of a huge reaction to 1968 and the politics of 1968 and then found some big connections. So I think I'm going to, for the next couple of of episodes, be focusing on some figures that are contemporary or a little bit after, maybe a little bit before, mostly a little bit after, because Powell does really start in...
02:19:30
Speaker
the post-war era, which is when a lot of this reimagining of conservatism happens. But yeah there's some fascinating stuff in there. Anyway. Okay, I guess it's just left for us to plug our Patreon. If you enjoyed listening to our episodes, if you want us to have better sound quality, or you want to hear more bonus content, if we have time or resources to make that, you can go to our Patreon, patreon.com slash odium symposium.
02:19:57
Speaker
You can become an odium connoisseur and have your, you can have early access to episodes. We're going to aim to release them. we release these episodes every other Tuesday, but we will give early access to paid Patreon members, at least by the Friday before that Tuesday.
02:20:16
Speaker
It's $5 a month. And thank you to Jen and thank you to Lee for being subscribers. And for the rest of you who are listening without subscribing, i believe Sarah has a message for you.
02:20:30
Speaker
Yeah, I love you and I'm looking out for you and I'm wishing the best for you. Yeah. And you're going to need it because God is going to judge you harshly and send you straight to fucking hell if you don't subscribe.
02:20:42
Speaker
We're on your side, really. All right. Until next time. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
02:21:03
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you get a succulent face stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
02:21:20
Speaker
level of masochism.