Does a Strong Moral Code Doom a Political Career?

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Murray details the subterfuge, lies and deliberate policy of those who actively promoted mass immigration, not least of which was the government of Tony Blair. Murray demolishes, with unassailable arguments, all the reasons that have been given over the years for the “inevitability” of immigration and the false charge of racism, which any questioning of the policy always engenders.

In many ways, Murray is Powell’s successor and will probably earn the same fate.

Enoch Powell’s fate was to be a prophet and a statesman, and it is for that dual role, not to refute or prove a point, that the speech should be revisited. The first paragraph of it would be profitably studied by all those who wish to make an effective public speech; Margaret Thatcher said that everything in his speeches had to be “worked out, in reason, from first principles.” It is a perfectly formed reasoning for all that follows, and it demolishes the vulgar and ill-thought accusations of racism made after it was spoken.

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His opening sentence stated that it is “the supreme function of statesmanship” to provide “against preventable evils.” A statesman, according to most definitions, is not simply a politician, which is perhaps why St. Thomas More is designated the Patron of Statesmen.

Among other attributes of the statesman are “great wisdom and ability in directing the affairs of government, or in dealing with important public issues,” the dictionary says. Powell understands, as he says, that in speaking or warning of avoidable evils, “people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles,” and, one might add, attaching the label of “prophet of doom” to those who speak in such a manner.

Such discussion, Powell says, is the “most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician.”

That description of a statesman’s duty, which Powell fulfilled at great cost, is also the role of the prophet — not a soothsayer or astrologer, but as Chesterton once said, a “sentinel.” The prophetic function, by derivation, Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote, was to be “one who speaks out. He must not wrap up his meaning; he must not expect success.”

Knox, in speaking of Belloc but also perfectly applicable to Enoch Powell, spoke of the “double tragedy of the prophet; he must speak out, so that he makes men dislike him, and he must be content to believe that he is making no impression whatever.” Powell finished his speech by confirming Knox’s definition: “to see, and not to speak, would be the greatest betrayal.”

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The Lord spoke of a “prophet’s reward,” which, in this life seems to be condemnation, ridicule, or persecution and death. Powell never predicted “rivers of blood”; as Sir Roger Scruton has written, he had a nobler and perhaps naïve belief in the cultural intelligence of his audience than was a reality.

He alluded to the Cumaen Sybil in Book VI of the “Aeneid” by Virgil, who saw the “River Tiber foaming with much blood.” The Sybil warns not only of what the “foreigner” might do, but also of what he might experience. Scruton writes that “rhetoric and allusion are dangerous, and never more dangerous than in the minds of those who do not understand them, but whose self-deceptions they reveal.”

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Proponents of mass immigration, specifically mass immigration from cultures inherently hostile to Christianity and Western “values,” will bring about, through their “self-deception,” the very hostility they so loudly condemn.

Those who fail in the role of statesman and prophet, which Powell personified, “deserve,” as he said, “and not frequently receive, the curses of those who come after them.”

Fr. Benedict Kiely is a Catholic priest and founder of Nasarean.org, which is helping the persecuted Christians of the Middle East.