Voice On The Right

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30959, 15 January 1966, Page 4

Voice On The Right

A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell. Edited by John Wood. B. T. Batsford. 150 pp. Index.

As a controversial and outspoken member of the right wing of the British Conservatives Enoch Powell, a former Minister of Health, a member of Mr Harold McMillan’s Cabinet in 1962-63, a rebel against the Prime Ministership of Sir Alec DouglasHome, and now a member of the Opposition “Shadow Cabinet,” needs little introduction to those interested in contemporary British politics. John Wood, an admirer, who edits this anthology of Mr Powell’s speeches, describes him as “the most significant figure in British politics.” He is the man who “dared to bring the conflict of political ideas into the open and explained more effectively than anyone else the alternatives before the country.” Certainly Mr Powell is an implacable enemy of Socialism where he believes he finds it. However, in the mid--1960’s his equating of freedom and capitalism has an anachronistic air. In spite of Mr Powell’s often passionate and learned analysis of the state of Britain the free

society there has not “virtually gone by default” as he claims.

Most of the speeches in this collection were made in the years 1962-64. Since then the British Labour Government, whatever its pre-election threats, has not indulged in the total planning by which Mr Powell believed it would quickly increase the dependence of Britons on an allembracing state. Faced with the realities of office the Labour leaders have behaved in a way not so different from their Tory predecessors. Yet Mr Powell deserves a hearing for the point of view he represents is still an important one m his own party. Once Professor of Greek at Sydney University Mr Powell brings to his political utterances a wealth of classical and historical allusions which often lift his remarks above the dull polemics which are now all too common, to Britain as in New Zealand.