"Belt Up, You Big Bore"

Britain's Enoch Powell is a Cantabrigian classicist who can speak eleven languages--and enrage listeners in any of them. Winston Churchill once described him as "that young madman who has been telling me how many divisions I will need to recapture India."

Last week, after his latest speech in bluntest English, insistent Enoch, 64, sent gorges rising again. Speaking to a group of Young Conservatives, he let loose on his favorite topic: there are too many "coloreds" in Britain. This, he predicted, would produce "eventual conflict on a scale which cannot adequately be described by any lesser term than civil war." Warming up to the war metaphor, Powell called skin color "a permanent and involuntary uniform which performs ... the functions of a uniform in warfare, distinguishing one side from the other, friend and foe, making it possible to see at a glance where to render assistance and where to attack."

Most Britons were aghast. Winston Churchill, the late Prime Minister's grandson and M.P. for the Stretford district where Powell spoke, called such sentiments "insane, venomous outpourings." Wolverhampton Laborite Renee Short was more explicit. She accused Powell of purveying twaddle and advised: "Belt up, you big bore."

Powell is notoriously unbeltable. He is used to quick ascents. The child of schoolteachers, he managed to get to Cambridge and became a professor (of Greek) at Australia's University of Sydney when he was only 25. During World War II, he rose from private to brigadier, and he won a seat in Parliament when he was 38. In 1968, in what became known as his "River of Blood" speech, Powell first brought Britain's race question out of the limbo to which other politicians had tacitly consigned it. The Nationality Act, he argued, was flooding London and Midlands ghettos with Indian, Pakistani, African and West Indian immigrants, who could claim British citizenship on the basis of their Commonwealth status. Within 15 or 20 years, he declared, there would be a horde of 3.5 million coloreds in Britain, and one day they would precipitate a bloody race war. (In the nine years since that speech, the country's non-white population has more than doubled, to nearly 2 million; this has caused enormous social problems, but relatively little violence.)

At that time, Powell's obsession so embarrassed Britain's Conservatives that Tory Leader Edward Heath booted his maverick front bencher out of the shadow cabinet. Powell later gave up a Tory seat he had held for 24 years, joined the Ulster Unionists and returned to Parliament from South Down, a Northern Ireland district, but his clipped mustache and hypnotic blue eyes remain familiar all over the country.

He spices his racial jeremiads with scholarly references to Thucydides and Sophocles. When he demands that coloreds be repatriated out of England, some critics dismiss him as little more than a British-style George Wallace. But his followers agree with his complaint that nonwhites constitute an "alien wedge" that threatens the homogeneity and continuity of the British way of life. "A Powell speech," he insists, "is worth reading and rereading." A rereading of his latest diatribe indicates that it was meant to be more than demagogic. Commented London's Daily Mail: "It is not racial conflict he seeks to provoke, but conflict with the law. He wants to become a legal martyr." Britain's Race Relations Act of 1965, in addition to condemning discrimination in public places, makes it an offense to incite hatred by words or writing. A new act, which takes effect this spring, eliminates the 1965 provision that malicious intent has to be proved. Now it will be sufficient to show that abusive words were used in circumstances where "hatred is likely to be stirred up against any racial group." Powell has attacked this interpretation as a challenge to free speech; his latest "civil war" oration was obviously calculated to invite prosecution in a possible test case.

The scope of the new law also disturbs British liberals; as it has been drawn up, drunks or fools who thoughtlessly make racist statements are as susceptible to prosecution as bigots who do it maliciously. Thus liberals, for once, find themselves uncomfortably agreeing with Enoch Powell on the questions of freedom of speech and individual rights. Powell has the government in a legal dilemma. Prosecuted, he achieves his martyrdom. Unhindered, he can continue to exploit racial tensions that might indeed at some point provoke a river of blood.

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