This a great piece by Ferdinand Mount, warmly reviewing a book about Enoch Powell and also providing additional context relating to Brexit and Brexiters.
On how the people were being allegedly deceived by those "high-ups"....and how familiar this will sound to modern ears.
On the effect of "that speech".....
On Powell's earlier plan to reconquer India and Churchill's understandable reaction.
Early indicators of Powell's racist "Rivers of Blood" impulse.....
Then, of course, his famous journey on the issue of Europe. And what he said as late as 1965.
Mount considers Powell's underlying driver: "wedded to the absolute, hostile to qualification, compromise or nuance". A kind of simplism, one might say.
Allied to paranoia, it sounds awfully familiar.
There is also the very accurate observation that in Brexiter psychology, nationalism will, in the end, trump everything. Including a strong belief in 'free markets'.
On the importance and symbolism to Powell of hard borders.
There is a lot more in here that is well worth reading. If you need to specially register to get one free article, make it this one.
A few Brexiters used to say that we needed domestic political reform at the end of all this, to avoid ever being taken into the EU again without the fullest consent.
We now need to broaden that into wholesale political reform to also avoid us getting into this current mess again
Right now, I suspect it is futile arguing for particular 'options' outside EU membership until we fully confront the unchecked nature of our politics and the ever-reducing quality of our politicians.
We need something of a quiet revolution on this front. I don't see us moving forward much until this is sorted (or moving forward in the usual tribal-infused way).
"Had it not been for the belief that Brexit might be overturned, perhaps Brussels would have listened to those who, in the aftermath of the referendum, wanted to draw Britain into a market-only tier, part of a “ring of friends” around the EU."
I'm sorry to say that Dan has been living in his own version of the truth since 2016, which has often been out of step with the rest of Vote Leave. They never gave a shit about EFTA yet he still projects his truth onto them as though they agree with him. They didn't and don't.
So I commuted into London from Bucks today, on business.
Impressions...
Amersham station car park was very quiet - at 8.30am.
The platform had one other person on it. And there were 6 of us in the train carriage all the way to London Marylebone. All masked. /1
Marylebone station was dead. TFL staff standing to one side looking bored/sad.
A sudden thought: HS2 and more capacity - really?
Entered the tube alone, watched by one staff member. Now I'm starting to feel sad. The times I've been on this network since a child, always busy.
Onto the tube network. Carriages are sparse. Jubilee carriage had more people - roughly every other seat free.
Virtually all wearing a mask; most the light blue disposable surgical masks. What happened to London chic, eh? And where are the mask sceptics? They barely exist.