Julia Hartley-Brewer sees nothing wrong in the Rivers of Blood speech

[JudyCoolibar]

twitter.com/juliahb1/status/775448373218406400

Thick or deluded?

Yes, he knew what he was doing talking about scared old ladies and "... [the] 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."

cdtaylornats: "Part of Powells problem was he was a brilliant classical scholar and quoting a line from the Aenid was never going to go down well with most journalists who would no doubt be trying to find out about Enid."

You seriously think that the reason journalists didn't like Powell's speech was that they didn't understand the classical allusion? Really?

hackmum - I think that anti-intellectualism is not a new phenomenon. Too clever by half was a common description back then.

However you have to look a Powells whole career - I suspect few of the people calling him racist could speak Urdu. He advocated for immigrants t work in the NHS - something bitterly opposed by the unions.

One of his speeches acclaimed by Dennis Healey as one of the best he had heard Powell said

"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'. 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. 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. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility."

At other times he railed against the evils of the old Victorian asylums that were still extant.

But the people who objected to his speech definitely were not solely or even mostly anti-intellectuals. After all, the Times, which was very highbrow at the time, described the speech as evil, and he was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet and was never appointed to political office thereafter.

He is also notorious as the Minister who refused to hold a public inquiry into thalidomide or start a campaign for everyone to throw out any thalidomide stocks, blaming the whole thing on ignorant women who took pills during pregnancy. As for advocating for immigrants to work in the NHS, that was precisely so that he could recruit people who would be willing to work for very low pay, and the unions were right to object.

One thing that sticks in my mind was a piece of film of him with his family where he was constantly being sarky and nasty with his children. There is something particularly unimpressive about a man who has to score points over any child, let alone his own, particularly when a camera is on him.