Eric Clapton stands by Enoch Powell

!!!

As someone with some legal training I can confirm that this is every bit as valid as most of Marcello's opinions.

However, he is by no means racist.

http://www.clarence.com/contents/musica/speciali/030527him/images/intro.jpg

Wasn't he also shitfaced when he said it? Not that that excuses it, of course, but I'd put it nearer to Bowie's coked-up nazi chic folly than Clapton's unapologetic Powell support.

He was the first musician to drop the N-bomb on a UK top 10 single as well, remember ("Oliver's Army").

also, dave and thesplooge: I've never called anyone a nigger whilst drunk either, or indeed witnessed anyone doing so. I have, however, seen friends and acquaintances indulge in talk and behaviour that, if I thought that it was a genuine reflection of their personality, I'd be *very* worried about them; and frankly, the thought of someone judging *me* based on drunken behaviour on my part very much frightens me, too.

ie, he liked them as a construct, not a reality, they were nice in the pretty picture books and on the records, and even in the studio! but, please, dont move next door to eric!

and, also, you could argue that his pro-powellist racism was primarily aimed at pakistani and indian (and, given the time frame, especially ugandan indians fleeing amin) rather than at britains black population, and that he saw no contradiction here.

i believe this to be racist behaviour

That anyone can seriously believe that Elvis Costello thought Ray Charles was a "blind ignorant nigger" is amazing.

Belief that other races are intrinsically inferior to your own is clearly racism.

The belief that too rapid an influx of people from other races and cultures into your own may lead to negative consequences is more problematic. I think it is at least possible to hold that view without being racist (ie if you believe the trouble will be caused by aspects of human nature common to all races).

But I also know absolutley nothing about British politics.

I go to civil rights rallies
And I put down the old D.A.R.
I love Harry and Sidney and Sammy
I hope every coloured boy becomes a star
But don't talk about revolution
That's going a little bit too far
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I cheered when Humphrey was chosen
My faith in the system restored
I'm glad the commies were thrown out
of the AFL-CIO board
I love Puerto Ricans and Negros
as long as they don't move next door
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

The people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I read New Republic and Nation
I've learned to take every view
You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden
I feel like I'm almost a Jew
But when it comes to times like Korea
There's no one more red, white and blue
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

I vote for the Democratic Party.
They want the U.N. to be strong
I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts
He sure gets me singing those songs
I'll send all the money you ask for
But don't ask me to come on along
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

To be fair, in the context of the times, this was not such an extreme view. The conventional wisdom among economists at the time was that hard choices had to be made in the trade off between unemployment and inflation (or "stagflation"). Full employment was an inappropriate goal because the last x% of jobs were bought at too high a price for the economy as a whole. Even many left-wing economists accepted this as (regrettably) true.

Right-wing economic view are not necessarily racist. Right-wingers broadly believe that people should keep what they earn and that wealth should not be redistributed to the poor. If a disproportionate amount of the poor are from particular racial groups that may look like racism.

Of course as a generalisation people opposed to any redistribution of wealth to the less well off are more likely to be racist than people who approve of redistribution, but being opposed to redistribution is not necessarily racist in itself.

Have we entered some kind of socialist dream without my noticing. That sounds more like the conventional trade-off now than the one perceived then. I don't thin k it was till New Labour that the goal of full employment was quietly dropped.

Not so. Powell was an early monetarist. The monetarists were the first influential group of post-war economists to argue that higher levels of unemployment were necessary to counter inflation. Thatcher implemented their policies, hence 3M+ unemployed.

In modern terms Brown has been staggeringly successful at combining relatively low inflation with low unemployment. I don't think there's anything particularly socialist about it, but this would certaintly have seemed like a dream to most economists in the 80s.

Wouldn't one think that Powell would have been protectionist, economically speaking (he got support from the dockers, didn't he?)? If only for whites, obviously...

Powell was in many ways on the cusp of the whole contradiction underpinning Thatcherism; a fervent believer in capitalism, his belief in racial and national "purity" and affinity to shared cultural mythology can only be undermined by capitalist expansion. i think he was a classic example of those conservatives who championed the idea of free-market economics as a means of getting us out of what they saw as the entrapping, restrictive post-war corporate state, but weren't so keen on what those theories actually brought about culturally. certainly, despite having championed many New Right economic theories when they were still very marginal in the party, having been passionately anti-Heath, having been slavishly admired by Margaret Thatcher and having seen her vote against the Race Relations Act and almost all similar legislation, he still turned against her in the 1980s because he thought she was too servile to the USA and not sufficiently "independent British". and even though he considered Communism to be evil, he predicted that Britain would be on the Soviet side in a Third World War between the USA and the USSR (many predicted such a war at the time, but even those who believed the whole of continental Europe would go Communist were generally convinced that Britain would hold out), which suspects that his idea of the British people had plenty of room for Statism as an overall concept (such purist ideas have to; they cannot make sense otherwise).

essentially Powell was an even balance of three distinct Right-wing tendencies - monetarist, romantic and straight-up racist. monetarism and breaking down the ideas placed in the mainstream by the Attlee government was very important to him for much of his life, it's true, but he held views on the superiority of the aristocracy to everyone else - going hunting as a young man so as to ape the landed classes, even insisting that Shakespeare's plays must have actually been written by some aristocrat because nobody from such relatively "humble" stock could create such great works - which led to a big gulf developing in the 80s between him and younger monetarists, many of whom were concerned almost above all else with breaking down the culture among the British middle classes of genuflecting towards pre-existing upper-class anti-commercial values (what i call "Wienerisation" after the man who had the biggest influence on it). i suspect that Powell's balance of monetarism, romanticism and racism seemed much much less contradictory when he was actually espousing it than it does now, the Right being so much less divided then.

Powell's insistence about Shakespeare's plays being written by some other aristocrat is truly barmy, and very suggestive of someone who wants to compartmentalise culture in a very rigid way. The man was supposed to be a scholar; did he have much evidence for these specific views on WS' plays' authorship...?

It is amazing to me that the Tories could hold themselves together as they did... the pursuit of power and the common objective to defeat Labour and to restrain 'socialism' are clearly the reason, but it's still strange that Heath, Maudling and MacLeod (whose views and policies are closer to today's left than to the right) could be of the same party as Joseph, Powell and Peter Griffiths (IIRC the name of the candidate who won a Birmingham seat against Labour's Patrick Gordon Walker, in the 1964 GE with an openly racist campaign)...

'Powell's insistence about Shakespeare's plays being written by some other aristocrat is truly barmy'

I'm afraid it isn't actually. He may have chosen to believe it for snobbish, classist reasons, indeed so have many others over the last few centuries (Shakespeare Conspiracy Theories do have a long pedigree). But they can't be dismissed that easily. Even Jonathan Bate and Stanley Wells, two of the most prominent Shakespeare scholars, had trouble providing a decent defence in the recent 'Much Ado About something' documentary (which explored the 'Marlowe was Shakespeare' theory). The oft cited' Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays because he wasn't educated enough' reason is contemptible, but also plausible. Not enough to change my mind, but still problematic. Even those candidates who weren't aristocrats, like Marlowe, (who went to Cambridge) had further education. Shakespeare's success in the dramatic/poetic world based on his origins is 'unusual', there's no denying it.

So disbelieving Shakespeare as the Folio author is not 'barmy'. Some barmy people have taken up the cause however.

From all I have experienced of the academic debate; it seems there's little doubt that some works were collaborative; i.e. say, some scenes of "Macbeth" were definitely of the mark of a different writer than the established Shakespeare. I remain to be convinced that there is strong enough evidence for people to assume that an aristocrat wrote WS' plays rather than assume the conventional wisdom.