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@GA2G
Will, I view Enoch Powell as "great", mainly because of his intellect. His academic accomplishments truly impressed me, as did his life of service to his country.
Those who fell for the National Front latching themselves onto his Rivers Of Blood speech, and using that to embolden their racist and racialist arguments, really didn't understand Mr.Powell at all. After all, as Health Minister in the early 1960s, he was responsible for the recruitment drive for nurses from the Caribbean - of which my mother was one....leaving behind her native Barbados, to come to London and marry my Grenadian dad (at the time, a student veterinary technician).
I was in awe of a man who attained a double starred first in Latin and Greek from Cambridge. An achievement that has remained truly rare indeed. As a bit of a linguist, his mastery of the English language leads me to believe that he DID know exactly what he had said, in the quote you gave regarding intercourse with a woman. In fact I had found him a man of a delicate and possibly feminine demeanour, though that may have been the gentility of class (to which he had risen to the upper echelons), or quite possibly it may have been a homosexuality that others have believed him to have been secretly participant in.
His River Of Blood speech is one of the most famous in UK history, and even if it is abhorent, is it untrue? Were there not race riots in Notting Hill (blacks versus Teddy Boys), then Brixton, then Tottenham? And is the BNP not becoming more popular in the east of London, and in parts of the Midlands? Isn't this what he foretold? Rather visionary I'd say, though in truth, I'd prefer that he had been completely wrong. Still, I was born due to Enoch Powell's West Indian recruitment drive for nurses.
I hope that wasn't argumentative, and.....that Marxist_Fixie never sees this post.