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Daniel Hannan

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He has written eight books on European policy, speaks French and Spanish and is author of The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain

Journalists' magic word

 

By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: November 6th, 2007

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Where would journalists be without that handy word “linked”? Almost any story can be constructed out of the fact that someone “has links with” (delete as appropriate) “the far Right” / “Muslim extremists” / “terrorism” / “Enoch Powell”.

Any reference to Enoch Powell provokes huge controversy

These “links” are often asinine. When I was first elected to the European Parliament, I and a handful of Euro-sceptic MEPs would occasionally try to sabotage bad Bills. Afterwards, when we gave our press conferences, the only question the then FT correspondent would ask was: “So does this mean that you voted with Jean-Marie Le Pen?”

This afternoon, a Mirror journalist told me that he “had had drawn to his attention” the fact that I had recently quoted Enoch Powell in a speech. I had, in other words, repeated the sin of Nigel Hastilow, the Tory candidate who resigned after remarking that Enoch Powell had been right.

(I am reminded of one of Matthew Parris’s funniest articles, his “A to Z of Political Soundness”, which gently satirised conservative opinions: “E is for Enoch. Enoch was right, of course. But we never specify what he was right about”.)

As regular readers of this blog will know, I quoted Enoch Powell on thesubject of the EU , or, more precisely, on the failure of the British people to wake up to what had been done in their name under the 1972 European Communities Act. I did so, as you may recall, in the context of a speech wholly about Europe.

For, when it comes to Europe, Enoch was right. He was one of the few politicians to understand, back in the 1960s, that the Common Market was not an economic project, but a scheme for political union. His warnings were subsequently vindicated by events.

But this, of course, is not what the Mirror is interested in. What it wants is to keep alive its puerile campaign to portray David Cameron as nasty. (Its editorial this morning is a good example of the babyish tone it takes on the subject.) I particularly enjoyed that phrase “drawn to my attention”. Drawn by whom? Presumably by a Labour reseacher, who had been frenetically googling “Enoch Powell” all night in the hope of finding another Tory politician who had quoted him. Really, you Mirrorchaps, you should read this blog: it has 20,000 unique users per week, and it might save you a bit of time.

For what it’s worth, I think Enoch Powell was wrong on immigration. The civil unrest that he forecast, and that many feared in 1968, didn’t materialise. Britain assimilated a large population with an ease that few countries have matched. Being an immigrant myself, I have particular cause to be grateful for Britain’s understated cosmopolitanism. To be sure, inward migration should be controlled: we want a rough sense of whom we are admitting and in what numbers; and (in large part because of Europe) we are losing that sense. But a measure of legal settlement can benefit a country.

Still, I declined to return the Mirror man’s call. His newspaper isn’t interested in discussing the merits of either immigration or the Euro-referendum. Rather, it wants to rehearse its familiar plaint that the Conservatives are a) “hopelessly split” and b) “lurching to the Right”. To this end, any mention of Enoch Powell by a Conservative , even, let us say, to praise his brave and humane intervention on behalf of the Kenyan prisoners at the Hola Camp in 1959 , will be twisted into a story of Tory racism. “Links”, you see: the most useful word in a reporter’s dictionary.

 

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