ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the question of Powellism. It addresses existing Political Studies accounts of Powellism as a discrete political phenomenon explicable via the nature of 'race' politics as liable to populist agitation and the peculiarities of the man himself. D. Schoen's account is representative: Enoch Powell's immigration speeches from 1968 on are noteworthy because of his effort to go beyond the statistics and personalise the concern he felt about the problem. Powell's elective role has been to push to a greater degree of sophistication the language politics of 'race' in the context of its discursive repression. The deployment of logic and weighted language is noticeably uncharacteristic of virtually all other political presentations and thus Powell is 'noticeable' for his oratory, as elsewhere. An inescapable component of Thatcherism has been its authoritarianism, particularly noticeable in the populist appeals made by the Thatcher regime in the wake of the inner city disorders and the Falklands' war.
