Sorry, BE, any contribution to rational has, itself, to be cool and rational. "Rivers of Blood" was neither. It set out to raise the emotional temperature of the times, and of the debate. Of course it didn't explicitly advocate a backlash; as already acknowledged, Powell was far too clever for that. But his intellegence is such that he cannot have been TOTALLY aware that the tone of his remarks were very likely to trigger such a backlash. So I consider him to have been a very dangerous racist.

Of the attributes you ascribe to him I accept (only) that of his elegance of phrase. As far as I can tell his scholarship was deep but limited in its scope, and his attitude to Europe, while consistent with his racism, I find bizarre . . . I suppose it, at least, was not inconsistent with his "Ulster Unionism"; an illogical attachment to a "Great" Britain which - insofar as it ever existed - was utterly inconsistent with the financial and political realities of the post-war world. And attachment to that myth has done the mass of the British people a great dis-service!

G.