Daniel Hannan & Enoch Powell: Spectacular Media Stupidity Guaranteed

If a politician expresses admiration for Winston Churchill do you immediately think that he’s a great fan of, among other considerations, casual indifference to the Bengal famine, the use of chemical weapons in Iraq or the pulverisation and total destruction of German cities? Of course you don’t. But when a politician says he admires Enoch Powell it’s as if he’d decided to fill the Tiber with blood by scurrying around the country and slaughtering the children of every immigrant in the land.

This is, as you might expect, also nonsense. But, lo and behold there’s a mini-rumpus and a song and dance over some comments made by Daniel Hannan to reason.tv. Hannan’s crime? To say that among his political heroes:

“In the British context, [was] Enoch Powell … as somebody who understood the importance of national democracy, who understood why you need to live in an independent country and what that meant, as well as being a free marketeer and a small-government Conservative.