“Enoch was right”: Reform UK’s director of campaigns keenly defended Enoch Powell

In yet another example of Reform UK employing someone with a dodgy history of social media posts, HOPE not hate can reveal the party’s director of campaigns and training, Michael Hadwen, has shown support for Enoch Powell and the far right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.

Back in April 2018, Dan Hannan, who is now a Conservative peer and was then sitting for the party in the European parliament, argued on Twitter that, while Powell was “right” about economics and Europe, he was “wrong about immigration”. 

Hannan explained: “Britain became multiracial without the unrest that he and so many others predicted.”

Hadwen was not impressed, responding to Hannan: “This tweet is sadly proof that many politicians who I have admired for years are not willing to fight against the systemic problems caused by unchecked multiculturalism. Enoch was right, he was just before the times.”

The politician Hadwen called “right” and “before the times” is most well-known for his racist, inflammatory and demagogic “Rivers of Blood” speech, which Powell, then a Tory MP, made to a Conservative Association in Birmingham in 1968. 

In the speech, Powell approvingly quoted a constituent saying, “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”; commented, about immigration, that “it is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”; and referred to black children as “wide-grinning piccaninnies”. 

He also voiced his support for “the encouragement of re-emigration” (i.e. ethnic cleansing), pronouncing that “if such a policy were adopted… the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects”. 

Powell’s racism and encouragement of ethnic cleansing resulted in him being swiftly booted out of the Tory shadow cabinet. 

But that apparently wasn’t enough to concern the now Reform director of campaigns and training, who has also displayed support for the infamous far-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.

Posting on Twitter in February 2016, Hadwen wrote that, if he became a MP, he would like Yiannopoulos as his PR manager.

When Hadwen wrote this post, Yiannopoulos – who rose to prominence as a leading supporter of the misogynistic harassment campaign known as Gamergate – was working for the American far-right news website Breitbart. 

During his time at Breitbart, Yiannopoulos said he doesn’t “entirely believe in lesbians”, claimed that “behind every racist joke is a scientific fact”, commented that a ban on female drivers is “the only thing Saudi Arabia gets right”, and was later revealed to have used antisemitic email passwords and solicited story ideas from white nationalists. 

Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter in July 2016 after he led a harassment campaign against the actor Leslie Jones and resigned from Breitbart in February 2017, after comments resurfaced in which he appeared to justify relationships “between younger boys and older men”. 

On top of the support he has shown for Powell and Yiannopoulos, in April 2018 – around a month after Russian agents attempted to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury – he said that “Russia is not my enemy,” adding: “We should be working with them, and not throwing around threats like a spoilt child.”

It’s not hard to see why Hadwen has found a home in Reform. 

As well as having previously said that, as “an operator,” Russian president Vladimir Putin is the world leader he most admires, Reform leader Nigel Farage is a longstanding supporter of Powell. 

In his 2011 book Flying Free, for instance, Farage termed Powell “a singularly great man,” saying he was “principled, with a formidable mind, the courage of his convictions and enduring independence of spirit”.

A few years before that, in 2008, Farage commented: “I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got.” 

Something for both Hadwen and Farage to consider: is it really the sign of someone who was “before the times” and a “great man” to inflame racism and encourage ethnic cleansing?