Editing Enoch Powell (section)

===Financial Secretary to the Treasury===
When Macmillan replaced Eden as Prime Minister, Powell was offered the office of [[Financial Secretary to the Treasury]] on 14 January 1957. This office was the [[Chancellor of the Exchequer]]'s deputy and the most important job outside the Cabinet.{{sfn|Heffer|1998|pp=210–211}}<ref group="nb">At a meeting of the 1922 Committee on 22 November 1956, Butler made a speech appealing for party unity in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. His speech did not go down well and [[Harold Macmillan]], whom Butler had taken along for moral support, addressed them and was a great success. In Powell's view this was "one of the most horrible things that I remember in politics&nbsp;... seeing the way in which Harold Macmillan, with all the skill of the old actor-manager, succeeded in false-footing Rab. The sheer devilry of it verged upon the disgusting". After Macmillan's death in 1986, Powell said "Macmillan was a Whig, not a Tory&nbsp;... he had no use for the Conservative loyalties and affections; they interfered too much with the Whig's true vocation of detecting trends in events and riding them skilfully so as to preserve the privileges, property and interests of his class".</ref>

In January 1958 Powell resigned, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer [[Peter Thorneycroft]] and his Treasury colleague [[Nigel Birch]], in protest of government plans for increased expenditure; he was a staunch advocate of disinflation, or, in modern terms, a [[monetarist]], and a believer in market forces.{{sfn|Roth|1970|pp=180–189}} Powell was also a member of the [[Mont Pelerin Society]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Shammas |first=Victor L. |date=March 2018 |title=Burying Mont Pèlerin: Milton Friedman and neoliberal vanguardism |url=https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12322 |journal=Constellations |language=en |volume=25 |issue=1 |page=9 |doi=10.1111/1467-8675.12322 |issn=1351-0487}}</ref> The by-product of this expenditure was the printing of extra money to pay for it all, which Powell believed to be the cause of inflation, and in effect a form of taxation, as the holders of money find their money is worth less.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Corthorn |first=Paul |title=Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2019 |isbn=9780198747147 |pages=53 |language=en |oclc=1083570370}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last1=Shrapnel |first1=Norman |last2=Phillips |first2=Mike |date=7 February 2001 |title=Enoch Powell |url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/0098/feb/09/obituaries.mikephillips |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20241114013632/https://www.theguardian.com/politics/0098/feb/09/obituaries.mikephillips |archive-date=14 November 2024 |work=[[The Guardian]]}}</ref> Retail price index inflation was between 3.7 and 3% at the time of his resignation.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Weston |first=Thomas |date=8 December 2023 |title=The UK economy in the 1950s |url=https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/the-uk-economy-in-the-1950s/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240302234518/https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/the-uk-economy-in-the-1950s/ |archive-date=2 March 2024 |website=House of Lords Library |publisher=[[Parliament of the United Kingdom]]}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=RPI All Items: Percentage change over 12 months: Jan 1987=100 – |url=https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/czbh/mm23 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20241226022842/https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/czbh/mm23 |archive-date=2024-12-26 |access-date=2025-01-01 |website=[[Office for National Statistics]] |publisher=[[UK Statistics Authority]]}}</ref>

During the late 1950s, Powell promoted control of the money supply to prevent inflation and, during the 1960s, was an advocate of [[free market]] policies, which at the time were seen as extreme, unworkable and unpopular. Powell advocated the privatisation of the [[General Post Office|Post Office]] and the telephone network as early as 1964.{{Sfn|Roth|1970|p=318}} He both scorned the idea of "consensus politics" and wanted the Conservative Party to become a modern business-like party, freed from its old aristocratic and "old boy network" associations.{{sfn|Roth|1970|p=319}} In his 1958 resignation over public spending and what he saw as an inflationary economic policy, he anticipated almost exactly the views that during the 1980s came to be described as "monetarism".<ref>{{Citation | title = 'One per cent not a triviality': Mr. Powell tells of dilemma | work = [[The Times]] | place = London | date = 10 January 1958 | page = 8}}</ref>