As the 1960s progressed, the bedrock assumptions underpinning established views of Britain's place in the world were increasingly called into question. This was in part the result of deepening worries about the UK's relatively poor economic performance, but also because new issues arose, bringing to the fore questions about the purpose and future direction of Britain. These included the future course of the Commonwealth and the question of whether Britain's future lay in the newly formed EEC. These shifts were put into dramatic relief by the conversion of Enoch Powell from a well-regarded Conservative backbencher and minister into an anti-establishment iconoclast. His outspoken opposition to the direction of travel taken by his own party – the Conservatives – on immigration and then the EEC – turned into an audacious attempt to stake out an alternative political vision for British Conservatism.1 The increasingly resonant arguments about nationality, immigration and sovereignty that he advanced looked like a sharp turn away from the kind of expansive, outward-facing and global self-image portrayed by Churchill and earlier proponents of ‘Greater Britain’. But, while there is undoubtedly some truth in this characterisation, it is also important to understand the ways in which Powell reworked some of the constituent themes of Anglosphere thinking rather than rejecting them altogether. His desire to challenge established views about Britain's position in the world and its national interests put a significant dent in the ‘great power complex’ which Churchill had done so much to sustain. Yet a careful examination of Powell's evolving thinking reveals that the Anglosphere continued to structure important parts of his outlook and that of the growing number of nationalists and populists who have come after him.2 The Anglosphere lived on into the era of ‘after empire’, but in a very different form.
The changing international context of the post-war years was a crucial spur to the anti-consensus arguments about nationhood and sovereignty which Powell began to advance. As Britain's rulers hesitated over the dilemma associated with choosing between the Commonwealth and the Anglosphere, on the one hand, and the EEC, on the other, they remained deeply dependent upon the leadership of the United States in world affairs. But, by the end of the 1960s, the consensus about the need for Britain to find a point of balance between its post-imperial and European interests, which Churchillian thinking had helped foster, was shattered, and disagreement over these options moved to the political forefront. And while references to Britain as a great power were still commonplace, this was becoming a much more difficult claim to substantiate. The Commonwealth, as we saw in chapter 3, was now increasingly depicted as a pathway to the past, a hangover from the era of imperial preference, and viewed by modernisers of both right and left as an unhelpful crutch to which Britain was still inclined to cling. And, for a growing number of political figures, joining the EEC emerged as an attractive, alternative trajectory. But others resisted such arguments and held to the integral relationship between Britain and its former colonies, especially its white settler peoples.
The deepening divisions associated with these different options coincided with growing unease in some quarters at the rising levels of immigration from the countries of the Commonwealth, particularly from Britain's African and Asian former colonies. Settled ideas about the character of the British nation were increasingly called into question. This trend too created a significant opportunity for Powell to gain a hearing and to present himself as one of the very few political figures of his generation able and willing to join the preoccupations of mainstream politics to the vernacular sentiments of ordinary people. The cornerstone of his increasingly outspoken interventions from the middle of the 1960s was the contention that imperial ambition and the delusions of great power status had allowed the country's rulers to lose touch with the values, tradition and meanings of the nation they governed. The nation was now in peril, and it was to the forgotten English heritage that Powell urged the Conservatives to return. He supplied an often poetic vision of a nation that needed to be reborn, freed from the delusions of empire. It was obvious to Powell that Britain remained a beacon and source of influence for those countries that gravitated towards the English values of free trade, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. But notions of transnational union and fixed alliances in international relations should, he believed, be abandoned. It was time to replant the Anglosphere in English soil.
Powell's heterodox stance on these issues stemmed from a gradual process of disillusion and rethinking on his part, which gradually came to pass in the 1950s. He had entered Conservative Party politics as an ardent advocate of empire and in the early days of his political career flirted with the idea of imperial federation.3 He shared the inveterate hostility to the erosion of Britain's position in the subcontinent exhibited by diehard Conservatives and famously shocked Churchill when, as a young advisor, he provided a detailed plan for the reconquest of India.4 But its struggle for independence represented a major blow to his outlook. And, as decolonisation began, he started to view Britain's remaining imperial commitments in very different terms.
During the 1950s his views on this, and other related subjects, began to shift quite markedly. Powell was a member of the Suez Group of Tory MPs who opposed the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal. But, after British troops left in June 1956, he broke with this faction and voted against the attempt to retake the canal on the grounds that Britain could no longer plausibly act as a global power. Soon afterwards he started to gravitate towards positions that set him against the leadership of his own party, and indeed the political establishment more generally. This transformation was rooted in his deepening frustration at the hold which empire still exerted upon Britain's rulers. But this was a chapter in their history which the British needed to close. Empire was a passing phase, its enduring ethos a ‘mirage’, not an integral aspect of the identity of the nation. The country's rulers were suffering from a profound ‘post-imperial neurosis’, as a once great nation was in danger of overreaching itself while simultaneously seeking refuge under the American nuclear umbrella. A deep suspicion of American hegemony represented one of his most enduring convictions.5
Powell viewed the emerging Commonwealth association with suspicion from the outset. This was little more than a ‘farce’ or ‘sham’ – a meaningless confederation in which countries exhibited no allegiance to each other, and over which Britain lacked any actual authority. This stance was first publicly apparent in March 1953 in the notable speech he delivered, as a backbencher, in response to the government's Royal Titles Bill. The fading glory of empire had been transposed onto a constitutionally incoherent union, he argued, which lulled the British into believing that they still led the world.
Instead, the English should look back over the compass of their own history, including the lengthy period before empire, to start to rediscover who they were and what their national mission now should be. Appreciating England's unmatched cultural heritage and understanding the unique achievement of a system of government based upon parliamentary sovereignty were now imperative. It was England, and its exceptional lineage, that Powell came to embrace with a fervour which his predecessors had reserved for ‘Greater Britain’. This national outlook undercut the ingrained habit of depicting England as a nation whose interests and outlook were expressed in entities larger than itself – empire and, latterly, the Commonwealth. But despite his critique of imperial consciousness, Powell's own conception of England's past was shot through with assumptions about past glories and greater achievements.6 In the current era, by contrast, a combination of liberalism, the emerging idea of multiculturalism, and a lingering belief in the duties associated with empire meant that such patriotic sensibilities were somehow frowned upon or denounced for their racialist content.
Powell's rhetoric grew more passionate and demotic as the 1960s progressed. And his outspoken stance on the perils of immigration towards the decade's end was soon followed by his decision to speak out against the UK's entry to the Common Market. Increasingly, he came to believe that such a model of economic union was bound to require forms of political and legal integration which would put in jeopardy Britain's unique model of parliamentary sovereignty. These contrarian standpoints stemmed from the radical rejection of the grand Churchillian vision which he began to question during the 1950s. There was an innate glory and splendour to Britain, but this did not depend upon the trappings of empire. Instead of the English being seen as the hub of a global network of imperial peoples, they were depicted as a once mighty, but increasingly overlooked, populace who needed to reaffirm and reclaim their own national culture. This meant casting to one side the imperial model of British citizenship which now threatened to reap disastrous consequences at home in the form of growing numbers of non-white immigrants to the UK.
This insistence upon the underlying durability and sense of tradition associated with Englishness stemmed from Edwardian ideas of nationhood in particular. Powell identified the principle of nationality and its close conceptual companion, sovereignty, as the key sources of allegiance binding the English people together and providing the invisible tie linking them to their unique form of government.7 In his eyes, Englishness grew from a deep and ancient heritage and bequeathed a set of cultural habits and common practices, as well as a distinct set of political and legal institutions. A sense of belonging to a nation could be inculcated only among those steeped in the practices, customs and traditions through which it was sustained. He was, therefore, sceptical that those from ‘other’ national and cultural backgrounds could ever be assimilated to Englishness, and he increasingly counterposed this ancient form of nationality to the invented idea of a legalistic British citizenship. His growing sense of the divergence of these ideas set the scene for his emergence as the tribune for popular hostility to rising levels of immigration from the Commonwealth.
And so Powell set about debunking the myths that had comforted and guided the British elite since 1945. He called upon the English, no longer at the hub of an expansive empire or the workshop of the world, to see themselves in a different way – as part of a national lineage in possession of age-old virtues that needed to be brought back to the fore. He also called for the renovation of the English lineage of free market exchange, the limited state, and lives lived in stable and ordered communities. Shorn of the delusions of ‘Greater Britain’, the UK should limit its military ambitions to its proximate neighbourhood and operate more independently of American power. Despite his deep hostility to forms of transnational economic union, he came to believe that Britain needed to reimagine itself as a primarily European power in its reach and influence.
The controversial public positions – on immigration, Europe and Ulster – which Powell adopted in these years, and the political isolation that resulted from them, turned him into a pariah in mainstream politics.8 And this position was solidified in the years that followed, culminating in his call for voters to support the Labour Party in the general election of 1974. Yet, despite his growing marginalisation within the party system, Powell's impact upon the wider public discourse and the Conservative wing of British politics was deep and long-lasting. This was certainly true in terms of his identification of immigration and Europe as issues that evoked deep feelings rooted in sovereignty and identity among many of the English. Powell used the terms ‘England’, ‘Britain’ and ‘UK’ pretty much interchangeably, signalling his deep beliefs in the unitary character of a state that was governed by the Crown-in-Parliament and the integral relationship between parliamentary government and the English inheritance. But he also ‘saw England and the English as the overwhelming force within that nation’.9 He was the first political figure in the post-war period to sense and give expression to the distinctive ways in which the English as a people felt about their state and nationhood.
This alternative vision began to take shape during the 1950s. There are a few glimpses of it in the rather conventional version of the national story – Biography of a Nation – which Powell jointly authored with Angus Maude in 1955.10 But it was expressed more fully in some of the speeches he delivered from this point onwards. He believed that an English cultural background was available only to those from the same ethnic stock who had been inculcated into the common habits and forms of understanding unique to the national tradition. This, together with the quasi-spiritual manner in which he tended to invoke Englishness, began to mark out his patriotism as highly distinctive in character and tone. In the – subsequently iconic – St George's Day speech which he delivered in 1961, he celebrated the enduring ‘mystery of England’, its unnoticed, but very real, presence at the heart of the British system of governance and law.11 He proceeded to call upon the powerful ancestral forces which lay behind the English idea, while stoutly resisting the modern inclination to define or stipulate what Englishness was. Summoning England's forebears, he asked that they ‘tell us what it is that binds us together’ and ‘show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.’12 Renewing and regaining the nation were acts of faith rather than forms of rational enquiry or cultural definition, and they required ritualistic observation and respect.
The English after empire, Powell went on, were returning home, just like the Athenians coming back to their city to find that it had been sacked and burned. Albion was, metaphorically, smouldering and damaged, with the conditions for its integrity challenged and its cultural heritage facing mortal threat. Empire was now presented as a risky journey away from the homeland of the English, and it was the latter which – despite its ravaged and disordered appearance – remained the true source of meaning and security. As he put it, ‘the nationhood of the mother country remained unaltered through it all, almost unconscious of the strange fantastic structure built around her’; and ‘England … underwent no organic change as the mistress of a World Empire. So the continuity of her existence was unbroken.’ What also remained intact, he observed, was ‘the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their particularities.’
Drawing upon such elegiac and ancestral ideas, Powell was able to present the arrival of small, but growing, numbers of immigrants from other cultures and nations as an existential threat to the national lineage. Those from different cultural backgrounds and traditions represented an inherent dilution of it and might well become the source of civil conflict. His dramatic shift of position on this particular issue was an important prelude to the increasingly strident calls he began to make from the mid-1960s for a change in the government's approach to immigration.13 His increasingly apocalyptic warnings about an English identity under threat from immigration paved the way for later generations of populist rhetoric on this score. Powell talked of ‘the sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected’,14 establishing a potent imaginative connection between new arrivals from the Commonwealth and the systematic ‘persecution’ of the English.
It was his outspokenness on the immigration question, above all, that turned Powell into the apocalyptic and controversial figure he became. His sensitivity to this question, and specifically some of the legal aspects associated with it, had long been apparent. He had become exercised during the debates about the Royal Titles Bill of 1953 and spoke on other occasions in debates about the status of Commonwealth countries and their citizens. This particular piece of legislation, which gave statutory recognition to the end of empire and the demise of the ‘British Commonwealth’, was seen by most parliamentarians as a technical piece of legal adjustment. But to Powell it created the absurd situation whereby the monarch was now to be head of a Commonwealth over which she did not have dominion, since some of its members were now republics. Previously he had expressed strong concerns about Labour's Nationality Act of 1948, which he had opposed because it created distinct categories of British citizen – and thereby undermined the unity of British subjects under the crown throughout the empire.15 The latter had – fatefully, in his eyes – moved away from the notion that the members of this association were all united by their shared allegiance to the sole source of sovereign authority, the Crown-in-Parliament. This attempt to divide up the sovereignty of the monarch was replicated in the new 1953 Bill. Such debates, and the profound worries they generated for him, were an important early marker of Powell's shifting thinking about empire and citizenship.
During the 1960s, the arrival of growing numbers of immigrants from Commonwealth countries brought these concerns back to the fore. Establishing at what point exactly Powell came to believe in the urgent need to reduce immigration has proved a contentious point among his interpreters.16 He certainly shifted his stance on this specific question, having begun the decade seemingly content with his own party's position of supporting relatively low levels of immigration to Britain. By its end, he was outspokenly opposed, and depicted the effects of immigration into the UK in apocalyptic terms. This accentuated his worsening relationship with Conservative Party leader Edward Heath and resulted in his sacking from the shadow cabinet in 1968.17 Moving into open conflict with his party, he broke ranks with the liberal tenor and tone that his party's leadership had come to employ on the immigration question. He repeatedly expressed scepticism about the anticipated numbers of new immigrants, consistently arguing that official figures underestimated the total numbers of likely arrivals and questioning policy towards family dependents. And from 1965 he began to call – though with some ambiguity – for programmes of voluntary repatriation.
His close association with this controversial subject brought Powell a huge amount of media attention and a new platform at a time when he was increasingly disenchanted with the political direction taken by Heath. He exploded into public consciousness following the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech he delivered in April 1968 in Birmingham. In this, he conjured up the spectacle of a beleaguered and vulnerable indigenous populace at the mercy of an uncivilised, hostile and rapidly multiplying immigrant population. Speaking as the prophet cast out in his own land, he anticipated the ‘chorus of execration’ that would follow his remarks, as he predicted growing discord caused by the negligent immigration policies of the elite. It was his duty as the political representative of the ordinary Englishman to speak out on these matters.
The nature of this speech, on this most sensitive of issues, effectively rendered him a political outlaw. Even though Powell had in many respects been the consummate ‘insider’, having worked his way up through the ranks of the Conservative Party – despite some notable tensions generated by his own middle-class social background18 – he subsequently broadened his critique of government policy, first on immigration and then on Europe, into a more expansive attack upon the political establishment as a whole. He focused in particular upon the combination of fatalism about British decline and bien pensant liberalism which prevailed among the country's leadership. And, over time, he came to adopt the rhetorical stance of the reviled outsider, ready to speak uncomfortable truths, masochistic in his relish for the opprobrium heaped upon him. In these ways Powell began to play the role of the populist leader, willing and able to promote the defence of the national homeland against the indifference and machinations of the elites.19 Both appealing to a high-minded conception of national mythology and unafraid to dip into a coarser seam of street-level racism, he gave shape and respectability to a discourse of ethnic-majority nationalism which had been marginalised in British politics since 1945. In so doing, he prepared the way for Thatcher's later reconfiguration of the politics of British nationhood and also for the political potential of anti-immigrant sentiments, a connection which re-emerged powerfully in some of the arguments aired during the Brexit campaign of 2016.
And yet, Powell's nationalist populism had some notable limits, primarily because of his deep commitment to the ideal of parliamentary sovereignty which meant that he actively discouraged extra-parliamentary mobilisation.20 He famously told a deputation of meat porters who marched in support of his stance on immigration to go home and write to their MPs.21 And for some while he was uncomfortable with the focus upon holding a referendum on the UK's membership which had become a focus for many of his fellow Common Market sceptics, changing his mind on this issue only in 1972.
His ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech attracted an unprecedented public response and was an important moment in the rebirth of a Conservative populism as a force in British political culture. Powell received more than 100,000 letters within a week, and his stance stimulated supportive demonstrations from various trade unions.22 A poll conducted in May of that year reported that 74 per cent of people agreed with his views – though his popularity ratings fell quickly in subsequent months. The correspondence he received reflected a mood of pessimism, especially among the working classes, about the fortunes of the nation in general and a complex stew of resentment and fear about the erosion of social benefits. As one commentator suggests, ‘immigration was as much a symptom as a cause of social ills and national weakness.’23 Powell served as a convenient hook upon which to hang a variety of frustrations and concerns.
The nationalism expressed in this correspondence was of a much more avowedly nostalgic kind than his own, devoted to the notion of ‘the people's empire’ and supportive of the ‘kith and kin’ vision of the English-speaking peoples of other parts of the Old Commonwealth – attachments for which Powell, ironically, had little sympathy. But it was what he had come to represent, as much as what he actually said, that assumed such importance. In particular, it was his capacity to speak to a palpable sense of melancholy and loss in working-class communities that ensured the resonance of his political rhetoric. He sensed that the flip-side to these deep sentiments of loss and melancholy were burgeoning feelings of grievance and anger, and he did all that he could – within the confines of his commitment to parliamentary government – to direct this mood towards the perennial targets of the populist imagination – untrustworthy elite politicians and undesirable aliens arriving on the homeland's shores.
Melancholy, loss and decline melded powerfully with notions of redemption, emancipation and renewal in Powell's speeches during this period. In political terms, the brand of parliamentary populism that he developed created a space that would be explored at a later point, in different ways, first by Margaret Thatcher and subsequently by proponents of Brexit.
Immigration was not the only issue on which Powell was outspoken at this point in his career. The implications of the UK's potential membership of the Common Market became another major focus for his energies. As with empire and immigration, Powell's stance on this issue shifted markedly in the early 1960s. Having initially been in favour of the UK's entry, on the grounds that a European Customs Union would promote the cause of free trade, he came to denounce such a scenario, since it would necessitate forms of political and legal coordination which would invariably impinge upon national sovereignty. Rather typically, he moved towards this position via the very particular constitutional question of whether parliament could legitimately consent to constrain its own will by ceding powers to a supranational body.
Powell's acerbic hostility to European membership also placed him outside the Conservative mainstream. For many years this was a lonely field to plough on the political right, bringing him into cooperation with figures from the left – notably Tony Benn during the referendum campaign of 1975.24 Indeed, it was not until the debates on the single currency and Maastricht Treaty in the late 1980s and early 1990s that his views began to gain traction with a small cohort of Conservatives. Many of the notes he struck during these years of opposition were echoed by a later generation of sceptics, especially his repeated mockery of Brussels ‘bureaucrats’ and denunciation of what he saw as vested interests at work lobbying for the European cause – the Confederation of British Industry above all.
Powell was convinced from an early stage that Europe, as well as immigration, would one day become a site towards which a wider sense of resentment would be drawn:
British membership of the Community will not stick. Lacking the essential foundation in opinion, it is built on sand. Every common policy, or attempted common policy, of the Community will encounter a political resentment in Britain … These resentments will intertwine themselves with all the raw issues of British politics: inflation, unemployment, balance of payments, the regions, even immigration, even Northern Ireland; and every one of these issues will be sharpened to the discomfiture of the European party.25
He was also, rather notably, opposed to membership of the European Community because of American support for this option. A European bloc, he believed, was destined to be a subordinate part of a larger US-dominated Western alliance. His own response to this issue reflected a growing unease on parts of the political right, mirrored on the further shores of the British left, about American influence in Europe. And his maverick stance extended also to his thinking about Britain's defence and security, including his opposition to the nuclear deterrent and scepticism about NATO. For Powell, slavish adherence to the international alliances forged by Churchill reflected a deep-seated British inferiority complex, and this was in turn the unwelcome by-product of its great power delusion.
By the early 1970s Powell was an established political heretic, firmly established in the public eye as the politician ready to speak out on issues where British sovereignty and national identity were at stake. His own rhetoric became increasingly embittered in relation to Heath in particular, whom he accused of breaking his promise to secure ‘the consent of the British Parliament and people’ before committing to entering the new EEC. While Heath succeeded in ensuring that the UK did join, Powell gave legitimacy and impetus to the rival contention – which came back into public discourse in the run-up to Brexit – that British accession to the Common Market was an act of betrayal by a cadre of establishment politicians who had lost faith in the historical lineage and unique cultural tradition of England.
One further issue became increasingly salient in Powell's thinking during the 1970s. This concerned the position and governance of Northern Ireland in a period of growing military conflict, during a period when the British government was seeking to develop a more stable constitutional settlement for the six counties. On this issue he achieved little popular resonance in England, although he did become an influential force within the North's Unionist politics. In 1987, he denounced the Anglo-Irish Agreement signed by his one-time protégée Margaret Thatcher in embittered, personal terms.
More generally, his interventions on this issue reveal much about Powell's conception of the British state and the anti-federal nature of his thinking about the UK. Having finally decided to leave the Conservative Party, he joined the Official Unionist Party in 1974 and represented the constituency of South Down until 1987. His unfailing belief that Northern Ireland needed to be reintegrated into the UK put him at odds with most of his Unionist colleagues, and with public opinion more generally. But Powell was insistent that the people of Ulster needed to be protected not only from Republican paramilitary violence but also from the unwillingness of their own state to recognise the priority of the principles of nationality and indivisible sovereignty. What for most politicians looked like a ‘law and order’ question was in his mind a conflict that dramatised wider issues of sovereignty and citizenship in the UK. Speaking in 1974, he declared that this struggle ‘is about nationality; and unless it is understood to be about nationality all discussion and contrivance and policy remain in the limbo of unreality and insecurity.’26 The tendency among the UK's politicians, and the British state, to view and treat Northern Ireland as quintessentially different from other parts of the kingdom represented a fundamental breach in the compact between people and state. This was an issue that should be of concern to all British citizens and politicians.
These ideas prepared the ground for Powell's own deeply hostile response to the emergence of arguments for the devolution of powers to Scotland, and potentially Wales, during the 1970s. Parliament, he believed, was the cornerstone of the English constitutional tradition and the site where the indivisible sovereignty of the people was exercised. He therefore rejected schemes for devolution as constitutionally illegitimate attempts to devolve the indivisible sovereignty of Britain's parliamentary government.
Powell's thinking on these various issues rested upon a coherent and distinctive understanding of Britain's history and the nature of its peoples' shared national identity. And this led him to think about a range of issues outside the parameters of Churchillian thinking and to detach from the discourse of ‘Greater Britain’ as articulated by Seeley. And yet, it is not entirely accurate to say that, in shifting from these traditions, Powell represented the simple negation of the ethos and ideals of the Anglosphere. In fact, he reworked parts of this lineage and in some respects sustained an older lineage of nationalist sentiment, even as he forcefully argued that the national spirit needed to be shored up and defended most powerfully at home. In this sense, he played a key role in relation to the Anglosphere concept: de-linking it from empire while leaning heavily still upon imperial ways of thinking, renewing an older tradition of Conservative nationalism, and preparing the way for the ‘neo-liberal’ reincarnation of this idea at the very end of the twentieth century.
Powell himself served in India from 1943 until 1946 and retained a deep interest in, and abiding affection for, the subcontinent.27 Even as he sought to bury empire in his polemical interventions of the 1960s, it is not hard to discern a lingering nostalgia for it in his thought. In 1959, he spoke from the backbenches against racial abuses in the empire and famously denounced the treatment of Mau Mau prisoners by the British authorities in Kenya out of an enduring sense of imperial responsibility. And his account of the history and essence of England overlapped substantially with the story told by Seeley and his fellow Victorian imperialists. He too saw England as an exceptional polity which was outward-facing in its pursuit of free trade and international alliances. Indeed, the imperial past was still assumed to be an integral influence within the history and outlook of the English nation. Powell's extensive knowledge of classical sources endowed him with an inclination to conceive of the national past in cyclical rather than linear terms. The return to the English homeland which he urged upon Britain's rulers was of a piece with the previous era of expansion and civilisational leadership, not a simple negation of it. Only thus could England find its strengths and return to the habits and policies which had placed it on the road to greatness in the first place.
Powell's anti-imperialist position after 1945 reflected the belief that the ethos and outlook of one era might become weaknesses or constraints if retained in another. Empire was over, but the outward-facing and global self-image portrayed by latter-day proponents of ‘Greater Britain’, which still prevailed, was now over-extending the British financially and militarily. The English-speaking people of Powell's imagination were no longer the hub of a global network of settler peoples, as envisaged by Churchill, but an overlooked and increasingly resentful nation whose cultural traditions and interests were being dangerously neglected by their own state. The hangover of the imperial outlook obscured the need for a realistic and proportionate understanding of Britain's influence and place in the world. The UK was a medium-sized power with a successful economy, which needed to put aside delusions about its ability to shape events in far-flung places and focus instead upon its own regional position.28
In order to rescue the English from their rulers' weaknesses of mind, it was time for the Anglosphere to come home. This represented less the negation of empire and its attendant outlook and more the reflection of a classically trained appreciation of the inevitable decline and fall of empires.29 Powell was also an increasingly pessimistic observer of those Anglophone states, notably the USA, that were attempting to devise a multicultural form of nationality. Any such venture was bound to lead to deep civil discord and was doomed to failure. Britain, by contrast, needed to throw off the two prevalent habits – of either clinging on to empire when its time was passed or seeing its own identity as one defined by the crisis of imperial dissolution.
Instead, Powell promoted the idea of English nationhood as a rich and deeply rooted lineage and the contention that this was increasingly being overlooked by the moral and political guardians of the state. In 1968 he evoked ‘the sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people’.30 His depiction of a nationality that was fundamentally at odds with political discourse and state policy has cast a long shadow over British politics, and indeed over later political attempts to mould British nationhood and develop a progressive English patriotism. This post-colonial nationalism reflected a search for certainty at a point when empire was over, and when its associated attachments and forms of imagined community seemed increasingly bereft of meaning.31 The quest for the reassurance of national foundations had a neurotic feel to it and heightened and legitimated feelings of hostility to incomers in a way that laid the foundations for a powerful new pattern of popular racism. By the 1970s, the name ‘Enoch’ became synonymous with street-level xenophobia rather than high-minded appeals to nationality.32
Powell's heterodox politics and critique of ‘Greater Britain’ can be seen as the first indication of a turning of the tide against lingering dreams of empire in the English national consciousness. Nevertheless, his historical and political imagination was still infused with the assumptions and ethos of the Anglosphere. These were now reworked for an era of national crisis and discord, and they were applied to England in a more concrete and bounded sense. In Powell's mind, a post-colonial Britain shorn of fantasies about its role at the helm of grand international alliances was far better placed to resume the national trajectory and economic path which had sustained its pre-eminence during the nineteenth century. Freed from such illusions, Britain could still play a constructive and beneficial role in international affairs, promoting freer trade and providing a beacon for those starting on their own journeys to national independence. Having been compelled to give up the colonies, the political elite needed to return to the governance of the internal empire and its increasingly imperilled core institutions – crown, parliament and union.
Despite Powell's own exile from mainstream politics, his ideas – on immigration and Europe – created a space which later demagogues and populists would come to occupy. The demotic and populist vision of the nation which he developed, in combination with his traditionalist Tory understanding of the parliamentary state, combined to underpin a very different version of the Anglosphere to that associated with Churchillian hubris or Commonwealth liberalism. And this new outlook offered an important opening to cultural sources which had gone untapped in British politics since 1945 – vernacular racism, deep anti-Americanism and a sharper edged nationalism. From this period onwards, the notion of England as the host of a tradition that found expression in entities larger than itself now faced a major political and intellectual challenge, and this counter-trend was to lead, after many subsequent twists and turns, to Brexit.33