Without exaggeration it may be said that Enoch Powell invented modern British nationalism - and that his death finds it peculiarly impoverished. That nationalism might be described as an amalgam of post-imperial nostalgia, neo-liberal economics, rooted hostility to non-white immigration, condemnation of European integration, anti-Americanism, passionate hostility to devolution within Britain, and to Irish nationalism outside it, in the name of a crusading unionism. Famously, Powell remarked that all political careers end in failure. His own finally concluded at the age of 85, as it began, on a scholarly note, several years after he published a textual study of St Matthew, entitled The Evolution of the Gospel. Before he entered politics he was a professor of classics, having achieved academic distinction through scholarships from a relatively lowly background; throughout his career he was an exceptionally accomplished linguist. His formidable oratorical skill as parliamentarian and populist drew freely on this learning, which enabled him to identify many elements of the political ideology he constructed. Despite his alienation from the Conservative Party, from whose shadow cabinet he was sacked in 1968 by Edward Heath after predicting bloody racial conflict as a result of black immigration, and which he advised people to vote against in the 1974 general election, Powell can be seen to have anticipated many of the themes which bitterly divided it in recent years. Defence of national sovereignty against external and internal assailants suffuses this threnody of imperial decline, racial purity, outright opposition to membership of the EEC and the maintenance of the United Kingdom against Celtic fissiparousness in Scotland, Wales or, most notably, in Northern Ireland, where he represented South Down for 13 years. Asked once during an interview how often he went to Ireland he replied that he never went to Ireland but frequently went to Ulster.
He brought discipline and intellectual coherence to Official Unionism's integrationist orientation under James Molyneaux. But he fell out bitterly with Margaret Thatcher over the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 and was equally suspicious of the Single European Act - because they breached Westminster's sovereignty. Powell mistrusted her close relationship with the United States under Ronald Reagan's leadership, although he was happier with her espousal of free market, anti-statist economics. His death reveals the UK to be a very different place than he would have wished. Devolution in Scotland and Wales, and a probable anti-integrationist settlement in Northern Ireland, challenge his brand of British nationalism. A functioning multi-racial and multi-cultural society mocks his prediction of bloody conflict. Britain's more positive role in the EU and the close trans-Atlantic identification between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton rebuke his dire warnings about the loss of sovereignty. But Powellism lives on in the Conservative Party, which has converged on his main doctrines under the leadership of William Hague. Whether this presages its further disintegration, or its revival, will depend on how effectively Labour steers Britain through the crisis of identity Enoch Powell helped to map out over a long and distinguished political career.