‘The Empire of England’: Enoch Powell, Sovereignty, and the Constitution of the Nation

The 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech brought back into public debate one of the most controversial figures in modern British political history. Powell remains indelibly linked to the stances he took on race and immigration in the 1960s and 1970s, but in recent years there has been a widening of the lens through which his politics and public arguments are viewed. This article contributes to this reappraisal, arguing that central aspects of his thinking were shaped by his highly distinctive reflections on sovereignty, representation, and the nation state in the early 1950s. It demonstrates that Powell’s positions on both the internal configuration of the nation state and its external relations were intertwined, and were applied by him on a fairly consistent basis throughout his career, informing the stances he took on the contentious issues of Europe and Ulster in the 1970s, as well as immigration. Our account of his thinking challenges both the tendency of his interpreters to treat his views on international relations and the internal politics of the United Kingdom as thematically distinct, and the accusation of political opportunism that has been a central motif in commentary on his political career.