Shadows of Empire by Michael Kenny Nick Pearce & Nick Pearce

Author:Michael Kenny,Nick Pearce & Nick Pearce
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Politics of British Nationality

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

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