Enoch Powell, the Conservative politician best known for his impassioned call for restrictions on immigration, also offered a controversial solution to the seemingly intractable “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. As Ulster Unionist MP for South Down between 1974 and 1987, he argued for closer integration with the rest of the United Kingdom based, above all, on the undivided sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament over a unitary state in which all power emanated from the center. This, he contended, would put Northern Ireland’s constitutional status beyond doubt, thus removing the ambiguity that, in his opinion, fueled the political violence. It is, of course, highly debatable whether this policy would have achieved Powell’s predicted outcome. At the time it certainly put him at odds with a large part of Ulster Unionist opinion, which strove to regain local legislative control. It also meant that he was out of line with British government strategy, which consistently sought a power-sharing arrangement between the local constitutional parties and increasingly envisaged the Republic of Ireland playing an important role in the resolution of the conflict.Footnote ¹ Moreover, from today’s perspective—in light of the development of devolved government in Scotland, Wales, and (in a more fraught manner) Northern Ireland—Powell’s policy proposals appear particularly unsuited to the new shape of the United Kingdom. A close examination of them, and of his overall interpretation of Ulster Unionism, might then be described as an investigation of a path not taken. Yet it is more than that too. Powell consistently interpreted his Unionism in terms of British nationalism, and so examining his Unionism is part of an exploration of how a prominent Conservative thinker understood the nation at a time of upheaval ushered in by the impact of decolonization and concerns over Britain’s wider decline. In examining these themes, this article places Powell’s arguments not in the context of recent debates over national identity and Britishness but instead in that of wider traditions of Conservatism and longer-term political thought on the Union.

In a broad sense, this article provides insights into a familiar, but notoriously perplexing, figure from the unfamiliar vantage point of Northern Ireland. Powell, who first entered Conservative politics after distinguished military service in the Second World War and an earlier high-flying career as a classical scholar, is not only difficult to place in post-1945 British politics but also, at times, contradictory. As MP for Wolverhampton South West between 1950 and 1974, he only briefly held cabinet rank (as minister for health between 1960 and 1963) yet developed a considerable public profile in spite of his aloof style. He was a one-time imperialist who had aspired to become viceroy of India, where he had been stationed during the war, but then became a prominent critic of the slow speed and reluctance of British decolonization. He was an early advocate of free-market economics and monetarism but only grudgingly supported the policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments in the 1980s. He was a staunch defender of the sovereignty of Parliament but increasingly found recourse in practice to the common-sense wisdom of public opinion. He was a firm advocate of party but endured difficult relations with those parties to which he belonged. Above all, he was obsessively logical about the development of his thinking but also prone to moments of instinctive romanticism, especially where attachment to his country was concerned.

The overall trajectory of Powell’s identification with the Ulster Unionist cause has been well documented.Footnote ² He took an interest in Ulster (as he persisted in terming it) from the late 1960s.Footnote ³ At this juncture, Powell was the most prominent backbench MP in Britain, having recently been dismissed from the Conservative shadow cabinet as a result of his so-called Rivers of Blood speech on immigration made in April 1968. Expressing fears of racial violence, he had alluded to Virgil: “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”Footnote ⁴ Meanwhile, Northern Ireland was quickly becoming one of the most pressing issues in British politics. These years saw the emergence of the Troubles, as civil rights protests and marches fed into a long-standing Catholic and Nationalist discontent with the Protestant- and Unionist-dominated government of Northern Ireland. This exacerbated existing sectarian feeling, precipitated considerable street violence, and then developed into a conflict characterized by rival paramilitary violence, with the British army deployed to maintain the peace but quickly becoming, along with the Northern Ireland police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a target for armed Republicans. As this happened, policy toward Northern Ireland played a part in Powell’s bitter feud with Conservative party leader Edward Heath, which came to a head as the 1970–74 Conservative government secured British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) and pursued a compulsory prices and incomes policy.

Following his decision not to contest Wolverhampton South West as a Conservative in February 1974, Powell took up the offer of fighting South Down as an Ulster Unionist in the General Election of October the same year. He had been a frequent visitor to Northern Ireland since 1970 and had established close links with the Ulster Unionist MPs, not least through their shared opposition to British membership of the EEC. Yet Powell’s move was also a pragmatic one: the Unionists offered him an amenable environment from which to return to Parliament. Despite speculation, Powell did not become the leader of the Unionist Party but his considerable political stature did afford him a certain amount of leeway to articulate his own views—even when they were at odds with the agreed policy of his new party. Furthermore, his closeness to James Molyneaux, Ulster Unionist leader at Westminster from 1974 and outright party leader after 1979, allowed Powell slowly to influence party policy in an integrationist direction. Meanwhile, he was notably successful in his bid to increase the number of Northern Irish seats at Westminster, exploiting the ever more insecure position of the 1974–79 Labour governments. In the 1980s, Powell’s articulation of integration began to influence a small band of relatively high-profile right-wing Conservative MPs, such as John Biggs-Davison, and further endeared him to certain strands of Conservative grass roots feeling. He was initially favorable to Margaret Thatcher’s handling of Northern Ireland but then bitterly disappointed (and deeply shocked) at the announcement of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, with the consultative role it envisaged for the Republic of Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland.

Inroads have been made into understanding and contextualizing Powell’s involvement with Ulster Unionism. His biographers have recognized it as an expression of his postimperial British nationalism that was now confined to the boundaries of the United Kingdom. They have also emphasized that—in Powell’s own mind—maintaining Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom sat alongside the imperative of resisting other threats to British nationhood in the form of British membership of the EEC and the growing United States influence over British policy.Footnote ⁵ James Loughlin has taken the argument further to suggest that, in Northern Ireland, Powell’s use of “rhetoric combining historicist British nationalism with an Ulster focus” struck a chord with the widespread Unionist “conception of the population of the United Kingdom as an imagined national community.”Footnote ⁶ Others have disagreed. Interpreting Ulster Unionism differently, they have argued that Powell’s views sat uneasily within it. His insistence on the need for unconditional allegiance to Britain has led those defining Ulster Unionism in terms of its conditional loyalty to view his stance as “a characteristically English formulation.”Footnote ⁷ Powell’s emphasis on the primacy of Westminster has found more favor among those who have interpreted Unionism in a civic manner as the “advocacy of full and equal citizenship within the United Kingdom.” Yet, even here, there were important differences. Whereas the civic interpretation of Unionism emphasized the importance of the state, pitching its claims “distinct from consideration of nationality,” Powell viewed citizenship in terms of an attachment to the nation.Footnote ⁸ Powell has, moreover, been criticized for advocating a “minimalist” approach to integration that stopped short of calling for British political parties to organize in Northern Ireland: electoral integration.Footnote ⁹ More recent scholarship has emphasized the multiple and overlapping identities—Ulster, British, Protestant, monarchical—within Ulster Unionism, but Graham Walker has nonetheless concluded that Powell “could not fathom the ethno-nationalism” prevalent particularly within its Ulster Loyalist elements.Footnote ¹⁰

Drawing heavily on the speeches and interviews Powell gave in Northern Ireland, this article offers the first sustained analysis of Powell’s Unionism and the policies he derived from it. It traces the development of his ideas from the late 1960s, puts them in the context of his longer-term thinking about the formation of the British nation, and identifies the tensions in his thought that were exposed by his active involvement in Unionist politics and in a wider debate about the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. In doing this, this study provides a counterbalance to the emphasis on his continuing involvement in British politics found in many existing accounts.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the article is also attentive to the political pressures that meant that Powell developed different arguments in different contexts. Correspondence from his private papers reveals that he did favor electoral integration, a case he made only very tentatively in public. He was also (unsurprisingly) markedly more critical of devolution in his speeches to Parliament, when debating the future of Scotland and Wales, than he was to Northern Irish audiences.

Altogether, this article deepens the understanding of Powell’s nationalism, whose “romantic” qualities, including an occasional tendency to rely on “instinct rather than reason,” have at times threatened to characterize it as a whole.Footnote ¹² This is not to dismiss these aspects of Powell’s thinking on the nation but rather to bring to the fore the institutional—parliamentary and legalistic—component of his thought that sat (sometimes uneasily) alongside them. Institutional concerns also underpinned his opposition to membership of the EEC (whose legislative powers he considered a direct threat to British sovereignty), but they have been overshadowed by debates concerning Powell’s stance on immigration and his precise role in the development of a racial aspect to British national identity after 1945.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, a related, and growing, body of work on Britishness has implicitly challenged the basis of Powell’s institutional arguments. Dissecting the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish national dimensions of Britishness, as well as its political and cultural values, this work has collectively denied the existence of the British nation, Powell’s central premise.Footnote ¹⁴

With the focus firmly on the institutional side, this article is positioned with those accounts that have suggested that Powell’s outlook is best understood in terms of ideas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the experience of self-government gave Ulster Unionism an overwhelmingly devolutionist emphasis. These discussions have noted his affinities with the prominent academic jurist A. V. Dicey, who contended that Irish Home Rule would undermine the fundamental principle of the British constitution: the overriding sovereignty of the Crown-in-Parliament, which could do anything except bind its successor. Like Dicey, Richard Bourke has further argued that Powell contended—but did not prove—that the union protected civil liberty.Footnote ¹⁵ Others, taking a still more critical view of Dicey, have labeled Powell his successor as the most prominent twentieth-century British primordial unionist, holding the union to be of value in itself rather than because of any positive consequences.Footnote ¹⁶ Engaging with these arguments, this article investigates exactly how Powell attempted to develop Dicey’s line of argument in the very different setting of the 1970s and 1980s.

This article further locates Powell’s arguments in wider traditions of Conservatism, demonstrating that he was not such an unusual thinker as his public reputation (that he, of course, helped to shape) sometimes suggests. As an entity, the nation has formed an important, but sometimes elusive, part of Conservative thought.Footnote ¹⁷ Powell’s commitment to the nation’s parliamentary institutions placed him in a broad conservative tradition dating back to Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ In defining the nation as a living being, Powell also subscribed to an organicist interpretation that had long been prevalent in Conservative intellectual circles.Footnote ¹⁹ Building on these foundations, this study shows that, in responding to particular developments in the turbulent history of Northern Ireland, Powell increasingly drew on the legalistic aspects of the political philosophy of his contemporary Michael Oakeshott.

The article has three parts. First, it examines in broad terms how Powell related his Ulster Unionism to the British nation, explicitly spelling out the connections that have been implied elsewhere. Second, it investigates the policies Powell advocated for Northern Ireland, taking his definition of integration wider than parliamentary representation by considering economics and governance. Third, it analyzes Powell’s engagement with a pivotal and divisive debate about the nature of Ulster Unionism: its allegiance to Britain.

As tension mounted in Northern Ireland in 1969, Powell was initially unsure of how to understand the situation.Footnote ²⁰ Perhaps influenced by the arrest of two European students in Londonderry for throwing gasoline bombs and by the significant level of student involvement in the civil rights movement, he argued that the tensions in Northern Ireland had affinities with the “purposeless violence and aggression” of the international student revolts the previous year.Footnote ²¹ Yet, by 1971, Powell had clarified his interpretation. By this point, the Republican Movement, increasingly dominated by the paramilitary Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and its political wing Provisional Sinn Féin, which had split from its “official” counterparts in late 1969, was making intensified claims for Irish national unity. Against this backdrop, Powell asked, “Are the people who inhabit the six counties part, or not part, of the nation which inhabits the rest of the United Kingdom, and is this territory which they inhabit part or not part of that nation’s national territory?”Footnote ²² By the following year, he was explicitly interpreting Unionism in this manner, defining it as “the assertion … of British nationality, the claim to be part of a whole … the British nation.”Footnote ²³

Powell considered that the postimperial world comprised nation-states.Footnote ²⁴ In 1955, Powell (along with his Conservative colleague Angus Maude) had made his first explicit attempt to define “that self-consciousness which is the essence of nationhood.” In organicist language, they had stated: “It [the nation] is that which thinks it is a nation.”Footnote ²⁵ By the early 1970s, Powell took this self-conception to mean the aspirations of the majority of the inhabitants. Responding to increased discussion about the rise of nationalism within the United Kingdom, Powell stated that “if it were the settled and preponderant wish of the people of Wales or of Scotland to be a separate nation, that would have to be recognised.”Footnote ²⁶ He made the same point when he was interviewed by Radio Éireann in September 1974 at his first press conference as an Ulster Unionist parliamentary candidate, replying to Provisional Republican arguments that gave primacy to the wishes of the majority in Ireland as a whole, and echoing a widespread Unionist defense of their hegemonic position, which had flourished since the late 1960s.Footnote ²⁷ Powell was provocatively asked if Northern Ireland would not be better off as part of the Republic of Ireland, and replied: “The majority of the inhabitants do not think so. It is thinking that makes a nation and that is the foundation of the Irish Republic.”Footnote ²⁸

Powell further defined nations by their shared allegiance to a form of common sovereignty. After adjusting to the loss of India, once the centerpiece of the British Empire in his mind, Powell had increasingly characterized the English nation in terms of the “unlimited supremacy of Crown-in-Parliament.”Footnote ²⁹ Yet, by the early 1970s, Powell was talking firmly about the British nation. In his 1974 South Down election campaign, he emphasized loyalty to the Crown-in-Parliament as a central part of his “Unionist faith.”Footnote ³⁰ That said, Powell undoubtedly “saw England and the English as the overwhelming force” within the British nation.Footnote ³¹ Indeed, in an institutional sense, he considered that the British nation had developed from the English one. His view was that the English Parliament had grown to encompass Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and that the “Irish Parliament ceased to exist in 1800, as did the Scottish Parliament in 1707,” at the point of the two Acts of Union.Footnote ³²

This line of argument had implications for Powell’s view of Protestantism. Powell did not primarily define his commitment to the British nation, and hence his Unionism, in terms of religion. Campaigning in October 1974, he made it clear that he would not be joining the Orange Order, the Protestant fraternal organization, despite its historically close ties to the Unionist Party.Footnote ³³ Furthermore, just weeks before his death in 1998, he accepted an invitation to remain as a vice-president of the Queen’s University Ulster Unionist Association, a position he had held since 1970, with an emphatic statement of his own position: “the struggle in Ireland is about the nation to which Ulster shall belong. There is no reason why it should depend upon … a single religion.”Footnote ³⁴ Yet Powell nonetheless attributed particular importance to the Church of England in both the formation of the British nation and its current form. This became apparent in 1978 when Powell argued that the Prince of Wales should not be allowed to marry a Catholic and still become king, subsequently being accused by the British press of pandering to Ulster Protestant sensibilities.Footnote ³⁵ Referring to the entrenchment of the break with Rome in the sixteenth century, Powell stated that it was a particular “characteristic of the English, who form the preponderant mass of that state and evolved its political institutions, that at a decisive point in their history they rejected separation between secular and spiritual authority.” This led Powell to argue that, so far as the Church of England was concerned, “a Roman Catholic Crown would … contradict the essential character of that Church which … distinguishes it from all other churches whatsoever … its derivation of authority from a source both secular and exclusive to the nation.”Footnote ³⁶ Powell did not repeat these remarks and, thereafter, religious references did not feature in his speeches in Northern Ireland. Yet, given the institutional centrality of the Church of England to the British nation (and given, perhaps, that he was a member of the Church of England himself), in 1987 he privately lamented the fact that the Protestant churches in Britain were fragmented, stating: “It was a cruel bit of history’s timing that dis-establishment of the Irish part of the United Church of England and Ireland preceded (by some fifty years) the secession of the 26 counties from the union. Otherwise we would presumably (and happily) have today the United Church of England and Northern Ireland.”Footnote ³⁷

The question of national allegiance was at the center of Powell’s criticism of mass immigration. Above all, he was fearful that it would create competing subnational allegiances that would undermine loyalty to the nation and lead to the type of communalism he had seen in India. Powell further objected to the 1948 Nationality Act’s provision for dual nationality through the new category of Colonies and United Kingdom citizenship.Footnote ³⁸ As early as 1969, Powell began to relate the latter argument to the developing crisis in Northern Ireland, voicing objections to the fact that citizens of the Republic of Ireland, if they lived in Britain, were given the right to vote and otherwise treated as British citizens.Footnote ³⁹ He argued that this arose from a misplaced British pretense that after 1922 the newly created Irish Free State “was still within the allegiance” as part of the British Commonwealth. The failure to rectify the situation, even after the declaration of the independent Republic of Ireland in 1949, meant that the British government unintentionally fueled the current tension because “the belonging of Northern Ireland and the not belonging of the Republic are at present obscured.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Powell made this demand time and again, frequently (but not exclusively) to audiences in Northern Ireland.Footnote ⁴¹ His objection related, of course, to his wider concerns that Britain had not come to terms with its postimperial status. As he made clear to a County Down audience in 1976, he was critical of the whole notion of dual nationality, saying that “no man can serve two masters” and arguing that Britain should “no longer recognise as citizens those who by a voluntary act acknowledge or avail themselves of another allegiance and citizenship.”Footnote ⁴² Yet Powell also strove to remind his Ulster Unionist colleagues of the direct relevance to them. Calling for a concerted effort to abolish dual nationality, he told Molyneaux that “I do not see … what other position Ulster Unionists can consistently or safely adopt, since otherwise they fatally weaken their essential view of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Republic,” adding that it “could prove indirectly helpful in securing a separation of Irish and British nationality.”Footnote ⁴³

Powell’s argument that Northern Ireland was part of the British nation involved the repudiation of the kind of Ulster separatism that manifested itself at various points in time in demands for Dominion status or even independence. In 1972 and 1973, the Vanguard Movement, a pressure group within the Unionist Party led by William “Bill” Craig who had as Northern Ireland Minister for Home Affairs taken the controversial decision to ban civil rights marches in 1968, began calling for semi-independence. Powell promptly argued that this would have meant “turning unionism into that denial of itself, isolationism.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Directly refuting the implications of the Vanguard publication Ulster—a Nation, Powell emphatically did not accept that there was any such thing as “an Ulster nationality” or “Ulster nationalism.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He did not dispute the existence of an “Ulster dimension” but saw this as akin to “other regional dimensions in Britain, profound, historic and self-conscious.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Powell further argued that an independent Ulster was not practical politics because of his wider contention that, in order to exist, nations had to be recognized as such by other nations. When former Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan proposed “a broadly independent state” of Northern Ireland in 1981, Powell dismissed the idea as “fantastic and wildly unreal.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The following year, Powell asserted that there was “nothing—or nothing but a brief and bloody intermezzo—between the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and an all-Ireland state.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1985 and 1986, amid discussion of a unilateral declaration of independence by some of those in the newly formed Ulster Clubs movement that sought to coordinate Unionist opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, he asserted frankly that such a notion was “nonsense” because the Republic of Ireland, Britain, and the United States would not recognize it.Footnote ⁴⁹

Powell also connected Ulster Unionism to his distinctive contribution to the wide-ranging debate over perceptions of British national decline.Footnote ⁵⁰ Powell’s thinking on the nature of decline had evolved over time. In the early 1960s, he criticized the failure to accept fully the end of the empire and called for a “new kind of patriotism” that was “overwhelmingly economic” in its commitment to the free market.Footnote ⁵¹ A little later, he added another dimension to his thesis, making it effectively a critique of other narratives of decline. He attacked the pervasive debilitating “conviction of national decline,” based on the loss of empire and a concern with Britain’s place in an international economic “league table.” Both assumptions, he contended, were spurious. With a romantically insular sense of Britain’s past centered on its own shores, he argued that its imperial phase had been an aberration in its history and that, given it was not a European state either, the preoccupation with the economic performance of France and West Germany was frankly arbitrary. Yet this did not make these concerns about decline any less worrying. Arguing that the “life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived largely in the imagination,” Powell contended, “nothing is more important to the well-being of a nation than what it thinks about itself.”Footnote ⁵² By the early 1970s, with British sovereignty threatened by entry to the EEC and British “identity” challenged by immigration, Powell argued that the central question increasingly “took on a political, rather than economic character and went to the most fundamental of all: Who are we? What are we? What is this nation?, ‘free’ or ‘unfree,’ ‘afraid’ or ‘not afraid’?”Footnote ⁵³

Powell related this analysis to Northern Ireland in 1971. He contended that the “future for a nation which failed or abandoned a million and a half of its own citizens on its own soil would be dark indeed … the ignominy would be irreparable.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As Powell campaigned in 1974, Northern Ireland assumed a larger place in his attack on what he portrayed as in “moral terms … the loss of confidence in our ability to take a grip upon ourselves as a nation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ With pressure mounting from Scottish and Welsh nationalism and Britain now in the EEC, Powell stated boldly that he regarded Ulster as “the test of Britain’s national will to live.” He argued, “a nation which spurns and treats with contempt and injustice a portion of its own people … will not long find that it possesses the fibre or the will to defend itself against other assaults, from within or without.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The following year, Powell began to develop the idea that Ulster Unionism had something to offer the wider British nation. Amid the “widespread loss of confidence in Britain itself,” Powell argued that “Ulster asserts defiantly, in the face of all dissuasion and denigration, that it is part of a greater whole … the United Kingdom, the British nation.”Footnote ⁵⁷ On another occasion, Powell stated, “Ulster never forgets what a nation is or what it is to belong to a nation.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This was powerful rhetoric but it did not stand close scrutiny against the reality of Ulster Unionism in practice, which was, as Powell understood, characterized in part by its conditional attachment to Britain. Nonetheless, in 1977 Powell developed these arguments further as his earlier concerns escalated into a full-blown “crisis of the nation’s belief in its own existence.” In this context, the reciprocal element was emphasized more strongly than ever as Ulster Unionism was said to offer a “living protest against the prevalent self-abasement of the British nation.”Footnote ⁵⁹

As the years progressed, Powell’s attention shifted toward the United States and, from 1979, he explicitly identified acquiescence in the face of its influence as the principal threat to the integrity of the British nation. Powell’s distrust of the United States dated back at least as far as 1943, when he had first met American officials in North Africa and taken the view that they were trying to dissolve the British Empire.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet even after Powell ceased to be an imperialist, he continued to hold an almost instinctive suspicion of US intentions. He now related this to Northern Ireland on the basis that a particular American concern was to put pressure on Britain to create an all-Ireland state.Footnote ⁶¹ Powell contended that the reasoning here was strategic: the Americans sought, he argued, the entry of “an all-Ireland state … into NATO, thus filling the gravest of all the gaps in the American strategy for Europe and the Atlantic.”Footnote ⁶² Mirroring the institutional focus of other interpretations of British decline, he began to argue that parts of the British civil service were particularly susceptible to US pressure. Powell considered that the Northern Ireland Office was dominated by the conviction that Ulster was “England’s ‘last colony’” and was accordingly “dedicated to the task of removing that encumbrance from her shoulders as quickly as possible.”Footnote ⁶³ He was especially concerned about the Foreign Office: “that nursery of traitors. … Its eyes and affections … fixed … above all on Washington DC, for whose favours and delectation this province is to be offered up a sacrifice.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Powell’s criticisms of the United States featured in the Unionist Party manifesto in 1983, and Powell himself made this a prominent strand of his election campaign, telling a meeting that the issue was: “Is Britain to be a nation in her own right or the obedient servant and satellite of the United States?”Footnote ⁶⁵ In the mid-1980s, blaming American pressure for the Anglo-Irish Agreement, he contended that the “strategic motive of purchasing American approval at whatever cost has risen to a point where it is no longer compatible with national self-respect.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Just as in the 1970s, Powell asserted that it was “Ulster’s lot to fight in some representative sense the moral battles of the whole nation.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Powell initially adumbrated his policy of integration in 1970, four years before he joined the Unionist Party, in a context of considerable flux in Northern Irish politics and increasing uncertainty over the jurisdiction of the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont, which operated on the basis of Unionist majority rule. The moderately reforming Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill had resigned in April 1969 amid rising sectarian tension, discontent with his leadership from within the Unionist Party, and criticism from the Reverend Ian Paisley outside the party that was proving increasingly difficult to dismiss. The founder of the Free Presbyterian Church, Paisley articulated a powerful fusion of anti-Catholic, evangelical Protestantism with intransigent opposition to change in Northern Ireland, which fed into long-standing Loyalist sentiments. O’Neill was succeeded by James Chichester-Clark, but his premiership was soon challenged by the same set of pressures. Moreover, the deployment of the British Army in August 1969, in response to rioting in Belfast and Londonderry, meant that the RUC lost authority over internal security.Footnote ⁶⁸ This development, together with intervention from Westminster to reform local government and public housing allocation (areas identified by the civil rights campaign as prone to discrimination), came to be seen as symbolic of Stormont’s weakness and, in turn, significantly bolstered Loyalist criticism of Chichester-Clark’s administration.

Powell’s first hint that he did not agree with the existence of the Northern Ireland Parliament came in a speech in February 1970. He was well aware of the potential impact of his comments at a time when the most prominent opposition to Stormont’s continuation came from Republican circles. For this reason, Powell had run a draft of the speech past the prominent Unionist politician Robin Chichester-Clark, brother of the Northern Ireland prime minister.Footnote ⁶⁹ Speaking on the same platform as other leading Unionists in Enniskillen, Powell stated: “The Stormont Parliament itself … though rendered familiar and habitual by the use of nearly fifty years, is the fragment of a structure, of which the remainder never came into existence and of which the completion has become, if possible, more inconceivable with the passage of time.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This was a reference to the fact that in 1920 the British government had sought to establish two home rule parliaments in Ireland. Powell’s conclusions were guarded but in a BBC interview the same day, he was sufficiently explicit to earn a public rebuke from Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Quintin Hogg. Powell stated: “I think there could come a time, and I think perhaps it would be right for our fellow citizens in Northern Ireland to be reflecting on this, when their assertion of oneness with the rest of the United Kingdom—which they passionately, clearly passionately, want to make—would be at odds with their assertion of this parliamentary independence.”Footnote ⁷¹ Over the next couple of years, Powell sketched out his position. In his first parliamentary intervention on Northern Ireland in April 1970, he argued for “a greater amalgamation and uniformity of administration, government, policy and economy in the six counties and in the rest of the United Kingdom.”Footnote ⁷² The following year his criticism of Stormont gathered pace, as he attributed to it some responsibility for sustaining the tensions by giving the impression that Northern Ireland’s constitutional status was ambiguous. Just before a short speaking tour of Northern Ireland, he stated in a widely reported interview with a Dublin current affairs magazine that “Stormont itself is a threat to the British link because it is an assertion of separateness. … Anything which blurs the status of Northern Ireland as part of the UK does practical harm in that it maintains or helps to maintain this basic fuel of disorder and disruption.”Footnote ⁷³ Powell stuck to the same theme during his visit, repeating his arguments in a speech at Londonderry and in an interview with Ulster Television.Footnote ⁷⁴

Despite his commitment to integration, Powell opposed the prorogation of Stormont in March 1972 by Heath’s Conservative government because of the simultaneous introduction of Direct Rule. The British government hoped that this would be a temporary measure to bring a swiftly deteriorating situation under control and to provide time for the local political parties to reach agreement on some kind of reformed devolution in the future. After replacing Chichester-Clark as Northern Ireland prime minister in 1971, Brian Faulkner had, with backing from the British Cabinet, introduced internment in a heavy-handed manner against those suspected of IRA involvement. This produced a backlash in terms of a spiral of Republican and Loyalist political violence and a series of anti-internment rallies, most notably one in Londonderry on 30 January 1972, subsequently known as “Bloody Sunday,” when the killing of thirteen unarmed civilians by British soldiers attracted worldwide attention.

Powell’s objection to Direct Rule was, of course, an obvious way of opposing Heath, but it was also based on disagreement with the fact that Northern Ireland—unlike the rest of the United Kingdom—was to be governed by ministerial decree. In the absence of a devolved parliament, he called for an increase in the number of Northern Irish parliamentary seats at Westminster. At a point when integration was being more widely mooted in Unionist circles, particularly by Paisley and his recently formed Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Powell labeled this “full integration” and said that it was “what Unionism in Northern Ireland should demand and work for.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In one sense, Powell did not therefore disapprove of the overall direction of British policy, emotively telling the Commons that Northern Ireland had “come home to this House.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet he did dislike the way in which Direct Rule was operating. Indeed, after Orders in Council were introduced in 1974 as a means of carrying through legislation, he was critical of them for inhibiting parliamentary debate on Northern Irish issues.Footnote ⁷⁷

There were, from Powell’s perspective, compelling political reasons for Unionists to adopt a policy of integration. In 1959, he had identified a “categorical imperative” for the success of parties in opposition, as the Unionists effectively now were with the introduction of Direct Rule. Powell argued that they should concentrate on elaborating “a great, simple, central theme, branching into all fields and subjects of debate, but in itself easily grasped.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Powell had found such a theme and tied his own advancement in Unionist politics to it. Yet, as time revealed, he was not only unable to persuade the Unionist Party to adopt it but also often had to word his proposals in ways that did not offend entrenched pro-devolution attitudes, obscuring the clarity of his position.

In spring 1974, with speculation mounting that he would contest a parliamentary seat in Northern Ireland, Powell’s difficulties began to become apparent. By this stage, the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC), an electoral coalition comprising the Unionist Party, the DUP, and the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (the successor to the Vanguard Movement), had been set up in order to oppose the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, which envisaged a power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive and a cross-border Council of Ireland. In practice, this meant that the UUUC was pitted against the pro-agreement parties making up the Executive, namely, those Unionists supporting Faulkner (who had been forced to resign as leader of the Unionist Party and replaced by Harry West); the constitutional Nationalist Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP), formed in 1970 and closely related to the civil rights movement; and the cross-community Alliance Party, also formed in 1970. Powell shared the UUUC opposition to power sharing but his reasons for doing so were quite different. The UUUC’s main concern was the extent of the role of the Council of Ireland but this was underpinned by a widespread Unionist desire to see the restoration of the old Stormont. In contrast, Powell argued against power sharing on the integrationist grounds that no other part of the United Kingdom possessed it, readily adding that he remained fully committed to the “undivided sovereignty” of Westminster.Footnote ⁷⁹ Powell was invited to attend the UUUC conference at Portrush in late April 1974 and made a case strongly for “total integration.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In the end, the conference endorsed a policy of devolution for Northern Ireland within a future federal United Kingdom. Yet, as he prepared to contest the October 1974 election as a candidate for the Official Unionist Party (OUP), a name adopted to distinguish it from Faulkner’s newly formed Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, and with the Executive having been brought down by the Loyalist Ulster Workers’ Council strike, Powell claimed to be “entirely in accord” with the recently agreed “Portrush Declaration.”Footnote ⁸¹ Once elected, he reiterated this statement, but began to press for increased parliamentary representation and democratic local government.Footnote ⁸² This was the first occasion on which Powell had mentioned an expanded role for local government but it was consistent with an integrationist approach, as the scope and powers of local authorities had been restricted under devolution. It was also another criticism of the working of Direct Rule because, at the point of Stormont’s prorogation, many responsibilities had been transferred from local councils to executive bodies.Footnote ⁸³

Powell was clearly being disingenuous, but the broader context allowed him some latitude. This was a period of increasing constitutional debate, and hence uncertainty, when previous assumptions about the United Kingdom’s status as a unitary state, which had been reflected in the report of the Royal Commission on the Constitution (often known as the Kilbrandon report) as recently as 1973, were being called into question.Footnote ⁸⁴ More importantly still, there was frequently a looseness of meaning in discussions of federalism that technically involved dividing, not devolving, power between Westminster and regional or provincial governments.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet during debates over Scottish and Welsh devolution in the mid-1970s Powell left little room for doubt over his own position. He made it clear that his own preference was to “find perhaps the means whereby we can entrust perhaps a larger degree of control over administration and a larger jurisdiction to work within the law even than that enjoyed today by the GLC [Greater London Council] or the metropolitan county councils.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Powell also emphasized two practical problems with federation: the large size of England, which meant that its representative institution would be a “competitor” to the House of Commons; and the powerful argument which became known as the “West Lothian Question”—the fact that MPs from Scotland and Wales would be able to “make law for the rest of the country upon the selfsame subjects over which legislative power is transferred to the new parliaments.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This reasoning underpinned Powell’s uninhibited dismissal of the idea: “I regard the federal solution merely as a theoretical structure which solves the conundrum posed by the proposal for legislative devolution inside a unitary state. In practical terms, it is a reductio ad absurdum. Nothing that I have said shows that I think it is at all practical or desirable for the United Kingdom.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Powell’s most profound objection, however, was that a federation would mean, “we have still destroyed the House and the Union.” His view was that the “nature of the House of Commons is that its sovereignty reaches into every nook and cranny of the national life … there are no powers which it will concede within this realm to any other authority.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, he frankly told Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in a private meeting in 1975 that the “Devolution Debate on the rest of the United Kingdom … provided a fortuitous opportunity of playing the Northern Ireland question long,” which allowed for the possibility that “as the power of local government increased, the spectre of Stormont would gradually be banished.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Powell’s thinly disguised advocacy of integration had a mixed reception. It gained some ground within the OUP as Powell pushed party leader West to make his policy demands (expanded local government and increased parliamentary representation) a priority and as he worked with Molyneaux, who was increasingly persuaded by Powell’s arguments, to derail any momentum for devolution outside the federal context.Footnote ⁹¹ Meanwhile, however, certain parts of the South Down Constituency Association became agitated in 1976 and 1977 that Powell was not “100% behind devolved government at Stormont,” which was their “first priority.”Footnote ⁹² Indeed, the most explicit support for Powell came from outside Northern Ireland. The prominent English Daily Telegraph journalist T. E. Utley, who had himself stood (unsuccessfully) as an Ulster Unionist parliamentary candidate in February 1974, found the idea of integration “logically irresistible” if Northern Ireland was to remain in the United Kingdom while adding that proportional representation should be introduced across the board.Footnote ⁹³

Powell continued to move cautiously. Once the principle of increased representation of Northern Ireland at Westminster was agreed in 1978, he began to push more vigorously for democratic local government and, to a lesser extent, for the full amalgamation of the Northern Ireland Civil Service into the British Civil Service.Footnote ⁹⁴ He did so, however, fully aware that West’s preference was to keep “our ideas on local government … in cold storage at the moment” and to concentrate on securing the return of devolved government.Footnote ⁹⁵ The argument over the party’s priorities was played out in an inconclusive manner at the OUP annual conferences between 1978 and 1981. Powell initially endorsed the regional council scheme proposed by the Conservatives in language that did not preclude devolution in a UK-wide context.Footnote ⁹⁶ Once the Scotland and Wales Acts had been rejected by referenda in 1979, and the regional council scheme abandoned by the new Conservative government in the same year, he pushed for strengthened local government in a manner that did not rule out Northern Irish legislative devolution in the longer term.Footnote ⁹⁷

Powell faced similar constraints in the advocacy of his economic policies. In principle, he wanted Northern Ireland’s economy to operate under the same free-market principles as the rest of the United Kingdom. Indeed, in 1972, at a time when he was drawing closer to the Ulster Unionist MPs, Powell set himself at odds with them through his opposition to the Northern Ireland Finance Corporation, which had been created to help bolster the local economy amid continuing civil unrest. In line with his long-standing opposition to state planning, he criticized the rationale of the body for mistakenly seeking to perform the kind of task best left to the private sector, arguing that “the harm and economic loss which ultimately result from public money, raised by taxation or by borrowing on public account, being invested in projects which public bodies and civil servants under various names consider may be profitable are just the same on this side of the Irish Sea and the other.”Footnote ⁹⁸ After being adopted as an OUP candidate, Powell offered a more conciliatory position. In an interview with Radio Éireann, he now defended British aid to industry in Northern Ireland given the “assault” it was facing but sought to “sharply distinguish” between this and what he saw as the prevailing trend in regional policy of “sustaining industries which are not viable by an infusion of tax payers’ money.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet days before the general election, Powell’s specific comments about subsidies to the Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff put him more starkly at odds with the bulk of Unionist opinion that attached particular significance to the shipyard as a symbol of Ulster’s industrial prowess and of its economic affinities with Britain. Pointedly, Powell stated that the “most dangerous projects for Ulster are those selected on political and not economic grounds and propped up with subsidies because they cannot satisfy the test of fair and open competition.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Similarly, in March 1975, when the government announced it was taking over the shipbuilders, Powell criticized the move. He suggested that it was “a deterrent to industry and enterprise” that sent damaging messages about the Northern Ireland economy akin to those projected by the nationalization of shipyards on the Clyde in Glasgow a few years beforehand.Footnote ¹⁰¹

At the same time, Powell emphasized those aspects of his economic policy that, while being in line with his advocacy of integration, were also more palatable to most Unionists. In speeches in Northern Ireland, and as the OUP economic spokesman in the House of Commons, Powell made it clear that he objected to the “absurdity” of attempting “to construct a sort of balance of payments table between the different parts of a unitary nation like the United Kingdom.” In the widest sense, this indicated Powell’s unhappiness with the imperfect financial integration deriving from the implementation of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, whose complex fiscal arrangements had originally necessitated the collection of such data. In the immediate context, it provided a means for Powell to denounce those who, amid increasing net transfers to Northern Ireland, sought to use government statistics “to show that Northern Ireland is an economic dead weight upon the United Kingdom” without fully acknowledging that it was “living under continuous enemy attack.”Footnote ¹⁰² Powell also objected to the practice of overlooking the circulation of Republic of Ireland currency in Northern Ireland, arguing that this did not occur in any other part of the United Kingdom and stressing that the right to coin money was a key symbol of national sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁰³

After Thatcher’s government came to power in 1979, Powell continued to tread carefully. Since Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader four years earlier, Powell had harbored some misgivings about her. He was concerned about her earlier support for Heath and her endorsement of British membership of the EEC, and questioned whether she was sufficiently committed to monetarism.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Even so, he was now instrumental in securing the passage of a resolution at the OUP annual conference that approved the overall direction of Conservative economic policy, stating, “the future of Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom as a whole lies in the expansion of a free market economy rather than reliance on a high level of public spending.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Yet he remained aware of Unionist concerns about the maintenance of financial support for Northern Ireland. In 1980, Powell told delegates at a specially convened pre-conference economic seminar that while he was vigorously opposed to “rampant public expenditure” because of its inflationary pressures, he nonetheless wanted Northern Ireland to secure “more than a fair share” of a balanced British budget to counter the effects of the ongoing conflict.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This approach clearly yielded dividends when he subsequently persuaded the conference to reject a resolution that was critical of the cost-cutting trend of Conservative regional policy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The early 1980s marked a significant change in Powell’s articulation of integration. Until now, with wider debates about devolution still ongoing, he had not only obscured some of his arguments under the cover of a superficial commitment to federalism, but had also tended to suggest that parliamentary sovereignty—and hence the union—were of intrinsic value. From this point on, he began to substantiate his case, building on the arguments made by Dicey. In 1978 Powell had already stated that “of all human contrivances, the parliamentary system of the United Kingdom affords the best available guarantee to those who live under it of justice and freedom.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the same year, he told a meeting of the pro-devolutionist Orange Order that “In no other framework and on no other plane can the rights and liberties of all in Northern Ireland be assured.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1980 Powell attempted to justify these claims, as the OUP stood aloof from the talks convened by the secretary of state, Humphrey Atkins, to discuss the future of Northern Ireland. Countering the suggestion that a power-sharing local assembly was needed to protect the interests of the Nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, he contended that “Parliament … is the natural protector of all minorities because it is itself made up of minorities.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This was because “both politically and geographically the consciousness that they are all minorities prevents them from coercing or trampling upon one another beyond a certain point.” Devolution in any form—the old Stormont regime as well as a power-sharing model—would only work to override the safeguards. Making a long-standing distinction between the political (Nationalist) and religious (Catholic) minorities that had recently gained renewed salience in Ulster Unionist circles, he argued:

At this juncture, Powell’s argument for integration came under attack from Bernard Crick, the Labour-supporting professor of politics at the University of London. Crick did not grapple with Powell’s argument about minorities but criticized the foundation of his position. Crick argued that a strong rhetorical commitment to the notion of parliamentary sovereignty since the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 had been used to obscure the reality that the United Kingdom actually operated “a kind of informal federalism,” especially where Northern Ireland was subsequently concerned, in recognition of the differences between its component parts. He thus contended that a new sort of federal arrangement, involving British-Irish inter-governmental cooperation, now offered the best prospects of a peaceful future for Northern Ireland. He was adamant that closer integration on the lines suggested by Powell would only lead to the persistence of the conflict and, in time, harden British opinion in favor of withdrawal.Footnote ¹¹²

In the meantime, Powell used his new arguments to support his earlier demands for the expansion of local government in Northern Ireland. He argued that this was compatible with the protection of minorities because local government was “a job of work … not a piece of independent sovereignty.” It operated “not only under the law made by Parliament but subject to power of control and intervention which are exercised by a Minister who is responsible to Parliament.”Footnote ¹¹³

Powell also entered new territory as he came very close to endorsing the integration of Northern Ireland into the British party system. Speaking in the House of Commons in 1982, he lamented the fact that “the party political structure of Northern Ireland differs from the rest of the United Kingdom.” Powell argued that this had a “profound effect on the relationship between subject and Government,” leaving them “exiled from the political system that is the United Kingdom as a whole” and constituting the “biggest and most significant difference … between the Province and the rest of the kingdom.” Making it clear how this related to local political minorities, he argued, “when, in the county of Durham, the Conservative minority contemplates the fact that it is unlikely to return a majority of Members to this House—or vice versa in Hampshire—it feels no estrangement as a result, because it identifies itself with the cause of the Labour Party, or the Conservative Party, as the case may be, throughout the nation.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The centrality of party to Powell’s arguments is striking, especially given his own uneasy relationship with the Conservative Party and even the OUP. Moreover, while his arguments about the protection of minorities by Parliament had lineage in Dicey, his faith in party did not. Indeed, Dicey had particular concerns that party interests could supersede national ones.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Yet, in his rhetoric at least, Powell was unequivocal, notably stating in 1978 that “All my political life I have been an almost fanatical advocate of party in politics.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Conveniently, Powell defined a party as “a body of persons who hold, advocate and desire to bring into effect certain political principles and policies” without necessarily being “at one on all subjects.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ He now added the explicit proviso that this process could “only be dissolved and held in equilibrium … within the single parliamentary legislative structure of the United Kingdom.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Powell had not yet explained how he thought electoral integration should take place. Indeed, he faced a particular problem here having long opposed the “socialist” Labour Party and then having fallen out with the Conservative Party, formerly the party of “nationality.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Famously he had, in effect, urged electors to vote Labour in February 1974 as a protest against Conservative support for the EEC. Furthermore, as recently as 1977, speaking on BBC Northern Ireland’s “Inside Politics” radio program, he had dismissed Unionist grass roots sympathy for the Conservative Party as “just stupid.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet, as time progressed, Powell had warmed to Thatcher’s government, publicly supporting its economic policy.Footnote ¹²¹ At the Ulster Unionist Executive Committee in 1982 he won support for a recommendation that the annual conference be moved from October to November in subsequent years—presumably to be in a position to respond to the Conservative conference meeting earlier in the autumn.Footnote ¹²² It was not, however, until November 1984 that Powell told a Unionist political meeting “it is through the Conservative Party that those Ulster electors who, in Great Britain, would be supporters and members of the Conservative Party must find a way to participate in the … political process of our nation.” Powell made this statement amid his satisfaction, which he voiced also to the OUP conference in the same week, that Thatcher had emphatically rejected the proposals of the New Ireland Forum during a press conference at Chequers. The Forum had sought to provide an agreed constitutional nationalist approach to Northern Ireland and comprised representatives from the main political parties in the Republic of Ireland, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Irish Labour Party, as well as the SDLP. Significantly, Powell interpreted Thatcher’s rejection of each of its proposed solutions (a unitary Ireland, a federal arrangement, or joint British-Irish authority) as demonstrating that “Ulster’s constitutional status is now to be put beyond all cavil and debate.”Footnote ¹²³

Powell did not subsequently repeat his (admittedly tentative) public endorsement of electoral integration as the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 reignited his worst fears that Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom was not secure. The agreement prompted Unionist politician Robert McCartney to form the Campaign for Equal Citizenship, in order urgently to demand British political party organization.Footnote ¹²⁴ Powell, however, argued that the agreement constituted a significant stumbling block to such party organization. Accordingly, when the OUP conference in November 1986 debated McCartney’s motion for the “full integration of Northern Ireland into the political institutions which apply to the rest of the United Kingdom,” Powell played a part in its eventual rejection by introducing an amendment calling for the postponement of any policy statement until after the agreement had been overturned.Footnote ¹²⁵ This led to a vitriolic backlash against Powell. The Campaign for Equal Citizenship’s journal made a point of criticizing him for not following through on his advocacy of “full integration.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Others, such as Brendan Clifford from the British and Irish Communist Organisation that had also played a role in building the momentum for electoral integration, made similar comments in a stinging manner.Footnote ¹²⁷ Yet Powell had not fundamentally changed his mind. In private correspondence in summer 1986 he stated that “I think the true remedy is for us to be integrated not only into the administration but into the party system of the United Kingdom, and I look forward to this happening one day.”Footnote ¹²⁸ In 1988, as both the Conservative and Labour parties discussed setting up constituency parties in Northern Ireland, Powell put forward a modified version of the same argument. He told his former political secretary Peter Clarke that the candidates of both parties would be “foredoomed to defeat by the commitment of their respective parties to the Anglo-Irish Agreement” but argued that in the future, “nothing can prevent politics in the province becoming aligned with those in the rest of the kingdom, though the alignment is more likely to take the form of the alliance between Ulster parties and mainland parties, like the present alliance of the SDLP and the Labour party and the former alliance of the Ulster Unionists with the Conservatives.”Footnote ¹²⁹

As Powell became more deeply involved in Unionist politics, he found himself embroiled in a series of related disputes about the nature of Ulster’s allegiance to Britain. This was arguably the most heavily contested element of Ulster Unionism in theory and practice, and became even more so as the Troubles unfolded. As early as 1972 Powell took issue with the notion of Ulster Loyalism. Addressing a rally at Banbridge, County Down, he provocatively asked, “Loyalty to what? Union with what? There must be no doubt or division or prevarication about the answers to those questions. The answer is not loyalty to Ulster; no, nor loyalty to yourselves. The answer is not the union of these six counties; no, nor union among yourselves. The answer is loyalty to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; and union means the union of all its parts, including this one.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Despite this, Powell took an initially benevolent view of Loyalist paramilitaries. He did this in a broader context in which many Unionist politicians were more critical of Republican paramilitaries than Loyalist ones and in a specific setting in which, in 1972 and 1973, Craig rhetorically embraced the armed Loyalist cause. With the rise in particular of the Ulster Volunteer Force since 1966, Powell criticized their strategy as “misguided … self-defeating [and] disastrous to their own cause.” Yet on two separate occasions—in 1971 and again in 1972, just after the formation of the Ulster Defence Association—he distinguished them from Republican paramilitaries on the basis that they sought to maintain their allegiance to the British nation, stating: “There is a world of difference between a citizen who commits a crime, in the belief, however mistaken, that he is thereby helping to preserve the integrity of his country and his right to remain a subject of his sovereign, and a person, be he citizen or alien, who commits a crime with the intention of destroying that integrity and rendering impossible that allegiance. The former breaches the peace; the latter is executing an act of war … the one is a lawbreaker; the other is an enemy.”Footnote ¹³¹ Powell did not repeat these arguments as Loyalist political violence increased in the mid-1970s and as he refined his own understanding of how the organically defined nation operated in practice. Drawing on the work of the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, Powell now categorized the nation as a civil association. This was primarily a legal relationship, backed up (sometimes imperfectly) by moral force, that sought to guarantee individual freedom and stood in contrast to an enterprise association imposing a common purpose.Footnote ¹³² Oakeshott’s arguments have been recognized as illuminating many facets of Conservative thought on the state and, more tentatively, as casting light on Powell’s own outlook.Footnote ¹³³ Furthermore, Powell himself was certainly familiar with aspects of Oakeshott’s work.Footnote ¹³⁴

Significantly, it was exposure to the realities of politics in Northern Ireland that forced Powell to clarify his position as he became increasingly concerned about the conditional allegiance exhibited widely in Unionist circles. He was aware of his own divergent position and so—when he planned to deliver a speech on the topic of allegiance at Kilkeel on 5 July 1975—he did not, in his customary manner, predistribute a copy of the speech through the Unionist party machinery.Footnote ¹³⁵ In line with Oakeshott’s emphasis on the obligatory nature of law, Powell criticized Loyalist paramilitaries for wanting to “obey some laws but not others,” such as holding firearms. He also argued that, in a more general sense, Unionists “could not put conditions on their obedience to the Crown-in-Parliament.” As expected, this created a backlash. Craig and Martin Smyth, Grand Master of the Orange Order in Ireland, both emphasized the conditional and monarchical nature of Ulster loyalty. The speech also prompted a significant exchange with Paisley, who contended that there was a dangerous precedent in Powell’s argument: “If the Crown-in-Parliament decided to put Ulster into a united Ireland, according to Mr Powell, we would have to obey if we were loyal.” West made the same point, powerfully arguing that “if the people of Ulster had been at all times loyal to the British Parliament in the past they would not have a Northern Ireland today.”Footnote ¹³⁶ In a subsequent interview, Powell recognized that—in such a scenario—“the whole meaning of unionism would have been destroyed, and consequently, the meaning of loyalty,” but he insisted that the prospect was frankly “inconceivable.”Footnote ¹³⁷ This disagreement had brought Powell face-to-face with a long-running dilemma in Unionist circles, which had become particularly acute in the years before 1914, as it appeared increasingly likely that Britain would put Ulster into an Irish Home Rule Parliament. In the future, Powell would himself have to grapple more closely with this question, and its implications for his own position, but for now it remained in the background.

In the meantime, Powell began to explain how unconditional allegiance to the Crown-in-Parliament secured the union. In 1974 Powell had made this point in abstract terms: “It simply is not within the range of political reality that a democratic nation state could sever off a part of itself where the majority of the inhabitants manifest repeatedly, under all manner of testing and despite all manner of pressure, their determination to remain part of the state.”Footnote ¹³⁸ In the years that followed, Powell developed his position. He held that allegiance to the Crown-in-Parliament was demonstrated through the act of election by which “the people gave in advance the pledge of their acceptance” of its sovereignty, constituting the “consent of the nation.”Footnote ¹³⁹ In 1981 he explicitly contended that electing MPs to Westminster guaranteed Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom because this made it “impossible” for the House of Commons to “reject a part of itself.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This, of course, swiftly became a provocative argument as the PIRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands, won a Westminster seat in April 1981 as part of a wider campaign for Republican inmates to be treated as political prisoners that, in turn, paved the way for the emergence of Sinn Féin as a political force, contesting, but not taking up, seats in the House of Commons. Powell’s position also provoked a backlash from the devolutionist wing of the OUP. Edgar Graham, a rising figure in the party and a law lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, articulated a long-standing distrust of Westminster parties and politicians, arguing that if “the union had to depend on the House of Commons for its defence, it would be a very fragile union indeed.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

Powell’s argument also contained some latent contradictions. It was seemingly underpinned by his belief in the overriding sovereignty of the Crown-in-Parliament to make or break any laws whatsoever. Accordingly, he distinguished it from the contention that Northern Ireland’s constitutional position was secured as a result of any particular piece of legislation, including the 1973 Northern Ireland Act, which stated that it would remain part of the United Kingdom so long as this was the wish of a majority of its population.Footnote ¹⁴² Yet, at the same time, Powell attributed significant power to the people going—in undefined ways—beyond that of election. Indeed, he stated on one occasion that “it is the people of Northern Ireland themselves, and they alone, who have it in their power to destroy the Union with Great Britain.”Footnote ¹⁴³ This mirrored arguments Powell had made about EEC membership when—even before reluctantly endorsing a referendum on the issue—he had obliquely contended that the “power is still the people’s if they have the will to use it.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Powell’s position was in line with the later twentieth-century trend toward various forms of popular sovereignty, including (but not limited to) referenda.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Even so, there were particular tensions within Powell’s thinking about the relationship between parliamentary and popular sovereignty which, in the Northern Irish context, centred on the question of who was able to sever the union—with knock-on implications for allegiance.

Powell’s acceptance of some degree of popular sovereignty had slowly become apparent in his discussion of the types of behavior that put the union in jeopardy. In a widely circulated speech in 1976, which showed very clearly his civil association reasoning, Powell identified a particular danger from Loyalist paramilitary activity: “the nationalist, the rebel, the seceder—these are the people who can, and frequently do, obtain their aims by lawlessness and force. You can get out of an association or a society or a nation by breaking its laws and by turning your back upon it. What you cannot do is to maintain your membership of it by those methods … the aims of Unionism, because it is Unionism, can only be attained through and under the law of the Union, and therefore they can only be attained under and through Parliament.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Powell also began to argue that Paisley’s actions threatened to undermine the union. He was critical of Paisley’s involvement—alongside the Ulster Defence Association—in the May 1977 United Unionist Action Council strike, which sought the restoration of devolved government on the basis of Unionist majority rule together with tougher security measures against the IRA. Powell asserted that it was a case of “direct action against Parliament and the Crown” that, if it had succeeded, would have led Parliament to conclude “with justification, that Ulster had withdrawn its claim and cancelled its right to be part of the union.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ These comments were part of a developing feud between Powell and Paisley, which intensified after the UUUC broke down in 1977 and then involved speculation at each subsequent general election that the DUP would challenge Powell in South Down. Indeed, as animosities deepened further, Powell attacked Paisley’s willingness to absent himself deliberately from the House of Commons, calling him an “anti-Unionist” and dismissing the DUP as “Protestant Sinn Féin,” a jibe which was also aimed at its support for devolution.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

It was, however, the events of the mid-1980s that placed Powell’s understanding of the British nation under most strain. In August 1984, with speculation mounting that a parliamentary tier would be created within the Anglo-Irish Council established in 1981 to formalize relations between London and Dublin, he argued that, if this happened, Parliament would be breaking the union and, in the process, relinquishing its claims on Ulster allegiance. Using powerful imagery, which evoked a potent (and widely held) interpretation of defiance surrounding the signing of the Ulster Covenant and the arming of the Ulster volunteers, Powell stated, “I say that the men of 1912 were right when they … declared that the mother country would forfeit its right to their loyalty if it put them into a Dublin parliament. The methods … have been refined and elaborated since 1912; but the substance and the end result intended are still the same. When a British government creates an Anglo-Irish body to comprise representatives and to deliberate on the affairs of this island, it will … have renounced its claim upon the allegiance of the British people of this province.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The following year—just ahead of the Anglo-Irish Agreement—Powell repeated this argument, albeit with some qualifications. Amid increasing discussion of Loyalist resistance, he now said that giving the Republic of Ireland a consultative role in Northern Ireland would require an act of Parliament which he was “not prepared to believe … will happen.” Nonetheless, he added that, “if they did it then that would be equivalent to stating that Northern Ireland was no longer an integral part of the United Kingdom … then any duty of obedience to the Parliament which had stated that Northern Ireland was not part of the United Kingdom would automatically have ceased … and we have some taste of the history of that from past events.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement on 15 November 1985, and its subsequent passage through Parliament, thus placed Powell in an awkward position. Enjoying direct contact with Thatcher, he had contributed to the Unionist sense of betrayal by leading party colleagues to believe that such an agreement would not take place, certainly unless the Republic of Ireland removed its constitutional claims to Northern Ireland.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Furthermore, the agreement had—by the criteria he had set out—come close to breaking the union. It steered well clear of joint authority but, with the creation of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, there was not only a shared commitment to the longer-term promotion of devolved government between the constitutional parties but also an immediate aspiration that the Republic of Ireland would be consulted, especially so far as the interests of Nationalists in Northern Ireland were concerned. Speaking in the House of Commons, Powell argued that it was “an unprecedented arrangement whereby a formal position is allocated to another country in respect of the conduct of affairs in the United Kingdom.” He cited the example of the 1979 referenda on Scottish and Welsh devolution to contend that its effect was “to strike at the very essence of that compact between the electorate and Parliament upon which parliamentary sovereignty depends.” He continued that “there is a counterpart to the undoubted right of this Parliament to make law of the United Kingdom. It is that, wherever it makes law differently for certain parts of the United Kingdom, it can do so only in accordance with the wishes, and normally at the petition, of the people of those parts of the United Kingdom.” With recent events stretching the moral underpinning of his civil association analysis almost to breaking point, Powell stated that this left Ulster allegiance in an uncertain position: “no one will be able to say after the Division tonight that the people of Northern Ireland are under an obligation to accept—whatever might be the meaning of the term “accept” in that context—the Anglo-Irish agreement that has been made between the two Prime Ministers. We are again straining beyond its moral limit the authority of this House.”Footnote ¹⁵²

Yet in Northern Ireland, where Unionist anger at the agreement was incandescent amid fears that it represented a movement in the direction of a united Ireland, Powell did not pursue the implications of his argument. After famously not appearing at the Unionist rally at Belfast City Hall on 23 November, he argued that the “Union is what Northern Ireland has never had,” since the existence of Stormont had ensured that it was “carefully kept at arm’s length from the rest of the United Kingdom.”Footnote ¹⁵³ He made the same point after reluctantly joining other Unionist MPs, from both the OUP and the DUP, in resigning his seat and fighting a by-election on the issue of the agreement in late January 1986.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This was an exaggerated form of Powell’s long-standing argument that Northern Ireland had never been fully integrated with the rest of the United Kingdom, but in the circumstances, it was a clear attempt to avoid a judgment on what exactly had happened. At the same time, Powell counseled against those who argued that Britain had broken the union, stating that their stance was what those opposed to the union wanted to hear and seeking to quash any talk of independence.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Powell was decidedly uncomfortable with the defiant message projected by the Unionist “Day of Action,” effectively a general strike accompanied by considerable intimidation, which took place on 3 March 1986.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In the context of intensified violence from Loyalist paramilitaries against both the RUC and Catholics, he returned to an emphasis on popular sovereignty as a warning to Unionist opinion: “nobody can take the Union forcibly from the people of Ulster so long as they maintain their claim of right intact. Only the Ulster people themselves can throw it away.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

As tensions in Northern Ireland over the agreement eased a little, Powell offered deeper reflection on the situation in the terms of his civil association framework. Addressing the Queen’s University Law Society in 1987, he identified it as posing an “ethico-legal problem.” Stating explicitly that the “general obligation of the citizen to obey the law depends on the law being duly made” and thus on its “moral force,” Powell repeated his argument that “without the consent of the people of Northern Ireland” the agreement was “monstrously inequitable.” Yet he placed this alongside his underlying conviction that “to live is to live in society, and to live in society is to live under laws.” At this juncture, Powell did not fully pursue the implications of this analysis, reverting to describing his position in romantic terms by stating that “this is our country, we have no other and can have no other, any more than a man can get himself another mother and father.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The following year, after his general election defeat by the SDLP’s Eddie McGrady, Powell spoke in more depth about the “insoluble contradiction which the Anglo-Irish Agreement … created for the people of Northern Ireland.” Grappling directly with the issue of allegiance, he accepted that there was “a logical argument for treating the law of the United Kingdom as no longer obligatory” but insisted that this still left the difficulty “of claiming to belong to a state and not obeying its laws.” This was why Powell himself had decided that, even under strained circumstances, the “law was still binding.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Powell’s deep involvement in Northern Irish politics over the better part of twenty years was highly unusual for a British politician. Yet, in articulating his Ulster Unionism during this time, he gave one of the fullest expositions of his understanding of the British nation. With his emphasis on the primacy of Westminster, his Unionism can be viewed in terms of an anachronistic, late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century agenda. Even so, it is inaccurate to argue, certainly after 1980, that Powell’s Unionism was primordial. In line with Bourke’s observations, Powell eventually followed Dicey in making a case for Parliament as the most effective protector of minorities but—in a very different context where he was tentatively endorsing electoral integration—took his arguments further, asserting the importance of political parties as a pivotal part of the parliamentary system and the central political means by which the electorate indentified with the nation. This meant that Powell not only looked backward but also forward, preempting by several years the burst of interest in British political party organization in Northern Ireland in the mid- and late 1980s. Ironically, this also made Powell, the perpetual party rebel, one of the foremost advocates of party at a time when the very notion of party politics was coming under growing criticism.

From the mid-1970s, Powell increasingly characterized the operation of the organically inspired nation in terms of Oakeshott’s civil association model. Defining the state’s role primarily as providing laws for society, this was consistent with Powell’s wider inclination to prioritize individual freedom and to limit government direction. In a Northern Irish setting, it underpinned his condemnation of law-breaking Loyalist paramilitaries. It also explains the heart of the quandary—whether or not to follow a law insufficiently backed by moral force—that Powell faced in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Powell’s policy of integration was part of a wider vision. He sought the creation of local government on the same model as the rest of the United Kingdom and the amalgamation of the Northern Ireland and British civil service. Wanting to see Northern Ireland governed in the same free-market manner as the rest of the United Kingdom, he also disapproved of government subsidies. As Powell’s interest in Northern Ireland had developed in the early 1970s, it was not unreasonable to suggest that he had not fully thought out his policies.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ By the mid-1980s, this was no longer a fair assessment. At the same time, Powell had to advance his arguments cautiously, at times disingenuously, in Unionist circles. This was apparent in economic policy, where he came up against widespread Unionist commitment to British financial aid, but more so in his opposition to devolution in the 1970s when he paid lip service to the aspiration of a devolved Northern Ireland government—so valued by much Unionist opinion—as part of a future federal United Kingdom. The realities of Ulster Unionist politics thus meant that, while Powell’s policy proposals gained some headway, he did not get close to persuading the party wholeheartedly to adopt an integrationist stance and was often unable to present it himself as a clear and coherent central theme—the kind of political strategy that Powell considered so vital to the electoral success of any opposition party.

There were, moreover, certain contradictions in Powell’s wider position. Reflecting debate about national decline, he lamented what he saw as diminishing faith in the British nation and contrasted this, time and again, with the defiant Unionist identification with the nation. Yet, as his clash with Paisley, West, Smyth, and Craig in 1975 vividly showed, Powell was actually well aware of the conditional commitment to Britain and its institutions exhibited by many strands within Unionism. One part of the explanation, of course, is that Powell was employing contradictory rhetoric to make very different points. Even so, his longer-term struggle fully to come to terms with the nature of Unionism in practice undoubtedly exposed a significant tension in his thought as he came face-to-face with the central question of British nationhood—the allegiance that held it together. Attempting to answer the question of who had the right to break the union, a perennial issue in twentieth-century Unionism, Powell stumbled between his emphasis on parliamentary sovereignty and the increasing claims of popular sovereignty. His involvement in Northern Irish politics thus exposed much more starkly an inconsistency in his position first revealed during the debates over British membership of the EEC.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Powell played a significant part in the debate about the future of Northern Ireland, with both admirers and critics engaging with his ideas. Yet, in more recent years, when Powell’s arguments have been considered they have usually been dismissed (implicitly and explicitly) on the basis that the United Kingdom is not a unitary state. Instead it has been suggested that it is better understood as a union state in which integration is less than perfect, partly due to its origins in two unions—the Scottish and Irish ones—rather than the simple extension of the sovereignty of the English Parliament.Footnote ¹⁶¹ It is, however, necessary to remember that this view only became the “new orthodoxy” in the late 1990s, and that Powell was operating in a situation in which understandings of the United Kingdom constitution were more heavily contested.Footnote ¹⁶²

It is also important not to dismiss altogether the longer-term impact of Powell’s advocacy of integration. Even after Powell’s active involvement in Unionist politics was over, his proposal still found its adherents. In the mid-1990s there was a resurgence of interest in the idea from prominent journalists in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Spectator. This was sparked by concerns about the Conservative government’s commitment to Northern Ireland following the 1993 “Downing Street” Declaration, which argued for Irish self-determination but stipulated that both parts of the island had to agree to any new settlement, and heightened the following year as the PIRA ceasefire made further negotiations possible.Footnote ¹⁶³ As recently as 2006, as the prospects of reestablishing the power-sharing executive set up under the terms of the 1998 Belfast “Good Friday” Agreement appeared shaky, Powell’s policies offered one commentator in a prominent Belfast intellectual magazine a way forward.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

On the whole, Powell was a voice of moderation in Northern Irish politics. There were important exceptions, most notably his initial (qualified) sympathy toward the intentions of Loyalist paramilitaries. By the mid-1970s, however, he had become markedly more critical of them. Moreover, by the early 1980s Powell was voicing a clear hostility to the way in which the old Stormont government had treated the minority population. In the early 1970s, he made clear his objection to those from the Republic of Ireland being treated as British citizens if they were resident in Britain. Nonetheless, Powell usually steered clear of any wider discussion of immigration, the issue that accounted for much of his public profile in Britain, and indeed it is doubtful whether articulation of it would have had much impact in the distinctive Northern Irish political culture.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Yet a close examination of his involvement in Unionist politics does reveal the same tactical trait—his use of inflammatory rhetoric—that had generated such controversy in British politics from the late 1960s. In this respect, it is hard to avoid criticism of his decision to invoke the powerful legacy of 1912 amid increasing Loyalist unrest at Anglo-Irish negotiations in 1984.