Notorious for his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech on the subject of immigration to the United Kingdom, the twentieth-century British politician, Enoch Powell, is all too often decontextualized and coopted into contemporary political debates. In April 2018, for example, the New Statesman described the tumult over Brexit and the Windrush

scandal as “Enoch Powell's revenge.” Paul Corthorn's carefully researched study of Powell's political thought is, therefore, a welcome and timely contribution to the history of postwar British politics.

Whereas Simon Heffer's biography of Powell numbers over one thousand pages (Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, 1998), Corthorn's book is short and succinct. Though he highlights it, Corthorn justifiably avoids becoming a foot soldier in a highly politicized historiography—one that exists largely as a binary, split between the assessments of the New Right and those of the New Left. In contrast with many of those accounts, Corthorn's is a considered one. It is not a biography but a thematic study. Introduction and conclusion aside, its five chapters attend to the principal issues with which Powell engaged throughout his parliamentary career: international relations, economics, immigration, Europe, and Northern Ireland.

Corthorn's analysis of Powell's position on the last of those topics is fascinating and revealing. Compared to some of the other themes covered in this monograph, like immigration, Powell's views on what he often called simply “Ulster” have received relatively little scholarly attention. The stance Powell took on that region was, Corthorn notes, distinct: unlike most other Unionists in the province, Powell was an integrationist for whom (like many Republicans) “parliamentary independence” was anathema. Hence he opposed Ulster nationalism and Ulster Loyalism, and proposed both an increase in the number of seats for Northern Ireland at Westminster and electoral integration (with Unionists ideally participating in national politics by voting for the Conservative Party).

Admittedly, much of what Corthorn argues has been discussed elsewhere. Unique, however, is his diligence in tracking the changes, nuances, and tensions in Powell's political thought—a task especially pertinent considering Powell's reputation for absolutism. Corthorn shows how Powell's controversial rhetoric over immigration obscured the great extent to which that politician wavered between advocacy for voluntary and compulsory repatriation respectively. Likewise, Corthorn emphasizes, Powell's speeches exhibit a tension between parliamentary sovereignty and its popular counterpart, the latter of ‘which, in the case of Northern Ireland, turned on the question of who had the power to break the Union’, the Northern Irish directly or their representatives in Parliament (133). These points may have been clearer, though, had the author offered a summary at the end of each chapter.

The overall thesis could be further developed. Corthorn's central argument is that Powell's various campaigns were united by the theme of decline. Yet despite the emphasis that the author places on ‘decline’, he fails to adequately engage with the considerable scholarship that has attended to this theme. For example, although Corthorn references one of the most conspicuous scholars of that concept and its career in post-war British politics, Jim Tomlinson, he does not fully address his work. Moreover, Corthorn's thesis can appear sporadic. Only at the end of the international relations chapter does he discuss the ways that Powell connected decline to the United Kingdom's relationship with the United States. Similarly, in the chapter on immigration, Corthorn briefly states how what Powell thought to be immigration's erosion of national homogeneity was in that politician's eyes representative of decline. Neither remark is sufficiently expanded upon.

This is a shame because “decline” raises further questions. It would, for instance, be interesting to know whether “decline” was for Powell conjunctural or cumulative. After all, that concept is temporal in that it relates to the past, present, and future. Corthorn admits that Powell constructed a form of declinism. But this particular interpretation of Powell's could have been brought into relief had Corthorn attempted greater comparative analysis. Fruitful points of contrast in this respect might have been other members of the New Right or neoliberals such as Margaret Thatcher or Sir Keith Joseph.

Powell's public speeches are, for Corthorn, crucial. Given Powell's stated desire to advance a set of arguments by way of those documents, this is understandable. In a highly contextualist fashion, Corthorn seeks to understand what Powell was “doing” in those statements. Unfortunately, the present reviewer was at times left a little confused as to whether Corthorn's is a predominantly intentionalist reading, or else a conceptual history concerned with surpluses of meaning. Nor is this the pedantry that frequently pertains to debates over method. The issue is one of clarity. Corthorn never quite explains how Powell both united his arguments around the topic of national decline and simultaneously did not explicitly do so. That said, he does concede that Powell's use of decline, being employed for political purposes, was not always consistent. Nevertheless, Camilla Schofield is more incisive when it comes to excavating Powell's motivations (“‘A Nation or No Nation?’ Enoch Powell and Thatcherism,” in Making Thatcher's Britain, ed. Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders [2012], 95–110).

Such criticism should not be overstated. In sum, this is a highly readable and informative text that will appeal to scholars and general readers. It portrays Powell not as the caricature of liberal nightmares or far-right dreams, but as a sophisticated and idiosyncratic political thinker whose ideational content is interesting both in its own right and as a lens through which to view postwar British politics. In so far as it leaves a few issues unresolved, this significant contribution nonetheless provides stable grounds for future scholarly research into the nature of both Enoch Powell's political thought and decline in modern British history. It is well worth engaging with.