One area where the state has undoubtedly failed, in Lowe’s eyes, is on the matter of immigration. While Reform has pledged to deport all illegal immigrants, Restore wants to go further. Lowe has promised to scrap the asylum system entirely, also stating last week that “legal immigration will almost come to a complete halt.” The goal is not just to halt migrant influxes but to reverse them. “Net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late,” he said in the speech with which he launched the party. “The barbarians are already in the gates.”

The remedy, Lowe warns, will be “incredibly painful”: a characteristically abrasive verdict. It is one thing to criticize quangos, and quite another to say that “we must crush parasitic Britain.” And as for the dissonance between government and individual? “The state has definitively become the enemy of the people.” 

In his doom-laden pronouncements, Lowe resembles no British political figure so closely as Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech has led a radioactive afterlife in the national consciousness. For Powell, Britain’s willingness to take in tens of thousands of immigrants rendered it “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. And compare Lowe’s talk of necessary pain to that 1968 call for an “extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take”. For better or worse, Powell presaged contemporary debates over migration and nationhood. The challenge, as Keir Starmer found out with his more milquetoast “island of strangers” line, is to acknowledge voters’ frustrations without sounding like him. 

Powell has been a political lodestar of sorts for Nigel Farage, Lowe’s bête noire and former boss who suspended him last year over dubious accusations of bullying. The Reform leader recalled being “dazzled”, as a schoolboy in the Eighties, listening to the former Tory MP speak. Last year, he insisted that Powell was fundamentally right about the scale of “community change” in the country. 

Yet, in his beliefs as well as his rhetoric, Lowe is a more obviously Powellite figure than Farage. He’s more interested in reducing the size of the state, is resistant to Reform’s nationalizing impulses, and is less vulnerable than his rival to charges of “socialism”. In many ways, Restore is the more conservative project, given that its central mission is to return Britain — in more explicit terms than Farage has dared — to a glorious past from its Blairite present. When it comes to presentation, Farage and Lowe — tweed-clad former public schoolboys with past lives in the City — are far closer to one another than they are to the intense, prodigiously academic Powell. Former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan found him unsettlingly zealous, complaining: “Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes.”

Where Lowe differs from Farage, though, is that he has done less to distance himself from figures and ideas which might be classed as far-Right. While the Reform leader has condemned Tommy Robinson for “stir[ring] up hatred” and stated that the activist has no place in his party, Lowe has praised Robinson’s campaigning against grooming gangs cover-ups. In 1974, Powell rejected the chance to stand as a candidate for the far-Right National Front, having left the Tories because of their stance on the European Economic Community. 

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Lowe would be wise to take such an approach with some of the groups and activists now attempting to tie themselves to Restore. Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right Britain First, has said he won’t stand candidates against Lowe’s party at local or national elections. Steve Laws, a prominent ethnonationalist who advocates for the expulsion of everyone who is not ethnically British, has committed his vote to Restore Britain and called Farage a “traitor”. On Monday, he posted to his 140,000 X followers: “I fully endorse Rupert Lowe to be PM. He will implement the majority of what I want to achieve in terms of remigration over the next 6-7 years.” 

These activists are unlikely to appeal to swing voters. Lowe, if he follows conventional electoral logic, is therefore presented with a dilemma: how to attract smart collaborators committed to immigration restrictionism, without also drawing in the cranks? The problem is that a cruder vision of nationalism pervades even the upper echelons of his party. Harrison Pitt, a writer who has been a key figure in devising policy for Restore Britain, has previously referred to mass immigration as the “ethnic cleansing” of white Britons, as well as highlighting the “erasure of [Britain’s] host population”. Additionally, he has appeared to suggest that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, whose parents were born in Pakistan, should return to her “homeland”, and vowed in December to make 2026 “the year of mass denaturalizations” for those who presently hold British citizenship. 

In an interview in December 2024, Lowe said that “I don’t care about people’s religion or their color,” but Restore has taken a far more robust approach to Islam than Reform has. Lowe is set on “resisting the relentless creep of radical Islam”, and his new party’s platform includes policies on outlawing the burqa, sharia courts and halal slaughter. Some of its senior figures also champion a notably muscular Christianity. For instance, Lowe’s campaigns director Charlie Downes, a Catholic convert, declared this week: “Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith.”

Both Downes and Pitt are still in their twenties, and Lowe has a notable following among a particular group of politically engaged, digitally-savvy young men. There’s even a collective term which can be used either pejoratively or affectionately: Lowemosexuals. The online sphere has become a battlefield between the Restore leader and Farage, who boasts more TikTok followers than the other 649 UK MPs combined. Lowe last year labeled the Reform boss’s leadership style “messianic”, yet his own role in Restore follows similar contours, the party’s profile relying largely on his social media reach.

Capturing wider support, of course, is a different proposition. According to polling from this week, 92% of Britons are unable to name Lowe when shown a picture of him. He is popular among his constituents, viewed as a committed and unpretentious champion for Great Yarmouth, but he has a majority of less than 1,500. He is expected to stand at the next election under the banner of Great Yarmouth First, which he established as a political party in December, yet his personal appeal may count for less when divorced from a Reform UK platform. 

So the question remains: is Restore a credible Right-wing movement — able to distinguish itself both from Reform and from the crowded field of nationalist groups on the more radical fringes — or just Lowe’s revenge project? County councillors are already moving over from Reform, providing some local infrastructure. Even if Restore doesn’t win seats at the next election, it will surely still prove a spoiler for further Farage gains. 

Here, Lowe could receive extra ammunition from an alliance with another of Farage’s jilted exes: Ben Habib. Having served as co-deputy leader for Reform, Habib was demoted in favor of Richard Tice, and quit the party in November 2024. The following spring he referred to Lowe’s treatment by Farage as an “injustice”, subsequently setting up a new party of his own, Advance UK, in June. 

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On Saturday, Habib extended an open offer to Lowe to merge their two parties. Lowe politely demurred by suggesting that Habib join Restore, which “would be stronger with you in it”. But Habib, who was born in Pakistan and moved to the UK as a teenager, is not widely popular among the hardcore Lowemosexuals. David Kurten — who leads the Heritage Party, another bit-part player in Britain’s hard-Right scene — summarized the dynamic thus: “Ben loves Rupert. Rupert’s fans would deport Ben.” Richard Inman, a prominent Advance UK member and organizer for Tommy Robinson, has accused Lowe of being “driven not by love of country, but by a massive ego”, adding that many of Restore’s supporters are “ethno-nats”. 

Advance has built up a respectable profile: it now has more than 40,000 members, nine councilors through defections from Reform, and outsized publicity thanks to endorsements from Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. But the Tesla mogul, as well as boosting Habib’s party, has in recent days cheered on the progress of Restore Britain. On Wednesday afternoon, he went so far as to accuse Reform of being “Nazis” because “THEY are the ones who want race extinction.” As the world’s richest man, armed with 234 million pliant X followers, Musk’s overseas influence is considerable; his amplification of posts about the grooming gangs helped push the Government into ordering a national inquiry. 

Musk is widely reviled among British voters, but his support — both X-based and financial — could boost Restore’s international profile and increase the chance of collaboration with like-minded parties such as Alternative for Germany and Spain’s Vox. Farage endorsed the AfD in 2017 but has, in recent years, kept a deliberate distance. There is a gap here for Lowe to exploit as anti-immigration groups build ties around Europe: these are parties which are gaining influence but which are still considered too dangerous by Reform and the Tories. 

While Farage might think he flies in the face of such squeamishness, and that he is dismantling the “uniparty” consensus, Restore supporters believe he instead represents little more than a continuation of the New Labour-inflected order which has governed Britain for the past three decades. According to Downes, Reform’s senior figures “basically agree that the vision Blair had for Britain was admirable and desirable”. In his view, “it will come to pass that Farage is the Regime’s lifeline, not its nemesis.”

Lowe’s calculation may well be that he doesn’t need to expunge the less savory elements from his party’s message, and that the electorate will instead move closer to him. The UK’s Overton window has undeniably shifted on immigration; Labour’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is taking a harder line than her Tory predecessors, even as the polls are led by a party with a plan for mass deportations. Almost half of Britons say they would support an agenda in which no new immigrants are admitted to the country and large numbers of recent arrivals are required to leave. British voters’ conception of national belonging remains chiefly civic, but some of Lowe’s most influential cheerleaders believe there is further room for that ideological window to move. 

Either way, the Restore leader is not one for apologies. On Wednesday, he wrote that he is “entirely uninterested” in “being called unpleasant names”. He has repeatedly made clear that being labeled racist is no deterrent for him. Pushed to recant a suggestion that illegal immigrants should be sent to remote Scottish islands for the “midges to do their work”, he doubled down. Lowe, evidently, has a thick skin. In his previous life as chairman of Southampton Football Club, disgruntled fans used to sing about hanging him from the Itchen Bridge. 

It’s easy to forget that, even after “Rivers of Blood”, Powell was immensely popular. Polls carried out shortly after the speech demonstrated that a majority of the British public agreed with his assessment of race relations. In 2002 he was voted one of the 100 greatest Britons ever. On his death, the Telegraph wrote that he “would survive more surely than any other British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill”. Just as Powell’s fears around integration proved prophetic, Lowe may now find himself a 21st-century equivalent — an emissary from a future Britain whose decline has been contingent on its tolerance.

Ferdinand Mount, who headed the No. 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher, wrote of Powell that “always, he is restlessly pursuing the ultimate safe haven: the nation.” Nationalism’s great strength, for Mount, is its “iron framework” — the “insistence that the nation is the supreme political fact”. The very act of restoration inherent to Lowe’s project is its own safe haven, as inarguable in its logic as “Make America Great Again”. He, like Powell before him, has recognized the British state as the sclerotic, rulebound husk it is. And now, as Powell was, he is filled with foreboding.

Well, sort of. On Monday, His Majesty released The King’s Music Room, an hour-long program celebrating music from across the Commonwealth, chosen (we are told) by the King himself. The segues between individual tunes were read, or at least sounded as though they were read, by the King. The show was released to coincide with Commonwealth Day, which is (again, we are told) celebrated in the 56 Commonwealth countries around the world. It was marked in the UK with a ceremony in Westminster Abbey, and is, according to its website, “an opportunity to celebrate the strong unity, diversity and shared values” of the Commonwealth countries.

But what does any of that mean in practice? This is more difficult to establish, especially when my straw poll of acquaintances across the Commonwealth indicated they were no more aware than I had been that “Commonwealth Day” was even a thing. In turn, though, as I listened to Charles’s podcast and pondered it as an event, it’s come to appear a subtler royal comment on this question than it might seem at face value.

The King’s Music Room was an enjoyably eclectic enough listen: a tour through the musical memories of a particularly cultured and well-traveled British upper-class boomer. Though they’re getting on a bit now, there are lots of this type still around in Britain, remnants of a caste that in earlier eras would have made a life somewhere overseas as colonial administrators, traders, or do-gooders. Most have adapted genteelly to the changed world in which they lead their lives, and retain the eclectic, international aesthetic interests of their imperial forebears as a kind of cultural muscle-memory.

Their bookshelves might hold Geraldine Elliot’s collections of African folk tales, alongside Kipling and Macaulay. They would have played Charles’s pick, mid-century South African singer Miriam Makeba, on a tape in the car (probably a Rover) years before Radio 3’s Late Junction launched in 1999. And for many of them, the Commonwealth was self-evidently a good thing, not least propagating that vague sense of international and multicultural fraternity they liked, from which all this nice music and interesting food and culture seemed to flow — just without the uglier aspects of empire.

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As a substantial political body, though, what has the Commonwealth actually achieved? Perhaps the thing we can say with most confidence is that it gave Britain’s monarchy something to do, having lost their role as heads of state for a globe-spanning empire. Charles’s mother, the late Queen, handled this transition gracefully, pivoting from Empress to global ribbon-snipper with quiet stoicism. And Charles the podcaster seems to be doing his best to continue in the same vein, promulgating the Commonwealth aspiration to “strong unity, diversity and shared values” through the medium of a world music playlist.

But in crunchier terms, there have always been skeptics — notably, in the Commonwealth’s relatively early days, the Cassandra-in-chief of postwar politics: Enoch Powell. Powell is, of course, known today mainly for the notorious 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech that tainted his legacy forever with the unforgivable sin of racism. On this basis, we might just dismiss his Commonwealth skepticism as an early sign of general animus against foreigners. But as Aris Roussinos has noted, Powell’s views on domestic politics have long overshadowed his insights on international affairs. In particular, he was a foreign policy realist: that is, he viewed geography, resources, relative power and national interest as more salient guides to what states can and should do, than questions of values. And it is this outlook, which fell out of fashion following the war in favor of a more utopian, internationalist approach, which forms the basis for his skepticism about the Commonwealth.

In one 1964 speech, Powell dismissed the idea that British voters gave much credence to the idea of “belonging to a Commonwealth” formed of every country once colonized or protected by, or otherwise connected to Britain. For Powell, this idea always had too many internal contradictions to achieve much. He noted that of its constituent states, “a number of these countries are antipathetic to one another”, while many show a visible, public “antipathy to Britain”. Brits, on the whole, don’t take this antipathy personally, Powell thought. But “it is difficult after all this to be told that all these countries form with us a great Commonwealth which is the world’s best hope for international and inter-racial cooperation”.

Powell didn’t buy it, and didn’t think the British electorate did either. Nor, it has seemed more recently, do many Commonwealth countries. The Union Jack has been steadily disappearing from national flags since the end of the empire. Others, meanwhile, seem to sense an opportunity to shake down relatively wealthy Britain, via historic guilt: Keir Starmer has come under sustained pressure from leaders of several Commonwealth members to pay reparations to former colonies for slavery. Elsewhere, it is unclear what if any contribution membership of the Commonwealth has made to smoothing the uneasy relation between (say) India and Pakistan, or the ongoing and vexed negotiations over whether it should be Britain or Mauritius who controls the Chagos Islands.

But as Powell also noted, this Commonwealth was not and never aimed to be any kind of defense or even trade alliance. It flourished mainly in the context of Pax Americana, as a kind of sentimental afterglow of the empire that Pax replaced and helped to dismantle. And now, as well as expressing the Commonwealth’s overt aspirations to vague unity and cultural diversity, King Charles’ podcast can be read as a diplomatically complex response to the decision by America herself, under Trump, definitively to abandon sponsorship of Pax Americana.

His Majesty is in an invidious position here. He is under pressure from pro-Ukraine voices in Britain to snub the President following cooling US support for Zelensky’s war against Putin. Canadians, meanwhile, are outraged by repeated US expressions of interest in annexing Canada — a Commonwealth country of which, nominally at least, Charles III remains the head of state. But he is also obliged to stay out of politics. Thus, despite some Canadians calling on the King to “stand up to” Trump, he has refused to comment on these annexation threats.

And indeed, Charles might retort to the stander-uppers: what would “standing up” achieve? Recent polls suggest that more than half of Canadians already feel their country should cut ties with the monarchy; perhaps these felt only vindicated. Charles’s obdurate silence in the face of possible Trumpian expansionism cannot have endeared him to the remaining loyalists. And yet, as commentators have noted with varying degrees of approbation and alarm, the Trump administration has made clear its decision to pivot from internationalism to foreign policy realism of a kind that would have been immediately intelligible to Enoch Powell. And from a realist perspective, what matters is hard power and spheres of influence. You don’t “stand up” to anyone unless you’re willing to follow through. And, here, Charles has nothing. Trump knows this: the fact that his proposal to annex Canada simply ignored the Commonwealth, and Canada’s links to Britain, suggests he has assessed both these and concluded accurately that they are essentially irrelevant to his doing whatever he wants.

So, with American sponsorship of a “rules-based international order” now replaced by apparent American sponsorship of a muscular international anarchy, we must ask: absent pax Americana, can the Commonwealth even survive? And if so, what for? If this entity has a future at all, it might be in the caucus recently endorsed by some Canadians for mutual support, in response to Trumpian policy: a sharp contraction from the current 56-nation Commonwealth into “CANZUK”, an alliance of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

Such an alliance might, after a fashion, thread the needle between the grim Powellist realism invited by the unfolding contemporary geopolitical picture, and the residual British tendency to keep one eye always on the horizon. Powell himself acknowledged “compelling ties of blood and sentiment” with these scattered states; ties that surely don’t obtain to the same degree with (say) Kenya, saving perhaps in the dim recollections of those few surviving colonial boomers born there before the Emergency. So per Powell, ethnic and historic factors argue for closer links; meanwhile, the territories themselves are far-flung enough to perhaps gratify that Anglo wanderlust.

But though such ties (and, often, literal extended family connections) might combine with Commonwealth history to argue for closer alliance, would Britain’s legacy ruling caste accept this? It’s a fairly safe bet that many of those colonial boomers, and some of their children too, would recoil from the ethnocentrism of Powell’s formulation. We might infer from King Charles’s playlist that he would be among the recoilers: his choice of tunes grants no particular favor, after all, to the CANZ components of a would-be CANZUK.

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But if the content argues overtly for a pluralistic “soft power” and greater Commonwealth of international cultural diversity, the choice of format quietly acknowledges that the real enabling soft-power context for all such statements rests outside his control. The recording wasn’t released on the BBC — let alone the run-down old imperial broadcaster, the BBC World Service, which recently announced that it would cut 130 jobs in a cost-saving exercise. No: the royal playlist dropped on Apple Music, an American corporate titan that, unlike the BBC, has genuinely global reach. And the King’s choice of platform tacitly acknowledges this key backdrop to many contemporary upheavals including, arguably, the Trumpian revolution: the fact that digital media is now a — perhaps the — key vector for “soft power”. Whether or not America wishes to sustain a hard-power Pax Americana, its soft-power digital domination is almost total: the lion’s share of digital media is currently American.

The King’s choice of platform, and even of final playlist entry, discreetly acknowledges this reality. Beyoncé is not a Commonwealth artist — she’s American. And when we put all this together, we can read The King’s Music Room as a statement with overt and covert sides, addressing multiple aspects of his diplomatic conundrum.

On one side, his obligation to speak to, celebrate, and acknowledge an impossibly broad and internally fractious greater Commonwealth, whose rationale for assembling has long since faded and whose existence always tacitly relied on America keeping the peace. On the other, the King’s politically far more sensitive obligation to sustain good relations with an America that has lost interest in keeping that peace — and for that reason needs more emollient handling than ever, just without offending a Commonwealth some of whose members now view America as hostile. It is not an easy feat.

As an artifact, The King’s Music Room squares that circle with a grace that would not have shamed the late Queen. But as a balancing act, we have to wonder how long it can be sustained. Should King Charles slip, we can only hope there is a CANZUK there to catch us.

The barometer stands for Britain’s seafaring heyday, at which time most vessels would have carried one. Even for a bureaucrat such as my forebear, documenting the fruits of that seaborne trade in the Customs House in Harwich, this object would have been richly symbolic of the peculiar mix of risk-taking and scientific pedantry that characterised our island’s maritime tradition.

The Powell, meanwhile, captures a blizzard of contradictory feelings, from a Britain that had only very recently lost the empire this seafaring tradition founded. It is a confusion due, in part, to the way the loss happened: partly through overstretch and decadence; but with the death-blow dealt by one of Britain’s former colonies: America.

In turn, this close kinship allowed the impression to flourish of this being less a parricide than a passing of the baton. Together, so the hope went, the Anglophone “West” would leave imperialism as such behind, and foster a peaceful, prosperous world for all mankind. But will this comforting fantasy still hold, if 21st-century America abandons this neutrality and turns imperialist herself?

This seems to be where we are, all of a sudden: with the de facto global hegemony that America long exercised obliquely, through a web of purportedly neutral international rules and obligations, giving way to a more naked spirit of expansionism. This isn’t just about the spirit of “endless frontier federalism” extolled in Heritage Foundation director Kevin Roberts’ manifesto for the New Right, or Elon Musk’s ambition to colonise Mars. It appears to have earthly territorial implications too: recently, President-elect Donald Trump has refused to rule out using American economic or even military force to expand US territory into areas of perceived geopolitical interest. Potential targets reportedly include Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

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Trump’s apparent willingness to comprehensively jettison America’s longstanding role as “world policeman”, in favour of active participation in great-power competition, has caused shockwaves around the world, with the Financial Times recently warning that he “risks turning America into a rogue state”. But leaving aside the question of whether “rogue states” are even conceptually possible, without a “global policeman” enforcing the rules, the prospect of America engaging openly in great-power competition raises deep-seated cultural and political questions for Britain in particular.

Beyond our seafaring history, my dad’s heirloom barometer might more romantically be said to stand for a peculiarly Anglo combination of home-loving and wanderlust, which together provide a common cultural stem for both Brits and Americans. It’s surely true that those historic Englishmen who left to settle the New World possessed these qualities in different proportion to those who roved but — like Bilbo Baggins — always assumed they’d return to the Shire eventually. Even so, whether Australian, Canadian, Brits or Americans, Anglo diaspora peoples tend to recognise this restless, roving streak in our national character.

By contrast, my dad’s Powell anthology captures crucial developments in the specific post-war political history of Britain, as distinct from those of the wider Anglo diaspora. In particular, Powell was excoriating on the self-soothing behaviour characteristic of Britain’s ruling class since the sun set on the empire: a bundle of delusions enabled in practice by the fantasy of diaspora “Anglosphere” continuity.

For when it came, the blow of Britain’s dethroning as Top Nation, by our own former colony, was softened by this sense of kinship. As the historian Nigel Ashton notes, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously analogised the handover in classical terms, telling his colleague Richard Crossman while the war was still ongoing that the British “are the Greeks in this American empire” and should run the Allied Forces Headquarters “as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”.

This quality of extended-family connection mixed with rivalry is vividly depicted in the literature of the immediate post-war period, such as John le Carré’s classic spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Against an early-Seventies backdrop of chilly air, clipped sentences, and penny-pinching, the novel’s British secret service agents refer to their American associates as “the Cousins”. It’s an ambivalent term, often used with mingled resentment and disdain: “Why tell the Cousins everything?”.

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Nor was this wholly unwarranted. For while Macmillan may have been — initially at least — optimistic about Britain enjoying an influential post-imperial position, as favoured flunkeys to the new hegemon, others, including Powell, were more cold-eyed about the dynamic. As noted by James Barr in his history of British and American rivalry in the post-war Middle East, former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden reminisced that, in the late Forties, Powell warned him that “in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans”. Eden admitted that it was only much later that he understood what Powell had already grasped: that cousins can be competitors as well as kin.

Nor was this Powell’s only moment of foresight. By the time the anthology I found on my dad’s shelves was published in 1969, he was already persona non grata, following a backlash to his notorious 1968 speech on Commonwealth immigration. But what strikes in Freedom and Reality is less Powell’s views on migration than his clear-eyed and prescient assessment of British ruling-class inability to adapt psychologically to the country’s shrunken reach and standing.

For more than a century, Powell points out, the British had been used to “Britain” also meaning India, and had thus, as he puts it, “got into the habit of thinking in what are sometimes called ‘global terms’”. In Powell’s view, having lost that real-world geographic reach, Britain should have refocused on Western Europe. But instead, unable to relinquish their habitual global perspective, the British elite conjured two ideas from the rubble of empire and war: firstly, the “Commonwealth”, and secondly the “special relationship” in which we were to be Greece to America’s Rome, in the joint pursuit of universal peace.

As Powell saw it, this represented a colossal self-delusion, in which “the vanishing last vestiges […] of Britain’s once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets, whereby […] in partnership with the United States we keep the peace of the world”. To him, this was a confection whose lack of basis in logic or reality was only outstripped by fantasies about the Commonwealth, an organisation he saw as riddled with contradiction and whose demands often ran counter to British national interest.

The half-century since Powell’s heyday doesn’t seem to have cured British elites of such fond dreams. Rather, it has compounded them by adding a third: the pan-European post-imperial project of mutual colonisation usually referred to as the EU. (Powell opposed this as well, also presciently, on the grounds that it would harm Parliamentary sovereignty.) And though Brexit went some way, for better or worse, to reversing Britain’s entanglement in that project, we still possess the same Hyacinth Bucket-like fixation with “Britain’s standing” on “the world stage”.

Nor have we shed the slavish commitment to showing “leadership” by outdoing even America in pursuit of US foreign policy priorities. Meanwhile, not even increasingly strident demands for “reparations” from supposed friends and allies in the “Commonwealth” seem capable of shifting the entrenched British ruling-class conviction that this entity is in some fundamental way a good and necessary thing for our country.

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But one of the crucial pillars on which Britain’s post-war, post-imperial cope rested was always American geopolitical neutrality. The idea was that we needn’t mourn the empire, which was bad anyway, because Anglophone cultural and economic leadership would persist — it would just shift its capital, wealth, and geopolitical interests several thousand miles west. But it would still be “the West”, still the English-speaking world, and still, however tenuously, the same cousinly spirit.

But the idea that Britain is a “leader” alongside America in keeping global peace relies on America both doing the defence legwork, and also making at least a nominal effort to look neutral. Where does that leave Britain, then, if the former is on the chopping-block and the latter risks being jettisoned for a new Arctic “Great Game”? In the genuinely post-liberal geopolitics this would produce, Britain is unlikely to be able to go on sitting in the current three-way intersection between Europe, the “Commonwealth”, and the Cousins.

This juggling act surely only lasted as long as it did because America’s self-appointed “global policeman” role prevented any of this trifecta’s more delusional implications from biting too deeply. But swap out global-policeman America for expansionist America and things quickly get messy. Should Trump actually annex Canada, for example, a Commonwealth state of which King Charles remains (however nominally) head of state, how should Britain respond? Similarly, should he make moves on the currently self-governing Danish territory of Greenland, should Britain come down on the side of our European neighbours, or the “Cousins”?

At least some in Britain clearly feel closer kinship with English-speakers across the pond than our neighbours across the Channel. There have, for example, been recent calls both in Britain and the US for a much more special relationship; even for Britain’s annexation by the Cousins. Especially for those younger, more tech-optimistic “Right-wing Progressive” Brits with portable careers and an eye on the Elon Musk phenomenon, absorption by the USA would likely read more as a formality than a significant change — and in any case as a more advantageous proposition than cosying up to a stagnant and censorship-happy EU.

In terms both of Europe’s resurgent Right-wing ethnopolitics and Britain’s specific history, it would in fact make perfect Right-wing sense. Having sailed our barometers around the world, leaving diaspora communities worldwide, it follows logically that a putative ethnopolitics of Englishness would look beyond as well as within the British Isles, toward that diaspora as well. (Whether such a diaspora would want anything to do with modern Britain is, of course, a separate question.)

For those still committed to European-style social democracy, meanwhile, our immediate neighbours might seem more ideologically congenial than the New World, not to mention more geographically relevant. And Britain’s now-considerable Commonwealth-heritage population, meanwhile, has far fewer direct historic links to the USA. For such groups, “Cousins” is unlikely to conjure a picture of mid-century WASPs.

It is too early to tell which way Britain will jump, though Starmer’s reverse ferret this week on the Chagos handover may be a sign of things to come. But we are leaving the inshore waters of the long 20th century — and, as the seafarers used to say, the glass is falling. For, to extend Macmillan’s classical analogy, the Cousins seem on a trajectory from republic to empire. And if this is so, Britain’s long era of self-delusion will soon be at an end, and with it the deferral of hard choices. What matters more to us: our legacy of empire, our near abroad, or our historic diaspora? I’m not sure I want to find out. But Britain has no prospect of charting a new course until we are willing to face these questions.

Lately, however, another set of immigration policy trendlines have begun to alter the town’s pacific character. Demonstrations consisting of more recent arrivals, also from South Asia, can now be seen in Brampton, protesting the prospect of their deportation. Though they came to Canada either with temporary worker or student visas, they believe themselves entitled to permanent residency; some of these students are even protesting their own failing grades! That their presence in the country — amounting to a mind-boggling 2.8 million temporary residents in a population of 40-odd million — continues to exert distortionary effects on wages and housing seems not to bother the rally-goers.

Meanwhile, authorities have registered a 30% rise in hate crimes, a 187% increase in auto theft, and a staggering 350% rise in home invasions in the Peel region of which Brampton is part; this has come on the heels of last year’s interethnic tensions, following the slaying of a Sikh activist. These statistics are not to suggest that all crime stems from immigrants but rather that an environment of material scarcity and institutional breakdown conduces to higher rates of crime, whether committed by immigrants or native-born individuals.

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In other words, Brampton, a microcosm for Canadian society, has begun to move away from the “bland” Bill Davis country of yesteryear, looking everyday a bit more like those politically fraught immigrant ghettoes found elsewhere; and its condition brings to mind another kind of Tory politician: Enoch Powell. Though Powell, of course, lived in another time and another country, his legacy had been to mark the passage of immigration from a point of quiet consensus into a source of intractable polarisation and social fragmentation. With more Canadians now expressing opposition to immigration, Canada faces its own “Enoch Powell moment”. And as the rest of the West reckons with the consequences of permissive migration, we must ask: how did Canada, so long a liberal multicultural oasis, begin to lose its exceptional status? To answer this, we must first understand the standards of the pre-existing immigration system, from which the current policies have so radically deviated.

Since the Sixties, Canadian immigration has operated on a principle of prudent control, both in terms of quality and quantity. In 1967, Ottawa came up with perhaps the greatest policy innovation that Canada ever produced: the points system, which could be used to measure candidates’ suitability for contributing economically and integrating socially in Canada.

At the same time, the nations of Western Europe, including Britain, were importing migrants from post-colonial peripheries to act as a “lumpenproletariat” or reserve army of labour, leading to a general erosion of social trust. Unlike in Canada where multiculturalism worked as a rhetorical gloss, European societies could not adjust so easily to their new situation, and it is in this context that Enoch Powell gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, a divisive act that nonetheless served as an expression of the sense of alarm felt by many ordinary people.

Canada avoided this path — and not just because of its isolated geography. Its leaders consciously opted for a different approach, choosing to prioritise Canadians’ cohesion and security. As the demographics of post-Sixties immigration show, the points system does not discriminate on the basis of race. But it does discriminate in favour of a certain type of immigrant: English or French-speaking, skilled, educated, financially secure, upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, and so forth, drawn from the middle classes of many nations. This is borne out by positive immigrant performance in such metrics as social mobility, savings accumulation, skills and educational achievement, and overall economic independence.

Thus, Canada is formally multicultural but functionally unicultural. The prevailing leitkultur is not ethnic or racial but rather sociological and class-based.

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By Michael Cuenco

It was Max Weber who made the connection between the austere theology of Calvinism and the ascendancy of the middle classes of industrialising Europe. At comparable stages of development, it is no surprise that something like Calvinism infuses the outlook of the middle classes of the developing world today, whatever their actual religion. It is an acquisitive (yet ascetic) classically bourgeois disposition that strives for success and respectability while retaining a commitment to family, community, and social order. This is what the points system draws from: it works to pre-empt Powell-esque backlashes by ensuring the quantity of immigration can be adjusted to economic conditions, while the quality is such that new arrivals reinforce the stabilising egalitarian character of society.

Until recently, parties cooperated to maintain this consensus, before a sea change unfolded around the time of Canada’s emergence from Covid-19, which had brought immigration to a standstill. The post-pandemic economy witnessed upward pressure on wages from tight labour markets and downward pressures on rental prices as well as the cratering of international student tuitions: businesses, landlords, and the higher education sector all stood to profit less. And as governments are more likely to respond to the concerns of these groups, policymakers rushed to restore a profitable climate for them. This meant one thing: jacking up the immigration intake.

Alongside immigration targets of more than 2 million new permanent residents until 2025/26 came a still more senseless move: the lifting of restraints on both the hiring of foreign workers and enrolment of international students; notably, these latter temporary streams did not have to pass through the points system to come to Canada, being let in with ever more liberality. The fact that federal Liberals under Trudeau and Ontario Tories under Doug Ford seemed to be of one mind on this only underscored how this arrangement — a betrayal of the previous, pro-middle-class system — had become the new consensus.

Even more damaging than the economic stress are the long-term social implications of having imported a new “lumpenproletariat”. Unlike the “Calvinist” middle-class immigrants of previous cohorts, these ones have often been taken en masse in from the villages and rural regions of their home countries, where lifestyles are markedly “pre-Calvinist”.

Canadian media, for predictable reasons, have been reluctant to report on just how problematic and maladaptive many in these cohorts have been, so journalistic accounts are scarce. But I have it on good authority from sources in the government, educational, and NGO sectors that many of these migrants are failing at most cultural markers of integration: from rampant cheating to disregard of basic norms to glaring lack of linguistic ability to a brazen willingness to bend public policies at every turn. If these trends continue, it won’t be long before places like Brampton acquire toxic reputations akin to the cultural powder kegs of Europe: the banlieus of Paris or the no-go zones of Malmö.

Beyond cuts to future intake across all streams, there can be only one sure way to restore balance to the system, so that it becomes bland again; and that is a sustained and far-reaching campaign of deportation of visa overstays.

But how can this be done?

It’s important first to note that the status quo in Canada is not open borders, even though the effect is similar. It is still a highly regulated and bureaucratised process that’s heavily reliant on visas, permits, and hiring forms; unlike in the US, where millions can live indefinitely as undocumented immigrants, Canada still has elements of a formidable “bureaucratic wall” and functional equivalents to “E-Verify” that could theoretically keep tab on overstayers. The Canadian government could use the vast array of data at its disposal from this system—bank accounts, employment records, bits of personal information and paper trails—to construct a comprehensive live database of temporary residents and prospective deportees, whose exit from the country can then be confirmed by exit controls.

The only thing missing, of course, is the political will to execute such a programme, for no major party seems to be really interested. Even if Canadians do go to an early election after this week’s political shake-up, it is unlikely that it will be fought over this issue. After decades of stability, Canada’s ruling class has chosen to squander its inheritance of the world’s most envied immigration policy. And as for what happens next, whether Canada ultimately goes the way of Bill Davis or Enoch Powell, we need only look to Brampton.

That same evening, less than five hours after the ceremony, someone levered the plaque off the wall with a crowbar and stole it. West Yorkshire Police immediately classed the incident a hate crime and opened an investigation. Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central, spoke for many when he declared: “It is not who we are as a city.”

In recent years, attempting to do justice to the memory of David Oluwale has been central to Leeds’s hopes of presenting itself as a more inclusive and tolerant city. Just weeks before the Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque was fixed in place last month, a bridge bearing Oluwale’s name was completed, spanning the river where he was found drowned in May 1969. More than half a century later, Leeds now finds itself contending with uncomfortable memories the city thought it had overcome.

When David Oluwale arrived in Britain as a stowaway on board a cargo ship carrying groundnuts from Lagos to Hull, he hoped to find a “New Jerusalem”. Within a few years, those hopes had been firmly dashed: in 1953, he was committed to a mental asylum following a violent altercation with Leeds police officers. Oluwale didn’t surface for another eight years. The effervescent dancer known to fellow Nigerians in Leeds as “Yankee” emerged a broken man. Now homeless, he picked up the kinds of criminal convictions born of living on the streets.

In the late Sixties, the climate across Britain was becoming more hostile for black people. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Leeds. In April 1968, the same month Enoch Powell delivered his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker was assigned to Millgarth police station in Leeds city centre, teaming up with Sergeant Kenneth Kitching in a pairing that would make Oluwale’s grim life even more hellish. The two officers made it their mission to clear vagrants off their patch, but Oluwale came in for special attention. Calling him their “playmate”, they urinated on him while he slept, forced him to bang his head on the pavement as “penance”, and drove him to the city limits where they would dump him in the dead of night. When Oluwale was arrested for disorderly conduct, the police entered “WOG” as his nationality on his charge sheet.

On 4 May 1969, a group of boys found his body when they were out walking by the River Aire close to Knostrop sewerage works, a few miles downstream from the city centre. The only mourners at his pauper’s funeral were the undertakers. But 18 months later, after a police cadet reported rumours he’d heard about Ellerker and Kitching, Oluwale’s body was exhumed. A Scotland Yard investigation concluded that the officers had pushed or caused Oluwale to fall in the river in the early hours of 18 April 1969, and the two were eventually tried for manslaughter and several assaults.

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Yet the trial at Leeds Town Hall brought further attacks on Oluwale. “What right have we to call him a citizen?” Basil Wigoder QC, representing Ellerker, asked the jury in his opening speech. “His only claim to being a citizen was that every now and then he was lodged in the local prison.” Even the judge failed to hide his distaste, describing Oluwale as “a dirty, filthy, violent vagrant”. Though Ellerker and Kitching received prison sentences for a number of assaults, they were ultimately found not guilty of manslaughter on the direction of this judge: the witnesses who’d seen two uniformed men chasing someone by the river could not identify Ellerker or Kitching and could not even be sure of the colour of the man being pursued. Despite the two officers’ violent hounding of Oluwale over several months, the judge concluded that there was no evidence they had caused him to drown.

That didn’t stop football fans taunting the police from the terraces: They’re the boys from Millgarth and they don’t care, they threw Oluwale in the River Aire. But the unsettling story of Oluwale slipped slowly from the broader public mind.

In the Seventies and Eighties, no northern multicultural city was without its racial antagonism, and none could boast of healthy relations between its police forces and black communities. As the socio-economic climate worsened, those strains intensified. And Leeds entered a particularly dark period. During a riot in the Chapeltown area on Bonfire Night 1975, several West Yorkshire Police officers received serious injuries.

Days before the Bonfire Night riot, Wilma McCann — a woman from Chapeltown — became Peter Sutcliffe’s first known victim. The Yorkshire Ripper was known as the “Leeds Ripper” in the early days, as his first three murders were in the city. This was the Leeds that David Peace excavated in his blistering Red-Riding quartet: a grey concrete hell “abandoned to the crows and the Ripper”. All the ills of the Seventies — the misogyny, the civic corruption and police violence — were rampant in Peace’s city.

It was in this same period that Leeds became synonymous with racism, mostly down to the reputation of the followers of its football club. National Front publications such as Bulldog were sold outside Elland Road containing proud league tables of the “most racist fans”: Leeds United were usually near the top. Black visiting players were regularly pelted with bananas.

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Tony Harrison’s 1985 state-of-the-nation poem V. didn’t help Leeds’s reputation. It achieved notoriety with a film adaptation aired on Channel 4 in 1987, becoming the first time the word “cunt” was uttered on British television. V. was inspired by a visit to Holbeck cemetery during the Miners’ Strike, when Harrison saw tombstones, including that of his parents, desecrated with swastikas and NF slogans and the ground littered with Harp lager cans.

“What is it that this aggro act implies?” the poet asks in his clash with the vandal, an alienated skinhead who’d “been on t’dole all my life in fucking Leeds!”  The poet wants to suggest that the hooligans’ “mindless desecration” is something more than lager-fuelled frustration at Leeds United letting them down every week. He portrays it as springing from feelings of loss: of real jobs, a sense of place, dignity and security. Harrison’s V. was a moving cry for a more united country, a revival of post-war decencies and solidarity.

I was teaching in Leeds in 2004 when I came across the then-obscured story of David Oluwale. In those days, I was immersed in the novels of David Peace, though the contemporary city was confident and buoyant.

But there was another Leeds that stood outside this new prosperity. The British National Party’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim message resonated in poorer parts of the city, particularly after the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Three of the bombers had been raised in the Beeston area of Leeds, coming from the close-knit terraced streets near to the cemetery that had inspired Harrison’s poem. A leaked membership list revealed that Morley, a few miles down the road from Beeston, had more BNP members than any other constituency in the country. Though the BNP had been picking up council seats in the region, it still came as a profound shock when, in June 2009, a BNP candidate was elected to the European Parliament for the Yorkshire and Humber area. The declaration of what was the party’s first major breakthrough into the political mainstream was made at Leeds Town Hall, the setting for Oluwale’s trial.

Lifting Oluwale’s story from the shadows of Leeds’s memory into the centre of its public history, and onto a plaque, had been a long, slow process. My own 2007 book was part of that effort. When it was adapted for the stage by Oladipo Agboluaje two years later, a large image of Oluwale’s face — a mugshot after one of his brutal arrests — was plastered onto the theatre wall, facing accusingly towards Millgarth police station.

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Back then, however, there was little appetite for a permanent memorial to Oluwale. Leeds Civic Trust acknowledged that his was a tragic case, but I was told this was not sufficient to merit a plaque. Such honour was bestowed on celebrated scientists and writers, the great brewers and tailors of Leeds, sporting heroes or social reformers. Marking a terrible event so that later generations might learn its lessons was not deemed good enough. It took the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the United States to change hearts and minds in Leeds.

Fast forward to last month, and the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial serves as a bracing reminder that Leeds is still doing battle with its historical demons. This was no random act of hooliganism; the perpetrator was no “HARPaholic yob”, as Harrison calls his Holbeck cemetery vandal. In an echo of the original offences against Oluwale, someone had set out to deny his citizenship and humanity.

The perpetrator might well turn out to be a solitary, embittered individual, but it comes in the context of a white English backlash against multiculturalism and against those calling, with growing confidence and assertiveness, for a different vision of Britishness. The recent Black Lives Matter assaults on monuments to white power and dominance seem to have provoked a kneejerk response: you tear down our history; I’ll tear down yours.

But the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial has also proved to be a spectacular own goal. The removal of the plaque was bigger news than its unveiling. Many more people, in Leeds and beyond, are now aware of the story of Oluwale. His name cannot be erased: a replacement plaque has already been crowdfunded and an image of the original one has been projected onto screens and billboards across the city. For all that Leeds is wrestling with its past, Tony Harrison’s dream of a more united society might not be a vain hope after all.

The covers of the Flashman series are cultural artefacts in themselves: the image of the smirking anti-hero, sabre in hand, dressed up in his mid-Victorian cavalry finery or Oriental costume, an exotic conquest entwined around his legs, is firmly set against the cultural mood of the moment. The bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, terror of the Rugby fags until his expulsion, Flashman’s unintentionally swashbuckling career can be understood as an earlier attempt to reckon with Britain’s imperial legacy. 

From his first appearance in 1966, Fraser’s Flashman was a product of the same ironic Sixties craze for Victoriana as the Sergeant Pepper cover, or The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), with which he overlaps in narrative and tone. The empire then was not as distant as it seems now: the brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya were closer in time then than the Iraq War is to us, and the Aden insurgency was still ongoing. Fraser himself had fought the Japanese in Burma, and was commissioned as an officer in the Indian army less than 20 years before the first Flashman novel, one of the very last of generations of young British men to have done so. 

A provincial grammar school boy, born in Carlisle to Scottish parents, Fraser’s family history was as intertwined with the fortunes of the empire as that of his creation, he would later note. “Well, the men will be going away again”, Fraser recalls his grandmother observing on the outbreak of war in 1939, adding that “her uncle had served in the Crimea, her brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century”. Indeed, Fraser wore his dead great-uncle’s ring — “he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan”, he notes — during his own active service in Burma.

“We saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India”, Fraser would later write in his memoirs:

“The cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door … It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.” 

As for Enoch Powell, whose views on mass immigration he also shared, for Fraser the loss of India was as tragic a historical catastrophe as that of the Soviet Union is to Putin: the fading of a great imperial story, and the painful lived “experience of a country which passes in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all”.

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And yet the imperial story revealed in the Flashman Papers is far more ambivalent than the old writer’s final reminiscences would make it seem, so much so that it read on first publication as part of the great Sixties satire boom, undercutting the old British certainties with its taste for the hypocritical and sordid. In Flashman, the first novel of the series, the central character reveals himself as a bully, a coward and a rapist, who nevertheless finds himself lauded, following a series of picaresque misadventures, as the brave hero of Britain’s disastrous First Afghan War. 

“Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady” has little time for the moralism of his Victorian contemporaries, “who praise God on Sundays and sneak off to child-brothels during the week”, and whose self-denying imperial heroes are presented uniformly as a collection of fools, hypocrites and God-botherers. The empire’s red-coated defenders are merely “whoremongering, drunken clowns”, while Flashman’s own interest in the empire is purely limited to what he can extract from it. In a passage that could be lifted directly from some modern-day anti-colonial Guardian-fodder, he observes that:

“In India there was power — the power of the white man over the black — and power is a fine thing to have. Then there was ease, and time for any amount of sport, and good company, and none of the restrictions of home. You could live as you pleased, and lord it among the niggers … and there were as many women as you could wish for. There was money to be had, too, if you were lucky in your campaigns and knew how to look for it. In my whole service I never made half as much in pay as I got from India in loot — but that is another story.”

How do we reconcile the two: the caddish anti-hero who exposes the extractive brutality of imperial rule and the writer himself, an unreconstructed imperialist in love with the glory, colour and romance of Britain’s Eastern possessions? Reading Fraser’s two volumes of memoirs together with the Flashman series, the overlap between the fictional creation and the writer himself is instructive. 

The Flashman universe is a clear working through of Fraser’s own wartime experiences, those of a provincial teenager suddenly thrust into a violent, romantic, alien world: “it is disconcerting to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice”.

Fraser’s own wartime memories — of bloody night-time battles in a Burmese forest, the execution of prisoners of war, the killing of a wounded Japanese soldier, all the fear and discomfort and confusion — are reworked in Flashman’s experiences of the Indian Mutiny and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the great disaster at Kabul. All the experiences of battle, real and fictional, are written in the same disordered, impressionistic way, in dreamlike passages of literary high Modernism where sudden death and incongruous, hallucinatory scenes swim together in an old man’s fading memory.

The essential literary conceit of the Flashman novels is the unreliability of memory: vivid scenes are seared into the narrator’s memory (“I can still see before me” or “I will never forget” are phrases which run through both the novels and memoirs) even as the details pass into oblivion. The Flashman novels are, in essence, the disordered, heart-racing flashbacks of Britain’s own imperial memory.

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And yet, behind the horror and the fear, the romance of adventure remains. The 40-year-old Fraser wrote the first Flashman novel while Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald, one of many from the wartime generation who, trapped behind a desk in middle age, would “throw aside his pencil and stare at the window and exclaim: ‘Oh, God, I wish the war was still on!’” Indeed, the inspiration for Flashman came to Fraser after a rare two-week embed with the Army fighting insurgents in Malaya and Borneo during the waning days of empire, where he had “got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again” and found the prospect of a return to office life too depressing to bear. “They have their hazards, but once you’ve trodden the wild ways you never quite get them out of your system.”

It worked: the Flashman series was a great success, removing Fraser from the newsroom and thrusting him into a world of literary success, and the financial comfort and foreign travel that came with Hollywood screenwriting. Writer of the Octopussy screenplay, Fraser effectively adapted the Bond formula to a Victorian imperial context, conjuring up a world of terrifying, eccentric villains who handily outline their dastardly plans to their trussed-up captive hero; of exotic beauties who give up their bodies in their hundreds for the lustful narrator’s use; of high adventure in romantic locales. Like Bond, the Flashman series is a product of the Sixties, a consoling myth of national derring-do at a period of catastrophic decline.

It is ironic, then, that the elderly Fraser would write so scornfully of “the children of the swinging Sixties” who created a society where “mis-called ‘Victorian values’ are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated”. As he noted sadly: “The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent.”

Was there any self-awareness in Fraser’s jibe at “the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far”? Perhaps, as with Sixties satirists such as John Cleese, the older writer looked back with loss at the passing world he had lampooned, and with guilty disgust at the world he had helped bring into being. 

There seems a great disjunct, after all, between the ageing writer’s contempt for the “the interminable explicit sex scenes” of 2000s television and the actual contents of his published body of work. There is far more sex and violence in a Flashman novel than in even the most vulgar output of modern television, though it must be noted that Flashman’s sex life, all “getting my wench buckled to” and “rattling her six ways from Sunday” as “I romped her up and down” and “bulling away like fury” in a manner “like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons” is far too cartoonish and strangely sexless to be erotic, like a higher-class version of Carry On Up the Khyber. The older Fraser gets, the more cartoonish the sex becomes, until by the time of 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, when our anti-hero lies “collapsed supine beneath that ponderous mass of ebony flesh”, “rogering this prime piece of dusky blubber” and “belaboured by balloons of black jelly”, we find ourselves adrift in a world far beyond the erotic.

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Reading Flashman today, his world — in which the easy libertinism of the Regency era was being replaced by thin-lipped, Victorian puritanism — seems oddly current. With an awareness of the horrors of war born from his own military service, and the cynicism of a senior journalist all too aware of how the sausage gets made, through Flashman Fraser expressed his contempt for the occasional bouts of war fever that excitable journalism awakens in the British public, with “the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down”.

As a downstream result of Fleet Street’s exertions, Fraser’s hero survives the Charge of the Light Brigade and finds himself chased by Russian soldiers on the road to Mariupol, observing that “the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do”, because “the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves”.

In the run-up to the American Civil War, Flashman finds himself forced to work with the idealistic abolitionist John Brown, who had “fuelled the passions of the wildest elements on both sides, and convinced even sensible and moderate people that the only answer was disunion and war”. In a country torn between two political factions who hated each other with visceral fury, divided on the politics of race, “he put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America breathed it in — and didn’t find the odour displeasing”.

Of Afghanistan, he observes, like many an editorial last summer, that “possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason” of Britain’s ignominious retreat, product of a Victorian bubble where “those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time”. Flashman’s world is not, after all, so very distant from our own.

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Over time, the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs: perhaps not intentionally, but simply because any writer, forced to churn out content regularly enough, ends up revealing more of himself than he intends. A craftsman rather than an artist, his successful formula is still very fine and entertaining handiwork, and the increasing sophistication of the historical footnotes Fraser appended to the novels emerges as the greatest joy of the series. 

It is odd that the 2000s world of his memoirs seems further from us today than Flashman’s world did to him — many of his observations, commonplace then, would now be considered hate speech — and yet Flashman’s world of imperial misadventure still seems resonant, and strangely current. Like Flashman and his creator, we are trapped as unwilling protagonists in history, whose endless rhymes and recurrences cannot be escaped.

Does Britain deserve obloquy for profiting so hugely from the Transatlantic slave trade, or credit for having abolished it? Statues of imperialists and slavers have been toppled and daubed and tossed into rivers. The Right, more rampant and paranoid than at any time since the war, denounces the ‘woke’ movement as a new and noxious threat to Western civilisation. Yet as far back as 1938, the great Lead Belly was already warning travellers to Alabama, “I advise everybody. Be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” But Belly’s warning was a long time ago.

Why has it all come alive again, and with such unappeased ferocity on both sides? The book that caught the zeitgeist in the midriff this year was Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland. It is never simplistic, always thoughtful, wry, and rueful as well as angry.

Sanghera comes from a family of Punjabi Sikhs and was brought up in Wolverhampton. He describes that upbringing in in his touching memoir The Boy with the Topknot. When he first went to school, he was unable to speak English, but he finished up at the great Wolverhampton Grammar School and then got a first in English at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He thus has the most intense imperial legacy, from Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech all the way back to the massacre of hundreds of Sikhs at Amritsar by the psychopathic temporary Brigadier Dyer.

In Empireland, he patiently explores that legacy: the loot in British museums (‘Loot’ is the Hindi word for the spoils of war, jocularly adopted by the British — a Pekingese dog found during the looting of the Summer Palace in Peking was christened Looty and sent home as a gift to Queen Victoria); the millions of post-war immigrants from the Commonwealth who have transformed England’s inner cities; above all, the abiding sense of the superiority and exceptionalism of the British race; and always in the background, the dark shadow of slavery, as abiding an embarrassment as it was profitable, best not spoken of in company — witness the silence of the Bertrams in Mansfield Park when their estates in Antigua come up in conversation.

Personally, Sanghera is grateful for everything that Britain has given him, and he acknowledges the formidable achievements of the British in India, up to and including the famous railways, one of the only vestiges of empire that ever make it on to TV, usually omitting the reality that the prime purpose in building them was to ferry troops quicker to suppress native disturbances and to carry British goods to the furthest corners of India at the cruel expense of native producers.

Sanghera refuses to tolerate the vainglorious, barely qualified praise of Empire from Right-wing historians and politicians, or their deliberate bleaching of our Island Story. Take David Starkey’s assertion, made in 2011, that “Britain is a white monoculture and schools should focus on our own history”. Sanghera’s deep-lying target is what he calls “imperial amnesia”, the pretence that the experience of the greatest empire ever known left no serious mark on the British psyche; a fifth of the world painted Peppa Pig pink, the English language the globe’s lingua franca — all this was a passing episode in our long history, which we shrugged off with a gracious smile.

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Outside the specialist literature, in the public sphere the whole experience has been muffled in a tactful silence as profound as the silence of the Bertrams. Now the argument has resurfaced with a vengeance — all the more toxic and unsettling for having been so long suppressed. At the many previous hauling downs of the Union Jack, would any royal personage have spoken as bluntly about the horrors of slavery as Prince Charles has just done on declaring Barbados a republic?

Nowhere can the extraordinary fluctuations in the British view of Empire be traced more vividly than in the rhetoric of Enoch Powell, Sanghera’s fellow-Wulfrunian whose shadow loomed so grimly over his childhood. Powell was devastated by the loss of India, but nevertheless wrote in his 1951 election address to the voters of Wolverhampton: “I BELIEVE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Without the empire, Britain would be like a head without a body.” But by the mid-1960s, he was claiming that the British Empire had been “a myth”, “a deception” and “an invention, all along”. That people had ever believed in it was “one of the most extraordinary paradoxes in political history”. He insisted that “England underwent no organic change as the mistress of a world empire”.

His response to Dean Acheson’s wounding taunt that “Great Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role” was to sign up wholeheartedly to Macmillan’s application to join the EEC: “It is as a European power… that we shall work out a Britain in the 1970s which does not need make-believe to bolster its self-respect… This is Britain’s world-wide role, no less than that of France or Germany.”

Powell’s recoil from this new enthusiasm was even more violent. By the time of the first referendum in 1975, he had become apocalyptic about the dangers of staying in the EU: “Belonging to the Common Market… spells living death, the abandonment of all prospect of national rebirth.”

You might think that such an erratic record would disqualify Powell from being taken seriously as a sage. Far from it. It is because he publicly charted his zigzags with such melodramatic passion that he attracted and still retains such undiminished veneration; witness the volume published in 2012 to celebrate what would have been his hundredth birthday with contributions from Roger Scruton, Simon Heffer, Andrew Roberts, Iain Duncan Smith et al. For his wanderings were their wanderings too, his disillusion their disillusion. He taught them to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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For Brexiteers, the suppression of imperial memory becomes almost as important for the future of the nation as the promotion of the project was in its heyday. Imperialist hankerings have to be explicitly denied. In This Sovereign Isle, one of the few attempts by a serious historian to justify Brexit, Robert Tombs, who in 1975 voted to stay in, argues that the Empire never did us much good: “Having an Empire had not been the source of Britain’s power and wealth… Empire had been in many ways a political, strategic and economic liability.” He insists that Brexit is in no sense a furtive effort to recreate it.

On the contrary, it is in fact a crucial trope in the Brexiteers argument that it was the European Union that was underpinned by “imperial nostalgia”. For historians like Toombs, and his fellow Cambridge historian Richard Tuck, the EU is indistinguishable — or very soon will be — from the great empires of the past. The idea of voluntarily sharing a range of powers with other nations is unimaginable to them. The simplest shared code of practice is seen as a vile infringement of sovereignty.

For Brexit Minister, David Frost, who is fast becoming the last hero of the cause, divergence is king. If as Lord Frost and Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, have both admitted, the results so far seem less than satisfactory, that is because Brexit has not been properly tried, an argument familiar from old Communists disillusioned with an earlier god that failed.

This view of the nation sees Britain’s borders as an impermeable, indispensable protection of our national integrity. Up until the Fifties, Powell believed that “we must reduce or remove the barriers to free movement within the Empire of goods, of money, and above all, of human beings”. Now of course the free movement of human beings must be resisted without remorse: send them back, dump them on hulks in the Thames Estuary, send them to Albania, let them drown. Anything rather accept any obligation of humanity, let alone of empire.

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This was not how the dream of disentanglement was presented. Once ‘out of Europe’, we would be free, nimble, our bounds would be boundless. What was not said, perhaps not even thought, was that the Brexit dream brought with it harsher implications, of wilful exclusion of others, of hostile vigilance.

Only Nigel Farage and the ultras were prepared to deploy that harsher language, which was why they had to be kept out of sight not to frighten decent folk. With all their faults, the old empires — the Roman, the Ottoman, the British — had a certain openness, a sloppiness about ground rules. Which is partly why half the ministers in the present government are the descendants of recent immigrants, many of them fleeing persecution as well as poverty. Palmerston defended to the hilt the somewhat sleazy character of Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew, who happened to be a British citizen by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. These days Pacifico would be lucky to get past immigration control.

It is because Brexiteer rhetoric depends on peddling a sanitised version of the national past that we must redouble our efforts to recover every scrap of that past — the years of Empire, yes, but the years in the EEC/EU too — and not brush over any of the peculiar institutions that have adorned or polluted those pasts, including the most peculiar institution of all, the mass transportation and enslavement of millions of our fellow human beings. With all its attendant sillinesses and petty intolerance, this is a struggle that needs to be played out to the end, until we understand better exactly where we have come from and who we are. Better woke than dead to the world.

This was also the first conference since Margaret Thatcher had been ousted as leader and — after sixteen years — many of the party faithful were far from reconciled to their loss. It should have been a tub-thumping, morale-boosting rally to send her successor, John Major, out on the campaign trail. Instead it saw the opening shots fired in a civil war that would go on to wreck that fourth term, drive the Tories out of power, and put the country on the road to Brexit. Because this was the conference when talk of a referendum on Europe began to take hold of the Right.

At the time, the European Economic Community (EEC) was entering a state of transition. In December 1991, the leaders of the twelve member-states would meet in Maastricht to negotiate the future path, and the following February meet again to sign the treaty that was to create the European Union (EU). This was a new incarnation of the great project, designed, as it said, “to advance European integration”.

The bit of that “integration” that was causing concern among some at Blackpool was the near-certainty that it would include a commitment to a single currency across all the EU nations. And the person most concerned was Thatcher herself. It was she who led the call for a referendum on the subject of what would one day become known as the euro.

In fact, she’d floated the idea before, nearly a year earlier, in the last throes of her premiership; it was part of her pitch against the leadership challenge of the Europhile Michael Heseltine. Amid the personal psychodrama of those final days, however, something as mundane as monetary union made little impression, and the referendum proposal wasn’t a big story. But if the public didn’t notice, her colleagues did, and it was one of the reasons why some cabinet colleagues turned against her; in characteristic fashion, she hadn’t consulted any of them about the proposal before announcing it.

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Apart from anything, it was out of political character for Thatcher. One of her first tasks as Tory leader had been to respond to the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC, called by Harold Wilson’s government in 1975. She had been forthright in her condemnation of the vote, accusing Wilson of trying to “pass the buck” and seeking to “bind and fetter” parliamentary democracy. And she stayed true to her word: during her eleven-and-a-half years in Downing Street, she did not hold a single referendum.

But now, the scale of the changes being suggested in the European negotiations, and in particular the spectre of a single currency, had banished those reservations. This was too big a step, too much of a threat to parliamentary democracy itself, to be undertaken without the approval of the people.

That was the message she brought to Blackpool. She didn’t address the conference directly — she didn’t need to: just her presence on the platform ensured a five-minute standing ovation. But she did speak to the press to make her position clear. And Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson, two of her most loyal lieutenants in the glory days, publicly supported the idea.

“If the decision is a case of changing the relationship between parliament and the people then there is a case for the people to be consulted,” argued the latter. Most significantly, Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, also hinted that he was in favour of a referendum. “I will not allow a single currency to be imposed on this country,” he insisted . “We don’t want laws to be made and taxes to be raised in Brussels for which the British people have not voted.”

The clamour became so great that the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, felt obliged to intervene. “It is not on,” he said. “It is simply not a subject for a referendum.”

Yet a split opened up at that Conservative Party conference, and in the following months it widened further. The headlines in the build-up to the Maastricht negotiations were dreadful: “Maggie blasts ‘arrogant’ PM”; “Thatcher urged to back Premier and halt Europe feud”; “Tebbit fans the flames in civil war over Europe”. This had become a personal and open fight between the Prime Minister and his predecessor: “Iron Lady v Quiet Man,” as the Daily Mail summarised it.

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It was against this background that Major insisted on Britain not participating in two of the key elements of the Maastricht Treaty. There was the Social Chapter — which set out common employment protections — and there was the single currency.

Even with Britain’s half-hearted involvement, Maastricht was a big deal. It conferred citizenship of the EU on all those within it, ensuring the right to live, work and vote equally in any of the member states. It strengthened the European Parliament, extended co-operation on policing, justice and foreign policy, and reduced the need for unanimous decision-making. It created the European Central Bank. This was “a new and decisive stage,” said Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, “which within a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamed of after the last war: the United States of Europe”.

The Conservative manifesto at the 1992 election boasted that “The Maastricht Treaty was a success both for Britain and for the rest of Europe”, and even if many Tory MPs didn’t agree, the fact that Major won an unexpected victory meant that he had a mandate; the calls for a referendum receded.

Instead, the fight was resumed in the Commons, where the treaty had to be ratified and where the Conservative majority of 21 was far from comfortable. Major faced opposition not only from Labour, demanding he sign up to the Social Chapter, but from those on his backbenches who objected to the whole thing. In a long series of votes, extending through to the summer of 1993, there were repeated rebellions by Tory MPs against their own government.

Thatcher’s private response to the treaty was that “the country is being sold down the river,” and although she had stepped down as an MP at the election, she was now in the Lords and still commanded much support. She spoke out against Maastricht in public, and urged on rebel MPs in private. Meanwhile, her predecessor Edward Heath, who was still in the Commons, weighed in on Major’s side, and the ensuing bitterness soured the party for years to come.

“In the voting lobbies it was not unknown for one Conservative MP to spit at another,” remembered Michael Spicer, one of the rebel MPs. “Physical violence occurred during the course of one or two crucial votes.” He also recalled a senior MP being dragged by his hair into the government’s lobby. Nicholas Soames, a Major loyalist, was particularly unimpressed by the married rebels Ann and Nicholas Winterton: “You’re cunts,” he told them after yet another vote, “and ugly ones to boot.”

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In scenes of great excitement, the final vote to ratify the treaty was lost in July 1993 by eight votes and Major responded by calling a vote of confidence in his own government. This was an unmistakeable sign of weakness and failure, the first time since the war a government had resorted to such a desperate measure. But Major was weak, and he was failing.

As a procedure, however, it was clever. If he lost the vote, Major said, he would call a general election, and there was a strong chance that the Tories would lose over a hundred seats. The rebels had little choice — “The PM’s got the Party by the goolies,” as one of them, Teresa Gorman, put it — and the confidence vote was won with relative ease. The Government was to limp on impotently for another four years.

But the party was badly damaged. And the unsatisfactory ending of the episode failed to bring closure.

As the Maastricht debate approached its end-game, a by-election in Newbury saw a safe Tory seat fall to the Liberal Democrats on a massive 28-point swing, a reflection of how low Major’s government had fallen. Little noticed was the fourth-place finish of Alan Sked, representing the Anti-Federalist League. He got just 600 votes, but this was the first stirring of what became UKIP, launched by Sked later in 1993.

And this was also the by-election where veteran anti-European Enoch Powell made one of his last-ever public appearances. He was driven to a rally at Newbury Racecourse by a young city trader named Nigel Farage, who later cited the experience as the moment that inspired his own political career. It wasn’t obvious at the time, but that European referendum floated by Margaret Thatcher was destined to return.

Depressingly for thoughtful nationalists, the folly of independence is now also passing into the “beyond question” area. Scots-born, Ivy League economist Mark Blyth, who recently (remarkably) accepted a role as an adviser to Sturgeon, claimed that the endlessly repeated trope that an independent Scotland would quickly become like Denmark and other Scandinavian states was impossible, and that plans for an independent economy showed “a complete lack of specificity”. In earlier comments Blyth said that the effect of independence on the Scots economy would be like “Brexit times ten”.

That Scotland should now be careening towards an economic train wreck has many authors. But one above all stands out, for imbuing the country with a heady, and electorally powerful mixture of Anglo-hatred, romanticism and boundless faith in European Union membership.

The mixture was concocted over 40 years ago by the Scots writer and academic Tom Nairn, who will be 90 next year. He can reflect that his writings — especially The Break Up of Britain (1977) and to a lesser extent After Britain (2000) — provided Scottish nationalism, the most potent of European secessionist movements, with a framework within which secession could be seen as essential for Scots’ self-respect. Though a Marxist, his is not primarily a programme for a more equitable economy, or a march through the institutions to craft a political system dominated by the working classes. It is most powerfully a textbook for despising England.

He has been adamant that his polemics are not anti-English, and has pointed to polls showing that Scots don’t hate English people – denials which are echoed by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (her now shamed predecessor, Alex Salmond, is a different matter). But that is not the point.

Scots can be as friendly to the English as they like, but England can only be seen as a ball and chain round Scots legs. In The Break-Up, Nairn’s favourite trope is firing off baroque fusillades of abuse aimed at the degraded husk of England — and the Britain it dominates — which now finds itself “a creaking English snail-shell of archaic pieties, deferential observance and numbing self-inhibition”; a country of  “rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay and cultural despair;” “a sinking paddle wheel state”, a “palsied corpus of Unionism”, an “indefensible and inadaptable relic, neither properly archaic not properly modern”, requiring “a motorised wheelchair and a decent burial” within the “hopelessly decaying institutions of a lost imperial state”.

As well as hopelessly decaying, England is hopelessly racist. In After Britain, Nairn yokes a “malign Euro-scepticism” to England’s “own brutish (racial) prejudice” and “post-imperial exclusiveness” — and produces the murder of Stephen Lawrence in south London as the prime example. Yet it was a murder which produced an outpouring of revulsion from all layers of British society, a report accusing the Metropolitan Police of institutional racism, a campaign by the Daily Mail — that most English of papers — to bring the culprits, at first acquitted, to justice, an appointment of Stephen’s mother, Doreen, to the peerage and the funding of a Stephen Lawrence Trust. The Lawrence killing showed the opposite of Nairn’s slur: it showed an English population, with a proportionately much higher number of people of colour than Scotland, appalled by it: in 2012, nearly 20 years after the event, a poll showed 66% of the British thought the sentences on the two men convicted too lenient, while two per cent thought them too harsh.

The casual attribution of a racism, which infects all of society, is indicative of Nairn’s style: sweeping generalisations of social malignity as a kind of jelly to hold his abuse. In The Break-Up, he devotes a chapter to the former cabinet minister Enoch Powell, finding that a speech Powell gave on empire in 1964 — ironically, in Dublin — had the effect of re-creating English “in the obscene form of racism”. Powell was in Nairn’s eyes England’s “nemesis”. When, in 1968, he gave a speech presaging “rivers of blood”, Edward Heath, the party leader, quickly fired him from the shadow cabinet.

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But even when Nairn was writing The Break-Up in the mid-late Seventies, it should have been obvious that English nationalism was a weak thing, that liberal, leftist and much centre-right opinion recoiled from racism and that institutions as the universities, the broadcasters (BBC and ITV), the trade unions, the churches and business corporations were similarly minded. Yet, 23 years later, in After Britain, the same urge to paint England as mired in “brutish prejudice” is peddled.

Nairn’s other large gift to contemporary nationalism is to propose that nationalism is next to socialism. Complaining, in The Break-Up, of Marxism’s “notorious inability to come to terms with modern nationalism”, he emends that fault, claiming that his analysis, which has shown the “moribund nature” of the British, has given the Scots “good reason to want out, and good cause for claiming that their exit is a progressive action.” He continues: “Lenin argued that nationalist upheavals could contribute to socialist revolution… in the great centres.” Lenin does argue, in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914) that national revolution leading to secession can be supported by revolutionary socialists on democratic grounds: but stresses that this can only be a transitional phase from “a completely victorious and consolidated socialism to complete communism”. To invoke approval of the main creator of the Soviet Union shows an ambition for a socialist Scotland of the “vote once, and forever” variety.

The SNP, which Nairn has consistently and enthusiastically supported, has never been socialist: it had been, for much of its history, incoherently pro-free market. Even Salmond, a little before taking power, commended the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, until forced to retract. Nicola Sturgeon’s social democratic stance is largely window dressing: in its governing years, since 2007, it has presided over a sharp decline in the quality of education in schools — once a source of pride: a recent survey by Legatum found it the worst in the UK, hurting the poorest children most. Health care is better — but drug use is the highest in Europe, children in care are double the UK national average, its biggest city, Glasgow, has record rates of murder, knife crime and domestic abuse, local government has been enfeebled by the centralising policies of the SNP and investment prospects are the weakest in the UK. Socialism of any kind is neither an option nor a real ambition of the nationalists: were it to become independent, it would be forced to compete with Ireland in providing a low-tax environment for mobile corporations.

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Europe is seen as the saviour — built up by Salmond’s rhetoric, mimicked by Sturgeon, focusing on vague issues like “ideals”: as she put it in 2019 in a speech at the European Policy Centre, “the basic values” are common, these being “an idealism to the EU project which appeals strongly to us… it is, at its heart, a peace project”. But it is not a peace project: its core mission to replace European states’ nationalisms by an all-Europe federation.

Nairn has a long and consistent attachment to Europe, publishing, in 1972, “The Left against Europe” as a special issue of New Left Review, using the insights and policies of the then-powerful Italian Communist Party, which argued that Europe’s states must transcend “narrow national limits” in order to confront the international trends governed by capitalist integration. The SNP did a U-turn — Salmond, who took the leadership in the early Eighties, was among the first to grasp that the leaving of the British union, fearsome for a majority of Scots (as the 2014 referendum on independence showed) would be moderated by the prospect of a safe and “progressive” European home.

But Europe is not a home for secessionist regions or nations: many, especially the Spanish and the Belgians, look on Scots nationalism as a threatening example for their own secessionist-tending movements. Even if no veto is wielded over its entry bid, it will — as Fabian Zuleeg, director of the Centre where Sturgeon spoke, has made clear — be required to “uphold and defend the principles of European integration, not least in accepting the terms and conditions of membership in full… shoring up stability and highlighting the benefits of EU membership”. Thus no opt outs, no long-term avoidance of membership of the Eurozone nor Schengen, no special treatment. Nor, for that matter, the  £10-12 billion a year, presently paid from the UK Treasury under the Barnet formula, from EU funds; and a hard border with the rest of the UK. States are about power, and the ability to enforce policies; and the EU, as a would-be state, can be no exception.

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In this, Nairn has broken with his former comrade, the long-time editor of the New Left Review, Perry Anderson — whose voluminous and often savage critiques of the EU posits it as an undemocratic and undemocratisable monster, with a parliament as ‘“the least consequential component of the Union” which provides “the appearance of a democratic assembly behind which oligarchic coteries are comfortably entrenched.” Wolfgang Streeck, a former director of Germany’s foremost sociological centre, the Max Planck Institute and a Review contributor, writes that “there is no supranationalism (in the EU) at all, or only as a veil behind which the real action, national and international, takes place. France sees Europe as an extended playing field for its global ambitions; Germany needs the European Union to secure production sites for its industries… and Italy needs ‘Europe’, in particular Germany, for its survival as a capitalist nation-state and economy.”

What does it need Scotland for? Only as an irritant to the rest of the UK, but it must be a well behaved irritant. Streeck and Anderson’s hard-headed assessments are a reproof to Nairn’s — and Sturgeon’s — cloudy romanticism. In this, as in his view of England, as in his ambitions for socialism, Nairn operates in a sphere of abstract utopianism, and has taught the nationalists to do likewise — at least in public. It has worked: romance, idealism, anti-Englishness, national pride, a mixture which has succeeded so far, beyond what even Nairn could have dreamed. But is it now, itself, in the kind of decline it attributes to England? That’s another day’s work.

In Britain, however, where “black power” also began to take hold, there was a twist: it wasn’t just being embraced by black people, but Asians too. Indeed, Stokely Carmichael once recalled his surprise when, during a trip to London in 1967, he witnessed Black Power “resonating” among “the raised fists in the Asian communities, especially among Pakistani youth.” This would extend into the 1970s and 80s, when South Asians and black people were united under the banner of “political blackness”.

In the US, “blackness” was  —  and remains  —  both a political and ethnic identity; in Britain, things have always been more complicated. Here, political blackness was fashioned to encourage solidarity and mobilisation between Black Caribbeans and South Asians: an identity for people who shared a history of colonial subjugation, migration and diaspora  —  and who were now being treated as second-class citizens.

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, for instance, left behind the ethnic pogroms of his native Sri Lanka to migrate to London in 1958, only to witness attacks by white mobs on West Indians during the Notting Hill riots. “I knew then I was black,” he wrote; he would be treated as black whether he accepted it or not. Decades later, not much had changed. After a long career as the editor of the journal Race & Class, Sivanandan wrote in 2008: “Black is the colour of our politics, not the colour of our skins”.

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But political blackness was born in a different era, one where “coloureds” — anyone who was not white — were treated as part of a de facto underclass in the UK. Institutional racism meant they occupied menial jobs, were denied decent housing and education and were excluded from many social spaces due to the “colour bar”.

At the time, the mainstream Left did little to change this state of affairs. Trade unions, for instance, were generally hostile to the cause of anti-racism. Political blackness, therefore, wasn’t simply a critique of Tory governments; it also attacked the Labour Party for being co-conspirators in institutional racism. “What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after,” was Sivanandan’s sardonic assessment. After Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, as fears abounded of Kenyan Asians “swarming” into Britain, it was Harold Wilson’s Labour government that rushed through the racist 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. Where previously Commonwealth citizens had had unlimited entry to Britain, as British subjects, they were now barred.

In this context, it made sense for the descendants of Britain’s colonies to band together. In 1968, Jagmohan Joshi co-founded the Black Peoples’ Alliance (BPA). Their founding congress was attended by various Caribbean and Asian militant groups — including the Pakistani Workers’s Association, the West Indian Standing Conference (WISC) and the Afro-Asian Liberation Front. The BPA took to the streets a year later, 8,000-strong, in a “march for dignity” to Downing Street, calling for the repeal of the Immigration Act. And over the next decade, it would, along with other groups, continue to play an important role in protesting police brutality and defending ethnic minority communities from far-Right attacks.

But political blackness is now a fossil. Today it’s widely accepted that it flattens out the differences between blacks and South Asians into an abstract non-white identity. For Kehinde Andrews, a modern-day black nationalist, blackness is the sacred unifying glue of the “African diaspora”. Turning into a political umbrella, he claims, “erases the history of political organising based around shared African ancestry” in Britain.

Moreover, discussions surrounding race in Britain have been further fudged by the super-diversity that has resulted from recent decades of mass migration from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Eastern European migrants, for example, have been the frequent object of xenophobia in the past couple of decades, despite being “white”. At the same time, the emergence of identity politics in recent years has had the effect of breaking up what was once a unified “black struggle” into ethnic and religious fragments.

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Within this political desiccation, it is hardly surprising that the Tories are the political group best equipped to appeal to an increasingly diverse electorate. It is, after all, something that they have been trying to do for a long time; in 1983, they ran an election poster featuring a besuited black man alongside the words: “Labour say he’s black. Tories say he’s British”. The message is clear: we emphasise nationhood and want to include you in it, while the Left wants to keep you imprisoned by your race.

Of course, when the Tories first tried to paint themselves as the party of the aspirational ethnic minority, the message was hollow: the party was extremely white. Now, the party is responsible for the most ethnically diverse cabinet in the history of British government. Beyond Rishi Sunak — who is, of course, its embodiment — there’s also Priti Patel, the daughter of Indian migrants by way of Uganda, at the helm of the Home office. Kwasi Kwarteng and Kemi Badenoch, both of West African stock, are Business Secretary and Equalities Minister respectively. Then there’s Claire Coutinho, Bim Afolami and Suella Braverman among others.

What this shows is that there is no such thing as “black politics” in any unitary sense. Black people, with various backgrounds, are acting politically across the spectrum. Yet today’s understanding of “political blackness” still implies that you need to have a particular kind of radical politics be “authentically black” politically — and any deviation equates to “selling out”.

This expectation that all ethnic minority politicians must be naturally Leftist reveals a basic ignorance of the fact that many of them come from communities and cultures that are conservative, probably more so than your typical Tory whose conservatism has been diluted by the winds of liberalism. Norman Tebbitt once expressed his admiration for the “natural conservatism” of British Asians (and you could chuck in British African communities too) for upholding traditional virtues: respect for tradition and faith, strong family and communal bonds, deference to authority and conservative sexual morality. A recent BBC survey of British Asians also concluded that they were more socially conservative than the rest of the British population.

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Of course, within ethnic minority communities these values are hotly contested, as in any community. Ethnic minorities are as divided by class and politics as white people. Many British Indians and some segments of Britons from West African communities are affluent, socially mobile and well credentialed enough to vote Tory; most other ethnic minorities are disproportionately poorer, so tend to vote Labour, though there are exceptions. Gone are the days when “political blackness” could be used to represent ethnic minorities as an underclass; significant slices have climbed the social ladder.

So don’t underestimate the power of a Tory government that can synthesise patriotism and multi-ethnicity, practise “colour blindness” and rebut the Left’s accusations of tokenism by pointing out that they operate on talent and aspiration and beliefs, not skin colour. The Tories’ message of equality of opportunity and meritocracy strikes a chord with many, whatever their hue.

On the identitarian Left, meanwhile, instead of “political blackness”, ethnic minorities are currently stuck with “people of colour’ or the soulless bureaucratic acronym BAME as umbrella terms to express their collective grievances to officialdom. Political blackness may have been flawed, but at least it was a radical attempt to encourage solidarity between different communities for a politics dedicated towards social transformation. Any attempt to revive it now would only degrade into kitsch.

For today, blackness in Britain has morphed from a radical political identity into an almost wholly racial identity associated with African ancestry. If anything, blackness has become an aesthetic, a chic identity swallowed up into the consumerist economy. Despite the Left’s best efforts, political blackness cannot be the basis for any politics of solidarity any longer.

Powell’s political obsessions, on the nature of British sovereignty and the urgency of its preservation against threats from strategic rivals abroad and Celtic nationalisms at home — as well as his twisting stance on Britain’s relationship with Europe‚ have not diminished in political importance since the 1970s: instead they have become the central concern of British politics.

“Throughout his political career,” Corthorn notes, “Powell grappled with what is arguably still the central issue in British foreign policy: the precise nature of the UK’s role in the world.” Yet, as a result of what Corthorn characterises as “a deeply polarized, and politicized, historiography”, Powell’s potential contribution to today’s debate has been minimised, a failing his excellent new book seeks to rectify, recentring Powell’s turbulent career as “part of a long-running and wide-ranging public debate over the ‘decline’ of the British nation”.  

Powell’s brilliance was never disputed even by his political enemies. Born to Warwickshire schoolteacher parents, the grandson of a Welsh ironworker, the fees for Powell’s education at Birmingham’s King Edward’s School and then Trinity College, Cambridge were covered by the clutch of scholarships he won for his intellectual precocity. In his first year at Cambridge, he won all the Classics prizes then open to undergraduates, a feat never equalled before or since.

Appointed as Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in his twenties, he found himself the youngest professor in the entire British Empire; joining the army as a private in 1939, he finished the war as one of its youngest brigadiers. A posting as a staff officer to India led him to fall in love with the country, and to dream of becoming its Viceroy, to which end he added Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi to the dozen languages he spoke, eight of them fluently.  

India’s independence therefore came as a shattering blow to Powell. Walking London’s streets alone the night Britain’s relinquishment was announced, struggling to come to terms with the significance of the moment for his beloved country and the Empire, Powell himself became one of India’s troubled Midnight’s Children.

The loss of India and Britain’s consequent diminished place in the world became the central pole of Powell’s worldview; the bloodshed of Partition fuelled his later fears both of mass immigration and of civil war in Northern Ireland, convincing him that “communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible”. His entire political career after 1947 would be devoted to defining, with an obsessive clarity not far from madness, the nature of British sovereignty in this new post-imperial world.

“Poor, poor Enoch,” the Conservative politician Iain Macleod observed of Powell in a cruel assessment which contains a great deal of truth, “driven mad by the remorselessness of his own logic.” Powell’s intellectual brilliance, the sheer, penetrating clarity of his mind drove him to a kind of extremist absolutism in the conclusions he reached. A visionary seer rather than a politician, he saw the essential nature of power relationships clearly — perhaps too clearly for his own good — with results most dramatically visible in his grasp of International Relations.

A foreign policy realist, obsessed with maintaining the balance of power upon which Britain’s place in the world depended, his conclusions drifted far beyond political reality. Few would argue as Powell did just after the fall of Singapore in 1942, while Britain struggled to preserve its Asian empire from the Japanese onslaught, that to maintain strategic independence from America “it was in the British interest to preserve its naval strength through means ‘not short even of alliance with Japan,’” otherwise “‘the British Empire would only exist on American sufferance.’”

But then, Powell’s intense loathing of “our terrible enemy” the United States was one of the few constants of his political career. His early realisation that America’s rise to global dominance would mean Britain’s total strategic subordination, shrouded from public view by the comforting fiction of equal partnership, was entirely correct, yet then as now was not a popular view within British conservatism.

There is something of de Gaulle in Powell’s distaste for the new superpower, and the urgency of his desire to maintain Britain’s independence from it. By the time of the Vietnam War, Corthorn notes, Powell “argued that Britain had ‘lost the ability to distinguish between an ally and a satellite, or between a friend and a lackey,’” lamenting that “the Soviet Union could hardly have expected more favourable comment from its satrapies in Eastern Europe.”

Indeed, for Powell there was little to choose between the two, and “no reason to believe that the British constitution will be threatened more by the socialist dictatorship than by the democracy of the United States”. Corthorn observes that “working on the basis that Britain had to be able to fight a war, if necessary, against the United States, Powell’s balance-of-power thinking led him to argue that Britain needed allies to ‘counter-balance the material superiority of the United States.’”

Praising de Gaulle for pulling France out of NATO, Powell foreshadowed the French strongman’s modern heir Macron in eyeing Russia as the counterweight to preserve his own nation’s strategic autonomy, asserting that “historically the existence of Russia has been the ultimate guarantee of the survival of Britain as an independent nation… When in the last decades of the twentieth century necessity restores an understanding between Britain and Russia, the entente will not be cordiale; but entente it will still be…” As Corthorn notes laconically, at the height of the Cold War, “Powell’s argument for an alliance with the Soviet Union was a radical one to make.

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Powell’s High Tory British nationalism, focused on defending Britain’s place in the world as a sovereign power rather than an American client state, put him at odds with the Conservative Party mainstream. By the early 1980s, at the height of the political romance between Thatcher and Reagan, Powell exulted that America’s lukewarm support in the Falklands War had “ushered in a “great liberation… when… the scales fell from the eyes of the British public and they beheld the United States not in the fairytale disguise sustained so sedulously since 1942 but as that nation really is.” At the end of the decade, Corthorn notes, “Powell’s stance towards Russia was increasingly favourable.”

By 1992, “Powell had developed his position into a full blown critique of the ‘new world order’, a term that had gained increasing usage to describe the hegemonic position of the United States,”. Three years later, and horrified at the prospect of sending British troops to separate the warring peoples of the former Yugoslavia from each other for what he saw as America’s strategic ends, Powell “argued darkly that ‘our present malaise arises from the abject subordination to America and American purposes.’” 

Powell’s absolutist principles and relentless quest to defend British sovereignty against all rivals also shaped his evolving views on Britain’s other great conflicted relationship, that with the European Union. A fierce critic, post-Suez, of Britain’s residual imperial pretensions, Powell initially viewed the nascent European Community as a means to preserve Britain’s autonomy within a Europe of Nations, approvingly citing de Gaulle’s analogous vision.

“Powell saw membership of the European Community as a means of checking British economic and international decline,” Corthorn notes, observing that “back in 1950, Powell had himself sought to prioritise trade with the Empire, but having argued that the Empire’s break-up was inevitable and that the Commonwealth was a pretence, he now blasted the (numerically diminishing) grouping ‘which remains irreconcilably opposed to a European alignment and still worships at the deserted shrine of Commonwealth preference.’”

Arguing that Britain should not “live in the past of a world-wide empire and the dominion of the seas,” Powell insisted with growing urgency that “the party must ‘be cured of the British Empire,’” to “consider ‘what (if anything) the Commonwealth is,’” and instead “‘find its patriotism’ in England.” For Powell, Britain’s salvation — the unresolved tension between England and Britain was as much a concern for Powell as it is for us today— was now to be found across the Channel.

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By the mid-1960s, Powell’s deliberations had led him to the conclusion that “Britain henceforth belongs with Western Europe”. “It is as a European power… that we shall work out a Britain in the 1970s which does not need make-believe to bolster its self-respect,” he claimed, arguing for Britain’s entry into the EC, asserting that “this is Britain’s world-wide role, no less than that of France or Germany, to be herself, genuinely and fearlessly, in the Europe and the world of the 1970s. The real isolationism and renunciation is to wrap ourselves round with illusions, such as the illusion of our ‘special relationship’ with the United States, or the illusion that the Commonwealth exists as a political force.” 

But over time, as much a result of his fierce distaste for Edward Heath as from his absolute commitment to national sovereignty, Powell evolved into a prominent critic of European integration. As Corthorn notes, by the time of the 1975 referendum, “after initially supporting the bid to join the European Community, Powell became one of the most prominent voices arguing that membership would undermine parliamentary sovereignty.”

For Powell, Britain’s sovereignty, expressed in his almost mystical devotion to the Crown-in-Parliament as the central essence of the nation’s being, came above all else. “I was born a Tory, I am a Tory, and shall die a Tory,” he vowed, “I never yet heard that it was any part of the faith of a Tory to take the institutions and liberties, the laws and customs, which his country has evolved over the centuries, and merge them with those of eight other nations into a new-made artificial state and, what is more, to do so without the willing approbation and consent of the nation.” 

Powell’s devotion to Parliament and the Crown as the repository of Britain’s national soul indicates, perhaps more clearly than anything else, the sharp distinction between his idealist political vision and the caricature of him as a rabble-rousing populist. There is something strangely akin to the modernist deconstruction of nationalism in his conception of nationhood, a paradoxic understanding that nations were as much willed constructs of popular assent, which could be made or unmade as conditions demanded, as they were the natural and immutable product of centuries of shared history.

“Nationhood is a baffling thing; for it wholly subjective,” he mused, “they are a nation who think they are a nation: there is no other definition.” Nations were then, for Powell, as much as for the later Marxist theorists of nationalism, imagined communities, a stance which informed his ambivalence over the Celtic nationalisms then only beginning to threaten the union. 

Even in his incarnation as an Ulster Unionist MP, Powell displayed no malice for Irish nationalism, at least in the Republic, while fiercely opposing its expression in the island’s six northern counties as a threat to the political sovereignty of the Protestant then-majority. “England will never again consent to live through the long and harrowing episode of the coercion of the Irish,” he declared when drawing parallels to the nascent nationalisms of Scotland and Wales, because “we have learnt, and learnt once and for all, that enforced unity is a curse, to which almost any consequence or condition is preferable.”

Consequently, in his great 1968 Prestatyn speech against devolution, speaking as “an English Midlander who has always been conscious that his forebears were Welsh” (and who spoke the Welsh language fluently), Powell observed that “if it were ever the preponderant and settled wish of either Wales or Scotland to be themselves a nation and therefore no longer to be part of this nation, that wish ought not to be resisted.”

Indeed, for Powell, the granting of devolution would in itself invalidate the union, for “if it were ever felt right and necessary for Wales or Scotland to be represented in a separate and exclusive parliamentary institution,” then “the great question would already have been answered [because] the very decision to establish such an institution would be a declaration that one nation no longer existed.” In Powell’s uncompromising, all-or-nothing view of politics, devolution “would be the watershed, the parting of the ways, the sign that a separate nation had been consciously, deliberately and once-for-all admitted to be there.”

As Corthorn notes, “Powell was adamant that the ‘nature of the House of Commons is that its sovereignty reaches into every nook and cranny of the national life’ and that there were ‘no powers which it will concede within this realm to any other authority.’” That sovereignty was the nation, for Powell. Within our home islands as much as across the Empire, defined against America or in his shifting stance on Europe, for Powell the matter of sovereignty, manifest in the sacred abstraction of the Crown-in-Parliament, was both central and absolute. 

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Then seen as quixotic obsessions, Powell’s overriding concerns with Britain’s strategic autonomy, with the nation’s relationship with both Europe and the United States and with the threat to the union posed by devolution are now the central problems roiling Westminster. Viewed in his lifetime as an eccentric, Cassandra-like doomsayer, many of his most troubling predictions, of Britain’s strategic decline and of the threat to the union posed by devolution, have indeed come to pass, yet it is difficult to see that he has any political heirs in the Britain of 2020. 

A committed free marketeer in later life, when, as Corthorn notes, “Powell was the foremost populariser of neo-liberal ideas in British politics, working closely with the Institute of Economic Affairs,” his devotion to the NHS would horrify the free market thinktankers who, now as then, play such a role in shaping the Conservative Party’s politics. “When forced to choose between his competing commitments to neo-liberalism and to the British nation,” Corthorn observes, “Powell chose the nation.”

Alien, too, to the free marketeers of 2020 were Powell’s apocalyptic views on mass immigration. As the neoliberal ideologue Milton Friedman noted with horror, Powell’s “position on labour migration is quite inconsistent with free market principles,” and his ferocious opposition to the extension of British Overseas Citizenship to Hong Kong residents, which he believed would lead, eventually, to another wave of mass migration, would place him at odds with his party’s modern incarnation. 

As for Brexit, Powell’s eventual, fierce opposition to the European Union would please many of the Conservative Party’s Brexiteers, yet his ridiculing of the Global Britain “delusions and deceits of a vanished Empire and Commonwealth” and his total and absolute hatred of the United States would have few takers in the modern Tory party. Perhaps it is here, as a foreign policy realist, that Powell’s uncompromising vision speaks most clearly to modern concerns.

As Corthorn notes, “Powell held that only a comprehension of the realities of power, as well as a keen sense of geography, could prevent Britain’s international eclipse.” A non-interventionist of a type now rare in British conservatism, he argued against Britain’s involvement in the first Gulf War on the basis that “we as a nation have no interest in the existence or non-existence of Kuwait” and that “Saddam Hussein has a long way to go yet before his troops come storming up the beaches of Kent or Sussex.” Jubilantly, and prematurely, declaring in 1986 “the death and burial of the American Empire,” Powell would perhaps discern buried within all the gloom and decline of modern Britain some glimmer of national revival, or at very least of sovereignty, to be salvaged from the wreckage of US empire.

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An imperialist who dreamed of becoming India’s Viceroy, Powell soon demanded that Britain cast off the burdens of the Commonwealth and seek its future in Europe, before rejecting Europe in turn; no doubt, observing the growing power of Scotland’s independence movement, the Unionist MP would reject the United Kingdom itself with just such a dramatic and total change of heart.

The late Sir Roger Scruton observed that the central pole of Powell’s identity was “England, as the moral core of our nationality, around which the fiction of Britain had been built,” with Powell himself affirming that England, the Crown and Parliament were inseparable, for “this continuous and continuing life of England is expressed, as by nothing else, by English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks… grafted onto it.” 

For all his shifting views, on Empire, on Europe and on the Union itself, it was England and the English nation at the heart of Powell’s worldview, and a romantic Little Englander lay buried deep within the swashbuckling high seas free-trader. Like Scruton, Powell did not perceive the threat unrestrained capitalism would pose to the timeless England he loved so much. As the Marxist political theorist Tom Nairn noted in 1970, Powell’s “far too overt identification with capitalism” was the “glaring weakness” in his political doctrine, for while “this may appeal to capitalists, and particularly small entrepreneurs… there is evidently a far larger area of the national soul to which it will never appeal at all.”

Yet echoing, with some ambivalence, his fellow Warwickshire visionary Tolkien, even Powell once observed “throughout the political spectrum the British have been dubious or downright condemnatory of the consequences of the industrial revolution and the capitalist market system; their ideal Britain has not been the ‘workshop of the world’; their values have been aristocratic, professional and above all rural.” 

A soothsayer rather than a politician, and a fundamentalist of sorts, perhaps the only constant in the violent twists and turns of Powell’s remorseless logic is what could be called a certain idea of England, expressed in a 1961 speech as a dreamlike vision of a timeless and unchanging nation, buried deep within it all, where “we today at the heart of a vanished Empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the Spring, England and herself”. 

The world’s media has, in recent days, been filled with tributes to the life of John McCain. Aside from his exceptional bravery as a captive in Vietnam, the main quality that these tributes focused on was McCain’s willingness, later in his life, to transcend political boundaries. It was not simply that McCain was willing to work with, befriend and advise Democrats as well as Republicans in the Oval office. Nor was it just the fact that on issues including campaign-finance reform, he was willing to push bipartisan legislation. Or that in 2008 he even suggested that Joe Lieberman (still a registered Democrat at the time) might be his running mate in his Republican campaign for the Presidency.

It was not the specifics that commentators and politicians noted, so much as the remarkable general attitude. It’s a frame of mind that is diminishing in American political life, just as it is retreating from political life in Britain and other major democracies.

When he was a Senator, McCain always held the view that reaching across the political aisle was a natural thing to do; he believed that what unites people elected to political life is greater than anything that can divide them. He saw political differences as just that – differences of politics but not differences in allegiance to the wellbeing of the nation.

Of course, it is easy to speak well of the dead. Any challenge they once posed is diminished, if not completely erased. And so it is interesting to observe such celebration of bipartisanship in the dead, when it’s the last thing to be lauded among the living.

During the week in which the world honoured John McCain, one of the very few figures in British politics who could be said to embody remotely similar ideals to those of the late Senator resigned from his party. In Britain, barely anyone has a career-long reputation for reaching across the political divide between Labour and Conservative. As in America, most people bemoan the lack of cross-party cooperation – but do little in practice to alter the reality. Not so the former Labour MP Frank Field. During his decades in Parliament, Field has been unusually morally consistent.

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He has been a constant foe of the excesses of capitalism and from the Maxwells to Phillip Green he has challenged those guilty of such excesses assiduously, forensically and to their faces. He has been a consistent critic of elements of the European Union and has campaigned and voted accordingly, whether the government of the day was Labour or Conservative led. In the process, he has gained Conservative admirers and left-wing detractors. But he has been a crucial embodiment of the views of millions of people: not Conservatives who want a token Labour party MP to love, but as a representative of the millions of Labour voters who voted ‘Leave’ and who see few people in their own party willing to respect their wishes.

There are other issues on which Field has also stood out. Ten years ago he set up an All Party Parliamentary Group on ‘Balanced migration’. He set this APPG up with the Conservative MP Nicholas Soames. This was seen, in Westminster and the press, as evidence of an ‘odd couple’ political friendship which gave hope that other such bipartisan friendships and cooperation might be possible. In reality such a thing has remained all-too uncommon.

But now Frank Field has resigned the Labour whip. Among the reasons given is the anti-Semitism which has become endemic in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.

Naturally, this has led to attacks on Field from hardline supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and others. Various claims have been made  against him, but perhaps the most striking has been their weaponisation of Field’s friendships across the political divide. In particular, his friendships with Margaret Thatcher and with Enoch Powell.

Both of these people are long-dead. But both of them, in death as in life, are still turned from living, breathing human beings with oddities and failings of their own, into fire-breathing monsters in the Left’s hall of infamy. There is even more ire for them in death than there was in life. Consider this programme, broadcast in 1978, in which the veteran Labour MP Dennis Skinner sits with Enoch Powell in a television studio discussing a range of policy areas. Skinner does not ‘no-platform’ Powell, or spend the programme railing against him. He recognises him as a fellow Parliamentarian, who represents his constituents and with whom he has points of political similarity as well as points of political difference.

Frank Field, now almost 80, has lived through plenty of the tos and fros of political life, and watched the rise and fall of many men and women of power. To have been on friendly terms with Powell or Thatcher is not an indictment of his personality, but a demonstration of his strength of character. Nor were these friendships kept darkly secret, as Jeremy Corbyn’s semi-professional outriders now wish to pretend. Six years ago Field contributed a moving, honest, warm and critical essay to the volume ‘Enoch at 100: a re-evaluation of the life, politics and philosophy of Enoch Powell’, edited by Lord Howard of Rising (Biteback, 2012).  It is worth re-reading. Field was just as open about his relationship with, and opinions about, Margaret Thatcher.

Nor is the fact that Field was able to sustain a friendship with Thatcher up to her last days evidence that he is some kind of closet Thatcherite. Such claims are akin to the claims by some Republicans that John McCain’s friendships with Lieberman and other Democrats demonstrated that he was a secret Democrat.

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After Margaret Thatcher’s death the House of Commons paid tribute to her. With the exception of a splenetic and deranged act of grave-spitting by Glenda Jackson, these tributes were appropriately respectful and thoughtful. But the most thoughtful and significant – from either side of the House – came in the tribute paid to Thatcher by Frank Field. As his local newspaper recorded, Field paid the most significant possible tribute to Thatcher: by analysing what she had wished to achieve in power but failed to accomplish. The speech was one of the most generous, critical and illuminating contributions the Commons had seen in many years.

Those who defend Corbyn and this special line of hyper-partisan, intra-party vituperation, might bear the tributes to McCain in mind as they determinedly roast Field. They will claim that being on even moderately friendly terms with Thatcher or Powell is nothing like being friends with Barack Obama or George W Bush. But they could not be more wrong. Hyperventilating attacks on both McCain’s erstwhile friends were at least equal to those attacks currently being made against some of Field’s friends.

Last week, the hysteria-whippers paused for a moment before the body of John McCain. If they are going to honour those tributes, they and their ilk should consider whether it might be a good idea not to save their kinder reflections for the dead, but occasionally share them about the living as well.