FOR a politician whose influence peaked in the 1970s and who died in 1998, Enoch Powell has been enjoying an impressive afterlife. It is almost impossible to escape him in Britain. The 50th anniversary of his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech against mass immigration has prompted a deluge of editorials, articles, television and radio programmes, protests and debates. Some have even tried to pin the recent Windrush scandal over threatened deportations on him.

Yet to focus solely on his views on immigration would be to miss the complexity of his politics, and his significance for contemporary liberals. For Powell was much more than just a racist reactionary, easy to dismiss in any debate on what an open society should look like.

Certainly, he always regarded himself as a high Tory. To prove it, he learned to hunt. But, awkwardly for liberals, he was also a fervent believer in free markets and free trade, years before Margaret Thatcher ever started talking about Thatcherism. Powell was advocating monetarism in the House of Commons in the late 1950s.

Moreover he believed in the extension of personal freedoms. During the 1960s he was one of only four Conservative front-bench MPs to vote for the legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. He also voted to end the death penalty. He believed passionately that every citizen should be equal before the law. He gave one of his most famous parliamentary speeches denouncing the murder of Kenyans by British officials in the Hola prison camp during the Mau-Mau rebellion in 1959.

He believed in the extension of personal freedoms, the legalisation of homosexual acts and ending the death penalty

And, of course, he was also passionately against Britain joining the EU, or the European Economic Community as it was known in his day. He believed that the EEC would not only restrict free trade by putting up barriers to trade with non-European countries. He also warned that it would end British sovereignty. For the very same reason he was also, almost uniquely for a Tory MP, strongly anti-American, resenting Britain’s post-war acceptance of its role as America’s “poodle”, as the critics would have it.

What to make of this bundle of apparent contradictions, or “Powellism” as The Economist first dubbed it in July 1965? He was a free-trader, but against the free movement of labour. His “Rivers of Blood” speech was racist in tone, and certainly incited racism (he became a hero to far-right groups), but he was for strict equality before the law.

For Powell, there were no contradictions. He was a trained classicist, not an economist (just like Boris Johnson, the current foreign secretary) and for Powell the survival and nourishing of the nation-state was the most important duty of a statesman. In the British context, specifically, he believed that this fundamental sense of nationhood—what it means to be “English”, as he always called it—was most clearly expressed in the tradition of parliamentary sovereignty, and the rule of the sovereign through Parliament. He did not use the word, but he believed in English exceptionalism, that the country had a unique history, spirit and character that had to be defended and preserved.

He was a free-trader, but against the free movement of labour

Seen through this prism, all the pieces come together. Free trade and free markets had made Britain a rich country, while Keynesianism and 1950s-style consensus politics, he believed, were ruining the economy. Powell also followed the Hayekian line that economic freedom, where wealth was dispersed as widely as possible, was a bulwark against political tyranny. Above all, however, reverting to economic liberalism in Britain was perfectly compatible with English parliamentary sovereignty. The EEC and America, however, certainly were not: adhering to both meant an automatic diminution of Parliament’s power to determine the nation’s destiny.

This also explained his admiration for Russia, a country which jealously guarded its independence of action. Mass immigration, in his view, whatever the skin-colour of the immigrant, was also bound to diminish the historical character of England, by importing “alien” (his word) cultures and habits into the country.

Powellism, as described above, has a very modern ring to it. He probably would have been a fan of Vladimir Putin; Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine would doubtless have met with his approval, although maybe not Mr Trump’s assault on free trade. The modern UK Independence Party (UKIP) is wholly inspired by Powell, and forced David Cameron into holding the fateful Brexit referendum in 2016. Many of the Brexit ministers are Powellite in some of their outlook; the increasingly restrictive immigration policies owe much to the concerns first voiced by Powell. By lighting the touchpaper of anti-immigrant sentiment in 1968, he invented modern populist politics—particularly the kind fomented by society’s most educated or richest.

What should liberals learn from Powell? Perhaps it’s “Enochonomics”

So what should liberals learn from Powell? Perhaps it’s the idea of what might be called “Enochonomics”.

First, that most people are motivated by more than economic gain. Powell articulated this point for his own era, and over the past 40 years public opinion has clearly travelled in his direction. Secondly, the nation-state, and particularly “England”, really matters to most people. Powell was wholly wrong that mass immigration could change a historic sense of Englishness—but he was right that most people still care deeply about their sense of country. Liberals will have to learn to articulate a sense of patriotism—it does not necessarily have to slip over into xenophobic nationalism.

Lastly, democracy and accountability matter. His original arguments against the EEC, that it was an unaccountable bureaucracy making laws with no regard for national parliaments, were exactly those that won the day in June 2016. “Take back control” would be a fair summary of Powellism.

In some ways Enoch Powell forces us back to the drawing board. He has some harsh lessons for liberals.