[4] His views on Britain's relations with the rest of the world derived ultimately from the belief in the independent nation state.
[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Roy Lewis stated that for Powell, the situation in Northern Ireland "went down to the roots of his position on nationhood, on British national identity, on the uniqueness of parliamentary government".
[15][16] Powell considered those who committed crimes because they believed, "however mistaken", that they were thereby helping to safeguard their country's integrity and their right to live under the Crown to be "breaches the peace".
[17] Powell also disagreed with the notion that members of the British Army were "glorified policeman", designed solely to keep order between two warring sides.
He believed that successive British governments, under American pressure, were determined to make Northern Ireland join an all-Ireland state, one way or another.
Powell believed that they should become independent sovereign states outside the United Kingdom if the Scottish and Welsh considered themselves to be separate nations from the English and the Northern Irish.
He believed that by leaving the empire and becoming independent, the new countries' affairs were no longer Britain's responsibility or in its national interest.
[25] Powell believed that even if the Soviet Union had wanted to, it would not have dared to invade Western Europe "for one simple overwhelming reason: it would have meant a war they couldn't expect to win" against the United States.
Having criticised conventions on business practice organised or funded by the government, he was the first major politician to call for de-nationalision of public services in the 1960s.
Powell's social views differed from those of his conservative allies in that he supported no-fault divorce and other aspects of the (so-called) permissive society put forth by Labour.
Thatcher desired to severely limit the power of trade unions by defeating them in open industrial showdowns, most notably with the miners' strike showdown against the NUM, whereas Powell defended labour unions and desired to build unity with the working class by winning over trade unionists to monetarist policies through logic, intelligence and political arguments that were in opposition to socialist arguments.
Powell's sentiment on Britain as part of the wider world would be more in line with Salisbury's "splendid isolation" than Thatcher's Atlanticism.
It was not until the late 1980s and into 1990 that Thatcher started expressing her increasing concern about the EEC's project to political and monetary union, whereas this was something that Powell had been warning about since the mid 1960s when he started openly opposing the EEC and the loss of British sovereignty that would result, showing Powell's stronger foresight into the matter.