From Britain's point of view the 1939 war had been a liberal war which had been entered into in a condition of moral indignation without the resource… - Maurice Cowling

The object of this volume is to suggest respects in which Mrs Thatcher's stance may be open to improvement. Its message is that a Conservative stance should not only be different from the liberal conservatism of the 1950s but should also avoid the class resentments of the converted socialists of the seventies. It should treat Liberalism and Marxism as similar sorts of doctrine and should approach the former more even that it approaches the latter with satire, ridicule and incredulity. It should feel impelled towards a diffidence, irony or detachment which, whether Christian or cynical, will enable it to avoid ethical earnestness; and it should do this not because ethical earnestness is dangerous but because it is earnest and, as Mr Heath discovered, provides no route to that unity of national sentiment for which Conservatives need to seek.

[T]he sense of national identity that existed in Britain until at least twenty years ago, with its mixture of common memories, images and expectations, may in places have been eroded; intelligence and skill will be needed if it is to be restored and, more important, extended to those who have never felt it.
For this, the Conservative party is no longer as well equipped as it used to be. Europeanism on the one hand has combined with doctrinal antitotalitarianism on the other to create the impression that the object of British policy should be resistance to Marxism. It is not, however, Marxism that it should be the object of British policy to resist. What it should be the object of British policy to resist is any threat to the independence and integrity of the United Kingdom, and in relation to this, EEC, NATO and the Commonwealth are merely instruments with no permanent claim on loyalty or attention. The only permanent claims are those which arise from the national interest defined in terms of sovereignty, historic continuity and national identity, and beyond these no other focus of loyalty is either necessary or desirable.

Mr Powell attaches the highest value to working-class opinion. It is one of his special audiences and one, moreover, that he thinks deserves a better diet than the awful pieties with which Mr Jenkins and his allies had hoped to lead it into a liberal future. Even without the exigencies of his own Irish situation, he would obviously regard it as a sympathetic support both to his stated opinions about Europe and immigration and to the conception of a unity of national sentiment transcending the divisions of the classes.
As the indication of a political position, this would be admirable if it were propounded from inside the Conservative party. It would, indeed, be a form of 'traditional Conservatism', indicating the duties of the elite, demanding from it a rhetorical commitment and establishing resonances between it and the body of the electorate in a way which no other Conservative has succeeded in doing in the last twenty-five years. If Mr Powell were still, or showed signs of wishing once more to become, a party Conservative, he would be in a position to complete the work he begun before he left—of manufacturing a spiritual glue that would bind down the elite and force it to use a language that would bind it to everyone else.