Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom

"When we have done our best, we should wait the result in peace."

"We often hear of bad weather, but in reality no weather is bad. It is all delightful, though in different ways. Some weather may be bad for farmers or crops, but for man all kinds are good. Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating."

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means waste of time."

"Earth and Sky, Woods and Fields, Lakes and Rivers, the Mountain and the Sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books."

"There are three great questions which in life we have over and over again to answer. Is it right or wrong? Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our education ought to help us to answer these questions."

"The tragedy of the stooge is that even if he thinks this through, he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge."

"I accused men of being responsible for a social breakdown which is costing us all, as taxpayers, £9.1 billion per year, and which is producing a generation of ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children."

"With £90 billion currently spent on welfare, the great economic issues of our time are social. They are moral. And yet the Government is virtually incapacitated from utterance by its own bumbling."

"The modern British male is useless. If he is blue collar, he is likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment. If he is white collar, he is likely to be little better."

"Something must be found, first, to restore women's desire to be married. That means addressing the feebleness of the modern Briton, his reluctance or inability to take control of his woman and be head of a household."

"Weep O ye shirt-makers of Jermyn Street ye Cool Britannia tailors and whatever exists of human finer feeling In the Ministry of Sound, the tank-topped bumboys blub into their Pils. In the delicatessens of Elgin Crescent the sawdust is sodden with tears For months years Carla Powell will go into mourning her plumage as black as night For Mandy is dead dead ere his prime!"

"On the other hand we don’t want our children being taught some rubbish about homosexual marriage being the same as normal marriage and that is why I am more than happy to support Section 28 ..."

"Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it."

"Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power."

"If you see anyone who is obeying the law, apart from the odd motorised rickshaw, please give me a ring. The national speed limit is, de facto, 99mph, because everyone knows that you lose your licence at 100mph. The law of the land is disregarded by good people, held in contempt by Middle England, and scorned by no less a person than Jack Straw, who saw fit to scream through the sound barrier when he was Home Secretary."

"Yes, cannabis is dangerous, but no more than other perfectly legal drugs. It's time for a rethink, and the Tory party - the funkiest, most jiving party on Earth - is where it's happening."

"Ok, I said to myself as I sighted the bird down the end of the gun. This time, my fine feathered friend, there is no escape."

"It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird."

"The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more... Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. … the British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right... If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. You never saw a place so abounding in bananas: great green barrel-sized bunches, off to be turned into matooke. Though this dish (basically fried banana) was greatly relished by Idi Amin, the colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited... The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty."

"I don't see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap dancing, and other related and vital subjects."

"We are confident in our story and will be fighting this all the way. I am very sorry that Alastair Campbell has taken this decision but I can see that he got his tits in the wringer."

"Nor do I propose to defend the right to talk on a mobile while driving a car, though I don't believe that is necessarily any more dangerous than the many other risky things that people do with their free hands while driving - nose-picking, reading the paper, studying the A-Z, beating the children, and so on."

"It is hard to think of a measure that the Government could have brought to the House that I could support more unreservedly and with greater pleasure than this Bill to expand the European Union. To sum up my response, I would merely say, "And about time too.""

"I am not by any means an ultra-Eurosceptic. In some ways, I am a bit of a fan of the European Union. If we did not have one, we would invent something like it—some means of association between the sovereign states of Europe, perhaps an organisation in Brussels—overnight."

"I forgot that to rely on a train, in Blair's Britain, is to engage in a crapshoot with the devil."

"I have as much chance of becoming Prime Minister as of being decapitated by a frisbee or of finding Elvis."

"The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP, they have run out of better ideas."

"The Lib Dems are not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition."

"I could not fail to disagree with you less."

"Not even Mr Blair has been able to erode the unions conviction that we all have a “right” to a minimum wage... Both the minimum wage and the Social Charter would palpably destroy jobs."

"Any seat would be mad not to take him. He's a terrific chap."

"It is just flipping unbelievable. He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness. Nailing Blair is like trying to pin jelly to a wall."

"As snow-jobs go, this beats the Himalayas."

"That is the best case for Bush; that, among other things, he liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me."

"Some readers will no doubt say that a devil is inside me; and though my faith is a bit like Magic FM in the Chilterns, in that the signal comes and goes, I can only hope that isn't so."

"If Amsterdam or Leningrad vie for the title of Venice of the North, then Venice - what compliment is high enough? Venice, with all her civilisation and ancient beauty, Venice with her addiction to curious aquatic means of transport, yes, my friends, Venice is the Henley of the South."

"[On Tony Blair] He's lost the plot, people tell me. He's drifting rudderless in the wide Sargasso Sea of New Labour's ideological vacuum."

"Look the point is ... er, what is the point? It is a tough job but somebody has got to do it."

"It was a stellar performance. I may as well give up now and make way for an older man."

"There is absolutely no one, apart from yourself, who can prevent you, in the middle of the night, from sneaking down to tidy up the edges of that hunk of cheese at the back of the fridge."

"My chances of being PM are about as good as the chances of finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive."

"I didn't see it, but it sounds barbaric. It's become like cock-fighting: poor dumb brutes being set upon each other by conniving television producers."

"Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix, and stay conscious."

"I have not had an affair with Petronella. It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle. It is all completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture. I am amazed people can write this drivel."

"Tremendous, little short of superb. On cracking form."

"I advise you all very strongly - go for a run, get some exercise, and have a beautiful day."

"Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike, as much as the sight of you ker-splonked on the Tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under."

"My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters."

"But here's old Ken - he's been crass, he's been insensitive and thuggish and brutal in his language - but I don't think actually if you read what he said, although it was extraordinary and rude, I don't think he was actually anti-Semitic."

"Howard is a dynamic performer on many levels. There you are. He sent me to Liverpool. Marvellous place. Howard was the most effective Home Secretary since Peel. Hang on, was Peel Home Secretary?"

"I'm having Sunday lunch with my family. I'm vigorously campaigning, inculcating my children in the benefits of a Tory government."

"What we hate, what we fear, is being ignored."

"I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around."

"The proposed ban on incitement to "religious hatred" makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself; and that would be pretty absurd, when you consider that the Bill's intention is to fight Islamophobia."

"I'm backing David Cameron's campaign out of pure, cynical self-interest."

"I think I was once given cocaine but I sneezed so it didn't go up my nose. In fact, it may have been icing sugar."

"I lost the job, but the well the honest truth is that this has been embellished by, probably by me, in the sense that there were two of us who were taken on as trainees, and this was in the, the, the 80s, I think it was the late 80s, and it was him or me who was going to get the job at the end of, at the end of, eight months or nine months.... It was, it was absolutely, it was mano-a-mano and of course it was him who got it."

"I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall, and I'd listen to this amazing crash from the greenhouse, next door, over, over in England, as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party, and, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of, of power."

"I can't remember what my line on drugs is. What's my line on drugs?"

"Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3."

"Old Man Howard, that Old Man Howard, he just keeps rolling, just keeps rolling."

"I'm very attracted to it. I may be diverting from Tory party policy here, but I don't care."

"Life isn't like coursework, baby. It's one damn essay crisis after another."

"I'm a rugby player, really, and I knew I was going to get to him, and when he was about two yards away I just put my head down. There was no malice. I was going for the ball with my head, which I understand is a legitimate move in soccer."

"Not only did I want Bush to win, but we threw the entire weight of The Spectator behind him."

"Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase... Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms: Chinese concert pianists are technically brilliant, but brilliant at Schubert and Rachmaninov. Chinese ballerinas dance to the scores of Diaghilev. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, although there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech... It is hard to think of a single Chinese sport at the Olympics, compared with umpteen invented by Britain, including ping-pong, I'll have you know, which originated at upper-class dinner tables and was first called whiff-whaff. The Chinese have a script so fiendishly complicated that they cannot produce a proper keyboard for it."

"For 10 years we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour party."

"I meant no insult to the people of Papua New Guinea, who I'm sure lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity like the rest of us... I am happy to add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology."

"I've got a brilliant new strategy, which is to make so many gaffes that nobody knows which one to concentrate on. [...] They cease to be newsworthy, you completely out-general the media in that way, and they despair. [...] You shell them, you pepper the media... you've got to pepper their positions with so many gaffes that they're confused. It's like a helicopter throwing out chaff, and then you steal on quietly and drop your depth charges wherever you want to drop them."

"The real hero of Jaws is the mayor. A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. OK, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor - we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer."

"The world's population is now 6.7 billion, roughly double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime. The UN last year revised its forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050, and I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat the issue with the seriousness it deserves."

"[O]ver the years, the argument changed, and certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very discussion of overall human fertility — global motherhood — has become more or less banned."

"All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn't it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?"

"Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb."

"[On attempting to find any reason to oppose Barack Obama] In the end I gave up, goggle-eyed and exhausted, having trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun."

"Had it been us staging the Games, I don't think we would necessarily have done the switcheroo with the girl with the braces"

"My policy on cake is still pro having it and pro eating it!"

"Thank you very much Mr Meyer, Anthony Meyer that is. I want to thank you, I want to thank the police of course, and my wife Marina and my family, and my utterly brilliant campaign team, the Conservative GLA candidates — some of whom were extremely unlucky tonight — and of course the thousands of Conservative activists, the ward captains and knocker-uppers who did such an amazing job today, and indeed yesterday, rather."

"This has been a marathon election as you can tell with a record turnout and I think it has been good for politics and it has been good for London."

"I want to thank Sian [Berry, Green Party] and Lindsey [German, Left List] and Alan [Craig, Christian Peoples Party] and Gerard [Batten, UKIP], who have sometimes joined us for hustings, but mainly I want to thank my two colleagues in the strange triumvirate who have been trundling around London's church halls and TV studios violently disputing the meaning of multiculturalism and the exact cost of conductors. On which point I think I'm going to declare victory."

"And I want to congratulate you Brian [Paddick] on your great common sense and decency with which you put your case and I do hope that it is not the end of our discussions about the police."

"And as for Ken, Mayor Livingstone, I think you have been a very considerable public servant and a distinguished leader of this city."

"You shaped the office of mayor. You gave it national prominence and when London was attacked on 7 July 2005 you spoke for London."

"And I can tell you that your courage and the sheer exuberant nerve with which you stuck it to your enemies, especially in New Labour, you have thereby earned the thanks and admiration of millions of Londoners, even if you think that they have a funny way of showing it today."

"And when we have that drink together which we both so richly deserve, I hope we can discover a way in which the mayoralty can continue to benefit from your transparent love of London, a city whose energy conquered the world and which now brings the world together in one city."

"I do not for one minute believe that this election shows that London has been transformed overnight into a Conservative city but I do hope it does show that the Conservatives have changed into a party that can again be trusted after 30 years with the greatest, most cosmopolitan, multi-racial generous hearted city on earth in which there are huge and growing divisions between rich and poor."

"And that brings me to my final thank you which is of course to the people of London."

"I would like to thank first the vast multitudes who voted against me - and I have met quite a few in the last nine months, not all of them entirely polite."

"I will work flat out from now on to earn your trust and to dispel some of the myths that have been created about me."

"And as for those who voted for me, I know there will be many whose pencils hovered for an instant before putting an X in my box and I will work flat out to repay and to justify your confidence."

"We have a new team ready to go in to City Hall. Where there have been mistakes we will rectify them. Where there are achievements we will build on them."

"Where there are neglected opportunities we will seize on them, and we will focus on the priorities of the people of London: cutting crime, improving transport, protecting green space, delivering affordable housing, giving taxpayers value for money in every one of the 32 boroughs."

"And I hope that everybody who loves this city will put aside party differences to try in the making of Greater London greater still. Let's get cracking tomorrow and let's have a drink tonight."

"In 1904, 20 per cent of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see a figure like that again. If you can't turn the clock back to 1904, what's the point of being a Conservative?"

"The meat in the sausage has got to be Conservative"

"When a regime has been in power too long, when it has fatally exhausted the patience of the people, and when oblivion finally beckons – I am afraid that across the world you can rely on the leaders of that regime to act solely in the interests of self-preservation, and not in the interests of the electorate. ... First-past-the-post has served this country well, and served dozens of other countries well. We would be mad to go to a great deal of trouble and expense to adopt a system that is less fair than the one we have. ... By all means let us have a referendum – the one we were promised, on the Lisbon EU Treaty."

"The excitement is growing so much I think the Geiger counter of Olympo-mania is going to go zoink off the scale."

"They are like glistening wet otters frolicking."

"It is often useful to give the slight impression that you are deliberately pretending not to know what is going on, because the reality may be that you don't know what is going on, but people won't be able to tell the difference."

"If we left the EU, we would end this sterile debate, and we would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by “Bwussels”, but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure."

"Now can I ask you a question, "Why is it that we're lucky to have so many Chinese students?" Is it because of the weather? Is it because we have so many French restaurants? Is it because we have so many communist bicycles? [At Beijing's 798 art district, 13 October 2013]"

"[A demonstration of "cultural interpenetration" between the UK and China] Who, according to JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, was Harry Potter's first girlfriend? Who is the first person he kisses? That's right, Cho Chang, who is a Chinese overseas student at Hogwarts school. [...] Ladies and gents I rest my case. [From a speech at Peking university, 14 October 2013]"

"[On deputy prime minister Nick Clegg] He's there to serve a very important ceremonial function as David Cameron's lapdog-cum-prophylactic protection device for all the difficult things that David Cameron has to do that cheese off the rest of the ... [ending absent] He’s a kind of shield. He’s a lapdog who’s been skinned and turned into a shield to protect."

"Putin's proxy army was almost certainly guilty of killing the passengers on the Malaysia Airlines jet that came down in eastern Ukraine. He has questions to answer about the death of Alexander Litvinenko, pitilessly poisoned in a London restaurant. As for his reign in Moscow, he is allegedly the linchpin of a vast post-Soviet gangster kleptocracy, and is personally said to be the richest man on the planet. Journalists who oppose him get shot. His rivals find themselves locked up. Despite looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf, he is a ruthless and manipulative tyrant."

"The choice is really quite simple. In favour of staying, it is in Britain’s geo-strategic interests to be pretty intimately engaged in the doings of a continent that has a grim 20th-century history, and whose agonies have caused millions of Britons to lose their lives. History shows that they need us. Leaving would be widely read as a very negative signal for Europe. It would dismay some of our closest friends, not least the eastern Europeans for whom the EU has been a force for good: stability, openness, and prosperity. It is also true that the single market is of considerable value to many UK companies and consumers, and that leaving would cause at least some business uncertainty, while embroiling the Government for several years in a fiddly process of negotiating new arrangements, so diverting energy from the real problems of this country – low skills, low social mobility, low investment etc – that have nothing to do with Europe."

"Think of Britain. Think of the rest of the EU. Think of the future. Think of the desire of your children and your grandchildren to live and work in other European countries; to sell things there, to make friends and perhaps to find partners there."

"And then there is the whole geostrategic anxiety. Britain is a great nation, a global force for good. It is surely a boon for the world and for Europe that she should be intimately engaged in the EU. This is a market on our doorstep, ready for further exploitation by British firms: the membership fee seems rather small for all that access."

"There is only one way to get the change we need - and that is to vote to go; because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says no."

"They want us to go to the polls in such a state of quivering apprehension that we do the bidding of the Euro-elites, and vote to stay in the European Union."

"Leaving the EU would be a win-win for all. The EU costs us a huge amount of money and subverts our democracy"

"[The UK is] big enough and strong enough to stand on its own"

"Would anyone in their right mind want to join the EU today?"

"You look at the plan to increase the efforts to prop up the single currency with an ever denser system of integration, with more and more regulation about all sorts of social and economic issues which will impact directly on this country, I think the risk is increasingly in staying in the project. I think the best thing we can do is show a lead, show an example and strike out for freedom."

"The EU is 50 years old, it is going in the wrong direction. It is time for real reform. The only way to get that is to leave."

"We will be informed by our most important ally that it is in our interests to stay in the EU, no matter how flawed we may feel that organisation to be. Never mind the loss of sovereignty; never mind the expense and the bureaucracy and the uncontrolled immigration. The American view is very clear."

"Something mysterious happened when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009. Something vanished from that room, and no one could quite explain why. It was a bust of Winston Churchill – the great British war time leader. It was a fine goggle-eyed object, done by the brilliant sculptor Jacob Epstein, and it had sat there for almost ten years. But on day one of the Obama administration it was returned, without ceremony, to the British embassy in Washington. No one was sure whether the President had himself been involved in the decision. Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President's ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender. Some said that perhaps Churchill was seen as less important than he once was. Perhaps his ideas were old-fashioned and out of date. Well, if that's why Churchill was banished from the Oval Office, they could not have been more wrong."

"There was a young fellow from Ankara Who was a terrific wankerer Till he sowed his wild oats With the help of a goat But he didn't even stop to thankera."

"Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically [...] The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. But fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void."

"After we liberate ourselves from the shackles of Brussels we will be able to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs right across the UK."

"Take back control of huge sums of money, 350 million pounds a week, and spend it on our priorities such as the NHS."

"Oh shit, we've got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen. Holy crap, what will we do?"

"There is no need for haste about severing the UK's ties [with the EU]"

"[The UK is] no less united... nor indeed any less European [following the decision to leave the EU]."

"It is vital now to see this [Brexit] moment for what it is. This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt, but it is a moment for hope and ambition for Britain. A time not to fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the flood, and sail on to fortune."

"We can all spend an awfully long time going over lots of stuff that I've written over the last 30 years... all of which in my view have been taken out of context, but never mind... I'm afraid that there is such a rich thesaurus now of things that I have said that have been one way or another, through what alchemy I do not know, somehow misconstrued that it would take me too long to engage in a full global itinerary of apology to all concerned."

"If Monsieur Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who chooses to escape, rather in the manner of some World War Two movie, then I don't think that is the way forward. I think, actually, it's not in the interests of our friends and our partners."

"I think Rex Tillerson is absolutely clear in his view, which is the same as mine. You have got to engage with Russia, but you have got to engage in a very guarded way. You have got to beware of what they are up to. There is no question that, when you look at Russian activity on the cyber front, when you look at what they are doing in the western Balkans, when you look at what has been happening in the Ukraine, you've got to be very, very cautious. I think it is entirely right to have a dual track approach. We don't want to get into a new Cold War. That's something London and Washington are completely at one on. But nor do we want Russian behaviour to continue as it is - and Rex Tillerson has been very clear about that."

"There is no plan for no deal because we are going to get a great deal,"

"There's a group of UK business people, wonderful guys who want to invest in , on the coast, near where Gaddafi was actually captured and executed as some of you may have seen. And they literally have a brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, to turn it into the next . The only thing they've got to do is clear the dead bodies away and then they'll be there."

"[At a Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee meeting on 1 November 2017] When I look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it. [Neither] Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe nor her family has been informed about what crime she has actually committed. And that I find extraordinary, incredible."

"[In the Commons on 7 November 2017, after criticism his earlier comments might make Zaghari-Ratcliffe's position worse] My point was that I disagreed with the Iranian view that training journalists was a crime - not that I wanted to lend any credence to Iranian allegations that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been engaged in such activity. I accept that my remarks could have been clearer in that respect, and I'm glad to provide this clarification."

"Ridiculous outcry over Toby Young. He will bring independence, rigour and caustic wit. Ideal man for job."

"[The attack was] a sign [from President Putin that] no-one could escape the long arm of Russian revenge ... [The attack] was a sign that President Putin or the Russian state wanted to give to potential defectors in their own agencies: 'This is what happens to you if you decide to support a country with a different set of values. You can expect to be assassinated'."

"If you do that you have to answer the question what next? What if the Iranians do rush for a nuclear weapon? Are we seriously saying that we are going to bomb those facilities at Fordo and Natanz? Is that really a realistic possibility? Or do we work round what we have got and push back on Iran together?"

"[T]hrow the baby out with the bathwater"

"If he can fix North Korea and if he can fix the Iran nuclear deal then I don't see why he is any less of a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize than Barack Obama, who got it before he even did anything,"

"I don't see why he's any less of a candidate for the than Barack Obama."

"[America wants to see] a confident free-trading Britain able to do its own deals"

"[A trade deal with America can not be achieved if the UK remained] in the lunar pull of Brussels"

"[A customs partnership would create] a whole new web of bureaucracy"

"Fuck business."

"[The Brexit] dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt"

"If you tell me that the burka is oppressive, then I am with you. If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree – and I would add that I can find no scriptural authority for the practice in the Koran. I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes; and I thoroughly dislike any attempt by any – invariably male – government to encourage such demonstrations of "modesty"."

"If a constituent came to my MP’s surgery with her face obscured, I should feel fully entitled – like Jack Straw – to ask her to remove it so that I could talk to her properly. If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber then ditto: those in authority should be allowed to converse openly with those that they are being asked to instruct."

"I am against a total ban because it is inevitably construed – rightly or wrongly – as being intended to make some point about Islam. If you go for a total ban, you play into the hands of those who want to politicise and dramatise the so-called clash of civilisations; and you fan the flames of grievance. You risk turning people into martyrs, and you risk a general crackdown on any public symbols of religious affiliation, and you may simply make the problem worse."

"It [Theresa May's Chequers plan] is a humiliation. We look like a seven-stone weakling being comically bent out of shape by a 500lb gorilla."

"Theresa May's Chequers plan for future relations with the EU would mean] abandoning our seat around the table in Brussels and continuing to accept the single market legislation"

"[There has been a] collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people."

"[The Chequers proposals represented] the intellectual error of believing we can be half-in, half-out"

"[A Super Canada deal would involve] zero tariffs and zero quotas [on all imports and exports]"

"[A Super Canada deal would involve: mutual recognition agreements covering UK and EU regulations to ensure] conformity of goods with each other's standards"

"[The UK should] chuck Chequers"

"[EU regulations would] cheat the electorate"

"if we get it wrong we will be punished"

"[I am] grateful to the committee for recognising that there was no intention to mislead the House and that I had been completely transparent"

"[I] didn't say anything about Turkey during the referendum. Since I made no remarks...I can't disown them"

"Take that [Irish border] backstop out, or at the very least give us a legally binding change - within the text of the agreement - that allows for the UK to come out [of the EU] of its own accord, and then we will be able to say that the agreement is imperfect but at least tolerable."

"I think an awful lot of money, an awful lot of police time, now goes into these historic offences and all this malarkey and you know £60million I saw has been spaffed up the wall on some investigation into historic child abuse? What on earth is that going to do to protect the public now?"

"The British people won't be scared into backing a woeful Brexit deal nobody voted for"

"We are being asked to vote for a customs union and a second referendum. The Bill is directly against our manifesto - and I will not vote for it. We can and must do better - and deliver what the people voted for."

"We will leave the EU on 31 October, deal or no deal. The way to get a good deal is to prepare for a no deal."

"[I will beat Labour and] put Nigel Farage back in his box"

"We will not be forgiven if we do not deliver Brexit on October 31"

"We need to realise the depth of the problems we face. Unless we get on and do this thing, we will be punished for a very long time. There is a very real choice between getting Brexit done and the potential extinction of this great party."

"I believe I am best placed to lift this party, beat Jeremy Corbyn and excite people about conservatism and conservative values."

"[The backstop is a "monstrosity" that wipes out the UK's sovereignty and is] being used to coerce the UK into becoming a vassal state of Brussels"

"[I am] not aiming for a no-deal [Brexit] outcome"

"[I will take the UK out of the EU by Halloween] come what may, do or die"

"If you Brexit sensibly and effectively, you take away so much of the ammunition of the SNP."

"We should actively campaign for a public understanding of the benefits of the [UK] union, economic and strategic, for the people and its component nations,"

"Interviewer: Can you give an example, in your political life, when you've set your own self-interest aside for the benefit of the country? Boris Johnson: Well, er, pfft, um, it's a good question, but er, I, I, I would, you know, I don't, obviously, it's an embarrassing but, but true that, um, er, it is obviously, possible, er, how should I put this, to make more money, er, by not being a full-time politician. Um, I don't, I don't want to put too finer point on it, er, but, you know, you have to, you have to, you have to, make sacrifices sometimes."

"Andrew Neil: You talk about article 5B in . Boris Johnson: Article 24, get it right Andrew, it's article 24, paragraph 5B. Andrew Neil: And how would you handle paragraph 5C? Boris Johnson: I would confide entirely in paragraph 5B. Andrew Neil: But how would you get round what's in 5C? Boris Johnson: I would confide entirely in paragraph 5B which is enough for out purposes. Andrew Neil: Do you know what is in 5C? Boris Johnson: No."

"[I will] deliver Brexit, unite the country and defeat Jeremy Corbyn"

"We are going to energise the country. We are going to get Brexit done on 31 October and take advantage of all the opportunities it will bring with a new spirit of can do. We are once again going to believe in ourselves, and like some slumbering giant we are going to rise and ping off the guy ropes of self doubt and negativity."

"Under no circumstances would we agree to any free-trade deal that put the NHS on the table."

"We want to, and we are going to, deliver on the mandate of the people, which is to take the UK out of the EU whole and entire on 31 October"

"[The Irish border backstop would] keep us locked in EU regulatory orbit, locked in the EU trading system, unable to control our own laws"

"Preparing urgently and rapidly for the possibility of an [EU] exit without a deal will be my top priority, and it will be the top priority for the civil service too."

"MPs should "honour the mandate of the people" by leaving the EU."

"There's a terrible kind of collaboration as it were, going on between people who think they can block Brexit in Parliament and our European friends"

"[The Irish border backstop is] inconsistent with the sovereignty of the UK"

"I do think they [the EU] understand there's an opportunity to do a deal. I think it's going to be touch and go."

"I just say to everybody in the country, including everyone in Parliament, the fundamental choice is this: Are you going to side with Jeremy Corbyn and those who want to cancel the referendum? Are you going to side with those who want to scrub the democratic verdict of the people - and plunge this country into chaos. Or are you going to side with those of us who want to get on, deliver the mandate of the people and focus with absolute, laser-like precision on the domestic agenda?"

"[I would] rather be dead in a ditch [than ask the EU to delay Brexit beyond 31 October]"

"I've looked carefully at no deal, I've assessed its consequences, both for our country and yours, and yes, of course, we could do it, the UK could certainly get through it, but be in no doubt that the outcome would be a failure of statecraft."

"Man: The NHS has been destroyed. It's been destroyed. It's been destroyed, and now you come here for a press opportunity. Boris Johnson: Well actually there's no press here. Man: [Points at camera crew] What do you mean there's no press here?"

"I've never heard such humbug in all my life."

"We have got a deal, oven-ready, by which we can leave the EU in a few weeks. It’s a great deal for this country. It delivers everything that I wanted when I campaigned for Brexit"

"Let's get Brexit done, but first my friends let's get breakfast done."

"I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands. People obviously can make up their own minds but I think the scientific evidence is... our judgement is that washing your hands is the crucial thing."

"I want to stress that for the vast majority of the people of this country, we should be going about our business as usual."

"We are embarked now on a great voyage, a project that no one thought in the international community that this country would have the guts to undertake, but if we are brave and if we truly commit to the logic of our mission - open, outward-looking - generous, welcoming, engaged with the world championing global free trade now when global free trade needs a global champion. I believe we can make a huge success of this venture, for Britain, for our European friends, and for the world."

"We are telling cafes, bars, pubs and restaurants to close tonight as soon as they reasonably can and not to open tomorrow. To be clear they can continue to provide take out services. Night clubs, theatres, gyms and leisure centres should close on the same time scale. These are places where people come together and indeed the whole purpose is to bring people together. Some people will be tempted to go out tonight. Please don't. You may think you are invincible bit there is no guarantee you will get mild symptoms. As far as possible we want you to stay at home - that's how we can protect our NHS and save lives."

"We have so far succeeded in the first and most important task we set ourselves as a nation to avoid the tragedy that engulfed other parts of the world."

"At this stage I do not think that the international comparisons and the data are yet there to draw the conclusions that we want."

"I am meant to be in control. I am the Führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions."

"[On the assumption Carrie Symonds, now Johnson, had briefed against Dominic Cummings] She hasn't briefed anyone and my instructions to all were to shut the f*** up. How is any of us supposed to know where these briefings come from? Look at the claims made on behalf of allies of Lee [Cain] and Dom, that I'm out in six months, that I can't take decisions, that Carrie is secretly forging lockdown policy, and about a billion equally demented claims. Are you responsible for all that crap? No. Then look at it from my point of view. This is a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism by a government that should be solving a national crisis."

"[The Conservative Party] thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just Nature's way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them. A lot of moderate people think it is a bit too much."

"We have to recognise that the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European land mass are over, and there are other, better things we should be investing in, in FCAS, in the future combat air system, in cyber, this is how warfare in the future is going to be."

"No more fucking lockdowns - let the bodies pile high in their thousands."

"I repeat, Mr. Speaker, that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party, and that no COVID rules were broken."

"I can tell you; I DO brush it! I have a comb in my office!"

"I believed implicitly that this was a work event. But Mr. Speaker, with hindsight, I should have sent everyone back inside, I should have found some other way to thank them, and I should have recognised that even if it could be said technically to fall within the guidelines, there would be millions and millions of people who simply would not see it that way."

"[I]f we took away the whip from everyone here [in the House of Commons] who's pinched someone's bottom, we'll lose our majority."

"It is clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative Party that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new prime minister. … I know that there will be many people who are relieved and perhaps quite a few who will also be disappointed. And I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world. But them's the breaks. … I want to thank you, the British public, for the immense privilege that you have given me. And I want you to know that from now on until the new prime minister is in place, your interests will be served and the government of the country will be carried on."

"He [Vladimir Putin] threatened me at one point, and he said, "Boris, I don't want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute" or something like that. Jolly. But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate."

"To those who say we may be denuding our own arsenals by giving the support, I say what is the point in deploying tanks and planes in North Carolina or North Rhine-Westphalia when Ukrainians could be using them now, where they are needed to help assure our collective security for decades?"

"I believe that, once this war is done, once the Ukrainians have won, then yes they should begin the process of induction both to Nato and to the EU."

"I have received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear - much to my amazement - that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament. They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons. They know perfectly well that when I spoke in the Commons, I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true and what I had been briefed to say, like any other minister. They know that I corrected the record as soon as possible; and they know that I and every other senior official and minister - including the current Prime Minister and then occupant of the same building, Rishi Sunak - believed that we were working lawfully together. I have been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts, the Committee know it. But they have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth, because from the outset, their purpose has not been to discover the truth, or genuinely to understand what was in my mind when I spoke in the Commons. Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court. Most members of the Committee - especially the chair - had already expressed deeply prejudicial remarks about my guilt before they had even seen the evidence. They should have recused themselves."

"[In March 2021, I] had commissioned some work on whether it might be technically feasible to launch an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and to take that which was legally ours and which the UK desperately needed."

"[After consultations] I secretly agreed with what they all thought, but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts."

"Frankly, once I pulled the carpets out of the flat in No 11, which is where we lived … the whole thing was looking a bit like a crack den, to be totally honest, and it needed to be refurbished."

"We're waging a proxy war (Russian invasion of Ukraine), but we're not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. For years now, we've been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs and it has been cruel."

"[On George W. Bush] What has brought so many folk on to the streets, however, is a much broader case: the President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy and who by his violent and ill-thought-out actions in Afghanistan and Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place. In so far as this may be an accurate representation of the marchers' beliefs, it deserves an answer. Let us dispense with the trivial abuse. The President was duly elected. He cannot help his buzzard-like appearance. Whatever the deficiencies of his syntax, they do not justify the loathing in which he is held."

"With friends like these, who needs Yemenis?"

"Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility."

"I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else."

"Boris was told to engage his brain before speaking in future."

"You are a self-centred, pompous twit. Even your body language on TV is pathetic. Get out of public life. Go and do something in the private sector."

"Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'"

"Boris Johnson voted in favour of scrapping section 28, although he had previously compared gay marriage to bestiality in a book he published, and referred to gay men as "tank-topped bumboys" while working as a journalist."

"Most politicians are ambitious and ruthless, but Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – my wallet. It is unnecessary to take any moral view about his almost crazed infidelities, but it is hard to believe that any man so conspicuously incapable of controlling his own libido is fit to be trusted with controlling the country. His chaotic public persona is not an act – he is, indeed, manically disorganised about everything except his own image management. He is also a far more ruthless, and frankly nastier, figure than the public appreciates."

"I would not take Boris's word about whether it is Monday or Tuesday."

"What does that say about you Boris Johnson? Aren't you in fact making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted...you're a nasty piece of work, aren't you?"

"There's no point trying to contain Boris. He's mayor of London, he can speak out if he wants to"

"The book reads as if it was dictated, not written. All the way through we hear Boris's voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster."

"Mr. Johnson ... made his name in Brussels not with honest reporting but with extreme euroskepticism, tirelessly attacking, mocking and denigrating the European Union. He wrote about European Union plans to take over Europe, ban Britain’s favorite potato chips, standardize condom sizes and blow up its own asbestos-filled headquarters. These articles were undoubtedly colorful but they bore scant relation to the truth."

"I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead."

"I am surprised and disappointed that you have chosen to repeat the figure of £350 million per week, in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union. This confuses gross and net contributions. It also assumes that payments currently made to the UK by the EU, including for example for the support of agriculture and scientific research, will not be paid by the UK government when we leave. It is a clear misuse of official statistics."

"He has turned being an upper-class buffoon into an art form."

"Not in my lifetime has there been a politician with less substance inflicting greater national damage."

"I've made an assessment of him over many years. He is a shallow populist – manifestly unsuitable for high office – who would undoubtedly be a disaster for the country and bring doom to the Conservative Party."

"I know that within the Tory party the hard Brexiteers are compared to the leaders of the French revolution. I think Gove is Brissot, and Boris Johnson is Danton, and Rees-Mogg is compared to Robespierre. We should not forget that the efforts of these men were not appreciated by the common man they claimed to represent – because they all ended up on the guillotine. So that’s important to remind [them]."

"You just don't care for anything because you're spoilt. You have no care for money or anything."

"Boris is an intellectual. They are rare among PMs. Gordon Brown was one, as was A J Balfour at the beginning of the 20th century. Boris should write a book a year to keep his mind engaged and active."

"Boris will be the most fun prime minister since Harold Wilson. We need that quality back into the heart of the nation and recognise that quality of life matters as much as economic statistics."

"Boris is a big man who doesn’t bear grudges. He should have a broad-based government of all talents. Once Brexit is resolved, there'll be long overdue challenges to solve."

"We must let Boris be Boris — and watch the fun begin."

"Good man, he's tough and he's smart. They're saying "Britain Trump", they call him "Britain Trump"."

"A clownish figure with silly hair and a passing relationship with the truth."

"90,000 Conservative members, whose views have become more extreme as their numbers have fallen, recently selected Boris Johnson as their new leader, and thus as the country's new prime minister. In doing so, they have chosen a mendacious chancer. It is no exaggeration to say that Johnson has lied his way to the top, first in journalism and then in politics."

"The Prime Minister's advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect."

"Feel a bit sick at Jo's name being used in this way."

"My brother is using words like surrender and capitulation as if the people standing in the way of the blessed will of the people as defined by 17.4m votes in 2016 should be hung, drawn, quartered, tarred and feathered. I think that is highly reprehensible language to use."

"The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail."

"The Prime Minister of our nation will, at times, have to stand up to President Trump, President Putin, President Xi of China. So it is surely not expecting too much that he spend half an hour standing up to me."

"Look what happens when the Labour party moves so, so far to the left. It comes up with ideas that are not able to be contained within a rational basis quickly. You're also going to see people saying, my God, Boris Johnson, who is kind of a physical and emotional clone of the president, is able to win."

"The Boris Johnson government's initial response to COVID-19 was the now discredited policy of "herd immunity" — the strategy of letting the virus rip through the population, infecting up to 40 million people, most of whom would recover and then supposedly be immune to the virus. The only problem was that this would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths — a prospect the Tories had to abandon in the face of expert denunciation and widespread public outrage. Johnson's change of tack was to move finally towards lockdown, advising against mass gatherings and urging people to avoid clubs, pubs, and restaurants — and most travel — as well as advising older people to self isolate."

"According to the Director-General of the WHO, the choice to abandon systematic testing and contract tracing, which were effective in Korea and Taiwan, was a major mistake that contributed to the spread of the virus in virtually every country. The ultimate cause of this alarming delay were strategic choices. [...] Other countries waited far too long to react, largely on the basis of the and crypto-Darwinian strategy of "herd immunity." Boris Johnson's United Kingdom was entirely passive in its initial approach."

"What I would say to people is, the prime minister's got very, very difficult choices to make, and I would encourage all members of the public and MPs to listen extremely carefully to what the prime minister says today and over coming days"

"The most accomplished liar in public life — perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister."

"He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true. And because he has been so famous for this skill for so long, he can use his reputation to ascend to new levels of playful paradox."

"Calling Johnson’s radicalism “hard right” might sound overdrawn. He did not set out to lead the party further to the right or, indeed, to lead it anywhere. His primary aim was to lead the party. Finding a label for his outlook is accordingly in one way pointless. Like Trump, he has no settled outlook. Nor is he unique in that regard among British Conservatives. Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Thatcherism, the Conservative Party has had no clear viewpoint. Anti-Europeanism, which appeared to fill the gap, was negative and temporary. Lacking aims or content of its own, Johnson’s radicalism lies in his forceful, hard-right style, with its disregard for familiar liberal-democratic norms and its claims to speak for “the people” against the elites and institutions. As a superbly skilled “trimmer,” Johnson is suited to improvisation by character and driven to it by predicament. Britain’s divided hard right, which he took over and found himself having to manage, promised implausibly to please both global-minded business and voters fed up with neglected public services, insecure work, and lack of housing."

"From the start Johnson has been a clown, but a useful clown. Now and then he has to be sacked, but he is always taken back, perhaps with a mock sigh. He has never quite equalled the stream of lies that he manufactured as Daily Telegraph correspondent in Brussels in the early 1990s: that the EU wanted to ban prawn cocktail crisps and British sausages, and to standardise the size of condoms because Italians had smaller penises. Week after week, he produced juicy fibs which had news editors on other papers demanding similar stuff from their own reporters in Brussels. Conrad Black, then the owner of the Telegraph and himself on the receiving end of several Johnson lies, was delighted. When Johnson was about to become prime minister in the summer of 2019, Black saluted his old employee, who "was such an effective correspondent for us in Brussels that he greatly influenced British opinion on this country's relations with Europe"."

"[Response to Q1109] Fundamentally, the reason for all these problems was bad policy, bad decisions, bad planning and bad operational capability. It doesn't matter that you have great people doing communications if the Prime Minister changes his mind 10 times a day, and then calls up the media and contradicts his own policy, day after day after day. You are going to have a communications disaster zone. Few things are discussed more inaccurately than communications"

"[Response to Q1126] nobody could find a way around the problem of the Prime Minister just, like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle into the other."

"[Response to Q1194] The heart of the problem was fundamentally I regarded him as unfit for the job."

"The culture wars suit the Johnson way of doing things [...] He's good at things that involve short, memorable slogans and showmanship. Is he good at test and trace? Not conspicuously so. Is he good at PPE? No. Is he good at lockdown timing? Absolutely not. But the thing that he's quite good at is spotting a dividing line."

"He rewrites reality in his mind afresh according to the moment’s demands. He lies — so blatantly, so naturally, so regularly — that there is no real distinction possible with him, as there is with normal people, between truth and lies."

"He [Johnson] is totally untrusted by anybody in No 10 yet has a superpower for making people feel sorry for him — "I feel sorry for him like my old dead-beat boyfriend, I hate myself for it but I can’t help it," said one in despair after a particularly dreadful meeting."

"His natural instinct is not to be open, not to be transparent, not to be accountable, but narcissitically to think 'what suits me, how can I extricate myself from this awkward situation, by what means can I arrogate blame somewhere else?'"

"I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take. Yesterday, he did the opposite of that. So I'll remind him of a quotation, altogether too familiar to him, of Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain, "You have sat there too long, for all the good you have done, in the name of God go.""

"Most politicians, as far as I can work out, are pretty incompetent, and then have a veneer of competence, you do seem to do it the other way around."

"Right now a visit of Boris Johnson in Kyiv started from one-on-one meeting with President Zelenskyy"

"This would activate the Queen. Lascelles Principles will direct her to decline his request for a dissolution. She then is left with the choice to dismiss him or not."

"Now think of Boris Johnson. All of these feelings will apply to him. He is going to be Heath with jokes added in, and Thatcher with consistency taken out, all rolled into a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted vindication that will be a permanent nightmare for the new prime minister. That he wants revenge on Rishi Sunak is already apparent, but if Liz Truss is elected, she will face the identical problem. The chances of her loyalty to him being repaid are close to zero. Boris lives his life as a performance, and he will want the next act to fill every seat in the theatre of British political life. The Conservative Party had no choice but to remove Johnson from office. His standards of governance and veracity had fallen below what reasonable people could defend. The downside is that the party will always have the problem of what he will say next."

"Q: You have supported a Prime Minister that has continually lied to the Queen, Parliament and the entire United Kingdom, therefore does this not bring into question your own personal integrity and honesty? A: I don't agree with that. Boris Johnson has been an excellent prime minister. He delivered on Brexit. He delivered on the Covid vaccine and he delivered on standing up to Vladimir Putin and backing the Ukrainians. I am proud of what he did."

"In some sense, him running is the dream [...] Droning on about how they need a sensible, serious person to fix the mess they’ve made then that honking pudding turns up with his travelling circus trailing behind. ... Is he a greased piglet any more? He became deeply unpopular with the public because the joke wore thin, he got humiliatingly booted out as PM and he set the Tories on a path to ruin. He was booed at the Queen’s Jubilee. The public tolerance for him would be so, so thin."

"There are several very good potential candidates for Conservative leader. But choosing Boris now would be — and I say this advisedly — an absolutely catastrophic decision."

"In his resignation speech, Boris Johnson showed no awareness of any personal failings that had led his party to turn on him. "When the herd moves, it moves," he complained, without apparent thought as to what might have provoked the herd into stampeding. He later complained the rules had been changed halfway through the relay race that the premiership had become. There had indeed been no rule against No 10 parties, but by the time they happened in lockdown it was against the law. There was no rule that a PM must resign if more than 50 of their ministers quit, but since being able to form a government that commands a Commons majority is the basis for being in power it should hardly need saying that these are circumstances that make resignation inevitable. Boris tried to break rules that no one had previously thought it necessary to state."

"Johnson and I really loathed each other. It was obvious. We really never spoke behind the scenes very much."

"[Sir Keir Starmer on being referred to as Sir Crasheroonie Snoozefest by Johnson.] It doesn’t matter — because I really couldn't give a toss and, you know, I really loathed him. He didn't stand for anything, he had no principles, he had no integrity, he lied through his teeth and he brings everybody down with him. Is there anybody who's had any relationship with Johnson — in any sense of the word — who hasn't ended up in the gutter?"

"We have to hope that the Johnson era is going to come to be perceived in the years ahead as a sort of dreadful aberration, as something that the British people realised was a disaster, and that the Conservative Party now has the courage to realise was disaster and to send Boris Johnson back where he belongs to the music halls [...] He is a brilliant journalist. He's a brilliant entertainer. He had no place in British public life."

"[H]is inner emptiness made it imperative for him always to be the centre of attention, craving affirmation and breaking truth and convention to achieve it."

"The damage that Johnson has done to the country is beyond measure. Has any prime minister done so much harm? Covid-19 was the most serious crisis to hit Britain since the Second World War. He ran the government as if he were the wayward manager of an amateur theatre company, full of histrionics, changes of mind and cliques."

"Much as Boris is not prone to getting really cross, nor using particularly strong language, this was one [time] where he really flipped. At our morning meeting, with a small gang of us, he just launched into a violent attack on Emmanuel Macron. And basically saying: "He’s a four-letter word that begins with 'c'’, he's a weirdo, he's Putin's lickspittle, we need to go studs up on this one" – a rugby term that basically means gloves off - "we need an orgy of frog-bashing, I’m going to have to punch his lights out"... Pretty strong stuff."

"[In 1964 or 1965] There was her baby, Alexander, a few months old, lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair. As I gazed at him, I didn't find that baby at all appealing, too pink and too noisy."

"That baby on the bath mat, who so decisively put me off the idea of teen motherhood, grew up to be the most disgraced prime minister under his ludicrously changed name of Boris: he looks much the same."

"As for Boris Johnson, I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen him naked."

"He can continue to cause damage to the party as he has done so conspicuously in recent years, because he retains a following in the country. That will be exploited by his friends in the popular press. But his real legacy is Brexit, the biggest historic mistake this country has made in peacetime."

"He's not a Tory, he’s somebody who used the Tory party ... he attacks what he calls the Westminster elite but he is so Westminster elite at heart - he’s wealthy, socially liberal, believes in animal rights, carbon net zero - he is not some Lee Anderson."

"[T]he interesting thing about him is that he has persecution mania. And people with persecution mania think that it's all a conspiracy and everybody's out to get them - that isn’t the case. The fact is with Boris he arouses ... such uncontrollable irritation that you just want him to go away. He brings everything on himself, he's not this victim."

"Carrie Johnson, in the caption of an Instagram post with a picture of her holding the newborn, joked: "Welcome to the world Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson born 5th July at 9.15am. (Can you guess which name my husband chose?!)" The former prime minister Boris Johnson is keen to be thought of as a scholar of the classics. In Greek mythology, Odysseus leaves behind his wife and child to seek adventure, encountering many other women along the way."

"There is an imperialism that deserves all honor and respect — an imperialism of service in the discharge of great duties. But with too many it is the sense of domination and aggrandisement, the glorification of power. The price of peace is eternal vigilance."

": These have often been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but also to Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and many others; Lord Denning in The Road to Justice (1988) states that the phrase originated in a statement of Irish orator John Philpot Curran in 1790: "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.""

"What a jolly awakening there will be some few years hence, when the inevitable argument of experience will show us a nation contradicting itself through the voices of its chosen representatives! The stupidest politician will sit up, rubbing his eyes. After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, "Lies — damned lies — and statistics," still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of. So we may be led to the serious consideration of change by the evolution of materials of conviction which those who run may read, though some who read may wish to run away from them."

"We may blunder on in spite of repeated miscalculations of the popular will. More penetrating and pernicious is the influence our ill-devised machinery has upon the character of our national life. It eats in and into it. It degrades candidates and electors alike. It does its worst to reduce to sterility of influence many of the best of the component elements of the people. The individuals survive, but with their political activity dead or dying, no opportunities of life and growth being afforded them. Finally it presents as an embodiment of the nation an assembly or assemblies into which none can enter who have not been clipped, and pared, and trimmed, and stretched out of natural shape and likeness to slip along the grooves of supply. A free press, free pulpits, and a free people outside help to correct what would otherwise become intolerable but press, pulpits and people, free as they are, work and live in strict limits of relation to the machinery established among them. The world revolves on its axis subject to the Constitution of the United States, and the most Radical newspaper man in London, if such there be, never lets his imagination range out of hearing of the Clock Tower."

"The young man who is moved in any way to contemplate an entry into public life, whose creed is not in absolute inheritance from his fathers, learns first of all to understand that there are two great political organizations, with one of which he must associate himself, learning and echoing its catch-words, accepting its leadership, and steeping himself in the belief that in it are wisdom and truth while the other party is void of both. It is not everyone whose ductile mind takes him through this training, and a goodly number of up-growing men of not the worst promise for the future have to step aside."

"What an education follows! It is really a fine comedy, though the players rarely know it. I am but a clumsy performer myself, and have to confess to incurable defects of training, so that I sometimes wonder I have not been hissed off the stage; still I have seen the performance through more than once or twice, and know something about it. Such tender and delicate adjustments and readjustments of convictions to keep the party balance sure! Such abundance of spoonmeat on the one hand, and such careful economy on the other of truths that may prove too strong for weak digestions! Such avowals of readiness to consider seriously any opinion, however obviously absurd, broached by a possible supporter! Such prompt denunciations of all the devices of an irreconcilable opponent!"

"As for life within a Legislature,— who can tell how warped and bent and twisted, and accommodated to the exigencies of party struggle become the faculties of belief? Strong and courageous natures know it, and remain strong and courageous in spite of knowledge and practice; but the pliancy of man is beyond admiration, and is nowhere better seen than under the schooling of Parliament."

"It is true— it has been already admitted— that the picture will not be universally recognized; but it has been suggested that the failure of recognition lies rather in the degeneracy of the faculty of seeing than in the misrepresentation of the vision to be seen. It may be also confessed that life often survives all the perversities of training. We cannot absolutely nullify the prodigality of nature, try as hard as we may. In spite of most careful management, untractable growths survive in the most provoking way, and intrude themselves into fields believed to be kept free from their presence. And sometimes it happens that the poor party managers have to accommodate themselves to the genius they curse."

"We must not pursue science for ends independent of science. It must be pursued for its own sake, and must lead to its own results."

"The English constitution was excellent until removed by foreign writers into the domain of theory, when in direct contradiction with its nature and origin it came to be admired as a common representative government."

"There is a wide divergence, an irreconcilable disagreement, between the political notions of the modern world and that which is essentially the system of the Catholic Church. It manifests itself particularly in their contradictory views of liberty, and of the functions of the civil power. The Catholic notion, defining liberty not as the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought, denies that general interests can supersede individual rights. It condemns, therefore, the theory of the ancient as well as of the modern state. It is founded on the divine origin and nature of authority. According to the prevailing doctrine, which derives power from the people, and deposits it ultimately in their hands, the state is omnipotent over the individual, whose only remnant of freedom is then the participation in the exercise of supreme power; while the general will is binding on him.† Christian liberty is lost where this system prevails: whether in the form of the utmost diffusion of power, as in America, or of the utmost concentration of power, as in France; whether, that is to say, it is exercised by the majority, or by the delegate of the majority,—it is always a delusive freedom, founded on a servitude more or less disguised. In one form and under one pretext or another, the state has been absolute on the Continent of Europe for the last 300 years. In the sixteenth century absolutism was founded on religious zeal, and was expressed in the formula cujus regio, illius religio. In the seventeenth century it assumed the garb of legitimacy and divine right, and the king was believed when he said, "L'état c'est moi." In the eighteenth century arbitrary government found a new and stronger basis in the theory of the public good, of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and justified every act of tyranny by the maxim, the king is the first servant of the state. All these principles of despotism are incompatible with the Catholic ideas, and with the system by which the Pope, on pain of being in contradiction with himself, and with the spirit and practice of the Church, is compelled to govern. They are condemned by the traditions, and by the moral obligations, of the Court of Rome, whose system is one of charity and of liberty, and which knows no public consideration which is superior to the salvation of souls."

"There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion."

"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."

"The nation had no instinct and no productive power that emancipated it from the customs of its forefathers. Every appeal against oppression was to the hereditary rights; the only protection which the Englishman knew was in the traditional laws of his country. By means of this perpetual recurrence to old principles, and of the gradual contrivance of new forms in which to secure their action, the English people conquered their freedom. The intensity of their conservatism was an impulse as well as a guide of their progress."

"Without presuming to decide the purely legal question, on which it seems evident to me from Madison's and Hamilton's papers that the Fathers of the Constitution were not agreed, I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."

"Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion, and it stands to the domestic feelings and to home-sickness as faith to fanaticism and to superstition."

"The man who prefers his country before every other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the State. They both deny that right is superior to authority."

"A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government. The theory of nationality, therefore, is a retrograde step in history."

"Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition."

"Although, therefore, the theory of nationality is more absurd and more criminal than the theory of socialism, it has an important mission in the world, and marks the final conflict, and therefore the end, of two forces which are the worst enemies of civil freedom, — the absolute monarchy and the revolution."

"The Protestants never occupied a more triumphant position, and their prospects were never brighter, than in the summer of 1572. For many years the progress of their religion had been incessant. The most valuable of the conquests it has retained were already made; and the period of its reverses had not begun. The great division which aided Catholicism afterwards to recover so much lost ground was not openly confessed; and the effectual unity of the Reformed Churches was not yet dissolved. In controversial theology the defence was weaker than the attack. The works to which the Reformation owed its popularity and system were in the hands of thousands, while the best authors of the Catholic restoration had not begun to write. The press continued to serve the new opinions better than the old; and in literature Protestantism was supreme. Persecuted in the South, and established by violence in the North, it had overcome the resistance of princes in Central Europe, and had won toleration without ceasing to be intolerant. In[Pg 103] France and Poland, in the dominions of the Emperor and under the German prelates, the attempt to arrest its advance by physical force had been abandoned. In Germany it covered twice the area that remained to it in the next generation, and, except in Bavaria, Catholicism was fast dying out. The Polish Government had not strength to persecute, and Poland became the refuge of the sects. When the bishops found that they could not prevent toleration, they resolved that they would not restrict it."

"The decisive struggle was in France. During the minority of Charles IX. persecution had given way to civil war, and the Regent, his mother, had vainly striven, by submitting to neither party, to uphold the authority of the Crown. She checked the victorious Catholics, by granting to the Huguenots terms which constituted them, in spite of continual disaster in the field, a vast and organised power in the State. To escape their influence it would have been necessary to invoke the help of Philip II., and to accept protection which would have made France subordinate to Spain."

"Judged by its immediate result, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a measure weakly planned and irresolutely executed, which deprived Protestantism of its political leaders, and left it for a time to the control of zealots. There is no evidence to make it probable that more than seven thousand victims perished. Judged by later events, it was the beginning of a vast change in the conflict of the churches. At first it was believed that a hundred thousand Huguenots had fallen. It was said that the survivors were abjuring by thousands, that the children of the slain were made Catholics, that those whom the priest had admitted to absolution and communion were nevertheless put to death. Men who were far beyond the reach of the French Government lost their faith in a religion which Providence had visited with so tremendous a judgment; and foreign princes took heart to employ severities which could excite no horror after the scenes in France."

"The worst criminals were not the men who did the deed. The crime of mobs and courtiers, infuriated by the lust of vengeance and of power, is not so strange a portent as the exultation of peaceful men, influenced by no present injury or momentary rage, but by the permanent and incurable perversion of moral sense wrought by a distorted piety."

"In Italy, where the life of a heretic was cheap, their wholesale destruction was confessed a highly politic and ingenious act. Even the sage Venetians were constrained to celebrate it with a procession. The Grand Duke Cosmo had pointed out two years before that an insidious peace would afford excellent opportunities of extinguishing Protestantism; and he derived inexpressible consolation from the heroic enterprise."

"A time came when the Catholics, having long relied on force, were compelled to appeal to opinion. That which had been defiantly acknowledged and defended required to be ingeniously explained away. The same motive which had justified the murder now prompted the lie. Men shrank from the conviction that the rulers and restorers of their Church had been murderers and abetters of murder, and that so much infamy had been coupled with so much zeal. They feared to say that the most monstrous of crimes had been solemnly approved at Rome, lest they should devote the Papacy to the execration of mankind. A swarm of facts were invented to meet the difficulty: The victims were insignificant in number; they were slain for no reason connected with religion; the Pope believed in the existence of the plot; the plot was a reality; the medal is fictitious; the massacre was a feint concerted with the Protestants themselves; the Pope rejoiced only when he heard that it was over. These things were repeated so often that they have been sometimes believed; and men have fallen into this way of speaking whose sincerity was unimpeachable, and who were not shaken in their religion by the errors or the vices of Popes. Möhler was pre-eminently such a man. In his lectures on the history of the Church, which were published only last year, he said that the Catholics, as such, took no part in the massacre; that no cardinal, bishop, or priest shared in the councils that prepared it; that Charles informed the Pope that a conspiracy had been discovered; and that Gregory made his thanksgiving only because the King's life was saved. Such things will cease to be written when men perceive that truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history."

"The sentiment on which [papal] infallibility was founded could not be reached by argument, the weapon of human reason, but resided in conclusions transcending evidence, and was the inaccessible postulate rather than a demonstrable consequence of a system of religious faith."

"To proclaim the Pope infallible was their compendious security against hostile States and Churches, against human liberty and authority, against disintegrating tolerance and rationalizing science, against error and sin."

"The yeoman farmers of the United States have always been the strength of the republic."

"I was struck in reading Karl Marx's new work by the extent to which he fetches his materials from England. It is a remarkable book, as the Koran of the new socialists."

"It is more essential that an enthusiast of the papacy be made to contemplate its crimes, because its influence is nearer the Conscience; and the spiritual danger of perverted morals is greater than the evil of perverted politics. It is an agency constantly active, pervading life, penetrating the soul by many channels, in almost every sermon and in almost every prayer book. It is the fiend skulking behind the Crucifix."

"Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race."

"In every age its [liberty's] progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food."

"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success."

"No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws."

"The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away."

"According to the common opinion indirect elections are a safeguard of conservatism. But all the Assemblies of the French Revolution issued from indirect elections."

"Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor of Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy..."

"[W]e are not so much concerned this evening with the dead letter of edicts and of statutes as with the living thoughts of men."

"A century ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had one audience of a Master in Chancery was made to pay for three, but no man heeded the enormity until it suggested to a young lawyer that it might be well to question and examine with rigorous suspicion every part of a system in which such things were done. The day on which that gleam lighted up the clear hard mind of Jeremy Bentham is memorable in the political calendar beyond the entire administration of many statesmen."

"It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the Five Codes of France."

"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion."

"The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation, — religion, education, and the distribution of wealth."

"In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. Liberty, by this definition, is the essential condition and guardian of religion..."

"The government of the Israelites was a , held together by no political authority, but by the unity of... faith and founded not on physical force but on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group of at least 120 families; and there was neither privilege of rank nor inequality before the law. Monarchy was so alien to the primitive spirit of the community that it was resisted by Samuel... The throne was erected on a compact; and the king was deprived of the right of legislation among a people that recognised no lawgiver but God, whose highest aim in politics was to... make its government conform to the ideal type that was hallowed by the sanctions of heaven. The inspired men who rose in unfailing succession to prophesy against the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the laws, which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers, and appealed... to the healing forces that slept in the uncorrupted consciences of the masses. Thus the... Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won—the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development... and the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man. The operation of these principles... occupies the whole of the space we are going over together."

"The conflict between liberty under divine authority and the absolutism of human authorities ended disastrously. ...In the very year 586 [BCE], in which the flood of Asiatic despotism closed over the city which had been, and was destined again to be, the sanctuary of freedom in the East, a new home was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the sea and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant was reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending its invincible arms so slowly and yet so surely over the civilised world."

"[L]liberty is ancient, and it is despotism that is new. ...The heroic age of Greece confirms it, and it is still more conspicuously true of Teutonic Europe. ...They exhibit some sense of common interest in common concerns, little reverence for external authority, and an imperfect sense of the function and supremacy of the State. Where the division of property and labour is incomplete there is little division of classes and of power. Until societies are tried by the complex problems of civilisation they may escape despotism, as societies that are undisturbed by religious diversity avoid persecution."

"Six hundred years before the birth of Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout the East it was propped by the unchanging influence of priests and armies. In the West, where there were no sacred books requiring trained interpreters, the priesthood acquired no preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown their powers passed to aristocracies of birth."

"What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,... who longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. ...rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere."

"From this universal degradation the world was rescued by the most gifted of the nations. Athens, which like other cities was distracted and oppressed by a privileged class, avoided violence and appointed Solon to revise its laws. ...Solon gave a share of power proportioned to the demands made on their resources. The poorest classes were exempt from direct taxes, but were excluded from office. Solon gave them a voice in electing magistrates from the classes above them, and the right of calling them to account. This concession... was the beginning of a mighty change. It introduced the idea that a man ought to have a voice in selecting those to whose rectitude and wisdom he is compelled to trust his fortune, his family, and his life. And this idea completely inverted the notion of human authority, for it inaugurated the reign of moral influence... Government by consent superseded government by compulsion, and the pyramid which had stood on a point was made to stand upon its base. By making every citizen the guardian of his own interest Solon admitted the element of Democracy into the State."

"Their [Athenians] history furnishes the classic example of the peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favourable. For the Athenians were not only brave and patriotic and capable of generous sacrifice, but they were the most religious of the Greeks. They venerated the constitution which had given them prosperity and equality and the pride of freedom...They tolerated considerable variety of opinion, and great license of speech...Thus they became the only people of antiquity that grew great by democratic institutions. But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs exercised its demoralizing influence on the illustrious Democracy of Athens."

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason."

"Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life."

"Increase of freedom in the state may sometimes promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the boundaries of Empire...A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be the citizen of a humble commonwealth in the Alps, without a prospect of influence beyond the narrow frontier, than a subject of a superb autocracy that overshadows half of Asia and of Europe."

"But it may be urged, on the other side, that Liberty is not the sum or substitute for of all things men ought to live for... to be real it must be circumscribed... advancing civilisation invests the state with increased rights and duties, and imposes increased burdens and constraints on the subject... a highly instructed and intelligent community may perceive the benefit of compulsory obligations which, at a lower stage, would be thought unbearable... liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims at a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but those of which it feels the advantage... a free country may be less capable of doing much for the advancement of religion, the prevention of vice, or the relief of suffering, than one that does not shrink from confronting great emergencies by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some concentration of power... the supreme political object ought to be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My argument involves no collision with these qualifying reflections. We are dealing, not with the effects of freedom, but with its causes. ...influences which brought arbitrary government under control, either by the diffusion of power, or to an appeal to an authority which transcends all government, and among these influences the greatest philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned."

"The great question is, to discover not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind."

"Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor; and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of that universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God."

"The Stoics could only advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten law in his heart. But when Christ said: "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's," those words, spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom."

"Constantine declared his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church. According to Justinian, the Roman people had formally transferred to the emperors the entire plenitude of its authority, and, therefore, the emperor’s pleasure, expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law. Even in the fervent age of its conversion the empire employed its refined civilization, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages, the reasonableness and subtlety of Roman law, and the entire inheritance of the Jewish, the pagan, and the Christian world, to make the Church serve as a gilded crutch of absolutism. Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience — a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. This vital element, which many centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression, had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient civilization, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the empire of the West."

"In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had kings, did not preside [at] their councils; they were sometimes elective; they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in obedience to the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in war. This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities, is the remote germ of parliamentary government."

"The idea that the ends of government justify the means employed, was worked into system by Machiavelli. He was an acute politician, sincerely anxious that the obstacles to the intelligent government of Italy should be swept away. It appeared to him that the most vexatious obstacle to intellect is conscience, and that the vigorous use of statecraft necessary for the success of difficult schemes would never be made if governments allowed themselves to be hampered by the precepts of the copy-book. His audacious doctrine was avowed in the succeeding age, by men whose personal character otherwise stood high. They saw that in critical times good men have seldom strength for their goodness, and yield to those who have grasped the meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if you are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality differs from private, because no government can turn the other cheek, or can admit that mercy is better than justice. And they could not define the difference, or draw the limits of exception; or tell what other standard for a nation’s acts there is than the judgment which heaven pronounces in this world by success."

"Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike."

"The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime, and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism. The clergy who had in so many ways served the cause of freedom during the prolonged strife against feudalism and slavery, were associated now with the interest of royalty."

"The tide was running fast when the Reformation began at Wittenberg, and it was to be expected that Luther’s influence would stem the flood of absolutism. For he was confronted everywhere by the compact alliance of the Church with the State; and great part of his country was governed by hostile potentates who were prelates of the court of Rome. He had, indeed, more to fear from temporal than from spiritual foes."

"Nations eagerly invested their rulers with every prerogative needed to preserve their faith, and all the care to keep Church and State asunder, and to prevent the confusion of their powers, which had been the work of ages, was renounced in the intensity of the crisis. Atrocious deeds were done, in which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy was the motive. Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians."

"John Knox thought that every Catholic in Scotland ought to be put to death; and no man ever had disciples of a sterner or more relentless temper. But his counsel was not followed. All through the religious conflict, policy kept the upper hand. When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin preached, and Bellarmine lectured; but Machiavelli reigned."

"That men should understand that governments do not exist by divine right, and that arbitrary government is the violation of divine right, was no doubt the medicine suited to the malady under which Europe languished. But although the knowledge of this truth might become an element of salutary destruction, it could give little aid to progress and reform. Resistance to tyranny implied no faculty of constructing a legal government in its place. Tyburn tree may be a useful thing; but it is better still that the offender should live for repentance and reformation. The principles which discriminate in politics between good and evil, and make states worthy to last, were not yet found."

"The French philosopher Charron was one of the men least demoralised by party spirit, and least blinded by zeal for a cause. In a passage almost literally taken from St. Thomas, he describes our subordination under the law of nature, to which all legislation must conform; and he ascertains it not by the light of revealed religion, but by the voice of universal reason, through which God enlightens the consciences of men. Upon this foundation Grotius drew the lines of real political science. In gathering the materials of International law, he had to go beyond national treaties and denominational interests, for a principle embracing all mankind. The principles of law must stand, he said, even if we suppose that there is no God. By these inaccurate terms he meant that they must be found independently of Revelation. From that time it became possible to make politics a matter of principle and of conscience, so that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace together, under the sanctions of a common law."

"It was manifest that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of good intentions which softens down the asperities of religious strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every state and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side."

"I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analyzed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is poison."

"At that time there was some truth in the old joke which describes the English dislike of speculation by saying that all our philosophy consists of a short catechism in two questions: “What is mind? No matter. — What is matter? Never mind.” The only accepted appeal was to tradition."

"The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth century."

"I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have spoken, the history of freedom was the history of the thing that was not. But since the Declaration of Independence, or, to speak more justly, since the Spaniards, deprived of their king, made a new government for themselves, the only known forms of Liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy, have made their way over the world."

"I have fixed my eyes on the spaces that heaven’s light illuminates, that I may not lay too heavy a strain on the indulgence with which you have accompanied me over the dreary and heartbreaking course by which men have passed to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be."

"The manifest, the avowed difficulty is that democracy, no less than monarchy or aristocracy, sacrifices everything to maintain itself, and strives, with an energy and a plausibility that kings and nobles cannot attain, to override representation, to annul all the forces of resistance and deviation, and to secure, by Plebiscite, Referendum, or Caucus, free play for the will of the majority. The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. The true democratic principle, that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall never be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle, that every man‘s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing. Religious toleration, judicial independence, dread of centralisation, jealousy of State interference, become obstacles to freedom instead of safeguards, when the centralised force of the State is wielded by the hands of the people. Democracy claims to be not only supreme, without authority above, but absolute, without independence below; to be its own master, not a trustee. The old sovereigns of the world are exchanged for a new one, who may be flattered and deceived, but whom it is impossible to corrupt or to resist, and to whom must be rendered the things that are Caesar's and also the things that are God’s. The enemy to be overcome is no longer the absolutism of the State, but the liberty of the subject. Nothing is more significant than the relish with which Ferrari, the most powerful democratic writer since Rousseau, enumerates the merits of tyrants, and prefers devils to saints in the interest of the community. For the old notions of civil liberty and of social order did not benefit the masses of the people. Wealth increased, without relieving their wants. The progress of knowledge left them in abject ignorance. Religion flourished, but failed to reach them. Society, whose laws were made by the upper class alone, announced that the best thing for the poor is not to be born, and the next best to die in childhood, and suffered them to live in misery and crime and pain. As surely as the long reign of the rich has been employed in promoting the accumulation of wealth, the advent of the poor to power will be followed by schemes for diffusing it. Seeing how little was done by the wisdom of former times for education and public health, for insurance, association, and savings, for the protection of labour against the law of self-interest, and how much has been accomplished in this generation, there is reason in the fixed belief that a great change was needed, and that democracy has not striven in vain. Liberty, for the mass, is not happiness; and institutions are not an end but a means. The thing they seek is a force sufficient to sweep away scruples and the obstacle of rival interests, and, in some degree, to better their condition. They mean that the strong hand that heretofore has formed great States, protected religions, and defended the independence of nations, shall help them by preserving life, and endowing it for them with some, at least, of the things men live for. That is the notorious danger of modern democracy. That is also its purpose and its strength. And against this threatening power the weapons that struck down other despots do not avail. The greatest happiness principle positively confirms it. The principle of equality, besides being as easily applied to property as to power, opposes the existence of persons or groups of persons exempt from the common law, and independent of the common will; and the principle, that authority is a matter of contract, may hold good against kings, but not against the sovereign people, because a contract implies two parties."

"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. To break off that point is to avert the danger. The common system of representation perpetuates the danger. Unequal electorates afford no security to majorities. Equal electorates give none to minorities. Thirty-five years ago it was pointed out that the remedy is proportional representation. It is profoundly democratic, for it increases the influence of thousands who would otherwise have no voice in the government; and it brings men more near an equality by so contriving that no vote shall be wasted, and that every voter shall contribute to bring into Parliament a member of his own opinions."

"The great object, in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific, is to get behind men and to grasp ideas. Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own, in which men play the part of godfathers and godmothers more than that of legitimate parents. We understand the work and place of Pascal, or Newton, or Montesquieu, or Adam Smith, when we have measured the gap between the state of astronomy, of political economy, &c., before they came and after they were gone. And the progress of the science is of more use to us than the idiosyncrasy of the man."

"I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone better in speaking."

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means."

"The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History. If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man’s influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest."

"ADVICE TO PERSONS ABOUT TO WRITE HISTORY — DON’T In the Moral Sciences Prejudice is Dishonesty. A Historian has to fight against temptations special to his mode of life, temptations from Country, Class, Church, College, Party, Authority of talents, solicitation of friends. The most respectable of these influences are the most dangerous. The historian who neglects to root them out is exactly like a juror who votes according to his personal likes or dislikes. In judging men and things Ethics go before Dogma, Politics or Nationality. The Ethics of History cannot be denominational. Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience. Put conscience above both system and success. History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong."

"Nationality is the great carrier of custom, of unreflecting habit and transmitted ideas that quench individuality. Conscience gives men force to resist and discard all this. Nationality has to be dealt with discriminatingly. It is not always liberal or constructive. It may be as dangerous when its boundary is outside that of the State as salutary when inside."

"Don't suspect me of denying the principle of nationality altogether. Only, if I were to say as much as you say, I should be afraid of being driven to admit the priority of National Independence before individual liberty,—of the figurative conscience before the real. We do not find that Nationalists are always Liberals, especially in Austria."

"We are forced, in equity, to share the government with the working class...If there is a free contract, in open market, between capital and labour, it cannot be right that one of the two contracting parties should have the making of the laws, the management of the conditions, the keeping of the peace, the administration of justice, the distribution of taxes, the control of expenditure, in its own hands exclusively. It is unjust that all these securities, all these advantages, should be on the same side...Before this argument the ancient dogma, that power attends on property, broke down. Justice required that property should-not abdicate, but-share its political supremacy."

"There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Error."

"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class."

"The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation."

"Almost all that has been done for the good of the people has been done since the right lost the monopoly of power, since the rights of property were discovered to be not unlimited."

"The immediate purpose with which the Italians and Germans effected the great change in European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed, not securities, but forces. Machiavelli's hour had come."

"If it can be shown that the majority of women will probably be Liberal, or that they will divide equally, I should say that the balance is, very slightly, in favour of giving them votes."

"[I]t will not do to act as if the moral question was not the supreme question in public life, and, in a sense, the vera causa of party conflict."

"By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of Mankind."

"General principles were so little apparent in the system that excellent writers suppose that the Whigs were essentially English, Nonconformists, associated with limited monarchy, unfit for exportation over the world. They took long to outgrow the narrow limits of the society in which they arose. A hundred years passed before Whiggism assumed the universal and scientific character. In the American speeches of Chatham and Camden, in Burke's writings from 1778 to 1783, in the Wealth of Nations, and the tracts of Sir William Jones, there is an immense development. The national bounds are overcome. The principles are sacred, irrespective of interests. The charter of Rhode Island is worth more than the British Constitution, and Whig statesmen toast General Washington, rejoice that America has resisted, and insist on the acknowledgment of independence. The progress is entirely consistent; and Burke's address to the colonists is the logical outcome of the principles of liberty and the notion of a higher law above municipal codes and constitutions, with which Whiggism began."

"[T]he Revolution of 1688...is the greatest thing done by the English nation. It established the State upon a contract, and set up the doctrine that a breach of contract forfeited the crown. ... Parliament gave the crown, and gave it under conditions. Parliament became supreme in administration as well as in legislation. The king became its servant on good behaviour, liable to dismissal for himself or his ministers. All this was not restitution, but inversion. Passive obedience had been the law of England. Conditional obedience and the right of resistance became the law. Authority was limited and regulated and controlled. The Whig theory of government was substituted for the Tory theory on the fundamental points of political science. The great achievement is that this was done without bloodshed, without vengeance, without exclusion of entire parties, with so little definiteness in point of doctrine that it could be accepted, and the consequences could be left to work themselves out."

"I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are the registered property of every school; that is to say — learn as much by writing as by reading; be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause of the weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice, and study problems in preference to periods."

"Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present."

"Praise is the shipwreck of historians."

"It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which, as the earthly wants and the passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark of history."

"History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active."

"Liberalism is really opposed to liberty. ... Modern liberalism in England as well as abroad, in America as well as in Europe, has done more to destroy liberty than monarchy has done."

"What one hears in Ranke. The whisper of statecraft. Not the tramp of democracy's earthquake feet. Not the dull roar of surging opinion."

"Sagacity in judging the value of testimony is his [Ranke's] only supreme quality."

"The Massacre of St. Bartholomew saved England. Coligny would have conquered Belgium."

"There is no example of liberty established by Protestants resisting Catholics. The French tried it and failed. The Dutch in like manner. The victory came out of the conflict of Protestants with Protestants."

"Reformation. Scotland is the only kingdom in which the change was accomplished in spite of the crown. Ireland the only country where it was prevented in spite of the crown."

"Religious liberty came not from the Reformation or from the sects as a whole but from particular sects...especially those which the Reformation sought to exterminate."

"The only resistance ever made to Louis XIV was from religion."

"The early history of the world is the history of a few great men. Their Wirkungskreis is immense—vaster than that of God himself."

"The lesson of modern history—that Religions enjoy (are endowed with) the prerogative of perpetual youth while philosophies seldom outlast a generation."

"Liberty becomes a question of morals more that politics."

"Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force."

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being."

"Property, not Conscience, is the basis of liberty. For the defence of Conscience need not arise. Property is always exposed to State interference. It is the constant object of policy."

"The strongest of all the obstacles to progress, the reign of the dead."

"Socialism. Sanctioned by Religion, by philosophy, by the experience of great nations—Revelation. Catholic and Protestant authorities supported it. ... Idea not repugnant to Canon Law, of administering the wealth of the rich for the good of the poor. ... Socialism common wherever there is intense religious zeal."

"Socialism the worst of all enemies of freedom because, if it could fulfil what it promises, it would render such a service to the world that the interests of freedom would pale, and mankind would carry over its allegiance to the benefactor who had a higher claim on its gratitude. ... This century has seen the growth of the worst enemy freedom has ever had to encounter—Socialism. Strong, because it solves a problem pol[itical] economy has, until now, failed to solve. How to provide that the increase of wealth shall not be at the expense of its distribution. ... Can only be realised by a tremendous despotism."

"S. B. is the greatest crime of modern times. It was committed on principles professed by Rome. It was approved, sanctioned, praised by the papacy. The Holy See went out of its way to signify to the world, by permanent and solemn acts, how entirely it admired a king who slaughtered his subjects treacherously, because they were Protestants. To proclaim forever that because a man is a Protestant it is a pious deed to cut his throat in the night."

"Democracy is government of the strongest, just as military despotism is. This is a bond of connection between the two. They are the brutal forms of government and as strength and authority go together, necessarily arbitrarily."

"A government which cannot be reformed does not merit to be preserved."

"Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences injurious to society and morality. Therefore, in last resort, the poor have a claim on the wealth of the rich, so far that they may be relieved from the immoral, demoralizing effects of poverty."

"Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the tablets of eternity."

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."

"He represented to a world not altogether sympathetic the worth and dignity of historical studies. He showed their real importance for a right understanding of the destiny of man, however regarded. He demonstrated also in his own person that history was not at once the Cinderella of the sciences and the playmate of the arts, below scientific inquiry as a means of training the mind to exact thought, and behind classical studies as an instrument of culture; but that if properly and consistently pursued it was a mental gymnastic of the highest order, and a great trainer in patience, sympathy, and refinement. He made history respectable."

"Twenty years ago, late at night, in his library at Cannes, he expounded to me his view of how such a history of Liberty might be written, and in what wise it might be made the central thread of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes only; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again."

"Men during the World War used to recall the prescience of Acton when he declared that the bayonets of Berlin constituted the most serious menace to our Empire."

"We can picture his mind as constantly knitting history together, then; and, though he failed to produce his magnum opus, he left behind him in his papers a tremendous intellectual system, which has stimulated many commentators and interpreters in our time... [B]ehind the multitude of Acton's reflective notes there is an intellectual system (and a record of the man's achievement) ampler and richer and more imposing than the published writings would suggest. The notes are an evidence of Acton's amazing intellectual integrity, his determination to confront the discrepant fact and not to shrink from the inconvenient anomaly."

"To-morrow I am going to London to meet at dinner Lord Acton, whom I have long been pining to see. He is a Roman Catholic, and is the most learned Englishman now alive, but he never writes anything."

"I have had a long correspondence with Lord Acton, and now begin to understand him. He demands that history should be primarily a branch of the moral sciences, and should aim at proving the immutable righteousness of the ideas of modern Liberalism—tolerance and the supremacy of conscience. He has used me as a peg to indicate that belief. He is revising his original remarks, but I do not expect that much clearness will ensue, though it will be very interesting."

"Acton may have been a wise man, but he was an indifferent historian, often surprised by the discovery of intrigue or double-dealing behind an official façade into a somewhat amateurish reaction: astonishment at the commonplace, overemphasis on the insignificant, heavily moral attitudes."

"[Acton knew] at least four foreign languages, and probably read and annotated more printed matter than anyone who has ever lived. And he was cosmopolitan in the intimate as well as in the superficial sense, for as a liberal Roman Catholic he was equally versed in the literature of authority and revolt, and knew, as no other Englishman, the great central tradition of post-Tridentine theology."

"Fri. a long talk with Ld. Acton in the garden, an hour and ½, mostly about various people and rather amusing. He has a shrewd eye for character, and yet charitable."

"He [Lord Acton] gave Herbert and me the History of Liberty, a sketch of it, most interesting. It is extraordinary the way he tingles with it to his fingers ends and yet can sit patient and quiet over wife and children and wait and wait another year before he writes it. What an extraordinary man."

"[Lord Acton's character] is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the day."

"His work may be put on the Index; but that is all. They will never excommunicate an English Peer. I always say that, if Lord Acton had written what Döllinger has written, and vice versa, it would still have been the Professor who would have got into trouble, while the Peer would have escaped scot free."

"Johnny Acton, who is extremely agreeable, left us two or three days ago to go to Germany, with the intention of coming back to study in the middle of October. His library is becoming immense. He has remodelled the old library. He has entirely filled the hall; he has furnished his own room with books, and he has bagged a bedroom for the same purpose. I can hardly open a book without finding notes or marks of his."

"[A] master of contemporary history...an impartial judge of modern England, so European, so supernational, so catholic, so liberal, so wise, so Olympian, so serene."

"In truth, the main characteristic of these men was vanity—intellectual and literary. They had the inflation of German professors, and the ruthless talk of undergraduates."

"Friendship is a relation that has many types. On none did I presume to set a more special value than on my intercourse with this observant, powerful, reflective, marvellously full mind. He saw both past history as a whole and modern politics as a whole. He was a profound master of all the lights and shades of ecclesiastical system; a passionately interested master of the bonds between moral truth and the action of political system; an eager explorer of the ideas that help to govern the rise and fall of States; and a scrupulous student of the march of fact, circumstance, and personality in which such ideas worked themselves through. He was comprehensive as an encyclopaedia, but profound and rich, not tabulated and dry."

"He was not without some intellectual difficulties for us to reconcile. The union of devoted faith in liberty with devoted adherence to the Church of authority was a standing riddle. His conception of history as a business of wide general forces did not easily fit in with his untiring hunt for incidents on the political backstairs, as the historian's most precious and decisive prizes. He was sometimes fatally addicted to the oblique and the allusive, as if he might enjoy playing hide-and-seek with the well-meaning reader. He winds up his weighty—almost too weighty—introduction to Machiavelli's Prince with the remark that the nineteenth century had seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime. I often challenged him for the precise list of this tremendous Newgate Calendar; I could never induce him to disclose more than a dozen."

"If the gods granted me the privilege of recalling to life for half an hour's conversation some of the great men of the past I have had the good fortune to know, I should say Acton."

"I went down into Shropshire to look at that famous library before it was removed to Cambridge. There were shelves on shelves of books on every conceivable subject—Renaissance Sorcery, the Fueros of Aragon, Scholastic Philosophy, the Growth of the French Navy, American Exploration, Church Councils. The owner had read them all, and many of them were full in their margins with cross-references in pencil. There were pigeon-holed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments, into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift of the section... I never saw a sight that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning. A quarter of the time that had been spent on making those marginal annotations, and filling those pigeon-holes might have produced a dozen volumes of sound and valuable history—perhaps an epoch-making book that might have lived for centuries. But all the accumulated knowledge had vanished... And I said to myself—intensive research, even by the most competent researcher, is wasted, unless the results are put together and printed."

"Lord Acton, a historian to whom learning and judgment had not been granted in equal proportions, and who, after years of incredible and indeed well-nigh mythical research, had come to the conclusion that the Pope could err."

"Lord Acton is probably the greatest historian whose books were never written."

"Lord Acton had great personal charm and delighted all with whom he came in contract by his amiability and exquisite courtesy. A decided indolence of disposition, a certain mental timidity, a distinct want of national fibre, were his main imperfections. With greater moral courage and a more sturdy literary conscience Lord Acton would undoubtedly have made a more striking mark in letters and in public affairs; but his life, as it was, remains a splendid example of devotion to study, to historical research, and to the cause of truth."

"Lord Acton, one of the greatest minds among modern Western historians, in whose career the sterilizing influence of Industrialism upon historical thought is tragically apparent."

"Dons of all subjects crowded to his oracular lectures, which were sometimes puzzling but always impressive. He had the brow of Plato, and the bearing of a sage who was also a man of the great world... What he said was always interesting, but sometimes strange. I remember, for instance, his saying to me that States based on the unity of a single race, like modern Italy and Germany, would prove a danger to liberty; I did not see what he meant at the time, but I do now!"

"Lord Acton... [is] the nearest approach to omniscience I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Theodore Parker."

"Lord Acton was a thorough man of the world. An insatiable, systematic, and effective reader, he was anything but a recluse. No man had a keener zest for the society of his intellectual equals. ...His learning, though vast and genuine, was never obtruded. Always ready to impart information, he shrank from the semblance of volunteering it. ...he would let people without a tithe of his knowledge lay down the law as if they knew everything, and would betray no other sign of amusement than an enigmatical smile. He had something of Addison's tendency... to draw out rather than to repress the sallies of conceited ignorance. But for any one who wished to learn, his resources were in their fullest extent available. To be in his company was like being in the best of historical libraries with the best of historical catalogues."

"His general attitude was one of rigid adhesion to certain facts, and careful avoidance of hasty judgments. Few people had stronger opinions than he, and their foundation was so solid that it was almost impossible to displace them. But he liked to hear all sides of every question, and to make allowance for all errors which did not involve a violation of the moral law. Any apology or even excuse for departure from the highway of the Decalogue he regarded as in itself a crime."

"A merciless intellectual critic he could hardly help being. He had so trained and furnished his mind that it rejected instinctively a sophism or a false pretence."

"He was a good talker because he was a good listener, always interested in the subject, not seeking to exhaust it, rather putting in from time to time the exactly appropriate word."

"His great work should have been, and was intended to be, a History of Liberty. For that purpose his library at Aldenham was collected, and to frame different definitions of liberty was one of his favourite pastimes. He loved liberty with all the ardour of Milton, and investigated it with all the science of Locke. ...This History was never written, nor even begun. All that there is of it, all that there ever was of it, except books and notes, materials for others to use, consists of two lectures delivered at Bridgnorth in the year 1877. One was called "The History of Freedom in Antiquity," and the other "The History of Freedom in Christianity." ...they are full of suggestion and insight. Their fault is that... they pour a quart of liquor into a pint pot. They are so much crowded with names and references, that to follow the chief thread of the argument is made needlessly hard. ...A geographer may have too many names in his map, and a learned man may condense his knowledge until it has no meaning for those who know less than himself. But, on the other hand, these lectures contain passages at once lucid and worth their weight in gold, which could only have come from a mind at once acute, meditative, and well stored."

"[I]t is indeed far removed from the sensual idolatry of mere size that vulgarises modern Imperialism. But it was with Lord Acton a fundamental principle and it is not the size of Periclean Athens, or of Elizabethan England, which made them imperishably great. ...We must look, Lord Acton warns us, to substance and essence, not to form and outward show. The martyrdom of Socrates was the act of a free Republic, and it was Caesar who liberated Rome from the tyranny of Republican institutions. The fault of the classical State was that it tried to be Church and State in one, and thus infringed upon individualism by regulating religion. The three things wanting in ancient liberty were representative government, emancipation of slaves, and freedom of conscience."

"Ever since his visit to America in the days of President Pierce, if not before, Acton had made a special study of the American Constitution in its strength and its weakness, in the amplitude of its safeguards, and in its fatal want of elasticity. A Monarchy cannot be too constitutional. But a too constitutional Republic is a difficult machine to work. England, said a French critic, is a Republic with an hereditary President: the United States are a Monarchy with an elected King."

"Notwithstanding Lord Acton's minute and conscientious accuracy in points of detail, he is always best and most characteristic in broad, luminous inferences from large masses of history and long periods of time. ...He showed that for eleven hundred years, from the first Constantine to the last, the Christian Empire was as despotic as the pagan; that it was Gregory the Seventh who made the Papacy independent of the empire; that Luther bequeathed as his political testament the doctrines of Divine right and passive obedience; and that Spanish Jesuits, in arguing against the title of Henry the Fourth to the throne of France, had anticipated the doctrines of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau."

"Passing on... to the dynastic change of 1688, he described the Whig settlement, not as a Venetian oligarchy, but as an aristocracy of freeholders, while from the American rebellion of the following century he drew the moral that a revolution with very little provocation may be just, and a democracy of very large dimensions may be safe. The defect in the principles of 1789 was that they exalted equality at the expense of liberty, and subjected the free will of the individual to the unbridled power of the State."

"He knew almost everybody worth knowing, and no one so fond of study was ever more sociable. But, as these letters show, the man whom above all others he esteemed and revered was Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone, with characteristic humility, always deferred to Lord Acton's judgment in matters historical. On the other hand, Lord Acton, the most hypercritical of men, and the precise opposite of a hero-worshipper, an iconoclast if ever there was one, regarded Mr. Gladstone as the first of English statesmen, living or dead."

"[W]hat could never be reproduced is the general impression of Acton's many contributions to the Rambler, the Home and Foreign, and the '. ...Any one who wished to understand the personality of Acton could not do better than take the published Bibliography and read a few of the articles on "contemporary literature" furnished by him to the three Reviews. In no other way could the reader so clearly realise the complexity of his mind or the vast number of subjects which he could touch with the hand of a master. ...His writing before he was thirty years of age shows an intimate and detailed knowledge of documents and authorities which with most students is the "hard won and hardly won" achievement of a lifetime of labour. ...he treats of matters which range from the dawn of history through the ancient empires down to subjects ...essentially modern ...In all these writings of Acton those qualities manifest themselves, which... gave him a distinct and unique place among his contemporaries. Here is the same austere love of truth, the same resolve to dig to the bed-rock of fact, and to exhaust all sources of possible illumination, the same breadth of view and intensity of inquiring ardour, which stimulated his studies and limited his productive power. Above all, there is the same unwavering faith in principles, as affording the only criterion of judgment amid the ever-fluctuating welter of human passions, political manœuvring, and ecclesiastical intrigue."

"We note the same value for great books as the source of wisdom, combined with the same enthusiasm for immediate justice which made Acton the despair of the mere academic student, an enigma among men of the world, and a stumbling block to the politician of the clubs. ...we find that certainty and decision of judgment, that crisp concentration of phrase, that grave and deliberate irony and that mastery of subtlety, allusion, and wit, which make his interpretation an adventure and his judgment a sword."

"The ardour of his opinions, so different from those which have usually distorted history, gives an interest even to his grossest errors."

"Perhaps... the most characteristic of these forgotten judgments is the description of Lord Liverpool and the class which supported him. Not even Disraeli, painting the leader of that party which he was destined so strangely to "educate," could equal the austere and accurate irony with which Acton, writing as a student, not as a novelist, sums up the characteristics of the class of his birth."

"The longer essays republished in these volumes exhibit... a personality which even those who disagreed with his views must allow to have been one of the most remarkable products of European culture in the nineteenth century."

"During the first period—roughly to be dated from 1855 to 1863—he was hopefully striving, under the influence of Döllinger (his teacher from the age of seventeen) to educate his co-religionists in breadth and sympathy, and to place before his countrymen ideals of right in politics, which were to him bound up with the Catholic faith. The combination of scientific inquiry with true rules of political justice he claimed, in a letter to Döllinger, as the aim of the Home and Foreign Review. ...a quarterly ...far surpassing, alike in knowledge, range, and certainty, any of the other quarterlies, political, or ecclesiastical, or specialist, which the nineteenth century produced. ...superior, while it displayed a cosmopolitan interest foreign to most English journals."

"Next came... the "fighting period," when he stood forth as the leader among laymen of the party opposed to that "insolent and aggressive faction" which achieved its imagined triumph at the Vatican Council. This period,... dated from the issue of the Syllabus by Pius IX. in 1864, may be considered to close with the reply to Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet on "The Vatican Decrees," and with the attempt of the famous Cardinal, in whose mind history was identified with heresy, to drive from the Roman communion its most illustrious English layman."

"We may date the third period of Acton's life from the failure of Manning's attempt, or indeed a little earlier. He had now given up all attempt to contend against the dominant influence of the Court of Rome, though feeling that loyalty to the Church... as a living body was independent of the disastrous policy of its hierarchy. During this time he was occupied with the great unrealised project of the history of liberty or in movements of English politics... In the earlier part of this period are... some of the best things that Acton ever wrote, such as the lectures on Liberty... It is characterised by his discovery in the "eighties" that Döllinger and he were divided on the question of the severity of condemnation to be passed on persecutors and their approvers. ...Finding that he had misunderstood his master, Acton was for a time profoundly discouraged, declared himself isolated, and surrendered the outlook of literary work as vain. He found... that in ecclesiastical as in general politics he was alone, however much he might sympathise with others up to a certain point. On the other hand, these years witnessed a gradual mellowing of his judgment in regard to the prospects of the Church, and its capacity to absorb and interpret in a harmless sense the dogma against whose promulgation he had fought so eagerly. ...the English element in Acton came out most strongly in this period, closing as it did with the Cambridge Professorship, and including the development of the friendship between himself and Mr. Gladstone."

"There were in him strains of many races. On his father's side he was an English country squire, but foreign residence and the Neapolitan Court had largely affected the family, in addition to that flavour of cosmopolitan culture which belongs to the more highly placed Englishmen of the Roman Communion. On his mother's side he was a member of one of the oldest and greatest families in Germany... The s... had intermarried with an Italian family, the Brignoli. Trained first at Oscott under Wiseman, and afterwards at Munich under Döllinger, in whose house he lived, Acton by education as well as birth was a cosmopolitan, while his marriage with the family of Arco-Valley introduced a further strain of Bavarian influence into his life. His mother's second marriage with Lord Granville brought him into connection with the dominant influences of the great Whig Houses."

"I must tell the House quite frankly that if I were confronted with a Japanese at this present moment and were asked to tell him that I believed that he was wrong in the treatment of those British prisoners in his hands, I could not but accept a similar criticism from him on the question of the atom bomb. I should be quite unable to avoid it. I am afraid I must say on the question of principle here involved—this question of moral principle—that I believe it to be humbug, when so many people, women, children, old folk, were killed by the atom bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. For every individual photograph that could be produced of a wounded and battered British prisoner of war in Japanese hands, I think one could find an equally horrible photograph of a victim of the atomic bomb. [Interruption.] An hon. Friend of mine says that the two things are not comparable. I do not myself believe that it is possible to draw any distinctions in war between the brutalities on both sides."

"With inherited liberal principles, I feel that the free movement of all people is a good thing and one to be encouraged. ... The Declaration of Human Rights has for one of its Articles the right of the human being to take a nationality, to change it, and not to be denied the right arbitrarily to change it. I realise it is not as easy as that, but most of the difficulties are definable difficulties based on facts and situations which the economic planners now available to Government Departments should be able to grasp and measure. I believe that the basic problem which prevents more immigration is an economic one. ... [T]here is a nearer approach to the ideal of universal admission in the United States than there is here. I think we could learn something from that. ... If we were to work out some form of migration policy based on these lines we would be doing some service to that free movement of populations which is a vital prerequisite to understanding in all parts of the world."

"The stars were just out and the crowd were laughing and joking but underneath it all was the tragedy of 6 million dead in the gas chambers and the miracle of a home for Jews after 1,900 years of pogrom and ghetto."

"It is we, on this side, who object to dreams of empire, because we think in terms of free association and we believe that the empire that was built up was based on force and domination by this country."

"There can be no greater friend of Israel in this House than I am. I say that quite sincerely. I have pressed that Israel should have arms in the present situation. I believe that if ever there was a case for it, it is today, with the massive supply of Russian war materials now going into Egypt, and that Israel should have more arms at once."

"[T]he Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez-faire as its philosophy and chooses Bureaucracy as its administrative method will stultify effective national economic planning without creating the necessary supranational planning mechanisms for growth and social justice under democratic control. ... [T]he political inspiration of the EEC amounts to a belief in the institutionalisation of NATO, which will harden the division of Europe and encourage the emergence of a new nuclear superpower, thus worsening East–West relations and making disarmament more difficult."

"[O]n balance Britain would have far less influence on world events if she were inside [the EEC] than she could have if she remained outside."

"Even relatively benign and temporary authoritarianism that rests upon elected power is being challenged. We are moving rapidly towards a situation where the pressure for the redistribution of political power will have to be faced as a major political issue. In a world where authoritarianism of the left or right is a very real possibility, the question of whether ordinary people can govern themselves by consent is still on trial—as it always has been, and always will be. Beyond parliamentary democracy as we know it, we shall have to find a new popular democracy to replace it."

"The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen."

"Change from below, the formulation of demands from the populace to end unacceptable injustice, supported by direct action, has played a far larger part in shaping British democracy than most constitutional lawyers, political commentators, historians or statesmen have ever cared to admit. Direct action in a democratic society is fundamentally an educational exercise."

"The demand for more popular power is building up most insistently in industry, and the pressure for industrial democracy has now reached such a point that a major change is now inevitable, at some stage. What is happening is not just a respectful request for consultation before management promulgates its decisions. Workers are not going to be fobbed off with a few shares...or by a carbon copy of the German system of co-determination. The campaign is very gradually crystallizing into a demand for real workers' control. However revolutionary the phrase may sound; however many Trotskyite bogeys it may conjure up, that is what is being demanded and that is what we had better start thinking about."

"Workers now have, through interdependence, enormous negative power to dislocate the system. Workers' control—if it means the power to plan their own work and to hire and fire the immediate plant management just as M.P.s are now hired and fired by the voters—converts that existing negative power into positive and constructive power. It thus creates the basis of common interest with local managers struggling to make a success of the business and to get devolved authority from an over-centralized bureaucratic board of management now perhaps sitting on them from above."

"We want industry to be in the public sector, to change the power structure of our society...We have not yet carved out of public enterprise a wide enough area of management decision which ought properly to be brought within the ambit of the workers themselves."

"[M]en who would rather go to jail than betray what they believe to be their duty to their fellow workers and the principles which they hold."

"[The first principle of British democracy is] our prime duty to each other and to what our conscience tells us to be right. If this leads individuals into conflict with the law, those individuals must be ready to take the consequences non-violently. In our democracy no man should tell another man to break the law, nor should any man break the law to by-pass Parliament. But a person who is punished for breaking an unjust law may if he is sincere and his cause wins public sympathy, create a public demand to have that unjust law changed through Parliament. This is the first and most fundamental principle of British democracy. It has a deep moral significance. Our religious and political liberties rest upon it."

"[The third principle of British democracy was that national sovereignty belonged to the people.] We lend it to our representatives to use for five years at a time. ... Any Government or MP pretending to give away these sovereign powers without the explicit consent of the people is acting unconstitutionally. Laws that pretend to take away these powers permanently have no moral authority. ... [Heath's government] will fail because they are trying to act contrary to centuries of British tradition. The people will not have it. But the resistance that is building up is not, in any sense, revolutionary."

"Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves."

"I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to see that what is said about us is true."

"[The Conservatives' Industry Act contains] the most comprehensive armoury of government control that has ever been assembled for use over private industry, far exceeding all the powers thought necessary by the last Labour government...Heath has performed a very important historical role in preparing for the fundamental and irreversible transfer in the balance of power and wealth which has to take place...The whole nature of the mixed economy operating on market forces has been transformed by this quiet revolution in a way that is not yet fully appreciated."

"The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945."

"The [pay] policy is principally designed to hold down wages rather than to check inflation. Inflation is being used as an excuse to destroy free trade union bargaining."

"The fines on the engineering union and the heavy damages that may be levied against the transport union go well beyond questions of economic policy and strike at the roots of free trade unionism. Conscientious objection to the law is not a criminal act. It is not the same as an attempt to overturn the Government and set up a new one, without elections, by the direct use of industrial strength."

"It takes powers which are permanent—this is not a temporary provisions Bill—and cover all fuels. I welcome the Bill because it will enable a Labour Government to do all they want under Labour's programme for Britain...It will give us the power to control all the oil companies, all the multi-nationals, to fix their prices and their distribution systems; and under these powers every other fuel and its use, including the chemical industry, will be brought within the control of the Government of the day. This will include road transport and private transport."

"[Edward Heath], who sold out Britain's interests to the Common Market and gave our sovereignty away without our consent—with support of Mr Thorpe and the Liberals—is not entitled to wave the Union Jack to get himself out of the mess."

"In developing our industrial strategy for the period ahead, we have the benefit of much experience. Almost everything has been tried at least once...The one constant element throughout this long history of policy has been the fact that these alternatives have been largely centrally decided and imposed and have been seen as problems of economics and management rather than as problems of politics and consent...Any constructive long-term industrial strategy must be developed by the longer, slower route of real consultation and power sharing, all done more openly. There is no alternative."

"What we lack in Government is entrepreneurial ability."

"This huge Commission building in Brussels, in the shape of a cross, is absolutely un-British. I felt as if I were going as a slave to Rome; the whole relationship was wrong. Here was I, an elected man who could be removed, doing a job, and here were these people with more power than I had and no accountability to anybody...My visit confirmed in a practical way all my suspicions that this would be the decapitation of British democracy without any countervailing advantage, and the British people, quite rightly, wouldn't accept it. There is no real benefit for Britain."

"Britain's continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation and the end of our democratically elected Parliament as the supreme law making body in the United Kingdom."

"We have come to the end of a chapter in our industrial history. The industrial system to which the Tory Party adheres—at least officially and in its manifestos—has failed us. ... It is no use blaming working people or the unions if they have to work in ancient factories with obsolete equipment producing old-fashioned goods at unecomonic prices and earning low wages as well. Working people not only are not responsible for the weakness of British manufacturing industry. They have hitherto been denied the tools and tackle that they needed to put it right. ... We have got to make a fresh start now. We have got to get investment up, and to get it up as soon as we can. If the market economy cannot or will not give us that investment, we must do it direct."

"If I had rescued a child from drowning, the national press would no doubt have headlined the story “Benn grabs child.”"

"We have confused the real issue of parliamentary democracy, for already there has been a fundamental change. The power of electors over their law-makers has gone, the power of MPs over Ministers has gone, the role of Ministers has changed. The real case for entry has never been spelled out, which is that there should be a fully federal Europe in which we become a province. It hasn't been spelled out because people would never accept it. We are at the moment on a federal escalator, moving as we talk, going towards a federal objective we do not wish to reach. In practice, Britain will be governed by a European coalition government that we cannot change, dedicated to a capitalist or market economy theology. This policy is to be sold to us by projecting an unjustified optimism about the Community, and an unjustified pessimism about the United Kingdom, designed to frighten us in. Jim quoted Benjamin Franklin, so let me do the same: "He who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary security deserves neither safety nor liberty." The Common Market will break up the UK because there will be no valid argument against an independent Scotland, with its own Ministers and Commissioner, enjoying Common Market membership. We shall be choosing between the unity of the UK and the unity of the EEC. It will impose appalling strains on the Labour movement...I believe that we want independence and democratic self-government, and I hope the Cabinet in due course will think again."

"The industrial crisis now facing Britain is far deeper than is generally appreciated; and so therefore the scale and scope of the national industrial strategy needed to overcome it is correspondingly greater. ... It is no exaggeration to say that Britain's whole future depends upon major investment in the expansion and reequipment of our manufacturing plants, aimed at restoring British industry to a competitive position in world and home markets. Such an investment programme will be a huge and lengthy task. It would involve us as a nation in spending some £6,000m a year on capital investment in manufacturing, double what we have been spending."

"He has a deep contempt for Britain, the British people and parliamentary democracy. He is trying to climb back to power via the Treaty of Rome, and put Britain under government from Brussels for ever. In 1970 Mr Heath solemnly promised that he would not take Britain into the Common Market without the full-hearted consent of the British people. He broke his pledged word then, and he now says he will not accept a 'No' vote on Thursday. Heath promised more jobs and higher living standards inside the EEC. These promises were all broken, and he now tells us we are so poor we cannot come out; beggars can't be choosers. That is false, too. Heath's leadership has been a total disaster for the British people. The Tory Party threw him out."

"Through me the energy policy of the whole Common Market is being held up. Without opening old wounds, it pleases me no end."

"[Written shortly after the death of Mao Zedong (the older Mao Tse Tung transliteration is used in the source)] In my opinion, he will undoubtedly be regarded as one of the greatest — if not the greatest — figures of the twentieth century: a schoolteacher who transformed China, released it from civil war and foreign attack and constructed a new society there. His influence throughout the world has been immense, based to some extent on power I suppose, but also on his tremendous achievements ... [H]e certainly towers above any other twentieth century figure I can think of in his philosophical contribution and his military genius."

"When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered."

"Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that."

"It is an indisputable historical fact...that Marxism has, from the earliest days, always been openly accepted by the party as one of many sources of inspiration within our movement, along with—though much less influential than—Christian Socialism, Fabianism, Owenism, trade unionism, or even radical Liberalism. Marxism is not synonymous with communism and it is not true that there is growing up in the Labour Party a dominant group which believes in violent revolution, the one-party state and suppression of democratic rights."

"If Parliament, public and press have now braced themselves to accept the plain and obvious truth that Cabinet discussions are interesting, vigorous and sometimes revolve around alternative policies, why should even the disclosure of an outline of the points at issue—while these discussions are in progress—be guarded against so relentlessly and so ineffectively from any risk of publicity? ... Secrecy in decision-making does not occur by accident or default. It is because knowledge is power, and no government willingly gives up power to the Commons, the public, or anyone else. Open government would disclose more about the processes of decision-making, including the workings of the Cabinet committee system, reveal the roles of officials and advisers, and involve both admitting and encouraging pressure upon ministers. ... If parliamentary democracy is, as I believe, a unique system of government, partly because it allows us to learn from our own mistakes in time to correct them, the raw material of that experience must be made available in time to use it for that purpose."

"North Sea oil could be a mask which conceals the decline of our economy. Don't think it will necessarily solve our problems. Britain was in a process of de-industrialization and it was essential that the revenue from oil should be used for reinvestment in industry. I have seen industry after industry in this country upon which our living standards rest going down because of the lack of investment. I have seen it in shipbuilding, aircraft, machine tools, the motor industry, motor cycles and electronics. Public investment and ownership were critical parts of the recovery of a society whose living standards and public service rested upon manufacturers."

"[T]he Opposition [Conservative Party] have consistently resisted, from the time when they were in office until now, any extension of British control over oil in the North Sea. ... The development of the North Sea is going on apace. But we believe that it is right that the British people should have a growing share in the benefits of the North Sea. ... It passes my understanding why a party which used to pretend to speak for the national interest should regularly denounce any extension of British control and ownership of the oil in the continental shelf."

"He said he did not approach the EMS proposal in a theological way. In his view the West German Government wanted it in order to cripple their competitors; the French wanted it because they wished to be equal to the Germans; and the EEC commissioners wanted it because they believed in a federal Europe. "It would mean that a British government could only get permission to devalue, if we wanted to, if we made big cuts in public expenditure. It would be quite impossible to implement Labour's Programme, 1976 and party conference decisions if we went into EMS. We ought to make it clear...that we are not prepared to go into it and we would veto it if it was not in the national interest.""

"More and more communists are coming to realize that socialism without democracy is no socialism at all. ... I believe that the next decade will see the growth in democratic socialism against the ideas of monetarism and corporation."

"I think that having 24 people around the Cabinet table whose future depends upon maintaining the good will of one man is fundamentally undemocratic and it would be far better if Cabinet ministers were accountable to the Parliamentary Labour Party."

"[T]he Party must have a much wider appeal. We have thought of the Party a bit narrowly, in terms of economic and industrial policy, as if every problem could be solved by setting up a quango. We have got to think of the appeal to women, to blacks, to the wider peace movement, the ecological movement and the regions. We have got to think out the whole devolution argument... You and I come from old-fashioned radical liberal families, and libertarianism is what it is about."

"I listened to a man called Pat Robertson, who runs a right-wing born-again Christian evangelical movement. It was such a hair-raising programme that it undid all the optimism that I had begun to feel when I came to this conference. This guy Pat Robertson, who looked like a business executive of about forty-five with one of those slow, charming American smiles, was standing there with a big tall black man beside him, his side-kick, and he talked continuously about the Reagan administration, about the defeat of the liberals, about Reagan's commitment to the evangelical movement. He had a blackboard showing what in the nineteenth century "liberal" meant. He then wiped that from the blackboard and said that today the liberals are Marxists, fascists, leftists and socialists. Then he showed an extract of Reagan saying, "We want to keep big government out of our homes, and out of our schools, and out of our family life." He went on and on for an hour like this. At the end, he said, "Let us pray", and, his face contorted with fake piety, pleaded with Jesus to protect America, "our country". I couldn't switch it off. It was so frightening, the feeling that we are now entering a holy war between that type of reactionary Christianity and communism. It is a thoroughly wicked and evil interpretation of Christianity."

"People who have 'come out' in the last two or three years by their own action make themselves vulnerable in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion caused by rising unemployment... The present inequality relating among other things to the definition of privacy, the differing ages of consent, the exclusion of the Armed Services and the Merchant Navy cannot be justified and must be completely swept away from the statute books."

"The Peasants' Revolt came as feudalism was breaking down in Britain, just as capitalism is breaking down today. Mass unemployment, the destruction of the welfare state, the health service and comprehensive education, would not be accepted, any more than would nuclear weapons based on British soil. We will not be satisfied until there is justice in Ireland. We will not allow the House of Lords to prevent us from doing what we want to do, nor the Community in Brussels, nor American generals in the Pentagon to decide what our future can be. The only way we can change Britain and the world is when working people gather together and decide whether they will change it. When we have decided we will change it, no power on earth can stop us."

"Those who argue that constitutional questions such as party democracy are irrelevant top the political struggle against Mrs Thatcher's Government are misreading the whole history of our movement. If constitutional issues are irrelevant, why did the Chartists have to fight so hard in the nineteenth century? Were the twentieth century suffragettes engaged in irrelevant activity when they were fighting for the vote? Constitutional questions are the key to power in a parliamentary democracy and have played a crucial role in the development of our movement."

"The Poles have had the courage to stand up to the Kremlin. The British people must now stand up to the Pentagon and close all their nuclear bases here."

"The violence of the press attacks on Aslef, and the sustained and bitter hostility of the media towards the Labour movement is responsible for the refusal to handle some newspapers on the railways. Day after day Fleet Street conducts its campaign against working people, ignoring their interests, distorting their arguments and abusing their representatives. Working journalists can no longer evade their moral responsibilities by shielding behind their editors, nor editors by shielding behind their proprietors. Nor can arguments based on the freedom of the press be used as an excuse to deny freedom of expression to millions of people who have lost their jobs, suffered cuts in living standards or in essential health and education services."

"[Journalists tell me:] "I didn't write the headline; the editor told me to say that. I will lose my job if I put it differently". But journalists were not exempted from what was happening in society. Their role could be likened to the Jews in Dachau who herded other Jews into the gas chambers."

"It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his,"

"I think the SDP really is a very right-wing party. In a funny way it’s more right-wing than Mrs. Thatcher because Mrs. Thatcher is an old-fashioned liberal, if you know what I mean, she believes in market forces and small government. But my knowledge and experience of the SDP is that they believe in a centralised system, they believe in a federal Europe in which we would only be a province under Brussels, they believe in retaining the American bases, they want a statutory pay policy so they would govern the wages of everybody without proper negotiation. I think they're a very hard right party and I think the Labour Party which has now got a decent policy as a result of all the work we’ve done is going to pick up a lot of support this year."

"I do not think we have a free press in Britain today. There is not a single newspaper that I can buy, not one in Britain that reflects my political position. And The Times, dare I say to you, is really disreputable. It does not print truthfully and faithfully what happens and it pretends, because it is printed in small print that it is above argument. But it is a political propaganda instrument like The Sun, but it is printed in rather better print and rather shrewder language."

"I tell the Prime Minister that this is an ill-thought-out enterprise and will not achieve the purposes to which it is put."

"When it comes to it, we shall have to make sovereignty negotiable, either by ceding it to the United Nations or arranging a transfer in some other way... Do not use that as an excuse for war. We cannot kill for flags today."

"He (John Ball) was preaching socialism long before Marx, Stalin or Brezhnev. He said things would not go well for England until all property was held in common. He was hanged, they cut his stomach out and he was drawn and quartered, his body cut into four pieces. That was the way they treated the Militant Tendency in 1381."

"The House of Commons represents only one third of the legislative structure, which under our unwritten constitution consists of the 'Queen in Parliament' within which the Crown prerogatives and the real powers of the House of Lords still play a significant part. Only the House of Commons represents the people and it is the only democratic arena in which Labour can win a majority... The fact is that the British constitution, parliamentary system and machinery of government are far from democratic in both theory and practice and they are full of obstacles for those who want to use them to bring about reform by democratic means. The Crown prerogatives, most of which are exercised by ministers, confer immense powers which can, if abused, frustrate the wishes of the electorate... The use of either prerogative power in a controversial manner in Britain would draw the monarchy into the heart of the political debate."

"Establishment necessarily involves a subtle corruption of the spirit of the church because it is safely embedded in the wider establishment of society, which includes the privileged and the powerful... How can those Christians who see monetarism being so cruelly applied to the old, the sick, the homeless, women, the black community, and the young unemployed, lead a struggle against this injustice from within an established church subject to a Cabinet and a parliamentary majority composed of those very people who are responsible for implementing those very policies?"

"The general election of 1983 has produced one important result that has passed virtually without comment in the media. It is that, for the first time since 1945, a political party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million people. This is a remarkable development by any standards and it deserves some analysis."

"[T]he 1983 Labour manifesto commanded the loyalty of millions of voters and a democratic socialist bridge-head in public understanding and support can be made."

"We are socialists because we believe that these rights cannot be fully realised in any society under capitalism, which, as in Britain now, has entrenched by law, the power of Capital over Labour, and subordinated human values to the demand for profit, at the expense of social justice and peace."

"Following the horrific news of the earthquake in Armenia, the response orf sympathy and understanding is amazing, with the Soviet Embassy open for gifts and messages. Gorbachev’s unilateral announcement of cuts of half a million troops has put Russian diplomacy right at the top, has ended the Cold war at a stroke and may bring hope to millions. What is so absurd is that the British defence policy is based on building bombs which would create a tragedy ten times as great as the earthquake and we are pouring money in to help Armenia. It is totally contradictory. The Labour Party has absolutely failed to think anything out. Caroline said disarmament will lead capitalism to collapse and could lead socialism to prosper, and I think she’s right."

"People say that if we work for the Single European Act, women will get their rights, the water will be purer, and training will be better. That is rubbish. It is part of the attempt to consolidate the EEC."

"It would be inconceivable for the House to adjourn for Easter without recording the fact that last Friday the High Court disallowed an Act which was passed by this House and the House of Lords and received Royal Assent — the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. The High Court referred the case to the European Court...I want to make it clear to the House that we are absolutely impotent unless we repeal Section 2 of the European Communities Act. It is no good talking about being a good European. We are all good Europeans; that is a matter of geography and not a matter of sentiment. Are the arrangements under which we are governed such that we have broken the link between the electorate and the laws under which they are governed? I am an old parliamentary hand — perhaps I have been here too long — but I was brought up to believe, and I still believe, that when people vote in an election they must be entitled to know that the party for which they vote, if it has a majority, will be able to enact laws under which they will be governed. That is no longer true. Any party elected, whether it is the Conservative party or the Labour party can no longer say to the electorate, "Vote for me and if I have a majority I shall pass that law", because if that law is contrary to Common Market law, British judges will apply Common Market law."

"I suppose I ought to put my reflections down. It was a remarkable two days. The NEC has abandoned socialist aspirations and any idea of transforming society; it has accepted the main principles not only of capitalism but of Thatcherism, and it thinks that now the Party has a chance of winning office."

"I have five questions that I ask people who have power, and I recommend them to the House. If I see someone who is powerful, be it a traffic warden, Rupert Murdoch, the head of a trade union or a Member of Parliament, I ask myself these five questions: "What power have you got? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How can we get rid of you?" That last question is crucial. We cannot get rid of Jacques Delors; we cannot get rid of the [European] Commission. We can get rid of a Government; but we cannot get rid of European legislation that a Government have entrenched during their period in office—be they a Labour Government with the Tories coming or the other way around."

"The Labour party believes in the traditional values of society—in the idea that we have responsibilities one to another and that we are not just greedy all the time, looking out only for ourselves. Without being personal, the philosophy that has been propagated over the past 10 years has been wicked and evil...to set man against man, woman against woman and country against country and to build on nationalism and racism...and all the damage that has been done by the Conservatives has been disgraceful...I have a measure called the Margaret Thatcher (Global Repeal) Bill...It would be easy to reverse the policies and replace the personalities—the process has begun—but the rotten values that have been propagated from the platform of political power in Britain during the past 10 years will be an infection—a virulent strain of right-wing capitalist thinking which it will take time to overcome."

"All war represents a failure of diplomacy."

"I’ve been in Parliament for forty-one years. I’ve been in the Soviet Union many, many times, to Moscow, and I love it; but I hope you will not equate democracy with capitalism, because capitalism imposes great hardship on people."

"Capitalism and British imperialism have exploited the world; and what I fear is that the only form of capitalism you could have would be a military form of capitalism, like Pinochet’s in Chile."

"If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights."

"The word 'socialism' on my poster has not lost me a single vote. People will support you if you're serious. My complaint about the Labour movement is that it hasn't done any teaching for 40 years; it has always been on the defensive. Thatcher was successful because she was a teacher. Her values, of course, were rotten."

"The plain fact is that every single policy that has been attempted by British cabinets has failed — partition, Stormont, power sharing, direct rule, internment without trial, "supergrass" trials, CS gas, strip searching, even the Anglo-Irish Agreement. ... I have long held the view that what we are discussing is not so much an Irish problem as a British problem in Northern Ireland. ... The real problem can be traced to the continued British presence in Northern Ireland. ... by the end of the century I believe Britain will have withdrawn from Northern Ireland just as it has done from so many colonies in the past."

"Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy — a very charming man called Liao Dong — and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century. He said that I couldn't admire Mao more than he did. I asked him how Mao was viewed now. He said Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong; the Cultural Revolution didn't work. He said he had been named after Mao — it was amusing."

"War is easy to talk about; there are not many people left of the generation which remembers it. The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup [sc., Edward Heath] served with distinction in the last war. I never killed anyone but I wore uniform. I was in London during the blitz in 1940, living where the Millbank tower now stands, where I was born. Some different ideas have come in there since. Every night, I went to the shelter in Thames house. Every morning, I saw docklands burning. Five hundred people were killed in Westminster one night by a land mine. It was terrifying. Are not Arabs and Iraqis terrified? Do not Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does not bombing strengthen their determination? What fools we are to live as if war is a computer game for our children or just an interesting little Channel 4 news item. Every Member of Parliament who votes for the Government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting responsibility for the deaths of innocent people if the war begins, as I fear it will. That decision is for every hon. Member to take. In my parliamentary experience, this a unique debate. We are being asked to share responsibility for a decision that we will not really be taking but which will have consequences for people who have no part to play in the brutality of the regime with which we are dealing. On 24 October 1945, [...] the United Nations charter was passed. The words of that charter are etched on my mind and move me even as I think of them. It says: "We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has brought untold sorrow to mankind". That was that generation's pledge to this generation, and it would be the greatest betrayal of all if we voted to abandon the charter, take unilateral action and pretend that we were doing so in the name of the international community. I shall vote against the motion for the reasons that I have given."

"Having served for nearly half a century in the House of Commons, I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so."

"I heard from Jeremy Corybn in the House of Commons yesterday that the alleged cancellation of the world debt was a complete fraud, because a condition has been imposed that any country that had its debt cancelled had to privatise its assets; so that’s where the money will be made. I mean, if ever the Marxist critique of capitalism was correct, its on this. Somebody wrote in the “New Yorker” the other day, ‘Marx may have been wrong about communism, but he was certainly right about capitalism.’"

"Tony Benn: I’ll tell you the problem. You never interview any of these people. You just show them shouting, fighting and in funny hats, making out they’re a lot of nutters."

"JS: Well we did have a chap at the top of the programme actually."

"TB: Well, I didn’t see that, but in general ‘protest’ is the wrong word; it’s the beginning of a political campaign. That’s how apartheid ended, that’s how men got the vote, it was by putting pressure on parliament."

"JS: Right, do you find yourself identifying with Tony Benn, or is he of a different era and not something you find a resonance with?"

"Paul Mobbs, Cyber-activist: I think we’re all going in the same direction. Campaigning is all about managing change and different views of how we manage that change. People today are using the Internet, much like in the Civil War people used pamphlets. We’ve just moved on and it’s got a lot more technical."

"JS: There’s no real identifiable ideology behind what’s going on here in Seattle, I mean."

"TB: It’s anti-capitalist, it’s anti-capitalist."

"INTERVIEWER: According to one analysis, the economic history of the last 20 years is a story about governments retreating from the marketplace and allowing free markets to reign. Do you buy that?"

"TONY BENN: No. What's happened is big corporations have seized governments and taken them over, making the state much stronger in the interest of corporate finance. That's what has happened. The state in Great Britain is much more powerful than it was when Mrs. Thatcher came to power. She destroyed trade unions, she destroyed local government, she limited free speech, and she recruited a lot of riot police. So the idea that market forces have weakened the state is nonsense. It's been strengthened. The people who control market forces have taken over the state. I met an old governor of Ohio a year ago, and he said to me, "You'll never have democracy while big business buys both parties and expects a payoff from whichever one wins." We're not represented anymore. We're managed on behalf of global capitalism, and that's why in Seattle and Prague and everywhere else in the world, people are beginning to stir, because they realize they're being managed now. Nobody represents them."

"INTERVIEWER: You've talked about the academics and the monetarists and so on. In Great Britain, the charge to undo the welfare state was led by Keith Joseph. Keith Joseph was concerned about a sense of freedom. What's the difference between your sense of freedom and his sense of freedom?"

"TONY BENN: In 1945 in the election, I drove a loudspeaker van around in the campaign, and we went to Covent Garden, and there was a guy called Knocker O'Connell. ... He did a political poem for me, and one line was this: "'F' stands for freedom, what Britain brags about. If you can't afford your dinner, you're free to go without." And that was the sort of freedom that capitalists believed in. You were free to starve if you weren't rich. This idea that keeping people down is the way you get freedom is ridiculous, because the world is dominated by multinational corporations that have never been elected. You can't get rid of them. How do you get rid of Bill Gates? You can't do it. But at least you can get rid of Clinton or Blair or Major or Bush. You can't get rid of corporations. And they are the ones who are dictating what sort of a world we live in. I think capitalism has one thing in common with communism: They both detest democracy. I used to go to Moscow on ministerial visits, and I'd meet the central committee for the Communist Party, and they had not been elected. And I would meet the commissars, and they had not been elected. And then I'd go on a ministerial visit to Brussels, and I'd meet the commissioners; they hadn't been elected. I'd meet the central bankers; they hadn't been elected. Communism and capitalism want to run society from the top, and you're allowed to decide whether your want Bush or Gore or Blair or Major, but you're not allowed to discuss capitalism in Russia or socialism in the West. Do you see what I mean? It's a very interesting thing to observe. Market forces destroy democracy by putting money above the voting machine or the ballot box."

"INTERVIEWER: Would you accept that the British economy by the mid- to late '70s was a mess?"

"TONY BENN: Well, I think there were a lot of problems. There was the oil crisis, and we may have another one. We're talking, remember, about the end of the year 2000. With a war in the Middle East, rising oil prices could throw the whole world economy into collapse again. So you have to recognize, as [Prime Minister Harold] Macmillan once said, that events can often change things. But what we did at the end of the war, to employ everybody, was a remarkable achievement. We built 400,000 houses. We built a health service, absolutely free when you needed it. You paid for it when you were well, and you got it for free when you were ill. Everything. No charge for spectacles or prescriptions or anything. That was a huge advance in human improvement. And now, increasingly, they're trying to privatize the health service so the rich will be able to afford to be looked after, but other people won't."

"INTERVIEWER: But the nationalized industries, do you think they were a success in the late '70s?"

"TONY BENN: Well, they were much better than what was there before, and they were better than what we have now. I mean, the pits, the mining industry has been privatized, and there are no pits left, and we've got 1,000 years of coal under our territory. When I was minister of energy, secretary of state by the time I left office, one-quarter of the North Sea was owned by the government. [It was owned by the] BNOC, British National Oil Corporation. It's all been sold off by Thatcher. So in the middle of the fuel crisis, you suddenly realize that the policies being pursued by a socialist government were in the interests of the public. And people see that now, you know. They're beginning to understand it now. But during the Cold War, of course, what they said was if you're against capitalism you must be an agent for the KGB; you must be working for the Kremlin; we're about to be invaded by the Red Army -- all of which was rubbish, but they used that to frighten people away from policies that really were in their own interest."

"We have been in recess since July, and during that time there have been a fuel crisis, a Danish no vote, the collapse of the Euro and a war in the middle east, but what is our business tomorrow? The Insolvency Bill [Lords]. It ought be called the Bankruptcy Bill [Commons], because we play no role."

"The big question today is 'Will globalisation allow democracy to survive?' On one side we have the multinationals, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. I want to help to redress the balance on the other side."

"I was the first MP to table a motion condemning apartheid in South Africa. When I first met Nelson Mandela he was a terrorist, when I next saw him, he was a Nobel Prize winner and the President of South Africa."

"The issues raised in the historic conflict between Charles I, resting his claim to govern Britain on the divine right of kings, and Parliament - representing, however imperfectly, a demand for the wider sharing of power - concerned the use and abuse of state power, the right of the governed to a say in their government, and the nature of political freedom. The Levellers grew out of this conflict. They represented the aspirations of working people who suffered under the persecution of kings, landowners and the priestly class, and they spoke for those who experienced the hardships of poverty and deprivation. They developed and campaigned, first with Cromwell and then against him, for a political and constitutional settlement of the civil war which would embody principles of political freedom, anticipating by a century and a half the ideas of the American and French revolutions."

"Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he'd come to the conclusion about capitalism which I'd come to much later, and I was a bit angry he'd thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that's what 'Das Kapital' was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, 'Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet."

"People at the top do not want to share their power. They’ve always got some marvellous reason: I’m following my religion; I’m following the laws of economics. Even Stalin: I’m representing the vanguard of the working class, so please don’t cause trouble. That is the battle that every generation has, and yet we mustn’t be pessimistic about it..."

"The Morning Star had an article by George Galloway, and in it he said, "Britain is currently run by a blood-splattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals." Now, first of all I think that's a totally ineffective way of getting your case across, but secondly, last November George pleaded with me to try to persuade the National Executive to let him stay in the party. So if I'd succeeded, he would have been still a member of a party currently run by a "blood-splattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals". It put me off George Galloway in a fairly fundamental way."

"The Americans would not allow an anti-American government to be elected in Britain - I mean an anti-capitalist government, a socialist government, to be elected in Britain. So how would you ever make a change, unless you put on such pressure that the system falls and then people take over. The idea that a little debate in Parliament will change things is really an illusion. I’m not in favour of a bloody revolution, because we saw what happened with Stalin, but I’m not in favour of surrendering, step by step, the right of people to dec ide the policies that the elected government follows, because otherwise you might just as well hang the whole thing up. That is the issue that interests me very much, and Paul Foot’s book, The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined, is highly relevant to it."

"My Great-grandfather was a Congregational Minister and my Mother was a Bible scholar, and I was brought up on the Bible, that the story of the Bible was conflict between the kings who had power, and the prophets who preached righteousness. And I was taught to believe in the prophets, got me into a lot of trouble. And my Dad said to me when I was young, "Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to let it (be) known.""

"[The Labour Party]'s never been a socialist party, but it's always had socialists in it, just as there are some Christians in the Church, it's an exact parallel."

"I was born about a quarter of a mile from where we are sitting now and I was here in London during the Blitz. And every night I went down into the shelter. 500 people killed, my brother was killed, my friends were killed. And when the Charter of the UN was read to me, I was a pilot coming home in a troop ship: 'We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.' That was the pledge my generation gave to the younger generation and you tore it up. And it's a war crime that's been committed in Iraq, because there is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons."

"Ideas are more powerful than guns."

"I rang John Rees because I heard that George Galloway had attacked the Respect party at some conference, so I thought it would be useful to know what was going on. John said that George was very much a loner, but that he was in contact with some fundamentalist Muslims in his constituency; that on a left-right basis he was on the right, not the left."

"If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people."

"An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern."

"I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralize them."

"People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don’t vote. They always say that that everyone should vote but I think that if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people that represented their interests there would be a real democratic revolution."

"Choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you are shackled with debt you don’t have the freedom to choose."

"I think democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world, because if you have power you use it to meet the needs of you and your community."

"The way change occurs to begin with, if you come up with a good idea, like healthcare, you're ignored. If you go on you must be mad, absolutely stark-staring bonkers. If you go on after that you're dangerous. Then, if the pressure keeps up there's a pause. And then you can't find anyone at the top who doesn't claim to have thought of it in the first place. That's how progress is made."

"First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."

"When you think of the number of men in the world who hate each other, why, when two men love each other, does the church split?"

"The key to any progress is to ask the question why? All the time. Why is that child poor? Why was there a war? Why was he killed? Why is he in power? And of course questions can get you into a lot of trouble, because society is trained by those who run it, to accept what goes on. Without questions we won't make any progress at all."

"I never liked meat - and my son Hilary, 30 years ago, said, 'If the world ate the grain instead of feeding it to animals and killing them, there would be enough food for everybody,'"

"In Labour Governments we did our best to make capitalism work in a civilised way. And we failed. It never can work. It will always exploit and oppress the people."

"I don't think people realise how the establishment became established. They simply stole land and property from the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since."

"The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it."

"[Tony Benn is] an Old Testament prophet preaching the sort of New Jerusalem he wants to see."

"Well then, who had he had time for, during his 24 years in the Party, if he didn't like collectivists and didn't like moderates? There was a pause. "Well, Benn. I have a high opinion of Wedgwood Benn. He is committed to a form of collectivism, but at least he is honest and original. I'd like to see him leading the Labour Party." You could have knocked me down with a feather. But, I said, would not Benn's leadership of the Labour Party make it still more likely that the country would go collectivist, with the inevitable erosion of our liberties as outlined by Johnson in his "Farewell"? Not necessarily, Johnson replied, because Benn was a genuine democrat, and might, when it came to the crunch between collectivism and liberty, choose liberty. But it would be too late by then! Well, said Johnson, it might be. But at least Benn leading Labour and Thatcher leading the Tories would present the country with "a proper choice" between collectivism and individualism. This struck me as dotty."

"He was a very good Postmaster General, all those coloured stamps, still going well. Tony's obsessed with shop stewards. That is why he liked planning agreements, because they would be run by shop stewards. We were having a shadow cabinet meeting and I asked for any other business. There was a deep sigh because we knew Tony would have something. And he said, I have just attended a meeting of the Bristol Aerospace workers, I think it was, and they just passed a resolution saying that they should have the right to sack the management at a week's notice. I said, why should they have a week? Why not give them just a weekend to clear out their lockers? I have always said about Tony that he immatures with age."

"Some of the Civil Servants used to contribute a lot to counter-briefing directed against Tony Benn on the assumption that he being anti-Europe everything he said should be resisted. I disliked this intensely. This kind of official politicking is one of the most unattractive aspects of the Civil Service... There is a sort of top Civil Servants' mafia. I soon found that they were trying systematically to get pro-European Ministers to gang up against anti-European Ministers. I used to receive briefings from the Foreign Office beginning with: "We expect Mr Benn to say the following..." I made it clear that these briefings about what Mr Benn would say and in the view of officials ought to say should not come from officials in the Department of Energy."

"Failure is always much more interesting than success, and Tony Benn remains in many ways the most fascinating left-wing figure of our time. These Diaries, covering the dawn of his Ministerial career ... serve as an opportune reminder of just how much he has thrown away. What they reveal is a young politician of the highest promise who a quarter of a century ago appeared to have the world of Labour politics at his feet."

"The story of the Postmaster General and the Queen and the conflict that arose between them over the need to have the monarch's head on every postage stamp provides easily the best part of this book (those who would dismiss it as trivial merely betray how little they understand the true nature of the power structure in Britain). It offers, in fact, a highly illuminating constitutional parable and one that Crossman, for all his desire to produce a twentieth-century Bagehot, was never quite able to match. No one interested in the political influence of the Crown, the intrigues of the civil service or the highly traditionalist character of Harold Wilson as the Queen's First Minister can afford to ignore it."

"It is ironic that Tony Benn's ministerial career should have left only two monuments behind — the uranium mine in Namibia he authorised as Energy Secretary, which helps to support Apartheid and is in territory illegally occupied by South Africa, and an aircraft [Concorde] which is used by wealthy people on their expense accounts, whose fares are subsidised by much poorer taxpayers."

"Another star was Tony Benn, at that time still rattling his full complement of syllables as the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn. From start to finish he and I have rarely agreed on anything, but he was always a courteous and effective debater, an English patriot, and as time has made socialism more and more a thing of the past, even a traditional figure. But perhaps we enjoy a sympathy based on our religious roots. When Tony became President of the Union I was invited to a celebration, attended by his father Viscount Stansgate, which, true to Tony's Nonconformist principles, was teetotal."

"Last night I had a talk with Tony Benn. He was the only person even half-right on the subject of North Sea oil. And how fascinating he is to talk to! His mind is so quick and versatile – but the loony prejudice (and this of course the motivation that keeps him active) never far below the surface. 'We want an Asia economy so as to be like Singapore – with its penal code' etc."

"Tony Benn is described as a politician by those who have never met him."

"One of the twentieth century's most committed parliamentarians."

"Tony Benn was at his apogee [in 1980], the hero of the left with an appeal that went far beyond their relatively small numbers. He was to me an enigma. Personally he was the sweetest of men, concerned about his friends and colleagues, ready to help, funny and self-effacing. His socialist values ran deep, owing more to the Levellers of the English Civil War than to Marx or Trotsky. The iconic leader for him was Colonel Rainborough of Cromwell's New Model Army, the man who declared during the famous Putney Debates: "The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he." Benn's charisma overwhelmed his reason, and his eloquence washed away his logic when he was responding to an adoring audience. One of my journalist friends observed that, during his speech to the conference, Tony held forth through the applause, not pausing for it to die down. He seemed to be in a self-induced trance. Indeed, some of his own supporters began to get worried. Comments were made on his staring eyes, even his sanity."

"Admired so many things about Benn. Unwavering principles; always open to new ideas; stellar political speaker but unfailingly courteous."

"Tony was a true friend of the Irish people. A principled politician and activist, he spoke up passionately for the idea of a united Ireland. He remained an avid supporter of Irish freedom throughout his life."

"He was an absolutely brilliant speaker ... he had such clarity of expression. [He was] a charming, nice man. He made enemies and kept enemies but on the whole most people regarded him with a good degree of affection long before it came to the stage when it was thought he could cause no harm. He was out of step for many years with whoever was in the charge of the leadership. He wanted to make people think and that was an admirable thing."

"Tony Benn was one of those rare things: a genuine radical for all his life. He was a fearless campaigner and a legendary figure for the Labour movement. Even when I disagreed with him, I always had enormous respect for his brilliance, his passion and his commitment to the people of Britain and of the world."

"[Benn was a] powerful, fearless, relentless advocate for social justice and people's rights."

"In the final decade of an extraordinary political life, Tony Benn was a great friend of Liberty and human rights. He spoke to packed audiences up and down the country against internment and identity cards and for values of internationalism and humanity. And he often shared the stage with speakers of different political stripes with considerable generosity. I shall never forget his many kindnesses to me, including when he ripped up a prepared speech he was about to deliver, in order to make my own nervous and novice remarks sound slightly less unplanned. In an age of spin, he was solid, a signpost and not a weathervane."

"In the evening of his life, Benn became the most successful political prophet in British history, attracting huge audiences up and down the country."

"Tony Benn was a giant of socialism who encouraged me to join Labour in 1977: wonderful inspirational speaker and person: will be deeply missed."

"He did one great thing in his life: he changed the constitution of the House of Lords. Apart from that he symbolised the sort of left-wing nuttiness that nearly destroyed the Labour party in the late 1970s and early 1980s."

"[Benn was an] iconic figure of our age. He will be remembered as a champion of the powerless, a great parliamentarian and a conviction politician. Tony Benn spoke his mind and spoke up for his values. Whether you agreed with him or disagreed with him, everyone knew where he stood and what he stood for. ... He believed in movements and mobilised people behind him for the causes he cared about, often unfashionable ones. In a world of politics that is often too small, he thought big about our country and our world."

"I wasn't a huge fan of Tony Benn, I think he was a fraud in many ways."

"We have a right to say that, if it means slightly dearer coal, it is better to have slightly dearer coal than cheaper colliers. Hon. Gentlemen here must face the issue that when they vote against this Bill, they are voting for lower wages for the colliers... It is always characteristic of Liberal hypocrisy to pay lip service to these things and refuse to face the consequences that follow from them. We say that you cannot get from the already dry veins of the miners new blood to revivify the industry. There veins are shrunken white, and we are asking you [addressing himself directly to David Lloyd George] to be, for once, decent to the miners—not to pay lip service, not to say that you are very sorry for them, not to say that that you are very sorry that these accidents occur, not to say that you are very sorry for the low level of wages and for the conditions of famine which have existed in the mining districts since the War, and then to use all your Parliamentary skill, all your rhetoric, in an act of pure demagogy to expose the mining community of this country to another few years of misery."

"Any impartial examination of the British courts will show that even now, when the capitalist class of Great Britain can afford the luxury of apparent impartiality, there is evidence of bias in the courts, and when we start to challenge your position and when your property is in peril your judicial impartiality will go as it has in the past, as it has in Germany, as it has all over the world. The reason why you are so kind and benevolent at the moment is that we do not threaten you. Political toleration is a by-product of the complacency of the ruling class. When that complacency is disturbed there never was a more bloody-minded set of thugs than the British ruling class."

"The Labour Party should oppose the Government arms plan root and branch."

"If the immediate international situation is used as an excuse to get us to drop our opposition to the rearmament programme of the Government, the next phase must be that we must desist from any industrial or political action that may disturb national unity in the face of Fascist aggression. Along that road is endless retreat, and at the end of it a voluntary totalitarian State with ourselves erecting the barbed wire around. You cannot collaborate, you cannot accept the logic of collaboration on a first class issue like rearmament, and at the same time evade the implications of collaboration all along the line when the occasion demands it."

"Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology."

"The fear of Hitler is to be used to frighten the workers of Britain into silence. In short Hitler is to rule Britain by proxy. If we accept the contention that the common enemy is Hitler and not the British capitalist class, then certainly Churchill is right. But it means abandonment of the class struggle and the subservience of the British workers to their own employers."

"What argument have they to persuade the young men to fight except merely in another squalid attempt to defend themselves against a redistribution of the international swag?"

"[T]he country is now more concerned with the Prime Minister winning the war than with his winning a Debate in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister wins Debate after Debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate."

"We have in this country five or six generals, members of other nations, Czechs, Poles and French, all of them trained in the use of these German weapons and this German technique. I know it is hurtful to our pride, but would it not be possible to put some of those men temporarily in charge in the field, until we can produce trained men of our own? ... [Y]ou have to purge the Army at the top. It will have to be a drastic purge, because the spirit of the British Army has to be regained."

"The Prime Minister must realise that in this country there is a taunt, on everyone's lips, that if Rommel had been in the British Army, he would still have been a sergeant."

"The rest of the responsibility for the early collapse of the Debate must, of course, rest with the Prime Minister himself, because his speech was unable to compete in attractiveness with the House of Commons meals, and everybody here knows what that means. If the Prime Minister will insist, on these occasions, on indulging in these turgid, wordy, dull, prosaic and almost invariably empty new chapters in his book, then he must expect something like what happened yesterday. ... I understand from my informants...that the Prime Minister was dressed in some uniform of some sort or other. I wish he would recognise that he is the civilian head of a civilian Government, and not go parading around in ridiculous uniforms."

"I have spent now more than a quarter of a century of my life in public affairs, and as I grow older I become more and more pessimistic. I started-if the House will forgive me this personal note - my career in public affairs in a small colliery town in South Wales. When I was quite a young boy my father took me down the street and showed me one or two portly and complacent looking gentlemen standing at the shop doors, and, pointing to one, he said, "Very important man. That's Councillor Jackson. He's a very important man in this town." I said, "What's the Council?" "Oh, that's the place that governs the affairs of this town," said my father. "Very important place indeed, and they are very powerful men." When I got older I said to myself, "The place to get to is the council. That's where the power is." So I worked very hard, and, in association with my fellows, when I was about 20 years of age, I got on to the council. I discovered when I got there that the power had been there, but it had just gone. So I made some inquiries, being an earnest student of social affairs, and I learned that the power had slipped down to the county council. That was as where it was, and where it had gone to. So I worked very hard again, and I got there-and it had gone from there too. Then I found out that it had come up here. So I followed it, and sure enough I found that it had been here, but I just saw its coat tails round the corner."

"By refusing the state effective intervention in the economic activities of society, the Tory is a potential Fascist element in the community. By denying Parliament a vigorous economic life he condemns it to death."

"I do not represent the big bosses at the top; I represent the people at the bottom, the individual men and women, and I say that this Regulation is the enfranchisment of the corporate society and the disfranchisment of the individual."

"I will go so far as to say that if the implications of the [Employment] White Paper are sound, there is no longer any justification for this party existing at all. We think that we represent a fundamental body of doctrine which is conducive to the welfare of the State, and which subsequently the State will have to adopt if it is to be saved. Therefore, I do not see for the life of me—and I am putting a serious proposition to the House—how a Coalition Government can pretend to be able to examine a situation of this sort and put an intelligible series of propositions to the House."

"Apparently some fire-eaters to-day have been saying "Never again must we allow ourselves to get into the same condition of military unpreparedness, so we are going to build up a vast war machine in this country in order to surround defeated Germany with a sea of peaceful tranquillity..." It looks as though the consequences of defeat will be more desirable than those of victory."

"This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time."

"[For Winston Churchill], democracy is a state in which the people acquiesce in the rule of property. Democracy is an admirable institution so long as the poor continue to carry the rich on their backs. When the poor decide to change places, democracy falls into disrepute. That is why, whenever you scratch a Tory, you find a Fascist."

"Although I am not myself a devotee of bigness for bigness sake, I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one."

"He is a man suffering from petrified adolescence....He is an extrovert, a picture thinker. He has intelligence but no intellect....He really has the values of a boy of seventeen to eighteen but he makes them sound like mature judgments by his sophisticated speech."

"I deplore the letter today in The Times from a distinguished orthopaedist, who talked about private practice as though it should be the glory of the profession. What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety."

"[W]e ought to take pride in the fact that, despite our financial and economic anxieties, we are still able to do the most civilised thing in the world—put the welfare of the sick in front of every other consideration."

"Why should we, who are clearing up the muddle, allow ourselves to be scared by headlines in the capitalist Press? It is the most prostituted Press in the world, most of it owned by a gang of millionaires."

"That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were."

"In 1945 and 1946 we were attacked on our housing policy by every spiv in the country—for what is Toryism except organised spivery? They wanted to let the spivs loose."

"I am keeping the mothers and children alive, but he half-starved them to death. He has the impudence to call me Minister of Disease when every single vital statistic by which the health and progress of the population can be measured is infinitely better now under the supervision of a common miner than it was then under the supervision of an aristocrat. I know if you took the vital statistics of the aristocrats they were as well off then as now. He looked after them all right. I am not concerned about that; I am concerned about our own people. Some people are worse off than before the war, of course. We meant them to be."

"I may be ready to be polite 20 years from now, when we are able to look back on 25 years of Socialist government. Then maybe I won't have enough energy to be rude. But while we have the energy to be rude let us be rude to the right people."

"[T]he kind of society which we envisage and which we shall have to live in will be a mixed society, a mixed economy, in which all the essential instruments of planning are in the hands of the State, in which the characteristic form of employment will be by the community in one form or another but where we shall have for a very long time the light cavalry of private, competitive industry."

"Never in the history of mankind have the best religious ideas found greater expression than in the programme we have carried out. “Suffer little children to come unto Me” is now not something said just from the pulpit. We have weaved it into the woof and warp of the national life."

"The language of priorities is the religion of socialism."

"I welcome this opportunity of pricking the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth."

"It has been suggested, I think by the hon. Member for East Aberdeenshire (Mr. Boothby) that the most constructive suggestion he could make was to urge an early General Election and a return of a Tory Government in Britain. Why on earth should he want to prophesy what might result from a Tory Government when history has the record for him? Why read the crystal when he can read the book?"

"The liberal never knew what kind of society he intended until he had, in fact, made it. If we, on the other hand, accept the obligation of planning the direction of economic activity, then we accept with it the burden of deciding who and what must first be served. ... This is the complex answer to those who think socialism is merely a matter of appetite. On the contrary, it is the first time in human history that mankind will have accepted the obligation of free collective moral choice as the ultimate arbiter in social affairs. This, in truth, is the People's Coming of Age."

"A very large part of the population of Wales was English-speaking, and the English-speaking part had a contribution just as big, if not bigger, to make towards Welsh cultural life than the Welsh-speaking part. A great deal of the literature of which Welshmen were proud and a great deal of the poetry for which this generation would be noted had been written in English by Welshmen."

"There is only one hope for mankind, and that hope still remains in this little island. It is from here that we tell the world where to go and how to go there, but we must not follow behind the anarchy of American competitive capitalism which is unable to restrain itself at all, as is seen in the stockpiling that is now going on, and which denies to the economy of Great Britain even the means of carrying on our civil production."

"There is only one hope for mankind — and that is democratic Socialism."

"[I]t is seriously suggested that before this nation has shown its capacity to manage democratic institutions peacefully we should allow it to rearm. I say to America and the people of the world that we are not yet feeling safe enough to allow another German rearmament to take place."

"The Communist Party is the sworn inveterate enemy of the Socialist and Democratic Parties. When it associates with them, it does so as a preliminary to destroying them. There is an old German aphorism which says: "To cast an enemy out it is first necessary to embrace him." That is what the Communists mean when they ask for co-operation and alliance with the Socialists... The Communist does not look upon a Socialist as an ally in a common cause. He looks upon him as a dupe, as a temporary convenience, and as something to be thrust ruthlessly to one side when he has served his purpose."

"I am not anti-American...but I do not believe that the American nation has the experience, sagacity, or the self-restraint necessary for world leadership at this time. They are engaged in the most tremendous rearmament programme the world has ever seen, and I cannot see any sense in it, and no one has yet tried to put any sense in it. ... When are we going to have some sense of national pride and tell the United States that she cannot have Great Britain on any terms? The Americans would understand us. They like plain speaking. Why do we not speak plainly to them?"

"Now that we are engaged once more in policy-making it is essential that we should keep clear before us that one of the central principles of Socialism is the substitution of public for private ownership. There is no way round this."

"[L]ife would indeed be easy if it were always clear what our duty is. Usually there is a conflict of duties as there is of loyalties. In order to serve one you often have to abandon the others. I remember a man saying to me during the last war that he had no use for rebels. Then I asked him how he would describe a German living in Germany and working for the defeat of the Nazis? Judged by conventional standards, the man was a rebel and a traitor. But judged in the wider context of humanity he was a hero. All you can really say here is that a man ought not to betray his first loyalty. The fact is that few people do. The problem is one of deciding which is the first loyalty from among a number of competing ones. And the higher the intelligence, the wider the knowledge, the keener the imagination, then the more loyalties there will be competing for our allegiance, and of course, the deeper the spiritual struggle involved in sorting them out."

"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down."

"For the Jew, the immediacy of his remote past is an intimate reality. He is living among places whose names are enshrined in his racial literature and they make sweet music to his ears. From Dan to Beersheba, he can now make a journey – Nazareth, Galilee, Jerusalem, all these and so many more belong to him in a special sense, for they whisper in his blood, and evoke memories of a time that was, before he was compelled to seek shelter in reluctant lands. When therefore the Arab says that the Jew should find a home anywhere except in Palestine he asks something the Jew cannot concede without mutilating his racial personality beyond endurance. It is no answer to say that many centuries have passed into history since the Jew was at home in Palestine. If he had been permitted the security of a safe home elsewhere, the answer might do. But, as we know, it was not so."

"It is not necessary to spend time in formal greetings. Our presence is itself sufficient to show our support for the Chinese people’s revolution. As Mr Attlee has already said, the Labour movement’s reaction to the Chinese Revolution followed the example it set after the first world war when it rallied to the support of the Russian Revolution. It follows naturally that the struggle of the British workers in their own country against the forces of capitalism causes them to sympathise immediately with the struggles of the workers in other countries."

"The day of imperial power is over. We are ashamed of our imperial past in Great Britain, and you have a lot to be ashamed of, too."

"I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating-machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice, he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine."

"Damn it all, you can't have the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver."

"If the Labour Party is not going to be a Socialist Party, I don't want to lead it."

"Nasser's a thug. He needs to be taught a lesson."

"Bevan described the proposal for a free trade market for Europe as a "will-of-the-wisp" which they were expected to spend their time following in Westminster. The whole idea was purely a nineteenth-century conception."

"I could quote almost all the ultimatums given by Hitler to countries that he invaded where he used exactly the same kind of language as the Prime Minister used the other day. The same language was used to Norway. ... We have only to substitute Egypt for Norway, because what did the right hon. Gentleman say? He said that he expected the Egyptian Government to peacefully permit the re-occupation of bases on the [Suez] Canal by the British Forces, and if they resisted they would be overcome with all necessary force. That is exactly what he said. Quite honestly, this is the language of the bully. There is no semblance of legal justification behind it."

"We say that Great Britain has always stood for civilised principles, and for humanity and justice. How do we answer now, when we drop bombs on helpless people? [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes, when we drop bombs. How do we answer now at whatever judgment seat any hon. Member likes to mention? A nation more powerful than us may drop even worse bombs on British cities. How answer that? With bombs? Bombs with bombs? That is the bankruptcy of statesmanship. The world has travelled that way in my own lifetime twice. We dare not travel that way again, because this time there will be no return."

"Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt in order to strengthen the United Nations. Every burglar of course could say the same thing, he could argue that he was entering the house in order to train the police. So, if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying, and he may be, he may be, then if he is sincere in what he is saying then he is too stupid to be a prime minister."

"The social furniture of modern society is so complicated and fragile that it cannot support the jackboot. We cannot run the processes of modern society by attempting to impose our will upon nations by armed force. If we have not learned that we have learned nothing."

"I have never been able to reconcile the obscene conduct of the Russian Communists under Stalin—the assassinations, tortures, imprisonments and the impounding of helpless people in camps—with their philosophy, and I have never understood how the Russians could do so. The only explanation is that it is not part of their Communism at all, but of Byzantinism."

"I do not take the view that Great Britain is a second-class Power. On the contrary, I take the view that this country is a depository of probably more concentrated experience and skill than any other country in the world."

"The great Powers of the world today as they look at the armaments they have built up, find themselves hopelessly frustrated. If that be the case, what is the use of speaking about first-class, second-class and third-class Powers? That is surely the wrong language to use. It does not comply with contemporary reality. What we have to seek is new ways of being great, new modes of pioneering, new fashions of thought, new means of inspiring and igniting the minds of mankind. We can do so."

"The collective psychology of the Moslem states is definitely repulsive to me. It is so morbid and wildly irrational that I am conscious of an abiding sense of unease when I am in one of them."

"[The Common Market is not] a blueprint for European prosperity and stability. ...[it is] the result of a political malaise following upon the failure of Socialists to use the sovereign power of their Parliaments to plan their economic life. ... Socialists cannot at one and the same time call for economic planning and accept the verdict of free competition, no matter how extensive the area it covers. The jungle is not made more acceptable just because it is almost limitless."

"I knew this morning that I was going to make a speech that would offend, and even hurt, many of my friends. I know that you are deeply convinced that the action you suggest is the most effective way of influencing international affairs. I am deeply convinced that you are wrong. It is therefore not a question of who is in favour of the hydrogen bomb, but a question of what is the most effective way of getting the damn thing destroyed. It is the most difficult of all problems facing mankind. But if you carry this resolution and follow out all its implications — and do not run away from it — you will send a British Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber. ... And you call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm."

"Just consider, all the little nations running for shelter here and there, one running to Russia and another to the United States. In that situation before anything else would happen, the world will have been polarised between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is against that negative polarisation we have been fighting for years. We want to have the opportunity to interpose between these two giants a moderating, modifying and mitigating diplomacy."

"[I]f as a nation we had decided we would repudiate on ethical and moral grounds the hydrogen bomb, we would then have to repudiate all the alliances based upon the possession of the hydrogen bomb by all the other allies. ... Those who desire that Great Britain should have no allies, and only Russia should have allies, are enemies of Great Britain and, not only that, they are enemies of the working class movement. We are only able to have an influence on the rest of the world if we have friends in the rest of the world."

"Unless we plan our resources purposefully, unless we are prepared to accept the disciplines that are necessary, we shall not be able to meet the challenge of the Communist world. As the years go by, and the people see us languishing behind, trying to prevent the evils of inflation by industrial stagnation, trying all the time to catch up with things because we have not acted soon enough—when they see the Communist world, planned, organised, publicly-owned and flaunting its achievements to the rest of the world—they will come to be educated by what they will experience. They will realise that Western democracy is falling behind in the race because it is not prepared to read intelligently the lessons of the twentieth century."

"This so-called affluent society is an ugly society still. It is a vulgar society. It is a meretricious society. It is a society in which priorities have gone all wrong."

"The challenge is going to come from Russia. The challenge is not going to come from the United States. The challenge is not going to come from West Germany nor from France. The challenge is going to come from those countries who, however wrong they may be – and I think they are wrong in many fundamental respects – nevertheless are at long last being able to reap the material fruits of economic planning and of public ownership. ... Our main case is and must remain that in a modern complex society it is impossible to get rational order by leaving things to private economic adventure. Therefore I am a Socialist. I believe in public ownership."

"The issue therefore in a capitalist democracy resolves itself into this: either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy."

"If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution."

"The function of parliamentary democracy, under universal franchise, historically considered, is to expose wealth-privilege to the attack of the people. It is a sword pointed at the heart of property-power. The arena where the issues are joined is Parliament."

"No serious student who studies the history of the last half century can deny the ferment of ideas associated with the names of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Their effectiveness in arming the minds of working-class leaders all over the world with intellectual weapons showed that their teaching had an organic relationship with the political and social realities of their time."

"In his management of delicate parliamentary situations Mr. Baldwin was more subtle than is Mr. Churchill. In 1929, when the General Election returned a stronger but still a minority parliamentary Labour Party, Mr. Baldwin did what he had done so successfully in 1924. He sat down and waited. “Give them a chance,” he said, knowing well this was precisely what they didn’t have! Mr. Baldwin was a past master in the use of political inertia. He waited for Mr. MacDonald to weaken his Government by policies which offered a series of rhetorical gestures in place of effective action. Then, when the time came, he struck with remorseless and deadly precision. Because of his restraint and apparent laziness, Mr. Churchill called Mr. Baldwin a “power miser”. But this was a superficial appreciation of the subtlety of Baldwin’s mind. I rate him very high indeed in the ranks of Conservative Prime Ministers. It is true that he presided over a period of capitalist decline in Britain. But there was no capitalist way of preventing the decline. The most that can be said against Mr. Baldwin is that being a Conservative he could not get out of his economic dilemma by applying Socialist policies. In contrast with Baldwin, MacDonald was a pitiful strategist. Instead of putting forward bold and imaginative proposals to deal with the economic and financial crisis he waited like Micawber for “something to turn up”. It was eventually Mr. Baldwin who turned up by kicking Mr. MacDonald into the Premiership of a so-called National Government in which MacDonald was the ignominious prisoner of a Conservative majority. In 1930, Mr. MacDonald, the alleged enemy of capitalism, was waiting anxiously for capitalism to solve its own crisis, and therefore rescue him from his embarrassments."

"Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus."

"Man must first live before he can live abundantly."

"A free people will always refuse to put up with preventable poverty. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution. The problem of how to prevent these three forces from coming into head-on collision is the principal study of the more politically conscious Conservative leaders. How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century."

"It is pertinent here to point to the different conditions under which contemporary revolutions of the East have to be carried out as distinct from those of the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the latter case Investment flowed freely from Europe to America, and along with the investment went skilled artisans of all kinds. It is true America did not have a large peasant population, but this was a further advantage. It was an empty country and it was filled by waves of migrants from Europe; many coming from backward European countries, but the advanced nations also made their contribution. Much of the machinery reaching America took the form of involuntary gifts, for the workings of the capitalist system produced a series of crises accompanied by bankruptcies which left much of the exported capital equipment unencumbered by subsequent financial claims. To this Europe added two wars partly financed by forced sales of European assets in America."

"The technical achievements of the past hundred years have produced a type of society different from any that has ever before existed, posing novel problems for mankind. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it has changed the character of the adaptions the individual has to make to his environment. His is now a straggle with society and not with nature. The vicissitudes that now afflict him come from what he has done in association with other men, and not from a physical relationship with the forces of nature. The division of labour into which he is born weaves his own life into a series of interdependencies involving not only his own personal surroundings, but moving in everwidening circles until they encompass most parts of the earth. Modem industrial society is no longer a multiplication of a number of simple self-sufficient social groupings, each able to detach itself from the others without damage to itself. It is multicellular, not unicellular. Each part is connected as though by an infinite variety of nerves with all the others, so that separation is now a mutilation. It is similar to a physical organism, but with this difference: that it has no head and therefore no mechanism with which to receive and co-ordinate the vibrations. This is so, not only between nations, but within each nation of the laissez-faire type, because such a philosophy by its very nature rejects the propriety of an a priori principle. There is no way of saying how far such a society has realised the intentions of its architects, because there was no architect and no intention. There is only an emergent. Science works for predictability: capitalist society is profoundly unscientific. It proceeds upon no hypotheses, because that would imply an order of values."

"There are many reasons why capitalist society does not command the assent of the masses. There is to begin with the sense of injustice arising from gross inequalities. This is a fertile source of discontent and will always render capitalist society unstable. But I do not consider this by itself as fatal to the existing order. There have been inequalities throughout the history of mankind, but they have not always proved incompatible with a certain degree of social stability. Complete equality is a motive that has never moved large masses for any decisive length of time. It has inspired sects and special Orders but it does not appear to be a condition congenial to normal living. There are probably causes deep in the human psyche to explain this, but they lie outside the province of this book. A sense of injustice does not derive solely from the existence of inequality. It arises from the belief that the inequality is capricious, unsanctioned by usage and, most important of all, senseless."

"The fact must be faced that Europe will never return to the practices, conventions and principles of pre-war. There is not only political paralysis in Western Europe; there is a profound lack of confidence in conventional values; and this is true for all social classes. This is accompanied by a deep spiritual malaise arising from a prolonged hesitancy to choose between a number of proffered alternatives. It is probably true that Western Europe would have gone Socialist after the war if Soviet behaviour had not given it too grim a visage. Soviet Communism and Socialism are not yet sufficiently distinguished in many minds. The large Communist votes in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy, are evidence that millions of men and women do not believe that competitive private enterprise has any future; at least of a sort that would commend itself to them. It is extremely doubtful whether the Communist vote is a vote for Communism. It is partly a protest vote and partly a demand for Democratic Socialism after the fashion of the first five years of the British Labour Government."

"A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society."

"A free Health Service is a triumphant example of the superiority of collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where commercial principles are seen at their worst."

"Democratic Socialism is not a middle way between capitalism and Communism. If it were merely that, it would be doomed to failure from the start. It cannot live by borrowed vitality. Its driving power must derive from its own principles and the energy released by them. It is based on the conviction that free men can use free institutions to solve the social and economic problems of the day, if they are given a chance to do so."

"The British constitution, with its adult suffrage, exposes all rights and privileges, properties and powers, to the popular will. The only checks are those that arise from a sense of justice and social propriety."

"The conversion of an industry to public ownership is only the first step towards Socialism. It is an all-important step, for without it the conditions of further progress are not established. One important consequence is a shift of power that resolves the conflict between public and private claims. The danger of the State machine being manipulated by private vested interests is thus reduced."

"The emergence of modern industry, with its danger of de-personalisation of the worker, challenges the vitality of democratic principles. In the societies of the West, industrial democracy is the counterpart of political freedom. Liberty and responsibility march together. They must be joined together in the workshop as in the legislative Assembly. Only when this is accomplished shall we have the foundations of a buoyant and stable civilisation."

"The spiv has entered into modern literature not only as a by-product of a rationing system. He is the modern equivalent of the smuggler. He is the prototype of the evader of taxes. All this occasions the bitterest resentment among those citizens whose social situation forces them to pay in full. The consequences from a Socialist point of view of what really amounts to a penalisation of the honest and of those whose job does not permit evasion is exceedingly serious. The power and prosperity of tax evaders thwarts one of the main aims of Socialism: the establishment of just, social relationships."

"In times of crisis the Conservative Party invariably attacks State expenditure on the social services so as to relieve the burden on property. The Socialist Party, on the other hand, rushes to the defence of State spending: their supporters are the poor and defenceless who most need it."

"The introduction of Italian labour into the mines is not a solution. It is merely an escape from present headaches and a precursor of worse ones to come. In our crowded island no one should pretend that a shortage of labour in a particular industry is solved by bringing workers in from abroad. The problem is one of mal-distribution of our own labour force, and this, in its turn, is the consequence of a capital and wages policy that obeys no long term purposive intention."

"There is no evidence to show that the Soviet Union wants a trial of strength."

"The political systems of the totalitarian nations might remain fixed for an indefinite time, if they could prevent the intrusion of modern industrial methods. But they are reaching out for these, and to the extent that they adopt them, they start the same chain of events that led to the growth of political democracy in the West. The only political system consistent with the needs of a modern industrial community is democracy. ... When you train workers to make the blueprints of modern industrial machines, to interpret the blueprints, make and work the machines, you are digging the grave of political dictatorship."

"Mankind is not born with an insatiable appetite for political liberty. This is the coping stone on the structure of progress, not its base. If political liberty and the institutions which enshrine it were the spontaneous imperatives of the human spirit, our task would be much easier. But they are earth-bound and time bound. The pulse of progress beats differently for different parts of the world, and if we are to understand what is happening around us and act intelligently about it, we must recognise that fact and realise that once we stood where they now stand."

"We should try to avoid new causes of tension, such as the rearming of Western Germany."

"That so many people suffer from preventable privation, whilst others enjoy privileges and material advantages that do not on any reasonable reckoning flow from personal accomplishments, is evidence of dangerous social instability."

"It must now be accepted by all thoughtful citizens that the social and economic consequence of the rearmament programme is only a special instance of a general case. If full employment is accepted as an aim to be ensued, and not only given lip service to, then We have left the automatism of the competitive capitalist system behind us, and deliberate selection and choice at the communal level must take its place. A pool of unemployment is the necessary accompaniment of selection by the price mechanism. It is the shock absorber of the capitalist system. The pool decreases or increases in obedience to the ebb and flow of economic activity, and the unemployed are crucified on the cross of the competitive price mechanism. Security of employment and the competitive society are a contradiction in terms. To promise full employment is to promise the transition from the capitalist system to one where we choose consciously to order the pattern of production and consumption; and the principles we employ in the doing of this must commend themselves to the wishes of a free electorate."

"We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land."

"The spectacle therefore afforded us by the United States is one of technical brilliance and social blindness."

"Soon, if we are not more prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets."

"Without free expression of opinion and the means to ensure it a democracy dies."

"Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual."

"I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction."

"Listening to a speech by Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence."

"Lloyd George was a bigger man than Churchill, and one of the biggest things about Churchill was that he knew it."

"No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied aid because of lack of means."

"Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows, have access, when ill, to the best that medical care can provide."

"Gaitskell wants to make capitalism work better – but with controls. That’s what makes him so dangerous. He wants capitalism to go on existing – but without the prizes which capitalism earns for itself. Of course this is impossible. It cannot work."

"There can be no immaculate conception of socialism."

"I stuffed their mouths with gold."

"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it."

"His personality and service to the public, for the good, as he saw it, for them, have been quite outstanding. He was a brilliant personality, a wonderful speaker. His writing was such that you felt bound to put him in the class of the intellectual rather than merely the expanded product of the working class. Everybody who has read his book, In Place of Fear, will agree, I think, with that statement. The constant oratory with which he was able to hold in spell—I would not say that it was equal to, but certainly it was in the region of, the spell which could be cast by Mr. Winston Churchill in another place—was quite unique."

"Bevan was a very remarkable individual. He was a brilliant orator and debater. He proved himself during the Labour Government to be a most capable administrator and during the last few years he had matured as a statesman. His death is a great loss to the Labour and socialist movement. Although we did not always agree I had great admiration and affection for him."

"He was a great and imaginative parliamentarian. His death has deprived public life of a warm and rewarding personality. His friends in all parties will mourn his passing."

"The tool of Marxist analysis that Bevan employed to underpin his criticism of the social and economic system attracted many followers but he was too much of a romantic and poet to believe that the aridities of Marxism, especially as distorted by Stalin, could be a cure for our ills. In personal relations Nye emanated great charm and conversation with him was a delight. The talk bubbed and his flashing intelligence touched what he said with vividness so that new insights seemed to pour from him. At his best on the public platform or in the House of Commons he was magic. He could lift an audience so that they shared with him new heights of understanding and awareness; he could fell his enemies – and sometimes disconcert his friends – with a single devastating phrase, and disarm opponents with a droll wit if the mood was on him."

"I say today that unless the right hon. Gentleman changes his policy and methods and moves without the slightest delay, he will be as great a curse to this country in time of peace, as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war."

"The Socialists dilate upon the National Insurance Scheme, Family Allowances, improved education, welfare foods, food subsidies, and so forth. They point to the benefits flowing to the people from these schemes and particularly to the housewives and children... All these schemes were devised and set in motion in days before the Socialists came to office. They all date from the National Coalition Government of which I was the head. I have worked at national insurance schemes almost all my life and am responsible for several of the largest measures ever passed. The main principles of the new Health Schemes were hammered out in the days of the Coalition Government, before the party and personal malignancy of Mr Bevan plunged health policy into its present confusion."

"[H]e has chosen the very moment of bringing the National Health Service into being to speak of at least half of the British nation as “lower than vermin” and to give vent to the “burning hatred” by which his mind is seared. We speak of the Minister of Health, but ought we not rather to say the Minister of Disease? For is not morbid hatred a form of mental and moral disease and indeed a highly infectious form?"

"He excelled as a critic, but, in contrast to Ernest Bevin, creative thought at that time was not his strongest characteristic. He would present any number of difficulties to any proposition which came from official sources, but seldom put forward any constructive proposals of a practical character. ... Aneurin Bevan's speech [to the Trades Union Congress at Brighton in 1933] was typical of him as he was at that time—well-phrased, fluent, tricky, and entirely unconvincing. Bevan was a politician by instinct and temperament and he rightly concentrated his main activities in that sphere. In my experience he exercised a negligible influence on trade union policy and action. How different from Ernest Bevin!"

"The P.M. [Winston Churchill] received, very formally, a Labour Deputation about Greece. He insisted on my having them all seated in the Cabinet Room before he came up from luncheon so that he might avoid shaking hands with Aneurin Bevan."

"He was, in sympathy, the fellow countryman of any man of any nation throughout the world, ever ready to defend that man, whatever his race, his colour, or his creed, and demand for him equality of rights with all his fellow beings on earth. He hated suffering. He hated inequality. He hated injustice. He hated domination, however and by whomsoever exercised. But, above all, he hated hypocrisy. Aneurin Bevan's supreme qualities were superb, unflinching moral courage, deep sincerity, and complete selflessness. That was his supreme strength. ... There was nothing mean or petty about Aneurin Bevan. He was upright; he was downright; he was forthright. Statesman, administrator, Parliamentarian, orator, incomparable advocate for the weak and the suffering and for justice everywhere, he was, at the same time, a true, sincere, lovable friend, whose memory every one of us will long cherish."

"The overwhelming impression that remains is of a man of size, a man whose intellect was capacious, lively and illuminating, a man whose emotions were strong and human, a man who believed greatly in his country and who believed also, which is rare these days, in the power of ideas, a man who strove to retain the predominance of politics over economics or mass-psychology. For this, in the end, is what we owe to politicians like him. A democracy cannot survive healthily without the example of individual leaders who dare all as individuals and leave, long after their failures are forgotten, the imprint of a great human being."

"He was, I believe, the most principled great political leader of the century in the sense that to sustain and apply his principles in practice was the motive power of his life, the passion that absorbed him while others were engaged in the darker corners of the political workshop. … Aneurin Bevan, I believe, did more than any other man of his time to keep alive democratic socialism as the most adventurous, ambitious, intelligent, civilised and truly liberal of modern doctrines. This, the triumph of his whole life and personality, was the greatest of his achievements."

"There are extraordinary parallels between Nye and Adolf Hitler. They are demagogues of exactly the same sort. ... If Nye were out of the Party, the main Tory propaganda for the next Election would be killed, whereas, if the Executive failed to carry his expulsion, the Tories would assert that Bevan is indispensable and the main master of the Party."

"Easily the most eloquent and impressive speaker in the House of Commons, he was a tower of strength to us in opposition. But he was also quite outstanding as a Minister in the Labour Government and in particular will always be remembered as the architect of the National Health Service. ... Whether one thinks of him as an orator of fire and conviction, a brilliant and formidable advocate, as a witty and urbane companion, or as a cultured and warm-hearted friend, he was above all a man of force and power, a man of strong and independent mind, a man of compelling and magnetic personality, a man who counted—a big man."

"Aneurin Bevan, who so eloquently expressed the aspirations of so many Labour men and women, will always be remembered by all who fight for the aims of socialism."

"In Place of Fear, which Bevan wrote in the white heat of his resignation, exhibits a broad-minded tolerance and intellectual imagination quite foreign to many of his disciples. At the same time he was too impatient of reality."

"Nye Bevan was a formidable negotiator. ... [H]e could spot a point or detect a flaw in an argument without waiting for a speaker to finish. He would purr or pounce according to his mood. If a suggestion was unacceptable to him, he would say so at once, never using the comforting formula that "the matter would be considered" when he really meant he rejected it. I do not remember any occasion when he said one thing and meant another—this was part of the trouble at certain moments."

"Bevan was petulant and vain, but he was on the frontier of being a great man, and he was certainly a great talker and a considerable wit. To shut oneself off from any concourse with him was like forgoing the opportunity to talk to Fox or Disraeli."

"Nye is asleep next door. Later today he will be taken home to Wales. Tomorrow he will be cremated in keeping with his known views. He was never a hypocrite. No falsity must touch him once he is no longer available to defend his views. He was not a cold-blooded rationalist. He was no calculating machine. He was a great humanist whose religion lay in loving his fellow men and trying to serve them... He knelt reverently in respect to a friend or friend's faith, but he never pretended to be anything other than what he was, a humanist."

"I am much grieved to learn of the death of Aneurin Bevan. He was a colleague with me on the back benches in the House of Commons for many years before the war and a real personal friend. He was a great and courageous fighter for what he believed to be right and was respected by members of all parties. He was a great parliamentarian."

"He was the most hated—if also the most idolized—politician of his time. … [I]n five and a half years at the Ministry of Health under Attlee he was to prove himself a great constructive pioneer. He was unusual, almost unique, in the labour movement in combining strong socialist principles with rare creative gifts of practical statesmanship. No less than his fellow-countryman, David Lloyd George, he was to prove himself an artist in the uses of power. … He remains, perhaps, the most attractive figure the British socialist movement has produced in its eighty-odd years of fitful life."

"Nye Bevan dies at 4.15 in the afternoon. I regret the loss of this splendid coloured figure and a great parliamentarian and patriot. When I was once being scolded for being malicious in my descriptions of people, Nye protested, "Harold is not malicious at all, He is the angel of pity.""

"He is more of an extremist and more of an internationalist than the average Labour M.P., and it is the combination of this with his working-class origin that makes him an interesting and unusual figure... Bevan thinks and feels as a working man. He knows how the scales are weighted against anyone with less than £5 a week... But he is remarkably free – some of his adversaries would say dangerously free – from any feeling of personal grievance against society. He shows no signs of ordinary class consciousness. He seems equally at home in all kinds of company. It is difficult to imagine anyone less impressed by social status or less inclined to put on airs with subordinates... He has the temperament that used to be called "mercurial" – a temperament capable of sudden low spirits but not of settled pessimism. His boisterous manner sometimes gives casual observers the impression that he is not serious and his warmest admirers do not claim that punctuality is his strong point. But in fact he has a huge capacity for work... He does not have the suspicion of "cleverness" and anaesthesia to the arts which are generally regarded as the mark of a practical man. Those who have worked with him in a journalistic capacity have remarked with pleasure and astonishment that here at last is a politician who knows that literature exists and will even hold up work for five minutes to discuss a point of style."

"Nye devoted his life to peoples of all classes, colours, and creeds. He was at all time a fearless advocate for what he believed to be right and just. He did not hesitate to challenge authority even though he was often subjected to misrepresentation and abuse. His colourful personality, deep social conscience, and brilliant oratory enlivened the British democratic scene. His place in the Labour movement can never adequately be filled."

"That the parties are so coy in speaking about health is mainly down to Nye Bevan. He made the NHS sacred and untouchable. He may have freed the patient from fear of medical bills, but he has locked the politician in perennial dread of change."

"He had a characteristic not common among politicians and perhaps especially unusual in the self-taught man: he was never satisfied with a debating argument or a particular train of reasoning unless he could relate it to some general principle and inform his contentions with the light which that general principle shed. For a series of years I took part in housing debates where Bevan intervened, and at times I broke a pygmy lance or two against his shield. ... The same thing was to be noticed in all Bevan's interventions: a subject had to be large, it had to have large bearings, it had (if necessary) to be given large bearings, before he could interest himself in it and feel at home with it."

"Those who heard Aneurin Bevan command the House of Commons, in his great days, with an eloquence surpassed, if at all, only by Churchill, are reminded by the biographer's quotations how strangely similar those two antagonistic orators were. Their marvellous and often unexpected vocabulary was that of the self-educated; their oratory often approached, and sometimes crossed, the bounds of intemperance; and they were capable of descent from flights of true imagination to depths of bathos. Bevan's style belonged, like Churchill's, to a more spacious parliamentary and political era, already past before he died."

"He was profoundly committed in his attitude to human beings and society, he was empirical about arrangements and institutions. This, I think, would have shown if he had become Prime Minister. What a voice and vision would then have dominated the life of Britain! How many dark places would have been illuminated, how many doubts and dangers would have been dispelled. Our problems would not have been waved away by a magician's wand overnight; but the attempt to solve them would have been rendered meaningful and more exciting. And I believe would have been solved. Wherever our proper realistic level in the modern world lies, Nye would have seen it, and could have led us there. We would have gone eyes open, tails up, ready to make it not a retreat but a triumph. ... The first task of political leadership is to get men to lift up their hearts. Churchill did it in 1940. Weizmann did it time and time again. Nye would have done it for Britain today."

"A man who was good in the essential sense of the word and that is the goodness of abounding charity."

"Millions of trade unionists will mourn the loss of Aneurin Bevan, a man who brought exceptional gifts of imagination and eloquence, courage and vigour into the service of the Labour movement."

"We come here now in our smart clothes and our pretty hats, but it was not like that when I first heard him speak up here in the thirties. Those are the days that we shall remember him most and we shall think of him as the great man who stuck up for the poor."

"His friends, and his opponents equally, will remember him not only for his eloquence and passion, his humour, the deep affection he inspired, but perhaps most of all for a sense of vision unrivalled in his generation."

"Though he was lazy, he would have been a good Prime Minister, with a rolling sweep of history and a deep love of his country. Unlike Wedgwood Benn, sometimes ridiculously compared to him, he was sensible and willing to make compromises, as he did with the doctors and dentists to get their co-operation in the National Health Service. Nye talked hot air about seizing “the commanding heights of the economy”...but he was too pragmatic to be a keen nationalizer."

"Sorry, old cock, to leave it in this shape."

"The Conservative Party has one overriding concern in foreign policy, and that is the growth of Communist power and influence in the world, and the dangers it can bring for all of us."

"There comes a time in every man's life when he must make way for an older man."

"For God's sake, bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country."

"I do not desire to give myself any fresh political label. Though the formation of the Union of Democratic Control it has been possible for me to work in close co-operation with several of your leaders and this joint effort on the part of the Labour members and radicals is having I think a very beneficial effect. I do not desire to alienate myself from any of my former political associates but rather to endeavour to urge them along the same path which I myself am treading."

"It is the intention of His Majesty's Government to lay on the table of both Houses of Parliament every treaty, when signed, for a period of 21 days, after which the treaty will be ratified and published and circulated in the Treaty Series. In the case of important treaties, the Government will, of course, take an opportunity of submitting them to the House for discussion within this period. But, as the Government cannot take upon itself to decide what may be considered important or unimportant, if there is a formal demand for discussion forwarded through the usual channels from the Opposition or any other party, time will be found for the discussion of the Treaty in question."

"Resolutions expressing Parliamentary approval of every Treaty before ratification would be a very cumbersome form of procedure and would burden the House with a lot of unnecessary business. The absence of disapproval may be accepted as sanction, and publicity and opportunity for discussion and criticism are the really material and valuable elements which henceforth will be introduced."

"When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty. books.google"

"The object of this volume is not to cast fresh blame on authorities and individuals, nor is it to expose one nation more than another to accusations of deceit."

"Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth."

"Lying, as we all know, does not take place only in war-time. Man, it has been said, is not "a veridical animal," but his habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish. But in war-time the authoritative organization of lying is not sufficiently recognized. The deception of whole peoples is not a matter which can be lightly regarded. A useful purpose can therefore be served in the interval of so-called peace by a warning which people can examine with dispassionate calm, that the authorities in each country do, and indeed must, resort to this practice in order, first, to justify themselves by depicting the enemy as an undiluted criminal; and secondly, to inflame popular passion sufficiently to secure recruits for the continuance of the struggle. They cannot afford to tell the truth. In some cases it must be admitted that at the moment they do not know what the truth is."

"People must never be allowed to become despondent; so victories must be exaggerated and defeats, if not concealed, at any rate minimized, and the stimulus of indignation , horror, and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public mind by means of "propaganda.""

"The use of the weapon of falsehood is more necessary in a country where military conscription is not the law of the land than in countries where the manhood of the nation is automatically drafted into the Army, Navy, or Air Service. The public can be worked up emotionally by sham ideals. A sort of collective hysteria spreads and rises until finally it gets the better of sober people and reputable newspapers."

"A Government which has decided on embarking on the hazardous and terrible enterprise of war must at the outset present a one-sided case in justification of its action, and cannot afford to admit in any particular whatever the smallest degree of right or reason on the part of the people it has made up its mind to fight. Facts must be distorted, relevant circumstances concealed, and a picture presented which by its crude colouring will persuade the ignorant people that their Government is blameless, their cause is righteous, and that the indisputable wickedness of the enemy has been proved beyond question. A moment's reflection would tell any reasonable person that such obvious bias cannot possibly represent the truth. But the moment's reflection is not allowed; lies are circulated with great rapidity. The unthinking mass accept them and by their excitement sway the rest. The amount of rubbish and humbug that pass under the name of patriotism in war-time in all countries is sufficient to make decent people blush when they are subsequently disillusioned."

"At the outset the solemn asseverations of monarchs and leading statesmen in each nation that they did not want war must be placed on a par with the declarations of men who pour paraffin about a house knowing they are continually striking matches and yet assert they do not want a conflagration. This form of self-deception, which involved the deception of others, is fundamentally dishonest."

"War being established as a recognized institution to be resorted to when Governments quarrel, the people are more or less prepared. They quite willingly delude themselves in order to justify their own actions. They are anxious to find an excuse for displaying their patriotism, or they are disposed to seize the opportunity for the excitement and new life of adventure which war opens out to them. So there is a sort of national wink, everyone goes forward, and the individual, in his turn, takes up lying as a patriotic duty. In the low standard of morality which prevails in war-time, such a practice appears almost innocent."

"In calm retrospect we can appreciate better the disastrous effects of the poison of falsehood, whether officially, semi-officially, or privately manufactured. It has been rightly said that the injection of the poison of hatred into men's minds by means of falsehood is a greater evil in war-time than the actual loss of life. The defilement of the human soul is worse than the destruction of the human body. A fuller realization of this is essential."

"Another effect of the continual appearance of false and biased statement and the absorption of the lie atmosphere is that deeds of real valour, heroism, and physical endurance and genuine cases of inevitable torture and suffering are contaminated and desecrated; the wonderful comradeship of the battlefield becomes almost polluted. Lying tongues cannot speak of deeds of sacrifice to show their beauty or value. So it is that the praise bestowed on heroism by Government and Press always jars, more especially when, as is generally the case with the latter, it is accompanied by cheap and vulgar sentimentality. That is why one instinctively wishes the real heroes to remain unrecognized, so that their record may not be smirched by cynical tongues and pens so well versed in falsehood."

"When war reaches such dimensions as to involve the whole nation, and when the people at its conclusion find they have gained nothing but only observe widespread calamity around them, they are inclined to become more sceptical and desire to investigate the foundations of the arguments which inspired their patriotism, inflamed their passions, and prepared them to offer the supreme sacrifice. They are curious to know why the ostensible objects for which they fought have none of them been attained, more especially if they are the victors."

"When the generation that has known war is still alive, it is well that they should be given chapter and verse with regard to some of the best-known cries, catchwords, and exhortations by which they were so greatly influenced. As a warning, therefore, this collection is made. It constitutes only the exposure of a few samples. To cover the whole ground would be impossible."

"There is the concealment of truth, which has to be resorted to so as to prevent anything to the credit of the enemy reaching the public. A war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act that a German had done to an Englishman during an action received a rebuking telegram from his employer: "Don't want to hear about any good Germans"; and Sir Philip Gibbs, in Realities of War, says: "At the close of the day the Germans acted with chivalry, which I was not allowed to tell at the time.""

"In Vienna an enterprising firm supplied atrocity photographs with blanks for the headings so that they might be used for propaganda purposes by either side."

"Atrocity lies were the most popular of all, especially in this country and America; no war can be without them. Slander of the enemy is esteemed a patriotic duty. An English soldier wrote (The Times, September 15, 1914): "The stories in our papers are only exceptions. There are people like them in every army." But at the earliest possible moment stories of the maltreatment of prisoners have to be circulated deliberately in order to prevent surrenders. This is done, of course, on both sides. Whereas naturally each side tries to treat its prisoners as well as possible so as to attract others. The repetition of a single instance of cruelty and its exaggeration can be distorted into a prevailing habit on the part of the enemy."

"Contempt for the enemy, if illustrated, can prove to be an unwise form of falsehood. There was a time when German soldiers were popularly represented cringing, with their arms in the air and crying "Kamerad," until it occurred to Press and propaganda authorities that people were asking why, if this was the sort of material we were fighting against, had we not wiped them off the field in a few weeks."

"A good deal depends on the quality of the lie. You must have intellectual lies for intellectual people and crude lies for popular consumption, but if your popular lies are too blatant and your more intellectual section are shocked and see through them, they may (and indeed they did) begin to be suspicious as to whether they were not being hoodwinked too. Nevertheless, the inmates of colleges are just as credulous as the inmates of the slums."

"The narrowest patriotism could be made to appear noble, the foulest accusations could be represented as an indignant outburst of humanitarianism, and the meanest and most vindictive aims falsely disguised as idealism. Everything was legitimate which could make the soldiers go on fighting."

"War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. If they were only used to deceive the enemy in the game of war it would not be worth troubling about. But, as the purpose of most of them is to fan indignation and induce the flower of the country's youth to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice, it becomes a serious matter. Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war."

"It must be admitted that many people were conscious and willing dupes. But many more were unconscious and were sincere in their patriotic zeal. Finding now that elaborately and carefully staged deceptions were practised on them, they feel a resentment which has not only served to open their eyes but may induce them to make their children keep their eyes open when next the bugle sounds."

"Between nations, where the consequences are vital, where the destiny of countries and provinces hangs in the balance, the lives and fortunes of millions are affected and civilization itself is menaced, the most upright men honestly believe that there is no depth of duplicity to which they may not legitimately stoop. They have got to do it. The thing cannot go on without the help of lies. This is no plea that lies should not be used in war-time, but a demonstration of how lies must be used in war-time. If the truth were told from the outset, there would be no reason and no will for war. Anyone declaring the truth: "Whether you are right or wrong, whether you win or lose, in no circumstances can war help you or your country," would find himself in gaol very quickly. In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie a misdemeanour, the declaration of the truth a crime."

"When the people of one country understand how the people in another country are duped, like themselves, in war-time, they will be more disposed to sympathize with them as victims than condemn them as criminal, because they will understand that their crime only consisted in obedience to the dictates of authority and acceptance of what their Government and Press represented to them as the truth."

"There is nothing sensational in the way of revelations contained in these pages. All the cases mentioned are well known to those who were in authority, less well known to those primarily affected, and unknown, unfortunately, to the millions who fell. Although only a small part of the vast field of falsehood is covered, it may suffice to show how the unsuspecting innocence of the masses in all countries was ruthlessly and systematically exploited."

"There are some who object to war because of its immorality, there are some who shrink from the arbitrament of arms because of its increased cruelty and barbarity; there are a growing number who protest against this method, at the outset known to be unsuccessful, of attempting to settle international disputes because of its imbecility and futility. But there is not a living soul in any country who does not deeply resent having his passions roused, his indignation inflamed, his patriotism exploited, and his highest ideals desecrated by concealment, subterfuge, fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deliberate lying on the part of those in whom he is taught to repose confidence and to whom he is enjoined to pay respect."

"None of the heroes prepared for suffering and sacrifice, none of the common herd ready for service and obedience, will be inclined to listen to the call of their country once they discover the polluted sources from whence that call proceeds and recognize the monstrous finger of falsehood which beckons them to the battlefield."

"[In Italy, when every sentence is liable to be scanned for traces of anti-Fascist sentiment] it is obviously safer to begin by choosing a more congenial subject than a free Athens or a free Rome. In Germany the effect of National-Socialism has been the opposite. Racial doctrines and political antipathy to the whole Roman Empire and its cognate ideas have had the result of discouraging study of the Italic peoples and of Rome, the mistress of the world. On the other hand, a peculiar kinship has been detected between the ancient Greeks and modern Germans. Not only the Greek civilization in general, but Thucydides in particular, has proved exceptionally congenial. The intensely political outlook of Thucydides may be made serviceable to a doctrine which asserts the absolute dominion of the State over every phase of individual existence; and, as the more striking figures of Caesar and Augustus had already been captured as prototypes by Mussolini, Hitler might well be made to look very like Pericles—or Pericles, rather, to look like Hitler."

"The world has recently been treated for nearly a decade to the unusual spectacle of a great empire deliberately taking every possible step to secure its own destruction, because its citizens were so obsessed by prejudice, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as never to perform the few logical steps necessary for proving that they would shortly be involved in a guerre à outrance, which could be neither averted nor escaped."

"I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable."

"It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors."

"The thought struck me for the first time today that our duty to our country may not terminate with the peace – apart, I mean, from the duty of begetting children to bear arms for the King in the next generation. To be more explicit, I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were; and if the present hostilities do not actually merge into a war with our terrible enemy, America, it will remain for those of us who have the necessary knowledge and insight to do what we can where we can to help Britain be victorious again in her next crisis."

"You have never expressed any decided political opinions, and indeed I do not know if or how far you assent to the proposition that almost unlimited sacrifices of individual life and happiness are worth while to preserve the unique structure of power of which the keystone (the only conceivable and indispensable keystone) is the English Crown. I for my part find it the nearest thing in the world to an absolute (as opposed to a relative) value: it is like the outer circle that bound my universe, so that I cannot conceive anything beyond it."

"The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions...for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it...Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading...In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful...[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state."

"We describe a Monarch by designating the territory of which he is Monarch. To say that he is Monarch of a certain territory and his other realms and territories is as good as to say that he is king of his kingdom. We have perpetrated a solecism in the title we are proposing to attach to our Sovereign and we have done so out of what might almost be called an abject desire to eliminate the expression "British." The same desire has been felt—though not by any means throughout the British Commonwealth—to eliminate this word before the term "Commonwealth." ... Why is it, then, that we are so anxious, in the description of our own Monarch, in a title for use in this country, to eliminate any reference to the seat, the focus and the origin of this vast aggregation of territories? Why is it that this "teeming womb of royal Kings," as Shakespeare called it, wishes now to be anonymous?"

"I believe a second factor which has weighed heavily in this matter is the attitude, or supposed attitude, of the United States. I confess that I am not greatly moved by this. Whatever may be the attitude of the American Government and public to the United Kingdom as such, my view of American policy over the last decade has been that it has been steadily and relentlessly directed towards the weakening and the destruction of the links which bind the British Empire together. [Cyril Osborne: "No!"] We can watch the events as they unfold and place our own interpretation on them. My interpretation is that the United States has for this country, considered separately, a very considerable economic and strategic use but that she sees little or no strategic use or economic value in the British Empire or the British Commonwealth as it has existed and as it still exists. Against the background I ask the House to consider the evidence of advancing American imperialism in this area from which they are helping to eliminate us."

"Perhaps the most insidious danger today is the notion, which many accept unreflectingly and others propagate sedulously, that a stable value of money is incompatible with economic progress or with a high level of employment. Theory and experience alike refute such a notion. I have already reminded you that throughout sixty years of Britain's golden age of expansion in every sphere, the value of money remained virtually constant. So far from it being true that inflation and a high level of employment hang together, the fact is that, for a nation in Britain's situation, dependent on world trade and commercial dealings with other countries for its livelihood, continued inflation is the greatest threat to full employment. It would be a tragedy if the Government or the nation allowed themselves to be diverted by these false fears from the single-minded pursuit of plain and elementary duty: the duty to secure and preserve the integrity and stability of the medium of exchange, on which depend all the economic dealings of man with man."

"There is no possibility of arguing that the present composition of the House of Lords can be justified either by logic or by reference to any preconceived constitutional theory. It is the result of a long, even a tortuous, process of historical evolution. Its authority rests upon the acceptance of the result, handed down to our time, of that historical process. It is the authority of acceptance, the authority of what Burke called "prescription". The House of Lords shares that characteristic with many of our most cherished and important institutions. Trial by jury, for example, is not to be justified in logic; it does not rest upon statute; it came to us by a strange historical evolution out of the sworn witnesses of a neighbourhood. Neither logic nor statute nor theory is a basis of that other hereditary institution by which it comes about that a young woman holds sway over countless millions. The authority of this House itself does not, in the last resort, rest upon any logic in the principles upon which we are formed or elected: it rests upon the acceptance by the nation of an institution the history of which cannot be divorced or torn out of the context of the history of the nation itself."

"I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgment on a fellow human-being and to say, "Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow." ... Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, "We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home." We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility."

"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside—the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault."

"That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the Imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead—in the eye of history, no doubt as inevitably as “Nineveh and Tyre”, as Rome and Spain. And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country. So 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 herself."

"Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English, generations before the “expansion of England”, who felt no country but this to be their own... Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the seventeenth, back through the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors, and there at last we find them, or seem to find them, in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel. From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their inscrutable silence. “Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.” What would they say? They would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring. They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection... They would tell us too of a palace near the great city which the Romans built at a ford of the River Thames...to which men resorted out of all England to speak on behalf of their fellows, a thing called “Parliament”, and from that hall went out their fellows with fur-trimmed gowns and strange caps on their heads, to judge the same judgments, and dispense the same justice, to all the people of England."

"One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible. The immemorial arms, gules, three leopards or, though quartered late with France, azure, three fleurs de lis argent; and older still, the crown itself and that sceptred awe, in which Saint Edward the Englishman still seemed to sit in his own chair to claim the allegiance of all the English. Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's. The unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries."

"For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishman—how the word “instinct” keeps forcing itself in again and again!—is for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, “her other realms and territories”, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history."

"If the activities of the health services are thus neither justifiable by economic calculation, nor assessable in comparative statistical terms, these are characteristics which they share with all the highest activities of man."

"In my early twenties I read all Nietzsche—not just the main works but the minor works as well, all of them, and every scrap of published correspondence. Nietzsche alone of men out of books has a share in the loyalty and affectionate gratitude which otherwise belongs only to living teachers."

"[T]he memory of big experiences in the world of books is flavoured with the tang of the physical setting in which they happened. I shall never be able to dissociate Ecce Homo from the old flying-boat route to the Antipodes... Or again, the long avenues of thought that have led from Frazer's Golden Bough seem to start physically in front of the dining-room fireplace of the home where as a boy of 15 I sat hour after hour absorbing first the one-volume abridgement and then the three-volume edition. I cannot imagine how different my mental and religious life would have been if the impact of J. G. Frazer had come at another time or not at all."

"Then, about the same time, there was the detonation of Sartor Resartus... It was not only the revelation of Carlyle; it was headlong precipitation into the ocean of German reading and German thinking, where I was destined to voyage long after romantic and uncritical enthusiasm had perished for ever with the rise of Nazism... The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books—confess it I must—have been with German books... there was Schopenhauer, carried up and down daily for months on the Sydney trams. There was Lessing, Hölderlin even; above all, and above all, there was Goethe. Was, and still is; for a spare 10s. note is as likely to this day to be exchanged for a volume of Goethe as for anything else that sits on a book-seller's shelves."

"I consider there is no surer touchstone of the civilisation of a community than the manner in which it cares for its mentally afflicted members; and among that group those whose mental affliction is of a kind which peculiarly excites fear and aversion are the most acid test of all. It is incumbent on the Minister of Health to see to it that this country has no reason to be ashamed of its performance in that test."

"We are a capitalist party. We believe in capitalism. When we look at the astonishing material achievements of the West, at our own high and rising physical standard of living, we see these things as the result, not of compulsion or government action or the superior wisdom of a few, but of that system of competition and free enterprise, rewarding success and penalising failure, which enables every individual to participate by his private decisions in shaping the future of his society. Because we believe this, we honour profit competitively earned; we respect the ownership of property, great or small; we accept the differences of wealth and income without which competition and free enterprise are impossible. If there is one single explanation of the contrast which exists today between the countries we call "underdeveloped" and the advanced societies of the West, that explanation is that these societies have enjoyed for generations the benefits of capitalist free enterprise, whereas the "underdeveloped" countries have not."

"We believe that a society where men are free to take economic decisions for themselves—to decide how they will apply their incomes, their savings, their efforts—is the only kind of society where men will remain free in other respects, free in speech, thought and action. It is no accident that wherever the state has taken economic decision away from the citizen, it has deprived him of his other liberties as well. It is not that there was some peculiarity in the character of the Russians or the other Communist nations which predisposed them to servitude. It is that state Socialism is incompatible with individual liberty of thought, speech and action. You may choose one or the other: you cannot have them both."

"A great part of the efforts of a civilised community are devoted to purposes which are not economic at all, but humane and human, altruistic if you please. Look at our vast expenditure...upon the National Health Service. I would scorn to justify it—even if the assertion were true—on the basis that somehow it promoted economic and productive efficiency. It is completely, triumphantly, justified on the simple ground that a civilised, compassionate nation can do no other. It, and all the other social services, is the corporate recognition by the community of its common obligation to its individual members."

"The collective wisdom and the collective will of the nation resides not in any little Whitehall clique but in the whole mass of the people—in the producers, listening to the voice of the customer at home and abroad; in the savers and investors, using their eyes and their brains to lay out their resources to best advantage; in the consumers themselves, expressing through all the complex nervous system of the market their wishes, their needs, their expectations. In short, the true national economic plan is being made all the time by the very people and institutions which the intellectual arrogance of the Socialist affects to despise. "Under Tory free enterprise" says Labour's policy, "no limit is set to the amount of our national resources and intellectual talent consumed by the popular newspaper, the glossy magazine, the cinema, commercial television and the advertising industry." What a world of contempt for the ordinary man and woman breathes in that haughty sentence!"

"The Tory principle is the opposite: to trust the people. This has been expressed in practical terms in our actions in the last twelve years. We dismantled and abolished the economic controls, licensing, rationing and powers of direction inherited from the war and post-war Socialism; we restored a market for savings and abandoned the rigging of artificial rates of interest, which had been a fruitful cause of inflation; we imposed on the nationalised industries, apart from those restored to the free economy, the discipline of making comparable profits with what similar investments elsewhere would produce, and we undertook a major surgical operation on the railways to enable them also to earn profits; in our trade policy we sought the widest and most competitive markets for our exports... in taxation policy we have aimed at leaving to the individual earner and the individual firm the free disposal of as large a proportion as possible of their income or profits; finally there is our determined and increasingly successful effort to keep for our money that stability of value which enables people to take their own decisions about spending and saving in terms which have a meaning."

"Society is much more than a collection of individuals acting together, even through the complex and subtle mechanisms of the free economy, for material advantage. It has an existence of its own; it thinks and feels; it looks inwards, as a community to its own members; it looks outwards as a nation, into a world populated by other societies, like or unlike itself. The Tory Party, with its deep sense of history, has always concerned itself especially with these two aspects of society, and I believe that the British people would instinctively and rightly reject a philosophy which offered them just an economic machine, however efficient and successful."

"We exist to say to the nation that its future, economically and socially, will best be what the people themselves make it; that the possibilities which lie open to their ingenuity, effort and initiative are wider far than any government could conceive, still less bring to pass; and that the duty of government is to help, but never constrain, the free development of the nation's resources and talents. We offer neither servitude, nor the safety, ease and irresponsibility of servitude. We offer freedom, and the risks, the dangers, the uncertainties, the untidinesses, but also the responsibilities and the opportunities which are inseparable from it."

""All men", said Aristotle, "by nature desire to know." The pursuit of truth, the effort to comprehend, arrange, interpret some aspect or other of the universe we perceive, is an activity of humanity which justifies, rewards and motivates itself. The study of something for its own sake, for the sake of knowing, understanding, grasping it and for nothing else, is an essential characteristic of education, lower or higher, though more obviously of higher education. The content of education must therefore be that which men would wish to know for its own sake."

"The people who founded the Working Men's College understood all this very well. The working men for whom this institution was created had a thirst for education in a way we can scarcely imagine today. It was not to pass examinations and qualify for better wages nor to raise themselves into a higher social class—though these are respectable ambitions and no doubt many of those early students felt them—but to get at knowledge for its own sake because without it their existence would be less worth to them, that the working classes demanded education and got it. This was part of the good life, and they were not to be denied it. To read and write, to borrow books and debate, to study the sciences and learn a foreign tongue—all these were so many steps not of economic advancement but of human dignity."

"The duty of every management is to conduct its business, including the price policy of the business, in the way which in the opinion of the management is likely to maximise the return on the capital invested in the business. A management which does not do this betrays more than the shareholders in the business; it betrays the employees and the nation as a whole. The national interest lies in all the nation's resources being put to the most advantageous use possible. Anywhere outside a Communist state—and perhaps the time is coming when even that qualification will be superfluous—this is done by seeking to secure the largest possible return on capital. To maximise profits is for management not an optional exercise or a work of supererogation; it is management's basic duty. If private enterprise in a capitalist society is not trying to do that, there is no point in private enterprise—nor, for that matter, in a capitalist society."

"Wages, profits, prices are determined, always have been determined, and always will be determined until we go Communist, by the market—by supply and demand working through the market. While we tie ourselves into knots trying to invent non-market criteria for our commissions to use, the market is there, noiselessly, efficiently, irresistibly doing the job for us all the time. Irresistibly—yes, and there's the rub. For there is one thing outside the market in a modern economy, and that is money itself. Governments can and do satisfy the demand for money, raise and lower the supply of money. In short, governments have the power to control money, which is so largely their own creation. If governments allow monetary demand to increase faster than productivity, the market will not stop the process, because it cannot stop it. The market will simply go on determining wages, profits and prices in ever higher monetary terms—until something busts."

"It is no accident that the Labour Party of 1964 should share this craving for autarchy, for economic self-sufficiency, with the pre-war Fascist régimes and the present-day Communist states. They are all at heart totalitarian."

"The Labour Party, we all know, have fallen head over heels in love with science. The very mention of automation or computers brings a gleam into their eyes and a glow to their cheeks. They promise to favour automative re-equipment and computerisation. The irony is that these same people are dedicated to destroying the largest and most wonderful computer the world has ever known. This is the computer into which are fed the whole time millions of facts not only from all over this country but from all round the globe. The answers tumble out of it in an unending stream: it tells us all the time what it is most advantageous to import or export; it tells us what the relative benefits are of the imported article and the "home-produced substitute"; it tell us what can be produced "economically and competitively" and in what quantity and where. This wonderful silent mechanism—dare I say, this "automative" mechanism?—of the market the Labour Party want to smash, in order to install in its place—what? The pathetic figure of a President of the Board of Trade going through the old Trade Returns with his officials and trying to reproduce—no, to improve upon—the result of millions of acts of judgment made continuously throughout the economy by those who, in total, have available far more data than the Board of Trade ever dreamt of."

"The creative forces in a nation lie in the people themselves—in their determination, their effort, their hopefulness, their thrift, their readiness to venture and to change. Only in proportion as they show and apply those qualities can the economy advance. The truly creative policies are the policies which enable the nation to put forth the effort and to take the decisions upon which, alone, the rate of its advance depends."

"Anyone who believes that the rise in the standard of living of the working classes in this country in the last twenty years or the last hundred and twenty years is due to the existence and actions of the trade unions, will believe anything. It is the kind of absurdity which people only entertain when they are desperately determined to do so, for fear of the consequences of disbelief. The rise in that standard is due to the greater productivity of labour, proceeding in turn from a whole host of causes—greater scientific and technical knowledge, more capital, better organisation, and so on. We all know this, and we all know that it has nothing whatever to do with restraint of trade or restriction of competition."

"I am not of course suggesting that combination cannot force up the price of labour in a particular employment above the market level. What I am saying is that this advantage is demonstrably often more or less short-lived: indeed, in the inflationary conditions which we have experienced in the last twenty years, any such gain has been neutralised and obliterated exceptionally quickly. But wherever and as long as there is an advantage, it is always at the expense not only of the community at large but of other workers: of the community at large, because its pattern of production and consumption is thereby less satisfactory than it otherwise would be—the standard effect of all monopoly and restriction; of other workers, because the higher cost of labour in that employment reduces demand for it and results in workers either being unemployed or being employed less remuneratively than they otherwise would be."

"It will be seen that all these difficulties attach to those aspects of trade unionism which involve restriction and coercion... I would hope and believe that it will not be impossible to disentangle the coercive and restrictive activities of trade unionism from all the rest of its long tradition, so closely entwined with our economic and social history. I can only say this: once the basic question is posed...as to the justification of private force in the pursuit of ends whether private or public, real or imaginary, that question has to be answered openly and fearlessly... If the conclusion is that no such justification can be shown to exist, either generally or in our own society and times, then sooner or late, however long and wearisome the process, however many inquiries and Royal Commissions we must live through, the law of this land will have to be brought into accord with what can be defended by its people as right and just."

"Contrary to popular belief there is no reason whatever to suppose that the remuneration of labour in general has been raised by the combination of labour through the trade unions to a higher level than it would have stood at otherwise. The rising standard of living of the employed population is due to many causes; but restrictive practices are not among them. No doubt in individual occupations combination has from time to time succeeded in raising real wages above what they would have been in its absence; but any such gain, which is invariably at the expense of workers in other employments and of the general public, is always temporary and usually brief. After more or less inconvenience and, in recent times, by dint of more or less inflation, the pattern of real wages reverts to one which corresponds with the balance of supply and demand for labour in the various employments in different parts of the country."

"The economic losses are those which are common to all monopolistic and restrictive practices. Whenever relatively more is paid for one set of services, and therefore less for all the rest, than would be paid in the absence of restrictive practices, the result is that the pattern of production is not as nearly as "right" as it would otherwise be: we waste part of our resources—human as well as material—by not putting them to the uses which yield the best return. In the modern state this is corrected not, as in the past, by unemployment and the forcing down of money wages, but by inflation and the devaluation of money: if one group succeeds in raising the price of its services by restrictive methods, then everyone else will also get around to being paid more for theirs, until a pattern which corresponds with the balance of supply and demand is again restored. The resultant inflation not only has the familiar inconvenient consequences for a country with a fixed parity of exchange. It also creates injustice for those persons and classes whose expectations are defined in fixed money terms."

"Now, there is one set of market forces, supremely important to Britain, which lie outside the reach of even a Socialist government. These are world market forces. Whatever government we have in this country, the rest of the world will only buy from us what it cannot get elsewhere cheaper and better. If our prices are high or our goods not the right ones, it will be no use saying: “Oh, but we have decided not to be ruled by market forces beyond our control.” The rest of the world would laugh in our faces. And what sheer nonsense and utter hypocrisy it is for a country dependent on selling a fifth of its product abroad to pretend not to “be ruled by market forces”!"

"When a man offers to sell you something at less than its market price, it is a pretty good sign that you are about to be swindled."

"In conditions of free enterprise and competition, one does not have to contrive modernisation or introduce it by government decree. It happens, and keeps on happening, of its own accord. A firm or an industry or an attitude which is no longer modern simply does not survive; it goes under and is replaced by others which are modern. Our motor industry, our chemical industry, yes, our steel industry, do not have to be told to modernise themselves. They keep on doing it because they have to, in order to export and meet the challenge of a fiercely competitive and rapidly changing world. If Britain wants to be modern, there is no substitute for the system of competitive free enterprise by which the Tory Party stands."

"In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that."

"Immigration was, and is, an issue. In my constituency it has for years been question number one, into which discussion of every other political topic—housing, health, benefits, employment—promptly turned."

"Before more months or years are spent by Ministers, by economic staffs, by industrialists and by trade unionists, in a pursuit which is as foredoomed to futility as filling a sieve or making a rope of sand, it is time to call a halt, and to declare in round and unmistakeable terms that an incomes policy, in any relevant or useful sense, does not and cannot exist—except perhaps in a communist dictatorship."

"The idea of the State-controlled economy is not modern at all. It is very old; and not only very old, but refuted and superseded long ago. It is quite true that the great principles of capitalism and free enterprise were expounded and explored around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Newton discovered gravitation in the seventeenth century. Copernicus proved in the sixteenth century that the earth revolves round the sun. But these truths are not thereby "out-of-date". They are not refuted by the lapse of time. The errors which they replaced are errors still. It is the Socialists and the economic planners who are the Ptolemaics and the flat-earthers of the modern world. They have not moved on beyond capitalism: they have moved back before it. In order to find the parallels to their faith in state regulation and control of the economy you have to go back behind Adam Smith and his contemporaries to the elaborate management of trade in the guilds and boroughs of the Middle Ages or to the French bureaucrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

"The present-day Socialist would be perfectly at home in the France of Louis XIV, where officials decided what industries should be created and located in what parts of France and her colonies, minutely regulated the imports and exports, subsidised and controlled prices, and managed the economy even down to prescribing the patterns which were to be woven in the state-owned tapestry works of Aubusson. There is the spiritual home of the Socialist planner. If Louis XIV could read Signposts for the Sixties, with its promise of the powers of government used to enforce a national plan of investment and production...it would win his full approval and support. There are no doubt some points of dissimilarity between Mr. Harold Wilson and Louis XIV; but in their economic policies they are twin souls. And the psychology and attitude of mind behind their common policy is not at all unlike. "The state?" said Louis, "Why, that is myself!" Was it not a Socialist minister who within living memory proclaimed, "We are the masters now"?"

"The explosion in productive energy which capitalism unleashed in the nineteenth century was accompanied by social evils and hardships which have since been outgrown and abolished. It has been possible to do so by means of that very increase in production itself, just as future social improvement will depend on the rate of our future economic advance. What tragic folly it would be if modern Britain were to cast away the subtlest and most efficient system mankind has yet devised for setting effort and resources to their best economic use, and were to go right back to the clumsy methods and crude fallacies which our forefathers thought they had left behind for ever."

"Public and private expenditure are not the same in their financial and economic effects. There is a very important difference between your expenditure and mine and the Government's expenditure. If you and I intend to spend but find we have not enough money, we have no choice but to think better of it. Not so the Government; if they are short, they can either make you and me pay more in taxation, or else they can actually create additional money... For politicians to increase public expenditure is easy and sweet; to refrain from increasing it, let alone to reduce it, is hard and uncomfortable. Thus it is that government intentions to spend get carried through, irrespective of whether this results in money being created faster than goods and services—irrespective, in other words, of the inflation which ensues. That is why Lord Cromer was perfectly right in saying that a high level of public expenditure causes inflation."

"So let us make this our resolve: we will not be tempted, or frightened, or cajoled into turning aside from our plain duty and common-sense necessity: so to control and limit and guide our public expenditure that it no longer entails upon this country the recurrent menace of inflationary crises or the more insidious but in the long run dangerous atrophy of an increasingly state-dominated economy."

"The effect of any combination to fix the price of labour in a particular employment by restraining those who would be prepared to pay more or accept less—that is what collective bargaining means if it means anything at all—is the same as the effect of any other restrictive practice: it makes everybody worse off in the end."

"[T]o the extent that collective bargaining does succeed in distorting costs, it must rank among the obstacles to improvement in the standard of living of the British worker; and the more effective it is, the greater the obstacle. The British industrial worker today works longer hours for less real wages than his counterpart in West Germany, and that will soon be true, if it is not already, of his counterparts in a number of other European countries. This is not because the British trade unions are not strong enough, any more than it is because the monopolies and restrictive practices among buyers and sellers of goods and services are not tight enough. It is because industrial effort is being more efficiently used elsewhere than here. This is what gives the immediacy and urgency to this whole question of the trade unions. The people of this country cannot afford to allow themselves the luxury of practices and habits, however encrusted with sentiment and benevolent superstition, which place obstacles in the way of more efficient use of our resources."

"I sometimes hear the suggestion made, even in the Conservative Party, that one would wish to see the official, responsible trade union leaders encouraged and strengthened, given the power to make binding contracts on behalf of their members, and placed under liability to penalties if their members break them. This would be the diametrically wrong direction in which to move. It would entrench and give legal sanctions to collective price-fixing itself, which is the essential economic evil. But there are more objections than on economic grounds alone; there are also grave political objections. If unions are to contract to deliver a stipulated quantity, and presumably quality, of labour at a stipulated price, then they would need to be endowed with disciplinary powers over their members, in order to secure the performance of the contract: the members would have to be subject, besides the general law, to a kind of private law or code. A trade union would cease to be in any sense a voluntary association; for only union members, and that, members of a specific trade union, would in practice be employable. This is the union shop and the closed shop—which the Tory Party has always repudiated—with a vengeance. The idea would carry us far down the road to the fascist, corporate state, where the economic life and decisions of the individual are regulated by corporations of employers and unions."

"The right of free association, which is pleaded on behalf of collective price-fixing by trade unions, means nothing unless there is an equal right of non-association. It is contrary to the Rule of Law that any private association of citizens should be permitted to exercise, let alone to be endowed with the positive power to exercise, coercion over those who do not choose to belong to it. This power of coercion derives primarily from the legal privileges which trade unions, and trade unions uniquely, have enjoyed for the last sixty years, privileges which enable them to behave in ways that for any other associations would be unlawful and would result in damages for those who suffered injury at their hands... [N]o one has succeeded in showing that today these coercive powers are other than superfluous at best and at worst harmful, and that...the state of the law on which those privileges rest is ripe for urgent reform. The law of picketing, intimidation, contracting-out, immunity from process is not at this day defensible, either in itself or in its economic consequences. When combination to fix the price of labour enjoys no privileges which are denied to combinations for the purpose of fixing other prices, then the right of free association will be a reality and not a phrase, and one of the most serious obstacles will have been removed which impede at present the use of this nation's abilities and resources for the benefit of all her people."

"If the Western nations were to confer on the rest of mankind not, as at present, just a tiny fraction of their goods and capital, but were, literally, in the words of the epistle, to ‘bestow all their goods to feed the poor’ their wealth would only disappear, like a snowflake on boiling water, into the maw of these vast and astronomically increasing populations, and the outcome would be a common level of poverty and incompetence. Whence, then, if from anywhere, are the means of improvement to come? There is only one possible answer: essentially from within. The investment and the initiative which made possible the development of the Western economies was not subscribed or donated from outside; it came from within. The rise of Japan, in far less than a century from Admiral Perry's arrival, to challenge the Western countries in technology and production, was not because she was spoon-fed with grants and uneconomic loans from a benevolent Europe or America: it was due to the spirit and character of her people and their aptitude and appetite to learn. The great, the only truly beneficent gift we have to offer is the example of that which has made the West productive – capitalism and enterprise. But it is a gift which implies the power and will to receive it: and that, although we can teach and demonstrate by precept and by example, it is not in our power simply to confer. In short, the secret of aid to the developing countries is not capital itself: it is capitalism."

"Under the Labour Government in the last eighteen months Britain has behaved, perfectly clearly and perfectly recognizably, as an American satellite."

"The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books."

"For over ten years, from about 1954 to 1966, Commonwealth immigration was the principal, and at times the only, political issue in my constituency in Wolverhampton. Between those dates entire areas were transformed by the substitution of a wholly or predominantly coloured population for the previous native inhabitants, as completely as other areas were transformed by the bulldozer. My uppermost feeling on looking back upon those years is of astonishment that this event, which altered the appearance and life of a town and had shattering effects on the lives of many families and persons, could take place with virtually no physical manifestations of antipathy. This speaks volumes for the steadiness and tolerance of the natives. Acts of an enemy, bombs from the sky, they could understand; but now, for reasons quite inexplicable, they might be driven from their homes and their property deprived of value by an invasion which the Government apparently approved and their fellow-citizens – elsewhere – viewed with complacency. Those were the years when a ‘For Sale’ notice going up in a street struck terror into all its inhabitants. I know; for I live within the proverbial stone’s throw of streets which ‘went black’."

"In my own constituency (where I estimate that about 10 per cent of the population are immigrants from Asia or the Caribbean) I have the impression that, as no doubt elsewhere, the first phase, the sudden impact of Commonwealth immigration, is over. I am going to prophesy, however, that there will be subsequent phases, when the problem will resume its place in public concern and in a more intractable form, when it can no longer be dealt with simply by turning the inlet tap down or off. Long before the coloured population reaches 5 per cent of the total, a proportion will have filtered into the general population, mingled with it in occupation, residence, habits and intermarriage. On the other hand, the rest, numerically perhaps much the greater part, will be in larger or smaller colonies, in certain areas and cities, more separated than now in habits, occupation and way of life. The irregular pattern of population and living which grew up higgledy-piggledy in the early years of immigration will have been tidied up. It is for these colonies, and the problems thereby entailed on our descendants, that they will curse the improvident years, now gone, when we could have avoided it all."

"Once you go nuclear at all, you go nuclear for good; and you know it. Here is the parting of the ways, for from this point two opposite conclusions can be drawn. One is that therefore there can never again be serious war of any duration between Western nations, including Russia—in particular, that there can never again be serious war on the Continent of Europe or the waters around it, which an enemy must master in order to threaten Britain. That is the Government's position. The other conclusion, therefore, is that resort is most unlikely to be had to nuclear weapons at all, but that war could nevertheless develop as if they did not exist, except of course that it would be so conducted as to minimise any possibility of misapprehension that the use of nuclear weapons was imminent or had begun. The crucial question is whether there is any stage of a European war at which any nation would choose self-annihiliation in preference to prolonging the struggle. The Secretary of State says, "Yes, the loser or likely loser would almost instantly choose self-annihiliation." I say, "No. The probability, though not the certainty, but surely at least the possibility, is that no such point would come, whatever the course of the conflict.""

"It is advertising that enthrones the customer as king. This infuriates the socialist...[it is] the crossing of the boundary between West Berlin and East Berlin. It is Checkpoint Charlie, or rather Checkpoint Douglas, the transition from the world of choice and freedom to the world of drab, standard uniformity."

"I find in my constituency in the last few weeks an ominous deterioration, which is taking the form not of discrimination by white against coloured but of insolence of coloured towards white and corresponding fearfulness on the part of white. It is this which will be exacerbated by the projected legislation on discrimination and which we shall have to take into account in making up our minds on our attitude."

"Integration of races of totally disparate origins and culture is one of the great myths of our time. It has never worked throughout history. The United States lost its only real opportunity of solving its racial problem when it failed after the Civil War to partition the old Confederacy into a "South Africa" and a "Liberia"."

"Often when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost for the gift of capitalism."

"There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response. This is the kind of feeling which you in Walsall and we in Wolverhampton are experiencing in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns. We are of course in a minority – make no mistake about that. Out of over 600 parliamentary constituencies perhaps less than 60 are affected in any way like ourselves. The rest know little or nothing and, we might sometimes be tempted to feel, care little or nothing. Only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school. He looked at me as if I were a Member of Parliament for central Africa, who had suddenly dropped from the sky into Westminster. So far as most people in the British Isles are concerned, you and I might as well be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances."

"Some problems are unavoidable. Some evils can be coped with to a certain extent, but not prevented. But that a nation should have saddled itself, without necessity and without countervailing benefit, with a wholly avoidable problem of immense dimensions is enough to make one weep. That the same nation should stubbornly persist in allowing the problem, great as it already is, to be magnified further, is enough to drive one to despair."

"It is no kindness on the part of politicians to minimize the size which those problems will assume, even if from now onwards every possible legislative and administrative action is taken to limit it. To draw attention to those problems and face them in the light of day is wiser than to apply the method of the ostrich which rarely yields a satisfactory result – even to ostriches. We have just been seeing in Wolverhampton the cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the shape of communalism. Communalism has been the curse of India and we need to be able to recognize it when it rears its head here. Large numbers of Sikhs, who had been serving the Wolverhampton Corporation voluntarily and contentedly, have found themselves against their will made the material for communal agitation. They have the same right as anyone else to decide which if any of the rules of their sect they will keep, and they had found no difficulty in entering the Corporation's employment and complying with the same rules as their fellow employees. For those who took a different and a stricter view there were plenty of other opportunities of employment. It will be the opposite to the equal treatment of all persons within the realm if employers are placed in the position of adjudicating upon the requirements of their employees' religion. The issue in this instance, is not racial or religious discrimination: it is communalism."

"What I would take 'racialist' to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief. So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is 'no'—unless, perhaps, it is to be a racialist in reverse. I regard many of the peoples in India as being superior in many respects—intellectually, for example, and in other respects—to Europeans. Perhaps that is over-correcting."

"All government rests upon consent, and consent is not to be had without taking counsel with the most eminent or influential or representative of the governed, and seeking their advice: the act of taking counsel cannot be separated from the act of exercising authority. All government rests also upon habit, upon being exercised in the same way or a similar way to that in which the governed remember or believe that it was exercised before. Brute force can break with habit; but as soon as brute force begins to turn into government, it does so by starting to observe habitual modes of behaviour. Habitual forms or institutions for counsel and consent are thus of the essence of government."

"Too often today people are ready to tell us: "This is not possible, that is not possible." I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts."

"I hope those who shouted "Fascist" and "Nazi" are aware that before they were born I was fighting against Fascism and Nazism."

"...on such a matter it is the duty of a politician to make and to declare his judgement. I do so, I hope, not unduly moved – though why should I not be moved? – by the hundreds – no, thousands – of my countrymen who speak to me or write to me of their fear and foreboding: the old who rejoice that they will not live to see what is to come; the young who are determined that their children shall not grow up under the shadow of it. My judgement then is this: the people of England will not endure it. If so, it is idle to argue whether they ought to or ought not to. I do not believe it is in human nature that a country, and a country such as ours, should passively watch the transformation of whole areas which lie at the heart of it into alien territory."

"The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or Asian still. Unless he be one of a small minority—for number, I repeat again and again, is of the essence—he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one. Time is running against us and them. With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing ‘in England's green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the United States."

"It would be different if there were some great widespread public indignation and demand: "Away with the prescriptive upper house of Parliament". There is not. There was recently carried out by Mr. McKenzie and a colleague of his a survey of working-class political attitudes called Angels in Marble. They found that "only one-third of the entire working class sample, and only a slightly higher proportion of Labour voters, favoured abolishing the Lords or altering it in any way…About a third of the whole sample" of working-class voters in the country "see the Lords as an intrinsic part of the national tradition or of the government of the country." As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive."

"[I]t depends indeed on whether the immigrants are different, and different in important respects from the existing population. Clearly, if they are identical, then no change for the good or bad can be brought about by the immigration. But if they are different, and to the extent that they are different, then numbers clearly are of the essence and this is not wholly – or mainly, necessarily – a matter of colour. For example, if the immigrants were Germans or Russians, their colour would be approximately the same as ours, but the problems which would be created and the change which could be brought about by a large introduction of a bloc of Germans or Russians into five areas in this country would be as serious – and in some respects more serious – than could follow from an introduction of a similar number of West Indians or Pakistanis."

"Enoch Powell: Now, we were invaded by the Danes, they did alter the country and we fought them for two hundred years. If that's what is meant – to be allowed to happen? Marghanita Laski: Were we wise to do so? Didn't they add to us in the end? Wasn't there much more suffering and misery because we fought them? Enoch Powell: Only because we fought them, and eventually subjugated them and Christianised them. (applause)"

"It depends on how you define the word "racialist." If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatically "No.""

"There is a limit to the number of (and I'm going to use this word in an entirely neutral sense) aliens who can be brought into a nation, particularly as close-knit and concentrated a nation as Britain is, without breaking the bounds of that society and setting up intolerable frictions and stresses as damaging to one side as to the other. Now, this is a question of number. But the relationship between number and difference is clearly important, because the more different they are – and colour is a signal, an outward signal of differences (not significant in itself, but it signalizes other differences that one can't deny) – the greater the difference, the smaller the numbers that can at any one time be accepted without breaking, or being thought to break (which comes to the same thing if we're talking about psychology), the framework of a nation and a society. So it's numbers."

"They tell us we must be prepared to contemplate, in fact to welcome, the alteration and alienation of our towns and cities. They tell us there is no such thing as our own people and our country. Indeed there is, and I say it in no mean or arrogant or exclusive spirit. What I know is that we have an identity of our own, as we have a territory of our own, and that the instinct to preserve that identity, as to defend that territory, is one of the deepest and strongest implanted in mankind. I happen also to believe that the instinct is good and that its beneficent effects are not exhausted... In our time that identity has been threatened more than once. In the past it was threatened by violence and aggression from without. It is now threatened from within by the foreseeable consequences of a massive but unpremeditated and fortunately, in substantial measure, reversible immigration."

"Trevor Huddleston: [W]hat I still want to know from you, really, is why the presence of a coloured immigrant group is objectionable, when the presence of a non-coloured immigrant is not objectionable. Enoch Powell: Oh no, oh no! On the contrary, I have often said that if we saw the prospect of five million Germans in this country at the end of the century, the risks of disruption and violence would probably be greater, and the antagonism which would be aroused would be more severe. The reason why the whole debate in this country on immigration is related to coloured immigration, is because there has been no net immigration of white Commonwealth citizens, and there could be no migration of aliens. This is merely an automatic consequence of the facts of the case; it is not because there is anything different, because there is anything necessarily more dangerous, about the alienness of a community from Asia, than about the alienness of a community from Turkey or from Germany, that we discuss this inevitably in terms of colour. It is because it is that problem."

"Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger. Because there can be no such thing as compulsory compassion or vicarious compassion, therefore it is a humbugging abuse of language, intended to deceive, to talk about a 'compassionate Government' or a 'compassionate party'—or even a 'compassionate society', unless one simply means by that a society which happens to contain a lot of compassionate individuals. Nor let anyone protest: 'Oh, but when I vote for a party which will "make provision on an unprecedented scale for those in need of help", it means I too shall have to pay my whack and so I am being compassionate after all'. Nonsense! The purpose of your vote is not to make yourself subscribe—that you can freely do at any time—but to compel others."

"I could not vote for any legislation which would legalise a constitution for Southern Rhodesia under which there would not be evident and relatively early advance to majority rule."

"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils."

"Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”"

""In this country in fifteen or twenty years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so."

"Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history."

"Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre."

"But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country."

"They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted."

"She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. 'Racialist,' they chant."

"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood.""

"That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal."

"We should do well in the Conservative Party to take extremely seriously the phenomenon of university disorder... The essential ingredient of the success of anarchy in its new form is the enslavement of the majority by a tiny minority... The object of this minority is the destruction of authority, of the institutions of society and of society itself—not, as in the classical revolutionary movements, for the purpose of substituting a different order and better institutions, but in order to destroy for destruction's sake. The great discovery has been how to turn authority, institutions and society against themselves, and to use the majority which accepts and approves them as a battering ram to smash them down. The method is essentially simple; but in its simplicity lies its subtlety and its efficacy. The secret weapon is the assumption that violence and disorder imply grievance. From this it follows that the grievance must be removed in order to stop the violence and disorder. It also follows that the real blame lies not with the violent and disorderly but with those responsible for the assumed grievance, namely with authority and society itself. The burden of accusation and condemnation is thus automatically diverted from the guilty on to the innocent, from the attacker on to the attacked, from the plotter on to his intended victims. The majority of members of the institution under attack, the organs of vocal opinion, and at last the general public itself, are so mesmerised by this technique that they become the instruments of its success. They take up and re-echo the taunts and complaints of the attackers, until the terrified holders of authority, finding themselves apparently surrounded by accusers on all sides, abandon their posts and buy off the aggressors."

"[O]ur prime responsibility in our several situations is to denounce folly and absurdity for what they are. Unless and until this is done, every successive outbreak of disorder, with its accompanying conditioned reflex of vocal approval for the demands of the disorderly, will mark another stage in the lapse of the universities into anarchy. The central folly and absurdity which cries aloud to be denounced is student participation. There is no, repeat no, rational justification for students to participate in the academic or administrative or disciplinary management of the universities. The whole idea is utterly nonsensical."

"It is an old delusion to suppose that those bent on violence and anarchy can be satisfied with instalments of what is miscalled reform. If reform were the object, they could be: but the object is not reform, the object is destruction. When a concession has been extorted here, it will be followed by another demand there; when one humiliation has been inflicted on the authorities, the means will instantly be sought of inflicting another. There is no quantity of danegeld which buys off anarchy; there is no end to the instalments which will be swallowed and leave the aggressor unsatisfied. Sooner or later, therefore, and sooner better than later, there has to be a halt; and the Conservative party has a peculiar responsibility in this...as the Party which claims a special identification with law and order. So far our record has been unimpressive. We have been content to stand on the touchline and watch the university authorities, in their pitiful inexperience and gaucherie, go down to one defeat after another without so much as a word from us. Worse, we have often played the anarchists' game ourselves by joining in approval of the anarchists' demands. The time is overdue to stand and be heard out loud. We shall not want for echo from the people, who wonder that those who should speak for them have been silent so long."

"It is of the nature of all internecine violence that it lives on hope. Violence feeds upon the hope of success ... violence will not continue indefinitely where the objects which it proposes to itself appear to be unattainable, or at any rate unattainable within a predictable future. The Government in Northern Ireland and the Government in this country actually assist violence and strengthen it in so far as they appear to act and appear to reform under the pressure of violence... [The Government should ensure that] neither by word nor deed do we treat the membership of the Six Counties in the United Kingdom as negotiable. Every word or act which holds out the prospect that their unity with the rest of the United Kingdom might be negotiable is itself, consciously or unconsciously, a contributory cause to the continuation of violence in Northern Ireland."

"All that I will say is that in 1939 I voluntarily returned from Australia to this country to serve as a private soldier in the war against Germany and Nazism. I am the same man today... It does not follow that because a person resident in this country is not English that he does not enjoy equal treatment before the law and public authorities. I set my face like flint against discrimination."

"Some of us personally witnessed what was done on the continent under that sign and it is a symbol we shall never forget."

"It so happens that I never talk about race. I do not know what race is."

"Have you ever wondered, perhaps, why opinions which the majority of people quite naturally hold are, if anyone dares express them publicly, denounced as 'controversial, 'extremist', 'explosive', 'disgraceful', and overwhelmed with a violence and venom quite unknown to debate on mere political issues? It is because the whole power of the aggressor depends upon preventing people from seeing what is happening and from saying what they see.The most perfect, and the most dangerous, example of this process is the subject miscalled, and deliberately miscalled, 'race'. The people of this country are told that they must feel neither alarm nor objection to a West Indian, African and Asian population which will rise to several millions being introduced into this country. If they do, they are 'prejudiced', 'racialist'... A current situation, and a future prospect, which only a few years ago would have appeared to everyone not merely intolerable but frankly incredible, has to be represented as if welcomed by all rational and right-thinking people. The public are literally made to say that black is white. Newspapers like the Sunday Times denounce it as 'spouting the fantasies of racial purity' to say that a child born of English parents in Peking is not Chinese but English, or that a child born of Indian parents in Birmingham is not English but Indian. It is even heresy to assert the plain fact that the English are a white nation. Whether those who take part know it or not, this process of brainwashing by repetition of manifest absurdities is a sinister and deadly weapon. In the end, it renders the majority, who are marked down to be the victims of violence or revolution or tyranny, incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong. The process has already gone perilously far, when political parties at a general election dare not discuss a subject which results from and depends on political action and which for millions of electors transcends all others in importance; or when party leaders can be mesmerised into accepting from the enemy the slogans of 'racialist' and 'unChristian' and applying them to lifelong political colleagues...In the universities, we are told that education and the discipline ought to be determined by the students, and that the representatives of the students ought effectively to manage the institutions. This is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense which it is already obligatory for academics and journalists, politicians and parties, to accept and mouth upon pain of verbal denunciation and physical duress.We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the 'developed' countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced 'aid' to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.Then there is the 'civil rights' nonsense. In Ulster we are told that the deliberate destruction by fire and riot of areas of ordinary property is due to the dissatisfaction over allocation of council houses and opportunities for employment. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that has not prevented the Parliament and government of the United Kingdom from undermining the morale of civil government in Northern Ireland by imputing to it the blame for anarchy and violence.Most cynically of all, we are told, and told by bishops forsooth, that communist countries are the upholders of human rights and guardians of individual liberty, but that large numbers of people in this country would be outraged by the spectacle of cricket matches being played here against South Africans. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but that did not prevent a British Prime Minister and a British Home Secretary from adopting it as acknowledged fact."

"A single currency means a single government, and that single government would be the government whose policies determined every aspect of economic life."

"The question...of membership [of the EEC] resolves itself...into the most basic of all possible questions which can be addressed to the people of any nation: can they, and will they, so merge themselves with others that, in face of the external world, there is no longer ‘we’ and ‘they’, but only ‘we’; that the interests of the whole are instinctively seen as over-riding those of any part; that a single political will and authority, which must necessarily be that of the majority, is unconditionally accepted as binding upon us all? That is the question. That is what the real debate is about... For myself, I say that to me it is inconceivable that the people of this nation could or would so identify themselves politically with the peoples of the continent of Western Europe to form with them one entity and in effect one nation."

"[W]e are talking about economic and political union. We are posing a question about political entity, about nationhood—the thing for which men, if necessary, fight and, if necessary, die, and to preserve which men think no sacrifice too great. In respect of our nationhood, then, I say that we are not a part of the continent of Europe. The whole development and nature of our national identity and consciousness has been not merely separate from that of the countries of the Continent of Europe but actually antithetical; and, with the centuries, so far from growing together, our institutions and outlook have rather grown apart from those of our neighbours on the continent. In our history, both recent and earlier, the principal events which have placed their stamp upon our consciousness of who we are, were the very moments in which we have been alone, confronting a Europe which was lost or hostile. That is the picture, that is the folk memory, by which our nation has been formed."

"Now, at present Britain has no V.A.T., and the questions whether this new tax should be introduced, how it should be levied, and what should be its scope, would be matters of debate in the country and in Parliament. The essence of parliamentary democracy lies in the power to debate and impose taxation: it is the vital principle of the British House of Commons, from which all other aspects of its sovereignty ultimately derive. With Britain in the community, one important element of taxation would be taken automatically, necessarily and permanently out of the hands of the House of Commons...Those matters which sovereign parliaments debate and decide must be debated and decided not by the British House of Commons but in some other place, and by some other body, and debated and decided once for the whole Community...it is a fact that the British Parliament and its paramount authority occupies a position in relation to the British nation which no other elective assembly in Europe possesses. Take parliament out of the history of England and that history itself becomes meaningless. Whole lifetimes of study cannot exhaust the reasons why this fact has come to be, but fact it is, so that the British nation could not imagine itself except with and through its parliament. Consequently the sovereignty of our parliament is something other for us than what your assemblies are for you. What is equally significant, your assemblies, unlike the British Parliament, are the creation of deliberate political acts, and most of recent political acts. The notion that a new sovereign body can be created is therefore as familiar to you as it is repugnant, not to say unimaginable, to us. This deliberate, and recent, creation of sovereign assemblies on the continent is in turn an aspect of the fact that the continent is familiar, and familiar in the recent past, with the creation of nation states themselves. Four of the six members of the Community came into existence as such no more than a century or a century and a half ago – within the memory of two lifetimes."

"An essential element in forming a single electorate is the sense that in the last resort all parts of it stand, or fall, survive or perish, together. This sense the British do not share with the inhabitants of the continent of Western Europe. Of all the nations of Europe Britain and Russia alone, though for opposite reasons, have this in common: they can be defeated in the decisive land battle and still survive. This characteristic Russia owes to her immensity. Britain owes it to her ditch. The British feel – and I believe that instinct corresponds with sound military reason – that the ditch is as significant in what we call the nuclear age as it proved to be in the air age and had been in the age of the Grande Armée of Napoleon or the Spanish infantry of Philip II. Error or truth, myth or reality, the belief itself is a habit of mind which has helped to form the national identity of the British and cannot be divorced from it."

"So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders. With so much of immediate and indisputable importance on their hands, why should they attend to what was forecast for the end of the century, when most of them would be not only out of office but dead and gone? … It was not for them to heed the cries of anguish from those of their own people who already saw their towns being changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation. For these the much vaunted compassion of the parties and politicians was not available: the parties and the politicians preferred to be busy making speeches on race relations; and if any of their number dared to tell them the truth, even less than the whole truth, about what was happening and what would happen here in England, they denounced them as racialist and turned them out of doors. They could feel safe; for they said in their hearts: 'If trouble comes, it will not be in our time; let the next generation see to it!' … The explosive which will blow us asunder is there and the fuse is burning, but the fuse is shorter than had been supposed. The transformation which I referred to earlier as being without even a remote parallel in our history, the occupation of the hearts of this metropolis and of towns and cities across England by a coloured population amounting to millions, this before long will be past denying. It is possible that the people of this country will, with good or ill grace, accept what they did not ask for, did not want and were not told of. My own judgment—it is a judgment which the politician has a duty to form to the best of his ability—I have not feared to give: it is—to use words I used two years and a half ago—that 'the people of England will not endure it'."

"One of the most dangerous words is 'extremist'. A person who commits acts of violence is not an 'extremist'; he is a criminal. If he commits those acts of violence with the object of detaching part of the territory of the United Kingdom and attaching it to a foreign country, he is an enemy under arms. There is the world of difference between a citizen who commits a crime, in the belief, however mistaken, that he is thereby helping to preserve the integrity of his country and his right to remain a subject of his sovereign, and a person, be he citizen or alien, who commits a crime with the intention of destroying that integrity and rendering impossible that allegiance. The former breaches the peace; the latter is executing an act of war. The use of the word 'extremist' of either or both conveys a dangerous untruth: it implies that both hold acceptable opinions and seek permissible ends, only that they carry them to 'extremes'. Not so: the one is a lawbreaker; the other is an enemy.The same purpose, that of rendering friend and foe indistinguishable, is achieved by references to the 'impartiality' of the British troops and to their function as 'keeping the peace'. The British forces are in Northern Ireland because an avowed enemy is using force of arms to break down lawful authority in the province and thereby seize control. The army cannot be 'impartial' towards an enemy, nor between the aggressor and the aggressed: they are not glorified policemen, restraining two sets of citizens who might otherwise do one another harm, and duty bound to show no 'partiality' towards one lawbreaker rather than another. They are engaged in defeating an armed attack upon the state. Once again, the terminology is designed to obliterate the vital difference between friend and enemy, loyal and disloyal.Then there are the 'no-go' areas which have existed for the past eighteen months. It would be incredible, if it had not actually happened, that for a year and a half there should be areas in the United Kingdom where the Queen's writ does not run and where the citizen is protected, if protected at all, by persons and powers unknown to the law. If these areas were described as what they are—namely, pockets of territory occupied by the enemy, as surely as if they had been captured and held by parachute troops—then perhaps it would be realised how preposterous is the situation. In fact the policy of refraining from the re-establishment of civil government in these areas is as wise as it would be to leave enemy posts undisturbed behind one's lines."

"[W]hen the empire dissolved...the people of Britain suffered from a kind of vertigo: they could not believe that they were standing upright, and reached out for something to clutch. It seemed axiomatic that economically, as well as politically, they must be part of something bigger, though the deduction was as unfounded as the premise. So some cried: 'Revive the Commonwealth'. And others cried: 'Let's go in with America into a North Atlantic Free Trade Area'. Yet others again cried: 'We have to go into Europe: there's no real alternative'. In a sense they were right: there is no alternative grouping. In a more important sense they were wrong: there is no need for joining anything. A Britain which is ready to exchange goods, services and capital as freely as it can with the rest of the world is neither isolated nor isolationist. It is not, in the sneering phrases of Chamberlain's day, 'Little England'...The Community is not a free trade area, which is what Britain, with a correct instinct, tried vainly to convert it into, or combine it into, in 1957-60. For long afterwards indeed many Britons continued to cherish the delusion that it really was a glorified free trade area and would turn out to be nothing more. On the contrary the Community is, what its name declares, a prospective economic unit. But an economic unit is not defined by economics – there are no natural economic units – it is defined by politics. What we call an economic unit is really a political unit viewed in its economic aspect: the unit is political."

"This is the positive aspect of British opposition to entry into the Community – the breadth and depth of the people's conviction that in no foreseeable future could they in this sense form one electorate with the inhabitants of the continent... It is that in their thousand-year history the British Isles has made a nation which recognizes itself more in its separation and difference from the continent than its similarity and kinship."

"The prospect of a Russian conquest of Western Europe is one for which history affords no material. The theory that the Russians have not advanced from the Elbe to the Atlantic because of the nuclear deterrent is not more convincing than the theory that they have not done so because they do not want to do so and have never envisaged, unless perhaps in terms of world revolution, a Russian hegemony in Western Europe... Of all the nations of Europe, Britain and Russia are the only ones, though for opposite reasons, which have this thing in common: that they can be defeated in the decisive land battle and still survive. This characteristic, which Russia owes to her immensity, Britain owes to her moat."

"In the ultimate matter of life and death, survival or defeat, the insular position of the British nation has set us apart from the inhabitants of the adjacent continent. This is a political fact which cannot be pretended out of existence. As long as it remains true, or is believed by the British themselves to remain true, the commitment of Britain to any continental combination can never be total... True, it has often been rumoured that Britain had lost, or was about to lose, that characteristic; but events have hitherto always proved that she had it still, and those events are the most formative element in the folk-memory of the British people... This is the reason why Britain, which is in many sense as European as any nation, cannot be integrated politically with the European continent."

"In our age it is the great majority which groans under the tyranny of small minorities, and large and even preponderant masses of opinion find no corresponding voice or expression in the constituted political parties... In the Britain of today the majority are convinced that they, the majority, will always lose, and that a minority of one sort or other, however untypical, will triumph. The present discontents, and the present dangers, are those of a public opinion which feels itself to be unregarded... People feel that without their consent, without (if possible) their knowledge, and certainly against their will, their own country is being taken and altered into what they do not recognise."

"At an educational conference not long ago, one head teacher spoke about "the seemingly planned intention of eroding all forces of authority", while another said "we know that the enemies of law and order would love to see the schools brought down, as far as their moral influence and prestige are concerned". What those head teachers were describing is what millions of people believe they are watching, helpless and not so much unregarded as positively derided: the deliberate dismantling of the frontiers of decency, morality and respect, with a view to producing far-reaching and indeterminate alterations in society itself. They do not believe that these and other phenomena, such as the spread of drugs or the undermining of the universities, are simply reflections of a change taking place spontaneously and generally. They believe that intention is at work, and that it is the intention of a small and elusive but powerful minority. What they do not understand is that they, the majority, seem to find themselves without voice or representation in the face of a prospect which appals them."

"Opinion has been right to fasten upon sovereignty as the central issue. Either British entry is a declaration of intent to surrender this country's sovereignty, stage by stage, in all that matters as a nation, and makes a nation, or else it is an empty gesture, disgraceful in its hollowness alike to those who proffer and to whose who accept it. The superior people laugh at those who talk about losing our Queen and our Monarchy... The Queen is the Queen in Parliament, as truly today as when her predecessor, Tudor Henry, observed that ‘we are nowhere so high in our estate royal as in this Our High Court of Parliament’. The question which the people of this country will have proposed to them is: will you, or will you not, continue to be governed by the Queen in Parliament? It is no less than that, and they have understood it."

"In your town, in mine, in Wolverhampton, in Smethwick, in Birmingham, people see with their own eyes what they dread, the transformation during their own lifetime or, if they are already old, during their children's, of towns, cities and areas that they know into alien territory...Of the great multitude, numbering already two million, of West Indians and Asians in England, it is no more true to say that England is their country than it would be to say that the West Indies, or Pakistan, or India are our country. In these great numbers they are, and remain, alien here as we would be in Kingston or in Delhi; indeed, with the growth of concentrated numbers, the alienness grows, not by choice but by necessity. It is a human fact which good will, tolerance, comprehension and all the social virtues do not touch. The process is that of an invasion, not, of course, with the connotation either of violence or a premeditated campaign but in the sense that a people find themselves displaced in the only country that is theirs, by those who do have another country and whose home will continue to be elsewhere for successive generations."

"I do not believe that this nation, which has maintained and defended its independence for a thousand years, will now submit to see it merged or lost; nor did I become a member of our sovereign Parliament in order to consent to that sovereignty being abated or transferred. Come what may, I cannot and will not."

"Virtually the entire inflow was therefore Asiatic, and all but three or four thousand of that inflow originated from the Indian subcontinent... It is by 'black Power' that the headlines are caught, and under the shape of the negro that the consequences for Britain of immigration and what is miscalled 'race' are popularly depicted. Yet it is more truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who will dispute with him the possession of his native land."

"[T]he only realignment of currencies which can be lasting and satisfactory is one which is continuously worked out by a free market."

"The monetary belief, or the monetary myth, upon which a whole generation has been reared—that an injection of money into the system is the automatic cure for unemployment—has collapsed in the face of the experience of the past four or five years."

"Keynes is dead!"

"The omnipotence of Parliament is for the British what for other nations is represented by the constitution, the declaration of independence and the law of human rights all rolled into one. That division of powers which was wrongly deduced from observation of Britain in the eighteenth century is unknown to Britain: just because we have no written constitution, the control of Parliament over both law and government has to be unlimited. In order for Britain to join the Community, the House of Commons has to be told, and to accept, that it will progressively lose its exclusive power to control legislation and government."

"The relevant fact about the history of the British Isles and above all of England is its separateness in a political sense from the history of continental Europe. The English have never belonged to it and have always known that they did not belong. The assertion contains no element of paradox. The Angevin Empire contradicts it as little as the English claim to the throne of France; neither the possession of Gascony nor the inheritance of Hanover made Edward I or George III anything but English sovereigns. When Henry VIII declared that 'this realm of England is an empire (imperium) of itself', he was making not a new claim but a very old one; but he was making it at a very significant point of time. He meant—as Edward I had meant, when he said the same over two hundred years before—that there is an imperium on the continent, but that England is another imperium outside its orbit and is endowed with the plenitude of its own sovereignty. The moment at which Henry VIII repeated this assertion was that of what is misleadingly called 'the reformation'—misleadingly, because it was, and is, essentially a political and not a religious event. The whole subsequent history of Britain and the political character of the British people have taken their colour and trace their unique quality from that moment and that assertion. It was the final decision that no authority, no law, no court outside the realm would be recognised within the realm. When Cardinal Wolsey fell, the last attempt had failed to bring or keep the English nation within the ambit of any external jurisdiction or political power: since then no law has been made for England outside England, and no taxation has been levied in England by or for an authority outside England—or not at least until the proposition that Britain should accede to the Common Market."

"[Parliament's] uniqueness lies in its virtually uninterrupted exercise of sovereignty through the centuries, so that, in the modern world of written constitutions and artificially erected representative assemblies, there is no other nation which is one with its parliament as we are. Among all the countries of Europe there is no other of which it could be said that its history would be unintelligible, almost non-existent, if the history of its parliament were removed."

"Such is, and will be seen to be, the effect of the legislation which the House of Commons must accept if the Treaty of Accession is to be ratified. It will be asked to divest itself of the unrestricted competence and authority which it has gained and maintained over centuries, and which the people of Britain regard as the guarantee of their national independence and political liberties."

"The Bill ... does manifest some of the major consequences. It shows first that it is an inherent consequence of accession to the Treaty of Rome that this House and Parliament will lose their legislative supremacy. It will no longer be true that law in this country is made only by or with the authority of Parliament... The second consequence ... is that this House loses its exclusive control—upon which its power and authority has been built over the centuries—over taxation and expenditure. In future, if we become part of the Community, moneys received in taxation from the citizens of this country will be spent otherwise than upon a vote of this House and without the opportunity ... to debate grievance and to call for an account of the way in which those moneys are to be spent. For the first time for centuries it will be true to say that the people of this country are not taxed only upon the authority of the House of Commons. The third consequence which is manifest on the face of the Bill, in Clause 3 among other places, is that the judicial independence of this country has to be given up. In future, if we join the Community, the citizens of this country will not only be subject to laws made elsewhere but the applicability of those laws to them will be adjudicated upon elsewhere; and the law made elsewhere and the adjudication elsewhere will override the law which is made here and the decisions of the courts of this realm."

"For this House, lacking the necessary authority either out-of-doors or indoors, legislatively to give away the independence and sovereignty of this House now and for the future is an unthinkable act. Even if there were not those outside to whom we have to render account, the very stones of this place would cry out against us if we dared such a thing. We are here acting not only collectively but as individuals; and each hon. Member takes his own responsibility upon himself—as I do, when I say for myself "It shall not pass"."

"Make no mistake, the real power resides not where present authority is exercised but where it is expected that authority will in future be exercised. The magnetic attraction of power is exercised by the prospect long before the reality is achieved; and the trek towards the rising sun, which is already in progress in 1972, would swell to an exodus before long. What do you imagine is the reason why Roy Jenkins is prepared to resign the front bench and divide his party in the endeavour to give a Conservative Prime Minister a majority in the House of Commons? The motive is not ignoble or discreditable—I am not asserting that—but it is a motive which it behoves people in Britain well to understand. It is the ambition to exercise his talents on the stage of Europe and to participate in taking decisions not for Britain here at home but for Europe in Brussels, Paris, Luxembourg or wherever else the imperial pavilions may be pitched. He does not, I assure you, forsee his future triumphs and achievements where his predecessors have seen them in the past – at the despatch box in the House of Commons or in the Cabinet room at Downing St. These are not good enough: the vision splendid beckons elsewhere."

"The House of Commons is at this moment being asked to agree to the renunciation of its own independence and supreme authority—but not the House of Commons by itself. The House of Commons is the personification of the people of Britain: its independence is synonymous with their independence; its supremacy is synonymous with their self-government and freedom. Through the centuries Britain has created the House of Commons and the House of Commons has moulded Britain, until the history of the one and the life of the one cannot be separated from the history and life of the other. In no other nation in the world is there any comparable relationship. Let no one therefore allow himself to suppose that the life-and-death decision of the House of Commons is some private affair of some privileged institution which at intervals swims into his ken and out of it again. It is the life-and-death decision of Britain itself, as a free, independent and self-governing nation. For weeks, for months the battle on the floor of the House of Commons will swing backwards and forwards, through interminable hours of debates and procedures and votes in the division lobbies; and sure enough the enemies and despisers of the House of Commons will represent it all as some esoteric game or charade which means nothing for the outside world. Do not be deceived. With other weapons and in other ways the contention is as surely about the future of Britain's nationhood as were the combats which raged in the skies over southern England in the autumn of 1940. The gladiators are few; their weapons are but words; and yet the fight is everyman's."

"When German sovereigns acceded to the throne of Britain, they were astonished to discover what George II used to call ‘that damned House of Commons’; but they learnt the lesson that the House of Commons had its way in the end. In former times and in modern times there has been a procession of occasions when the nations of the continent forgot or ignored the House of Commons to their cost, because to forget or ignore the people of Britain themselves, who, however late they awaken, will not suffer themselves to be parted from their heritage of parliamentary self-government and national independence."

"Week by week, month by month, the House of Commons votes to divest itself of what it had gained through a length of time not much shorter than the history of England itself, the trophies of its past struggles, the prizes of conflicts which will be renowned as long as English history is read."

"[I]t is not speculation, leads and lags, and the rest which cause the trouble. It is their impact against fixed exchange rates. With a floating exchange rate, speculation is not only harmless; it actually does its work, of moving the rate to correspond accurately with the net total of all anticipations. Speculation only becomes harmful, it can only do baleful work, when it is confronted with a blatantly false assertion made and attempted to be sustained by Governments in terms of a fixed parity... [I]n a world of economic change and in a world where the major monetary powers are likely for a long time to come to be pursuing their own different policies, the nearest approach to stability we can have is by allowing those changes to be reflected in rates which are free to move. We ought now, at last, to abandon the illusion that we can call change to a halt and live in a world of our own pretence, and instead to provide, by a sensitive and continuous recognition of changing reality, at least that stability which is available."

"[A]s long as the rate is fixed the speculator is on a one-way option. As soon as the rate is determined by the market, speculation is equal and opposite at the market rate. One has only to imagine what would be the position—and it is not an entirely out-of-the-way analogy—if there were to be fixed rates on the Stock Exchange. Everyone would know when they were false and did not correspond with the realities. The consequence would be that from time to time we should have to unpeg the fixed rates, with catastrophic changes of value, instead of the market rates being determined by the judgments of all who participate in the market. The same happens with a floating rate for a currency."

"[W]ith a floating rate we should still have to cope with our own domestic inflation. Of course, with a floating rate we cannot guarantee this or that rate of increase in our domestic product. But, with a floating rate, of this we can be sure, that we shall not artificially, for the sake of a shibboleth and a fetish, impose upon this country alternately the evils of deflation and of inflation, that we shall not go on repeating the bad film seen so often during the last 25 years."

"All belief in democracy, above all in parliamentary democracy, is an act of faith, as the maintenance of all free institutions is an act of faith. It depends on the faith that the political will of the people is capable of self-expression and of impressing itself upon those free institutions and ultimately moulding them to its will. If that be not so, then democracy and Parliament and all their theory are empty husks. So it is a question of faith whether the people will defend, are determined to defend, have the desire and purpose to defend, or, if it is lost, to restore and regain, the supremacy of Parliament and the political independence of this country."

"The plantation of Ulster, right or wrong, wise or unwise, beneficent or not, did take place; neither it nor its consequences can be pretended out of existence. The people of this province are part of the British nation, and the soil of this province is British soil, because the great majority of its inhabitants are so minded."

"[T]he power to control the supply of money, which is one of the fundamental aspects of sovereignty, has passed from government into other hands; and therefore new institutions must be set up which will in effect exercise some of the major functions of government. They would set the level of public expenditure, and settle fiscal policy, the exercise of taxing and borrowing powers of the state, since these are indisputedly the mechanism by which the money supply is determined. But they would do more than this. They would be supreme over the economic ends and the social structure of society: for by fixing prices and incomes they would have to replace the entire automatic system of the market and supply and demand—be that good or evil—and put in its place a series of value judgments, economic or social, which they themselves would have to make...There is a specific term for this sort of polity. It is, of course, totalitarian, because it must deliberately and consciously determine the totality of the actions and activities of the members of the community; but it is a particular kind of totalitarian regime, one, namely, in which authority is exercised and the decisions are taken by a hierarchy of unions or corporations—to which, indeed, on this theory the effective power has already passed. For this particular kind of totalitarianism the Twentieth Century has a name. That name is "fascist"."

"Does my right hon. Friend not know that it is fatal for any Government or party or person to seek to govern in direct opposition to the principles on which they were entrusted with the right to govern? In introducing a compulsory control of wages and prices, in contravention of the deepest commitments of this party, has my right hon. Friend taken leave of his senses?"

"In order for all prices to rise—in other words, in order for the value of money to fall—it is necessary, it is elementary, that the supply of money, whatever precisely is meant by that, or whatever precise measurement is applied to it, should be increasing relative to the supply of goods and services; and since the supply of goods and services, however unsatisfactory we might find its growth, is certainly not diminishing, we are clearly confronted with the effective consequences of a growth in the money supply. Indeed, in a modern economy, long-term inflation—that which we have experienced in the past and of which we are experiencing an acute phase at the moment—can be explained or accounted for only in terms of the rate of increase of the money supply."

"The connection between the control of inflation and unemployment is that if a substantial level of inflation is in operation and that level is reduced, then to that extent it is inevitable that transitionally unemployment should result. I say again: it is inevitable that controlling inflation, in the sense of reducing or eliminating it, causes transitional unemployment... It arises from the disappointment of the expectations which are maintained during a period of inflation."

"During any period of inflation expectations, calculations, plans are bound to be based upon an extrapolation of that degree of inflation. After all, we all extrapolate—we have to form notions of what is to come from what has just gone. Then, if inflation in fact tails off or is eliminated, a certain proportion of those expectations are defeated, in some cases disastrously; and until resources have rearranged themselves and expectations have re-formed themselves upon the basis either of reduced inflation or of stable money values, there will be transitional unemployment of resources, including labour. Anyone who purports to reduce or end inflation without causing transitional unemployment is either deceiving himself or deceiving others; and those who object to a method which undeniably holds the key to inflation that it would cause unemployment...are really saying, though they do not dare to do so openly, that they would rather inflation continued than that additional, transitional unemployment should be incurred; for if inflation is slowed down or eliminated by whatever means—by prayer, by magic, by prices and incomes policy, or by control of the money supply—that is the result which will follow."

"With this Bill my right hon. Friends continue their pursuit of one of the hoariest futilities in the recorded history of politics, the attempt to use coercion in some form or other to prevent the laws of supply and demand from expressing themselves in terms of prices."

"We must judge ourselves, but we may not judge others, even though I find it difficult to understand how those who argued, as we did in the last Parliament, against something essentially indistinguishable from this Bill, who denounced it in principle and who forswore anything of the sort when they presented themselves to the electorate, can support it now. Still, we must all answer ourselves. Therefore, I answer the question now, as I shall in the Lobby tonight, by saying that for myself I can not."

"Independence, the freedom of a self-governing nation, is in my estimation the highest political good, for which any disadvantage, if need be, and any sacrifice are a cheap price. It is worth living for; it is worth fighting for; and it is worth dying for."

"The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not to account for what is, and what is accepted."

"Parties come and go, governments come and go. But if we lose the power to make and unmake governments, to make and unmake parliaments, then everything else is changed. Even if I were convinced that the result of doing what Michael Foot has described—regaining what we ought never to have given away—even if I were convinced that the result of that would be that we would have Labour administrations for the rest of my lifetime, I would say: well, so be it. But at least we have retained the power to decide under what general principles this nation is going to be governed."

"I was born ambitious, I suppose I shall die ambitious. I can no more change it than the colour of my eyes."

"The whole basis and justification of the resort to statutory control of wages and prices was that the exorbitant demands and monopoly powers of the trade unions were the cause of the rate of inflation with which we were afflicted. Never, not even in pantomime, has the demon king been so speedily whipped back into the wings. His place is now occupied by what is called world prices. World prices, we are assured, are the principal if not the sole cause of the continuing inflation and the justification therefore for the continuance of a statutory policy to control in detail prices, wages, dividends, and the rest... But what has that to do with inflation? Prices change relatively to one another whether there is inflation or not. Changes in the economic world reflect themselves in real, that is relative, changes in prices. But a relative change in prices, even of a group of requirements so important as those which this country habitually imports, is not the same as inflation, and it does not cause inflation."

"The dilemma is this: they know, and we know, that if the rate of inflation is to be reduced, at whatever rate my right hon. and learned Friend later this afternoon announces is the Government's intention, then the result of that, for the time being, must be a slowing down of the rate of economic growth and a slowing down, to put it mildly, in the fall in unemployment. That is the known and certain consequence of reducing the rate of inflation—not of the way in which it is done but of the fact that it happens."

"They have a duty either to say to the country, "We propose to continue with inflation at its present level and to maintain or 'contain' it at that level, because otherwise there would be at least a temporary loss of growth and unemployment", or, alternatively, to say, "So great and intolerable are the consequences, direct and indirect, social, moral and economic, of on-going inflation at a cumulative rate of nearly 10 per cent. per annum, that we intend to bring that rate down steadily, consistently, perceptibly, and...we tell you that the price which we shall have to pay for that will be some reduction in growth and in employment." ... I am prepared to say, as I have done over and over again, that I believe inflation at 10 per cent. per annum cumulative to be an evil far more dangerous, far exceeding in its consequences the cost of the temporary dislocation which is involved in terminating it. I have said that time and again... We either go on at present with the present rate of inflation or else we deal with inflation and incur the temporary cost in terms of output and employment. In the real world there is no third choice. What the Government are doing with their counter-inflation policy is declining to take that decision in the open, declining to come forward and make clear which decision it is that they have taken, and using the counter-inflation policy as a means of pretending that a third course exists when they know that it does not."

"[More than a year ago I] ventured to inquire of the Prime Minister in the House of Commons whether he had taken leave of his senses. In the circumstances it was a solicitous but not unreasonable inquiry. The Government had suddenly embarked upon a course on which their predecessors had shipwrecked; which in Opposition they had consistently opposed and denounced; on which at the general election they had promised not to embark; and which ministers had been unanimously and indignantly repudiating until a few weeks before... The rate of inflation has not been lower during the period of the statutory counter-inflation policy: it has been higher. So official apologists have had to resort to the last refuge of the disconcerted: to claim that things would have been even worse without the policy... The greater evil still of all statutory counter-inflation policies is the antagonism, at once futile and disastrous, which they inevitably set up between the state on one side and the various classes and interests in the community on the other side. The danger of this was frighteningly illuminated by the Prime Minister's outburst last week against the miners, who, whether or not they are wisely led by their trade unions, have neither done nor threatened to do anything which is against the law. Yet the accusation was brought against them that, because the House of Commons had approved a government White Paper and a code which, in terms of law, is binding (if it all) only upon the Price Commission and the Pay Board, therefore the miners are defying Parliament and the people's elected representatives and placing themselves beyond the pale of the constitution. To say this is to blur, indeed to deny, the very distinction on which constitutional liberty rests, the distinction between law and not-law. If possible, more breathtaking still was the Prime Minister's assertion that (in his own words) the responsibility of the Government "expressed in the price and pay code, is not the responsibility we sought; it was a responsibility which Parliament gave us because there is no other way of containing inflation in this country". One cannot but entertain fears for the mental and emotional stability to whom such language can appear rational."

"It is deeply worrying that at a time when past budgetary policies have carried Britain deeper and deeper into inflation, and when the world is waiting to see whether we have the resolution to deal with inflation at its source, more and more symptoms appear that the Government has withdrawn into a world of make-believe of its own, in which disasters are transferred into successes, and responsibility and blame are transferred from where they belong on to synthetic obstacles and enemies."

"The wounds from which this country is bleeding today have not been inflicted by an external enemy. They are self-inflicted wounds; they are what we have done to ourselves... Over what, then, is it, that there is conflict between the unions and the State, so dangerous, so deep, that it threatens to create massive unemployment and a massive fall in the production of this country? It is the determination, incessantly repeated, of Her Majesty's Ministers that their interpretation of what can be extracted by logic from the interstices of the stage 3 price and pay code shall be the ne plus ultra, the law of the Medes and Persians, and that nothing beyond that shall be regarded as in any way reconcilable with the national interest and the national salvation. It is in pursuit of the Ministers' interpretation of statutory control of wages that we have been brought into this conflict, the conflict of which the consequences are not merely before us but are bringing anxiety to every family in the country."

"In 1970 my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, and all of us who sit on these benches on the Government side of the House, said to the country "We utterly reject the philosophy of compulsory wage control," or again—"Labour's compulsory wage control was a failure...and we will not repeat it." Why did we say those things so emphatically, over and over again, to the country in 1970? We said them on the basis of what we had argued, experienced, seen and watched over the preceding years. We said them out of a conviction, often stated, that the inevitable result of combining inflation with the attempt to control it by compulsory control of wages was bound to be the most damaging and irresolvable conflict between State and citizens. We said them because...we were convinced in those days that inflation was the result, overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, of actions and policies which were within the power and control of Government. It was because we were convinced that if Government, for their part, would so manage the finances of the nation, if they would so frame the policies within their control, within their hands, there would, indeed, be industrial conflicts, there would be collective bargaining, carried no doubt sometimes to the use of the strike weapon, and there would be the attempt, natural and inevitable, to reassess and reassess again the real relativities between the wages of one industry and another and those of one job and another, but we would not be bringing into the arena of direct conflict between Government and citizen every wage dispute, every bargain, every price and every wage that was fixed. We were convinced that responsibilities would lie where they ought to lie—the responsibility of management and the responsibility of trade union leadership could be exercised where they belonged—if Government would exercise the responsibility which is theirs."

"[T]o reduce the rate of inflation in an economy from something like 10 per cent. to any figure which we would dare to regard as tolerable, cannot but be accompanied by severe stresses, one of which will be an increase in unemployment. That does not derive from the method by which it is done. It derives from the fact that it is done."

"I make no apology for once again reminding the House, and particularly my right hon. and hon. Friends, of what was our view not so long ago on the policies which have led us to this stage. I do so in no spirit of criticism or of recrimination, but because I believe that there are practical and important deductions to be drawn from recalling the fact that when the Conservative Party was elected by a majority we told the country that we utterly rejected the philosophy of compulsory control of wages. We said that we had seen the Labour Government's statutory control of wages fail and that we did not intend to repeat it. We did not make those statements as a matter of mere theory. We did not make them, as it were, in the margin or idly. They arose not only from theory but from the observation, both in this country and elsewhere, that the attempt to combine Government policies which in themselves are inflationary with the endeavour to regulate and control prices and wages has invariably and inevitably led to an impasse and to irresolvable conflict between the demands of Government on the one hand and the realities, as the private citizen sees and knows them, on the other. We were speaking not merely from theory but from experience."

"Our present experience and our present predicament was foreseen and forecast in principle. It was exactly what we had seen happen before. It was exactly what had led us to renounce the very course of action upon which we subsequently entered. We are, therefore, obliged not to seek an escape by accusing external events, such as the movement of forces and prices in the outside world, for the crisis with which we have to deal. More important still, we are freed from the danger of supposing that either we or the country at large are the victims of the perversity of a group of our fellow citizens... It is salutary to be reminded that it is an impasse which was always implicit in the course of statutory control of prices and wages upon which we engaged. When we renounced that course we did not do so merely as a contrast to a voluntary prices and wages policy. The accent was not specially upon the word statutory or compulsory. We renounced it because our whole conception of the cause and, therefore, the cure of the scourge of inflation was such that the attempt to regulate individual prices and wages, either by compulsion or by agreement, was irrelevant. In a sense, we have the grim satisfaction of seeing the realisation and verification of what we ourselves predicted."

"What I have learned and what I fervently believe is that neither high and stable levels of employment nor prosperity nor anything that a nation can desire is to be obtained by debauching its currency; that the mere manufacture of additional money, the mere process of inflation, though it may create temporary euphoria, is no basis upon which, for any class in the community, security or prosperity can be built. It is in that belief and in the belief that it is demonstrated by history that I speak as I do."

"The Government know perfectly well that, in order to cope with the rising inflation and disastrous trade balance, it is indispensable to budget for a severe increase in taxation and a further reduction in the rate of growth of public expenditure. They have the majority and the authority to do this now. They do not need an election in order to act in the national interest. Nor do they need an election to get the country back to full-time work. Neither the miners nor the other trade unions have broken the law or threatened to break it. There is nothing sacrosanct about stage 3 or the Government's interpretations of it. A settlement will have to be found in the mining industry – and in every other industry – which will get the necessary labour into the necessary jobs."

"Could my right hon. Friend explain why the increase in oil prices is deflationary but the increase in all other international prices has apparently been inflationary?"

"It is for me supremely that kind of question on which, if there be a conflict between the call of country and that of party, the call of country must come first. Curiously, it so happens that the question 'Who governs Britain?' which at the moment is being frivolously posed, might be taken, in real earnest, as the title of what I have to say. This is the first and last election at which the British people will be given the opportunity to decide whether their country is to remain a democratic nation, governed by the will of its own electorate expressed in its own Parliament, or whether it will become one province in a new European superstate under institutions which know nothing of the political rights and liberties that we have so long taken for granted."

"The question is: can they now be prevented from taking back into their own hands the decision about their identity and their form of government which truly was theirs all along? I do not believe they can be prevented: for they are now, at a general election, provided with a clear, definite and practicable alternative, namely, a fundamental renegotiation directed to regain free access to world food markets and recover or retain the powers of Parliament, a renegotiation to be followed in any event by a specific submission of the outcome to the electorate, a renegotiation protected by an immediate moratorium or stop on all further integration of the UK into the Community. This alternative is offered, as such an alternative must be in our parliamentary democracy, by a political party capable of securing a majority in the House of Commons and sustaining a Government."

"Now there are a lot of people about whom it behoves to be very cautious in accusing their political opponents of past or prospective U-turns. In acrobatics Harold Wilson, for all his nimbleness and skill, is simply no match for the breathtaking, thoroughgoing efficiency of the present Prime Minister [Heckler: "Judas!"] Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!"

"I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me...it is something I cannot alter."

"I remember in the winter of 1945–46 cycling by myself along an open road near Muttra, when a young Brahmin drew alongside me and after some conversation in Urdu between us, pointed to his home some hundred yards from the road and suggested I go there with him for a drink of water. While my hosts used a brass vessel, I drank from a rough earthen tumbler, which, on thanking them and taking my leave, I smashed on the ground to show that I knew it could not anyhow be used again. 'He is a Hindu,' they said to one another with a smile. There is a sense in which it had been true: the British were married to India, as Venice was married to the sea."

"Once got within the walls, physical and liturgical, of the Church of England, I was proud enough and English enough to see that it was a goodly inheritance from which, like a prodigal son, I had so long deliberately exiled myself. However, like someone who returns after long absence to an ancestral home, I looked at the half-familiar scenes with new eyes. Here was yet another kind of truth which I had not suspected. For all the wonders of the national church and its mother tongue, there was no stopping-place there, no rest for the soles of the feet. I discovered that whoever entered the south door of a parish church had stepped inside the Church Universal. The more he laboured to understand and to render intelligible the inheritance of his own church, the more plainly he would confront the fact of the Catholic Church: that the truth of the Gospel and the truth of the Church, the existence of the Gospel and the existence of the Church, the knowledge of the Gospel and the knowledge of the Church, are indivisible, and the one unthinkable without the other. I had been compelled to acknowledge a truth that is corporate, and when I had done so, I noticed that the loyalties I had lived with in war and peace had been corporate too."

"The English state was the only one which finally resolved the great debate of the Middle Ages by the principle of supremacy, that is, by refusing to recognise that there could be any power or right of human compulsion over its members which derived from a source outside the realm, or that there could be concurrent sources of compulsion within the realm. This solution reflects, and no doubt emphasises, a characteristic of this nation which differentiates it from other European nations on either side of the Atlantic more than we or they commonly recognise. On the European mainland and in America concurrence of powers and limitation of sovereignty are taken for granted; in Britain we simply do not imagine them... In the United Kingdom the ultimate sovereignty resides in one person, upon whose authority when in Parliament the law knows no limitations."

"It is because everywhere else in Christendom the state has been rebuilt within the last two hundred years upon principles which derive sovereignty from elsewhere than the monarch...that Britain is today the only surviving state which exercises spiritual as well as temporal authority and where sovereignty is ecclesiastical as well as secular... For us alone the identity of nation and Church survives in the symbolism of historical forms, and the link between spiritual and secular sovereignty is still, despite everything, a living reality."

""God save the Queen"... is the distinctive self-assertion, come what may, of one nation against the rest; she is not their Queen, she is our Queen, and her allegiance marks us off as a separate people."

"As I watch and listen to the voices that are raised to persuade electors to surrender their own birthright because they fear their fellow subjects, I think I discern ahead the shape of a Conservative Party that is the party of a class, and not of a nation – and thus doomed to extinction."

"It is the old, old worry: will the British people perceive in time what is happening to them and where they are being taken? If they do, I am not afraid for the outcome. But will they? … referendum day is certainly not the last chance, because I am sure that, if the result is interpreted as sanctioning Stay In, the events of the following months will open many eyes that are closed at present. Perhaps, however, I might express it this way: if referendum day is not September, 1939, at any rate it is September, 1938. The nation is being invited to confirm the surrender, and the permanent surrender, of its most precious possession: its political independence and parliamentary self-government, and the right to live under laws and to pay taxes authorized only by Parliament and to be governed by policies for which the executive is fully accountable through Parliament to the electorate. Above and beyond all the arguments about butter mountains and Brussels bureaucrats there lies that stark fact, undenied and undeniable."

"Never again, by the necessity of an axiom, will an Englishman live for his country or die for his country: the country for which people live and die was obsolete and we have abolished it. Or not quite yet. No, not yet. The Referendum is not a ‘verdict’ after which the prisoner is hanged forthwith. It is no more than provisional... This will be so as long as one Parliament can alter or undo whatever that or any other Parliament has done. Hence those golden words in the Government's Referendum pamphlet: ‘Our continued membership will depend on the continuing assent of Parliament.’"

"I do not know if the doctrine that the nation-state arose in the 19th century was still being taught ... but it is erroneous. The nation-state reaches back far into the origins of Europe itself and perhaps beyond. If Europe was not always a Europe of nations, it was always a Europe in which nations existed, and were taken for granted, as a basic form of the State."

"Inflation is caused by a continuing surfeit of money; inflation can therefore be controlled or prevented only by striking at the source of money surfeit. It follows that all prices and incomes policies are irrelevant and futile, whether they are voluntary or compulsory. If the surfeit of money continues, then all prices and incomes must rise accordingly."

"There is the guilty knowledge that a fall in the rate of inflation must be accompanied by a rise in the rate of unemployment and that a sharp fall from a high rate of inflation must have severe consequences, which are inescapable. This is because an economy geared to inflation at 25 per cent per annum has to undergo a terrific readjustment to change to expectation of only 15 per cent or 10 per cent per annum inflation. Since inflation cannot go on up for ever, this prospect is inescapable."

"To be loyal is, for the Unionist, to accept the will of Parliament as expressed in the law of the land, which is made by the Crown in Parliament... What, however, no person who calls himself a Unionist can do without self-contradiction, is to place limits or conditions upon his obedience to the Crown in Parliament. He cannot say: "If Parliament makes laws I do not like, I will not obey them". He cannot say: "Unless Parliament amends the present laws in the way I want, I will go off and declare myself independent"."

"It would be hard nowadays to find a practitioner who upon being pressed did not confess to two main propositions: the disease of inflation in its modern form is caused by an exorbitant increase in money; and, secondly, that increase is caused by governments borrowing from the banking system in order to cover excess public expenditure."

"The devolution debate will be based upon a proposition no less objectively false than to assert that two and two make five. It is the proposition that it is possible to establish one or more local parliaments within the unitary parliamentary state known as the United Kingdom."

"[A written constitution] would replace the Crown in Parliament by a supreme court as the ultimate sovereign authority; for wherever there is a written constitution, the true sovereign in the state is that piece of paper, and its priesthood—the ultimate human sovereigns—are the judges who authoritatively interpret it... I am extremely doubtful if the people of Britain, when they discovered what was involved, would prefer to be governed instead by an unelected unrepresentative judiciary, or would be willing to dethrone the Crown in Parliament as their sovereign in order to install her Majesty's judges in the vacant space."

"It is a profound fallacy to suppose that there is anything to be regretted in a fall in the exchange rate. A fall in the exchange rate mirrors one or both of two things. It either mirrors a decline in our real terms of trade, or else, or also, it mirrors differential inflation in this country compared with inflation in the other countries with whose currencies we are comparing the exchange value of our own. On neither of those grounds is a fall, if there be a fall, in the exchange rate a sign that something is wrong with us or that the fall ought to be suppressed and forcibly reversed. If a fall in the exchange rate reflects a fall in the real terms of trade—if it really means that an item we are producing at the moment exchanges in Toronto or Timbuctoo for less than it formerly did—that is due to an alteration in the economic pattern of the world as a whole. The sooner and the more accurately we know about it, the sooner and the more accurately we shall adapt and alter our behaviour and productive efforts to fit those changes in the real world of which, in the end, we are the servants and not the masters, whether under a Labour Government or under any other sort of Government in this country."

"My own view—I will put it more strongly: my conviction—is that the death penalty would not only not be a deterrent to terrorism but would be a stimulus to terrorism. It would not be a deterrent...because...we are dealing with men the very nature of whose activity is that they are prepared to risk their lives."

"It is easy to talk about the death penalty in the abstract, before anybody is caught, before terrorists have been sentenced and are in the eye of the public and the world. What, a girl of 17? That is who it might be... So we should find that the instrument with which we thought we had armed ourselves had broken in our hands. It would recoil upon us, because we should discover that a torrent of revulsion prevented us from applying what we had taken up as the supreme weapon of defence. That should be enough to satisfy one that the death penalty would not be a deterrent. But I have said more: I have said that I believe that it would be a positive incitement to terrorism. What could be more desirable for those who are anyway prepared to risk their lives in a cause which they hold honourable—although we cannot imagine how it could be honourable to uphold it by their means—than that, instead of the possibility of imprisonment for a number of years on conviction, they could have martyrdom, the glittering prize of terrorism throughout the history of revolution in Ireland? That would be the great attraction—even if the death penalty were not made the ground or the justification for further terrorism, which many people would consider it to be. So the death penalty would be an incentive rather than a deterrent."

"When we speak of the pride and self-confidence of our nation, the Crown—the Monarchy—is absolutely central; nor do I know how better one would gauge the state of this nation's psychological health, of its national morale, than by its attitude towards its greatest, its unique, institution... Of all the sources of true and proper pride to a British person none is greater than the common possession of the Crown. I use the word "possession" advisedly, in its full and most literal sense. Because our Crown is the product of the history of this nation, because it grows like an oak in the soil of these islands, it is therefore the personal possession of every citizen and subject, however humble, however poor. It is a total misconception...to suppose that there is anything of class, anything which is restrictive or destricted, about the Crown. Whatever may be said of any other institution, the Crown is the common, precious and hereditary jewel of all British subjects and of all the people of this country. To approach that common possession, that symbol and personification, with the attitude, "How ungenerous can we be? How little can we contrive to spend upon it? How much can we clip?"—not of its magnificence, for it has ever been the pride of English greatness not to be magnificent through lavishness, but in more fundamental ways—"How much can we restrict the outward signs and manifestations of what the Crown is to this country?" is a sign that we are still divorced from the pride and self-confidence without which a nation cannot face the world and without which this nation cannot learn to face the world again."

"I do not believe that the loyalty of those many who over those 270 years, and particularly in this century, worked together and died together as part of the union under the Crown, was to the Crown quite simply, even though they wore the Crown on their uniforms and many of them wore it on their hearts. They were not the mercenaries of a Habsburg empire bound together by personal union and dynastic marriages; they were not the servants of a Hohenzollern empire imposed by military force. It was the Crown of the United Kingdom in parliament which was the centre of loyalty, as it is the essential unifying element of this realm, in the name of which and under the inspiration of which men and women these 270 years have worked and lived and died together."

"I often find myself in some embarrassment as an Anglican wondering whether I am a Catholic or a Protestant."

"Although there are aspects of mugging which are continuous, permanent, old-fashioned, the new word is describing a typically new thing. That new thing, as is recently being admitted, is connected with the change in the composition of the population of certain of our great cities. To use a crude but efficient word for it, it is racial. Its prevalence is due to the fact that an implant into our society has changed a community that was previously homogeneous into a community which is no longer homogeneous and self-identifying... I was delighted with the terminology of the Metropolitan Police report to the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration: ‘Experience has taught us the fallibility of the assertion that crime rates amongst those of West Indian origin are no higher than those of the population at large’. Splendidly expressed! Beautifully expressed!"

"The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimiliable populations—what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called "alien wedges"—in the heartland of the state...The disruption of the homogeneous "we", which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a "divided community"...take charge and begin to operate autonomously. Let me illustrate this pathology of a society that is being eaten alive...The two active ingredients are grievance and violence. Where a community is divided, grievance is for practical purposes inexhaustible. When violence is injected—and quite a little will suffice for a start—there begins an escalating competition to discover grievance and to remove it. The materials lie ready to hand in a multiplicity of agencies with a vested interest, more or less benevolent, in the process of discovering grievances and demanding their removal. The spiral is easily maintained in upward movement by the repetitions and escalation of violence. At each stage alienation between the various elements of society is increased, and the constant disappointment that the imagined remedies yield a reverse result leads to growing bitterness and despair. Hand in hand with the exploitation of grievance goes the equally counterproductive process which will no doubt, as usual, be called the "search for a political solution"...Indeed, attention has already been drawn publicly to the potentially critical factor of the so-called immigrant vote in an increasing number of worthwhile constituencies. The result is that the political parties of the indigenous population vie with one another for votes by promising remedy of the grievances which are being uncovered and exploited in the context of actual or threatened violence. Thus the legislature finds itself in effect manipulated by minorities instead of responding to majorities, and is watched by the public at large with a bewildering and frustration, not to say cynicism, of which the experience of legislation hitherto in the field of immigration and race relations afford some pale idea...I need not follow the analysis further in order to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy disintegrates when the national homogeneity of the electorate is broken by a large and sharp alteration in the composition of the population. While the institutions and liberties on which British liberty depends are being progressively surrendered to the European superstate, the forces which will sap and destroy them from within are allowed to accumulate unchecked. And all the time we are invited to direct towards Angola or Siberia the anxious attention that the real danger within our power and our borders imperatively demand."

"Yet even though that picture is dark and darkening, there is one factor which has not yet been injected. I do not know whether it will be tomorrow, or next year, or in five years; but it will come. That factor is firearms and explosives. With communities which are so divided nothing can prevent the injection of explosives which we know perfectly well from experience in other parts of the United Kingdom and the world. At first there will be horrified astonishment, and inquiry as to what we have done wrong that such things should be happening. Then there will be feverish endeavour to find methods to allay the supposed grievances which lie behind the violence. Then follows exploitation by those who use violence of the ascendancy they have thus gained over the majority and over authority. The thing goes forward, acting and reacting, until a position is reached in which—I shall dare say it—compared with those areas, Belfast today will seem an enviable place."

"The clause is an example of one of the most prevalent and damaging fallacies in this whole subject—the fallacy of supposing that the consequences that are apprehended from the massive substitution, in various parts of the country, for the indigenous population of a population from overseas are either due to what is called physical deprivation, poverty, and so on, or can be in any way alleviated, avoided or foreclosed by material provision...It is by no means true that the areas of maximum New Commonwealth immigrant entry—the locations of what Lord Radcliffe many years ago called "the alien wedge"—are characteristically or specifically coincident with the areas of greatest poverty and desuetude in our cities. In some cases the two coincide. Sometimes, naturally, this happens in the central and rundown areas—run down because they are central—that because they are central it is in those areas that major immigrant populations are found...Over and over again this easy illusion has been propounded, and as often experience has disposed of it. It is not because people are poor, to the extent that they are poor, and it is not because they live in the streets of the inner cities, in which the indigenous population of this country has lived—gradually improving, and in some cases rapidly improving over generations—that we apprehend what will be the consequence when one-third of some of the major cities and industrial areas of our country is in New Commonwealth occupation. It is because of human differences. It is because of the clash and contrast between two populations which contend for the same territory."

"In 1940 the voice which cried "Speak for England" came from a Tory bench. It comes from there no longer... The Conservative Party declared that the nation state as exemplified by an independent and self-governing United Kingdom was obsolete. Thereby for me the Conservative Party ceased to be the Conservative Party which I thought I knew."

"Those who catch faint glimpses, in Birmingham or Notting Hill, of what others have dreaded for years, those who find themselves strangers and aliens in one familiar area after another of an English town or city, those who hear from others' lips with diminishing incredulity the circumstances in which less fortunate fellow-citizens live, should repeat to themselves over and over again one single sentence, sad, simple and true: "You have seen nothing yet". Then let them give to those who presume to represent and govern them no peace and no respite until they have led the nation from under the shadow of the disaster which overhangs it."

"Like the Home Rule Bills of Gladstone and Asquith, not one of which was ever put into practice, the Scotland and Wales Bill contains at its heart a contradiction not merely insoluble but destructive. It sets up parliaments in parts of the kingdom, but allows the MPs from those parts to make law for the rest of the country upon the self same subjects over which legislative power is transferred to the new parliaments."

"Through my childhood and adolescence the land and the buildings of England and Wales were perceived by me always somehow in a fourth dimension, the dimension of time, as if they were the stage and scenery of the long epic of the English kings. The predominant role of the monarchy and its bearers was as unifiers: they seemed to be the nation-creators, and later the empire-creators, both actively, by force and policy, and passively, as the unifying focus of sentiment and the source of lawful authority."

"Though legend relates otherwise, I would not have chosen, if I could have avoided it, to become the eponymous exponent of the conviction that by no contrivance can the prospective size and distribution of our population of 'New Commonwealth ethnic origin'...prove otherwise than destructive of this nation. The basis of my conviction is neither genetic nor eugenic; it is not racial, because I can never understand what 'race' means and I have never arranged my fellow men on a scale of merit according to their origin. The basis is political. It is the belief that self-identification of each part with the whole is the one essential precondition of being a parliamentary nation, and that the massive shift in the composition of the population of the inner metropolis and of major towns and cities of England will produce, not fortuitously or avoidably, but by the sheer inevitabilities of human nature in society, ever increasing and more dangerous alienation."

"A victorious continental enemy, determined to absorb this United Kingdom into its dominions, could not have dictated at Westminster a more comprehensively humiliating surrender than the Act which Parliament passed in 1972 in order that this country should become part of the European Economic Community. It enacted that the laws of an external authority should prevail over our domestic laws, it gave an external authority the power to legislate and tax without the consent of Parliament, it placed in the hands of that external authority the whole control of Britain's trade. Moreover, those who counselled it did so on the express ground that Britain was obsolete as a nation state. Wilhelm II could not have demanded so much; I doubt if Hitler would have demanded more. I can still only half believe that I was myself an unwilling witness to my country's abnegation of its own national independence... I can only say that I will never accept as fait accompli the renunciation of our national independence and the destruction of our parliamentary sovereignty which took place in 1972."

"We, this nation, have a right, because we are such, to formulate and follow the standards by which we will judge the worth of what we do and of what others offer to us and expect from us... The breath which condemns submission to laws this nation has not made condemns submission to scales of value which this nation has not willed. To both sorts of submission I ascribe that haunting fear, which I am sure I am not alone in feeling, that we, the British will soon have nothing left to die for. That was not a slip of the tongue. What a man lives for is what a man dies for, because every bit of living is a bit of dying. At the beginning I refused to define patriotism; but now at the end I venture it. Patriotism is to have a nation to die for, and to be glad to die for it—all the days of one's life."

"To tell the indigenous inhabitants of Brixton or Southall or Leicester or Bradford or Birmingham or Wolverhampton, to tell the pensioners ending their days in streets of nightly terror unrecognisable as their former neighbourhoods, to tell the people of towns and cities where whole districts have been transformed into enclaves of foreign lands, that "the man with a coloured face could be an enrichment to my life and that of my neighbours" is to drive them beyond the limits of endurance. It is not so much that it is obvious twaddle. It is that it makes cruel mockery of the experience and fears of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary, decent men and women...In understanding this matter, the beginning of wisdom is to grasp the law that in human societies power is never left unclaimed and unused...Men's nature is not only, as Thucydides long ago asserted, to exert power where they have it: men cannot help themselves from exerting power where they have it, whether they want to or not...It is the business of the leaders of distinct and separate populations to see that the power which they possess is used to benefit those for whom they speak. Leaders who fail to do so, or to do so fast enough, find themselves outflanked and superseded by those who are less squeamish. The Gresham's Law of extremism, that the more extreme drives out the less extreme, is one of the basic rules of political mechanics which operate in this field...Both the general law and its Gresham's corollary point, in contemporary circumstances, towards the resort to physical violence, in the form of firearms or high explosive, as being so probable as to be predicted with virtual certainty. The experience of the last decade and more, all round the world, shows that acts of violence, however apparently irrational or inappropriate their targets, precipitate a frenzied search on the part of the society attacked to discover and remedy more and more grievances, real or imaginary, among those from whom the violence is supposed to emanate or on whose behalf it is supposed to be exercised. Those commanding a position of political leverage would then be superhuman if they could refrain from pointing to the acts of terrorism and, while condemning them, declaring that further and faster concessions and grants of privilege are the only means to avoid such acts being repeated on a rising scale. This is what produces the gearing effect of terrorism in the contemporary world, yielding huge results from acts of violence perpetrated by minimal numbers. It is not, I repeat again and again, that the mass of a particular population are violently or criminally disposed. Far from it; that population soon becomes itself the prisoner of the violence and machinations of an infinitely small minority among it. Just a few thugs, a few shots, a few bombs at the right place and time – and that is enough for disproportionate consequences to follow."

"There is a peculiar atmosphere in the Committee this afternoon that I do not think that I am the only one to have sensed. It is not an agreeable atmosphere; it is an atmosphere of a certain embarrassment, or even suppressed tension. For a time I was striving to locate the parallel atmosphere of which I was being reminded. Then, suddenly, it occurred to me what it was. It is an atmosphere that will be familiar to nearly all hon. Members who have suffered a near and severe bereavement. We are in the circumstances of a household, between a decease and a funeral when the body is still in the house."

"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."

"Christianity does not, repeat, not, look forward to a gradual betterment of human behaviour and society or to the progressive spread of peace and justice upon earth. Still less does Christianity purport to offer a scheme or general outline for bringing that about. Quite the reverse, it uniformly teaches, as if to emphasize the point for good measure, that things will get worse rather than better before we are through."

"It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at."

"What happens then when majorities in the directly elected European Assembly take decisions, or approve policies, or vote budgets which are regarded by the British electorate or by the electorate of some of the mammoth constituencies as highly offensive and prejudicial to their interests? What do the European MPs say to their constituents? They say: “Don't blame me; I had no say, nor did I and my Labour (or Conservative) colleagues, have any say in the framing of these policies”. He will then either add: “Anyhow, I voted against”; or alternatively he will add: “And don't misunderstand if I voted for this along with my German, French, and Italian pals, because if I don't help roll their logs, I shall never get them to roll any of mine”. What these pseudo-MPs will not be able to say is what any MP in a democracy must be able to say, namely, either “I voted against this, and if the majority of my party are elected next time, we will put it right”, or alternatively, “I supported this because it is part of the policy and programme for which a majority in this constituency and in the country voted at the last election and which we shall be proud to defend at the next election”. Direct elections to the European Assembly, so far from introducing democracy and democratic control, will strengthen the arbitrary and bureaucratic nature of the Community by giving a fallacious garb of elective authority to the exercise of supranational powers by institutions and persons who are – in the literal, not the abusive, sense of the word – irresponsible."

"Of course I am very proud of being a Tory. Yes, in my head and in my heart I regard myself as a Tory. As I have said, I was born that way; I believe it is congenital. I am unable to change it. That is how I see the world... [The EEC] is the most un-Tory thing that can be conceived."

"[Conservative Party bosses are] Athenian oligarchs who would always sacrifice culture for class."

"It is one of the handicaps arising from our insularity and a peculiar side effect of our self-conceit that we are simply incapable of comprehending the depth and durability of the resentment which is held against us by the Germans and the French, by the Germans for the obvious reason that we defeated them; by the French for the less obvious but still more potent reason that we did not share in their defeat... Nobody is more Francophile than I am. But we understand nothing if we do not understand the axiomatic nature of the laws of attraction and repulsion between an off-shore island nation and the political system of the adjacent continent... Politics is the continuation of war by other means... It is a little reminder that for the principal continental nations, notably Germany and France, the European Economic Community is indeed "the continuation of war by other means"."

"The TUC are about as desirous of providing an alternative government to the Crown in Parliament as the Chiefs of Staff... The fear of domination by trade union power is among the most divisive and the most spurious."

"I am one of what must be an increasing number who find the portentous moralisings of A. Solzhenitsyn a bore and an irritation. Scarcely any aspect of life in the countries where he passes his voluntary exile has failed to incur his pessimistic censure. Coming from Russia, where freedom of the press has been not so much unknown as uncomprehended since long before the Revolution, he is shocked to discover that a free press disseminated all kinds of false, partial and invented information and that journalists contradict themselves from one day to the next without shame and without apology. Only a Russian would find all that surprising, or fail to understand that freedom which is not misused is not freedom at all.Like all travellers he misunderstands what he observes. It simply is not true that ‘within the Western countries the press has become more powerful than the legislative power, the executive and the judiciary’. The British electorate regularly disprove this by electing governments in the teeth of the hostility and misrepresentation of virtually the whole of the press. Our modern Munchhausen has, however, found a more remarkable mare’s nest still: he has discovered the ‘false slogan, characteristic of a false era, that everyone is entitled to know everything’. Excited by this discovery he announces a novel and profound moral principle, a new addendum to the catalogue of human rights. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have a right not to know, and it is a more valuable one.’ Not merely morality but theology illuminates the theme: people have, say Solzhenitsyn, ‘the right not to have their divine souls’ burdened with ‘the excessive flow of information’.Just so. Whatever may be the case in Russia, we in the degenerate West can switch off the radio or television, or not buy a newspaper, or not read such parts of it as we do not wish to. I can assure Solzhenitsyn that the method works admirably, ‘right’ or ‘no right’. I know, because I have applied it with complete success to his own speeches and writings."

"Look where you like...and you will see the political structure of the EEC being progressively and deliberately used to draw Britain into inextricable attachment – industrially, agriculturally, socially, and economically – to the West European land mass by weakening and then extinguishing its organs of independent self-determination. It is the assertion of continental hegemony over the off-shore island nation; but within that continental hegemony the hegemony of France, which twenty years ago would have been scoffed at as unthinkable, is today a practical and growing reality. In the web that is being woven quietly, unhurryingly, unceasingly, the purchase of Chrysler (UK) by Peugeot would be one more thread. It is a political and not an economic question, a national and not an industrial question, upon which the British Cabinet have to decide. If they understand, Her Majesty's government will say no."

"Robin Day: So you would say, would you – I hope I am not misrepresenting you – that the question of parliamentary sovereignty and national sovereignty as affected by our membership of the EEC, is the issue on which you would like to see most people have as their reason for voting one way or the other? Enoch Powell: Yes, for – in peace as in war, it is the great, the ultimate, question for any nation. If we still are a nation. So really I am inviting the British people and have been these many years, to say whether or not they intend still to be a nation."

"Might I indicate the difficulty which some of us feel over collective compassion? The good Samaritan had compassion. If two good Samaritans had compassion, that would still be individual compassion, not collective compassion. If the good Samaritan had been obliged by decree of the Roman Emperor to assist the traveller, that would not be compassion at all, because it would be done under obligation."

"Being a nation is, in the last resort, subjective; those who feel they are a nation and behave accordingly are one."

"Is the Chancellor aware that I envy him the opportunity and the privilege of announcing a step that will strengthen the economy of this country and help to restore our national pride and confidence in our currency?"

"The first rule of German statecraft is the maintenance of the Common Market link with France... Germany and France are the Siamese twins of the European Community. Britain, we ought clearly to understand, all humbug set aside, is expendable. Her function in the Community is to provide the continent with a captive market for dear food, and to place at the disposal of the Community for common use Britain's assets, whether they be the seas around her coasts (the ‘Community's fish stocks’) or her sources of power (the ‘Community's energy stocks’). It is not by accident that Britain finds herself the milch cow of Europe: that was the idea of it from the start... [T]he capture of the United Kingdom by the Common Market represented the reversal of Britain's successful maintenance of her independence since the 16th century: the counter-attack in a new, non-military form had at last succeeded and reduced the historic arbiter of Europe, at least temporarily, to the disarmed status of another European state. The combination of Germany and France, that eventuality dreaded and always frustrated by our forefathers, has produced, albeit under an expected guise, the outcome they foresaw."

"[The source of continuous hostility to Unionism for years has been] that nest of vipers, that nursery of traitors, which is known as the British Foreign Office."

"If identical goods were being produced at widely differing efficiency in different parts of the United Kingdom or if the United Kingdom and Germany, or Japan, or the United States, were part of a single unit with a single currency, then of course the less efficient producers would be knocked out. That is why Germany is so keen for Britain to go into the European Monetary System, so that it can wipe out the British industries which it is in competition."

"The few Roman Catholics who serve in the [[w:Ulster Defence Regiment|[Ulster Defence] regiment]] today are very brave men indeed. They do so at the risk of their lives in a way that their colleagues do not. I am proud to have some of those men in my constituency and to know them personally."

""Because it has come to be so" is the only, but to him sufficient, answer which the Englishman gives for his institutions and the authority which is immanent in them."

"The Englishman instinctively treats loyalty as by its nature unconditional, because he has – so to speak – nowhere else to go: the Crown and the institutions described collectively as those "set in authority under it" are his peculiar possession, they are his own history, his own nationhood, and he can only defy them and divest himself of them at the cost of denying himself."

"There is no doubt that the contrast is patent between what we call, with too gross a classification, the developed and the undeveloped countries... Why is there this difference, this divergence, this bifurcation? ... [I]t is not due to any difference in intellectual capacity, human ability or insight. It is an absurd notion that the European is intellectually superior to vast millions of the human race in Asia and elsewhere. The subtlety, the insight, the power of reflection and of argument to be found in India and elsewhere are equal to anything which is within our conception or grasp. As for character and human ability, it would be ludicrous, and a confession of total and boorish ignorance, to say that it is difference in those respects which accounts for these differences of experience. In case I be misunderstood, may I say at once that I do not believe that the IQ method of analysing the human race produces useful results for this purpose. I doubt whether many of the characteristics which we regard as typically and transcendentally European are purely intellectual. I think they have in them very much of the moral and very much of the social."

"Will the right hon. Lady take the opportunity today and every day to make clear to the country, as only she can, that the courses that are being commended to her by the official Opposition and by many other voices mean nothing but a deliberate return to hyper-inflation?"

"I soon came to know in the weary debates and the 104 divisions against the European Communities Bill who it was with whom I shared feelings of anger, outrage and hatred at what was being perpetrated. I am aware that the "Left" is supposed to be motivated only by the desire to be unimpeded by "Europe" in converting Britain into a socialist state; but I am compelled to depose that the instincts and reasoning of the "Left" opponents of membership...were exactly as nationalistic, not to say patriotic, as my own...[I part company with Labour only] because of my blind, high Tory ultimate faith in the people. If they are the people I thought and still want to think that they are, those who represent them will assuredly be pulled back in time from the betrayal of their birthright of parliamentary freedom either to a European state or to a Marxist bureaucracy."

"The nation state is the product of that logic. In England ... it was worked out to its final conclusion at the Henrician reformation, the event by which the English nation state was fully realised. All exertion of authority, whether the making or the enforcement of law, the taking of collective decisions of an executive (i.e. not legislable) character, the imposition and collection of taxes, the judgment of causes—in short, all duress brought to bear by the society upon the individual—proceeds from one source, and that source an internal and native one. The England of Henry VIII found it impossible that its laws should be made, that its causes should be judged, or that a revenue should be procured from it by an external authority. In other words, there was no such thing as external authority: the expression was a contradiction in terms... There is a name for appealing over the head of the Crown to an authority outside the realm, and that name is treason. The word may be disused, but the thing is not; and the penalties of praemunire, which those guilty of it formerly incurred, were not disproportionate to its seriousness."

"[A]llegiance is the very essence of nationhood, there is no meaning in nationhood without allegiance. Nationhood means that a man stands to one nation, to one loyalty, against all others—that is what it is about."

"[I see no reason to depart from my view] that at some point along the line of growth, absolute and proportionate, of the Commonwealth population in London and the other English cities affected, there lies the certainty of violence on a scale which can only be adequately described as civil war."

"The Conservative Party in the House of Commons has played ball with Paisley for 18 months, during which he has sat among them on the government benches but voted against them... For was he not the secret weapon of those who wanted to send Ulster the way of white Rhodesia? … That is why the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Humphrey Atkins, and the Northern Ireland Office spent the first year-and-a-half of this Parliament building up Ian Paisley and whispering to him and to everybody else that he was going to be the big white chief under a new set-up which they planned to introduce. They recognized in him a man with no dedication to the Union, a man who would abuse the Parliament of the Union to its face and declared that he owed it no allegiance... He is afraid for his own skin, and afraid of the fringe men of violence on whose backs he would fain ride, provided he can distance himself from them when serious trouble looms. The old adage holds good; all bullies are cowards, and most cowards are bullies. That is the last trait which completed the portrait of the man who the enemies of the Union are hoping against hope will put them in business again."

"Of course we didn't know how distinguished we were. We didn't know that others were to get the Nobel Prize and not share it with us for the monetarist theory. But, of course, men are not primarily activated by economic motives and I have always therefore assigned free economics a place only, a subordinate place, inside the whole of politics. And, in speech after speech to my countrymen, I've said: "Now, if you don't care for this or that, then that's your choice. Go your ways, but if what you are wanting is this or that economic result, then this is the way to get it." But I have never regarded economics as other than subordinate in the scale of values and, in recent years, and particularly vis-à-vis this government, which I think is sometimes too materialistic, too ready to establish what it calls competitive criteria."

"[T]hose of us who have seen—the insight is not restricted to any single party or to politicians alone—the future population content of inner London and other great cities have been unable to imagine that that could come about without at some stage—I will use phrases which I have used myself—inner London becoming ungovernable or violence which could only effectually be described as civil war."

"If you want to know what the SDP is about, look at its morning star, Roy Jenkins, the greatest Euro-bureaucrat of them all, a man who would never put up with anything British if he could find something foreign to embrace instead. The SDP is the extreme pro-European party, whose one common characteristic and undisputed stance is devotion to the destruction of Britain's parliamentary independence. Anyone who thinks that a bit rough should be aware that one of the SDP's proposals is to take away even the scrutiny, let alone control, of European legislation from the House of Commons and give it to the Assembly at Strasbourg."

"If, on the other hand, the Conservative party invites the electorate to link national independence in its mind with Bennery and all things 'left' and to discern in membership of the Community a bulwark against the dangers of socialism, the implications are still more disreputable; for this is nothing other than saying that one would rather live under the tutelage of foreigners than incur the risk of one's fellow countrymen being free to make up their own minds. That would be to stamp the Conservative party as a class party with a vengeance, a slur the more damaging because there were in fact, at the time of the original debates, Conservatives inside and outside Parliament who did advocate membership on precisely that ground—blood brothers, no doubt, of those who in an earlier generation viewed the rise of Hitler with equanimity or approval as a safeguard against Communism."

"Lord Scarman found that what he calls "the black community" was alienated. He found also that the black community suffered a number of disadvantages: in a period and in areas of special difficulties—economic, occupational, environmental—it had more than its fair share. The assumption—it is not argued; it is not even explicitly stated: it is an assumption—is that the black community is alienated because it is disadvantaged. That is a dangerous gap in the reasoning; for it is by no means self-evident, and by no means necessary, that the two facts should be connected as cause and effect. There is another possible explanation of the alienation. It is that the community, being of that size and composition and in those circumstances, is alien: alienation can be a manifestation of being alien. It can be the self-perception and the being perceived by others as different and distinct; and, in the case of a black community...it is a difference which is instantly and mutually visible and which produces mutual coherence or repulsion."

"We were dragged into folly by the Americans over Iran. We were dragged into folly by the Americans over Afghanistan. Neither national interest nor moral obligation requires us to be dragged by them into folly over Poland."

"Yet we slink about like whipped curs ... our self-abasement principally takes the form of subservience to the United States ... we are under no necessity to participate in the American nightmare of a Soviet monster barely held at bay in all quarters of the globe by an inconceivable nuclear armament and by political intervention everywhere from Poland to Cambodia. It is the Americans who need us in order to act out their crazy scenario... We simply do not need to go chasing up and down after the vagaries of the next ignoramus to become President of the United States."

"I would sooner receive injustice in the Queen's courts than justice in a foreign court. I hold that man or woman to be a scoundrel who goes abroad to a foreign court to have the judgments of the Queen's courts overturned, the actions of her Government countermanded or the legislation of Parliament struck down."

"The Prime Minister [Margaret Thatcher], shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the "Iron Lady". It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made."

"It is not unknown for people coming to my house to be told by the taxi-driver that there is no charge. It is an unintended and unsought testimonial, but I would be surprised if that I feel is not what the mass of my fellow countrymen feel. I don't feel separate just because I was a professor of Greek. My countrymen say: "this man sees what we see, he feels as we feel, he's one of us, thank God.""

"It is conventional to refer to the United Nations in hushed tones of respect and awe, as if it were the repository of justice and equity, speaking almost with the voice of God if not yet acting with the power of God. It is no such thing. Despite the fair-seeming terminology of its charter and its declarations, the reality both of the Assembly and of the Security Council is a concourse of self-seeking nations, obeying their own prejudices and pursuing their own interests. They have not changed their individual natures by being aggregated with others in a system of bogus democracy... Does anybody seriously suppose that the members of the United Nations, or of the Security Council, have been actuated in their decisions on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands by a pure desire to see right done and wrong reversed? That was the last thing on their minds. Everyone of them, from the United States to Peru, calculated its own interests and consulted its own ambitions. What moral authority can attach a summation of self-interest and prejudice? I am not saying that nations ought not to pursue their own interests; they ought and, in any case, they will. What I am saying is that those interests are not sanctified by being tumbled into a mixer and shaken up altogether. An assembly of national spokesmen is not magically transmuted into a glorious company of saints and martyrs. Its only redeeming feature is its impotence... The United Nations is a colossal coating of humbug poured, like icing over a birthday cake, over the naked ambitions and hostilities of the nations."

"The British Labour Party has always been nationalist, if not insular, and...not just democratic but parliamentarian. But it is confrontation with the EEC that has presented the Labour Party with an uninhibited appeal to patriotism. Internationalist it may be in phrases; when it comes to policy, it is nationalist."

"I am not mistaken in knowing that in 1935 I was convinced there would be another German War and I must expect to be killed in it. I am not mistaken in remembering that in 1937 at a Trinity College feast, when the guest of honour said 'Our Government is doing its best to prevent war', I shouted out from the fellows' table 'But we want war'. I am not mistaken in remembering that in 1937, driving to Boar's Hill with Gilbert Murray, I said to him "There's no hope for us unless we go to war with Germany" and he looked me straight in the eyes and replied "I think so too". Nor have I imagined the immensity of the relief when on 3 September 1939 I learnt that appeasement and betrayal were over and that England, if it went down, would go down fighting."

"Nobody disputes, I believe, that our nuclear weaponry is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities, she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide – the extinction of our race – in the most literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. An officer may, in the hour of his country's defeat and disgrace, commit suicide honourably and rationally with his service revolver; but in any collective context the choice of non-existence, of the obliteration of all future hopes, is insanity."

"By one of those happy combinations of circumstance in English history which half persuade us that our nation is specially favoured by Providence, the Book of Common Prayer was preserved intact through more than four centuries while the passage of time subtly imparted to it the supercharge of archaism and familiarity which it could not possess at the outset but which make it a uniquely English vehicle of religious and ritual expression."

"Until the synodical revolution of the Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974, the language of the Book of Common Prayer was distinguished by being uniquely authoritative, established and fixed by the Crown in Parliament, the supreme source of authority in this realm... The Tractarians were doubly right when they acclaimed the Book of Common Prayer as the proof of the catholicism of the Anglican Church: right because the words and formulae, being themselves impregnable, were susceptible of an interpretation which bridged the gulf of the Reformation; and right because the essential mark of catholicism, uniformity imposed by universal authority, was placed upon it by the untrammelled imperium of the English nation state. Without the authoritative fixity of its liturgy, the unique comprehensiveness and broadmindedness of the Church of England would not have been possible."

"I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination—'seeing', to quote a recent speech of the British Prime Minister, 'the rest of the world as its rightful fiefdom.' How any rational person, viewing objectively the history of the last thirty-five years, could entertain this 'international misunderstanding' challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension. The notion has no basis in fact... If Russia is bent on world conquest, she has been remarkably slothful and remarkably unsuccessful."

"I don't think that would be entirely unfair. There are some things which get on one's nerves and some things that don't. And I'm, to use a rather journalistic word, allergic to the things that are typically American. I think that's fairly natural to someone who has just been described as a Tory and is always ready to describe himself as a High Tory."

"At the invitation of Her Majesty's Government, the United States is about to station on the soil of the United Kingdom nuclear weapons which, we are told, will be used only after consultation and by joint decision with Her Majesty's Government. Anyone who, after the experience of the last few days and of recent years, imagines that the United States will defer to the views of the Government of this country is living in a dangerous fool's paradise. Anyone in office who entertains that illusion is in no position to serve the security of this country."

"It was educational heresy to justify spending money on education to make factories and enterprises more profitable and competitive. "The state which tries to use its power to exalt and promote the one kind of learning to the disadvantage of the other is an inhuman and barbarous state. In the end it will bring down upon its subjects the penalties which attend upon all humanity and barbarism, when the greedy expectations attached to the advancement of science turn to bitterness and disillusionment." Education was a good thing in itself. It was a strong human instinct and needed no secondary justification."

"Having risen at my customary hour of seven, going down, tiptoeing down, and seeing the paper slanting through the letterbox, and reading the words “Heath's Gamble...” Heath's Gamble? I thought. Gamble? So I pulled it through and it fell out flat on the mat: “Heath's Gamble Fails”. So I took it up with me to the bathroom and sang the Te Deum."

"The prospect I have put before you demands that government, politicians and public answer the following question: What sort of a country will Britain be when its capital, other cities and areas of England consist of a population of which at least one-third is of African and Asian descent? I have not dodged that question since it was first posed. My answer, upon a maturely considered judgment, is that it will be a Britain unimaginably wracked by dissension and violent disorder, not recognizable as the same nation as it has been, or perhaps as a nation at all."

"Does the right hon. Lady understand—if she does not yet understand she soon will—that the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?"

"I should like to have been killed in the war."

"The rights of a freeborn Englishman, which used to be secured to him by his native institutions, are no longer good enough. On pain of displeasing an outside world that lived under horrid tyrannies long after England was self-governing, we petition foreign judges sitting on the continent to declare and enforce our rights by interpreting at their discretion a document which no English lawyer...would imagine in a nightmare. We tolerate these judges telling the House of Commons what the House of Commons shall or shall not do. Bitterest of all, and freshest in our minds today, the English, who once were wont, if allies failed, to defend themselves alone against ‘the three corners of the world in arms’, accept with apparent docility the occupation of their soil in time of peace by self-appointed protectors, as though the Roman legions were still stationed at York and Caerleon, and we pay them the humiliating tribute of conforming ourselves to their policies, their strategies, and their philosophy. England has forgotten itself."

""Parliament" is a word of magic and power in this country. We refer to "parliamentary sovereignty." We live under the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament. Our history and political life would be unintelligible if Parliament were removed from that history. There is no other European nation of which the same can be said. There is no other European nation at the heart of whose identity and history lies its parliamentary assembly."

"The Prime Minister constantly asserts that the nuclear weapon has kept the peace in Europe for the last 40 years...Let us go back to the middle 1950s or to the end of the 1940s, and let us suppose that nuclear power had never been invented...I assert that in those circumstances there would still not have been a Russian invasion of western Europe. What has prevented that from happening was not the nuclear hypothesis...but the fact that the Soviet Union knew the consequences of such a move, consequences which would have followed whether or not there were 300,000 American troops stationed in Europe. The Soviet Union knew that such an action on its part would have led to a third world war—a long war, bitterly fought, a war which in the end the Soviet Union would have been likely to lose on the same basis and in the same way as the corresponding war was lost by Napoleon, by the Emperor Wilhelm and by Adolf Hitler... For of course a logically irresistible conclusion followed from the creed that our safety depended upon the nuclear capability of the United States and its willingness to commit that capability in certain events. If that was so—and we assured ourselves for 40 years that it was—the guiding principle of the foreign policy of the United Kingdom had to be that, in no circumstances, must it depart from the basic insights of the United States and that any demand placed in the name of defence upon the United Kingdom by the United States was a demand that could not be resisted. Such was the rigorous logic of the nuclear deterrent... It was in obedience to it...that the Prime Minister said, in the context of the use of American bases in Britain to launch an aggressive attack on Libya, that it was "inconceivable" that we could have refused a demand placed upon this country by the United States. The Prime Minister supplied the reason why: she said it was because we depend for our liberty and freedom upon the United States. Once let the nuclear hypothesis be questioned or destroyed, once allow it to break down, and from that moment the American imperative in this country's policies disappears with it. A few days ago I was reminded, when reading a new biography of Richard Cobden, that he once addressed a terrible sentence of four words to this House of Commons. He said to hon. Members: "You have been Englishmen." The strength of those words lies in the perfect tense, with the implication that they were so no longer but had within themselves the power to be so again. I believe that we now have the opportunity, with the dissolution of the nightmare of the nuclear theory, for this country once again to have a defence policy that accords with the needs of this country as an island nation, and to have a foreign policy which rests upon a true, undistorted view of the outside world. Above all, we have the opportunity to have a foreign policy that is not dictated from outside to this country, but willed by its people. That day is coming. It may be delayed, but it will come."

"She has peaked. I have the feeling of 1945. Mrs Thatcher has never known losing office as Gladstone did and the need to face changing circumstances and clear new obstacles before returning to power."

"Chernobyl has strengthened the] growing impulse to escape from the nightmare of peace being dependent upon the contemplation of horrific and mutual carnage. Events have now so developed that this aspiration can at last be rationally, logically and – I dare to add – patriotically seized by the people of the United Kingdom if they will use their votes to do so."

"Powell: The people who think they are the people of this country will be fighting for their country. Ross: I'm not sure that I understand that. Surely many black people regard themselves as genuinely British. Powell: People fight for power, people fight for domination. Ross: And this will be a battle for domination? Powell: And they try to resist it. Ross: What do you think the outcome will be? Powell: Appalling."

"England alone found the way to transmute its feudal assembly into a matchless instrument of free government, which the rest of the world vainly aspire to imitate."

"England is the country of the English... England is the stage on which the drama of English history was played and the setting within which the English became conscious of themselves as a people ... when politicians and preachers attempt to frighten and cajole the English into pretending away the distinction between themselves and people of other nations and other origins, they are engaged in undermining the foundation upon which democratic government by consent and peaceable civilised society in this country are supported ... those who at the end of the twentieth century wish to keep alive that consciousness of being English, which seemed so effortless and uncontroversial to our forefathers, will discover that they are called upon, if they take their purpose seriously, to confront the most arrogant and imposing prejudices of their time."

"The EEC however is not, and never has been, about freedom of trade: it is about, and always has been about, a closed-off internal trading system in Europe... What the EEC is bent upon has nothing to do with free trade or free anything. It is a naked assertion of the will to power, the will to create a unified state to which instead of our own national organs of representation and government we are all to be subordinated."

"The immediate occasion for alarm is the government's announcement that British contractors for supplying armaments to our armed forces must in future share the work with what are called ‘European firms’, meaning factories situated on the mainland of the European continent. I ask one question, to which I believe there is no doubt about the answer. What would have been the fate of Britain in 1940 if production of the Hurricane and the Spitfire had been dependent upon the output of factories in France? That a question so glaringly obvious does not get asked in public or in government illuminates the danger created for this nation by the rolling stream of time which bears away the generation of 1940, the generation, that is to say, of those who experienced as adults Britain's great peril and Britain’s great deliverance. Talk at Bruges or Luxembourg about not surrendering our national sovereignty is all very well. It means less than nothing when the keys to our national defence are being handed over: an island nation which no longer commands the essential means of defending itself by air and sea is no longer sovereign...The safety of this island nation reposes upon two pillars. The first is the impregnability of its homeland to invasion by air or sea. The second is its ability and its will to create over time the military forces by which the last conclusive battle will be decided. Without our own industrial base of military armament production neither of those pillars will stand. No doubt, with the oceans kept open, we can look to buy or borrow from the other continents; but to depend on the continent of Europe for our arms is suicide."

"Q: Who caused the inflation? A: The Chancellor of the Exchequer. Q: How did he cause it? A: By putting a flood of new money into circulation. Q: Why did he do that? A: To prevent the exchange rate of the pound rising last year. Q: Why did he want to stop it rising? A: To keep level with the Deutschmark. Q: What for? A: To make it easier to join the EMS."

"The European Community now fills the place in socialist thinking which used to be occupied by the Comintern."

"We obey our laws because we feel them to be our laws; we submit to be governed by our institutions because we feel them to be our institutions. They are identified with us, intuitively and emotionally, because we are, we think, part and parcel of them and they of us."

"I was born a Tory. Define: a Tory is a person who regards authority as immanent in institutions. I had always been, as far back as I could remember in my existence, a respecter of institutions, a respecter of monarchy, a respecter of the deposit of history, a respecter of everything in which authority was capable of being embodied, and that must surely be what the Conservative Party was about, the Conservative Party as the party of the maintenance of acknowledged prescriptive authority."

"We are taunted—by the French, by the Italians, by the Spaniards—for refusing to worship at the shrine of a common government superimposed upon them all... where were the European unity merchants in 1940? I will tell you. They were either writhing under a hideous oppression or they were aiding and abetting that oppression. Lucky for Europe that Britain was alone in 1940."

"Like all human institutions, it [the state] too is mortal. An observer watching the behaviour and listening to the language of British politicians since 1972...would have been reasonably entitled to conclude that the British had become disenchanted with the unique form of government which continues to distinguish them from their continental contemporaries and had resolved to abandon parliamentary self-government under an unwritten constitution in order to be embraced by a single state – and that a unitary, not a federal state – comprising western Europe, the Iberian peninsula and Greece and live forever under treaties interpreted by the European Court. I am not the person best qualified to advise you whether that judgement would be premature, because my own obstinate refusal to countenance the abandonment of parliamentary self-government by the United Kingdom has resulted in my living the life of an Ishmael in British politics since 1972. I will therefore do no more than leave you with some cautionary words of a general character. Nations do tend to behave remarkably like themselves and to revert to past habits even after appearing to have departed from them for sometimes lengthy periods. The most reliable indication of a nation's future behaviour is its history. It would be an exaggeration no doubt, but a venial exaggeration, to say that the history of Britain is the history of British parliamentary self-government."

"Unlike every other parliament in the world, the parliament of the United Kingdom does not owe its existence to any document or treaty."

"It is debate which holds government to account or, to put the matter less pompously, forces government to make sense – if it can. For hour after hour or, if the subject is legislation, in detailed debate after detailed debate, ministers have to prove, if they can, the truth and the common sense about what they are doing or proposing. In the end, they and the whole House know what to make of it all; and because the House of Commons knows what to make of it all, the people outside also get to know. That is the real restraint upon what government can do. That is the inner meaning – I almost said "the private meaning" – of British democracy; for it is distinctively a parliamentary democracy... Government upon advice is the secret which has enabled the British to retain intact through so many vicissitudes the monarchy which remains the focus of national loyalty as well as the dynamo by which the machinery of the state is driven."

"[The House of Lords] is an integral part of Parliament simply because that is how Parliament evolved, and its powers, like those of the House of Commons, derive not from a theory but from precedent."

"The world is full of evil men engaged in doing evil things. That does not make us policemen to round them up nor judges to find them guilty and to sentence them. What is so special about the ruler of Iraq that we suddenly discover that we are to be his jailers and his judges? ... we as a nation have no interest in the existence or non-existence of Kuwait or, for that matter, Saudi Arabia as an independent state... I sometimes wonder if, when we shed our power, we omitted to shed our arrogance."

"I [also] know that, on my deathbed, I shall still be believing with one part of my brain that somewhere on every ocean of the world there is a grey, grey ship with three funnels and sixteen-inch guns which can blow out of the water any other navy which is likely to face it. I know it is not so. Indeed, I realised at a relatively early age that it is not so. But that factor – that emotional factor... will not die until I, the carrier of it, am dead."

"To me a Tory is a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions—that's a carefully honed definition. We have made the law, not for extraneous reasons, not because it conforms with a priori specifications; it has been made by a particular institution in a particular way and can be changed by that institution in a particular way. A Tory therefore reposes the ultimate authority in institutions—he is an example of collective man."

"The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established."

"It obliges one to think with a particular kind of logic and severity. If it is nonsense, it will not go into Latin...I regard it as cruelty to the young to deprive them of that insight into language...Who would have thought Thatcher would be responsible for introducing the Prussian system, of dictating from central government the content of education in the supposed interest of the state? Translation into Latin was the great stamp and mark of English classical scholarship...My fatal decision was not to be pedantic and leave it in Latin. I had written Et Tiberim multo spumantem sanguine cerno: from Virgil in the Aeneid. And at the last minute I said, 'I can't put that out in Latin, that's pedantic'...In Latin, it would have been lost."

"It's not impossible but it's difficult, for a non-white person to be British."

"He says to the Sovereign: "I no longer am leader of the majority party in the House of Commons; but I am carrying on as your Prime Minister." Now I don't think anyone can say that—at least without inflicting damage on the constitution... [it is] tantamount to treating the monarch herself with disrespect and denying the very principle on which our parliamentary democracy is founded."

"A pity she did not understand them!"

"The analytical faculty is underdeveloped in women."

"In old age it is no longer possible to credit the sheer, almost physical agony which is caused in youth by the passage of time, when the turning of spring into summer arouses pain as lively as the pain of toothache. The succession of the seasons is like a recurrent inescapable catastrophe, which sweeps away what is young and beautiful, and what is beautiful because it is young."

"I hate the ugly, hate the old, I hate the lame and weak, But more than all I hate the dead That lie so still in their earthen bed And never dare to rise."

"Oh, sweet it is, where grass is deep And swifts are overhead, To lie and watch the clouds, and weep For friends already dead."

"Mother, with longing ever new And joy too great for telling, I turn again to rest in you My earliest dwelling."

"While yesteryear I tarried In a garden in the south, I met a youth who carried A rose-bud in his mouth.I gave him chase and caught him, And would not set him free, But held him and besought him To give the flower to me.He smiled, and broke a petal And laid it in my hand— It seared like molten metal, And here is yet the brand."

"Now I alone sit by the fire, And one remains of three; For two have got their heart's desire And left their grief to me."

"I did not speak, but when I saw you turn And cross your right leg on your left, and fold Your hands around your knee, I felt a flow Of white-hot lava seething up the old Volcano-shaft. That selfsame attitude, Though not of yours, it was which long ago Fired me, an innocent, unknowing boy, And led me on to sin and on to learn And onwards to the very fount of woe."

"Powell did strike me, however, as an extremely capable and intelligent Conservative politician. There was no fanatical gleam in his eyes, though I do remember feeling that his attitude to India was slightly strange. I could not place it at the time; it was neither jingoism nor simply nostalgia, but nor was it the scholarly interest of a historian or the detached reflections of a logician. Many years later when I was reading Paul Scott’s opus on the British in India, I suddenly remembered Powell. One of the major characters in Scott’s novels reminded me of him. It was Ronald Merrick, whose ambiguous class background in Britain ultimately exploded in colonial India. This was a reflection of something that ran very deep in many middle- and lower-middle-class Englishmen and women who had served as colonial administrators or officers in India."

"I would say Mr. Powell, Enoch is fully supported by me on what he has said. He's not discriminating against any races, but he wanted the indigenous Londoners, their children, to have a brighter future. He does not want England to be colonised by Africa, by Asia. London for Londoners, Scotland for Scottish, Wales for Welsh and Uganda for Ugandans. Rhodesia for Zimbabwean people, not for the white minority regime, South Africa for the black majority. London can have any technical assistance, anybody that wanted to employ in London but not to dominate the people of England. Therefore I support him as a person which all Great British people should have to be their Prime Minister."

"The supreme intellectual among the Tories was their supreme rebel: Enoch Powell. Powell was a true intellectual, more of an intellectual than any Labour politician: for he was a scholar. No other politician had the ability to translate the law book of a medieval Welsh king, edit Greek texts with a dryness that made Housman look gushing, master the intricacies of the medieval House of Lords, and reinterpret the New Testament... He was a formidable speaker, logical, precise, incandescent, as fluent as Benn but more ordered, more gifted in his use of metaphor and in the balance of his sentences... Our generation considered him the embodiment of all they feared... His curious classless voice, his staring eyes that might have been transplanted from Rasputin, his clear incisive sentences, made him a demonic figure for his contemporaries... Powell himself was content to await the verdict of history, certain that that verdict would prove him to be the most far-sighted man of his times."

"[T]he Western world, which has always stood on very shaky foundations, is coalescing according to the principle under which it was organized, and that principle is white supremacy. From England to Sacramento, Ronald Reagan and Enoch Powell are the same person."

"Looking back at the full text of Powell's speech, you will find it springs a number of surprises. Not least, Powell never used the phrase "Rivers of blood". He actually quoted a line from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. "I see the river Tiber foaming with much blood" ("Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno", line 86)... Uncharacteristically, Powell seems to have overlooked the way the quotation might contradict his own arguments. True, the Sibyl was referring to the bloodshed that would result from Aeneas' attempt to found his new city in Latin territory, integrating his own line into that of the native population. But that bloodshed would lead to a strong and proudly mixed community of Trojans and Latins. And Aeneas' Rome in due course would become the most successful multi-cultural society of the ancient world – granting full citizenship to the inhabitants of its imperial territories, and eventually seeing Spaniards, Africans and others on the Roman imperial throne... Powell should have thought a bit harder about the implications of his clever classical allusion."

"Powell was a first rate classicist."

"I am glad I went [to Powell's funeral]. Enoch was somebody who believed what he said and said what he believed. He treated people with respect. He would talk to shopkeepers in Wolverhampton about the PSBR as if they were bankers and they listened because they knew they were being treated respectfully... [At the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution in Paris] the only comment Enoch made was that "the revolution proved once again the absurdity of trying to build a constitution based on the Rights of Man". The French looked at him as if Edmund Burke was still alive, which in a way he was."

"However controversial his views, he was one of the great figures of 20th-century British politics, gifted with a brilliant mind. However much we disagreed with many of his views, there was no doubting the strength of his convictions or their sincerity, or his tenacity in pursuing them, regardless of his own political self-interest."

"In April 1968, Powell made the notorious speech in which he foresaw “the River Tiber foaming with much blood” in consequence of excessive immigration... His solution was mass repatriation of non-white people. The speech led to racial violence in the Midlands but it made Powell a hero, particularly to the lumpenproletariat, astonished and gratified to discover a person of culture and refinement prepared to echo their fouler thoughts. There are signs in this centenary volume that Powell came to regard the speech as something of a mistake. It was, in truth, unforgivable."

"There was nothing languid or easygoing about Enoch Powell...he was probably the most intellectually formidable of the men who have passed through the Research Department. He took an interest in almost every subject, and on almost every subject he had a strong and pungently expressed views. Only some of these were eccentric... Powell has an inventive mind. He has also a warm heart and I think it a thousand pities that he ever made his first notable speech on immigration, when the Tiber was to run with blood. This led him on to an incurable rift with his own party leaders which has been made wider by the variety of causes of schism which he espouses. Powell could be a most valuable lieutenant instead of a lost assailant, and this is a pity."

"Mr Powell is the first Conservative politician since Stanley Baldwin who seems to have made a significant impact on the minds of the working classes."

"Enoch Powell in his speech of April 1968 quoted the remarks of a constituent that the black man would have the whip hand over the white man in Britain within fifteen to twenty years. I note that there is not yet a single black Member of Parliament, that they are absent from the higher ranks of the law, the Civil Service, the police and the Armed Forces, and that the election of a black mayor is still regarded as newsworthy... Mr Powell's constituent will have to wait for many more years before coloured people reach the heights which so alarmed him, and by that time I trust that he will have discovered that we all share a common humanity."

"Edward Norman (then Dean of Peterhouse) had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons. The discussion moved on to “Western values”. Mrs Thatcher said (in effect) that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values. Powell: “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.” Thatcher (it was just before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): “Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.” “No, Prime Minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.” Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism."

"The main Tory supporter on our side [during the 1975 EEC referendum] was Enoch Powell. It could have been politically embarrassing, but Enoch played it straight down the line, scrupulously keeping party politics out of it. He also revealed old-world courtesy. When, for instance, we found that a press conference we had arranged for him clashed with one I had been hoping to hold, he insisted on giving way to me, postponing his own. In fact, he showed more sense of solidarity than Tony Benn, who like so many politicians with exceptional talents did not like working in a team."

"That man Powell is extraordinary. He is the best Greek scholar since Porson."

"Whatever one may wish to believe, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Powell's impact on the [1970] election was great, that he made a strong appeal to many of the 'ordinary people'...and that the two-year campaign he brought to an independent climax in the ten days before the election struck oil in places where Conservatives had not struck oil before."

"His current doctrines are an intellectualized version of ideas which have been the common diet in most parts of the body of the Conservative party for the last 25 years, but they have been transformed in the course of exposition and given a wider range of relevance than they had before... They are in fact the expression of a feeling, which is to some extent present in all classes, that the language used by politicians is not the language the body of the people understands and that the distance between politicians and the public is great and growing. Above all they confirm the impression that anyone who speaks a language the public wants to hear will attract the hysterical censure Mr. Powell has attracted from the self-appointed leaders of the 'thinking classes', i.e. the 'great big world of Fleet Street, Whitehall, St. James's Street', etc. ... Nothing done by Mr. Powell has been more important than his demonstration that they can be rejected by a highly articulate thinking politician who attracts hysterical censure precisely because he rubs in the unpalatable truth that a rhetoric maybe offensive to these parts of the 'thinking classes' and yet reflect opinions that are widely shared, deeply held and common to all classes in this country... What Mr. Powell has done is to change the climate of opinion. This is a matter of great importance. Over the last thirty years a morally conservative, hard headed and patriotic electorate has been persuaded to defer to an eccentric element amongst the progressive intelligentsia."

"Mr. Powell is an economic Whig but a political Tory."

"“Even if I were convinced that the result would be that we would have Labour administrations for the rest of my lifetime, I would say: Well, so be it.” Torn out of their context and repeated in a long series of news bulletins, Enoch Powell's words seemed far more savage than they did at the end of what must have been one of the most civilized political discussions of recent years. Each from his own standpoint, our two most distinguished Parliamentarians had expressed their passionate belief in our British system of Parliamentary democracy and their determination to rescue it even now from the perils of the EEC. If it had been a Labour Government that had taken us into the Market, Michael Foot would have been faced with Mr Powell's dilemma, and I am pretty certain he would have come to the same conclusion. Read in its context, the statement reveals only what we already know, that Mr Powell has one thing in common with Mr Foot—he cares more about our British Parliamentary democracy than about anything else in the world."

"I do wish that instead [of talking about the EEC] you would concentrate on making speeches on immigration, because that is so vitally important and you are so right about it."

"Ah, Enoch, dear Enoch! He once said something to me I never understood. He said, "You know, I've told you all I know about housing, and you can make your speech accordingly. Can I talk to you about something that you know all about and I know nothing? I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans." You know, I had no idea what he meant. I do now."

"He simply believes in Order and Authority and is always prepared to offer a half-brilliant, half-mad, intellectual defence of them."

"I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got."

"In Britain, a herald of the twenty-first- century hard right, made himself heard. Enoch Powell set himself and his career against the state-friendly centrism and multilateralism that attracted Toryism in the 1950s and 1960s. A powerful, unyielding mind, Powell was an early framer of a popular counter-faith in the unstable dual monarchy of the free market and nation that before long captured the right across Europe and the United States."

"If one thinker is to be credited with starting the long rightward shift in British conservatism from the 1980s onward, it is Enoch Powell (1912–1998). In a period of centrist compromise, Powell heralded Thatcherism, but he also did more. In elevating the market, Thatcherism, if not Thatcher herself, was at root global and multilateral. Powell revered the global market but wanted to return politics to the nation. At once economically globalist and geopolitically unilateralist, Powell was the herald of British conservatism’s turn against Europe. When sacked in 1968 from the shadow cabinet for an inflammatory speech on immigration, a shrewd Tory editorialist who sensed Powell’s appeal wrote that containing Powellism would occupy his party for the next decade. The editorialist was off by a factor of five. Containing Powellism would occupy the party for the next half century and, in the 2010s, it would finally fail."

"What a theme, and what a speech, and what a speaker, and how Oliver Cromwell himself would have been thrilled to hear the parliamentary cause elevated to its rightful pre-eminence... Writing as an impenitent Leveller who still begs to differ with you (and Oliver Cromwell) in so many matters, I still cannot withhold my wonder and excitement at what I heard there today."

"The Tory Kingdom would sooner or later have been his to command, for he had all the shining qualities which the others lacked. Heath would never have outmanoeuvred him; Thatcher would never have stepped into the vacant shoes. It was a tragedy for Enoch, and a tragedy for the rest of us too."

"Everyone who wrote about him was certain of one thing: Enoch Powell was not a racist. He "said things we didn't agree with" (Tony Blair). He was "an extreme nationalist, but not a racialist" (Denis Healey). He inspired racialists "but was not a racialist himself" (Tony Benn). The Tory papers which revered him and called for parliament to be prorogued in his memory would not contemplate the possibility that he was a racialist. The unanimity was complete. Which is all very odd because the most important thing by far about Enoch Powell was that he was a racist pig of the most despicable variety."

"I have met, talked with, and participated in meetings with Enoch Powell on a number of different occasions. He has a better and deeper understanding of economic principles, and a clearer conception of the relation between economic and personal freedom, than any other major political figure I have ever met. And even this is to put it mildly. Broaden the field as widely as you want, and I have met few men who have as sophisticated an intelligence on these matters as Powell."

"When I came to England in the late 60s, Sergeant Pepper was ruling the land, de Gaulle was the Great Satan and it was only months before Enoch Powell made his classical allusion to the Tiber. It is right that his speech that night has become a myth of a dark moment in contemporary British culture. His mean and ugly prophecies of bloodshed - rivers frothing with blood, no less - was not simply a mad outburst. It did not come from nowhere...It was no surprise, in the end, that Powell should pluck that evil image from his knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean world to portray the panic that had gripped the country. He was not speaking for himself alone, but he spoke too strongly, abandoning post-imperial euphemisms about non-European foreigners. His eyes flashed with prophetic conviction and suddenly, so it seemed to Ted Heath, the lunacy had gone too far. He sacked him from the shadow cabinet"

"All our hopes for England rest now on Enoch Powell."

"I think the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard was by Enoch Powell in 1959, castigating the Macmillan Government over the murder of African prisoners at Hola camp in Kenya; it had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes."

"Enoch Powell was unique in the absolutism of the intellectual and moral propositions on which he based his arguments. When he was Professor of Greek at Sydney his colleagues used to call him “the textual pervert”. He built glass towers of dazzling logical integrity, whose foundations in the real world became more and more precarious as they rose higher and higher. In politics as in life, a logical conclusion is usually a reductio ad absurdum."

"If Enoch Powell had stood for leadership of the Conservative party he would have won "by a landslide" and if he had stood to be Prime Minister he would have won by a "national landslide"."

"I never came close to understanding Enoch Powell. He was the only adversary in the House of Commons who ever seriously worried me. Others were nimble and could disconcert me for a moment, but Powell, by his appearance, voice and choice of words, radiated an authority which I had no immediate resources to match. We were almost neighbours in South Eaton Place, and he was invariably courteous to my wife. But I never had a friendly conversation with him, and never understood the admiration verging on worship which he inspired in intelligent commentators. I saw at first hand the harm done in turn by his negative eloquence on immigration in 1968, on Ireland in 1984/5 and throughout on Europe. It was a tragedy that such patriotic fervour, deep learning and forceful talent should have been dedicated to detecting non-existent conspiracies and upholding different causes of the sour right."

"It's a dependable party game: who was the MP who...emerged as a strong and early opponent of hanging and supported homosexual law reform; was fiercely anti-Nato, anti-American and opposed to Britain possessing nuclear weapons; pioneered the Clean Air Act ... became a vehement critic of Empire and hugely embarrassed a Tory government by a passionate condemnation of British treatment of Africans confined in the Hola Camp in Kenya? (The MP in question was so infuriated by the racist excuse that different standards applied in Africa that he/she actually cried with vexation at the end of the speech.) As Minister of Health the same politician earned an extremely progressive reputation by attacking the mental hospitals as oppressive Victorian institutions which ought to be closed to allow more humane care within the community... This MP was...the first in any party to argue for a minimum income for the old and the unemployed, argued for the nationalisation of the universities and completely free education for all students, and refused...the offer of a life peerage... Most people...would volunteer all sorts of left-wing Labour MPs: not one in a hundred would have guessed that the right answer was Enoch Powell."

"In the mid-Seventies he came to Oxford to give a talk about devolution... [A] large audience, perhaps half black and brown, came to heckle and boo their bogeyman. They were very quickly silenced as Powell wove his spell, proving that devolution was a nonsense, but adding that decolonisation had surely taught us that morally we couldn't refuse a vote for independence from a people that wanted it... Finally, someone suggested he couldn't mean it: what if Oxford voted for independence? Would he grant that? He replied that you could reduce any argument to absurdity with an absurd example but yes, if the people wanted it, how could one refuse? And then added, cuttingly, but why talk such nonsense about Oxford? Why not use real examples: what if Bradford, Brixton or Southall, which are really different, vote for independence? The words were spat out with real venom, eyes flashing. Immigration had not previously been mentioned: in the audience heads lurched back, as if a collective slap in the face had been administered. At the end everyone filed out in silence, as if physically beaten. Over dinner, I asked him why he had done it: he had come close to getting a standing ovation and then he had deliberately thrown it all away. “Oh yes,” he said, “I could see I had won them over, so I thought, if you want to accept me, it's got to be the whole package, not just my views on devolution. So I showed them the cloven hoof. I don’t want any easy victories.”"

"On a robust set of assumptions, Powell was responsible for the victory of the Conservatives in 1970 and of Labour in February 1974."

"Powell is the politician who dominates our age as no other does. The arguments that he articulated in the 1960s and 1970s resonate across the world. On the one hand, the seemingly unstoppable rise of the populist right, from France's Marine Le Pen to Hungary's Viktor Orban. On the other, the abiding split on Europe within the Conservative party that no leader has ever healed. The age of Brexit is the age of Powell."

"Enoch Powell has the finest mind in the House of Commons. The best trained, and the most exciting... Powellism is not wholly or even a mainly a right-wing creed: by those rather absurd touchstones that 'progressives' delight to use—abolition of corporal and capital punishment, implementation of the Wolfenden Report, the humanising of penal and mental health reform—Powell is a progressive. Typically, Powell declines to be typed. He does not fit into any political slot. He is just Enoch Powell... I am a fellow-traveller, but sometimes I leave Powell's train a few stations down the line, before it reaches, and sometimes crashes into, the terminal buffers. I am certainly less logical in my political approach, but I would argue that Powell suffers sometimes from an excess of logic."

"Poor Enoch! Driven mad by the remorselessness of his own logic!"

"Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes."

"I tried to persuade him that he was too logical, a concept which he could neither accept nor understand... I do not recall meeting anyone else with a mind that had such a power of acquiring knowledge. At one stage when Enoch was detailed to become an expert on town and country planning, he acquired the standard textbook and read it from page to page, as an ordinary mortal would read a novel. Within a matter of weeks he had fully grasped both the principles of the problem and the details of the legal situation. Within a matter of a few months he was writing to the author of the textbook, pointing out the errors that he had made."

"The essence of representative democracy, Powell argued, is majority rule. No matter how consociational arrangements, there will always be some party or interest that is left out of the ruling coalition. So what is it that persuades the minority to put up with rule by the majority? Lincoln had suggested that it was the opportunity to change the government by swinging public opinion behind the opposition. But why should they be prepared to wait, particularly if the odds on success are long and there is a better chance of influencing events by taking the law into their own hands? Powell's answer was that the minority will only put up with majority rule, if there is some overarching community sentiment which is stronger than the conflicts of ideological, economic or political interest that customarily divide people on a daily basis."

"We badly need another Enoch Powell to articulate the role of the nation state in the twenty-first century, but until such a paragon appears, we can return to the canon of his writings and speeches to remind us why the nation state still does and should matter... As well as Disraeli, but very few Tory thinkers since, Enoch Powell himself had a mission "to teach the English their nationhood", as well as a genius for defining it."

"Powell's impact has not just been limited to public opinion polls. The Butler–Stokes data from 1970 and 1974 clearly demonstrated that Powell played a decisive role in winning the 1970 election for the Tories and came back to make an important contribution to the Labour victory in February 1974. He has been able to mobilise his supporters in opposite directions at two different elections four years apart without the benefit of a political organisation or a strong base in the leadership of either political party; influence of this sort is probably unprecedented in British political history... His ability to fill a hall was unrivalled in British politics between 1968 and 1974."

"It was in his invocations of this thinking, feeling collective that Powell made his distinctive contribution to British politics... [T]hrough his language he placed this thing as squarely before the consciousness of his listeners as Shakespeare had done in his history plays, and invited them to recognise that he was talking not about an abstraction, but about their own destiny, which is but the microcosm of the larger destiny on which they depended."

"Often Powell's audiences felt that he was speaking liturgically, when he touched on the subject of England. And they were right. In elucidating the idea of sovereignty, Powell invokes "the Crown in council, the Crown in Parliament and the Crown in judgement", blessing the existing institutions with names that repeat their magic without explaining it. When, in his famous St George's Day speech, he allows himself the use of purple prose...it is in order to emphasise the mystery of England. The "real presence" in the heart of politics of that inexplicable thing called the Crown, the very thing over which Shakespeare puzzled in his history plays."

"Powell establishes without argument, but by direct invocation of the central mysteries of his political faith, that our joining the European Community (as it then was) had created a crisis of legitimacy. If legitimacy lies concealed within institutions, and summarised not by reasons but by the power of their sacred names, then fundamental changes to those institutions can never be legitimate. To put it another way: to describe political processes in sacramental language is to rule out all changes which are not adjustments... Powell...was right...that this transformation amounted to a disenchantment with England, and a loss of those magical formulae on which our pride, allegiance and law-abidingness had hitherto depended. To the demoralised nation that we have become, Powell's language seems fraught and quaint. But we look around ourselves in vain for the alternative, recognising that no politician today has the ability to renew through his words the enchantment that has for centuries attached us to our country, and made it so natural to us to make the sacrifices required for its survival."

"Of all my pupils he always insisted on the highest standards of accuracy and knowledge in those who taught him. Woe betide the careless young master, as I was, who was guilty of a rash statement because, from the back bench of the Upper Sixth would come a voice, “But, sir”, followed by a long quotation from an author. He was a pupil from whom I learnt more than most."

"Cyril Chantler, one of Britain's wisest doctors, likes to give people a photocopy of Enoch Powell's book on medicine and politics and tell them that it's the best thing ever written on the NHS. Younger readers may not have heard of Enoch Powell, but he was a Tory minister of health in the early 1960s. He is most famous for his racist "rivers of blood speech," and I can remember protesting outside his Belgravia home. Could he really have written the best book on the NHS? I think that Cyril is right. One of Powell's strengths is that he was a distinguished classicist and writes beautifully, with directness, clarity, and wit: it's like reading Tacitus on the NHS. Another strength is his inability to dissimulate; the source of his catastrophic speech, his weakness as a politician, and his most famous observation that "all political careers end in failure.""

"I knew Powell at Cambridge when he was a young classical scholar. His IQ is enormously high."

"Roy's parliamentary successes were often based on reflections as much as rhetoric. I remember one speech when Enoch Powell interrupted him with what appeared to be a telling point. Roy paused and thought and looked at the ceiling. He delayed his reply so long that there was an uncomfortable feeling among his supporters that for once he had been put off his stride. Then he said: “The Right Honourable Gentleman's logic, as always, is impeccable. But since he always starts from false premises, he is bound to come to the wrong conclusion.” In an off-the-cuff remark he had summed up Enoch Powell's whole career."

"For those who saw and heard Enoch Powell, the memory is indelible – the black moustache, the burning eyes, the hypnotic, metallic voice, the precision of language, the agility in debate. These will be largely lost to future generations. But, in a more important respect, Powell will survive more surely than any other British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill. His speeches and writings will be read so long as there exists a political and parliamentary culture in which speaking and writing matter. And if there comes a time when such a culture is all but destroyed, those brave few who wish to restore it will find in the thoughts of Enoch Powell something approaching their Bible."

"I have always read Enoch Powell's speeches and articles very carefully. He was not helpful over things like the Anglo-Irish Agreement. I think he has been absolutely right about the economy – inflation is a monetary phenomenon. I always think it was a tragedy that he left. He is a very, very able politician. I say that even though he has sometimes said vitriolic things against me."

"His intellect was second to none... Enoch got us on to the right argument about inflation."

"Enoch was right. He had made the two intellectual leaps in economic policy which Keith Joseph and I would only make some years later. First, he had grasped that it was not the unions which caused inflation by pushing up wages, but rather the Government which did so by increasing the supply of money in the economy. Consequently, incomes policies...were a supreme irrelevance to anti-inflation policy. The only aspect of the matter which Enoch then and later failed sufficiently to grasp was the importance of the indirect link between trade union power and inflation. This lay in the fact that over-powerful trade unions priced their own members out of jobs, and inflicted unemployment on both union and non-union workers alike. Governments...would then react by lowering interest rates and expanding the money supply. This would increase demand and jobs for a time, but it also increased inflation... That said, Enoch's insight into the cause of inflation was of supreme importance."

"Undoubtedly, Enoch was our finest intellect – classicist, historian, economist and biblical scholar... [H]e was a powerful public orator and able to command the House of Commons, or indeed any audience, with his remorseless logic and controlled passion. But as regards the Shadow Cabinet, by this stage he had largely withdrawn into himself. He was disliked and probably feared by Ted Heath... On Sunday 21 April 1968...I woke up to find the front pages of the newspapers dominated by reports of a speech Enoch Powell had made in Birmingham on immigration the previous afternoon. It was strong meat, and there were some lines which had a sinister ring about them. But I strongly sympathised with the gravamen of his argument about the scale of New Commonwealth immigration into Britain. I too thought this threatened not just public order but also the way of life of some communities... I was also quite convinced that, however selective quotations from his speech may have sounded, Enoch was no racist."

"Enoch was the best parliamentarian I ever knew. Everything in Enoch's speeches had to be worked out in reason from first principles."

"There will never be anybody else so compelling as Enoch Powell. He had a rare combination of qualities all founded on an unfaltering belief in God, an unshakeable loyalty to family and friends and an unswerving devotion to our country. He was magnetic. Listening to his speeches was an unforgettable privilege. He was one of those rare people who made a difference."

"On the matter of his [Powell's] objections to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement I now believe that his assessment was right, though I wish...he had been less inclined to impugn the motives of those who disagreed with him."

"He talks so fascinatingly on history, architecture and many subjects that politics seldom came up, but I should be disappointed if on any subject he did not produce some interestingly heterodox views."

"Among the various textual notes that appear in academic journals, I still find much to commend in the articles by J. Enoch Powell in the Classical Quarterly for 1935 and 1938. His suggestions and conjectures are also implicit in his absolutely indispensable Lexicon to Herodotus."

"On the issue raised by Mr Powell [the EEC] hinges the question whether the British are to retain power to decide their own destiny. In other words, are we to be independent? ... On that issue, put that way, I stand four-square in line with Mr Powell and I hope he is not embarrassed. He is moving to the position which the late General de Gaulle took up at the time of the collapse of France in the last war."

"On 20 April 1968 Enoch Powell delivered his notorious 'rivers of blood' speech about the perils of allowing Commonwealth immigrants into the United Kingdom. Kenneth was furious. Powell, Kenneth observed to me, had been assiduous in recruiting men and women from the West Indies to staff the National Health Service. It could not have worked without them."

"He abhors the label right and calls himself a Tory radical. For him the essence of Powellism is its frankly Gaullist emphasis on national independence and its marking out of political ground in which a realistic patriotism can flourish again. But paradoxically it is not rightist in the old-style Tory sense. Mr. Powell, unlike the true Tory right, calls for a withdrawal from Empire not even into Europe but into Britain... Mr. Powell is seen by his lieutenants as the latter-day Joe Chamberlain in the Tory Party, the boy from "Brum" who, though he is unlikely ever to lead his party, will change its orientation and nature by driving it into a Gaullist radicalism rather than on to the right."

"Powellism is now part of the English intellectual and moral tradition; part of the nation's mythology. The man, too, is a legend in his lifetime. So in a sense his work is done. For whatever eventually happens to him his ideas have now entered the bloodstream of the British body politic, guaranteeing them a kind of immortality. Of no other living British statesman could the same be said."

"In my opinion, any man who can afford to buy a newspaper should not be allowed to own one."

"Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow."

"In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme."

"The proposition that Muslims are welcome in Britain if, and only if, they stop behaving like Muslims is a doctrine which is incompatible with the principles that guide a free society."

"Not only was it wrong for us to deal superficially with what Europe involved but we've paid the price ever since, because every time there's a crisis in Europe, people say with some justification, "Well, we wouldn't have been part of this if we'd really known the implications." Joining the European Community did involve significant loss of sovereignty but by telling the British people that was not involved I think the rest of the argument was prejudiced for the next thirty years."

"Diversity was the encouragement of people to live together in harmony despite their differences and rejoice in the differences rather than deplore them."

"Roy Hattersley...returned to the smoke of battle in Westminster where he at once began to work actively for Callaghan. He called in Roy Jenkins's room to tell him ... Roy Hattersley told him why. His growing lack of sympathy with Jenkins's political position was reinforced by Jenkins's recent television broadcast saying that more than 60 per cent of national income devoted to public expenditure would lead to tyranny – quite the opposite of what Tawney and Crosland had written and Hattersley himself believed. Hattersley was supporting Callaghan for fear of ‘splitting the vote’ and letting Foot in."

"Until Roy Hattersley said he would shoot himself if I became prime minister, I had not been able to see any possible advantage in standing."

"You cannot just have a socialist revolution in Norwood and nowhere else."

"There is now a desperate need for a London-wide left caucus of those interested in the GLC and local councils so that we can compare and discuss what is happening in each borough."

"I feel a degree of regret that Marshall did not push on and say 'Abolish the GLC', because I think it would be a major saving and would have released massive resources for more productive use."

"The H-block protest is part of the struggle to bring about a free, united Ireland. They have my support, and they have the support of the majority of the Labour Party rank and file. I have been consistently in favour of withdrawal from Ireland and to get away from the idea that it is some sort of campaign against terrorism. It is in fact the last colonial war."

"I can't think of a more appalling contrast between this wedding beanfeast and what is happening in Ireland."

"Everyone is bisexual. Almost everyone has the sexual potential for anything."

"Nobody supports what happened last Saturday in London. But what about stopping it happening? As long as we are in Ireland, people will be letting off bombs in London. I can see that we are a colonial power holding down a colony. For the rest of the time violence will recur again and again as long as we are in Ireland. People in Northern Ireland see themselves as subject peoples. If they were just criminals or psychopaths they could be crushed. But they have a motive force which they think is good."

"What Britain has done for the Irish nation is, although is spread over 800 years, worse than what Hitler did to the Jews. The difference is that one was compacted into a short period of time"

"He asked to see me again. I think he wants me for my body."

"The next election will bring an influx of over 120 new MPs who will be overwhelmingly on the Left."

"There are other people whose fear is if you bring down South Africa there will be a communist regime takeover - and that's a risk I'm prepared to see. I would much rather see South Africa under a communist regime than under the present one if that's the choice I'm faced with."

"I take a much more pragmatic view than many people on the Left about working with Neil Kinnock. Kinnock represents the best vehicle possible for achieving socialism now."

"Nothing could have been greater than the pride of serving this city. I do not believe — I am sure I speak for my colleagues on all sides — nothing else that happens to us in our lives will be as rewarding and fulfilling as the years that we have spent in this building."

"What a squalid and irresponsible little profession it is. Nothing prepares you for how bad Fleet Street really is until it craps on you from a great height."

"The British judiciary is one of the most corrupt in the world because of politically active judges."

"If Voting Changed Anything They'd Abolish It"

"I'm not in favour of the army, I'm in favour of replacing it with armed workers' brigades to defend the factories."

"I urge everybody to stay inside the Labour Party and fight to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. There must now be a serious question over whether Frank can hope to beat Steven Norris on May 4 when Londoners will widely perceive the Labour nomination to have been stolen. The lesson of Wales is that our voters will not be taken for granted. A Labour campaign that was dead in the water from day one will limp on to polling day and never allow us to get on to the real issues that matter to Londoners, such as transport, unemployment and crime. In the interests of uniting the Labour party, I hope Frank Dobson will consider his position over the next few days. He must decide whether he is willing to accept this tainted result or stand down in the interests of Labour and London. Over the last six months Londoners have had to listen to politicians. Now it is time for politicians to listen to Londoners, and I shall be saying nothing further until I have had a chance to listen to Londoners."

"The IMF and World Bank are still appalling, and now the World Trade Organisation too. All over the world people die unnecessarily because of the international financial system. Every year the international financial system kills more people than World War II. But at least Hitler was mad."

"As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago..."

"Only some ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster."

"George Bush is just about everything that is repellent in politics... You have got this super-patriotic hawk who was a coward when his country was actually involved in a war and has the most venal and corrupt administration since President Harding in the 20s. He is not a legitimate president... This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown."

"Some US journalist came up to me and said: 'How can you say this about President Bush?' Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction."

"The American agenda is sweeping everything before it, and although it's not perfect, the EU is better on environmental issues. It's a less rapacious form of capitalism."

"I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lampposts and that they've got a proper government that represents the people of Saudi Arabia."

"When you see someone trying to manoeuvre it round the school gates you have to think, you are a complete idiot."

"Oliver Finegold: Mr Livingstone, Evening Standard. How did it ... Ken Livingstone: Oh, how awful for you. Finegold: How did tonight go? Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment? Finegold: How did tonight go? Livingstone: Have you thought of having treatment? Finegold: Was it a good party? What does it mean for you? Livingstone: What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal? Finegold: No, I'm Jewish. I wasn't a German war criminal. Livingstone: Ah … right. Finegold: I'm actually quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go? Livingstone: Well you might be, but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard. You're just doing it 'cause you're paid to, aren't you? Finegold: Great. I've you on record for that. So how did tonight go? Livingstone: It's nothing to do with you because your paper is a load of scumbags. Finegold: "How did tonight go?" Livingstone: It's reactionary bigots ... Finegold: I'm a journalist. I'm doing my job. Livingstone: … and who supported fascism. Finegold: I'm only asking for a simple comment. I'm only asking for a comment. Livingstone: Well, work for a paper that isn't ... Finegold: I'm only asking for a comment. Livingstone: … that had a record of supporting fascism. Finegold: You've accused me ..."

"It may very well be offensive, and that is a matter of personal judgment, but it was not racist. I have been through several media firestorms and I have taken the view that if I made a mistake I apologise. But I am not going to apologise if I don't think I have done anything wrong. It would be easy to buy off media pressure by lying but I am not going to do it."

"When reporters say to me I'm only doing this because it's my job... that's the same abdication of moral responsibility at the thin end of the wedge that in its most extreme and horrific version ends up with others being prepared to stand as a concentration camp guard. You are responsible for your own choices in this life. I have always been, so are reporters."

"Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes in history — the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised" expression of racist barbarity. Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism."

"To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews."

"Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres."

"All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims — and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments — not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral. They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong — but would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners."

"You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not."

"I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at presidents or prime ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners — black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old — indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for caste, for religion or whatever. That isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it is just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder — and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other."

"Finally, I wish to speak, through you, directly to those who came to London today to take life. I know that you personally do not fear to give your own life in exchange for taking others — that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you do fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society, and I can show you why you will fail. In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations, and even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfill their dreams and achieve their potential. They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail."

"In this city 300 languages are spoken and the people that speak them live side by side in harmony. This city typifies what I believe is the future of the human race and a future where we grow together and we share and we learn from each other."

"I want finally to thank Londoners for their solidarity. There are some places in the world where such an incident would have unleashed internal strife and physical violence. London has stood together, we haven’t had any problems of the sort you might see in other parts of the world and I think it says everything about what is right about this city."

"If you go back a couple of hundred years to when the European cities really started to grow and peasants left the land to seek their future in the cities there was a saying that “city air makes you free” and the people who have come to London all races, creeds and colours have come for that. This is a city that you can be yourself as long as you don’t harm anyone else. You can live your life as you chose to do rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a city in which you can achieve your potential. That, I think, is our strength and that is what the bombers seek to destroy. They fear that freedom, they fear a world in which the individual makes their own life choices and their own moral value judgements and that is what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail."

"Perhaps if they're not happy here they can go back to Iran and try their luck with ayatollahs, if they don't like the planning regime or my approach."

"It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook."

"One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era."

"To take such generous contracts and screw them up so dramatically must suggest that these are the most probably the worst business people ever assembled in one place to run anything. … the civil servants were taken to the cleaners and on the face of it you still end up with a £750 million overspend based on your mismanagement of them. I think they should be sacked, hung drawn and quartered, thrown out of the country and the whole thing (the London Underground) returned to public ownership. I saw that they (Metronet management) wanted to talk to the Mayor about this — wasting their breath sunshine! — they can go out and raise the money amongst their shareholders who came here to get their snout in the trough — they screwed it up; they are not getting any of our money!"

"I think Londoners find it bizarre that ten weeks after the allegations in the Evening Standard, you haven't questioned Lee [Jasper]. All these questions about Lee — he can come down from his office now and answer them, and you sanctimonious hypocrites are dragging this out so the lies can carry on in the Standard, you're not talking about Lee coming here 'till March. Bring him here today. Ask him your questions. Let Londoners see the answers. You're dragging this out for electoral purposes. Sanctimonious hypocrites, every one of you."

"I am not in favour of any parental choice in education. You will go to your local school."

"When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews."

"One of the things that Chávez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. There was about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela. He allowed them to live, to carry on. I suspect a lot of them are using their power and control over imports and exports to make it difficult and to undermine Maduro."

"Ken is the man that we all need Ken is the leader of the GLC!"

"We look to the left and to the right And we need help but nobody's in sight Where is the man that we all need Tell him he's to come and rescue me."

"[The former Labour Party general secretary, Margaret McDonagh had died a few days before] Take her most controversial political battle. She helped exclude Ken Livingstone from the Labour candidacy for London mayor in 2000. As general secretary she took most of the blame for it. He won as an independent and she was accused of being "a control freak". At the time this was seen as a grotesque political error. I saw it differently then. And I do now. Livingstone shouldn't have been the Labour candidate for anything and it was worth losing, and enduring the political attacks, to assert that."

"First of all, I've never heard of the fellow. Second, I'm not going to dignify it with a response."

""One day the world will know that #RedKen was right"."

"Today Livingstone said that Hitler supported Zionism. Most people know that Zionism was in fact a response to antisemitism; most people know that Hitler wasn't in the business of responding to antisemitism but was himself the greatest antisemite of all time. Livingstone smears Jews, at least those who refuse to identify as anti-Zionist, by saying that they're like Nazis. He encourages people on the left and in the student movement to relate to Jews as though they were Nazis; unless they disavow Israel. Antisemitism? No, not at all. Just criticism. ... The Livingstone Formulation is named after Ken Livingstone. ... [It] conflates anything allegedly antisemitic, in this case repeatedly insulting a Jewish reporter by comparing him to a Nazi, into the category of legitimate criticism of Israel. Secondly, it goes further than accusing people who raise the issue of antisemitism of being wrong; it accuses them of being wrong on purpose; of crying wolf, of playing the antisemitism card. It alleges an intent, often a collective intent and so a conspiracy, to mobilise Jewish victim-power for illegitimate purposes."

"When the Labour Herald printed a foully anti-semitic cartoon Mr Kenneth Livingstone, boss of the GLC, not only defended its publication, but said that the only thing he regretted about it was that it did not go far enough."

"You're a disgusting racist, you're rewriting history. A Nazi apologist. A Nazi apologist. You're a disgusting Nazi apologist, Livingstone."

"I think you've lost it, Mr Livingstone ... What are you on at the moment? You certainly shouldn't be on Labour’s national executive."

"He has every right to his own view but not to express it when he is mayor of this city."

"I know one thing... Ken Livingstone is a folk hero."

"[Pigeons are] rats with wings."

"Our duty is to make our country so strong that no aggressor will challenge us."

"The British people must be strong. If we talk we must be ready to act. We must speak with the authority of the strong because our voice is practically the only voice in the world which will speak out with authority for right."

"I believe that the proper way to approach this problem is not to wait until Herr Hitler makes more demands, but tell him we are going to make some demands. I should tell him that if he wanted anything he must first come into the society of nations and play his part."

"I have never believed in peace at any price."

"On the debate on the occupation of the Ruhr (Hansard, 13th–15th February 1923) the whole Left attacked France as "militaristic", "obsessed by fears which are largely the result of its own reactionary policy", "immoral", and aimed "at the complete destruction of Germany". The diehards did not take the same view. Lt.-Col. Croft (Bournemouth) (now Lord Croft): "I think Germany has shown pretty clearly that she is not going to do more than she can [help]. She is going to try and convince us that she cannot do anything like as much as we ask." Sir F. Banbury (whose pride was that he had only once voted for an Act of Parliament in his life): "I believe that if the Germans were given time to recover they would use that time in order again to commence a European war." Mr. Remer: "Our past policy has encouraged Germany to make defaults." I mention these views, not because they are my own; they are not. But they are a great deal nearer truth than the stuff the Left was talking at this time."

"It is simply not true, as the authors of Guilty Men and Cassius assert, that the Labour Party, as a Party, was not pacifist, that its pacifism was limited to a few groups or individuals, that its pacifism ceased on the appearance of Hitler or did not continue long after his rise to power. From the first the Labour Party was riddled with pacifism. Its theory was pacifist. Its leaders were pacifist. Its members were pacifist, and its declared policy was pacifist. Disarmament it preached as party policy and because Conservatives were known to preach patriotism and strong armaments. As early as 1922 pacifism became the official doctrine of the Labour movement. At the Edinburgh Conference in that year a motion was carried that Socialist Parties everywhere should "oppose any war entered into by any government, whatever the ostensible object of the war". In 1923 the Party Conference at London pronounced in favour of "immediate Universal Disarmament by mutual agreement". There are even now Labour Members of Parliament who would fail to understand that such a policy must always put a premium on aggression, since it would give a would-be aggressor an automatic start. In 1926 the Margate Conference approved a policy of treason by general strike, calling on the workers to "meet any threat of war so called defensive or offensive, by organizing a general resistance, including the refusal to bear arms, to produce armaments, or to render any material assistance". At the Birmingham Conference, 1928, the Party's policy: "Labour and the Nation" was adopted. This included the renunciation of War, and Disarmament."

"The truth which the Left would not face—and will not face, even now—is that from 1932 and probably from 1929 collective security was moribund, owing to the re-emergence of a Germany determined to destroy it, and the existence of a Japan which had never really believed in it. It could only rise from the dead by the development of a system of armaments in the hands of the peace-loving nations capable of defeating and destroying the governments in the aggressor countries. The only future of the League lay through rearmament, and not through opposition to it."

"The fact is that the 1935 election was fought very largely on the subject of armaments. The Government wanted to rearm "too little and too late", but still on a considerable—if not a "huge"—scale. The Socialists and Liberals condemned this policy as wrong, as false to "collective security", and as leading to a war that could otherwise be avoided... [T]his was the issue which the Labour Party chose to fight, late in 1935—the Government arms policy versus the Socialist policy of disarmament by agreement and an international air police force. Looking back on this issue in 1945, who can possibly doubt to-day that the Conservatives were right and that the Left was pitifully wrong?"

"Some armaments for Great Britain are necessary on any view of collective security... "collective security", so far from being an excuse exonerating our country from possessing armaments, is in fact a commitment demanding a higher degree of preparation for war than the mere defence of its shores would entail. The Left never understood that their foreign policy was inconsistent with their defence policy, and so must be held responsible for our weakness. But responsibility does not end there. To carry on war (and this is what we should have had to do to vindicate "collective security") it is not enough to have arms. It is necessary to possess a higher degree of national unity than a single democratic party can afford. How on earth could we expect to defy Japan, or even miserable Italy, when for years—and even at the very time when it called for the use of "sanctions"—the Labour movement had been declaring that should sanctions lead to war, even a "so-called defensive" war, they should oppose its prosecution and call a general strike?"

"The fundamental principle of all foreign policy is that enunciated by Mr. Walter Lippmann, when he writes that you must balance commitments with power. To fail to do this is not brave, moral, "realistic", "idealistic", "progressive", or "reactionary". It is merely silly. To incur commitments without building up power to discharge them and to call this practice collective security is at the worst political chicanery and at the best self-deception, and leads inevitably to bankruptcy, military, political, and moral. This was consistently the policy of the Left in the years 1919–39."

"The second principle is that a nation should know what its interests are and should then ascertain what military power is required to defend them. A nation which fails to do this does not thereby escape the necessity of fighting for its legitimate interests; it only ensures that when it does have to fight it will not have the power to fight successfully. The Left consistently denied this principle. The argument used amounted to the pretence that the protection by fair means of a legitimate interest was not a moral or righteous purpose in foreign policy. This delusion is based on the double fallacy of supposing that interests are always immoral things which it is wrong to defend and of supposing that interests which are not defended by those who possess them will ever be preserved by anyone else. To this day this fallacy permeates nearly all left-wing propaganda in domestic and foreign policy alike."

"[W]e have always been determined to prevent a combination of forces hostile to ourselves and to separate such a combination when it has arisen; we have always resisted the domination of Europe by a single power, since such domination would cause us to live in a state of armed peace in order to prevent a sudden descent on our shores."

"The period immediately after the war came to an end with the French occupation of the Ruhr. Only Lord Rothermere ran a series of articles entitled "Hats off to France". The Left was furious. Even the moderate Right would not co-operate. Yet if one thing is certain, it is clear that the occupation of the Ruhr was justified by the event. Germany had defaulted in her payments, claimed inability to pay. The French occupied the Ruhr, took over the coal mines, and worked them as a security for the debt. The Germans retaliated with their first inflation and with an attempt at a general strike. They tried to pretend that the inflation was involuntary. We now know better than that. When it was decided to reverse the policy Dr. Schacht put an end to the inflation in a matter of forty-eight hours. The general strike failed. The French occupied the Ruhr for a period of nine months. At the end of this time Germany capitulated, and the French had won. The six years succeeding this decisive event (1923–9) were the only peaceful years the Continent really knew between the wars. Whatever might be said by the friends of Germany the occupation of the Ruhr was a success."

"To our refusal to accept the French view of German duplicity and to our failure to regard the peace treaties as binding, many of our present troubles are due."

"The Manchurian incident was the direct result of the London Conference negotiated by the Labour Government in 1930 under which the pacifist MacDonald and the almost wholly ignorant Henderson agreed to scrap five more battleships on behalf of Britain, induced American to scrap three, but failed to persuade the Japanese to scrap more than one. This agreement, which was hailed as a triumph for disarmament, was in reality the cause of the break-up of peace in the Far East, and the partial cause of our weakness against Italy in 1936. The responsibility for this lies with the Labour leaders and the party which supported them."

"The whole position is a crystal clear example of the proposition that commitments and power must be balanced. Failure to balance them leads to bankruptcy, moral, political, and diplomatic. Neither Britain nor America was capable of paying the debt of honour. Why? Not because we did not support the League. Not because we did not believe in collective security. Not because we loved the Japanese. The reason is much simpler. Years of pacifism, disarmament, and false economy had deprived us of the power to do so."

"[T]he Disarmament Conference met early in 1932. Under the Presidency of good Arthur Henderson, whose Naval Disarmament Conference in London had been such a success for the Japanese, the only fear in the heart of every good Leftist was, of course, that the wicked Tories with their insane love of armaments might sabotage the whole affair."

"Conservatives do not believe that political struggle is the most important thing in life... The simplest among them prefer fox-hunting — the wisest religion."

"The Conservative Party is based on its love of country. "The Conservative Party is national," said Disraeli, "or it is nothing." Britain is the first of our political principles, her honour — by which I mean the fulfillment of her moral purpose — her security, her prosperity."

"Conservatism derives its inspiration and seeks to base its policy on what Conservatives believe to be the underlying unity of all classes of Englishmen, their ultimate identity of interest, their profound similarity of outlook, the common dangers and difficulties they have shared in the past, and with which they are still faced, and the necessity for unity as the true means of meeting them together."

"The nation, not the so-called class struggle, is therefore the base of Conservative political thinking. Harmony, not struggle, is its ruling political objective. The health, security, and prosperity of Britain and of all its people is its first guiding political principle. Conservatives place patriotism at the top of the list of civic virtues."

"The great glory of Britain has not consisted only in her internal policies and constitution. Again and again her blood and treasure has been shed against absolutism on the continent of Europe. Her hatred of absolutism has been impartial as between right and left. Neither Louis XIV, Napoleon, Robespierre, nor Hitler could count Britain amongst their friends. We were not put off by specious and bogus crusades against Bolsheviks or aristocrats. A human being is a human being, and minorities, classes, and small nations have their rights. These are the rights which Britain’s intervention has vindicated again and again. But for Britain, Europe would have reverted to spiritual and political dictatorship long ere this."

"There are few more popular or successful institutions than the British monarchy. There are few more important practical guarantees of the happiness or security of this country or the unity of the Commonwealth than its continuance."

"We, who have seen the collapse of the authority of the French Republic precisely because it lacked the mystique and prestige of the British monarchy, can ill afford to deny the advantage which attends the possession of a traditional, as distinct from a revolutionary, constitution. The one may be more logical; the other appears to keep out the weather more successfully. Conservatives therefore believe, in the main, in the acceptance of established authority, wherever it is found, without enquiring too closely into its documents of title."

"The first stage in the progress of a society from barbarism to civilization has been the creation of a system, always more or less imperfect, in which anarchy and lawlessness have given place to law and order."

"Obviously, here there is nothing of logic; there can be no claim to legitimacy if one goes back far enough. But, historically speaking, the development of large areas of law and order depending upon the authority of some established organ of government has been the means whereby civilization has grown up. It was the same in the ancient as in the modern world, the same in legend as in history. We do not hear of Menes uniting the Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt by any superiority in title or wisdom, and we read how Deioces, the founder of ancient Media, resorted to guile. The title of Rome to the greatest system of ordered government the Western World has known was by arms alone. Legitimacy is only one of the matters which constitute authority, prescription another. Neither is indefeasible, but both in the absence of a stronger claim are to be respected. Constitutional authority remains the first article of a Conservative creed."

"It was the Tory Party which took its stand in the nineteenth century against the principles of laissez faire Liberalism, of which it is now accused by its more ignorant opponents of being the sole inventor and patentee. More still, it did so on what would now be considered the orthodox Socialist ground that capitalism was an ungodly and rapacious scramble for ill-gotten gains, in the course of which the richer appeared to get richer and the poor poorer."

"Being Conservative is only another way of being British."

"A great party is not to be brought down because of a scandal by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar."

"Lord Hailsham: But to try to turn it into a party issue, is really beyond belief contemptible. Robert McKenzie: Do you feel that the others that have spoken out, the Bishops, The Times and so on, have tried to turn it into a party issue? Hailsham: I think you have!"

"If the British public falls for this, I think it would be stark, staring bonkers."

"If you can tell me there are no adulterers on the front bench of the Labour Party you can talk to me about Profumo."

"Moderation is the hallmark of our country and the burden of our Conservative faith. ... [I]n an age of violence the Conservative watchwords must be law, justice, moderation and humanity."

"There is a sense in which all law is nothing more nor less than a gigantic confidence trick."

"No democracy has been defeated by a dictatorship from inside or from out because it has been itself too disciplined. It has been destroyed in the end by force or fraud. It is not strength but weakness which kills democracy. It has been overthrown or it has been taken over. It has not been eroded, or undermined: it is not decisiveness but dither which undermines the prestige and its will to resist. It is not inaction but inability to act that destroys the authority of democratic institutions. It is no use masking anarchy or indecisiveness under the bland names of liberalism and permissiveness."

"Experience shows that at this rate of inflation, democracy cannot survive... A middle-class backlash is inevitable. A populist movement. In the end people will not put up with the law being broken and factions of the workers getting away with it with impunity. People will take control into their own hands, or a strong government will use the public forces to seize control. People will get hurt. Quite likely there will be a lot of violence one way or another. But in the end there is a limit to what middle-class people will tolerate."

"It is an excellent thing that Mr Powell has joined the Ulster Unionists. They have found a new leader to desert, and he a fresh cause to betray."

"It is not a point of which I am much ashamed. Having grown up in the 1930s, I have a hatred of unemployment. The reason why we over-reacted, if over-reacted we did, was because we hoped that, if it could be shown that we were doing our best to deal with avoidable unemployment, the unions would voluntarily restrain their demands and prevent suffering in the community. The truth is that Mr Powell is so intent for personal reasons on ruining Mr Heath that no attack, however violent, however irrational, or however evilly intentioned, is beyond him in his present frame of mind."

"[The Labour Party's leadership is] dominated by rather rootless intellectuals or obviously bourgeois eccentrics like Mr Michael Foot and Mr Wedgwood Benn."

"Until 25 years ago this country, by which I mean the United Kingdom and in particular Great Britain, has I suppose by common consent been one of the most successful human communities ever seen upon the face of this planet. It is notorious but worth reminding ourselves in the present situation that we almost alone, I think absolutely alone, among the peoples of Europe have been immune from foreign invasion, have been practically secure from civil war, have defended the liberties of Europe against one tyranny after another; that we have excelled in peace no less than war; that we pioneered modern industry, and that we led the advance of modern science; that we largely founded modern commerce, and even, to compare what is perhaps ridiculous with the sublime, invented almost every known human recreation and sport, with the possible exceptions of polo and chess. I do not think that these things happened by chance. I believe that they happened because the peoples of these islands had learnt to live together in harmony and to treat the interest of each as the interest of the whole."

"There is the break-up gang, the "Break Up Britain" gang, of the "Scot-Nats." and the "Welsh-Nats.", apparently wishing to strip the assets of the United Kingdom as if it were a kind of shell company and deprive us all of our nation, which is Britain, and perhaps to go back to the days of Flodden or Owen Glendower. There is class divided notoriously against class... There is union against management and there is even union against union: interest against interest—town against country; and even individual against individual. Until we can recapture the spirit of service, perhaps the spirit of sacrifice, certainly the spirit of patriotism, this is to my mind the longer-term and perhaps the more dangerous crisis of the two."

"I believe inflation in that sense and on that scale corrupts a country in its moral as well as in its economic life, undermines law and order and threatens our free institutions."

"What is urgently needed is some limitation on this nominally elected dictatorship. It is here that I join hands with the conventional Bill of Rights enthusiasts, of whom...I am not one."

"We live under an elective dictatorship, absolute in theory if hitherto thought tolerable in practice. How far it is still tolerable is the question I want to raise."

"Nothing has shown so clearly the evils of elective dictatorship as the past few weeks, which had culminated in the Lib–Lab pact."

"I am concerned least we should be accused of being ideologues. This country is practical-minded, and it is a charge we should not find difficult to rebut. We must explain our policies, not by reference to ideological concepts but by reference to practical necessities."

"That he is one of the most brilliant people of his age in England there can be no possible doubt; in my judgment that he is more certainly ear-marked for success than any man I know."

"I had watched Quintin under pressure during the Suez crisis where he had shown admirable calm at the Admiralty in testing circumstances; and while I had some misgivings about his famous "judgement" I felt that he could take on the leadership and the job of Prime Minister, and make a success of it."

"A very able man, Lord Hailsham. I understand that he is going to be promoted as a result of what he is doing here."

"I am beginning to feel that I haven't the strength and that perhaps another leader cd do what I did after Eden left. But it cannot be done by a pedestrian politician. It needs a man with vision and moral strength – Hailsham, not Maudling. Yet the "back-benchers" (poor fools) do not seem to have any idea, except "a young man". Admirable as Maudling is, I doubt if he cd revive our fortunes as well as Hailsham. (I sent H. to Moscow on purpose, to test his powers of negotiation etc. He did very well.)"

"I feel Hogg (with all his absurdities and posturings and emotions) represents what Stanley, and John Loder, and Boothby, and Noel Skelton and I tried to represent from 1924 onwards. Those who clamour for Butler and Home are really not so much shocked by Hogg's oddities as by his honesty. He belongs both to this strange modern age of space and science and to the great past – of classical learning and Christian life. This is what they instinctively dislike."

"He always got the big questions right."

"Hailsham believed deeply in the need to restore the cohesion of society and in the importance of protecting individual freedom. He saw the Common Law, administered by an independent judiciary, as one of the two great bulwarks supporting such protection and strongly resented the attacks made both in and out of Parliament on judges. In 1984, when those attacks were at their most vehement, his ideas never had more direct relevance. His very presence and courage in public life gave some assurance that constitutional democracy would never be overthrown."

"I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still going."

"Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal."

"Concentration alone conquers."

"Silence is the severest criticism."

"How strangely easy difficult things are!"

"Success soon palls. The joyous time is, when the breeze first strikes your sails, and the waters rustle under your bows."

"To make pleasures pleasant, shorten them."

"The first duty towards children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that."

"You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it."

"Women see through and through each other; and often we most admire her whom they most scorn."

"All movement, of every creature, comes from the desire after something better."

"One of the finest sayings in the language is John Foster's "Live mightily.""

"It would not be too much to say that if all drinking of fermented liquors could be done away, crime of every kind would fall to a fourth of its present amount, and the whole tone of moral feeling in the lower order might be indefinitely raised."

"The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose, And the Rose loved one: For who recks the Wind where it blows? Or loves not the Sun?None knew whence the humble Wind stole, Poor sport of the skies: None dreamt that the Wind had a soul In its mournful sighs.O happy Beam, how canst thou prove That bright love of thine? In thy light is the proof of thy love, Thou hast but to shine.How its love can the Wind reveal? Unwelcome its sigh: Mute, mute to the Rose let it steal— Its proof is—to die!"

"Two lives that once part, are as ships that divide When, moment on moment there rushes between    The one and the other, a sea,— Ah, never can fall from the days that have been    A gleam on the years that shall be."

"There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy."

"A good heart is better than all the heads in the world."

"The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self."

"It is not Wisdom, but Ignorance, which teaches men presumption; Genius may be sometimes arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as Knowledge."

"He is certainly a man who bathes and "lives cleanly," (two especial charges preferred against him by Messrs. the Great Unwashed)."

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

"Repent!—that is the idlest word in our language."

"Poverty makes some humble, but more malignant."

"The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells."

"Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature: it makes the proud man meek,—the cheerful, sad,—the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy, fall before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character."

"Fate laughs at probabilities."

"Buy my flowers—O buy—I pray! The blind girl comes from afar; If the earth be as fair as her children say, These flowers her children are!"

"He who has loved often has loved never."

"Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus—it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it."

"There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace."

"The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone."

"Books are waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought."

"There is no anguish like an error of which we feel ashamed."

"When stars are in the quiet skies,  Then most I pine for thee; Bend on me, then, thy tender eyes,  As stars look on the sea!"

"Beauty, thou art twice blessed; thou blessest the gazer and the possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet disposition—a lovely soul—an affectionate nature—will speak in the eyes—the lips—the brows—and become the cause of beauty. On the other hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the world—to be cheerful and serene—to hope and to confide. There is more wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face."

"There is an old age which has more youth of heart than youth itself!"

"When the People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one."

"Castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up."

"Rank is a great beautifier."

"Curse away! And let me tell thee, Beauseant, a wise proverb The Arabs have,—"Curses are like young chickens, And still come home to roost!""

"You speak As one who fed on poetry."

"Love hath no need of words."

"Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword."

"Take away the sword— States can be saved without it!"

"Ambition has no risk."

"In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves For a bright manhood, there is no such word As "fail"."

"Our glories float between the earth and heaven Like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun, And are the playthings of the casual wind."

"When a person's down in the world, I think an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching."

"The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan."

"Little minds give importance to the man who gives importance to nothing."

"Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny."

"To the man who aspires to know, no man who has been the meanest student of knowledge should be unknown."

"Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance."

"We commenced research where modern conjecture closes its faithless wings. And with us, those were the common elements of science which the sages of to-day disdain as wild chimeras, or despair of as unfathomable mysteries."

"Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue."

"Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!"

"Though Hope be a small child, she can carry a great anchor!"

"Night, to the earnest soul, opens the Bible of the Universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is written,—"God is everywhere!""

""It is destiny!"—phrase of the weak human heart! "It is destiny!"—dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admit no destiny! On earth, guides Conscience—in heaven, watches God. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one—to dethrone the other!"

"Light literature,—that grace and flower of human culture, that best philosophy of all, humanizing us with gentle art, making us wise through the humours, elevated through the passions, tender in the affections of our kind."

"The most useless creature that ever yawned at a club, or counted the vermin on his rags under the suns of Calabria, has no excuse for want of intellect. What men want is not talent, it is purpose,—in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labour."

"Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never. While we speak, new worlds are sparkling forth—suns are throwing off their nebulae—nebulae are hardening into worlds. The Almighty proves His existence by creating."

"The brilliant chief, irregularly great, Frank, haughty, rash,— the Rupert of debate!"

"Alone!—that worn-out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing, and grief hath known, Of hope laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!"

"Love gains the shrine when Pity opes the door."

"He never errs who sacrifices self."

"Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common—inquisitiveness. Let childhood have its way, and as it began where genius begins, it may find what genius finds."

"Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read."

"It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is Intensity."

"We cannot think or act, but the soul of some man, who has lived before, points the way. The dead never die."

"Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors."

"It is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself, should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every desire he has links him with others."

"The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs action."

"Believe me that the happiest act of intellect, however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real!"

"Be prepared for either wisdom through joy, or wisdom through grief. Enough that, looking only through the mechanism by which this mortal world is impelled and improved, you know that cruelty is impossible to wisdom."

"The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who, early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius."

"In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern."

"Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light—every eye looking on finds its own."

"Strike from mankind the principle of Faith, and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep."

"My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth."

"A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to consider it when it becomes to-day."

"Life consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning; but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn."

"There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood."

"Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to "the far-away.""

"The good man does good merely by living."

"This demonstrates an energy of exertion, a fecundity of invention, and a readiness of composition rarely to be met with; and when taken in connexion with the unquestionable excellence of several of his works, fairly entitles him to rank as one of the most extraordinary geniuses of the age. He is, undoubtedly, in prose, whether we regard his matter or his style, one of the best of our living writers. His poetry, however, is beneath mediocrity, and cannot but produce in the minds of the thousands who have read his novels with delight, a regret that he should waste his time in putting together such an heterogeneous and unmeaning mass of metre and rhyme as is contained in the "Siamese Twins," and some other of his poems. As a novelist, he is, without doubt, the most popular writer now living."

"You could not have the Victorian Age without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real touchstone of the time."

"Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming comedies about The Caxtons and Kenelm Chillingley; none of his other works have a high literary importance now; with the possible exception of A Strange Story; but his Coming Race is historically interesting as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a weapon of the Socialists."

"Men crowded to the House of Commons to hear the latest performance of "the orator of the century." Epigrams, antithesis, alliteration—all the conscious tricks of the trade—were packed into his ornate harangues, which no one now remembers."

"He Charles Greville] was the vainest being—I don't limit myself to man—that ever existed; and I don't forget Cicero and Lytton Bulwer."

"To complete the tale of my writings at this period, I may add that in 1833, at the request of Bulwer, who was just then completing his England and the English (a work, at that time, greatly in advance of the public mind), I wrote for him a critical account of Bentham's philosophy, a small part of which he incorporated in his text, and printed the rest (with an honourable acknowledgment), as an appendix In this, along with the favourable, a part also of the unfavourable side of my estimation of Bentham's doctrines, considered as a complete philosophy, was for the first time put into print."

"The sensation that is excited in the literary world by the simple announcement of a new work emanating from the pen of the talented E. L. Bulwer, is the precursor of the delight to be experienced by the perusal. Bulwer is the Napoleon of English literature—the great mover of that sphere in which he shines so resplendently—the individual whose magic quill, with one single drop of ink, can make thousands reflect. He is the metaphysician-novelist of England, as de Balzac is the pride of France. His works are not merely everyday books which we throw aside never to resume, after a hasty perusal: they are standard volumes in every library—they may occasionally serve as books of reference—their philosophy raises them to an eminence far above the common tale of interest purposely written to afford a momentary amusement."

"[William Henry] Harrison was speaking to Beckford about Bulwer. "A coxcomb", says Harrison. "Ay," said Beckford, "a cultivated one, and blows double!" Everybody has a spite at Bulwer because the public think him clever, and they don't."

"Lytton is one of the authors upon whose merits the critics have never agreed with the public. He won immense popularity in the face of generally hostile criticism, and even his success failed to obtain a reversal of the judgment. Some of his qualities, however, are incontestable. No English author has displayed more industry, energy, versatility, or less disposition to lapse into slovenliness. His last works are among his best; and though he often tried the experiment of publishing anonymously (as in The Caxtons and The Coming Race), his success showed that his popularity did not depend upon his previous fame."

"Lytton showed courage but hardly discretion in attempting to be more of a poet or philosopher than nature had made him. He had enough talent to convince himself that he had the genius which is above talent. He wrote some excellent verses in the style of Pope, but fancied that he could also be a Spenser. His characters show more shrewdness of observation than imaginative insight, and the stories, while most carefully designed and constructed, show, not creative impulse, but dexterous management and a quick eye for dramatic effect. His curious attempts at the mysterious too often remind us of spirit-rapping rather than excite the thrill of supernatural awe. He scarcely fails, however, unequivocally, unless in his attempts at the humorous or the descriptions of the lower orders. He shows so much ability and such sustained activity of thought that the critic feels some hesitation in disputing too strongly the claims of his admirers, and only regrets that he had not written at least one novel expressing his views of life frankly and vigorously, without aiming at the ideal or at the propitiation of the respectable. It might have been less edifying, but would certainly have been more interesting than his actual achievements."

"As the first Jedi Member of this place, I look forward to the protection under the law that will be provided to me by the Bill"

"Greeks complained vigorously that Macedonia already existed as a region of Greece and so could not be a separate country as well. This seems churlish in the extreme. The Greeks have their own country, their own name and have been showered with financial assistance since joining the EU. These people - the Macedonians - have recently escaped communism and have virtually nothing. And as if Greek pettiness wasn't enough the Albanians tend to dream of incorporating a large slice of FYR Macedonia into a Greater Albania while the Bulgars tend to think of the country as part of a Greater Bulgaria.Yet as far as I could see, the country - and I am determined to call it Macedonia - has a perfect right to exist. The population is overwhelmingly Macedonian, with a distinctive language, culture and history. It is poorer than some of the other old Yugoslav republics, but considerably richer than Albania. The people are civilised, friendly and highly educated. Even my tour guide had an MBA... From now on I will call our esteemed EU partner "the former Ottoman possession of Greece"."

"I am the heir to Blair."

"I joined this party because I believe in freedom. We are the only party believing that if you give people freedom and responsibility, they will grow stronger and society will grow stronger."

"I want you to come with me. We'll be tested, and challenged, but we'll never give up. We'll never turn back. So let the message go out from this conference, a modern compassionate Conservatism is right for our times, right for our party — and right for our country. If we go for it, if we seize it, if we fight for it with every ounce of passion, vigour and energy from now until the next election, nothing and no one can stop us."

"I think it was right to remove Saddam Hussein. I think it was the right decision then and I still think it was right now."

"There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state."

"I want to talk about the future. He was the future once."

"We will reflect the country we aspire to govern, and the sound of modern Britain is a complex harmony, not a male voice choir."

"I think the prospect of bringing back grammar schools has always been wrong and I've never supported it. And I don't think any Conservative government would have done it."

"I am Conservative to the core of my being, as those who know me best will testify."

"Issues that once divided Conservatives from Liberal Democrats are now issues where we both agree. Our attitude to devolution and localisation of power. Iraq. The environment. I'm a liberal Conservative."

"UKIP is sort of a bunch of ... fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly."

"Lots of people call me Dave, my mum calls me David, my wife calls me Dave, I don't really notice what people call me."

"Instead of talking about the things that most people care about, we talked about what we cared about most. While parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life, we were banging on about Europe. As they worried about standards in thousands of secondary schools, we obsessed about a handful of more grammar schools. As rising expectations demanded a better NHS for everyone, we put our faith in opt-out for a few. While people wanted more than anything stability and low mortgage rates, the first thing we talked about was tax cuts."

"Look at me and think of Schwarzenegger."

"When we were first told the extent of Ivan's disability I thought that we would suffer having to care for him but at least he would benefit from our care. Now as I look back I see that it was all the other way round. It was only him that ever really suffered and it was us — Sam, me, Nancy and Elwen — who gained more than I ever believed possible from having and loving such a wonderfully special and beautiful boy."

"Too many twits make a twat."

"It is the next big scandal waiting to happen. It's an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money. I'm talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisors for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism. We believe in market economics, not crony capitalism. So we must be the party that sorts all this out."

"I believe that secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people's worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest. We can't go on like this. I believe it's time we shone the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and forced our politics to come clean about who is buying power and influence."

"I agree with Nick."

"Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp."

"We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror, whether to India or whether to Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world. That is why this relationship is important. It should be a relationship based on a very clear message: that it is not right to have any relationship with groups that are promoting terror. Democratic states that want to be part of the developed world cannot do that. The message to Pakistan from the US and the UK is very clear on that point. The point I was simply making in response to a question is we have to be clear in our dealings with the Pakistanis, as we are and as the Americans are, that it is unacceptable for any support to be given from within Pakistan for any terrorist organisations that export terror. I choose my words very carefully, which is that it is unacceptable for anything to happen within Pakistan that is about supporting terrorism elsewhere."

"In terms of the future, our country has a hung parliament where no party has an overall majority and we have some deep and pressing problems — a huge deficit, deep social problems, a political system in need of reform. For those reasons, I aim to form a proper and full coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. I believe that is the right way to provide this country with the strong, the stable, the good and decent government that I think we need so badly. Nick Clegg and I are both political leaders who want to put aside party differences and work hard for the common good and for the national interest. I believe that is the best way to get the strong government that we need, decisive Government that we need today."

"I came into politics because I love this country, I think its best days still lie ahead and I believe deeply in public service, and I think the service our country needs right now is to face up to our really big challenges, to confront our problems, to take difficult decisions, to lead people through those difficult decisions so that together we can reach better times ahead."

"One of the tasks that we clearly have is to rebuild trust in our political system. Yes, that's about cleaning up expenses, yes, that's about reforming parliament, and yes, it's about making sure people are in control and that the politicians are always their servants and never their masters. But I believe it's also something else — it's about being honest about what government can achieve. Real change is not what government can do on its own, real change is when everyone pulls together, comes together, works together, when we all exercise our responsibilities to ourselves, our families, to our communities and to others. And I want to help try and build a more responsible society here in Britain, one where we don't just ask what are my entitlements but what are my responsibilities, one where we don't ask what am I just owed but more what can I give, and a guide for that society that those that can should and those who can't we will always help. I want to make sure that my Government always looks after the elderly, the frail, the poorest in our country. We must take everyone through us on some of the difficult decisions that we have ahead. Above all it will be a Government that is built on some clear values, values of freedom, values of fairness and values of responsibility. I want us to build an economy that rewards work, I want us to build a society with stronger families and stronger communities and I want a political system that people can trust and look up to once again."

"This is going to be hard and difficult work. The coalition will throw up all sorts of challenges, but I believe together we can provide that strong and stable government that our country needs, based on those values, rebuilding family, rebuilding community, above all, rebuilding responsibility in our country. Those are the things I care about, those are the things that this Government will now start work on doing. Thank you very much."

"Turkey is a secular and democratic state. This is all the more reason to make Turkey feel welcome in Europe... This is something I feel very strongly and very passionately about. Together I want us to pave the road from Ankara to Brussels."

"I will remain your strongest possible advocate for EU membership and for greater influence at the top table of European diplomacy."

"[I want to] pave the road [for Turkey to join the EU], the country is vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our diplomacy"

"Too many people thought ‘I’ve paid my taxes, the state will look after everything’. But citizenship isn’t a transaction – in which you put your taxes in and get your services out. It’s a relationship – you’re part of something bigger than you, and it matters what you think and feel and do. So to get out of the mess we’re in, changing the government is not enough. We need to change the way we think about ourselves, and our role in society. Your country needs you."

"I am very sorry that Andy Coulson has decided to resign as my Director of Communications, although I understand that the continuing pressures on him and his family mean that he feels compelled to do so. Andy has told me that the focus on him was impeding his ability to do his job and was starting to prove a distraction for the Government. During his time working for me, Andy has carried out his role with complete professionalism. He has been a brilliant member of my team and has thrown himself at the job with skill and dedication. He can be extremely proud of the role he has played, including for the last eight months in Government. I wish Andy all the very best for his future, which I am certain will be a successful one."

"I think we should be helping the opposition groups because they want a democratic Libya, they want a future for that country."

"Picture by picture, these criminals are being identified and arrested, and we will not let any phony concerns about human rights get in the way of the publication of these pictures and the arrest of these individuals."

"I do not believe there is a binary choice for Britain that we can either sacrifice the national interest on issue after issue or lose our influence at the heart of Europe's negotiating process. I am absolutely clear that it is possible to be a both a full, committed and influential member of the EU but to stay out of arrangements where they do not protect our interests."

"I think some of these schemes - and I think particularly of the Jimmy Carr scheme - I have had time to read about and I just think this is completely wrong. People work hard, they pay their taxes, they save up to go to one of his shows. They buy the tickets. He is taking the money from those tickets and he, as far as I can see, is putting all of that into some very dodgy tax avoiding schemes. That is wrong. There is nothing wrong with people planning their tax affairs to invest in their pension and plan for their retirement - that sort of tax management is fine. But some of these schemes we have seen are quite frankly morally wrong. The Government is acting by looking at a general anti-avoidance law but we do need to make progress on this. It is not fair on hard working people who do the right thing and pay their taxes to see these sorts of scams taking place."

"This coalition has a clear new year's resolution: to kill off the health and safety culture for good."

"Democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin... Simply asking the British people to carry on accepting a European settlement over which they have had little choice is a path to ensuring that when the question is finally put - and at some stage it will have to be - it is much more likely that the British people will reject the EU. That is why I am in favour of a referendum. I believe in confronting this issue - shaping it, leading the debate. Not simply hoping a difficult situation will go away."

"It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics. I say to the British people: this will be your decision."

"When we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in-or-out choice to stay in the EU on these new terms; or come out altogether. It will be an in/out referendum."

"If we left the European Union, it would be a one-way ticket, not a return"

"Referendum Bill passes first Commons stage, bringing us one step closer to giving the British people a say on Europe."

"I want to talk about the internet, the impact it is having on the innocence of our children, how online pornography is corroding childhood and how, in the darkest corners of the internet, there are things going on that are a direct danger to our children, and that must be stamped out."

"It’s wonderful news from St Mary’s Paddington, and I’m sure that right across the country, and indeed right across the Commonwealth, people will be celebrating and wishing the Royal couple well."

"It is an important moment in the life of our nation, and I suppose above all it is a wonderful moment for a warm and loving couple who have got a brand new baby boy."

"It’s been a remarkable few years for our Royal family - the Royal Wedding captured people’s hearts, the extraordinary and magnificent Jubilee and now this Royal birth. All to a family that has given this nation so much incredible service and they can know that a proud nation is celebrating with them a very proud, happy couple tonight."

"Already London is the biggest centre for Islamic finance outside the . But today our ambition is to go further still. Because I don’t just want London to be a great capital of Islamic finance in the Western world. I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world."

"I know some people look at foreign companies investing in our businesses, financing our infrastructure or taking over our football clubs and ask – shouldn’t we do something to stop it? Well, let me tell you, the answer is “no.”"

"First, for years people have been talking about creating an Islamic bond – or – outside the Islamic world. But it’s just never quite happened. Changing that is a question of pragmatism and political will. And here in Britain we’ve got both. This government wants Britain to become the first sovereign outside the Islamic world to issue an Islamic bond."

"I’m against these aggressive tax avoidance schemes but I’m not just against them, this Government has taken a huge amount of steps to legislate and toughen the laws and go after aggressive tax avoidance schemes for the very simple reason that if people go after these schemes and aggressively avoid tax they’re making it the case that everyone else has to pay higher taxes as a result so I think we should be very clear, tax evasion is illegal and for that you can be prosecuted, you can go to prison for tax evasion. Tax avoidance is in these cases, very aggressive tax avoidance schemes, they are wrong and we should really persuade not to do them and that’s why we have these court cases where the court looks at whether a scheme is really about avoiding tax rather than anything else and the court was very clear in this case."

"Gary Barlow has done a huge amount for the country, he’s raised money for charity, he’s done very well for Children in Need so I’m not sure, the OBE was in respect of that work and what he’s done but clearly what this scheme was was wrong and it’s right that they’re going to pay back the money."

"They are killing and slaughtering thousands of people... they boast of their brutality... they claim to do this in the name of Islam, that is nonsense, Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims, they are monsters."

"I care deeply about those who struggle to get by — but I believe the best thing to do is help them stand on their own two feet. And no, that’s not saying, "You're on your own," but, "We are on your side, helping you be all you can." And I believe in something for something; not something for nothing."

"We are the first party to have a female prime minister, we were the party of the first Jewish prime minister and I know one day, we are going to be the party of the first black or Asian prime minister."

"We are a shining example of a country where multiple identities work. Where you can be Welsh and Hindu and British, Northern Irish and Jewish and British; where you can wear a kilt and a turban; where you can wear a hijab covered in poppies. Where you can support Man Utd, the Windies and Team GB at the same time. Of course, I’d rather you supported West Ham."

"Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice - stability and strong Government with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband."

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'."

"Islamic State (IS) is a perversion of the religion of Islam - a poisonous death cult that poses an existential threat."

"If you are a boy, they will brainwash you, strap bombs to your body and blow you up. If you are a girl, they will enslave and abuse you."

"[On the Calais crisis.] I accept that, because you have got a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs, it's got a growing economy, it's an incredible place to live."

"[e]verything that can be done will be done to make sure our borders are secure and make sure that British holidaymakers are able to go on their holidays"

"We just thought people in Yorkshire hated everyone else, we didn’t realise they hated each other so much."

"I have a simple view, which is the terrorism we faced was wrong, it was unjustifiable, the death and the killing was wrong. It was never justified and people who seek to justify it should be ashamed of themselves."

"I am ready to campaign with all my heart and soul to keep Britain inside a reformed European Union."

"Of course, this extremist ideology is not true Islam. That cannot be said clearly enough. But it is not good enough to say simply that Islam is a religion of peace and then to deny any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists. Why? Because these extremists are self-identifying as Muslims."

"You should not be walking through the lobbies with Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers."

"It was never envisaged that free movement would trigger quite such vast numbers of people moving across our continent. And countries have got to be able to cope with all the pressures that can bring - on our schools, our hospitals and other public services."

"Over generations, we have built something extraordinary in Britain – a successful multi-racial, multi-faith democracy. It’s open, diverse, welcoming – these characteristics are as British as queuing and talking about the weather."

"It is here in Britain where different people, from different backgrounds, who follow different religions and different customs don’t just rub alongside each other but are relatives and friends; husbands, wives, cousins, neighbours and colleagues. It is here in Britain where in one or two generations people can come with nothing and rise as high as their talent allows. It is here in Britain where success is achieved not in spite of our diversity, but because of our diversity."

"As we talk about the threat of extremism and the challenge of integration, we should not do our country down – we are, without a shadow of doubt, a beacon to the world."

"Every one of the communities that has come to call our country home has made Britain a better place."

"I know what a profound contribution Muslims from all backgrounds and denominations are making in every sphere of our society, proud to be both British and Muslim, without conflict or contradiction. ... I know too how much you hate the extremists who are seeking to divide our communities and how you loathe that damage they do."

"What we are fighting, in Islamist extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent its own barbaric realm. And it often backs violence to achieve this aim – mostly violence against fellow Muslims – who don’t subscribe to its sick worldview. But you don’t have to support violence to subscribe to certain intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish. Ideas which are hostile to basic liberal values such as democracy, freedom and sexual equality. Ideas which actively promote discrimination, sectarianism and segregation. Ideas – like those of the despicable far right – which privilege one identity to the detriment of the rights and freedoms of others. And ideas also based on conspiracy: that Jews exercise malevolent power; or that Western powers, in concert with Israel, are deliberately humiliating Muslims, because they aim to destroy Islam. In this warped worldview, such conclusions are reached – that 9/11 was actually inspired by Mossad to provoke the invasion of Afghanistan; that British security services knew about 7/7, but didn’t do anything about it because they wanted to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash. And like so many ideologies that have existed before – whether fascist or communist – many people, especially young people, are being drawn to it. We need to understand why it is proving so attractive."

"The root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself."

"No-one becomes a terrorist from a standing start. It starts with a process of radicalisation. When you look in detail at the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were first influenced by what some would call non-violent extremists."

"The extremist world view is the gateway, and violence is the ultimate destination."

"The adherents of this ideology are overpowering other voices within Muslim debate, especially those trying to challenge it. There are so many strong, positive Muslim voices that are being drowned out."

"For all our successes as multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, we have to confront a tragic truth that there are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain – and who feel little or no attachment to other people here. Indeed, there is a danger in some of our communities that you can go your whole life and have little to do with people from other faiths and backgrounds."

"When groups like ISIL seek to rally our young people to their poisonous cause, it can offer them a sense of belonging that they can lack here at home, leaving them more susceptible to radicalisation and even violence against other British people to whom they feel no real allegiance. ... This is what we face – a radical ideology – that is not just subversive, but can seem exciting; one that has often sucked people in from non-violence to violence; one that is overpowering moderate voices within the debate and one which can gain traction because of issues of identity and failures of integration."

"Let’s not forget our strongest weapon: our own liberal values."

"We are all British. We respect democracy and the rule of law. We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, equal rights regardless of race, sex, sexuality or faith. We believe in respecting different faiths but also expecting those faiths to support the British way of life. These are British values. And are underpinned by distinct British institutions. Our freedom comes from our Parliamentary democracy. The rule of law exists because of our independent judiciary. This is the home that we are building together."

"We should together challenge the ludicrous conspiracy theories of the extremists. The world is not conspiring against Islam; the security services aren’t behind terrorist attacks; our new Prevent duty for schools is not about criminalising or spying on Muslim children. This is paranoia in the extreme."

"We must stand up to those who try to suggest that there is some kind of secret Muslim conspiracy to take over our government, or that Islam and Britain are somehow incompatible. People who say these things are trying to undermine our shared values and make Muslims feel like they don’t belong here, and we will not let these conspiracy theorists win."

"You won’t be some valued member of a movement. You are cannon fodder for them. They will use you. If you are a boy, they will brainwash you, strap bombs to your body and blow you up. If you are a girl, they will enslave and abuse you. That is the sick and brutal reality of ISIL."

"We need to have a total rethink of what we do in our prisons to tackle extremism. And we need our internet companies to go further in helping us identify potential terrorists online. Many of their commercial models are built around monitoring platforms for personal data, packaging it up and selling it on to third parties. And when it comes to doing what’s right for their business, they are happy to engineer technologies to track our likes and dislikes. But when it comes to doing what’s right in the fight against terrorism, we too often hear that it’s all too difficult."

"As we do all of this work to counter the Islamist extremist ideology, let’s also recognise that we will have to enter some pretty uncomfortable debates – especially cultural ones. Too often we have lacked the confidence to enforce our values, for fear of causing offence. The failure in the past to confront the horrors of forced marriage I view as a case in point. So is the utter brutality of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)."

"We need more co-ordinated efforts to drive this out of our society. More prosecutions. No more turning a blind eye on the false basis of cultural sensitivities."

"There are other examples of this passive tolerance of practices running totally contrary to our values. The failure of social services, the police and local authorities, to deal with child sex abuse in places like Rotherham was frankly unforgiveable."

"Look what happened in Tower Hamlets, in the heart of our capital city. We had political corruption on an epic scale: with voters intimidated and a court adjudicating on accusations of ‘undue spiritual influence’ for the first time since the 19th century. As the judge said: those in authority were too afraid to ‘confront wrongdoing for fear of allegations of racism’. Well this has got to stop."

"As we counter this ideology, a key part of our strategy must be to tackle both parts of the creed – the non-violent and violent. This means confronting groups and organisations that may not advocate violence – but which do promote other parts of the extremist narrative."

"We’ve got to show that if you say “yes I condemn terror – but the are inferior”, or “violence in London isn’t justified, but suicide bombs in Israel are a different matter” – then you too are part of the problem. Unwittingly or not, and in a lot of cases it’s not unwittingly, you are providing succour to those who want to commit, or get others to commit to, violence."

"I find it remarkable that some groups say “We don’t support ISIL” as if that alone proves their anti-extremist credentials. And let’s be clear Al-Qaeda don’t support ISIL. So we can’t let the bar sink to that level. Condemning a mass-murdering, child-raping organisation cannot be enough to prove you’re challenging the extremists."

"We must demand that people also condemn the wild conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism, and the sectarianism too. Being tough on this is entirely keeping with our values. We should challenge every part of the hateful ideology spread by neo-Nazis."

"We need to put out of action the key extremist influencers who are careful to operate just inside the law, but who clearly detest British society and everything we stand for. These people aren’t just extremists. There are despicable far right groups too. And what links them all is their aim to groom young people and brainwash their minds."

"Universities are bastions of free speech and incubators of new and challenging ideas. But sometimes they fail to see the creeping extremism on their campuses. When David Irving goes to a university to deny the Holocaust – university leaders rightly come out and condemn him. They don’t deny his right to speak but they do challenge what he says. But when an Islamist extremist goes there to promote their poisonous ideology, too often university leaders look the other way through a mixture of misguided liberalism and cultural sensitivity."

"I want to say something to the National Union of Students. When you choose to ally yourselves with an organisation like CAGE, which called a “beautiful young man” and told people to “support the jihad” in Iraq and Afghanistan, it really does, in my opinion, shame your organisation and your noble history of campaigning for justice."

"This extremist ideology is not true Islam. I have said it myself many, many times, and it’s absolutely right to do so. And I’ll say it again today. But simply denying any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremists doesn’t work, because these extremists are self-identifying as Muslims. ... It is an exercise in futility to deny that. And more than that, it can be dangerous. To deny it has anything to do with Islam means you disempower the critical reforming voices; the voices that are challenging the fusing of religion and politics; the voices that want to challenge the scriptural basis which extremists claim to be acting on; the voices that are crucial in providing an alternative worldview that could stop a teenager’s slide along the spectrum of extremism."

"The extremists are the ones who have the money, the leaders, the iconography and the propaganda machines. We need to turn the tables."

"We can’t stand neutral in this battle of ideas. We have to back those who share our values."

"It’s only the extremists who divide people into good Muslims and bad Muslims, by forcing their warped doctrine onto fellow Muslims and telling them that it is the only way to believe."

"I know that for as long as injustice remains – be it with racism, discrimination or sickening Islamophobia - you may feel there is no place for you in Britain. But I want you to know: there is a place for you and I will do everything I can to support you."

"As well as tackling isolation, there is one other area we must look at if we are to build a truly cohesive society – and that is segregation. It cannot be right, for example, that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths. That doesn’t foster a sense of shared belonging and understanding – it can drive people apart."

"The government needs to start asking searching questions about social housing, to promote integration, to avoid segregated social housing estates where people living there are from the same single minority ethnic background. Similarly in education, while overall segregation in schooling is declining, in our most divided communities, the education that our young people receive is actually even more segregated than the neighbourhoods they live in."

"Many faith schools achieve excellent results and I’m the first to support the great education they provide. I chose one for my own children. Today I visited King David’s school, a Jewish school here in Birmingham where the majority of children are from faith backgrounds."

"This is how I believe we can win the struggle of our generation. Countering the extremist ideology by standing up and promoting our shared British values. Taking on extremism in all its forms – both violent and non-violent. Empowering those moderate and reforming voices who speak for the vast majority of Muslims that want to reclaim their religion. And addressing the identity crisis that some young people feel by bringing our communities together and extending opportunity to all."

"Britain has never been cowed by fear or hatred or terror. Our Great British resolve faced down Hitler; it defeated Communism; it saw off the IRA’s assaults on our way of life. Time and again we have stood up to aggression and tyranny."

"We have refused to compromise on our values or to give up our way of life. And we shall do so again. Together we will defeat the extremists and build a stronger and more cohesive country, for our children, our grandchildren and for every generation to come."

"It is a complex subject: the Muslim Brotherhood comprises both a transnational network, with links in the UK, and national organisations in and outside the Islamic world. The movement is deliberately opaque, and habitually secretive."

"The Muslim Brotherhood’s foundational texts call for the progressive moral purification of individuals and Muslim societies and their eventual political unification in a Caliphate under Sharia law. To this day the Muslim Brotherhood characterises Western societies and liberal Muslims as decadent and immoral. It can be seen primarily as a political project."

"Parts of the Muslim Brotherhood have a highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism. Both as an ideology and as a network it has been a rite of passage for some individuals and groups who have gone on to engage in violence and terrorism. It has stated its opposition to al-Qaida (AQ) but it has never credibly denounced the use made by terrorist organisations of the work of Sayyid Qutb, one of the Brotherhood’s most prominent ideologues. Individuals closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK have supported suicide bombing and other attacks in Israel by Hamas, an organisation whose military wing has been proscribed in the UK since 2001 as a terrorist organisation, and which describes itself as the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood."

"Aspects of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and activities therefore run counter to British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, equality and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. The Muslim Brotherhood is not the only movement that promotes values which appear intolerant of equality and freedom of faith and belief. Nor is it the only movement or group dedicated in theory to revolutionising societies and changing existing ways of life. But I have made clear this government’s determination to reject intolerance, and to counter not just violent Islamist extremism, but also to tackle those who create the conditions for it to flourish."

"Because of Britain's generous in-work benefits system, a graduate from the Czech Republic could be financially better off stacking shelves in a supermarket in Britain rather than undertaking skilled work in the Czech Republic. That doesn't make sense for Britain or for the Czech Republic."

"If he came to visit our country, I think he would unite us all against him."

"I believe that Britain will be safer, stronger and better off by remaining in a reformed European Union"

"If an EU migrant's child is living abroad, then they should receive no child benefit or child tax credit, no matter how long they have worked in the UK and no matter how much tax they have paid"

"I would say to Boris what I say to everybody else which is that we will be safer, we'll be stronger, we'll be better off inside the EU. I think the prospect of you know linking arms with Nigel Farage and George Galloway and taking a leap into the dark is the wrong step for our country and if Boris and if others really care about being able to get things done in our world then the EU is one of the ways in which we get them done."

"[Leaving the European Union] could hurt working people for years to come"

"[Having to negotiate new trading rules from scratch would lead to a long period of unacceptable uncertainty for British business.] Seven years of not knowing what the arrangements would be for trading with Europe... Seven years of uncertainty for businesses wanting to invest in Britain not knowing what our relationship with Britain would be. They cannot be justified. They cannot be in our national interest. We should reject that out of hand."

"I make no apology for the fact that we are sending to every household in this country this leaflet, which sets out what the government's view is and why we come to that view. We're not neutral in this. We think it would be a bad decision to leave - for the economy, jobs, investment, family finances and universities."

"It has not been a great week. I know that I should have handled this better, I could have handled this better. I know there are lessons to learn and I will learn them. Don't blame Number 10 Downing Street or nameless advisers, blame me... I want to be open. [...] I was obviously very angry about what people were saying about my dad. I loved my dad, I miss him every day... He was a wonderful father and I'm very proud of everything he did. But I mustn't let that cloud the picture. The facts are these: I bought shares in a unit trust, shares that are like any other sorts of shares and I paid taxes on them in exactly the same way. I sold those shares. In fact, I sold all the shares that I owned, on becoming prime minister. [...] Later on I will be publishing the information that goes into my tax return, not just for this year but the years gone past because I want to be completely open and transparent about these things. I will be the first prime minister, the first leader of a major political party, to do that and I think it is the right thing to do."

"If there is one constant in the ebb and flow of our island story, it is the character of the British people."

"Above all we are obstinately practical, rigorously down-to-earth, natural debunkers. We approach issues with a cast of mind rooted in common sense, we're rightly suspicious of ideology and sceptical of grand schemes and grandiose promises."

"You shouldn't try to hold an independent sovereign nation in an organisation against its will."

"isolationism has never served this country well"

"Nine out of 10 economists say there'll be a profound shock if we leave the EU. That means there will be less money - not more. It's also why so many doctors and nurses support remaining in the EU."

"An EU exit would put a bomb under our economy"

"The right thing to do is to fight for a great Britain in the EU and not take the Little England option of Nigel Farage"

"our economy would be smaller [if the UK left the single market]"

"If we restrict our access [to the single market] we will be less well off and that obviously affects what we can spend on our public services,"

"It is deeply concerning that the Leave campaign is criticising the independent Bank of England. We should listen to experts when they warn us of the dangers to our economy of leaving the European Union."

"[leaving the EU and the single market is] not the right way to control immigration"

"The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected"

"I have also always believed that we have to confront big decisions, not duck them. That is why we delivered the first coalition government in 70 years, to bring our economy back from the brink."

"I will do everything I can as Prime Minister to steady the ship over the coming weeks and months but I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination."

"Britain is a special country. We have so many great advantages: a Parliamentary democracy where we resolve great issues about our future through peaceful debate; a great trading nation, with our science and arts, our engineering and our creativity, respected the world over. And while we are not perfect, I do believe we can be a model for the multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, where people can come and make a contribution and rise to the very highest that their talent allows."

"It might be in my party's interest for him to sit there, it's not in the national interest and I would say, for heaven's sake man, go."

"while Britain is leaving the European Union, it will not, it should not and in my view it won't turn its back on Europe"

"Thank you very much. Doo, doo, doo, doo. Right."

"The last thing I would say is that you can achieve a lot of things in politics and get a lot of things done; in the end, public service and the national interest is what it is all about. Nothing is really impossible if you put your mind to it. After all, as I once said, I was the future once."

"[A strong election victory would allow Theresa May to] stand up to people who want an extreme Brexit either here or in Brussels"

"Brexit turned out less badly than we first thought. [The Leave vote was] a mistake not a disaster."

"[I regret the] difficulties and the problems we've been having trying to implement the [Brexit] result"

"I hope [Theresa May] wins the vote tonight, I'm sure she will. I hope then that Parliament can come together and find an alternative partnership agreement with the European Union, that's the right way forward, that's what her deal was about last night and she has my support as she does this."

"The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail"

"Today’s decision on HS2 is the wrong one. It will help to fuel the views of those who argue that we can no longer think or act for the long term as a country; that we are heading in the wrong direction. [...] I regret this decision and in years to come I suspect many will look back at today’s announcement and wonder how this once-in-a-generation opportunity was lost."

"The Prime Minister has asked me to serve as his Foreign Secretary and I have gladly accepted. We are facing a daunting set of international challenges, including the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East. At this time of profound global change, it has rarely been more important for this country to stand by our allies, strengthen our partnerships and make sure our voice is heard. While I have been out of front-line politics for the last seven years, I hope that my experience – as Conservative Leader for eleven years and Prime Minister for six – will assist me in helping the Prime Minister to meet these vital challenges."

"[On his appointment as foreign secretary] I said yes surprisingly quickly actually, because I wasn't expecting it at all."

"When you are PM you are doing so many things at once. It's nice to focus on one thing, even if that one thing is the whole world!"

"He [Nigel Farage] is currently trying to destroy the Conservative Party by standing for Reform. [...] I want to be as sure as we can that we get no Reform members of parliament and the Conservative Party can move forward."

"[W]hat I want is robust policy and measured language. I think with these populists what you get is inflammatory language and hopeless policy."

"Hug a hoodie."

"He wants a Bill of Rights for Britain drafted by a Committee of Lawyers. Have you ever tried drafting anything with a Committee of Lawyers?"

"I'm sure he's got a very great many merits, but thus far they've been fairly effectively concealed from public view."

"There is nothing to him. He is like a hollow Easter egg with no bag of sweets inside."

"It seems to me he has lost the art of communication; but not, alas, the gift of speech."

"I'm all for apprenticeships, but this is no time for a novice."

"So what's happened to that twat David Cameron, who called it on? Let's be fair, how comes he can scuttle off? He called all this on, yeah, he called it on, where is he? He's in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up, yeah, where is the geezer? I think he should be held account for it. He should be held account for it. Twat."

"He seems content-free to me. Never had a job, except in PR, and it shows. People ask, "What do you think of him?" and my answer is: "He doesn't make me think.""

"As Europe struggled to recover from recession, in 2015 the British prime minister David Cameron tossed Brussels a grenade. He said he would hold a referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership the following year. The torch of British Euroscepticism had passed from left to right. It was now Conservatives rather than Labour who were most anti-European. Cameron’s attempts to appease his ‘leave’ voters by negotiating reforms to the EU were dismissed by the ever cautious Merkel and, in June 2016, to Cameron’s surprise and dismay, the British electorate voted narrowly to leave the EU. The vote was taken as binding by the government. The date decided by Parliament for departure was March 2019."

"His premiership will be defined, like Anthony Eden's, by a single disastrous decision. Unlike the Suez debacle, however, Cameron's misjudgement has caused a rupture not just with Britain's most important ally but with all our allies simultaneously."

"Cameron is a politician of principle and talent who bequeaths to his successor a legacy of constitutional crisis, diplomatic isolation and economic danger. The provisional judgment on his premiership must, in the circumstances, be that it is pure failure."

"Even Dick Turpin had the decency to wear a mask when he robbed people."

"As I said the first time I came to London as President, for the G-20 summit, the days are gone when Roosevelt and Churchill could sit in a room and solve the world's problems over a glass of brandy, although I'm sure that Prime Minister Cameron would agree that some days we could both use a stiff drink. In this century, our joint leadership will require building new partnerships, adapting to new circumstances, and remaking ourselves to meet the demands of a new era."

"Part of Cameron's problem is that he was excessively influenced by his experience of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, when he put his premiership on the line for another knife-edge, in/out, winner-take-all vote, and won. But the Brexit referendum was different and in refusing to acknowledge the differences he ended up losing everything. As far as I can see, two things went wrong. In one crucial respect, Cameron failed to follow the formula that served him so well in Scotland. Separately, he failed to appreciate that an in/out vote, which suited his purposes in Scotland, was a big mistake for the question of EU membership. This mistake didn't just cost Cameron his political career. It cost the country its political sanity."

"He struck me as the type of guy who would stand at the back of the dance hall and just move his shoulders. He has got no rhythm. He looked like the kind of guy who would be an embarrassing uncle."

"She behaves with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor"

"She is a half-mad old bag lady. The Finchley Whinger."

"...so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying"

"He was a fairly competent chairman of Housing [on Lambeth Council]. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, "What on earth is Councillor Major doing?" I can't believe he's here and sometimes I think he can't either."

"Since the great days of Jimmy Greaves, it's the only time anyone's managed to score five times in a Chelsea shirt."

"To make matters worse, they have elected a foetus as the party leader. I bet a lot of them wish they had not voted against abortion now!"

"That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and live-saving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude towards these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again."

"I have gone to a safe house, as they say, so I might as well have a different name"

"I found it intellectually numbing, tedious in the extreme. All you were was a sort of high-powered social worker and perhaps not even a good one. So I won't miss that."

"Living proof that a pig's bladder on the end of a stick can be elected to Parliament"

"At one point Portillo was polishing his jackboots and planning the next advance. And the next thing is he shows up as a TV presenter. It is rather like Pol Pot presenting the Teletubbies."

"I think my exact words were "Fuck me!""

"We'll look back and wonder who were these barbarous people, just like we look back at those who supported bull-baiting"

"Personally I wish the police had truncheoned the English fans to death, but I can’t really say that on the record."

"I am finding the inherent politeness of this place quite destabilising. Having come from a House where politeness is about as rare as an orderly queue at a London bus stop, the culture shock on entering your Lordships' House has been profound. Indeed, such relentless politeness is not merely destabilising, but positively exhausting."

"I could have been a serious athlete, only to have my promise cut short when I discovered Woodbines and women. Thankfully I have long since given up the former, and the latter have long since given up on me—except, of course, for the lovely Lady Stratford, who for reasons beyond my comprehension still tolerates my presence."

"More people have probably died from eating dodgy Chinese food than contracting some form of avian flu. The last thing we want is for the Daleks from Defra to start suggesting that they want to exterminate wildlife—as is their normal response when confronted with such a problem. We do not want any proposal that migrating birds are going to be destroyed because of alarmist figures and notions that appear in the Tory press."

"If champagne ever wanted cheering up, it would drink Tony Banks."

"...one of the most charismatic politicians in Britain, a true man of the people."

"After all there is the two edged sword that will never fail you, with enthusiasm for one of its edges and irony for the other. However mired and weedy be the current of life there will be always joy and loyalty enough left to keep you unwavering in the faith that politics is not as it seems in clouded moments, a mere gabble and squabble of selfish interests, but that it is the State in action. And the State is the name by which we call the great human conspiracy against hunger and cold, against loneliness and ignorance; the State is the foster-mother and warden of the arts, of love, of comradeship, of all that redeems from despair that strange adventure which we call human life."

""The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he..." [Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, Putney Debates 1647] This is one Liberal Text. And it is more distinctive than may at first appear. It asserts the individual and the value of any individual - even the poorest He. But it asserts it without envy. It does not demand that the rich be made poor - nor even claim that the poor are more deserving than the rich. It demands equality in one thing only, the right to live one's own life."

"Our long-term objective is clear: to replace the Labour Party as the progressive wing of politics in this country."

"Neither the Government nor the local authorities make any wealth or have any money of their own. If we want them to spend more and more we have to pay. The remedy is in our hands. Stop running to them asking them to do this, that and everything under the sun - and demand instead that they stop doing and spending so much."

"In bygone days, commanders were taught that when in doubt, they should march their troops towards the sound of gunfire. I intend to march my troops towards the sound of gunfire."

"After listening to the debate on unemployment I can see a danger that Liberals lose to the Tories their claim to have new and sensible ideas and are left saying "Me too" to a Socialist conventional wisdom which is failing...The salient need of this country—to produce more and much more efficiently—hardly figured on the agenda."

"Why do I—the original advocate of realignment on the Left—object to the Lib-Lab pact? Precisely because I do not think it will lead to realignment. For one thing, the Gaitskellites have fled the field. The Labour Party looks and behaves more and more as the servants of the trade union leaders...When the election comes, either the Labour Party win—and if that happens they will say "Thank you very much" to us and go on with more collectivism—or they lose, and we shall be tarred with their failure...Don't let us become oysters to Carpenter Jim, however genuinely benevolent he may seem."

"The root objection to the pact is the nature of the Labour Party. It is not liberal. It is not becoming more liberal. The social democrats remain ineffective, or sneak off, after preaching equality to everyone else, to some of the highest-paid jobs open to the British. As a final spectacle of degradation, they are to be seen intimidating the Grunwick workers...The Labour Party remains without principle, clinging to office, paid by the trades unions, and with an anti-democratic Marxist wing. The pact, I fear, is having no effect on the nature of that party."

"10 per cent inflation is not heaven and the factors are all still there to push it up much further next year. Nor has the Government any policy adequate to deal with unemployment. It is not capitalism that is in crisis. It is Socialism that is in collapse. The faith has vanished. The principles are shattered. It won't do for Liberals merely to say they will put on the brakes. Even if you slow down the Gadarene swine, they will go over the precipice eventually."

"The state owned monopolies are among the greatest millstones round the neck of the economy...Liberals must stress at all times the virtues of the market, not only for efficiency but to enable the widest possible choice...Much of what Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph say and do is in the mainstream of liberal philosophy."

"We should not delude ourselves into thinking that an incomes policy is other than a serious infringement of freedom...Nor have the Liberals explained how it is to be worked, and even if they had, it is certainly not a permanent answer to our economic troubles...At present, the Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance occasionally looks too much like a half-way house on the old road to state socialism. It will spend more than the Tories but rather less than Labour...Such compromises may win votes, but they will not improve the country."

"Now the employer is to be told that if the unions force him to pay exorbitant wages or go out of business if he tries to continue, he will be taxed. The unions will escape any punishment. The employer will not be allowed to increase employment by paying lower wages nor to attract good labour by paying higher wages. We shall have another huge department to supervise the whole operation...an incomes policy is minted in the thinking of 1945."

"The Liberal Party doesn't seem to know in its mind what to do about it—its ostensible view is that the mix of the mixed economy must be left as it is. This seems to be a slightly doubtful proposition...We have to reduce the public sector, the state-run sector, and hand it over to other bodies. The economy is probably unmanageable so long as the state attempts to do so much. The Liberals have not given nearly enough thought to the question of the bureaucracy of the state, what is suitable for the state to run...I personally agree with the SDP line, not with that of the Liberal unilateralists. I want to remain in NATO and I believe that a deterrent is essential and it promotes peace...I would not support unilateral disarmament either on moral or practical grounds."

"Chartism] might have become purely proletarian—in which case there would always have been a tendency towards revolution—or it might have progressed by a middle and working class alliance—in which case a pacific policy was almost essential. In fact...the extremists undermined the case of the moderates and the moderates queered the pitch of the extremists. Nevertheless it is unlikely, even if their respective fields had been clear, that either could have succeeded."

"The success of the middle class alliance depended on the acceptance by the working class element of middle class leadership and middle class ideas."

"The destruction of this inequality, the creating and maintaining of a society in which it cannot exist becomes the essential and direct purpose of all Socialist activity."

"[T]he fundamental objective and criterion by which policy must be judged [is] the achievement of Economic Equality... [W]ithout it Labour policy becomes merely opportunist, distinguishable only from the policies of other parties by the suggestion of attractive means to 'Prosperity', a greater humanitarianism, and, as some would have it, far less favourable circumstances in which to take action... A failure to advance in the direction of that ideal [of social justice] is bound to appear little short of betrayal."

"I was a witness of two civil wars and their ghastly and tragic consequences, and I learnt, as never before, to value the freedom of British political traditions."

"It must be admitted that politically communism is the same [as fascism]."

"Socialists should understand that it is their duty to do anything in their power directly or indirectly to assist the revolutionary opposition within fascist countries."

"So long as production is left to the uncontrolled decisions of private individuals, conducted, guided and inspired by the motive of profit, so long will Poverty, Insecurity and Injustice continue."

"Fascism has become the last defence of a crumbling economic system. It is the last bulwark of Capitalism."

"While prepared to fight for the democratic ideals as such and for the ideal of collective security as such there is little to attract us in fighting merely to preserve the territorial integrity of the British Empire."

"Peace can only be secured by re-establishing the rule of law in international affairs...neither a neo-nationalism nor a cowardly surrender to Fascism will be accepted by the vast mass of our people. For the moment rearmament is also essential...the scandalous gaps in our defences have become a byword."

"I want to say a word about industrial relations in this industry. This takes my mind back nearly 20 years when, fresh from the University, inexperienced but keen, I started my earning career by lecturing in a small mining town... That was in 1927 just after the end of the coal strike. I do not know that I taught the miners much in the way of economics, but they taught me a great deal. They taught me what economic feudalism was. They taught me what the naked exercise of arbitrary economic power meant. They taught me what it was to be victimised... They taught me what was the reality of economic life."

"Between the wars, the heavy unemployment in Great Britain and keenly competitive conditions abroad were factors which had to be taken into account in wage negotiations. Employers were afraid that higher wages, by adding to their costs, would make it more difficult for them to sell their goods, especially in export markets. If this happened unemployment would increase and workers' representatives had to bear this in mind also. The larger the number of unemployed, also, the more difficult it was to maintain full workers' solidarity, i.e. an employer could resist a strike, and make cuts in wages more easily the more workers were out of work. Thus in the last resort it was the existence of heavy unemployment, at home and abroad, which allowed employers to resist wage claims and discouraged workers from pressing them too far."

"Conditions have greatly changed in Great Britain since the end of the war owing to the existence of full employment. Negotiations about wages between the two sides of industry now take place in entirely different circumstances. There is no reserve of labour to compete for jobs. ... If wages rise faster than productivity the increases in cost can usually be passed on in increased selling prices. There is thus in the economic system very much less check on the upward movement of money wages. ... [I]f wages at home rise unchecked, it is more likely in general that exports will gradually cease to be competitive and there will be balance of payments difficulties. These can be met, in the end, by devaluation. A succession of devaluations completely undermines confidence in any currency. ... It is clear that a very difficult problem faces a country such as ours, which wishes to maintain full employment and yet to avoid the undoubted evils of rising prices and balance of payments difficulties abroad."

"In recent years, hours of work have been reduced, holidays have been increased, the age of entry into employment has gone up, and above all, our general health and expectation of life as a people have markedly improved. It is a natural corollary of these changes that we should work longer and retire later."

"I am not easily roused to anger but I must say that this latest cry to cut back the spending of worse off people to cure a crisis mostly caused by too much spending by better off people is intolerable."

"I just cannot share this Gandhi outlook... If people have more money to spend they may, it is true, gamble or smoke or drink it away. But a lot of them will also enjoy nicer holidays, which is a very good thing for them. We really must keep under control, and pretty strict control, the area within which "the man in Whitehall knows best"."

"I am a Socialist and have been for some 30 years. I became a Socialist quite candidly not so much because I was a passionate advocate of public ownership but because at a very early age I came to hate and loathe social injustice, because I disliked the class structure of our society, because I could not tolerate the indefensible differences of status and income which disfigure our society...because I hated poverty and squalor... Pay people more if they do harder, more dangerous, and even more responsible work; pay people more if they have larger families. But the rewards should not be, as they still are, dependent upon the accident of whether you happen to be born of wealthy parents or not... I am a Socialist because I want to see fellowship, or if you prefer it, fraternity...[while preserving] the liberties we cherish. I want to see all this not only in our country but over the world as a whole. These to me are the Socialist ideals. Nationalisation...is a vital means, but it is only one of the means by which we can achieve these objects."

"We cannot forget that Colonel Nasser has repeatedly boasted of his intention to create an Arab empire from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. The French Prime Minister, M. Mollet, the other day quoted a speech of Colonel Nasser's and rightly said that it could remind us only of one thing—of the speeches of Hitler before the war."

"The fact is that this episode must be recognised as part of the struggle for the mastery of the Middle East. That is something which I do not feel that we can ignore. One may ask, "Why does it involve the rest of the Middle East?" It is because of the prestige issues which are involved here. ... [P]restige has quite considerable effects. If Colonel Nasser's prestige is put up sufficiently and ours is put down sufficiently, the effects of that in that part of the world will be that our friends desert us because they think we are lost, and go over to Egypt."

"I have no doubt myself that the reason why Colonel Nasser acted in the way that he did, aggressively, brusquely, suddenly, was precisely because he wanted to raise his prestige in the rest of the Middle East. ... He wanted to challenge the West and to win. He wanted to assert his strength. He wanted to make a big impression. Quiet negotiation, discussion around a table about nationalising the Company would not produce this effect. It is all very familiar. It is exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war."

"All I can say is that in taking this decision the Government, in the view of Her Majesty's Opposition, have committed an act of disastrous folly whose tragic consequences we shall regret for years. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes, all of us will regret it, because it will have done irreparable harm to the prestige and reputation of our country."

"I don't believe the present Prime Minister can carry out this policy. His policy this last week has been disastrous and he is utterly, utterly discredited in the world. Only one thing now can save the reputation and honour of our country. Parliament must repudiate the Government's policy. The Prime Minister must resign."

"It is wholly untrue that I deplored the strategy of the [general] strike. I did not honestly think a great deal about it. I knew that once the chips were down my part was on the side of the strike. I considered the Government had behaved badly to the miners and that was that."

"You can be assured of this. There will be no increase in the standard or other rates of income tax under the Labour Government so long as normal peacetime conditions continue."

"I conclude that we should make two things clear to the country. First, that we have no intention of abandoning public ownership and accepting for all time the present frontiers of the public sector. Secondly, that we regard public ownership not as an end in itself but as a means—and not necessarily the only or the most important one to certain ends—such as full employment, greater equality and higher productivity. We do not aim to nationalise every private firm or to create an endless series of State monopolies. While we shall certainly wish to extend social ownership, in particular directions, as circumstances warrant, our goal is not 100% State ownership. Our goal is a society in which Socialist ideals are realised. Our job is to move towards this as fast as we can. The pace at which we can go depends on how quickly we can persuade our fellow citizens to back us. They will only do this if we pay proper attention to the kind of people they are and the kind of things they want."

"Clause Four] lays us open to continual misrepresentation... It implies that we propose to nationalise everything, but do we? Everything?—the whole of light industry, the whole of agriculture, all the shops—every little pub and garage? Of course not. We have long ago come to accept...a mixed economy... [the]... view of 90 per cent of the Labour Party—had we not better say so instead of going out of our way to court misrepresentation?"

"It was on account of the [General] Strike that I first came to know Douglas and Margaret. I had been reading some socialist theory as well as economics—Tawney, the Webbs, Marx (about half of volume i of Das Kapital), J. A. Hobson, Hugh Dalton, but I did not at that time follow day-to-day politics at all closely. Thus for me, as I think for many others, the impact of the Strike was sharp and sudden, a little like a war, in that everybody's lives were suddenly affected by a new unprecedented situation, which forced us to abandon plans for pleasure, to change our values and adjust our priorities. Above all we had to make a choice. And how we chose was a clear test of our political outlook. The vast majority of undergraduates [at Oxford University] went off to unload ships and drive trams or lorries. For me this was out of the question. All my sympathies were instinctively on the side of the miners, the unions, the Labour Party, and the Left generally. It was their cause I wanted to help."

"For my part, I hold that the central idea of British Socialism is the brotherhood of man. It is this rather than public ownership which surely inspires all our aims in foreign, colonial, social, and economic policies alike. It is this which inspires our protests about Suez and Hola and Cyprus. It is this which is the common link between our hatred of racial discrimination, our opposition to sabre rattling jingoism, our support for a world order and for aid from richer to poorer countries, our belief in social justice and a classless society, our hopes of building a community based on something better than acquisitiveness and rivalry, our respect for the freedom of the individual."

"We may lose the vote today, and the result may deal this party a grave blow. It may not be possible to prevent it, but there are some of us, I think many of us, who will not accept that this blow need be mortal: who will not believe that such an end is inevitable. There are some of us who will fight, and fight, and fight again, to save the party we love. We will fight, and fight, and fight again, to bring back sanity and honesty and dignity, so that our party – with its great past – may retain its glory and its greatness."

"[D]oes [the Prime Minister] realise that it is precisely because of our admirable record in converting a former colonial empire into a free Commonwealth that we ought to welcome and support anti-colonial resolutions in the United Nations, and that to fail to do so inevitably gives the impression that we still support colonialist régimes?"

"Let us not forget that our object here is to try ultimately to bring about full democracy in Northern Rhodesia. We know that that will take a little time. We know that it must involve an acceptance by the white minority themselves of an African State which will be under the control of the African people. We believe that the white minority have an important part to play there, but they must accept the fact that we must get over this hump or past this watershed—whatever the metaphor may be—and that with the pace of events moving as it is in Africa, the time has long since gone when white supremacy can possibly be a viable policy."

"It can hardly be denied—can it?—that the theory and practice of apartheid—the advocacy of a permanent division of men according to the colour of their skin, and involving, in practice, different rights, opportunities and status—is a continuous affront to the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth."

"[T]he common ideals of racial equality, political freedom, extending the right of self-government to the rest of the Commonwealth, non-aggression in international affairs, economic co-operation, and aid between nations. These ideals may be imperfectly realised in many instances, but, nevertheless, they, and they alone, give the Commonwealth its real justification today, just as the extraordinary variety in terms of geography, race and religion of the Commonwealth provides a wonderful opportunity to advance these ideals in a practical form in the world as a whole."

"[W]e cannot draw a line between freedom in one place and freedom in another. Freedom, like peace, is indivisible. If we believe in freedom in Hungary, and in East Germany, then we must believe in it in Angola and in Rhodesia. Detention without trial is just as bad whether in Ghana or Hungary or Rhodesia."

"It is, in my opinion, an utter and complete myth that there is the slightest danger or prospect of millions and millions of brown and black people coming to this country. Anyone who is trying to put that across is only trying to frighten people into believing that. ... We do not believe that the Bill is justified by the facts. We think that probably it will not work at all. But at the same time we think that it will do irreparable harm to the Commonwealth. ... It is a plain anti-Commonwealth measure in theory and it is a plain anti-colour measure in practice."

"It has been said that the test of a civilised country is how it treats its Jews. I would extend that and say that the test of a civilised country is how it behaves to all its citizens of different race, religion and colour. By that test this Bill fails, and that is fundamentally why we deplore it. Of course, there are some people who will be glad. I have no doubt that there will be some Fascists who will claim this as the first victory they have ever won. ... I beg the Government now, at this last minute, to drop this miserable, shameful, shabby Bill. Let them think, consult and inquire before they deal another deadly blow at the Commonwealth."

"I don't believe in faith. I believe in reason and you have not shown me any."

"Of course after the conference a desperate attempt was made by Mr. Bonham-Carter to show that of course they weren't committed to federation at all. Well I prefer to go by what Mr. Grimond says; I think he's more important. And when he was asked about this question there was no doubt about his answer; it was on television. And the question was [laughter] I see what you mean, I see what you mean. Yes was the question: "But the mood of your conference today was that Europe should be a federal state. Now if we had to choose between a federal Europe and the Commonwealth, this would have to be a choice wouldn't it? You couldn't have the two." And Mr. Grimond replied in these brilliantly clear sentences: "You could have a Commonwealth linked, though not of course a direct political link, you could have a Commonwealth link of other sorts. But of course a federal Europe I think is a very important point. Now the real thing is that if you are going to have a democratic Europe, if you are going to control the running of Europe democratically, you've got to move towards some form of federalism and if anyone says different to that they're really misleading the public." That's one in the eye for Mr. Bonham-Carter. [laughter] Now we must be clear about this, it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent nation-state. I make no apology for repeating it, the end of a thousand years of history. You may say: "All right let it end." But, my goodness, it's a decision that needs a little care and thought. [clapping] And it does mean the end of the Commonwealth; how can one really seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe, which is what federation means, it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations; it is sheer nonsense."

"Mr Hugh Gaitskell, who took over from Cripps in the autumn of 1950, probably understood his job better than any Chancellor before or since... His officials had a great respect for him, but they complained that he insisted on doing other people's work for them—a complaint that may simply mean that he wanted to run his own policy."

"‘Butskellism’...was, of course, a term compounded by The Economist out of Gaitskell's name and mine. ... [E]ach of us would, I think, have repudiated its underlying assumption that, though sitting on opposite sides of the House, we were really very much of a muchness. I admired him as a man of great humanity and sticking power, and was to regard his untimely death in 1963 as a real loss to the Labour party, to the country and to the tone of public life. But I shared neither his convictions, which were unquenchably Socialist, nor his temperament, which allowed emotion to run away with him rather too often, nor his training which was that of an academic economist. Both of us, it is true, spoke the language of Keynesianism. But we spoke it with different accents and with a differing emphasis."

"He was a man of passion and emotion which he did not often show. He had a deep sense of personal responsibility, a strong sense of duty from which he could not be deflected when he had made up his mind, and a steely will which was a source of his courage... Compromise did not come easily to him although later, when he became Leader of the Party, he recognised the need for accommodation. And in the Shadow Cabinet he would sometimes allow a contrary view to his own view to prevail, letting it pass with a deep, deep sigh at the irrationality of his colleagues. But, on certain issues, notably immigration and the rights of West Indians to come to this country, he was unshakeable, whether his views were popular or not. On all important matters of policy he radiated the assurance that if you and he shared the same beliefs they would be safe in his care and he would not betray them, even if under pressure you yourself weakened. He was therefore a source of strength to his friends and admirers, with a personal kindliness and a sense of fun whenever he relaxed. His loss was a great tragedy. He would have been a strong Prime Minister if he had lived."

"Like many others, I admired his exceptional qualities of honesty and courage. They were to cause him trouble during his leadership, especially his determination to change the Party's constitution on public ownership and his bitter fight against unilateral disarmament. But by the time of his death he was leading a united Party that seemed poised for victory at the approaching general election. I am sometimes asked what kind of Prime Minister he would have been... his penetrating and informed mind would have shown itself in a clear vision of the direction in which he wanted to take a socialist Britain. He had formed strong views about equal opportunity and abhorred racialism, and he possessed a passionate belief in Britain's future... His deep sense of Britain's history and greatness would have led him as Prime Minister to offer a strong lead on world issues. He was pro-Europe but anti-Common Market because, like others among us, he was a strong believer in the Atlantic Alliance. And he cared deeply about the Commonwealth. Perhaps, had he lived to see our former colonial territories in the Commonwealth forming other alliances and in the process growing away from Britain, together with our lessening importance in the eyes of the United States, he might have changed his mind about membership of the European Community."

"Whether he was a sufficiently radical leader for a left-wing party is another question. But he was a leader. You had complete confidence in him. You trusted him. You knew absolutely where you were with him, and of how many other politicians in Britain at the moment could you say the same? Most of the others are dwarfs and pygmies beside him ... My last thought of this man is of his huge vitality, because he was immensely vital, he was as strong as an ox, he was as gay as a child, and it simply seems to me wrong that now he should be dead."

"Hugh's policy on the nuclear deterrent was clear. He said the independent nuclear deterrent was absolute nonsense. We could neither afford it nor was it necessary to make it ourselves."

"Once he made up his mind there no was calculation of the consequences to himself... Integrity, absolute integrity, this was the essential quality of Hugh Gaitskell's character... He knew...that Clause Four was an article of faith to me and my generation. When I reminded him of this he replied sternly: "Maybe, but you know that we do not intend, any of us, to implement Clause Four fully, and I regarded it as my duty to say so to the party and the country." When he considered it was his duty to say or do something nothing could change him. The sharp edge of intellectual integrity would cut through all barriers."

"He had the best political manners of anyone I have known and they flowed from deep conviction and a thoroughly generous nature. He kept the level of political discussion very high."

"I was worried by a streak of intolerance in Gaitskell's nature; he tended to believe that no one could disagree with him unless they were either knaves or fools. Rejecting Dean Rusk's advice, he would insist on arguing to a conclusion rather than to a decision. ... Gaitskell took my views on foreign policy seriously. I think I helped to form his position on Suez, the Common Market, Russia, and the atomic bomb. Most of his Godkin lecture on disengagement was written by me. If he had become Prime Minister I would probably have become his Foreign Secretary, after Harold Wilson had held the job for a year or two; and he told close friends that he thought I would be the best person to succeed him as Party leader. Nevertheless, I have always doubted whether the fierce puritanism of his intellectual convictions would have enabled him to run a Labour Government for long, without imposing intolerable strains on so anarchic a Labour movement."

"His humanism, his respect for other people's enjoyment of life, his civilized egalitarianism, made him deeply suspicious of those who preferred slogans to power. ... [H]is attitude on this [the EEC] or on anything else was never one of uncomprehending insularity. It was India, not Little Englandism, which fought in his breast with European social democracy. ... He saw the world, and particularly the Western community, as interdependent; and he saw the great responsibility on this fortunate segment to try to ameliorate the grinding poverty of the poor two-thirds. His devotion to racial equality was absolute."

"He would not have been a perfect Prime Minister. He was stubborn, rash, and could in a paradoxical way become too emotionally committed to an over-rational position which, once he had thought it rigorously through, he believed must be the final answer. He was only a moderately good judge of people. Yet when these faults are put in the scales and weighed against his qualities they shrivel away. He had purpose and direction, courage and humanity. He was a man for raising the sights of politics. He clashed on great issues. He avoided the petty bitterness of personal jealously. He could raise banners which men were proud to follow, but he never perverted his own leadership ability: it was infused by sense and humour, and by a desire to change the world, not for his own satisfaction, but so that people might more enjoy living in it. ... He was that very rare phenomenon, a great politician who was also an unusually agreeable man."

"This does not mean that Hugh Gaitskell, who would have been nearly seventy-five when the SDP was formed, would have left the Labour Party. I do not personally believe he would have done so, if for no other reason than, had he lived, I suspect the need for a creation of the SDP would never have existed."

"I soon came to regard Hugh Gaitskell...as an outstanding man. His fight against the unilateralists made a deep impression on me. The whole stand against CND within the Labour Party with his famous 'Fight, and fight again' speech made me think: 'This man has principles'."

"When facing some of the more difficult choices of my career, I have asked myself how would Hugh Gaitskell have handled a similar situation."

"One of the greatest if more intangible achievements of the late Mr. Hugh Gaitskell was to raise the whole level of political discourse in Britain."

"Political integrity was the most precious quality which Hugh Gaitskell brought to the service of the Labour movement. ... In particular it endowed him with the courage to master the crisis which came to him in October, 1960, when the party conference rejected the official policy on defence and declared for the unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons. His resolve "to fight and fight and fight again", to rescue the movement from what he deemed to be perilous courses awoke sharp conflict within it, offering a serious challenge to his leadership. He emerged from the struggle with his authority unassailably established within a party to which he had restored cohesion and confidence. The drift to disintegration was halted. His skill and patience were rewarded by the steady reversal of the unilateralist trend... The climax came at the 1961 party conference. The earlier decision was overturned by almost a ten-fold majority, a victorious testimony to the transformation which Gaitskell had wrought. In the process he had immensely enhanced his reputation and had made a powerful impact on the public consciousness as a man possessing the authentic attributes of leadership—resolute will, robust courage, resilient spirit and wise judgment."

"Hugh Gaitskell was that rare creature, a passionate intellectual. Rationality was his creed. His limited patience was strained almost beyond endurance by the the stolid prejudices of the trades union leaders he depended upon, and the colourful sophistries of his left-wing critics. Born in India of Civil Service parents, he was as much a liberal as a socialist. He cherished liberty, detested racism, and believed in the redistribution of income and wealth to achieve social justice. He was never attracted to the European Community, for as a political entity it threatened to eclipse the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth embodied Gaitskell's deepest convictions, including internationalism and interracialism, and it had developed out of Britain's imperial history with which his family had had close connections."

"Nye called Hugh “a desiccated calculating machine”, thinking him cold and unemotional. It was a serious misjudgement, which proved Nye's undoing. Hugh was passionate in the cause of reason. He loved the Labour Party and wanted to make it something like the German Social Democratic Party was then: free of ideological bitterness and hatred, strong for prosperity and justice and equality, the determined but moderate natural party of government which Harold Wilson foolishly thought he had achieved while actually destroying it."

"Getting something like this wrong is not just an academic error or an argument at conference. It affects the jobs of millions. Unlike the ERM, the single currency is for all time. British business could find itself trapped in a burning building with no exits."

"The truth is that the supporters of British membership of a single currency tend to fall back on one central argument that overshadows all others. They say: "It's going to happen and that we can't possibly be left out." It is the argument used by every lemming throughout the centuries and it does not bear close scrutiny."

"Many of them [European politicians] believe our ultimate objective should be the creation of a single European state, and that this is an inevitable destiny. I believe they are wrong. There is a limit to European political integration. We are near that limit now."

"One could find oneself trapped in the economic equivalent of a burning building with no exits. In Asia, those countries that have had the most violent reactions to the financial crisis have been those countries that do not have the safety valve of democratic elections. How will the peoples of Europe react to a recession without the electoral means of changing the people responsible?"

"It was our national identity, so powerfully expressed in Winston Churchill's speeches, which had helped see us through the darkest days of the war. For us, patriotism was the focus of our resistance against Nazi tyranny. We have never been as nervous of nationalist feelings as our continental neighbours, and I believe we have never really understood, let alone showed, the fears and ambitions of European federalists."

"The lesson of Yugoslavia and the Russian federation is that it is dangerous to force disparate peoples into a common political unit unless they already feel a sense of national affinity."

"The Tony Martin case lit a touch-paper that has led to an explosion of anger and resentment among millions of law-abiding British people who no longer feel the State is on their side. The specifics of the particular case are best left to the criminal courts. But politicians aren't doing their job if they don't listen and respond to the unprecedented outcry which has greeted the murder conviction for this Norfolk farmer who was defending his home against burglars."

"What has happened to our courts system when career burglars and muggers get a few dozen hours' community service, or a couple of months in prison if they are unlucky, while people defending their homes against the very same criminals risk long prison sentences?"

"I was the driver's mate, delivering the bottles and beer around South Yorkshire. We used to have a pint at every stop – well the driver's mate did, not the driver, thankfully – and we used to have about 10 stops in a day. You worked so hard you didn't feel you'd drunk 10 pints by four o'clock, you used to sweat so much. But then you had to lift all the empties off the lorry. It's probably horrifying but we used to do that then go home for tea and then go out in the evening to the pub."

"Nothing is more absurd than a Prime Minister who has committed us in principle to joining the Euro saying last week that he was against it. He talks about his five tests; we know what they are: "Does Peter want it? Will Gordon let me? Will the French like it? Will Robin notice? Can I get away with it?"

"In the Prime Minister, we have a man who has forfeited the right to be believed or to be trusted. In more than 20 years in politics, he has betrayed every cause he believed in, contradicted every statement he has made, broken every promise he has given and breached every agreement that he has entered into. In 1982, the Prime Minister said that we would negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC. In 1994, he said: "Under my leadership, I will never allow this country to be isolated." In 1996, he said that he had made it clear that if it is in Britain's interest to be isolated then we will be isolated. There is a lifetime of U-turns, errors and sell-outs. All those hon. Members who sit behind the Prime Minister and wonder whether they stand for anything any longer, or whether they defend any point of principle, know who has led them to that sorry state. In one of his frequent meetings with the former leader of the Liberal party, whom he so much preferred to meeting his own Cabinet, the Prime Minister told us as it is. He said that he had taken from his party everything they thought they believed in and had stripped them of their core beliefs and that what kept them together was power."

"We have a Government that has contempt for the views of the people it governs. There is nothing that the British people can talk about, that this Labour Government doesn't deride. Talk about Europe and they call you extreme. Talk about tax and they call you greedy. Talk about crime and they call you reactionary. Talk about asylum and they call you racist. Talk about your nation and they call you Little Englanders. This Government thinks Britain would be alright if only we had a different people. I think Britain would be alright, if only we had a different Government."

"I thank the Prime Minister for his remarks about me. Debating with him at the Dispatch Box has been exciting, fascinating, fun, an enormous challenge and, from my point of view, wholly unproductive in every sense. I am told that in my time at the Dispatch Box I have asked the Prime Minister 1,118 direct questions, but no one has counted the direct answers—it may not take long."

"For the first time in history at Question Time, all three parties are represented by a stand-in for the real leader."

"To see how the post of a permanent President of the European Council could evolve is not difficult even for the humblest student of politics, and it is, of course, rumoured that one Tony Blair may be interested in the job. Now, if that makes us uncomfortable on these benches, just imagine how it is viewed in Downing Street! I must warn Ministers opposite that having tangled with Tony Blair across this Dispatch Box on literally hundreds of occasions, I know his mind almost as well as they do. I can tell them that when he goes off to a major political conference of a centre-right party and simultaneously refers to himself as a socialist, he is on manoeuvres, and is busily building coalitions as only he can. We can all picture the scene at a European Council sometime next year. Picture the face of our poor Prime Minister as the name of "Blair" is nominated by one President and Prime Minister after another: the look of utter gloom on his face at the nauseating, glutinous praise oozing from every Head of Government, the rapid revelation of a majority view, agreed behind closed doors when he, as usual, was excluded. Never would he regret more no longer being in possession of a veto: the famous dropped jaw almost hitting the table, as he realises there is no option but to join in. And then the awful moment when the motorcade of the President of Europe sweeps into Downing Street. With gritted teeth and bitten nails: the Prime Minister emerging from his door with a smile of intolerable anguish; the choking sensation as the words, "Mr President", are forced from his mouth. And then, once in the Cabinet room, the melodrama of, "When will you hand over to me?" all over again."

"[To Harriet Harman] Before turning to domestic issues, I was going to be nice to the right hon. and learned Lady. She has had a difficult week. She had to explain yesterday that she dresses in accordance with wherever she is going: she wears a helmet on a building site, she wears Indian clothes in the parts of her constituency with a large representation of Indian people, so when she goes to a Cabinet meeting, she presumably dresses as a clown. As I said, I was going to be nice to her before her previous response."

"[T]he Conservative Party is like an absolute monarchy, but this is qualified by regicide. If we take any form of PR back to our parliamentary colleagues, they will be looking for new leadership"

"This country needs an increased capability to protect ourselves, not only against cyber attacks on the government but on businesses and on individuals"

"It remains the case that the single biggest terrorist threat to this country remains al-Qaeda, or people inspired by al-Qaeda, but what has happened is a reminder that it is not the only source of violent extremist or terrorist attack."

"I described the euro as a burning building with no exits and so it has proved for some of the countries in it"

"[The EU has] too much power.. there should be powers that are returned to this country"

"The very making of these allegations undermined Britain's standing in the world as a country that upholds international law and abhors torture. As a government we understand how important it is that we not only uphold our values and international law, but that we are seen to do so."

"[Without intelligence agencies] terrorist groups would have free rein to harm UK citizens here and abroad"

"It is strongly in the interests of Syria, of the wider region and of the United Kingdom that we support them and deny space to extremist groups"

"We want to get a better relationship with the EU - there are changes we want in that relationship"

"We also need to see how changes in the eurozone are affecting the EU and how that affects this country and the relationship of the countries together. But when we have done that there is a strong case for fresh consent in this country and the people of this country having their say."

"It is about... making a success of membership of the EU but also with democratic consent for that in its modern form and the best form that we can bring about."

"I welcome the formation of the new Israeli Government. I warmly congratulate Prime Minister Netanyahu on his second consecutive term in office at this important time in Israel’s history. We look forward to working with his new Government to further develop our strong bilateral relations and to advance our successful partnerships in areas such as trade, security, science, technology and higher education. As I have said previously, there is no more urgent foreign policy priority in 2013 than making progress towards achieving the two-state solution. I have urged the United States to lead international efforts to revive the peace process and pledged that the UK will spare no effort in mobilising European Union and Arab states behind decisive moves for peace. I welcome President Obama’s visit to the region next week. I call on Prime Minister Netanyahu, and President Abbas, to demonstrate leadership and courage in working with the international community to secure the peace which is so strongly in the interests of both Israelis and Palestinians."

"We will continue to work closely with the Somalia government on shared priorities, which include tackling conflict, countering terrorism and piracy, providing humanitarian assistance, and promoting UK interests in Somalia"

"[Publishing the bill is a] demonstration of our commitment to a referendum [on the EU]"

"We are determined to reach a diplomatic settlement to the Iran nuclear crisis."

"There has never been any doubt in my mind that we should have an embassy in Tehran if the circumstances allowed"

"To end up destroying the UK and gravely weakening the European Union would not be a very clever day's work. So, even as a long-standing critic of so much of that struggling organisation, I am unlikely in 2016 to vote to leave it."

"Any [Brexit] deal is bound to be full of compromises which one group or another in Parliament finds difficult to stomach."

"If you are less influential in crafting the overall approach of the EU you end up with less influence in the rest of the world."

"The electorate voted to leave the EU, and therefore we leave. What is more, the number of people who voted to do so was higher than the number of votes cast for any government in our history. To me and many of my former colleagues in government who preferred to remain, the argument was over."

"[There is potential for Brexit to become the] greatest economic, diplomatic and constitutional muddle in the modern history of the UK, with unknowable consequences for the country, the government and the Brexit project itself"

"[Philip Hammond] has evidently been trying to persuade his cabinet colleagues that we should be seeking to stay in the EU single market and customs union during a transition and 'implementation' phase lasting to 2022, followed by a free trade deal with our former partners after that. This is seen by longstanding advocates of leaving as a 'soft' position or a climbdown. But in reality it is a plan to rescue Brexit from an approaching disaster."

"Imagine going back to the people of this country and saying 'you got this wrong in the referendum, you may have turned out in record numbers and most of the country voted to leave but nevertheless we think you got it wrong and we are going to run it again'. Imagine the hate-filled campaign that would divide this country. I do not think that is a price worth paying."

"[The Chequers Brexit proposals are] the most that can be achieved within the inevitable and inescapable constraints"

"[On the history of former prime ministers and their successors] Now think of Boris Johnson. All of these feelings will apply to him. He is going to be [[Edward Heath|[Edward] Heath]] with jokes added in, and [[Margaret Thatcher|[Margaret] Thatcher]] with consistency taken out, all rolled into a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted vindication that will be a permanent nightmare for the new prime minister. That he wants revenge on Rishi Sunak is already apparent, but if Liz Truss is elected, she will face the identical problem. The chances of her loyalty to him being repaid are close to zero. Boris lives his life as a performance, and he will want the next act to fill every seat in the theatre of British political life. The Conservative Party had no choice but to remove Johnson from office. His standards of governance and veracity had fallen below what reasonable people could defend. The downside is that the party will always have the problem of what he will say next."

"In the distant days when I was Tory leader I had a private rule never to appeal for party unity. This was mainly because, if your request as a leader for unity is promptly followed by more infighting, you look even less credible and in charge than before you asked. It was also a recognition that unity is seldom produced by calling for it. Unity arises from a leader creating the conditions for it."

"Labour looks less alarming than under Neil Kinnock but it is also a lot less exciting than under either him or Blair. The party is not the wave of the future, as it was in the early days of New Labour. Sir Keir Starmer's team are currently interesting because they are judged to be close to power, rather than being close to power because they are judged to be interesting. And excitement doesn't even come into it."

"Those of us who have been in public life have all had the privilege of meeting extraordinary people — soldiers who kept fighting when injured, Paralympic athletes who triumphed, small businesses that learnt from failure to succeed — and have seen the power of moving on without rancour or self-pity. Political leaders would do well to aspire to those attributes and to shoulder their own share of responsibility. If you became prime minister, with a majority behind you and a decent term in front of you, but were overthrown amid chaos, there is indeed someone to blame. It’s you."

"I don’t envy the remaining Tory MPs. It was a hard job in 1997 and this time it will be even tougher. There's a moment when you understand you face the challenge of your lifetime, but that's a sign you’ve only just begun to grasp it. For the Conservative Party, the next big move can start a recovery or bring extinction."

"To make matters worse, they have elected a foetus as the party leader. I bet a lot of them wish they had not voted against abortion now!"

"[I]f I were looking for advice on what to wear or what not to wear, the very last person I would look to is the man in the baseball cap."

"The extreme advanced party is likely for the future to have on its side a great portion of the most highly cultivated intellect in the nation, and the contest will lie between brains and numbers on the one side, and wealth, rank, vested interest, possession in short, on the other."

"The new problem for statesmen will be not how the Queen's Government may be carried on, but how the National Will may be most promptly executed."

"If we survey the entire field of political action, we shall find that progress, wherever it is stayed, is stayed by the untimely relics of territorialism, and that in removing them we at once find ourselves led on to the true conditions by taking the policy of industry for our foundation. The industrial policy is emphatically the national policy... At nearly every point it is the superstition or sinister interest of the territorial power which thwarts, restrains, and depresses the harmonious adjustment of laws and administration to the needs of the public well-being."

"There is the Irish question... Underneath the surface of this, and wrapped up in it, are nearly all the controversies of principle which will agitate the political atmosphere for our time. It is a microcosm of the whole imperial question. It is the test of our fitness to deal with the other problems which modern circumstance, pressing hard against the old order of ideas and traditions, is forcing upon our attention. The functions of the State, the duties of property, the rights of labour, the question whether the many are born for the few, the question of a centralised imperial power, the question of the pre-eminence of morals in politics—all these things lie in Irish affairs."

"It is not for the candidates, but for the temper shown by the constituencies, that one may grieve, if there be matter for grief in the unmistakable proof which the elections are furnishing, that people do not recognise the necessity of giving supreme political power to supreme political intelligence."

"The evils of a military system, which, after all, every day must attenuate, are light compared with the evils of an anarchic conservatism reinstated in central Europe. Divided Germany means preponderating Russia. What can be more desirable in the interests of the highest civilisation than the interposition in the heart of the European state-system, of a powerful, industrious, intelligent, and progressive people, between the western nations and the half-barbarous Russian swarms? To the careful observer of the history of modern Europe it is plain that increasing vigour and self-conscious strength in Germany are other words for the spread eastwards of the best of those ideas, the most durable of those civilising elements, in which the difference of historic development has enabled England and France to anticipate her."

"In the American civil war partisanship with the sides there was the veil of a kind of civil war here. An unspoken instinct revealed to mutually hostile classes in England that their battle also was being fought in the contest between the free North and the slave-holding South. The triumph of the North, as has been often remarked, was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen, depose official Christianity in Ireland, and deal a first blow at the landlords."

"I shall not flinch if they decapitate or flagellate all the bishops and curés in Paris."

"Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."

"Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the tragedy of man."

"Household suffrage as yet is only a thing on paper. We have still to feel its reality. The new possessors of power are still hardly aware that it is theirs. And who are the new possessors of power? The skilled artisans, the leaders of trade societies, and the like? Alas, no; it is not they but those below them, those between the artisan and the pauper, who, whenever they choose to awake, or whenever they choose in their dreams to let somebody else lead them, hold the destinies of our society in their hands."

"In plain English, a majority of those who come out of the schools cannot read a newspaper. This unfortunate class is our ruling class. Their votes can carry elections, change administrations, decide policies. As yet they have no initiative, and it may be some time before they cease to follow the initiative of others. When their time comes, and a leader, they will make terrible short work with a good deal that you hold precious now."

"The sophists of newspaper press are so busily fighting momentous practical issues with the lath sword of some little abstract theory, that they have no eyes for the gulf which is ready to open at the feet of them and the institutions which they so absurdly suppose themselves to be defending... They do not discern that the same classes who are now believed to be on the point of following the publicans and the clergy to the polls...are one day very likely to invent cries of their own, that will bring destruction where the abused reformer to-day only seeks improvement, and, where we only seek to amend, will trample, efface, obliterate."

"Evolution is not a force but a process; not a cause but a law."

"You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him."

"Do let us try to give a national, not a class tone to English politics ."

"If the country does best, where State action is least, you at least require political effort enough to reduce those noxious forms of State action which have come down to us from the imprudence of pre-scientific days. The philosopher, for example, who is most in earnest for the free play of social forces, is bound before all other men to press on for the disestablishment of the State Church."

"Germany is the power in whose strength, prosperity, and vigorous government, Europe has the most vital interest, because she is the Power best able from her position to deal with Russia."

"Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other."

"You cannot demonstrate an emotion or prove an aspiration."

"It is not enough to do good; one must do it the right way."

"I'm all against your “autoritaire”. I don't believe in it, and I never did. Your Cromwells and Fredericks don't do their work half as well as slow sober free American citizens."

"Yet the Opposition refused to extend the franchise unless they were assured that there would be some manipulation or re-arrangement of seats, which, would, in fact, be taking away with one hand what was given with the other. He regretted that proportional representation should have been introduced into the debate from that side of the House, for all these schemes were but new disguises for the old Tory distrust of the people."

"Should they, whose forefathers would not endure the tyranny and misgovernment of kings, submit to the oppression and stupidity of peers? (Loud cheers.) The presence of an hereditary Chamber, which was, in fact, not much more at this moment than a Tory club with the power of unlimited veto in a free Government, was nothing more than a very bad practical joke... That great pile of Durham Cathedral had stood for eight centuries. Many a struggle had it witnessed in all these long years between feudalism and humanity, between the privileged few and the toiling multitude. In spite of many a gloomy hour the cause of humanity had conquered; it was conquering still, and if they were true to one another before many months were past they would have added another and a most glorious victory to those achievements of the past. (Loud cheers.)"

"Yes, gentlemen, be sure that no power on earth can separate henceforth the question of mending the House of Commons from the other question of mending or ending the House of Lords. (Loud cheers, the whole assembly rising and waving their hats.)"

"[W]ill any one tell me what there is to venerate in the House of Lords? (Laughter and cheers.) Will any one tell me when in the great battle of freedom they have been on the side of freedom and justice? (Cheers.) Will they tell me when they have not been against it? (“Always.”) ... Who will talk of the ripe wisdom of an assembly which resists without courage, and obstructs without straightforwardness; which asserts without approval, and gives way without conviction? (Loud cheers.) ... [I]f we have to consider a second rejection of this Bill the Liberal party will borrow an amendment of the Tory party with a slight variation, and propose, “No treatment of Parliamentary reform is satisfactory which does not include the reform of the hereditary Chamber.” (Prolonged cheers.)"

"‘Natural rights’...[is not] a true way of putting things—and certainly not the most useful and fertile way. Nature [is] simply the mastery of the strongest [and confers no rights on man]. Two savage tribes contend for a tract of land of wh. they are in need for their subsistence: nature gave the right to this land to the tribe wh. was strong enough to thrash the other. No right is worth a straw apart from the good that it brings: and all claims to rights must depend—not upon nature—but upon the good that the said rights are calculated to bring to the greatest number. General utility, public expediency, the greatest happiness of the greatest number—these are the tests and standards of a right; not the dictate of nature."

"Some think that we are approaching a critical moment in the history of Liberalism... We hear of a divergence of old Liberalism and new... The terrible new school, we hear, are for beginning operations by dethroning Gladstonian finance. They are for laying hands on the sacred ark. But did any one suppose that the fiscal structure which was reared in 1853 was to last for ever, incapable of improvement, and guaranteed to need no repair? ... Another heresy is imputed to this new school which fixes a deep gulf between the wicked new Liberals and the virtuous old. We are adjured to try freedom first before we try interference of the State. That is a captivating formula, but it puzzles me to find that the eminent statesman who urges us to lay this lesson to heart is strongly in favour of maintaining the control of the State over the Church? But is State interference an innovation? I thought that for 30 years past Liberals had been as much in favour as other people of this protective legislation... [O]ther countries have tried freedom and it is just because we have decided that freedom in such a case is only a fine name for neglect, and have tried State supervision, that we have saved our industrial population from the waste, destruction, destitution, and degradation that would otherwise have overtaken them... In short, gentlemen, I am not prepared to allow that the Liberty and the Property Defence League are the only people with a real grasp of Liberal principles, that Lord Bramwell and the Earl of Wemyss are the only Abdiels of the Liberal Party."

"I hope...Her Majesty's Ministers...will...say that the Soudan must be left to its own people to work out their own deliverance in their own fashion."

"And we are so often reminded, Sir, of the villainy of the character of the Irish nation, that I rejoice to be able to bring these facts forward. The whole of this Bill is based on the theory that the Irish people are incorrigible. The Commissioners have put upon public record that the Irish people are naturally honest, hard-working, and deeply attached to their country. And I say, Sir, that a man of this kind who makes such a sacrifice—and there are thousands of them in Ireland—excites my pity quite as much—as the victim of a moonlighting outrage. I say I am less anxious—anxious as I am—to secure vengeance upon 100 or 200 ruffians than I am to secure rightful and humane treatment for the thousands of poor tenants in Ireland. There is the difference between Gentlemen opposite and us on this side of the House."

"But are you so sure...that when Ulster, or the corner of Ulster knows that Great Britain has made up its mind that there is to be an effective, a real self-government in Ireland—are you so sure Ulster will turn its back upon Ireland and claim to be excluded from such Government? (“No.”) I do not believe it... I say that a good deal of this zeal for Ulster is artificial."

"I half wrote a discourse on modern democracy, how the rule of numbers is to be reconciled with the rule of sage judgment, and the passion for liberty and equality is to be reconciled with sovereign regard for law, authority, and order; and how our hopes for the future are to be linked to wise reverence for tradition and the past."

"There is a loud cry in these days for clues that shall guide the plain man through the vast bewildering labyrinth of printed volumes."

"We are told by a Lord of the Admiralty who represents a Sheffield division that it is all over with the old Manchester school, and that we have got into new days. I do not belong to the Manchester school. I have nothing to say about the Manchester school except this—that I chanced to write the life of a very important leader of that school. and what did Mr. Cobden say upon this very point? He said:—"I am willing to spend a hundred millions on the fleet if necessary". The Radical party have never been the party who denied the great proposition that lies at the bottom of British politics—namely, that we must have absolute supremacy at sea."

"We are told that we are a pack of Socialists and faddists, and that common sense is on the side of the Unionist party. Well, for my part, I am for going in for all progressive legislation step by step. I do not believe in the short cuts. If Socialism means the abolition of private property, if it means the assumption of land and capital by the State, if it means an equal distribution of products of labour by the State, then I say that Socialism of that stamp, communism of that stamp, is against human nature, and no sensible man will have anything to say to it. But if it means a wise use of the forces of all for the good of each, if it means a legal protection of the weak against the strong, if it means the performance by public bodies of things which individuals cannot perform so well, or cannot perform at all, then the principles of Socialism have been admitted in almost the whole field of social activity already, and all we have to ask when any proposition is made for the further extension of those principles is whether the proposal is in itself a prudent, just, and proper means to the desired end, and whether it is calculated to do good, and more good than harm."

"[S]o far as sick pay is concerned, I do not see how the State is to be responsible for the payment of...sick pay, how the State is to be able to exercise that efficient control over what is known as malingering, feigning sickness, though the friendly societies are able to do so."

"I confess that I am in favour, if we can, of sticking to the old system by which you yourselves shall use your own judgment and your own energy in order to cultivate the virtue of thrift, and in order to see that thrift is rewarded... I cannot conceive a more important virtue to cultivate than this of thrift."

"I am not going to enter into this chapter, but you all know that this which is called—I do not much like the name, but I confess I have not a better name—"State Socialism" is what has protected us from revolutionary socialism, which is much a worse thing. Probably a considerable portion of this audience consists of men who live on weekly wages; but I ask you not to rush at the first thing that is offered you, not to believe that because a thing sounds very pleasant—like compulsory reduction, for example, of the hours of labour—do not be quite sure until you have looked round it that it may not end in leaving your condition worse than it found it. I should deplore the advance of State Socialism, though I believe much may be hoped from it. I should regard it as a great disaster, the greatest disaster that could befall this great population, if it did anything to take away your self-reliance, the control of the individual over his own appetites and passions, his own idleness and self-indulgence, and make you look to anything but self-reliance. This, in the long run, would do more harm than good."

"I myself am no opponent of State intervention. I have never been, and never shall be, as soon as it is shown to me that State intervention can achieve some good end which cannot be reached without it. And I hope that opinion will soon turn in the direction of municipal intervention in these affairs, wherever municipal intervention is adequate, and I will tell you why...I believe that in municipalities the area of supervision is sufficiently small, that people concerned come up in sufficiently close quarters with the matters of administration to enable them to avoid all the dangers, risks, and wastes to which the general state of capitals is open."

"According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to the mind that it matters little either way. Men are disenchanted. They have got what they wanted in the days of their youth, yet what of it, they ask?"

"[T]here is nothing that the most prominent men in the Liberal party more earnestly desire than that labour representation, direct labour representation, shall be as large as possible... It is sometimes said to me, "Oh! but you are against State intervention in matters of great social reform". At this time of the day it would be absurd for any man who has mastered all the Mining Regulations Acts, the Factories Acts, the great mass of regulation which affects trade; it would be absurd for any man to stand on a platform and say he was entirely against State intervention. I, for my part, have never taken that position... My own belief is that in the matters of hours and of wages for adult male labour the interference would be a bad and mischievous thing...that in such matters, for example, as housing of the poor and so forth, the proper machinery through which to carry out these operations is municipal and not Parliamentary."

"I have always been strong for a large increase of labour representation in the House of Commons... Now, I dare say the day may come—it may come sooner than some think—when the Liberal party will be transformed or superseded by some new party; but before the working population of this country have their destinies in their own hands, as they will assuredly do within a measurable distance of time, there is enough ground to be cleared which only the Liberal party is capable of clearing. The ideal of the Liberal party is that view of things which believes that the welfare of all is bound up with injustice being done to none. Above all, according to the ideal of the Liberal party—that party from which I beseech you, not for my sake, but for your own, not to sever yourselves—the ideal of the Liberal party is this—that in the mass of the toilers on land all the fountains of national life abide and the strongest and most irresistible currents flow."

"I said years ago that I would rather be the man who helped on a rational scheme which should secure the comfort of old age than I would be a general who had won ever so many victories in the field. These are, to me, the two most tragic sights in the world—a man who is able to work, and anxious to work, and who cannot get work; and the other tragic sight is that of a man who has worked until his eyes have become dim, and his natural force has become abated, and he is left to spend the declining years of a life that has been so nobly used, so honourably used, in straits, difficulties, and hardships."

"I want to take in all these labour questions from the largest possible nationalist point of view, and it is this—that while the State should do all that it prudently can to protect the health and life, not only of women and children, but of the whole assembly of workers, it is absurd, it is perilous to thrust Acts of Parliament, as I have said before, like the steam ram-rod into the delicate machinery of commercial undertakings."

"It was often asked how it was that Scotland was a democratic country. He believed that the root causes of the spirit of democracy in its truest and highest sense still prevailed and would prevail in Scotland. Some said that the Scottish people were democrats because of John Knox and the parish schools; some said it was due to Burns, who was the truest democrat who ever wrote a verse; some said it was the Presbyterian form of ecclesiastical organisation. He would be content with the result that, somehow or other, there was in that part of the island a sort of reservoir of democratic man-to-man feeling which they hardly found in any other part of the United Kingdom."

"We all know that the besetting danger of Churches is formalism; the besetting danger of State action, of corporate action, is officialism and mechanism; and we all know that it is a drawback to many modern ideals that they rest upon materialism and a soulless secularism."

"Imperialism brings with it militarism, and must bring with it militarism. Militarism means a gigantic expenditure, daily growing. It means an increase in government of the power of aristocratic and privileged classes. Militarism means the profusion of the taxpayer's money everywhere except in the taxpayer's own home. And militarism must mean war...it is not the hateful demon of war but white-winged peace that has been the nurse and guardian of freedom and justice and well-being over that great army of toilers upon whose labours, upon whose privations, upon whose hardships after all the greatness and the strength of Empires and of States are founded and are built up."

"I freely recognise that it would be most stupid not to recognise that there is a sense in which the word imperialism is used in the sense of national duty, not national vainglory, in which it is used as meaning not aggression but the service of mankind... Imperialism in this higher and better sense must be tested and measured and limited by common sense and the Liberal party will only be useful as an instrument of human progress so long as they walk persistently and steadfastly in the path of these watchwords—peace, economy, and reform. If the Liberal party abandon that path, what will they be but a body without a soul?"

"You may carry fire and sword into the midst of peace and industry—such a war of the strongest Government in the world against this weak little Republic, and the strongest Government in the world, with untold wealth and inexhaustible resources, will bring you no glory. (Renewed and prolonged cheering.) It will bring you no profit but mischief, and it will be wrong. (Hear, hear.) You may make thousands of women widows and thousands of children fatherless. It will be wrong. (Cheers.) You may add a new province to your Empire. It will still be wrong. (Renewed cheers.) You may give greater buoyancy to the South African stock and share market. (Hear, hear.) You may create South African booms. You may send the price of Mr. Rhodes's Chartereds up to the point beyond the dream of avarice. Yes, even then it will be wrong. (Loud and continued cheering.)"

"Had they thought of the relations between Imperialism and social reform? Could we continue this process of territorial expansion with our increasing Budgets? What we wanted was resolute and sustained attention to strengthening our industrial position. What was the use of conquering new markets when it was as much as we could do to hold the markets which we had already? (Cheers.) As to the Liberal policy...the day when the Liberal party forsook its old principles of peace, economy, and reform the Liberal party would have to disband and to disappear. (Cheers.) The Socialists would take its place... [I]f he were to choose between the Socialist and the Militarist, with all his random aims, his profusion of national resources, his disregard for the rights and feelings of other people, he himself declared he considered the Socialist's standards were higher and their means were no less wise. (Cheers.)"

"Simplicity of character is no hindrance to subtlety of intellect."

"The conference of railway men will damage us gravely with the middle class, for railways are the middle class investment, and to pull profits down...as they admit to be the effect of their demand—will frighten people. And if anybody thinks we can govern this country against the middle class, he is wrong."

"I am as cautious a Whig as any Elliot, Russell, or Grey, that was ever born."

"I have often thought that Strafford was an ideal type, both for governor of Ireland in the 17th century, and governor of India in the 20th century."

"I submit that it is an Agreement that this country may not only be contented with, but proud of."

"Define it as we may, faith in Progress has been the mainspring of Liberalism in all its schools and branches."

"[I] always had a soft place in my heart for the patrician Whigs."

"I am, and always have been, a pretty strong individualist."

"I am a theorist, but I detest the introduction of abstract principles into the great practical difficulties of this nation."

"There has been a great deal of talk about raising class prejudice. I dislike class prejudice... There has been no feeling of class prejudice in my mind; but, my Lords, there is a worse thing than class prejudice, and that is race or national prejudice. We have not had much of it, in fact I may say almost none of it, here. Still is it not true that the cry which is going to be loudly invoked in this election, the Irish cry, depends upon race and national prejudice? Talk of class prejudice. The classes will take care of themselves, I trust. The English working man in my view—and I represented a great and important group of them for many years—is not in the least a Phrygian with a red cap, though some of his fellows may talk in that vein."

"Whether France or Italy or Germany or England has made the greatest contribution in the history of modern civilisation—however that speculative controversy may be settled, this at least is certain, that those are not wrong who hold that Germany's high and strict standard of competency, the purity and vigour of her administration of affairs, her splendid efforts and great success in all branches of science, her glories—for glories they are—in art and literature, and the fixed strength of character and duty in the German people entitle her national ideals to a supreme place among the greatest-ideals that now animate and guide the world. Do not let us forget all that. German ambition is a perfectly intelligible and even lofty ambition."

"History, as Treitschke contends, is first of all the presentation of res gestae, and of active statesmen. The essential things in the statesman are strength of will, courage, massive ambition, passionate joy in the result. It needs no wizard to see how such doctrine as this lends a hand to the sinister school of political historians, who insist that the event is its own justification; that Force and Right are one."

"The noble Earl, Lord Curzon, stated that he could not understand how it is that we, the Party who have always taken the side of people rightly struggling to be free, do not sympathise with Ulster. In all the cases that he named—Italy, Greece, and so forth—there was actual oppression and hateful misgovernment. No one says there is actual oppression or hateful misgovernment in Ulster. It is all hypothesis."

"The decrepitude that ended in the Latin conquest of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward reproof to the optimist superstition that civilized communities are universally bound somehow or another to be progressive."

"I was always opposed to the Anglo-Russian agreement—so was Kitchener. Who stands most to gain out of this war? Russia. Who is the real aggressor? Russia. At the end of it we shall have her on our backs. What do you imagine will be the effect on the Indian mind of the employment of Indian troops against Europeans?"

"Censorship...ought to be confined to the temporary suppression of military and naval news which might assist the enemy... Public opinion might be fallible, but it was not half as fallible as individual opinion, and, good or bad, the Government had to lean upon it; how could they do that unless public opinion had full, free, and correct information as to facts?"

"I'm sick of Wilson ... He hailed the Russian Revolution six months ago as the new Golden Age, and I said to Page, “What does he know of Russia?” to which Page replied, “Nothing.” As for his talk about a union of hearts after the war, the world is not made like that."

"A mirage, and an old one... One may as well talk of London morality being due to the Archbishop of Canterbury. But take away Scotland Yard!"

"I have not read it, and I don't intend to read it. It's not worth the paper it's written on. To the end of time it'll always be a case of “Thy head or my head.” I've no faith in these schemes."

"Liberalism, as we have known it, is dead beyond resurrection."

"As for progress, what signs of it are there now? And all we Victorians believed in it from the Utilitarians onwards."

"There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out."

"The proper memory for a politician is one that knows what to remember and what to forget."

"In my creed, waste of public money is like the sin against the Holy Ghost."

"Success depends on three things: who says it, what he says, how he says it; and of these three things, what he says is the least important."

"Excess of severity is not the path to order. On the contrary, it is the path to the bomb."

"I don't like that hateful heresy, proportional representation."

"Ireland and Russia are the two most ‘Christian’ countries in Europe. To-day they are the most disfigured by violence and outrage. What do you make of that?"

"I should like to have been there if only to have got up and said, “If Mr. G.'s Home Rule Bill had been passed 30 years ago could Ireland have been worse than it is now? Would it not have been better?” And then fallen dead like Lord Chatham."

"Montagu calls himself my disciple. I see very little of my teaching in him. This dyarchy won't work. As for his strange plea for rousing the masses of India out of their “pathetic content” by reforms for which they do not ask, and which they cannot work, it's a most unwise remark. My reforms were quite enough for a generation at least."

"Let us look at the history of Ireland, the history of this chronic government by coercion. What does it mean? It was the naked government of another Kingdom by irresponsible force—irresponsible, that is to say, as regards those whom this system was to affect. Coercion Laws were passed, and were smoothly, described as being for the protection of life and property, of respect for ordinary law, and so on. All those methods proved an ugly failure."

"My only consolation has been to read up the history of Ireland in Lecky and our abominable treatment of her. All the faults of the Irish character are traceable to that."

"Present party designations have become empty of all contents...Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson."

"Finished Morley. A book worth having read. J.M.'s style at 80 is as bad as his style when Secretary for India was admirable. Doubt whether I can recover my sense of judicial appreciation after reading contemptuous reference by him to Keir Hardie. That reference, suggesting as it does that men, and parties and even the common people were but objects for comment and ways and means to experience intellectual and spiritual, destroys my hopes of genuine admiration. And yet he was something of a great head both to oppressed India and Ireland. Perhaps deep social resentment and revolutionary ardour take the form of aesthetic restlessness in a mind like J.M.'s."

"This is not a tragedy, but it means the disappearance of the last survivor of the heroic age. He was my first political mentor, and for more than fifty years a wise counsellor, the best of comrades, and in these last years an unfailing and devoted revered friend. Only last week I had from him an affectionate letter which I shall always treasure. English literature and the great traditions of public life are impoverished by his loss."

"As for Morley, he was never a good speaker, but he is a brilliant conversationalist. His fault in politics is that he's too negative."

"Since the death of Mr. Bradlaugh Mr. Morley was the most powerful exponent of individualism in the country... [E]very sensible man who had the future social welfare of his class at heart must be utterly opposed to Mr. Morley, who set his face against the collective ownership of land, the State ownership of railways, a legal eight hours day, and other questions of social legislation that would be useful to the community of workers."

"John Morley...should be mentioned here, not as an orator, for he would make no such claim, but as the last or almost the last exponent of the classical literary style. Just as his great Biography of Mr. Gladstone teems with splendid phrases, original without being extravagant, imaginative without being ornate, so in some of his platform speeches, delivered in the days when he addressed great popular audiences, the principles of his political creed were expounded in a garb that reminds one of the school of literary orators that ended with Canning and Macaulay. It was not rhetoric, because the sense was never sacrificed to the form, but it was an inspired form of spoken prose."

"The King...seems to have unburdened himself to Lord Morley. In the course of their discussions His Majesty pleased him greatly by observing that he looked upon him as the only representative of the old Whigs left in the Cabinet, and certainly, in so far as Whiggism is an attitude of mind, His Majesty's judgment was not wanting in acuteness."

"Lord Morley deplored Winston's Bradford speech... He took particular exception to the phrase “there are worse things than bloodshed,” which he described as “a platitude, and worse, a Tory platitude.” The subject cropped up at luncheon in Downing Street, when the Prime Minister instanced the enthusiasm with which the speech was received, and the cheers with which Winston was greeted in the House of Commons, as a proof that it corresponded to the feelings of the party. Lord Morley reminded them that a great Prime Minister, who once lived in that house, on being told of the popular delirium with which the declaration of war had been welcomed, replied, “They are ringing the bells now, but in no long time they will be wringing their hands.” He went on to say, so he told me, “You may talk as you like of bloodshed, but I venture to say this, that the first blood shed in Ireland, not in mere civil commotion, but in conflict between the Ulster Volunteers and the forces of the Crown, will mean the end of Home Rule.” Such a declaration from such a source has tremendous significance, but will it have much effect?"

"The menace of European war has come with startling abruptness. I received this afternoon the intimation that the Cabinet had decided to initiate the precautionary stage in the preparations for war. In a few minutes' talk I had with Lord Morley, I discovered that the step met with his keen disapproval, and that, upon its being followed by mobilisation, he would cease to incur further ministerial responsibility. Sympathetic as he is towards France in her secular struggle with Germany in the world of ideas, he cannot brook this country becoming a party to what he regards as a Slavonic movement against Teuton influence. Russia and all she stands for is still for him identified with barbarism, and he looks upon any tendency hostile to Germany that has its roots in Slav aspirations as prejudicial to the interests of civilisation."

"Twelve months ago you were below the gangway, now you are one of the foremost, most popular, most trusted leaders of the Party, after having discharged with signal ability and success the duties of the most difficult post in the Cabinet. I doubt whether our political history has any parallel for so swift, so sure, so well-deserved a rise. The future of the Liberal party will (if your life is spared), be coloured, influenced, controlled by you."

"I came across the articles written by John Morley in the Pall Mall Gazette during the Irish coercion period of Gladstone's Government. When read in sequence they seemed irresistible in their argument that coercion was not, under modern conditions, possible as a permanent system of governing Ireland. The only alternative was Home Rule. I was intellectually convinced: Morley seemed to be clear and consistent in his thought about Ireland."

"The best stroke the labour party could do would be to defeat Mr. Morley. He did not think Mr. Morley dishonest, or lacking in moral character or backbone, but his ideas were antagonistic to the new ideas which were beginning to find vent amongst the common people, and...it became a duty to prove to Mr. Morley and those who thought with him that the old school of Liberalism had had its day, and must now give place to the new... Mr. Morley was honest, but that was not everything. Mr. Morley was too much a man of the study, and was not in touch with his working-class fellows, and it was their sacred duty to try and bring about his defeat."

"If only Morley had let politics alone, he might have been the Gibbon of his age."

"The conversation passed into politics and particularly upon Germany, and I was astonished to find how “unrealistic” (as I thought) his views were about Germany's attitude (this was in 1909) and how far more he leaned towards Goethe than towards Comte. A three hours' talk with Morley was a delightful experience."

"It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the more typically English a writer on political or social problems then appeared to the world, the more is he to-day forgotten in his own country. Men like Lord Morley or Henry Sidgwick, Lord Acton or A. V. Dicey, who were then admired in the world at large as outstanding examples of the political wisdom of liberal England, are to the present generation largely obsolete Victorians."

"It is the end of a chapter and of a life which has consoled me more than anything else for the horrors, cruelties, and perversities of this hateful age with its false prophets and professional impostors, its office seekers, profiteers, wirepullers – all obsequious worshippers of Force, Popularity, and Pelf."

"Compromise, written by John Morley, Mill's favourite disciple, explores some of the subsidiary problems that revolve round the question how far self-respecting men may submit to false conventions and employ economies of truth in public and private life. Morley often told me that he intended Compromise to be a supplement to Mill's Liberty; and the two books have provided many of us with a philosophic faith."

"In his fascinating treatise On Compromise, John Morley pointed out that even a man who is convinced that his own opinions are right is not necessarily intolerant; and he might have added that even those who are intolerant in private life are not necessarily believers in public coercion or persecution. The Bolshevik threat — "Be my brother, or I slay thee" — is the sign of a weak, as well as of a ferocious faith. It only requires a little common sense and a little knowledge of the world to recognise the truth of the old adage — "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." In Morley's words, "you have not converted a man because you have silenced him." Submission or acquiescence in a political system or a religious dogma when obtained by law, imprisonment, torture, threats or coercion of any kind "is as worthless and as essentially hypocritical as the conversion of an Irish pauper to Protestantism by means of soup tickets, or that of a savage to Christianity by the gift of a string of beads.""

"It was pleasant and interesting to be in almost daily intercourse with a friend with whom I had much in common, and whose conversation, when he was in the humour for it, was most agreeable to listen to. But he was not always in the humour, for, as his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, J. E. Ellis, said to me in describing him, he was "a man of moods." No truer word was ever spoken, and he had his bad days as well as his good ones. These variations in his temperature were naturally inconvenient, and made him less pleasant as a chief than he ought to have been: he was charming, but there was a sense of insecurity. Of all the Secretaries of State under whom I served he was the most intellectually brilliant, and, though he took to politics rather late in life, he had speedily raised himself to a conspicuous position; but he certainly was, in my opinion, born to be a thinker and a writer rather than a practical statesman and administrator."

"Politically, I suppose he was very far from me, and some of his Gods I hope never to revere. But he always talked from a full mind and a full heart. He liked the men who really count and the lamp of reason burned the more brightly for his presence. Some of his work seems to me very first rate — in literary criticism the essays on Macaulay and Carlyle, in political criticism those on Maine and Condorcet; the biographies of Voltaire and Diderot, the essays on Machiavelli and Robespierre. I have always liked the life of Cobden as a great picture of that era, and disliked the Gladstone as a tombstone rather than a book, though it has great occasions. As I look back the striking thing about the long hours I used to spend there was his wide and generous attitude to life. And many of his heroes were mine — especially Cromwell, Voltaire and Mill. And I think he did some great political work — Ireland, India and South Africa are all tributes to his insight."

"I do wish Morley had lived a few months longer to see MacDonald Prime Minister. The old man had talked of it so eagerly and so often."

"Morley was the last of the great, the true, Liberals."

"This inner conflict between the man of letters and the man of politics in Morley pursued and paralysed him all through his life."

"In action he was sometimes wanting in courage and in promptitude, but he never shrank from taking any risk on what he considered a matter of basic principle. He used to laugh at the epithet of “Honest John”, but he fully deserved it; with all his little weaknesses and his small and human vanities, he was emphatically a noble figure. He hated cruelty, he was humane, he was consistent. He might see the faults of the poor, but in heart and soul he was always with them. When I was talking to him once about the tragedies that lay behind the brilliant surface of aristocratic society, and suggested what material these things might give to a dramatist or novelist of genius, Morley almost impatiently replied that he took no interest in their rotten joys or their rotten sorrows; he was more interested in the poor wage-earner, who had to keep wife and children on scanty and uncertain resources. To sum him up; he failed, so far as he did fail, because he was a philosopher and not a bruiser."

"Christianity represents man as being by nature sinful, and the evils of the world as being due to the inherent imperfections in his nature. This doctrine Mr. Morley regards as entirely fatal to an efficacious doctrine of progress."

"Mr Morley has never entirely deserted literature for politics; he has brought his political training to bear on literature; witness his admirable studies of Sir Robert Walpole and of Oliver Cromwell, books which abound in wise saws and pregnant reflections that could never have been inspired in the study. They are the fine flower of political experience, ripened in the senate and the market-place, quickened by the habit of dealing directly with men, and perfected by rare literary skill."

"The effect of Peel's conduct in 1829 and 1846 has always seemed to me deplorable. The only person among our statesmen who has a right to propose a Home Rule Bill is Mr. John Morley."

"After my return to Parliament as member for Blackburn, my wife and I became friendly with Lord Morley, who was a native of the town. We often visited him at his house in Wimbledon, and our conversations with him remain among the happiest of our recollections. He was a charming conversationalist, and his penetrating comments on his political contemporaries were illustrating and fascinating."

"In the afternoon we journeyed down with Haldane to see Lord Morley, who for some unexplained reason desired to see us. We have never been on terms of friendship with John Morley. We have neither liked nor disliked him; and we have always assumed a similar attitude on his part. But it seems that in his political prime he was acutely aware of the socialist criticism of Gladstonian politics and deeply resented it. To-day he is a dignified, benevolent and infirm old man, pathetically anxious to make his peace with the new world of social democracy. In his old age he is more open-minded to the new thought than he was when he had the vigour to grasp its meaning. The catastrophe of the great war has compelled his pacifist soul to seek comradeship in the international socialist movement... As Sidney said goodbye he said wistfully “There is no malice between us?”—as if our visit had been one of reconciliation. We have been quite unconscious of any relationship—good or bad—between us and him."

"That consecrated combination of private interests and public plunders."

"Faced with the alternative of saying goodbye to the gold standard, and therefore to his own employment, and goodbye to other people's employment, Mr. Churchill characteristically selected the latter course."

"We propose first to expand credit in order to create demand. That new and greater demand must, of course, be met by a new and greater supply of goods, or all the evils of inflation and price rise will result. Here our Socialist planning must enter in. We must see that more goods are forthcoming to meet the new demand."

"The ranks of the City are now divided. The advanced section, headed by Mr McKenna and Mr Keynes, face the orthodox and reactionary ranks which are led by Mr Montagu Norman and the heads of the Treasury. To the uninitiated it...seems a little unfortunate that the ex-Labour chancellor should appear...to be an ardent supporter of Mr Montagu Norman. It will be little less than a disaster if in this struggle Labour support is accorded to the reactionary elements in the City."

"If you love our country you are national, and if you love our people you are a socialist."

"The declared object of deflation was the restoration of the gold standard at pre-war parity. Its actual effect has been to create unemployment by the restriction of industrial credit. By the lever of unemployment it has forced down wages and has thus facilitated the return to gold through the reduction of prices. An incidental effect has been to transfer purchasing power from the workers, whose wages have been reduced, to the bondholders, whose interest has remained the same. It has also doubled the real burden of Debt since 1920, and was largely responsible for the mining lock-out last year, by the reduction in terms of sterling of the money which we receive for coal sold abroad. Deflation, in fact, has been responsible for a sinister catalogue of disasters which can be substantiated in detailed argument that has never yet been rebutted."

"We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers."

"Feudalism worked in its crude and inequitable fashion until the coming of the Industrial Age. Today the Feudal tradition and its adherents are broken as a political power and in most cases are ignobly lending their prestige and their abilities to the support of the predatory plutocracy which has gained complete control of the Conservative Party. In modern times the old regime is confronted with two alternatives. The first is to serve the new world in a great attempt to bring order out of chaos and beauty out of squalor. The other alternative is to become flunkeys of the bourgeoisie. It is a matter of constant surprise and regret that many of my class have chosen the latter course."

"Together in Britain we have lit a flame that the ages shall not extinguish. Guard that sacred flame, my brother Blackshirts, until it illuminates Britain and lights again the paths of mankind."

"A fight between several parties of the British people: Nothing of the kind! A fight between two or three big money combines, that and nothing else. Without the weight of money behind the party machines, in an electoral battle today determined purely by principle and by the number of active workers...British Union could fight and beat today the old parties over the whole electoral field. But you know and I know, the battle is nothing of the kind. The battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight. Or when they speak democracy, they don't mean government by the people...they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money."

"Living financially and economically on American charity, selling up the house to the Yanks when he won't pay any more charity out. Are you content to be occupied and protected by American aeroplanes? Are you content to be in the position of an old woman, jipped by her young relations? You who were the greatest power on earth fifty years ago, and still can be! Why do I say, 'you still can be'? Because, my friends, I know you, I know the British people! I know that twice in my lifetime in the world war I fought in, in the world war the younger men fought in. We the British have put our effort, our energy of valor, of heroism, unequalled in the history of mankind."

"[Fascism] was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly."

"I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics."

"...the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes."

"Great men of action never mind on occasion being ridiculous; in a sense it is part of their job."

"A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity; it is an occupational risk."

"Tom Mosley is a cad and a wrong 'un and they will find it out."

"Mosley is the only man I have ever known who could have been the leader of either the Conservative or Labour party...he might have been a very great Prime Minister."

"Capable of becoming either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister."

"No rising star in the political firmament ever shone more brightly than Oswald Mosley, none promised more surely to soar to the heavens – and none fell to earth with so deadening a thud. Never were such rich talents so wretchedly squandered. Never did success turn to failure so inscrutably."

"Did he not appear to you to be a public man of no little courage, no little candour and no little ability."

"He is too 'logical' and if he had his way would attempt to presently 'Russianize'...our government."

"It was a very able document and illuminating."

"I like the spirit which informs the document. A scheme of national economic planning to achieve a right, or at least a better, balance of our industries between the old and the new, between agriculture and manufacture, between home development and foreign investment; and wide executive powers to carry out the details of such a scheme. That is what it amounts to. ... [The] manifesto offers us a starting point for thought and action. ... It will shock—it must do so—the many good citizens of this country...who have laissez-faire in their craniums, their consciences, and their bones ... But how anyone professing and calling himself a socialist can keep away from the manifesto is a more obscure matter."

"[David Lloyd George] said that Mosley was one of the worst tragedies he knew. If Mosley had stuck it, he was just the type that was needed at the moment. He was just the sort of fellow who could talk to this crowd. You needed a fellow today like Mosley, who could have cheeked them."

"I had many conversations with him during the next few months [in 1930], and was struck both by his acute intelligence and his energy. There was a moment later in the year when I was myself tempted to work with his New Party, for there were many points of his programme which seemed to me at once reasonable and constructive. ... I deeply regretted the course that Sir Oswald Mosley later took. Even his loyal friends...left him when they saw his movement beginning to develop into a form of Fascism, with everything which that implied. This whole story was something of a tragedy. Great talents and great strengths of character were thrown away in vain."

"He is the only living Englishman who could perfectly well have been either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister."

"He was the only English politician who might easily have become Prime Minister as Conservative, Liberal or Socialist."

"I heard Mosley speak here on Sunday. It sickens one to see how easily a man of that type can win over and bamboozle a working class audience."

"One would have had to look a long time to find a man more barren of ideas than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even the elementary fact that Fascism must not offend national sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party programme from Italy and the salute from Germany, with the Jew-baiting tacked on as an afterthought, Mosley having actually started his movement with Jews among his most prominent followers."

"Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was one of the most interesting failures, not least because Mosley probably had the greatest intellectual gifts and the strongest social connections of all the fascist chiefs. As a promising junior minister of the Labour government of 1929, he put forward a bold plan in early 1930 to combat the Depression by making the empire a closed economic zone and by spending (into deficit, if need be) for job-creating public works and consumer credit. When the leaders of the Labour Party rebuffed these unorthodox proposals, Mosley resigned and formed his own New Party in 1931, taking a few left-wing Labour MPs with him. The New Party won no seats, however, in the parliamentary election of October 1931. A visit to Mussolini persuaded the frustrated Mosley that fascism was the wave of the future, and his own personal way forward."

"Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (October 1932) won some important early converts, like Lord Rothermere, publisher of the mass-circulation London Daily Mail. Mosley’s movement aroused revulsion, however, when his black-shirted guards spotlighted and beat up opponents at a large public meeting at the Olympia expedition hall in London in June 1934. Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, at the end of the same month, provoked the departure of 90 percent of the BUF’s fifty thousand members, including Lord Rothermere. At the end of 1934, Mosley took an actively anti-Semitic track and sent his Blackshirts to swagger through London’s East End, where they fought with Jews and Communists, building a new clientele among unskilled workers and struggling shopkeepers there. The Public Order Act, passed soon after the “Battle of Cable Street” with antifascists on October 4, 1936, outlawed political uniforms and deprived the BUF of its public spectacles, but it grew again to twenty thousand with a campaign against war in 1939. Mosley’s black shirts, violence, and overt sympathy for Mussolini and Hitler (he was married to Diana Mitford in Hitler’s presence at Munich in 1936) seemed alien to most people in Britain, and gradual economic revival after 1931 under the broadly accepted National Government, a coalition dominated by conservatives, left him little political space."

"Mosley was a disciple of Keynes in the 1920s; and Keynesianism was his great contribution to Fascism. It was Keynesianism which in the last resort made Mosley's Fascism distinctively English, though it was not an Englishness which most English pundits were then prepared to recognise, being as remote from the Keynesian thinking as they were from the problems which gave birth to it."

"To Jo Grimond he epitomizes the aristocratic bully."

"The resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley did not come as a surprise... I doubt, indeed, if anybody would be able to work with Mosley unless he were prepared to meekly follow him... I never had any faith in the sincerity of Mosley's professions of Socialism. I was always suspicious of a rich man who came into the Socialist Movement and at once became more socialist than the Socialists... My views of Mosley's sincerity were very generally shared by the Labour members... It was felt that he was a man on the make, and was using the Labour Movement as an instrument for satisfying his ambition... If ever Mosley had the powers of a Hitler or a Mussolini he would be more ruthless and merciless, because weaker and vainer, than those two dictators."

"The greatest comet of British politics in the twentieth century...an orator of the highest rank. He produced, almost unaided, a programme of economic reconstruction which surpassed anything offered by Lloyd George or, in the United States, by F. D. Roosevelt...He has continued fertile in ideas...A superb political thinker, the best of our age."

"From his childhood onward this boy [the future Edward VIII] will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score—[Cries of ‘Oh, oh!’]—and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation. [Cries of ‘Oh, oh!’] A line will be drawn between him and the people whom he is to be called upon some day to reign over. In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow—[Loud cries of ‘Oh, oh!’ and ‘Order!’]—and the end of it all will be that the country will be called upon to pay the bill. [Cries of Divide!]"

"We are called upon at the beginning of the twentieth century to decide the question propounded in the Sermon on the Mount, as to whether we will worship God or Mammon. The present day is a Mammon-worshipping age. Socialism proposes to dethrone the brute-god Mammon and to lift humanity into its place. I beg to submit, in this very imperfect fashion, the resolution on the paper, merely promising that the last has not been heard of the Socialist movement either in the country or on the floor of this House, but that, just as sure as Radicalism democratised the system of government politically in the last century, so will socialism democratise the country industrially during the century upon which we just entered."

"As a matter of hard, dry fact, from which there can be no getting away, there is more Labour legislation standing to the credit account of the Conservative Party on the Statute Books than there is to that of their opponents. It is a grotesque assumption that one side exists for the purpose of passing such legislation while the other does so grudgingly and under the force of compulsion."

"For my own part I have always maintained that to claim for the Socialist movement that it is a "class" war dependent for its success upon the "class" consciousness of one section of the community is doing Socialism an injustice, and indefinitely postponing its triumph. It is, in fact, lowering it to the level of a mere faction fight. Socialism offers a platform broad enough for all to stand upon who accept its principles ... Socialism makes war upon a system, not upon a class."

"There were those who still believed that women should remain the domestic drudges they had been all through the ages, but they were aware that in every sphere of industrial activity women labour was coming more and more into competition with that of men, and the question they had to decide was whether they wanted women as competitors who would undercut wages or as comrades who would fight side by side to get better conditions for men and women alike. Class exclusion had been removed, but sex exclusion remained, and the time had now come when every cause that divided democracy ought to be removed. ... These women had no option but to make themselves a disagreeable nuisance to every party until their claims had been considered. ... Being outside the franchise, they were justified in being rebels until the State made them citizens. Men had no right to sit in judgment upon their tactics and their methods. They knew their own business and had courage and capacity for carrying the movement through. As a democrat, as a labour man who wanted to see the working classes more fully represented in the seat of power, and as a Socialist, he desired to see the political inequality which ruled women out from citizenship removed."

"They should remember that if wages were not so good as they should be, if the hours were long, and if the conditions of labour were becoming worse, the responsibility rested with those men who would not come inside the union and try to make things better. What was it that kept them apart? Some people said it was because...men held different religious opinions they would not work together in the union. Nothing, in his opinion, could be more stupid. What did it matter to a man whether his neighbour was a Protestant or a Catholic so long as they were working men and had one common interest, to work together for each other's good?"

"They wanted to see in the House of Commons a strong Labour party, which would be able to compel the employer class and the landlord class to take their hands off the life of the nation and enable the working people to have a chance to live. They knew the terrible curse landlordism had been to Ireland; it had been the same in Scotland. It had been a curse all the time and always, and they wanted to get rid of it. They could only do so by having Labour members in Parliament to fight the cause of the common people."

"The Zulus in South Africa were being treated, like the dock labourers at home, as a means for making money for an unscrupulous and conscienceless gang. As a member of the Labour party he was going to stand up for the Zulus or for any other race or people who were being treated unjustly under the British flag. He stood up for working men at home, and he did so for working men in South Africa."

"The Master of Elibank is quite right when he says that Socialism and Liberalism are antagonistic forces. Socialism represents the principles taught by Christ, the reign of love and fraternity; Liberalism represents fierce, unscrupulous strife and competition, the aggrandisement of the strong, the robbery of the weak. Between these there can be no truce. The struggle is between God and Mammon, and Liberalism has ever been a devotee of Mammon."

"His sympathies were with the people of Russia, but they were also with the colonial races of South Africa. He did not limit his sympathies to the colour of a man's skin, the religion he professed, or the language he spoke. Wherever he saw wrong being done or an injustice perpetrated, he had no option but to speak out and protest and make the truth known... They wanted to see justice obtain in the earth, justice in Russia, justice in Great Britain, and justice in South Africa, and the glory of the Socialist movement was that it united all that was best in the race in denouncing the wrong and helping to introduce right."

"Surely we had got beyond that stage of civilisation as represented by war and the age of barbarism. What was the deduction from Mr. Haldane's observations? That the mass of the people in the industrial army corresponded to the rank and file in the military Army were to have no opinions, no individuality, no will of their own, no right to think, and no power to act, that they were to be obedient and in subjection to those placed in power and authority over them. That kind of dogma might do for the military feudalism of Germany, but it was alien and contrary to the freedom-loving spirit of Scotland, which inspired the poems of Robert Burns."

"They of the Labour party were free-traders to a man."

"Socialism stood for the divinity of the human race and as such detested war and all preparations leading to war. The one party in the world that could be trusted to be a peace party at all times was the Socialist and Labour party."

"Finance was the power that the people had most to fear. It made States and Kings and Cabinets, and even Liberal Cabinets, mere puppets to dance when the Rothschilds pulled the strings. The Labour party had made its protest, and they were proud of it."

"For 50 years they had had free trade in Great Britain and they had a greater mass of sordid, miserable destitution in this country than could be found in any other country on the face of the globe. If tariff reform would solve the question there would be no poverty in America, protection was never intended to benefit the working classes."

"Profit sharing, by anchoring a man to the spot, by breaking down the sense of his own consciousness, which inspired every big strike, had a positive tendency to lower wages and worsen the conditions of employment. Therefore he looked with no hope to profit sharing."

"Thanks to the wise legislators of the past who had allowed our native land to go out of cultivation and left us dependent upon other countries for our food supplies, all that an invading force would be required to do would be to stop our food supplies coming in; the gaunt enemy of hunger would do all the invader's work."

"If...the Social Democrats make substantial gains at the polls every one here...will accept that as indisputable proof that the German people desire peace. ... A great Socialist triumph on that day would not only sweep the clouds of war from off this political horizon, but would also make it easy for an understanding to be reached between Germany and Great Britain concerning future naval policy, and thus relieve the taxpayers of both countries of the crushing burden which the present rivalry in Dreadnought building imposes."

"Women have no voice in making the laws which they are expected to obey. "What about Mrs. Pankhurst?" ejaculated one of the audience, to which Mr. Hardie retorted, "If women are not allowed a say in making the laws they are justified in breaking them." (Loud shouts of dissent and a voice, "What about burning houses?") Mr. Hardie continued:—When men were agitating for the franchise not only were houses burnt, but there was armed revolution and rioting. I will oppose every Franchise Bill, including what is called plural voting, until women have the franchise."

"Nationalisation of land, mines, and railways was not necessarily of a definite Socialist character. In Germany they had nationalisation of railways, but it did not help the workers, and in India they had nationalisation of land, railways, and mines, and there was more poverty among the workers there than in any other country. They might have all these things nationalised for the advantage of capitalism and the condition of the workers the same as before. Unless they had the State controlled by the working class and abolished class rule they could nationalise what they pleased, but the worker would continue in a subordinate position."

"“Their honesty,” said honest Keir Hardie, “is proverbial. They borrow and lend on word of mouth, and the repudiation of a debt is almost unknown.”"

"Max Muller, on the strength of official documents and a missionary report concerning education in Bengal prior to the British occupation, asserts that there were 80,000 native schools in Bengal, or one for every 4000 of the population. Ludlow, in his History of British India, says that "in every Hindoo village which has retained its old form I am assured that the children generally are able to read, write, and cipher, but where we have swept away the village system, as in Bengal, there the village school has also disappeared.""

"If the State has no right to interfere to protect the poor struggling against circumstances over which they have no control in the industrial world, it is difficult to see why the same State should be considered a beneficent agency when called in to protect the property of the rich against an infuriated mob of starving people. If the poor are to be left to struggle for existence unaided by the State, then why not the rich?"

"If it could be shown that the great Trust magnate or the great Aristocratic landowner, apart from the advantages of his inherited wealth, was a more highly developed species of humanity than the poor struggling sempstress or the unemployed docker, then there might be some justification for allowing the docker and the sempstress as the representatives of a weaker class to die out in order to enable the more highly developed creature to survive; but one moment's reflection will show that the alleged superiority of the landowner or the Trust magnate rests on one fact alone, namely, that he owns certain material possessions, usually inherited, which enable him to dictate the terms upon which his less fortunate fellow creatures shall be permitted to live."

"The individualistic conception of the State as some external authority exercising a malign influence upon the life of the community is a travesty of fact. The State is that form of organised society which has evolved through the process of the ages, and represents the aptitude for freedom and self-government to which any people has attained. The policeman and the soldier, for example, who are at the call of the landlord or the employer when tenant or workman becomes turbulent, exist by the will and under the express authority of those same tenants and workmen, who constitute a preponderating majority in the State, and without whose consent neither soldier nor policeman could continue to exist."

"No law can give freedom to a people which is dependent upon some power or authority outside themselves for the necessaries of life. The owners of the means of life can dictate the terms upon which all who are not owners are to be permitted to live."

"Socialism does not propose to abolish land or capital. Only a genius could have thought of this as an objection to Socialism. Socialism proposes to abolish capitalism and landlordism."

"The landlord, qua landlord, performs no function in the economy of industry or of food production. He is a rent receiver; that, and nothing more. Were the landlord to be abolished, the soil and the people who till it would still remain, and the disappearance of the landowner would pass almost unnoticed. So too with the capitalist."

"By capitalist, I mean the investor who puts his money into a concern and draws profits there from without participating in the organisation or management of the business. Were all these to disappear in the night, leaving no trace behind, nothing would be changed."

"There is the increasing tension required in the conduct of business which so saps a man's energies as to leave him little of either time or inclination for the cultivation of any other than the business faculty. A tendency to revolt against this is a well-marked feature of the social life of our time. Of what use is it, ask these slaves of the ledger, to spend the greater part of a lifetime in acquiring a competency only to find after it has been acquired that its acquisition has taken all the savour of enjoyment out of life?"

"By inherited instinct we are all Communists at heart; and if the isolated Ego of self gets the upper hand for a time he produces results so terrifying that the mistake of allowing him to rule is speedily made apparent, and we begin to seek a way whereby we may return to the kindly sway of the spirit of Altruism."

"Almost without exception, the early Christian Fathers whose teachings have come down to us spoke out fearlessly against usury, which includes interest also, and on the side of Communism. They proclaimed that, inasmuch as nature had provided all things in common, it was sinful robbery for one man to own more than another, especially if that other was in want. The man who gathered much whilst others had not enough, was a murderer."

"History is one long record of like illustrations. Must our modern civilisation with all its teeming wonders come to a like end? We are reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days—Imperialism, taking tribute from conquered races, the accumulation of great fortunes, the development of a population which owns no property, and is always in poverty. Land has gone out of cultivation and physical deterioration is an alarming fact. An so we Socialists say the system which is producing these results must not be allowed to continue. A system which has robbed religion of its saviour, destroyed handicraft, which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on the streetsm and upright men into mean-spirited time-servers, cannot continue. In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow. Socialism with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. It has claimed its martyrs in the past, is claiming them now, will claim them still; but what then? Better to "rebel and die in the twenty worlds sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life.""

"The events of the past few weeks in the Aberdare and Rhondda valleys must have shown you anew that a Liberal government is first and foremost a capitalist government. If the bloodshed and riotous conduct of which the police have been guilty had taken place under a Conservative government every Liberal platform would have rung with denunciations of the wicked Tories; but, because it is the Liberals who are responsible there is a conspiracy of silence in the press and every Liberal speaker is dumb."

"The Home Secretary not only defends the actions of the police and refuses an enquiry into the charges against them but also eulogises the hooligans in uniform, whilst Liberal MPs, with few exceptions, back him up by their votes in the Division Lobby."

"As a consequence of this the men on strike are believed by millions of people who know nothing of the facts to be wild, riotous, drunken, worthless scamps, whereas the very opposite is the truth. The military and police have been sent to help the masters to crush the men. The trick won’t succeed."

"During the contest I shall be a good deal in other constituencies where Labour men are being opposed. Both parties fear the presence in Parliament of Labour men whom they can can neither silence nor control. I want to see the number of such men increased, so that political hypocrites to the Churchill type may be unmasked and the health, comfort, safety, and general well-being of the working class promoted. I know you will hold the fort for Labour in my absence."

"A number of the delegates – even at the Marxist meeting of the Second International – were supportive of class struggle but opposed to violence, basing their socialism on ethical, partly Christian, foundations at least as much as on Marx. Keir Hardie, who had left school at the age of eight and from the ages of ten to twenty-three had worked in coal mines, was a case in point. His socialism was an eclectic mixture, owing much to the poetry of Robert Burns, religious mysticism and an intuitive feel for ‘the gradualist, peaceful evolution of British society, however pugnaciously he might champion the workers’ cause’. To the British political establishment, Hardie seemed an extremist (not least as a result of his attacks in Parliament on the monarchy); for the revolutionary Lenin, he epitomized 'opportunism'."

"The Independent Labour Party is extremely indefinite in its tactics, and its leader, Keir Hardie, is a super-cunning Scot, whose demagogic tricks are not to be trusted for a minute. Although he is a poor devil of a Scottish coal miner, he has founded a big weekly, The Labour Leader, which could not have been established without considerable money, and he is getting this money from Tory or Liberal-Unionist, that is, anti-Gladstone and anti-Home Rule sources. There can be no doubt about this, and his notorious literary connections in London as well as direct reports and his political attitude confirm it. Consequently, owing to desertions by Irish and radical voters, he may very easily lose his seat in Parliament at the 1895 general elections and that would be a stroke of good luck — the man is the greatest obstacle at present. He appears in Parliament only on demagogic occasions, in order to cut a figure with phrases about the unemployed — without getting anything done — or to address imbecilities to the Queen on the occasion of the birth of a prince, which is infinitely banal and cheap in this country, and so forth. Otherwise there are very good elements both in the Social-Democratic Federation and in the Independent Labour Party, especially in the provinces, but they are scattered; yet they have at least managed to foil all the efforts of the leaders to incite the two organisations against each other."

"Keir Hardie's socialism [was] idealistic in character, drawn more from Methodism and Robert Burns than from Karl Marx."

"It sometimes filled him with a little bit of melancholy when he thought that to many in the Labour movement Keir Hardie was only a name. The generation that knew the man was steadily being turned out, and before many years would all have gone. Hardie would only be something like a myth in the imagination of the living. He would be arrayed in garments of great dignity, and with almost superhuman purity and power, which always happened when a great man had died and had become a historical figure. But whatever happened to Hardie, he would always remain as the first man in their great Labour movement."

"He set out not to clear his own course, but to blaze a trail along which he might lead the people towards the city of his dreams, a city well founded on justice and on equality, a city in which all men and women might live together and work together in brotherly service for the common good. It is for us to carry on with the building of that city, encouraged by his example, held together in unity by the common heritage which has come to us from him. We salute his memory. We pass on to complete his work."

"He is an observant, hard-headed, honest fellow, but rather vain and crammed full of vehement preconceptions, especially on all the most delicate and dubious parts of politics. Perhaps it is only the men with these unscrupulous preconceptions—knocking their heads against stone walls—who force the world along."

"[He was] one of the best loved and most respected of the public men of those times. His politics were, above all, the politics of compassion; his voice was the voice of the oppressed and the neglected—the sufferers from a civilisation that was full of injustices."

"During the years Hardie was in Parliament, from 1892 to 1895...he made the subject of unemployment an issue in British politics. Before then the State acknowledged no obligation to make provision for the unemployed. They were regarded as being in the main a lot of drunken, thriftless, ne'er-do-wells whose condition was due to their own fault. By persistently keeping the unemployed question before Parliament, and by speaking at week-ends throughout the country, Hardie at last succeeded in getting the Government to admit a public responsibility for the unemployed. To Keir Hardie, more than to any other man, the credit was due for the great change which, in the last 30 years, had come over Parliament, and the awakening of the public conscience on this question."

"Snowden denied that Hardie's Socialism was indebted to the teachings of Karl Marx. He had often heard Hardie say that his Socialism was derived from the New Testament and the poems of Robert Burns, rather than from the writings of Socialist economists."

"Keir Hardie created the British Labour Party and determined its character – an alliance between trade unions and political radicals, with a leaven of well-meaning careerists... His socialism derived more from Carlyle and Ruskin than from Marx."

"By listening to the lectures and reading a wide variety of books I nursed the seed which had been planted in my mind by Keir Hardie's speech in Denver, and by Myron Reed's discussions of the human struggle there."

"Keir Hardie told me that it was Progress and Poverty which gave him his first ideas of Socialism. Henry George, he felt, had claimed too much for the results of the appropriation of the economic rent of land, and had not appreciated the importance of capitalistic exploitation."

"To him more than to any other individual the bringing of the British working classes to a consciousness of their own power is due."

"He was not the politician, but the prophet and the seer. Compromise was not in the man's nature. He was the unsparing iconoclast who sought to break the illusions and conventions of his generation. He had set before himself an ideal which he pursued regardless of the hostility and opposition of enemies, and often with scant regard for the criticism and advice of his friends. But, withal, he was the greatest product of the democracy of our times."

"His speeches were not those of the politician, but of the man with a mission and a message. His fine, rugged appearance, his powerful and resonant voice, the character of his popular addresses, brought to one's imagination the old Hebrew prophets thundering forth denunciation of the evils of their day and prophesying the coming of a better time. The moving impulse of Keir Hardie's work was a profound belief in the common people. He believed in their capacity, and he burned with indignation at their unmerited sufferings. He was no theoretic dogmatist. He never argued on the platform the economic theories of Socialism. His Socialism was a great human conception of the equal right of all men and women to the wealth of the world and to enjoyment of the fullness of life."

"Hardie profoundly believed himself to be inspired with a mission. After the declaration of the poll in an election in which he had been an unsuccessful candidate, he said to a gathering of his supporters: "I come from a race of seers, and I see clearly in prophetic vision the day, not fifty years ahead, when the cause for which we stand will be triumphant"."

"His life was the expression of a deep religious faith. A mutual friend once said to me: "If Hardie were the most blatant atheist I should still regard him as the most religious man I have ever known". "I do not know", Hardie once said to me, "what they will say about old Keir Hardie when he is dead and gone. But this at least I hope they will be able to say—that, with all his faults, he always fought for his own class." And that, indeed, those of us who knew him can say."

"Few men have had so great an influence on the political life of the country. In the day when the common people enter into the Promised Land no name deserves to be more affectionately and gratefully remembered than Keir Hardie."

"The object of Socialism is not to render the individual capable of living on his personal resources. That is the theory of radical individualism. Its object is to create in him a greater and greater sense of his dependence upon the state, and, at the same time, to inculcate in him the conviction that he is a part of it and that he has a duty and responsibility toward the state; and that only in so far as he fulfils this duty can he benefit by the advantages of a complete personal and social life."

"Truth," it has been said, "is the first casualty of war."

"It is no part of my job as Chancellor of the Exchequer to put before the House of Commons proposals for the expenditure of public money. The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance."

"I would like to see the word 'nationalization' banned from the socialist vocabulary."

"I hope you have read the election programme of the Labour Party...this is not socialism. It is Bolshevism run mad."

"They were told that Cobdenism was dead. ... Cobdenism was never more alive throughout the world than it was to-day. ... To-day the ideas of Cobden were in revolt against selfish nationalism. The need for the breaking down of trade restrictions, which took various forms, was universally recognized even by those who were unable to throw off those shackles."

"To every outworn shibboleth of 19th-century economics he clung with fanatic tenacity. Economy, Free Trade, Gold — these were the keynotes of his political philosophy, and deflation the path he trod with almost ghoulish enthusiasm."

"He was really a tender-hearted man, who would not have hurt a gnat unless his party and the Treasury told him to do so, and then only with compunction. ... We must imagine with what joy Mr. Snowden was welcomed at the Treasury by the permenant officials. All British Chancellors of the Exchequer have yielded themselves, some spontaneously, some unconsciously, some reluctantly to that compulsive intellectual atmosphere. But there was the High Priest entering the sanctuary. The Treasury mind and the Snowden mind embraced each other with the fervour of two long-separated kindred lizards, and the reign of joy began. He was a preaching friar with no Superior to obey but his intellect. ... The British democracy should be proud of Philip Snowden. He was a man capable of maintaining the structure of Society while at the same time championing the interests of the masses."

"It is always difficult for an administration or party which is founded upon attacking capital to preserve the confidence and credit so important to the highly artificial economy of an island like Britain. Mr. MacDonald’s Labour-Socialist Government were utterly unable to cope with the problems which confronted them. They could not command the party discipline or produce the vigour necessary even to balance the budget. In such conditions a Government, already in a minority and deprived of all financial confidence, could not survive. The failure of the Labour Party to face this tempest, the sudden collapse of British financial credit, and the break-up of the Liberal Party, with its unwholesome balancing power, led to a national coalition. It seemed that only a Government of all parties was capable of coping with the crisis. Mr. MacDonald and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, on a strong patriotic emotion, attempted to carry the mass of the Labour Party into this combination. Mr. Baldwin, always content that others should have the function so long as he retained the power, was willing to serve under Mr. MacDonald. It was an attitude which, though deserving respect, did not correspond to the facts. Mr. Lloyd George was still recovering from an operation – serious at his age; and Sir John Simon led the bulk of the Liberals into the all-party combination."

"When perhaps any Government would have been broken by economic events beyond the control or even the influence of this country—but when the outdated Treasury views of the pre-Keynes era, reinforced by the Puritan Cobdenism of Snowden, prevented any expansionist action to relieve unemployment. Men were sacrificed and left to rot under the Treasury doctrine that the way to deal with unemployment caused by chronic deficiency of demand was to add to that deficiency by cruel retrenchment."

"[The NHS is] a great national blessing enabling people to live longer and happier lives."

"Perhaps there is at work here a process, apparent in many situations but imperfectly understood, by which problems reproduce themselves from generation to generation. If I refer to this as a cycle of deprivation."

"It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism. (I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that I was not really one at all.)"

"The question we must all ask ourselves is how Mr. Benn was able to come within striking distance of the very heart of our economic life in the first place... an important part of the answer must be that our industry, economic life and society have been so debilitated by 30 years of Socialistic fashions that their very weakness tempts further inroads. The path to Benn is paved with 30 years of interventions: 30 years of good intentions: 30 years of disappointments. These have led the collectivists to say that we are failing only because we are taking half measures. The reality is that for 30 years the private sector of our economy has been forced to work with one hand tied behind its back by government and unions. Socialist measures and Socialist legacies have weakened free enterprise."

"We are now more Socialist in many ways than any other developed country outside the Communist bloc—in the size of the public sector, the range of controls and the telescoping of net income. And what is the result? Compare our position today with that of our neighbours in north west Europe—Germany, Sweden, Holland, France. They are no more talented than we are. Yet, compared with them, we have the longest working hours, the lowest pay and the lowest production per head. We have the highest taxes and the lowest investment. We have the least prosperity, the most poor and the lowest pensions. We have the largest nationalized sector and the worst labour troubles."

"There is in this country an even more insidious attack on the law than the crime we are experiencing—as no doubt there is in every country—and that is the pervasive attack upon the free society. Many separate and distinct trends are being experienced, some from outside, some from within. There are armed groups, some with specific purposes, some with apocalytic purposes. A wide range of political forces, using anything from subversion to ordinary lobbying, seek to swing our society away from freedom. Violence is condoned and is very near the surface. The far Left with totalitarian purpose is widely active in factories, schools, universities and communications. There are deliberate destroyers at large pursuing various ideologies to seek to provoke and discredit the police in order to advance their aim of eroding our liberties. These extreme movements can mobilise shifting but substantial support from the naive, and can, and do, exploit every sort of resentment, frustration and grievance."

"If we are to retain the freedom of our society, we in this House must try to understand the many forces at work, the excessive permissiveness in some schools which has led to lack of self-discipline, the attitudes and the management at some secondary schools, the deliberate subversion that goes on at some schools, the exploitation and glamorisation of violence in many films and on television, and the licensed obscenities permitted, very wrongly, some years ago by the BBC. I am reminded of the poignant words of Caliban to Prospero: "You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse." That seems, alas, appropriate to some of our school children. Behind all these manifestations there is a mindless fashion for revolution."

"The totalitarian antics of the far left, if not firmly handled by the Government of the day, produce a reaction in the far Right. I am a member of a minority with every reason to abominate the attitudes of the National Front. But I warn the House that if the excesses of the far Left are not curbed—of course, within the rule of law—we fuel the National Front; and the tragedy of that movement is that it contains not only some very nasty people but also some frustrated decent people, too, many of them trade unionists who see the far Left in action every day."

"It was not long ago that we thought utopia was within reach... What has happened to all this optimism? Has it really crumbled under the weight of rising crime, social decay and the decline of traditional values? Have we really become a nation of hooligans and vandals, bullies and child-batterers, criminals and inadequates?"

"Rousseau's educational theories had persuaded teachers] to dispense with the structured systems of learning which have been so successful in the past. [The result is] the belief, taught by Mr Roy Jenkins, that a permissive is a civilised society... A facile rhetoric of total liberty and of costless, superficial universal protest has really been a cover for irresponsibility. Our loud talk about the community overlies the fact that we have no community. We talk about neighbourhoods and all too often we have no neighbours. We go on about the home when we only have dwelling places containing television sets. It is the absence of a frame of rules and community, place and belonging, responsibility and neighbourliness that makes it possible for people to be more lonely than in any previous stage in our history. Vast factories, huge schools, sprawling estates, sky-scraping apartment blocks; all these work against our community and our common involvement one with another."

"There is moreover a commercial exploitation of brutality in print and in film which further debases the moral climate. And how is it that a generation that rejects the exploitation of man by man and promises the liberation of women can accept the exploitation of women by pornography? The left, usually so opposed to profitable commerce in trades beneficial to the public, systematically defends the blatant commercialism of the pornographic industry."

"The old virtues of patriotism and national pride have been denigrated in the name of internationalism, love of all our fellow-men. But no one can love mankind if he does not love his own countrymen. It was the radical Socialist writer and patriot, the late George Orwell, who described the left-wing intellectuals as men motivated primarily by hatred of their own country. Socialists who spoke most about brotherhood of man could not bear their fellow-Englishmen, he complained. Their well-orchestrated sneers from their strongpoint in the educational system and media have weakened the national will to transmit to future generations those values, standards and aspirations which made England admired the world over."

"The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in socio-economic classes IV and V. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness which are more important than riches. They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births. A high proportion of these births are a tragedy for the mother, the child and for us. Yet what shall we do? If we do nothing, the nation moves towards degeneration, however much resources we pour into preventative work and the over-burdened educational system. It is all the more serious when we think of the loss of people with talent and initiative through emigration as our semi-socialism deprives them of adequate opportunities, rewards and satisfactions. Yet proposals to extend birth-control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried girls, the potential young unmarried mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition. Is it not condoning immorality? I suppose it is. But which is the lesser evil, until we are able to remoralise whole groups and classes of people, undoing the harm done when already weak restraints on strong instincts are further weakened by permissiveness in television, in films, on bookstalls?"

"From the mid-Victorian era till a few years ago, we were confident that our society was moving under its own momentum, or as a result of our reforms, towards the goals summed up by the term embourgeoisement. The artisan of Victorian days, who read serious literature, supported radical causes, was sober and self-improving, gave hope that the workers would become bourgeois... In their inception, the trades unions, co-operative societies and friendly societies reflected bourgeois thought, and aspired to achieve the benefits of bourgeois life for their members, as Lenin, among others, complained."

"I thought I was a Conservative. I thought I was a Conservative, but all the time I was in favour of... I was in favour of shortcuts to Utopia. I was in favour of the government doing things, because I was so impatient for good things to be done."

"Making the rich poorer does not make the poor richer, but it does make the state stronger—and it does increase the power of officials and politicians, power more menacing, more permanent and less useful than market power within the rule of law. Inequality of income can only be eliminated at the cost of freedom. The pursuit of income equality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum."

"Keynes was certainly not a Keynesian."

"We are over-governed, over-spent, over-taxed, over-borrowed and over-manned."

"Monetarism is not enough."

"There is an anti-enterprise climate. The educational system is divorced from industrial understanding... The socialist ethic of institutionalized envy is fostered by many politicians, communicators and academics. A pattern of esteem has grown up which tends to perpetuate an unbalanced deployment of brain power. The Government pre-empts an excessive share of rare talents, scientific and technological, often for prestige projects of little interest to consumers."

"Profits have nearly vanished in real terms. Inflation nearly destroyed balanced sheets, helped by misleading accounting practices. There is all too little awareness among politicians and officials of the concept of opportunity cost, that you cannot have your cake and eat it."

"The more subsidized and overmanned and make-work jobs we carry as a community, the less competitive we are and the more we shall lose our markets at home and overseas to our rivals... The process is cumulative. It is based on the two simple facts that we depend on raw materials and goods from abroad which we must pay for by selling goods and services abroad; and that not even the TUC can force foreigners to buy our output."

""Moderates" behind whom Red Fascism spreads."

"Low output a man, which is what overmanning comes to, means low pay a man. Overmanning does not protect British jobs except in the short-term. The jobs protected by it are German and Japanese jobs. Overmanning is a large part of the British disease and the Labour Government actually encourages it. The industrial strategy, a verbal smokescreen, may blather on about being competitive but nearly every action taken under it involves a subsidy from the taxpayer to overmanning."

"Although expenditure on regional incentives will continue to be substantial, I must emphasise that regional differences will not be reduced simply by redistributing money from taxpayers; there needs also to be local enterprise and plenty of co-operation in making businesses competitive and profitable. Nothing will do more for the prosperity of a region than a reputation for effective work, high productivity and co-operation between work force and management."

"Unions, in order to obtain higher pay, tend to threaten private employers with bankruptcy and public employers, nationalised or State, with disruption and damage to the public, and they tend to threaten employers, regardless of the demand for the product or service, regardless of the demand for their labour and skills, regardless of the profit or loss of the employer, regardless of the scope for increased productivity and regardless of the freedom of union members to move in search of higher pay if they can get it elsewhere. The word "regardless" is near the heart of the British disease."

"Unions often force private employers to choose between the immediate disaster of a long strike if they resist or the deferred disaster of crippled competitiveness and squeezed profit if they give way. What British unions in general tend to demand, and extract, from employers is all too often something for nothing—increased earnings regardless—a demand for higher pay without a readiness to co-operate in financing that higher pay by higher productivity. The result of such pay increases is higher unit costs and so higher prices, tiny real profits, blunted competitiveness and therefore fewer jobs and lower pay and pensions than would otherwise be possible."

"We need to develop within our children and young people the capacity to respect the cultures and beliefs of the different groups that make up our society; and we need to develop the resolve to treat each other justly. Secondly, we must eliminate, so far as any society can, the under-achievement of many of our children and young people from all sections of the community. We need to raise the performance of all pupils and to tackle the obstacles to higher achievement which are common to all. But we also need to tackle those special factors which additionally may contribute to the under-achievement of many members of our ethnic minorities."

"The entrepreneur is the person who seeks to identify what consumers, at home or abroad or both, want and would be willing to buy at a profitable price. These entrepreneurs are the job-creators because it is they who gather the men and women, the material, the machinery, and the money to turn the vision of a market into a reality."

"All my life, I thought I was a Conservative. Now I know that I have never been one. The scales have dropped from my eyes."

"We found it hard to avoid the feeling that somehow the lean and tight-lipped mufflered men in the 1930s dole queue were at least partly our fault."

"It was apparently Chris Patten, as director of the Conservative Research Department in the late 1970s, who came up with the 'Mad Monk' epithet which stuck to Joseph for the reason that makes some nicknames and caricatures irresistible: immediate recognition. It was not the whole truth; it was not simply a hostile slur (Joseph saw the joke himself); it was, even so, a way of tagging a major politician whose driving ambition was not focused simply on his own advancement."

"The speech is deeply disturbing in that it attempts to cast the poor as the villains who are undermining society. For a nation which has successfully fought against Nazism, it is worrying that any attempt should be made to find scapegoats... Although in the cool of the evening he will probably choose to deny it, the speech bore all the marks of whipping up a campaign against the poor. It put forward family planning as a remedy without stating that the primary way to help these mothers was to give them money and education as an incentive to limit their families."

"A wonderful mixture of Rasputin and Tommy Cooper."

"Keith was one of the kindest men I ever met in British politics; he had a brilliant mind, an unswerving integrity and a rigorous commitment to any conclusions that he reached... what you could never question about Keith was the sincerity of his beliefs or the reasonableness with which he put them."

"Keith was a fascinating man to work with: hugely intelligent (a fellow of All Souls) yet immensely unsure of himself; eager to question everything, including not least his own premises; always thinking aloud, even the unthinkable. To make a long journey with him was like travelling with a foraging squirrel: he was constantly tearing articles out of newspapers, writing notes to himself and stowing them about his person. Problems sometimes arose for him from the need to make order from this whirlwind of ideas, and so to arrive at sustainable executive decisions."

"The Secretary of State's attitude was callous and amounted to a dereliction of duty. The steel workers and their families will draw their own conclusions, but I believe that for generations to come the name Joseph will stink in the nostrils of the people of South Wales."

"Although Keith could turn in a first-rate despatch box performance when he was really in the mood, he was too unworldly to be a really effective politician in the practical sense. Tormented by self-doubt, devoid of guile, and with a passion to educate, he laboured under the delusion that everyone else, friend or foe, was as intellectually honest and fundamentally decent, as lacking in malice and personal ambition, as he was."

"[In September 1974] Sir Keith Joseph broke the Heath line with a speech on Tory economic mistakes which Powell described as "an admirable anthology from my speeches on the subject in recent years." Sir Keith made no acknowledgements; powellism without Powell suddenly offered big political rewards, and Sir Keith set up, soon afterwards, an institute to depowellise the alternative Conservatism with which he proposed to transform the Party, and perhaps his own position in it."

"From the start, there was a tendency in the Shadow Cabinet to move away from the Heath line of policy further to the Right: to this I was totally opposed. In particular, I could not support the arguments of Keith Joseph, who was inclined to say that all we had done in the Government of 1970–74 was wrong and not true Conservatism. I totally disagreed with this, because it seemed to me that Keith was fully entitled to measure himself for a hair shirt if he wanted to, but I was blowed if I could see why he should measure me and Ted at the same time. I could not help recalling Selsdon Park, and the swing to the Right in our policies which occurred then, and how long it had taken in Government to get back to the realities of life. I feared that the same thing was beginning to happen again. In particular there was the argument about Incomes Policy and Money Supply, and which was the right way to deal with inflation. I stuck to the view that an Incomes Policy was essential and had been a necessary part of the policies of Conservative Governments since it was first introduced by Peter Thorneycroft when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The other doctrine, the monetarist doctrine of which Keith Joseph was the most articulate and intellectual exponent, said that Incomes Policy was unnecessary and unworkable, and that inflation could best be contained by restricting the money supply. This doctrine, based on the teachings of Professor Friedman, seemed to me to be totally divorced from reality. In so far as it was a guide to action at all, it merely was a restatement in new phraseology of the old doctrine of a credit squeeze. But the tide was running strongly in the monetarist direction at that time."

"[He is] nutty as a fruit-cake."

"His offence does not consist in discovering and confessing past error. If he had been elected in 1970 on a policy of price and wage controls to cure inflation, I would have no complaint if subsequent experience and reflection led him to conclude that the policy was unsound. That is not what happened. He was elected "utterly rejecting the philosophy of compulsory wage control". As an intelligent man, he knew why such a strong assertion could safely be made – namely, the irrelevance of such control to inflation, which therefore had other causes. That policy was suddenly reversed in the third quarter of 1972 by the government to which Joseph belonged; and he was not so immersed in the social services as not to know. He held his peace, however, until he no longer had cabinet office, salary, car and chauffeur to sacrifice and could expect to gain rather than lose personally by re-affirming what he had always been aware of."

"[He is] a very fine person, of deep and strong convictions and an unmistakable sincerity which adds to [the] force and persuasiveness of his arguments."

"Few men have been so cruelly misrepresented. The portrayal of Keith as an insensitive axeman, or the mad monk, was unfair and totally remote from reality. I found in Keith not only one of the major intellects of the Thatcher Government but one of the kindest, most highly principled, thoughtful and decent men in politics – or anywhere else."

"Keith is always a power because he has a tremendous brain and great intellectual capacity. He's a very shy person. He's one of the most sympathetic people. You know, shy people are often very sympathetic but are rather afraid of showing it; but he had a most marvellous record when he was Secretary of State for the Social Services, and I think he's got a great deal to offer. You always need a first class mind to co-ordinate the thinking out of new policies. After all, we had Rab Butler, you know 1945–50, Keith in a way is the new Rab Butler of the 1973 period."

"He is one of the party's progressive intellectuals, and his judgment is widely respected although he is not the most bravura performer at the Dispatch Box."

"I am tremendously grateful to him, not personally but for the lead he has given the country—it is what has been needed for a very long time. One thing that Sir Keith spelt out very clearly was the way that the extreme left had cashed in on permissiveness. I believe passionately that you cannot separate our economic ills from our present moral decadence. Until this speech, the people of Britain have been like sheep without a shepherd. But now they have found one."

"Together with Joseph, Howe was very soon the most influential politician in the most important field of Thatcherite politics: the breaking of the economic consensus. The leader occupied a kind of middle position between them. Joseph articulated ideas, Howe formulated policies, and Mrs Thatcher was the essential conduit from one to the other."

"For my part I do not feel any great horror at the idea...of the possible establishment of a Republic in this country. (Loud cheers.) I am quite certain that sooner or later it will come. (Renewed cheers and ‘Bravo!’) But...there is really not any great practical difference between a free constitutional monarchy such as ours and a free republic."

"[T]he party will not again be reunited till a new programme has been elaborated which shall satisfy the just expectations of the representatives of labour, as well as conciliate the Nonconformists who have been driven into rebellion. It is impossible to say with certainty what will be the exact form of this protest against the ever-recurring assumption that the time has come when statesmen may rest from their labours and parties be at peace, but it must include some or all of the following ideas which have been exercising a growing attraction for political thinkers, and which are summed up in the sentence which may perhaps form the motto of the new party—Free Church, Free Land, Free Schools, and Free Labour."

"Despite the perpetual adulation of ourselves which is always going on, and the constant recitals of our prosperity and of the progress we are making in science and general culture, we are compelled occasionally to turn aside from the contemplation of our virtues and intelligence and wealth, to recognise the fact that we have in our midst a vast population more ignorant than the barbarians whom we affect to despise, more brutal than the savages whom we profess to convert, more miserable than the most wretched in other countries to whom we attempt from time to time to carry succour and relief."

"All this disease is produced by filthy, ill-ventilated, uncomfortable homes; those homes, in their turn, drive the people to the public-houses and worse places. It is usual to say that these results are due to the ignorance of the people. That is true; but it would be almost truer to say that this ignorance in its turn is the result of the conditions amid which the people live. What folly it is to talk about the moral and intellectual elevation of the masses when the conditions of life are such as to render elevation impossible! What can the schoolmaster or the minister of religion do, when the influences of home undo all he does? We find bad air, polluted water, crowded and filthy homes, and ill-ventilated courts everywhere prevailing in the midst of our boasted wealth, luxury, and civilisation."

"I say to Ireland what the Liberals or the Republicans of the North said to the Southern States of America—The union must be preserved. You cannot and shall not destroy it. Within these limits there is nothing which you may not ask and hope to obtain—equal laws, equal justice, equal opportunities, equal prosperity."

"I believe that sooner or later it will be found necessary to undertake some public works in Ireland... England is the only country in the world in which it has been found possible to leave public works entirely to private enterprise. State assistance in some form or another is afforded...in every other country in Europe... I fully admit the difficulties and dangers of any such undertaking: the probability of jobbery and inefficiency; but as to the character and the poverty of the Irish people, I would at once appoint the strongest scientific and technical Commission it would be possible to obtain to report on certain broad classes of undertakings, especially on railways, reclamation, main drainage and harbours with a view to some considerable scheme of public works. I do not think the pecuniary risk would be so great as is generally supposed; and in any case I should regard the loss as a reasonable insurance against much greater evils."

"The Whigs as a party are played out, and the next great fight will be between the Tory democrats and the democratic Radicals. It will never do for the latter to be out-bidden, so you must prepare for something very drastic."

"Putting aside personal compliments what are the facts? A saving of 7 per thousand in the death-rate—2,800 lives per annum in the town. And as 5 people are ill for everyone who dies there must be a diminution of 14,000 cases of sickness, with all the loss of money, pain and grief they involve. Unless I can secure for the nation results similar to these which have followed the adoption of my policy in Birmingham it will have been a sorry exchange to give up the Town Council for the Cabinet."

"Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class—of the class to which he himself belongs—who toil not, neither do they spin—whose fortunes, as in his case, have originated in grants made long ago, for such services as courtiers render to kings—and have since grown and increased while they have slept, by the levy of an unearned share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country of which they form a part."

"Hitherto, the well-to-do have governed this country for their own interest; and I will do them this credit—they have achieved their object. Now I trust the time is approaching for those who work and have not. My aim in life is to make life pleasanter for this great majority; I do not care if it becomes in the process less pleasant for the well-to-do minority. Take America, for instance. Cultured persons complain that the society there is vulgar; less agreeable to the delicate tastes of delicately trained minds. But it is infinitely preferable to the ordinary worker."

"During the last 100 years, the House of Lords has never contributed one iota to popular liberties or popular freedom, or done anything to advance the common weal; but during that time it has protected every abuse and sheltered every privilege."

"One may confidently anticipate that the whole aspect of the agricultural question will undergo a change, and that...legislation will, under the pressure of the new force applied to it, be introduced for the purpose of bringing the land into the best use for the nation. Thus far the agricultural labourer has been regarded by the political economists as a mere machine—an instrument to be used for the creation of wealth, deposited in the hands of the few; not as a human being whose comfort, health, and home are to be considered, and who has a claim to such benefits as were conferred by the Factory Acts upon the labourers in towns. If his welfare cannot be sufficiently protected without the taxation of property, then property will be taxed. But it is needless now to attempt to define the measures that may be necessary for these ends. It is enough to indicate their general character. They sound the death-knell of the laissez-faire system."

"The goal towards which the advance will probably be made at an accelerated pace, is that in the direction of which the legislation of the last quarter of a century has been tending—the intervention, in other words, of the State on behalf of the weak against the strong, in the interests of labour against capital, of want and suffering against luxury and wealth."

"I do not think that the democracy will have any love for a policy of intervention and aggression, nor any ambition for conquest and universal domination. These things lead straight to the conscription, and you will not be eager or even willing to pay the blood tax which is levied on your brethren in the continental countries. (Cheers.) I anticipate, then, that you will give no assistance to the party who are clamouring for what they call a strong foreign policy, and who at this moment, in the interest chiefly of the bondholders and financial speculators, are calling upon us to take possession of Egypt without regard to the wishes of the population or the just susceptibilities of other nations. We are in Egypt at this time in pursuance of an unselfish object."

"[I]f the occasion should come to assert the authority of England, a democratic Government, resting on the confidence and support of the whole nation, and not on the favour of any limited class, would be very strong. It would know how to make itself respected, and how to maintain the obligations and the honour of the country. I think foreign rulers would be very ill advised if they were to assume that because we are anxious to avoid all cause of quarrel with our neighbours we are wanting in the old spirit of Englishmen, or that we should be found very tolerant of insult or long suffering under injury."

"If foreign nations are determined to pursue distant colonial enterprises we have no right to prevent them. We cannot anticipate them in every case by proclaiming a universal protectorate in every unoccupied portion of the globe's surface which English enterprise has hitherto neglected. But our fellow subjects may rest assured that their liberties, their rights, and their interests are as dear to us as our own; and if ever they are seriously menaced the whole power of the country will be exerted in their defence (cheers), and the English democracy will stand shoulder to shoulder throughout the world to maintain the honour and integrity of the Empire. (Cheers.)"

"What is to be the nature of the domestic legislation of the future? (Hear, hear.) I cannot help thinking that it will be more directed to what are called social subjects than has hitherto been the case.—How to promote the greater happiness of the masses of the people (hear, hear), how to increase their enjoyment of life (cheers), that is the problem of the future; and just as there are politicians who would occupy all the world and leave nothing for the ambition of anybody else, so we have their counterpart at home in the men who, having already annexed everything that is worth having, expect everybody else to be content with the crumbs that fall from their table. If you will go back to the origin of things you will find that when our social arrangements first began to shape themselves every man was born into the world with natural rights, with a right to a share in the great inheritance of the community, with a right to a part of the land of his birth. (Cheers.) But all these rights have passed away. The common rights of ownership have disappeared. Some of them have been sold; some of them have been given away by people who had no right to dispose of them; some of them have been lost through apathy and ignorance; some have been stolen by fraud (cheers); and some have been acquired by violence. Private ownership has taken the place of these communal rights, and this system has become so interwoven with our habits and usages, it has been so sanctioned by law and protected by custom, that it might be very difficult and perhaps impossible to reverse it. But then, I ask, what ransom will property pay for the security which it enjoys? What substitute will it find for the natural rights which have ceased to be recognized?"

"When the issues of peace and war are trembling in the balance, and when an unguarded word might be productive of much mischief, everyone who is under any sense of responsibility is bound, for a time at least, to maintain a temporary reserve. All, therefore, that I will say, is that war, even a successful war, is so great a misfortune for all who are engaged in it that it is the highest obligation of a patriotic Government to exhaust every means of honourable and amiable settlement. (Hear, hear.) But if, when we have done that, we find ourselves face to face with a determined policy of aggression, and have to make an appeal to the loyalty and the support of the Empire, I believe that the summons will be responded to as it has been in past times, and that the English democracy will show that it is patient and resolute, and endurant to the end, and that it will exhibit that courage and tenacity which have always in past times distinguished the Anglo-Saxon race. (Cheers.)"

"When government was represented only by the authority of the Crown and the views of a particular class I can understand that it was the first duty of men who valued their freedom to restrict its authority and to limit its expenditure. But all that is changed. Now government is the organized expression of the wishes and the wants of the people, and under these circumstances let us cease to regard it with suspicion. Suspicion is the product of an older time, of circumstances which have long since disappeared. Now it is our business to extend its functions and to see in what way its operations can be usefully enlarged."

"In the first place I urge upon you a full recognition of the magnitude of the evils with which we have to deal; in the second place I insist on the right of those who suffer to redress (cheers); and in the third place I assert the duty of society as a whole to secure the comfort and welfare of all its individual members. As a consequence of this, I desire to submit to you that it belongs to the authority and to the duty of the State—that is to say, of the whole population acting through their chosen representatives—to utilise for this purpose all local experience and all local organisation, to protect the weak, to provide for the poor, to redress the inequalities of our social system, to alleviate the harsh conditions of the struggle for existence, and to raise the average enjoyments of the majority of the population. (Loud cheers.)"

"The pacification of Ireland at this moment does, I believe, depend upon the concession to Ireland of the right to govern itself in the matter of its purely domestic business... I do not believe that the great majority of Englishmen have the slightest conception of the system under which this free nation attempts to rule a sister country. It is a system which is founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers encamped permanently as in a hostile country (Cries of "Shame.") It is a system as completely centralized and bureaucratic as that with which Russia governs Poland, or as that which was common in Venice under the Austrian rule."

"I want you not to accept as final or as perfect, arrangements under which hundreds of thousands, nay, millions, of your fellow-countrymen are subjected to untold privations and misery, with the evidence all around them of accumulated wealth and unbounded luxury. The extremes of wealth and of poverty are alike the sources of great temptation. I believe that the great evil with which we have to deal is the excessive inequality in the distribution of riches. Ignorance, intemperance, immorality, and disease—these things are all interdependent and closely connected; and although they are often the cause of poverty, they are still more frequently the consequence of destitution, and if we can do anything to raise the condition of the poor in this country, to elevate the masses of the people, and give them the means of enjoyment and recreation, to afford to them opportunities of improvement, we should do more for the prosperity, ay, for the morality of this country than anything we can do by laws, however stringent, for the prevention of excess, or the prevention of crime."

"He is face to face with the whole population of England and Scotland, reinforced as it will be by at least one-fifth of the population of Ireland itself, and to threaten 32 millions of people with the vengeance of four millions is a rhetorical artifice which is altogether unworthy of Mr. Parnell's power and influence. (Hear, hear.) But it is said by him that justice requires that we should concede to Irishmen an absolute right to self-government. I would reply that that is a right which must be considered in relation to the security and welfare of the other countries in juxtaposition to which Ireland is placed, and with whose interests hers are indissolubly linked. I cannot admit that five millions of Irishmen have any greater inherent right to govern themselves without regard to the rest of the community than would the five millions of persons who inhabit the metropolis."

"The great programme of our civilization is still not solved. We have to account for and to grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence of abundant wealth and teeming prosperity. This programme some men would put aside by reference to the eternal laws of supply and demand, to the necessity of freedom of contract, and to the sanctity of every private right of property. But these phrases are the convenient cant of selfish wealth... Our object is the elevation of the poorer of the masses of the people, a levelling up which shall do something to remove the excessive inequalities in the social condition of the people."

"If we fail, let us try again and again until we succeed."

"I hope we may be able sooner or later to federate, to bring together, all these great dependencies of the British Empire into one supreme and Imperial Parliament (cheers), so that they should be all units of one body, that one should feel what the others feel, that all should be equally responsible, that all should have a share in the welfare and sympathize with the welfare of every part. That is what I hope, but there is very little hope for it if you weaken the ties which now bind the central portion of the Empire together. (Cheers.)"

"As I passed through England and the United States, and again when I crossed the boundary of the Dominion, there was one idea impressing itself upon my mind at every step, indelibly written upon the face of two vast countries, and that was the greatness and importance of the distinction reserved for the Anglo-Saxon race—(cheers)—that proud, persistent, self-asserting and resolute stock which no change of climate or condition can alter, and which is infallibly bound to be the predominant force in the future history and civilisation of the world. (Cheers.)"

"The interest of true democracy is not towards anarchy or the disintegration of the Empire, but rather the uniting together kindred races with similar objects. You have a portion in the great path that lies before us. It may yet be that the federation of Canada may be the lamp lighting our path to the federation of the British Empire. (Cheers.) If it is a dream—it may be only the imagination of an enthusiast—it is a grand idea. (Hear, hear.) It is one to stimulate the patriotism and statesmanship of every man who loves his country; and whether it be destined or not to perfect realisation, at least let us all cherish the sentiment it inspires. Let us do all in our power to promote it, and enlarge the relations and goodwill which ought always to exist between sons of England throughout the world and the old folks at home. (Prolonged cheering.)"

"[W]e want to convince the country that there is a better chance of really popular reform from a Unionist Government than from the Parnell–Gladstone."

"Be as Radical as you like, be a Home Ruler if you must, but be a little Jingo if you can."

"The fact is, that in social questions the Tories have almost always been more progressive than the Liberals, and the Conservative leaders in their latest legislation have only gone back to the old Tory traditions. Almost all the legislation dealing with Labour questions has been initiated by Tory statesmen, and most of it has been passed by Tory Governments. The Factory and Workshops Acts, the Mines Regulation Act, Merchant Shipping legislation, the Acts relating to sanitation, artisans' dwellings, land purchase, allotments, small holdings and free education are all Conservative, and it is therefore historically inaccurate to represent the Tory Party as opposed to socialistic legislation."

"He is opposed to expansion of the Empire and to any expense, on the ground, as I understand, that we have enough to do at home. Now, suppose this view...had been put 50 or 100 years ago, and suppose it had been accepted by the Parliament of that day, I ask myself what would now be the position of this country, what would be the position of persons in the slums for whom my hon. Friend has so much sympathy and feeling? Does my hon. Friend believe, if it were not for the gigantic foreign trade that has been created by the policy of expansion, that we could subsist in this country in any kind of way—I do not say in luxury, but in the condition in which at present a great part of our population live? Does he think that, we could support 40,000,000 of people in these small islands? Is it not the fact that the great proportion of the 40,000,000 people of this country earns its livelihood by the trade brought to the country in consequence of the action of our ancestors 50 or 100 years ago who did not shrink from making sacrifices, and who were not ashamed...to peg our claims for posterity? We are the posterity who enjoy the result of that policy; and are we to be meaner and more selfish than those who preceded us? Are we to do nothing for those who come after us? Are we to sacrifice that which those who went before have gained for us? Why, if this idea of closing all the doors through which all new trade is to come to us is to be accepted by this House, we must adopt some means or other by which our population can be kept stationary. And I venture to say that when our ancestors pegged out claims for us, as they did in many parts of the world, they were not at the time more promising than the claims which are now under consideration."

"I believe that the people of this country have decided this matter in their minds, and have determined that they will take their full share in the disposition of these new lands and in the work of civilisation they have to carry out there. I think they are justified in that determination—justified by the spirit of the past, justified by that spirit which has shown that the spirit of travel and adventure and enterprise distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon race has made us peculiarly fit to carry out the work of colonisation."

"If we are not going to give up this mission—to use a word I do not much like, but it has been previously employed—let us look the matter courageously in the face, and be prepared, if need be, for sacrifice of life and money, which, in the first instance, we may have to make in order to carry it out. We have come to the point at which we do not consider life so sacred that it may not be sacrificed to save life. For my own part, I hold that, both in matters of life and money, we may sacrifice both, if we see before us a prospect of good and a satisfaction for the sacrifice we may make. The people of this country, in my opinion, have by large majorities declared that it is our duty to take our share in the work of civilisation in Africa... They know that an omelette cannot be made without breaking eggs, and I do not believe that they are prepared to count the cost."

"I and those who agree with me believe in the expansion of the Empire, and we are not ashamed to confess that we have that feeling, and we are not at all troubled by accusations of Jingoism."

"We have secured for Uganda the pax Britannica which has been so beneficial in India... What existed in Uganda at that time were anarchy and civil war of the worst kind. If we had not been there thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people would have been cruelly massacred; and after the victory of one party or the other what remained of the minority would have been cruelly tortured to death."

"What is the Slave Trade, and what is the cause of it? People do not make slaves through love of cruelty or mischief, but they do so because they made their livelihood by it. Tribes are enslaved, are taken as slaves, in order to carry burdens to the coast, and when they have done that they are sold for what they will fetch. If you could give to the slave-raiding Arabs, who at the present moment are the most barbarous and brutal people on the face of the earth, peaceful means of making an honest livelihood, do you mean to say that they enjoy war so much that they will not accept these means? If you say so, I think all history and experience is against you. You have never found a case where it has been made profitable to a nation or tribe to keep the peace that they have not done so... Make it the interest of the Arab slave traders to give up the Slave Trade, and you will see the end of that traffic."

"I say that this Bill has been changed in its most vital features, and yet it has always been found perfect by hon. Members behind the Treasury Bench. The Prime Minister [William Gladstone] calls "black," and they say, "it is good": the Prime Minister calls "white," and they say "it is better." It is always the voice of a god. Never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation. [Cheers, cries of "Progress!" and "Judas!"]"

"I have no sympathy at all with the new Radicalism of which Sir William Harcourt is now a conspicuous supporter, although a recent convert. I have no sympathy with the policy of men whose representatives abet and aid the projects of the enemies of this country (hear, hear)—the men who whine over the fate of Lobengula, but denounce as murderers the British officers and the brave Englishmen, who, at the risk of their lives and fortunes in all parts of the world, are doing their part to maintain the great Empire of the Queen. (Cheers.) I have no sympathy with men who apparently approve of French aggression, and who at the same time deprecate any increase of the British Navy; or with those who preach consistently in all parts of the world, in Africa, in Asia, and in Ireland their favourite doctrine of "Scuttle.""

"I am, and shall be in the future, proud to call myself a Unionist (cheers), and be satisfied with that title alone, believing that it is a wider and nobler title than that either of Conservative or Liberal, since it includes them both (hear, hear), and since it includes all men who are determined to maintain an undivided Empire, and who are ready to promote the welfare and the union, not of one class, but of all classes of the community. (Cheers.)"

"I say that...there is no leader of public opinion in this country who will not fail in his duty if he does not impress upon his countrymen the absolute necessity of preventing their security from being undermined. (Cheers.) Gentlemen, there is one thing that you must never lose sight of. The creation of an all-powerful navy by any other Power is chiefly valuable to them as an instrument of aggression. To us an all-powerful navy is the essential condition of our existence. (Cheers.) If we were to lose even for three months the control of the great highways of the ocean by which we communicate with our distant possessions and dependencies, these possessions would be absolutely at the mercy of any Power with unlimited military strength which took advantage of our absence from the sea to attack them... I will only say...that I desire you to impress upon you the importance...of doing all in your power to support the party...which will be sensible to responsibilities of Empire, which will be mindful of the traditions of a great governing race, and which will be determined to hand down to future generations intact and unimpaired the great inheritance of a world-wide dominion. (Loud cheers.)"

"[T]he electors are much more interested at the present time in social questions and the problems connected with the agitation of the Labour Party than they are with either the House of Lords or any other constitutional subject."

"I have taken office with two objects; to see whether something cannot be done to bring the self-governing Colonies and ourselves into closer relations, and to attempt the development of the resources of the Crown Colonies, especially to increase our trade with those Colonies."

"I venture to claim two qualifications for the great office which I hold, which to my mind, without making invidious distinctions, is one of the most important that can be held by any Englishman; and those qualifications are that in the first place I believe in the British Empire, and in the second place I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen."

"The resolution which was conveyed to the Prime Minister on behalf of the Australian colonies and the display of patriotic enthusiasm on the part of the Dominion of Canada came to us as a natural response to the outburst of national spirit in the United Kingdom, and as a proof that British hearts beat in unison throughout the world, whatever may be the distances that separate us. (Cheers.) Then let us cultivate those sentiments. Let us do all in our power by improving our communications, by developing our commercial relations, by co-operating in mutual defence (cheers), and none of us then will ever feel isolated, no part of the Empire will stand alone, so long as it can count upon the common interest of all in its welfare and in its security. (Cheers.) That is the moral I have derived from recent events. That is the lesson I desire to impress on my countrymen. In the words of Tennyson— "Let Britain's myriad voices call, Sons, be welded each and all, Into one Imperial whole, One with Britain, heart and soul! One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!" (Loud cheers.)"

"And in the time to come, the time that must come, when these colonies of ours have grown in stature, in population, and in strength, this league of kindred nations, this federation of Greater Britain, will not only provide for its own security, but will be a potent factor in maintaining the peace of the world. (Cheers.)"

"The establishment of commercial union throughout the Empire would not only be the first step, but the main step, the decisive step towards the realization of the most inspiring idea that has ever entered into the minds of British statesmen."

"You can not have omelettes without breaking eggs; you can not destroy the practises of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without the use of force; but if you will fairly contrast the gain to humanity with the price which we are bound to pay for it, I think you may well rejoice in the result of such expeditions as those which have recently been conducted with such signal success in Nyassaland, Ashanti, Benin, and Nupé—expeditions which may have, and indeed have, cost valuable lives, but as to which we may rest assured that for one life lost a hundred will be gained, and the cause of civilization and the prosperity of the people will in the long run be eminently advanced."

"Let it be our endeavour, let it be our task, to keep alight the torch of imperial patriotism, to hold fast the affection and the confidence of our kinsmen across the seas; so that in every vicissitude of fortune the British Empire may present an unbroken front to all her foes, and may carry on even to distant ages the glorious traditions of the British flag."

"I say, speaking for the Government, that in so far as in us lies there shall be no second Majuba. Never again, with our consent, while we have the power, shall the Boers be able to erect in the heart of South Africa a citadel from whence proceed disaffection and race animosities. Never again shall they be able to endanger the paramountcy of Great Britain. Never again shall they be able to treat an Englishman as if he belonged to an inferior race."

"I believe that the men of Yorkshire will not forget the words of the Mayor of Mafeking that "A seat lost to the Unionist Government is a seat gained by the Boers.""

"At the present moment the Empire is being attacked on all sides and in our isolation we must look to ourselves. (Cheers.) We must draw closer our internal relations, the ties of sentiment, the ties of sympathy, yes, and the ties of interest. (Cheers.) If by adherence to economic pedantry, to old shibboleths, we are to lose opportunities of closer union which are offered us by our colonies, if we are to put aside occasions now within our grasp, if we do not take every chance in our power to keep British trade in British hands, I am certain that we shall deserve the disasters which will infallibly come upon us. (Cheers.)"

"The days are for great Empires and not for little States. The question for this generation is whether we are to be numbered among the great Empires or the little States."

"Justification of union is that a bundle is stronger than the sticks which compose it, but, if the whole strain is to be thrown upon one stick, there is very little advantage in any attempt to put them into a bundle."

"[T]he expression was, "If you want our aid, call us to your Councils." Gentlemen, we do want your aid. We do require your assistance in the administration of the vast Empire which is yours as well as ours. The weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate. We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us, be very sure that we shall hasten gladly to call you to our Councils. If you are prepared at any time to take any share, any proportionate share, in the burdens of the Empire, we are prepared to meet you with any proposal for giving to you a corresponding voice in the policy of the Empire."

"The terms of peace at Vereeniging were the charter of the Boer nation. They had every right to call upon the British to fulfil them in spirit and letter. If, in any respect, they thought these terms had not been, or would not be, carried out in the future, let them bring complaints and they would be redressed."

"In the terms of peace it was promised that education in Dutch should be given to the children of parents who desired it. This promise would be kept."

"He heartily agreed with Dr. Smuts when he said they must stand together in the work of resettlement and restoration. The hope of South Africa lay in closer intercourse between the two races. They were not really separated either in interest or character. If they went back to their history they found that in centuries long ago they were kinsfolk, and now, although they had been separated, the resemblances between them were greater than the differences. The characteristics which the British admired they had—namely, patriotism, courage, tenacity, and willingness to make sacrifices for what they believed to be right and true. He believed that with a little consideration on both sides and readiness to give as well as take before many years, probably before many of them could anticipate, they would be one free people under one flag."

"You are invited to share the privileges and glories of the Empire which is yours as well as ours, and was made by your forefathers as well as ours; and you are also asked to share the burdens of Empire. If I have ever been in any doubt as to what answer you would give it has been removed by my experiences since I have been in South Africa. There is a small minority in the United Kingdom and elsewhere which is apt in great questions of policy to haggle about the cost. A conception of empire will not be gained if treated in a huckstering spirit. (Loud cheers.) The Empire is a great and priceless possession which we cannot weigh in the balances, putting so much empire against so much gold. My opinion is that the peoples of the Colonies will resent any imputation on their loyalty to this great ideal, and will feel no sacrifice too great to maintain their fundamental position. A Canadian statesman has said that the British are now one people, animated by one spirit, and that they shall in future stand shoulder to shoulder in support of their common interests and common rights. (Cheers.) That is the tone in which the matter should be treated. I call on all the colonies to sustain it to the end. If this be achieved I venture to predict that the British Empire, standing four-square to all the winds that blow, will carry down the distant ages these ideals of humanity, justice, and freedom on which they have been based."

"You must bear in mind that we are above parochial and provincial patriotism, for patriotism in itself is worthy of a wider and nobler conception of Imperial life, which it behoves us all to cultivate. These times are critical and creative times. On what is done now the future of South Africa depends. Every one may contribute, according to his means and opportunity, to secure the greatness of the union. A new nation is now springing up and growing under our eyes to be a great free nation under the British flag. (Cheers.) Do not forget the Empire. Do not forget the motherland that bore you and in your time of stress and difficulty came to your aid. She may yet need your support. You must be prepared at all costs to give it. (Loud cheers.) What an Empire it is for which we are all responsible! It is the greatest in extent that the world has ever known, with a population of four hundred million inhabitants, which includes hundreds of different races, which embraces every climate, and which produces every necessary and luxury of life. (Cheers.) What a heritage! You are co-heirs with us in its privileges and its glories. Are you going to be content to be sleeping partners? (Cries of "No.") You must claim your share in all that the Empire represents; you must claim as an honour and a privilege your share in its burdens and obligations; you must join with us to do everything to maintain the union and confirm the strength, power, and influence which I believe in the future you will find to be the greatest force in civilisation and in the peace of the world."

"For my own part I believe in a British Empire, in an Empire which, although it should be its first duty to cultivate friendship with all the nations of the world, should yet, even if alone, be self-sustaining and self-sufficient, able to maintain itself against the competition of all its rivals; and I do not believe in a Little England which shall be separated from all those to whom it would in the natural course look for support and affection, a Little England which would then be dependent absolutely on the mercy of those who envy its present prosperity, and who have shown they are ready to do all in their power to prevent its future union with the British races throughout the world. (Loud and continued cheers.)"

"It will be impossible to secure preferential treatment with the colonies without some duty on corn as well as on other articles on food, because these are the chief articles of colonial produce. Whether this will raise the cost of living is a matter of opinion, and there is no doubt that in many cases a duty of this kind is paid by the exporter, and it really depends on the extent of competition among the exporting countries... But, even if the price of food is raised, the rate of wages will certainly be raised in greater proportion. This has been the case both in the United States and Germany. In the former country the availabile balance left to the working man after he has paid for necessaries is much larger than here. These are facts which we have to bring to the notice of the working men generally."

"At present we go into negotiations with foreign countries empty-handed. We have nothing to give, and we have to take what they are good enough to leave for us. If we were able to bargain on equal terms, I believe that the duties now imposed on our produce would be generally reduced. There would be a competition among foreign nations for our markets which would bring us nearer to real free trade than we have ever been."

"You are told by the opponents of all change that such a reform as I contemplate would involve this country in ruin, would bring starvation to the homes of the working people, and destroy our export trade. If these predictions have any foundation, how are we to account for the fact that the increase of exports, wages, and general prosperity during the last 20 years in the United States and Germany has been greater than in the United Kingdom, which is the only civilised country in the world to enjoy the blessings of unrestricted free import?"

"[What] is the effect of payment for imports by interest on securities? Is it not the effect that such payment does not promote employment of labour, and that, therefore, although the wealth of the country so paid may not be less in aggregate, the national wealth will be worse in the sense that it will tend to cease being a manufacturing and producing nation and will become instead a nation of consumers, chiefly rich men and their dependents?"

"[It was] better to keep the employment in this country even though the workmen (and everyone else) had to pay a little more for the articles manufactured at home than for those coming from abroad, where wages may be lower and the condition of employment more favourable to the manufacturer."

"What are our objects? They are two. In the first place, we all desire the maintenance and increase of the national strength and the prosperity of the United Kingdom...in the second place, our object is, or should be, the realization of the greatest ideal which has ever come to statesmen in any country or in any age—the creation of an Empire such as the world has never seen. (Cheers.) We have to cement the union of the States beyond the Seas. We have to consolidate the British race. We have to meet the clash of competition, commercial now. Sometimes in the past it has been otherwise; it may be again in the future. Whatever it be, whatever danger threatens, we have to meet it no longer as an isolated country. We have to meet it as fortified and strengthened and buttressed by all those of our kinsmen, all those powerful and continually rising States which speak our common tongue and pay allegiance to our common flag."

"When Mr. Cobden preached his doctrine he believed, as he had at that time considerable reason to suppose, that while foreign countries would supply us with our foods and raw materials we should remain the workshop of the world and should send them in exchange our manufactures. But that is exactly what we have not done. On the contrary...we are sending less and less of our manufactures to them, and they are sending more and more of their manufactures to us...Our existence as a nation depends upon our manufacturing capacity and production."

"In 1872 we sent to the protected countries of Europe and to the United States of America 116,000,000 of exported manufactures. In 1882...it fell to 88,000,000. In 1892...it fell to 75,000,000. In 1902, last year, although the general exports had increased, the exports of manufactures had decreased again to 73½ millions. And the total result of this is that after 30 years you are sending 42½ millions of manufactures less to the protected countries than you did 30 years ago. Then there the neutral countries...they have fallen 3½ millions...you have lost altogether in your export of manufactures 46 millions. How is it that that has not impressed the people before? Because the change has been concealed by our statistics... You have failed to observe that the continuance of your trade is dependent entirely on British possessions. While these foreign countries have declined 46 millions your British possessions have increased 40 millions."

"Our Imperial trade is absolutely essential to our prosperity at the present time. If that trade declines, or if it does not increase in proportion to our population and to the loss of trade with foreign countries, then we sink at once into a fifth-rate nation. Our fate will be the fate of the empires and kingdoms of the past. We have reached our highest point...I do not believe in the setting of the British star; but then I do not believe in the folly of the British people. I trust them, I trust the working classes of this country. I have confidence that they who are our masters, electorally speaking, that they will have intelligence to see that they must wake up. They must modify their policy to suit new conditions."

"The Colonies are prepared to meet us. In return for a very moderate preference they will give us a substantial advantage. They will give us, in the first place—I believe they will reserve to us the trade which we already enjoy. They will arrange for tariffs in the future in order not to start industries in competition with those which are already in existence in the mother country... But they will do a great deal more for you. This is certain. Not only will they enable you to retain the trade which you have, but they are ready to give you preference to all the trade which is now done with them by foreign competitors...We must either draw closer together or we shall drift apart... It is, I believe, absolutely impossible for you to maintain in the long run your present loose and indefinable relations and preserve these Colonies parts of the Empire...Can we invent a tie which must be a practical one, which will prevent separation...I say that it is only by commercial union, reciprocal preference, that you can lay the foundations of the confederation of the Empire to which we all look forward as a brilliant possibility."

"We, in a spirit of humanity of which I entirely approve, have passed legislation—to which I may say I have without boasting myself contributed very largely—to raise the standard of living amongst our working people, to secure to them higher wages, to save them from the competition of men of a lower social scale. We have surrounded them with regulations which are intended to provide for their safety. We have secured them, or the majority of them, against the pecuniary loss which would follow upon accidents incurred in the course of their employment. There is not one of those things which I have not supported... But they have all entailed expense, they have all raised the cost of production; and what can be more illogical than to raise the cost of production in this country in order to promote the welfare of the working classes, and then to allow the products of other countries—which are not surrounded by any similar legislation, which are free from all similar cost and expenditure—to allow them freely to bring each country in competition with our goods, which are hampered in the struggle?"

"If you allow this state of things to go on, what will follow? If these foreign goods come in cheaper, one of two things must follow. Either you will have to give up the conditions you have gained, either you will have to abolish and repeal the fair-wages clause of our Factory Acts, and the compensation to workmen, and either you will have to take lower wages, or you will lose work. You cannot keep your work at this higher standard of living and pay if at the same time you allow foreigners at a lower standard and lower rate of pay to send their goods freely in competition with yours."

"Now the Cobden Club all this time rubs its hands in the most patriotic spirit and says, "Ah, yes; but how cheap you are buying." Yes, but think how that effects different classes in the community. Take the capitalist... His interest is to buy in the cheapest market, because he does not produce, but can get every article he consumes. He need not buy a single article in this country; he need not make a single article. He can invest his money in foreign countries and live upon the interest, and then in the returns of the prosperity of the country it will be said that the country is growing richer because he is growing richer. What about the working men? What about the class that depends upon having work in order to earn wages or subsistence at all? They cannot do without the work; and yet the work will go if it is not produced in this country. This is the state of things which I am protesting."

"Greenock was one of the great centres of the sugar trade... Then came foreign competition, aided by bounties; and your trade declines so seriously that only the very best, the very richest, the most enterprising, the most inventive can possibly retain their hold upon it. If there had been no bounties and no unfair competition of this kind what would have happened? In the last 20 or 30 years the consumption of sugar throughout the world has increased enormously. The consumption in this country has increased enormously; and you would have had your share...if normal conditions and equal fairness had prevailed; and at this moment in Greenock, quite independently of the other industries you may have found to occupy you, there would have been in sugar alone ten times as many men employed as there were in the most palmy days of the trade. But normal conditions have not obtained. You have been the sufferers; and, as I have said, a great number of your refineries have been closed, have disappeared altogether. The capital invested in them has been lost, and the workmen who work in them—what has become of them?"

"Free imports have destroyed this industry, at all events for the time, and it is not easy to recover an industry when it has once been lost... They have destroyed agriculture... Agriculture as the greatest of all trades and industries of this country has been practically destroyed. Sugar has gone, silk has gone, iron is threatened, wool is threatened, cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it? At the present moment these industries, and the working men who depend upon them, are like sheep in a field. One by one they allow themselves to be led out to slaughter, and there is no combination, no apparent prevision of what is in store for the rest of them. Do you think, if you belong at present to a prosperous industry, that your industry will be allowed to continue? Do you think that the same causes which have destroyed some of our industries, and which are in the course of destroying others, will not be equally applicable to you when your turn comes?"

"The Colonies are no longer in their infancy. They are growing rapidly to a vigorous manhood. Now is the time—the last time—that you can bind them closer to you. If now you disregard their aspirations and wishes, if when they make you an offer not specially in their interests but in the interests of the Empire of which we are all a portion—if when they make you this offer you reject it or treat it with scorn you may do an injury which will be irreparable, and, whatever you yourselves may feel in after life, be sure that your descendants will scorn and denounce the cowardly and selfish policy which you will have pursued."

"When I was in South Africa nothing was more inspiring, nothing more encouraging, to a Briton to find how the men who had either themselves come from its shore or were the descendants of those who had still retained the old traditions, still remembered that their forefathers were buried in its churchyards, that they spoke a common language, that they were under a common flag, still in their hearts desired to be remembered above all as British subjects, equally entitled with us to a part in the great Empire which they, as well as us, have contributed to make...I did not hesitate, however, to preach to them that it was not enough to shout for Empire...but that they and we alike must be content to make a common sacrifice...in order to secure the common good. To my appeal they rose. And I cannot believe that here in this country, in the mother country, their enthusiasm will not find an echo. They felt, as I felt, and as you feel, that all history is the history of States once powerful and now decaying. Is Britain to be numbered among the decaying States? Has all the glory of the past to be forgotten? Have we to prove ourselves unregenerate sons of the forefathers who left us so glorious an inheritance? Are we to be a decaying State? Are the efforts of all our sons to be frittered away? Are their sacrifices to be vain? Or are we to take up a new youth as members of a great Empire which will continue for generation after generation, the strength, the power, and the glory of the British race?"

"Lord Goschen tells you that France only takes 2 per cent. of its corn from abroad, that it is self-sufficient, and that Germany only takes 30 per cent., whereas, he says, we take four-fifths. That is not a comforting reflection...it is not a comforting reflection to think that we, a part of the British Empire that might be self-sufficient and self-contained, are, nevertheless, dependent, according to Lord Goschen, for four-fifths of our supplies upon foreign countries, any one of which, by shutting their doors upon us, might reduce us to a state of almost absolute starvation... [T]he working man has to fear the result of a shortage of supplies and of a consequent monopoly. If in time of war one of the great countries, Russia, Germany, France, or the United States of America, were to cut off its supply, it would infallibly raise the price according to the quantity which we received from that country. If there were no war, if in times of peace these countries wanted their corn for themselves, which they will do, or if there were bad harvests, which there may be in either of these cases, you will find the price of corn rising many times higher than any tax I have ever suggested. And there is only one remedy for it. There is only one remedy for a short supply. It is to increase your sources of supply. You must call in the new world, the Colonies, to redress the balance of the old. Call in the Colonies, and they will answer to your call with very little stimulus or encouragement. They will give you a supply which will be never failing and all sufficient."

"What is the whole problem as it effects the working classes of this country? It is all contained in one word—employment. Cheap food, a higher standard of living, higher wages—all these things, important as they are, are contained in the word employment. If this policy will give you more employment, all the others would be added unto you. If you lose your employment, all the others put together will not compensate you for that loss."

"It is absolutely impossible to reconcile free trade with trade unionism. You can have one or you can have the other, but you cannot have both; and I am glad to say that in saying that I have the support of a trade unionist with whom I have disagreed upon almost every other question, Mr. Keir Hardie... [I]t is not only the consumer you have got to consider. The producer is of still more importance; and to buy in the cheapest market is not the sole duty of man, and it is not in the best interest of the working classes."

"What is the good, I ask, in the name of common sense, of prohibiting sweating in this country if you allow sweated goods to come in from foreign countries? If you insist on limitation, of hours and upon precautions for security, bear in mind all these things add to the cost of production, to the difficulties of the manufacturer in selling his goods, and unless you give him some increased price, some increased advantage in compensation, then he cannot carry on competition any longer. All these conditions in the long run will result not to your advantage, for you will have no work to do, but to the advantage of the foreigner, who is not so scrupulous and who conducts his work without any of these conditions... If protected labour is good, and I think in many ways it is...then it is good to protect the results of labour, and you cannot do one without the other."

"What Washington did for the United States of America, when he made what is in itself a self-contained and self-sufficient empire of some 80 millions of souls, what Bismarck did for Germany when he united between 50 and 60 millions of people, that it is our business and duty to do for the British Empire."

"While our investments abroad may provide a sufficient return to the capitalists...they tend directly to a transfer of employment from this country to our rivals & competitors."

"I can conceive it is a possible theory that we might be even richer if we became simply a distributive Empire, a home for millionaires and for their dependents, with no productive industry whatever, no one who would come under our present description of working men, that is to say, a man who labours at some definitive trade or industry for himself. I can conceive that it might be possible that there should be even more cheques passing through the Clearing-house than there are now; that the returns of income-tax would be larger. A single millionaire might increase the returns from income-tax more than they would be diminished by the destruction of a whole industry of Birmingham. But, for reasons of difference in national character and position (hear, hear), you may be richer, but not greater. (Hear, hear). You may sink to a position which I do not like to contemplate, and yet all these official statistics might show you a constant tale of progress and increasing wealth."

"London is the clearing-house of the world."

"Banking is not the creator of our prosperity, but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but is the consequence of our wealth; and if the industrial energy and development which has been going on for so many years in this country were to be hindered or relaxed, then finance, and all that finance means, will follow trade to the countries which are more successful than ourselves."

"Take the case of Spain. I think in the case of Spain, and I am certain in the case of Holland, that there is more acquired wealth in those countries today than there was in the palmiest times of their history; but is that all? In spite of the growth of their wealth they have fallen from their high estate. The sceptre they once wielded so proudly has passed into other hands and can never return to them. (Hear, hear.) They may be richer, but they are poorer in what constitutes the greatness of a nation, and they count for nothing in the future opinion of the world. Is it wished that we should follow in the same lines? ("No, no.") But of what are we proud? Of our wealth? I think that is a contemptible form of pride. (Cheers.) Are we proud of our power? Are we proud of the use we may make of that power in order to influence the civilisation of the world? Do we desire to be, as we have been in the past, one of the greatest of nations? Do we wish our voice to be heard in Europe? (Cheers.) Then, if so, do not let us be misled by those who would teach us that we can afford to stand where we are and yet wallow in comparative luxury that may, indeed, be greater than any we have enjoyed before. (Cheers.)"

"Let us take one rival for comparison. What about Germany? ... [T]heir exports will have increased twice as fast as ours... Well, if that goes on, what is going to happen? We are continously improving our position; they are making more rapid progress. They are already neck and neck. It is perfectly clear that in a very short time they will have passed us; and in regard, at all events, to this test, we shall have fallen from our position in relation to the other nations of the world... I do not come before you to tell you that our prosperity has disappeared. No; but I say that our position is deteriorating, and I say that, unless you do something to prevent it, we shall go the course of all those other nations to which I have referred. (Hear, hear.) We shall fall from the highest place, we shall be lower in the scale of nations, and with that goes all the power and all the influence to which I attach so great a value."

"If employment is falling off, what is the lesson? The lesson is that our home trade, our domestic consumption, must have decreased in a larger proportion than our foreign trade has increased. (Hear, hear.) The competition from abroad has grown more and more severe, and, on the whole, taking our trade as a whole, it must have declined if the employment in trade has decreased. (Hear, hear.) Wages have been reduced. You have only to read the papers to see almost daily some trade or another has to submit to a reduction. That, then, is not a proof of boundless prosperity. It is a proof of comparative decline, and, in my judgment, the handwriting is on the wall, there to be read by every impartial man; and, though I contemplate no immediate catastrophe, I say the situation calls for preparation while there is still time to find a remedy. (Cheers.)"

"Are we to be an empire or are we to be only a kingdom? The great Napoleon said that "Providence was always on the side of the big battalions." Do you suppose that is not the same with countries as with armies? The struggle for life, the struggle for existence in future will not be between cities or even between kingdoms. It will be between mighty empires; and the minor States will come off badly if they are left to be crushed between the gigantic bulk of these higher organisations. Our opponents see this truth dimly, because when we come to talk of the prosperity of America and Germany they say, "Yes, that is natural. Are they not greater than us, are they not more numerous?" Then in a sort of despairing fatalism they seem to say, "What can our little England do but fall a victim to the inexorable decrees of fate?" I am not impressed by their pessimism. (Cheers.) I refuse to despair of my country. (Cheers.) Are we not also an empire? (Cries of "Yes.") Are we not as great in area and as great in population, greater in the variety of our products and opportunities than any empire that exists or that the world has ever seen? Yes; but our union is incomplete, and the question which to me is everything is "Will it attain to a higher organisation?" It is impossible that it can remain the same; it must either shrink or it must develop."

"In the great revolution which separated the United States from Great Britain the greatest man that revolution produced...was Alexander Hamilton. He...left a precious legacy to his countrymen when he disclosed to them the secrets of union when he said to them, "Learn to think continentally." (Hear, hear.) And, my fellow-citizens, if I may venture to give you a message now I would say to you, "Learn to think Imperially" (Cheers.) ... I ask you to be worthy of your past; I ask you to remember that the future of this country, which we all cherish so much, lies in the future of the British race. The Colonies and possessions—they are the natural buttresses of our Imperial state, and it behoves us to think of them as they are now, in their youth and promise, to think of them also what they will be in a century hence when grown to manhood and developing beyond anything we can hope for their motherland. (Cheers.) Think of them as they are; think of them as they will be; share and sympathise with their aspirations for a closer union; do nothing to discourage them, but show your willingness to co-operate with them in every effort they make or propose. So, and so only, can you maintain the traditions of the past, the renown of this Imperial City, and the permenance of that potent agency for peace and for civilisation that we call the British Empire. (Loud cheers.)"

"The day of small nations has passed away; the day of Empires has come."

"You are suffering from the unrestricted imports of cheaper goods. You are suffering also from the unrestricted immigration of the people who make these goods. (Loud and prolonged cheers.)... The evils of immigration have increased during recent years. And behind those people who have already reached these shores, remember there are millions of the same kind who, under easily conceivable circumstances, might follow in their track, and might invade this country in a way and to an extent of which few people have at present any conception. The same causes that brought 10,000 and 20,000, and tens of thousands, may bring hundreds of thousands, or even millions. (Hear, hear.) If that would be an evil, surely he is a statesman who would deal with it in the beginning. (Hear, hear.)... When it began we were told it was so small that it would not matter to us. Now it has been growing with great rapidity, it has already affected a whole district, it is spreading into other parts of the country... Will you take it in time (hear, hear), or will you wait, hoping for something to turn up which will preserve you from what you all see to be the natural consequences of such an invasion? ... [I]t is a fact that when these aliens come here they are answerable for a larger amount of crime and disease and hopeless poverty than are proportionate to their numbers. (Cheers.) They come here—I do not blame them, I am speaking of the results—they come here and change the whole character of a district. (Cheers.) The speech, the nationality of whole streets has been altered; and British workmen have been driven by the fierce competition of famished men from trades which they previously followed. (Cheers.)... But the party of free importers is against any reform. How could they be otherwise?...they are perfectly consistent. If sweated goods are to be allowed in this country without restriction, why not the people who make them? Where is the difference? There is no difference either in the principle or in the results. It all comes to the same thing—less labour for the British working man. (Cheers.)"

"Is the Unionist party, the Conservative party, to be without a definite policy of social reform? It is to our party that they owe the whole of that body of legislation connected with the Factory Acts, free education, the distribution of lands in the shape of allotments and small holdings, the compensation for accidents to workmen in the course of their employment... The policy of resistance, of negation, is no sufficient answer to that Socialist opinion which is growing up amongst us—the Socialist opinion the objects of which are, after all, worthy of earnest and even favourable consideration...that policy, by whomsoever propounded, is a policy which means money, which means expenditure, it is closely connected with the third object of our party officially declared—that fiscal reform is the first constructive policy of the Unionist party. (Cheers.)"

"The free-traders were against all State interference of any kind; they were against the Factory Act, they were opposed to the laws to prevent fraud and adulteration, especially in the interests of the working classes, they were against trade unions, they were in favour of unlimited competition, they would buy everything in the cheapest market and especially labour... [W]e cannot logically and consistently attempt to defend labour against unfair competition without defending at the same time against unfair competition the product of that labour."

"England without an Empire! Can you conceive it? England in that case would not be the England we love. (Cheers.) If the ties of sympathy...between ourselves and our children who are soon to become great nations across the seas—if these ties were weakened or destroyed, if we suffered their affection to die from want of food, if we allowed them to drift apart—then this England of ours would sink from the comparative position which she has enjoyed throughout the centuries...she would be a fifth-rate nation existing on the sufferance of her more powerful neighbours."

"There are men in the House of Commons, who profess in a special sense to be the representatives of Labour, who would not allow me, who represent a great working-class constituency...to claim to represent you. In order to do so I must be a man who did some work 30 years ago and never did any since. (Loud laughter.) It is these men who are at the present time blackening the characters of those who are upholding the British dominion and British honour throughout the world... They have no ear of sympathy for the men who suffered for the Imperial cause. The other day some officers, British soldiers, were murdered with savage brutality for no reason or provocation. They had no sympathy with those officers or the families that they left behind them, their only idea was to shield the assassins from the proper penalty of their crime. ("Traitors.")... But one thing I will say, and I say it in your name; these men at any rate do not represent the working classes of England (loud cheering), and never yet in our history or in the history of the British race has a great democracy been unpatriotic. (Hear, hear.)"

"It is a question (of native labour) which has engaged my most careful attention in connection with West Africa and other Colonies. To listen to the right honourable gentleman, you would almost think that it would be a good thing for the native to be idle. I think it is a good thing for him to be industrious; and by every means in our power, we must teach him to work. No people ever have lived in the world's history. who would not work. In the interests of tbe natives all over Africa, we have to teach them to work."

"We are all of us taxed, and taxed heavily. Is that a system of forced labour? To say that because we put a tax on the native therefore he is reduced to a condition of servitude and of forced labour is, to my mind, absolutely ridiculous. It is perfectly fair to my mind that the native should contribute something towards the cost of administering the country."

"If that really is the last word of civilization, if we are to proceed on the assumption that the nearer the native or any human being comes to a pig the more desirable is his condition, of course I have nothing to say I must continue to believe that, at all events, the progress of the native in civilization will not be secured until he has been convinced of the necessity and the dignity of labour. Therefore, I think that anything we reasonably can do to induce the native to labour is a desirable thing, the existence of the tax is an inducement to him to work."

"That he never held the title of Leader of this House or of the head of the Government is felt, by friends and by foes alike, to be an accident in his career."

"I note genuine sympathy, which never failed him, with the precarious lot of those who in one way or another fell victims to the stress and strain of our social and industrial life. Another is the imaginative quality which suffused and coloured, not only his language, but his ideas when he confronted the larger issues of national policy. Lastly, may I not say, no statesman of our own, or, perhaps, of any time, surpassed him in the two great qualities of confidence and courage—confidence, buoyant and unperturbed, in the justice of his cause, courage, persistent and undismayed, in its steadfast pursuit."

"I believe that the more you consult colonial opinion, the more it will be brought home to the minds of every one of you that in those outlying and most important portions of our Empire it is my right hon. friend that they look as the man who, above all others, has made the British Empire a reality (loud cheers), not only to those who live in these islands, but to every subject of his Majesty the King."

"If high courage, if an unconquerable soul, if qualities that made him capable of grasping not merely the official details of administrative work, but gave him a glance that could embrace the largest questions, if a courage that feared no odds, if industry which defied fatigue, and a courage that quailed not even under disease—if all these qualities constitute, as surely they do constitute, a great man, nobody ever had them in a greater measure than Mr. Chamberlain... We knew how rapid was his decision, how quick was his grasp of the most complicated problem, how clearly he saw the line which should in his opinion be pursued in any great emergency, how, when that line was once determined upon, with what courage, what loyalty, what resource and what eloquence, he was always prepared to pursue it to the end. He was a great statesman; he was a great friend; he was a great orator; he was a great man; and the House does well to mark in a signal and exceptional manner its sense of the loss that this country has suffered, and its sense of the greatness of him who has now become one of the heroes of the past, one of those great characters who illustrate our Parliamentary and public history, and on whom after all more than on anything else, the greatness of our Empire must depend"

"The Empire has stood together! My father is vindicated."

"There was something else in the example of my father's life which impressed me very deeply when I was a young man, and which has greatly influenced me since I took up a public career. I suppose most people think of him as a great Colonial Secretary and tariff reformer, but before he ever went to the Colonial Office he was a great social reformer, and it was my observance of his deep sympathy with the working classes and his intense desire to better their lot which inspired me with an ambition to do something in my turn to afford better help to the working people and better opportunities for the enjoyment of life."

"I loved dining with Joe Chamberlain; he was a sparkling animal, attractive and fascinating, but he was a disrupter, a bad element. The Conservative Party was mad to adopt the raw doctrine of Imperial Preference."

"When I was twenty-two I saw the great Joe Chamberlain for the first time... I was immensely impressed from the first moment with Mr. Chamberlain's remarkable personality... What impressed me most about him was his decisiveness and the fact that he always knew exactly where he was going... He asked me to stay with him at Highbury, which was like a pilgrim going to Mecca... [H]e...said—"Why do the people not realise that Germany is making war upon us, that her economic attack is just as surely an act of aggression as if she had declared hostilities? She will never rest until she dominates the world and before ten years are over, mark my words, she will be using her terrible military machine and nothing can prevent our being involved." ... On another occasion he said—"Tariff reform is our defence. It is just as vital as the navy. We must arm if we are not to be beaten without striking a blow.""

"Above all else, whether you agreed with him or not, there could be no other verdict but that "This was indeed a man," for in an age of great debaters he stood out as a born fighter with an uncompromising mind and burning faith... One meets only two or three people in life who at first contact make one feel "command me and I will follow" and Chamberlain was one of them... The great test is surely whether a man's influence lives on after he has gone and in this respect Chamberlain must be unique. He was never Prime Minister, and yet if you want to raise a certain cheer with any ordinary British audience you have only to mention his name... Go overseas and you will find that across Canada, in every part of British Africa, Australasia or the East...if British statesmanship is discussed, the name of Chamberlain always crops up. This is not so much for what he did...but because through him there breathed something new, a fresh outlook, a creed to inspire, a new hope in unity and union. We have never seen his like again—may I leave it at that."

"I have never supposed since the days of "Ransom" that Mr. Chamberlain would be in the least unwilling to enter into a discussion regarding the unequal distribution of wealth, and I think it is extremely probable that in the course of this and ensuing sessions he may find many opportunities of discussing this problem with some of the newly-returned Members of Parliament. But in all the discussions on this momentous subject which he may enter into with the Labour Members, I venture to express the opinion that he will find among the projects and plans which he will be called upon to discuss none containing a more Socialistic principle than that which is embodied in his own scheme, which, whether it can properly be described as a scheme of protection or not, is certainly a scheme under which the State is to undertake to regulate the course of commerce and of industry, and tell us where we are to buy, where we are to sell, what commodities we are to manufacture at home, and what we may continue, if we think right, to import from other countries."

"Our children will tell their sons of the statesman who in the evening of his days, crowned with years and honour, beheld what our Empire might be made, who stepped aside from the sheep tracks of little politicians, who put from him ease, and comfort, and friendship, and lost even health itself, that he might inspire and lead the young generation to follow him along the new path. (Cheers.)"

"Throughout his career, as it seems to me, there were two principles which were at the basis of his political action...a desire to improve the condition of the people, and an intense, and perhaps almost aggressive, national pride."

"He never filled the post for which his great qualities seem specially to have destined him. He never was Prime Minister. But what is success and what is failure? "It is not what man does that exalts him, but what man would do." He almost alone has changed the whole spirit of the relationship of the different parts of the Empire towards each other, and has thus laid strongly the foundation on which other men may build."

"Mr. Chamberlain is unquestionably the future leader of the people... He is a Radical and doesn't care who knows it as long as the people do."

"I recognise that Mr. Chamberlain's historic agitation has rendered one outstanding service to the cause of the masses. It has helped to call attention to a number of real crying evils festering amongst us, the existence of which the governing classes in this country were ignorant of or overlooked... He has committed the party which, by temperament, tradition, and interest, is opposed to great changes—he has committed it to propositions which social reformers of other schools of thought have hitherto in vain sought to convert them."

"[Chamberlain delivered] two remarkable speeches in [1885], that at Glasgow on September 15, and that at Inverness three days later. I still remember, as though it were but yesterday, the thrill of pleasure which went through Radical Scotland when the first speech was delivered. Its bold audacity struck the imagination of the country. We waited with interest and at a high tension for the Inverness pronouncement. The earnest candour of the man who based his politics upon the fact that one in every thirty people in the country was on the parish, that one in every ten was on the border of starvation, as he had done in Glasgow, and was flaunting the classes with cavalier indifference whilst declaring that for the increase of the material resources of the poor there was "no hope whatever except in the radical revision of the laws which affect the tenure of land," touched the imagination of Radical Scotland... Mr. Chamberlain's speech at Inverness was therefore no ordinary pronouncement. People flocked to the town from far and near—and they were rewarded. Never was the crofter position better put. He reiterated his doctrines about land ownership. A volcano of fury shot up next morning from the Conservative press, but thousands of hearts were stirred for the coming contest by the joy that at last a man had appeared who really meant business."

"Chamberlain...specifically advocated tariff reform as an employment policy: "Tariff reform means jobs for all." As a political device it was aimed directly at the working-class electorate... Tariff reform...proposed to reunite the political and economic systems and, despite Chamberlain's personal disavowals, threatened the enforcement of a new social discipline. It was the closest to a continental political strategy Britain had ever reached; its failure meant the failure not only of a policy that would have subordinated the working class under a new fiscal–industrial order but the failure of any working-class ideologies—Marxism, for instance—which also argued that the country's political and economic systems should be reunited."

"The other model was the Australian one: a system of industrial relations dependent upon compulsory arbitration and judicially established wage minima for both skilled and unskilled workers within a protected economy... That was not a subsistence but a "living" wage of the kind that the British unions never actually got. This was the bargain of Australian tariffs: employers got protected markets and employees got protected wages. It was the kind of system that might have emerged from Joseph Chamberlain's campaign for tariffs had he a clearer and more limited idea of what he wanted; had he not tried to bundle up in one policy proposals both to save the Empire and provide guaranteed employment for British workers—proposals either of which could have worked separately but not together."

"The collapse of employment in the great "staple" industries after 1920 provided protection with its historic opportunity. In effect what happened was what Joseph Chamberlain always said would happen; though before 1914 it never did."

"From his boyhood up, Joseph Chamberlain has been consumed with a passionate longing to benefit the lot of the common people. Not Burns, nor Keir Hardie is more constantly preoccupied by the necessity for doing something to make the cottage of the labouring man less of a hovel and more of a home."

"Mr. Chamberlain is at this moment the most popular and the most trusted man in England. He is the most popular of British statesmen throughout our Empire. To our kin beyond the seas he, more than any other man, stands for Imperial unity and consolidation."

"The loss of Chamberlain alone was immeasurable disaster; his influence with the democracy had for some time past exceeded Gladstone's; I found of late that if audiences cheered Gladstone's name for two minutes, they cheered Chamberlain's for five... In any case, the energy of a Parliament created for social reform was to be spent on prolonged struggle over a subject which had formed no part of the election programme. Working men would find that their devotion had been thrown away, their confidence abused, the promised reforms to which they gave their votes postponed indefinitely, if not altogether sacrificed, to a measure which no one among them had ever heard."

"It was better to have a somewhat harsh Budget, which would cure inflation, rather than a generous, popular Budget which would merely undermine the purchasing power of the pound."

"Future nationalisations will be more concerned with equality than with planning, and this means that we can leave the monolithic public corporation behind us and look for more intimate forms of ownership and control."

"Neutrality is essentially a conservative policy, a policy of defeat, of announcing to the world that we have nothing to say to which the world will listen. ... Neutrality could never be acceptable to anyone who believes that he has a universal faith to preach. And those countries which have successfully adopted it in the past have paid the price of becoming little islands full of frustrated hedonists. Switzerland and Sweden are as ideologically sterile as they are physically undevastated."

"It is quite impossible to advocate both the abolition of great inequalities of wealth and the acceptance of a one-quarter public sector and three-quarters private sector arrangement. A mixed economy there will undoubtedly be, certainly for many decades and perhaps permanently, but it will need to be mixed in very different proportions from this."

"The first duty of a party of the left is to be radical in the context of the moment, to offer the prospect of continuing advance, and to preserve the loyalty of those whose optimistic humanism makes them its natural supporters."

"Representative democracy demands a clear division of function between the electors and the elected. The former choose their representatives and retain the essential right of sacking them, if they are not satisfied with their work, at the end of a fixed period. But in the meantime the elected representatives, whether they are members of Parliament or city councillors, should be given full freedom to do their jobs. Any form of referendum is an infringement of this freedom, and the more complex and detailed the issue upon which it is held the more absurd an infringement it becomes."

"It is hard to understand why an attempt to get more of the national product for those who at present get least is to be dismissed as pandering to envy, while an attempt to tilt it the other way by securing more concessions for the discontented Conservative electors of Tonbridge is not denounced as rapacity, and why the one is manifestly more worthy than the other."

"The chief danger for a country placed as we are is that of living sullenly in the past, of believing that the world has a duty to keep us in the station to which we are accustomed, and showing bitter resentment if it does not do so. This was the mood of Suez; and it is a mood absolutely guaranteed, not to recreate our past glories, but to reduce us to a level of influence and wealth far lower than that which we need occupy. ... Our neighbours in Europe are roughly our economic and military equals. We would do better to live gracefully with them than to waste our substance by trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the power giants of the modern world."

"Suez was a totally unsuccessful attempt to achieve unreasonable and undesirable objectives by methods which were at once reckless and immoral; and the consequences, as was well deserved, were humiliating and disastrous."

"Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than the most perfect of economic policies."

"There is also the point, put by my hon. Friend the Member for Grimsby yesterday, that if we are to devote absolute priority constantly to shrinking the total of public expenditure as a proportion of our national income, what sort of community are we to live in? Do hon. Members opposite really want to see, in Professor Galbraith's striking phrase, "Public squalor in the midst of private affluence", as the future for this country? Let hon. Members make no mistake about it: that is what this involves, and our hospital, education and public services will become even more inadequate than they are at present if we devote our attention primarily and exclusively to the task of shrinking the proportion of public expenditure."

"We exist to change society. We are not likely to be very successful if we are horrified at any suggestion of changing ourselves. One of the things from which we are suffering is a misplaced national complacency: a belief that we do things better than anyone else. Do not let us be too afraid, as a Labour Party, of learning from some of our friends abroad. Parties all over the world have been modernizing themselves. There are only two unreconstructed socialist parties in the world—the French and the Australian. Do not let us be too conservative, complacent, and insular."

"I am myself convinced that the existing law on abortion is uncertain and is also, and perhaps more importantly, harsh and archaic and that it is in urgent need of reform. I certainly shall have no hesitation in voting for the Second Reading of the Bill. I take this view because I believe that we have here a major social problem. How can anyone believe otherwise when perhaps as many as 100,000 illegal operations a year take place, that the present law has shown itself quite unable to deal with the problem? I believe this, too, because of the danger which exists at present to those who are forced to resort to back-street abortionists and to the misery which is caused to some of those who fail to get an abortion. I believe it also because we all know...that the law is consistently flouted by those who have the means to do so. It is, therefore, very much a question of one law for the rich and one law for the poor."

"It would be a mistake to think...that by what we are doing tonight we are giving a vote of confidence or congratulation to homosexuality. Those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt and shame. The crucial question, which we are nearly at the end of answering decisively, is, should we add to those disadvantages the full rigour of the criminal law? By its overwhelming decisions, the House has given a fairly clear answer, and I hope that the Bill will now make rapid progress towards the Statute Book. It will be an important and civilising Measure."

"No one contemplating the present position and looking back at the whole series of vicissitudes which has beset the British economy throughout the past 20 years can find the prospect other than very difficult at present. But I believe that there is also a great opportunity at present. There is certainly no quick, easy road to prosperity for this country, but the changes which must be made are fairly marginal. They must be made with absolute determination, but if they are so made, and accepted by the people, the whole outlook can change. The Government can only provide the right framework. Unless they do that, our national energies will be misdirected, but once they have done it the opportunities for export and growth and efficiency must be seized by everyone. There will still be two years of hard slog ahead. But at the end of it we could have a more securely-based prosperity than we have known for a generation."

"It is not some malevolent quirk of international bankers which makes the balance of payments surplus necessary. It is the hard facts of life. Quite a few of the resolutions mention the need to get rid of the shackles of international finance. These shackles can be exaggerated. If you want less to do with bankers and fewer International Monetary Fund visits the answer is straightforward: Help us to get out of debt. It is no good urging independence and denying policies to that end."

"In these circumstances it is essential we should be able to speak with sanity and authority in world monetary affairs. You cannot do this from a position of perpetual deficit."

"[The "permissive society" had been allowed to become a dirty phrase.] A better phrase is the 'civilized society', based on the belief that different individuals will wish to make different decisions about their patterns of behaviour and that, provided these do not restrict the freedom of others, they should be allowed to do so within a framework of understanding and tolerance. ... And the idea that our moderate progress towards giving the individual greater freedom from the law in matters of social conduct is responsible for the troubles of modern society is plain nonsense."

"One of the central purposes of democratic socialism was to extend throughout the community the opportunity of freedom of choice which used to be the prerogative of the few."

"Three years ago it [public opinion] was strongly in favour of entry [into the EEC]. It may change again...and in any case I do not believe that it is always the duty of those who seek to lead to follow public opinion."

"At conference the only alternative [to the EEC] we heard was 'socialism in one country'. That is always good for a cheer. Pull up the drawbridge and revolutionize the fortress. That's not a policy either: it's just a slogan, and it is one which becomes not merely unconvincing but hypocritical as well when it is dressed up as our best contribution to international socialism."

"In spite of half a century of effort, our society—and still more our world—is still disfigured by gross unfairness. ... Concern is indivisible and so is selfishness. A society which says 'to hell with famine and disease in Bangladesh, it's all their own fault, isn't it?' is extremely unlikely to balance this with compassion and justice for its own pensioners and its own low-paid."

"The next Labour Government can be content with nothing less than the elimination of poverty as a social problem. ... The Labour movement was created to fight against a wealthy minority on behalf of a poor majority. Now it has a more complex and demanding task. It has to enlist the majority in a struggle on behalf of a poor minority, who on grounds of age or health or family circumstances or disgracefully low pay are unable to help themselves. No one has a right to expect a fair deal for himself unless he is prepared to work for one for others too."

"We have to persuade men and women who are themselves reasonably well off that they have a duty to forgo some of the advantages they would otherwise enjoy for the sake of others who are much poorer. We have to persuade car workers in my constituency that they have an obligation to low-paid workers in the public sector. We have to persuade the British people as a whole that they have an obligation to Africans and Asians whom they have never seen. Our only hope is to appeal to the latent idealism of all men and women of good will, irrespective of their income brackets, irrespective of their class origins. In place of the politics of envy, we must put the politics of compassion; in place of the politics of cupidity, the politics of justice; in place of the politics of opportunism, the politics of principle. Only so can we hope to succeed. Only so will success be worth having."

"What is more likely [if there were a referendum]...is that party loyalties would be strongly mobilized and that in order to frustrate the government of the day the Opposition would form a temporary coalition of those who, whatever their political views, were against the proposed action. By this means we would have forged a more powerful continuing weapon against progressive legislation than anything we have known in this country since the curbing of the absolute powers of the old House of Lords. Apart from the obvious example of capital punishment, I would not in these circumstances fancy the chances, to take a few random but important examples, of many measures to improve race relations, or to extend public ownership, or to advance the right of individual dissent, or to introduce the planning restraints which will become increasingly necessary if our society is to avoid strangling itself."

"There has been a lot of talk about the formation of a new centre party. Some have even been kind enough to suggest that I might lead it. I find this idea profoundly unattractive. I do so for at least four reasons. First, I do not believe that such a grouping would have any coherent philosophical base...A party based on such a rag-bag could stand for nothing positive. It would exploit grievances and fall apart when it sought to remedy them. I believe in exactly the reverse sort of politics...Second, I believe that the most likely effect of such an ill-considered grouping would be to destroy the prospect of an effective alternative government to the Conservatives...Some genuinely want a new, powerful anti-Conservative force. They would be wise to reflect that it is much easier to will this than to bring it about. The most likely result would be chaos on the left and several decades of Conservative hegemony almost as dismal and damaging as in the twenties and thirties. Third, I do not share the desire, at the root of much such thinking, to push what may roughly be called the leftward half of the Labour Party...out of the mainstream of British politics...Fourth, and more personally, I cannot be indifferent to the political traditions in which I was brought up and in which I have lived my political life. Politics are not to me a religion, but the Labour Party is and always had been an instinctive part of my life."

"It is not much good talking about fundamental and irreversible changes in our society and being content with a 38 per cent Labour voting intention. ... Democracy means that you need a substantially stronger moral position than this to govern effectively at all, let alone effecting a peaceful social revolution. The programme we put forward must be capable of being carried out in what may well be difficult economic circumstances."

"[Roy Jenkins] agreed with many of the criticisms levelled against the performance of private industry and he agreed that the country needed a sharp change. There was a case for a significant extension of public ownership. (Applause.) But public ownership must be related directly to the ordinary Labour voters and the potential Labour voters in their day to day lives, particularly in development areas, to inflation, housing, and land use. "It is no good taking over a vast number of industries without a clear plan as to how and by whom they are going to be run. It is no good pretending that a transfer of ownership in itself solves our problems.""

"The sense of shame that the Chancellor should have felt is far more personal. It is a sense of shame for having taken over an economy with a £1,000 million surplus and running it to a £2,000 million deficit. It is a sense of shame for having conducted our internal financial affairs with such profligacy that our public accounts are out of balance as never before. It is a sense of shame for having presided over the greatest depreciation of the currency, both at home and abroad, in our history. It is a sense of shame for having left us at a moment of test far weaker than most of our neighbours...There is, I believe, a greater threat to the effective working of our democratic institutions than most of us have seen in our adult lifetimes. I do not believe that it springs primarily from the machinations of subversively-minded men, although no doubt they are there and are anxious to exploit exploitable situations. It comes much more dangerously from a widespread cynicism with the processes of our political system. I believe that the Chancellor contributed to that on Monday. I believe that it poses a serious challenge to us all...None of us should seek salvation through chaos. There is a duty too to recognise that we could slip into a still worse rate of inflation and a world spiral-ling downwards towards slump, unemployment and falling standards, with our selves, temporarily at least, well in the vanguard. What is required is neither an imposed solution nor an open hand at the till. The alternative to reaching a settlement with the miners is paralysis...The task of statesmanship is to reach a settlement but to do it in a way which opens no floodgates for if they were opened, it would not only damage everyone but it would undermine the differential which the miners deserve and which the nation now needs them to have."

"...one should not doubt that there is in Britain a great body of moderate, rather uncommitted opinion, and that unless substantial sections of such opinion can feel happy in supporting one or other of the major parties the result will be an intolerable strain upon the traditional pattern of politics. ... The stalemate will not be broken unless and until we can move over to the Labour Party a sizable part of this potentially progressive, but non-extreme opinion. I do not think that has happened yet."

"If we are to get through the immense problems of the next few years we need to heal and not to deepen the wounds of the nation. That can, I believe, be done upon the basis of party government. ... But it cannot be done upon the basis of ignoring middle opinion and telling everyone who does not agree with you to go to hell."

"...we are a party dedicated to the rule of law and to parliamentary democracy. What the law says, even if we don't like it, is what we have to accept until we can change it by constitutional means. No one is entitled to be above the law. If we weaken on that principle we can say goodbye to democratic socialism, because what is sauce for the goose will be sauce for the gander, and there are plenty of right-wing elements who if given the excuse would gain momentum in defying future measures of social progress which they would not like. That is and will be my policy as long as I am at the Home Office."

"...it must be clear that a future Labour Government intends to keep Britain fully part of the Western community of nations. ... Today there is a greater danger of that community falling apart than at any time since 1947. ... I myself believe that the threat of such a breakup would be greatly exacerbated by our withdrawal from Europe. ... There is no future for an isolationist Britain. If anyone wants a Britain poised uneasily between the Western alliance and the Communist block they can in the immortal words of Mr Sam Goldwyn "include me out"."

"But this is not merely a question of our political and military posture. It also affects our economic policy. We have to live and trade in an open world. We cannot make ourselves a closed society in which we can only keep men and capital by erecting a ring fence around ourselves so that they have to stay. ... To sustain it [our overseas deficit]—and the only alternative would be a drastic cut in our standard of living and a considerable contribution to the dislocation of world trade—we shall have to borrow and go on borrowing a great deal from abroad. To pretend that you could get this money in while retreating into a siege economy would be to live in a world of dangerous phantasy."

"I am in favour of sensible, well argued extensions of public ownership. ... But I am also in favour of a healthy, vigorous and profitable private sector. We do and shall depend upon it to provide a great part of our jobs, our exports and our production. And if we allow a mood of sullen uncertainty to build up in that sector we shall lose more than we shall gain by the sensible and necessary extension of the public sector."

"...we must recognise that the greatest threat to the cohesion of our society today is the still increasing rate of inflation. ... We are approaching a new threshold...which is a rate with which hardly any democratic system in the world has so far survived. ... No country can accept this rate of inflation for more than a very short period. ... Its effects will be unfair, divisive, unsettling and in the last resort destructive. ... No one will be able to plan ahead. The country will not for long put up with it. If we cannot solve it by tolerable and civilized methods, then someone within a few years will solve it by intolerable and uncivilized ones."

"We must restore some stability and be prepared, if necessary, to make some sacrifices, both of dogma and materialism, to achieve it. There is no point in pretending that we are not facing an economic crisis without precedent since the growth of post-war prosperity."

"What makes you think I care about my political career? All that matters to me is what is happening in the world, which I think is heading for disaster. I can't stand by and see us pretend everything is all right when I know we are heading for catastrophe. It isn't only Europe. It is a question of whether this country is going to cut itself off from the Western Alliance and go isolationist."

"[I] could not stay in a Cabinet which had to carry out withdrawal [from the EEC]."

"It is the police who are our main protection against terrorism and it is to the police that we must give our sustenance and support. It cannot be without reluctance that we contemplate powers of the kind proposed in the Bill, involving as they must some encroachment—limited but real—on the liberties of individual citizens. Few things would provide a more gratifying victory to the terrorists than for this country to undermine its traditional freedoms in the very process of countering the enemies of those freedoms. This we must keep in mind not only today but in the future as we persevere in what may not be a short struggle to eradicate terrorism from this country...the Bill proposes strengthened powers in four broad areas. First, it proscribes the IRA and makes display of support for it illegal. Second, the Bill makes it possible to make exclusion orders against persons who are involved in terrorism. Third, the Bill gives the police wide powers to arrest and detain, within limits, suspected terrorists. Fourth, it gives the police powers to carry out a security check on all travellers entering and leaving Great Britain and Northern Ireland."

"Inflation in Britain is at an unacceptable level. It is now mostly home-induced and wage-induced. It is moving well out of line with that of the rest of the world. If it goes on doing so it will ruin us as a nation, both economically and politically. It is of a different order from any of our other difficulties. It is, quite simply, our biggest menace since Hitler."

"Let there be no doubt that our present rate of inflation is the main cause of our economic difficulties. There never has been a more mistaken piece of economic analysis than the view that we should accept inflation to avoid unemployment. Inflation today, so far from being an alternative to unemployment, is its main cause. If our rate of cost increase is allowed to continue close to twice that of the average for the developed world it will increasingly price us out of world markets. Employers...will have to restrict their activities and still more their labour force in response to mounting and uncontainable wage and salary bills."

"Not to have gone into Europe would, in my view, have been a misfortune. But to come out would be on an altogether greater scale of self-inflicted injury. It would be a catastrophe. ... I care very much about the influence of Britain in the world, and also about our capacity to control our own destiny. To me, that is much more important than the legalistic definition of sovereignty."

"Were we to leave [the EEC], the worst damage would be done to ourselves. But not only damage. Western unity, at a time of great international danger, is under greater strain than at any time since it was put together in the aftermath of the war a generation ago. Were we to start to disengage, the whole delicate but precious structure might begin to fall apart."

"The myths about the evils of the [European] Community grow ever more manifold as day passes day. We are told that it would prevent any advance of public ownership. What happened to British Leyland during the past two days? The truth is almost the reverse. It is not the change of ownership which is threatened by staying in, it is the basic plan for buttressing and rejuvenating British Leyland and saving the jobs which go with it which would be fatally undermined by coming out."

"He could not regard the question of sovereignty as the ark of the covenant of socialism. It was neither socialist nor realistic to think one could have sovereignty in the world of today. "We live in an integrated world and our duty is to play our part in that with our neighbours. I distrust people who proclaim their love for humanity but illustrate it by being unable to get on with those around them.""

"I find it increasingly difficult to take Mr Benn seriously as an economics minister."

"[Britain outside the EEC would go into] an old people's home for fading nations. I do not believe in premature senility, either for nations or for individuals. And I do not even think it would be a comfortable or agreeable old people's home. I do not much like the look of some of the prospective wardens. I do not think the food or heating supplies would be very secure. There would be nobody much to pay for renovations. Our old friends would not much want to come and see us (the axis of power would run increasingly from Washington to Bonn or Brussels). We would find it increasingly difficult to afford to go and see them; and even if we got there we might find ourselves greeted on the doorstep with more embarrassment than welcome."

"If Reg Prentice is cut down it is not just the local party that is undermining its own foundations by ignoring the beliefs and feelings of ordinary people, the whole legitimate Labour Party, left as well as right, is crippled if extremists have their way. ... If tolerance is shattered formidable consequences will follow. Labour MPs will either have to become creatures of cowardice, concealing their views, trimming their sails, accepting orders, stilling their consciences, or they will all have to be men far far to the left of those whose votes they seek. Either would make a mockery of parliamentary democracy. The first would reduce still further, and rightly reduce, respect for the House of Commons. It would become an assembly of men with craven spirits and crooked tongues. The second would, quite simply, divorce the Labour Party from the people."

"I do not think you can push public expenditure significantly above 60 per cent [of GNP] and maintain the values of a plural society with adequate freedom of choice. We are here close to one of the frontiers of social democracy."

"...be prepared first to look at the evidence and to recognize how little the widespread use of prison reduces our crime or deals effectively with many of the individuals concerned. [The rule of law does not mean] our own pet prejudices. It means, in a democratic society, the law as passed by an elected Parliament and applied by impartial courts. You cannot have a rule of law while dismissing with disparagement Parliament, the courts and those who practise in them. That is not the rule of law. It is exactly what the pressure groups you complain about seek to achieve by demonstration."

"I respect your right to put them to me. You will no doubt respect my right to tell you that I do not think all the points in sum amount to a basis for a rational penal policy."

"Our determination to ensure good community relations is unswerving. There is no room for racial hatred in our crowded island. We cannot afford not to make a success of a multi-racial society. A moving speech was made the other day in the other place by Lord Pitt, himself a distinguished citizen of London of West Indian origin. In that speech, he looked forward hopefully to a harmonious multiracial Britain setting an example to the world. He spoke on a high level of moral seriousness, but reminded us too that our self-interest is also served by racial harmony and tolerance. I agree with that view, and would share Lord Pitt's hope, but I do not see it as an easy or even a certain outcome, at any rate in this generation. Its accomplishment will depend on the minority community accepting that this country will not take, in Lord Pitt's own words, a "large and unending stream" of dependants, and on the majority community accepting that tolerance is one of the greatest and most traditional of British virtues and that if that tradition is broken we shall all of us suffer deeply, both minority and majority, and suffer for many years to come."

"My wish is to build an effective united Europe. Now I've never sought absolutely to define exactly what I mean by this, but I've got an absolute clear sense of direction. I've never been frightened about the pace being too fast, I have been frightened about the pace being too slow. I do not think it's terribly useful to lay down blueprints as to whether one will be federal or confederal in the year 2000 and beyond. I want to move towards a more effectively organized Europe politically and economically and as far as I am concerned I want to go faster, not slower."

"I think that British politics, as at present constituted do make it difficult for people who are essentially men of the centre—I am a man of the left centre, but I've never pretended to be terribly far away from the centre of British politics. ... The gladiatorial nature of the House of Commons, with two sides lined up against each other, puts a premium on disagreement rather than upon agreement. This is inclined on both sides to give a greater strength to the wings rather than to the centre. ... there are appalling economic problems facing this country at the present time...I don't think it's terribly useful, terribly relevant or terribly convincing just to engage in an endless game of tu quoque. You've got to think of something better than 'It's your fault',—'No, it's not, it's your fault'. There's a sterility in this which is a danger to the country."

"There has always been a left, an extreme left, in the Labour Party. ... there is now more of an attempt, patchy, but an attempt by extremist organizations to infiltrate and work through the Labour Party at the present time—the phrase is 'entryism'. It is something which is certainly there and which one certainly has to beware of."

"If one looks at the evolution of Europe, you can say we've got a customs union, we've got the common agricultural policy, we've got certain other forms of integration and cohesion, but many of the hopes of the founding fathers are still very far from being realized."

"Those who had most insistently demanded the innovation of the referendum, because they thought it would produce exactly the opposite result, were temporarily stunned by the sudden revelation that they were populists without the support of the people. Now they have recovered from their concussion and seek to reopen the issue. ... Even if they had a coherent alternative policy, which they do not, it would wreck itself upon the rock of inconstancy. ... No one any longer expects us to be a rich country. But with an almost touching faith they still hope that we will be consistent and reliable. It is exactly this store of remaining national credit which the false democrats who first demanded and now deny the referendum seek to undermine."

"We must relaunch with a newly defined relevance to the circumstances of the late 1970s the drive towards economic and monetary union. We must find ways of avoiding recourse to the danger of psuedo-solutions of national protectionism to threats to sensitive sectors of the economy."

"[The effect of the Suez Crisis on the French was quite different.] We turned across the Atlantic. They turned across the Rhine, and Europe was built without us. There is room for argument about the causes of what followed. There is no doubt about what happened. Over the first 13 years of the [European] Community's life national income per head increased by 72 per cent in the Six and by 35 per cent in Britain. The result was that from being almost the richest country in Western Europe we became one of the poorest. France for the first time since the industrial revolution surpassed us in economic strength. The German economy achieved nearly twice our weight."

"Do we really believe that we have been more effectively and coherently governed over the past two decades than have the Germans, with their very sensible system of proportional representation? The avoidance of incompatible coalitions? Do we really believe that the last Labour Government was not a coalition, in fact if not in name, and a pretty incompatible one at that? I served in it for half its life, and you could not convince me of anything else."

"You also make sure that the state knows its place, not only in relation to the economy, but in relation to the citizen. You are in favour of the right of dissent and the liberty of private conduct. You are against unnecessary centralization and bureaucracy. You want to devolve decision-making wherever you sensibly can. You want parents in the school system, patients in the health service, residents in the neighbourhood, customers in both nationalized and private industry, to have as much say as possible. You want the nation to be self-confident and outward-looking, rather than insular, xenophobic and suspicious. You want the class system to fade without being replaced either by an aggressive and intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a 'get rich quick' society. ... These are some of the objectives which I believe could be assisted by a strengthening of the radical centre."

"During this conversation she vouchsafed her only awareness of Dimbleby. The Belgian Prime Minister was justifying his hesitancy about cruise missiles by citing his coalition difficulties. Mrs Thatcher turned to me with a mixture of belligerence, good humour and total self-satisfaction and announced to a slightly bewildered table – none of them elected by the British system – "And that is all your great schemes would amount to.""

"[A]lmost without a struggle, we have just witnessed a major lurch to the left in policy-making. The supreme authority of the Labour Party committed itself nine days ago to...a near neutralist and unilateralist position, which would make meaningless our continued membership of NATO...a commitment to practical non-cooperation with the European Community, leading in all likelihood to a firm proposal for complete withdrawal...a massive further extension of the public sector, despite the manifold unsolved problems which beset our nationalised industries, and mounting evidence from all over the world that full-scale state ownership is more successful in producing tyranny than in producing goods. Capitalism has its crisis today, but so too does estate socialism. There is now no economic philosopher's stone. But more successful nations are those which embrace a mixed economy and follow it with some consistency of purpose, not forever changing the frontiers. What remains of the private sector is to have enterprise squeezed out of it by being subjected to a straightjacket far tighter than in any other democratic country in the world. This is not by any stretch of the imagination a social democratic programme. Nor do I believe that it is the way to protect Britain's security, help the peace of the world, revitalise our economy, or represent the views of the great majority of moderate left voters."

"I therefore believe that the politics of the left and centre of this country are frozen in an out-of-date mould which is bad for the political and economic health of Britain and increasingly inhibiting for those who live within the mould. Can it be broken? ... There was once a book, more famous for its title than for its contents, called the Strange Death of Liberal England. That death caught people rather unawares. Do not discount the possibility that in a few years time someone may be able to write at least equally convincingly of the strange and rapid revival of liberal social democratic Britain."

"The two main parties feared the SDP more than they feared each other. Their narrow dogmas had alienated more and more people and would never achieve a widening appeal across classes, regions and occupations. They had replied by trying to pretend that the SDP was all things to all men and women. It was not true. ... It had no place for class warriors or for those who wanted to fight outdated ideological battles; no place for little Englanders; for those selfishly concerned with their own problems and not with those of their neighbours and the nation as a whole. The Labour Party went increasingly into its chauvinist bunker and the Conservative Party showed little or no concern for the problems of the developing and poor nations."

"Many of the early nationalisation measures were right. They have remained part of the social fabric. I favour measures of that type."

"Oh, Socialism! I haven't used that word for years. If you mean nationalizing the means of production, distribution and exchange... That leads to disaster. I mean, just look at Poland!"

"We had our liberal hour, when we passed the Sexual Offences Act which stopped all homosexuals being criminals. I'm not ashamed of that. We mustn't slip back into illiberal attitudes. You see, there are two strands in the Labour Party. The libertarian strand and the authoritarian puritan strand. By and large, the libertarians have come with us and the others have stayed behind."

"The whole spirit and outlook of the [SDP] party, its leaders and its members must be profoundly opposed to Thatcherism. It could not go along with the fatalism of the Government's acceptance of massive unemployment."

"A rolling back of the frontiers of State surveillance is necessary. ... I have come to the conclusion that this side of MI5 has become more trouble than it is worth. It falls over its own feet too often. It arouses more suspicion and complaint than is justified by the results its achieves. ... On grounds of utility I would now close down the political side of its activities."

"First, there is really no sign at all of any significant reduction in unemployment without a major change in policy...Unemployment has probably levelled out but at a totally unacceptable figure. Secondly, contrary to what the Secretary of State said, the post-oil surplus prospect—not merely the post-oil prospect, because the oil will take a long time to go, but the surplus, the big balance of payments surplus, which is beginning to decline quite quickly—still looks devastating...our balance of payments is now overwhelmingly dependent on this highly temporary and massive oil surplus. Our manufacturing industry is shrunken and what remains is uncompetitive...We have a manufacturing trade deficit of approximately £11 billion, all of which has built up in the past three to four years. This is containable by oil and by nothing else. Invisibles can take care of about £4 billion or £5 billion but they cannot do the whole job. As soon as oil goes into a neutral position we are in deep trouble. Should it go into a negative position, the situation would be catastrophic...To sell off a chunk of capital assets and to use the proceeds for capital investment in the rest of the public sector might just be acceptable. However, that is not what is proposed, and what is proposed cannot be justified on any reputable theory of public finance; and when it is accompanied by a Minister using the oil—which might itself be regarded as a capital asset; certainly it is not renewable—almost entirely for current purposes, it amounts to improvident finance on a scale that makes the Prime Minister's old friend General Galtieri almost Gladstonian."

"Several fallacies have been accepted too freely recently about the position of our manufacturing industry in the balance of our economy. The biggest fallacy is the view that salvation lies in services, and only in services. The corollary to that is that it is inevitable and desirable that over the past two decades there has been a reduction of nearly 3 million in employment in manufacturing industry. That is a massive reduction and represents nearly 40 per cent. of the total in manufacturing industry over that time. I do not believe that that should have been the case. That has been precipitate and dangerous and it has not been associated with an increase in productivity which has led to our maintaining our relative manufacturing position...I have come increasingly to the view that the Government stand back too much from industry. In my experience, they do so more than any other Government in the European Community. They do so more than the United States Government. We have to remember the vast US defence involvement in industry. They certainly stand back more than do the Japanese Government. To some extent, the motive is the feeling that we have had an uncompetitive and rather complacent industry which must be exposed to the full blasts of competition, and if that means contracts, even Government contracts, going overseas, we should shrug our shoulders and say that the wind should be stimulating. That process has been carried much further in Britain than in any other comparable rival country. I am resolutely opposed to protectionism. I am sure that it diminishes the employment and wealth-creating capacity of the world as a whole. That would be the result of plunging back into that policy. I also believe, however, that this totally arm's-length approach in the relationship between Government and industry is something that no other comparable Government contemplate to the extent that we do. It is not producing good results for British industry and it is a recipe for a further decline in Britain's position in the Western world. The Government should examine it carefully and reverse it in several important respects."

"The combined efforts of Government policy since 1979 have been not to improve but substantially to worsen our competitive position. We have gone from a huge manufacturing surplus of £5.5 billion in 1980 to a 1986 third quarter deficit of £8 billion a year...Even with oil production continuing for some time, the current account has gone from a £3 billion surplus to a deficit predicted by the Chancellor of £1.5 billion...Sadly, the Government's great contribution, having refused to stimulate the economy by more respectable means, is a roaring consumer boom, which there is not the slightest chance of their moderating before an election. A roaring consumer boom does not, to any significant extent, mean more employment. In our competitive position, worsening under the Government, it means overwhelmingly higher imports, a still worse balance of payments position and a classic path to perdition. To have produced, after seven and a half years, the combination of total monetary muddle, a worsened competitive position, a widespread doubt in other countries as to how we are to pay our way in the future, a desperately vulnerable currency and the prospect of an unending plateau of the highest unemployment in a major country in the industrialised world is a unique achievement over which the Chancellor is an appropriate deputy acting presiding officer."

"We have Mr. Wright's allegation that a surveillance operation was mounted against Lord Wilson of Rievaulx when he was Prime Minister in the mid-1970s...Many criticisms can be made of Lord Wilson's stewardship—I have made some in the past and I have no doubt that I may make some more in future—but the view that he, with his too persistent record of maintaining Britain's imperial commitments across the world, with his over-loyal lieutenancy to Lyndon Johnson, with his fervent royalism, and with his light ideological luggage, was a likely candidate to be a Russian or Communist agent is one that can be entertained only by someone with a mind diseased by partisanship or unhinged by living for too long in an Alice-Through-the-Looking-glass world in which falsehood becomes truth, fact becomes fiction and fantasy becomes reality. The result of the allegation has been substantially to fortify the view that I expressed in a letter to The Times 18 months ago, which is that MI5 should now be pulled totally out of its political surveillance role."

"It is the duty of the state to lean firmly but unvindictively in favour of greater equality."

"They [the Government] argue that if the rich are made rich enough, some wealth will spill over to make the poor less poor. There is no sign of that happening. On the contrary, the gap has widened. The number of those below the poverty line and with little hope of rising above it has grown inexorably. Connected divides become deeper and wider—that between the employed and the unemployed, that between the north and south, and that between those who share prosperity and those to whom it looks like a closed fortress. The Budget...does nothing to counteract that. ... If I were the Chancellor, I would be deeply apprehensive for the future cohesion of our society under his policies."

"I therefore think that our negotiations have achieved a satisfactory prospectus for an electable left-of-centre alternative to Thatcherism. And that was what the SDP was always intended to be: a party which was free alike of proletarian sullenness or of bourgeois triumphalism and which challenged both the old arrogance that the establishment always knows best (particularly if it can use secrecy to prevent anyone judging whether it really does) and the new heresy that the mystical entity of "the market" can run everything. A controlled economy is not much good at producing consumer goods. But "the market", in terms of protecting the environment or safeguarding health, schools, universities or Britain's scientific future, cannot run a whelk-stall. And if asked which is under greater threat in Britain today, the supply of consumer goods or the nexus of civilized public services, I unhesitatingly answer the latter."

"Undoubtedly, looking back, we nearly all allowed ourselves, for decades, to be frozen into rates of personal taxation which were ludicrously high...That frozen framework has been decisively cracked, not only by the prescripts of Chancellors but in the expectations of the people. It is one of the things for which the Government deserve credit...However, even beneficial revolutions have a strong tendency to breed their own excesses. There is now a real danger of the conventional wisdom about taxation, public expenditure and the duty of the state in relation to the distribution of rewards, swinging much too far in the opposite direction...I put in a strong reservation against the view, gaining ground a little dangerously I think, that the supreme duty of statesmanship is to reduce taxation."

"We have been building up, not dissipating, overseas assets. The question is whether, while so doing, we have been neglecting our investment at home and particularly that in the public services. There is no doubt, in my mind at any rate, about the ability of a low taxation market-oriented economy to produce consumer goods, even if an awful lot of them are imported, far better than any planned economy that ever was or probably ever can be invented. However, I am not convinced that such a society and economy, particularly if it is not infused with the civic optimism which was in many ways the true epitome of Victorian values, is equally good at protecting the environment or safeguarding health, schools, universities or Britain's scientific future. And if we are asked which is under greater threat in Britain today—the supply of consumer goods or the nexus of civilised public services—it would be difficult not to answer that it was the latter."

"In retrospect we might have been more cautious about allowing the creation in the 1950s of substantial Muslim communities here, although when one observes the, in some ways, greater problems which France and Germany have in this respect, it is an illusion to believe that in the integrated world of today any major country can remain exclusively indigenous."

"My broad position remains firmly libertarian, sceptical of official cover-ups and uncompromisingly internationalist, believing sovereignty to be an almost total illusion in the modern world, although both expecting and welcoming the continuance of strong differences in national traditions and behaviour. I distrust the deification of the enterprise culture. I think there are more limitations to the wisdom of the market than were dreamt of in Mrs Thatcher's philosophy. I believe that levels of taxation on the prosperous, having been too high for many years (including my own period at the Treasury), are now too low for the provision of decent public services. And I think the privatisation of near monopolies is about as irrelevant as (and sometimes worse than) were the Labour Party's proposals for further nationalisation in the 1970s and early 1980s."

"...my natural prejudices, such as they are, are much more green than orange. I am a poor unionist, believing intuitively that even Paisley and Haughey are better at dealing with each other than the English are with either."

"...the basic fact of Tony Blair's election does make it, in my view, the most exciting Labour choice since the election of Hugh Gaitskell in December 1955. ... The most fundamental presentation issue for the Labour Party is one of openness or inwardness. Nothing does the party more harm than when it turns in on itself in a mood of proletarian sullenness. Tony Blair epitomises the reverse of this. ... I hope he will use this opportunity in favour of sticking to a constructive line on Europe, in favour of sensible constitutional innovation...and in favour of friendly relations with the Liberal Democrats. ... I hope Mr Blair will not lead the Labour Party further in a free-market direction. Good work has been done in freeing it from nationalisation and other policies. But the market cannot solve everything and it would be a pity to embrace the stale dogmas of Thatcherism just when their limitations are becoming obvious."

"I have three great interests left in politics, a single currency, electoral reform, and the union of the Liberals with Labour. And all three are languishing."

"My central belief is that there are only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully in all the main activities of the Union and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and gain as much benefit as possible from inside. The other is to recognise that Britain's history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be other than a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member. If so, it would be better, and certainly would produce less friction, to accept this and to move towards an orderly and, if possible, reasonably amicable withdrawal."

"My view is that the Prime Minister [Tony Blair], far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little too Manichaean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white, contending with each other, and with a consequent belief that if evil is cast down good will inevitably follow. I am more inclined to see the world and the regimes within it in varying shades of grey. The experience of the past year, not least in Afghanistan, has given more support to that view than to the more Utopian one that a quick "change of regime" can make us all live happily ever after."

"I am in favour of courage—who is ever not in the abstract?—but not of treating it as a substitute for wisdom, as I fear we are currently in danger of doing."

"He is a superb debater, skilful in his deployment of argument, sensitive to the mood of the House, sometimes commanding in his use of language. However harshly his Budgets may hit the pocket, at least they should fall pleasantly on the ear... [H]e has today a more committed personal following than any other senior Labour politician... [T]he impression being built up of him as an intelligent, liberal, idealistic figure has won him some support even on the left, in addition to his firm adherents among the younger men of the centre and right."

"As a parliamentary performer...Mr Jenkins is a class apart from the rest of either front bench... He not only looks superior: he is superior."

"Roy Jenkins has risen fully and magnificently to the occasion. Yesterday's Budget was really everything that was economically needed. It should give devaluation a virtually certain guarantee of success."

"He may not be a Socialist but at least he is a radical. Jim is neither."

"Roy's drawl always lengthens when he is angry, which heightens the effect of contempt."

"The trouble with Roy is that he is so damned civilized. If only he could remain civilized and have an injection of red blood as well."

"Rousseau's educational theories had persuaded teachers] to dispense with the structured systems of learning which have been so successful in the past. [The result is] the belief, taught by Mr Roy Jenkins, that a permissive is a civilised society... A facile rhetoric of total liberty and of costless, superficial universal protest has really been a cover for irresponsibility. Our loud talk about the community overlies the fact that we have no community. We talk about neighbourhoods and all too often we have no neighbours. We go on about the home when we only have dwelling places containing television sets. It is the absence of a frame of rules and community, place and belonging, responsibility and neighbourliness that makes it possible for people to be more lonely than in any previous stage in our history. Vast factories, huge schools, sprawling estates, sky-scraping apartment blocks; all these work against our community and our common involvement one with another."

"The "Council of Social Democracy" seems an awfully dull name. I was going to suggest that the Jenkins–Williams group should be called the League of Agweeable Fellows Incommoded by Tiresome Extweemism – or Lafite for short... Mr Jenkins himself is possibly the most over-rated figure in British politics, a competent administrator but an uninspiring speaker and an irritating writer. He gave his political testament in the Dimbleby Lecture the November before last: "You want the class system to fade without being replaced either by an aggressive and intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a 'get rich quick' society." In other words, as Ferdinand Mount glossed at the time, you want to keep the yobs away from the best claret."

"A socialite rather than a Socialist."

"I wholly agree that Mr. Jenkins' saying that a permissive society is a civilised society is something that most of us would totally reject. Society must have rules if it is to continue to be civilised. Those rules must be observed and upheld by Government and by all leaders throughout the community."

"[T]his much-loved, gracious figure who is to the liberal classes what the Queen Mother is to the rest of us."

"[B]efore the Argentine action he was the subject of all our attention. He had won Hillhead. He had taken his seat. He has put a notably incomprehensible, but no doubt distinguished, maiden question to the Prime Minister about micro-chips. All things seemed possible for him. But within days Dr David Owen had seized the SDP controls and was roaring away on the subject of submarines, frigates, and vertical take-off. Dr Owen is at home with such matters. Mr Jenkins is not. Like Switzerland, he is prosperous, comfortable, civilized and almost entirely landlocked. His only previous contact with the high seas has been in various good fish restaurants."

"I went to the BBC for Question Time... Roy Jenkins was going on about Militant being a "cancer in the Labour Party", so when it came to me I turned on him and the SDP. "You talk about cancer! Everything you have achieved in your life has been on the backs of the working class. Your father was a miner; he was imprisoned in 1926; and every office you have ever held was because of the Labour Party, and then you kick away the ladder." I thought he was going to have a stroke. His face went absolutely scarlet. He is used to being buttered up as a man of principle."

"He was not a good Chancellor. He was really responsible for the inflation which began in 1970 and continued in the years after and it was his fault."

"I thought it was horrifying that they threw him out at Hillhead. A man of such great distinction and stature. It was dreadful. It tells you something about the Scots."

"In Bruce Anderson's Sunday Telegraph...article he writes about the idea that Roy Jenkins might have become Chancellor of the Exchequer in her (Mrs Thatcher's) first government... We had discussed it quite frequently and she was very interested in it, having some doubts about Geoffrey Howe at the time and recognizing how good Roy Jenkins had been at cutting expenditure."

"In my view, Roy's best period in office was as Home Secretary in the Cabinet of 1966; he then succeeded in stamping his liberal humanism on a department not notorious for that quality. He was not well suited to the politics of class and ideology which played so large a role in the Labour Party. His natural environment was the Edwardian age on which he wrote so well... His appearance had the sleek pomposity of Mr Podsnap; behind it there was a sharp and unsentimental mind... Above all, he was never satisfied with second place in any field; he always wanted to be top. I believe this explains much in his career after his poor showing in the election for Labour Party leadership in 1976."

"Callaghan resigned as Chancellor after devaluation. His place was taken by Roy Jenkins who was, in my judgment, the ablest of the four Chancellors I served. He listened to advice, but made up his own mind, explaining to his advisers the grounds for his decision. He was at times able to foresee contingencies of which his staff had not warned him, such as the possible devaluation of the French franc, and was judicious in assessing such contingencies and deciding what measures were appropriate to the circumstances. He was not afraid to take extreme measures to overcome major dangers, adding more to taxation and cutting more from public expenditure than his advisers suggested and showing a sound judgment of what was at stake. This resoluteness in the circumstances in which he took office enabled him to carry the Cabinet with him after three years in which they had shrunk from much milder action."

"A. J. P. Taylor told me in 1970, in one of those impromptu addresses to individuals that made the Beaverbrook Library so entertaining a place, that Wilson was transparently Lloyd George redivivus and Roy Jenkins an aspirant Asquith."

"[H]e is the second most successful British politician of modern times. The first is Margaret Thatcher... Roy Jenkins is one of those characters, best portrayed by Trollope, who is thoroughly worldly and yet has integrity. Power and glamour and party (and parties) all matter to him, but they matter only in a context that is, though he would avoid the phrase, morally serious. Despite his accent and demeanour (only his pronunciation of the word "sitooation" discloses the Welsh background), Jenkins has deep roots in the Labour movement. His opponents say that he severed them for snobbish reasons, but it is more likely that he did so because of a principled preference for the liberal over the tribal."

"And in persona, though clearly self-regarding and de haut en bas, he is also amused, self-critical, unbitter and detached. He is one of the few retired senior politicians who do not seem warped or broken by the career they have chosen. Perhaps this is because Jenkins knows that he has striven for what he believed in most of the time, and achieved a good deal of it. We are a "liberal" society in the sense in which he meant it. We are in the European Union. We have a Labour government in which the power of the labour movement has been weakened beyond Roy's wildest hopes. It's thanks to him more than any other single person. True, the whole thing is pretty ghastly, and far from the "civilised" polity he wanted. But that is not because of any personal failing: it is simply because he is, by and large, in the wrong."

"One of the outstanding statesmen of his era."

"As a founder of the SDP he was probably the grandfather of New Labour."

"One of the most remarkable people ever to grace British politics. He was a friend and support to me."

"An outstanding British statesman and a great European. He will be remembered with great esteem for his historic role in the birth of the euro."

"Roy Jenkins was both radical and contemporary; and this made him the most influential exponent of the progressive creed in politics in postwar Britain. Moreover, the political creed for which he stood belongs as much to the future as to the past. For Jenkins was the prime mover in the creation of a form of social democracy which, being internationalist, is peculiarly suited to the age of globalisation and, being liberal, will prove to have more staying power than the statism of Lionel Jospin or the corporatist socialism of Gerhard Schröder."

"Roy Jenkins was the first leading politician to appreciate that a liberalised social democracy must be based on two tenets: what Peter Mandelson called an aspirational society (individuals must be allowed to regulate their personal lives without interference from the state); and that a post-imperial country like Britain could only be influential in the world as part of a wider grouping (the EU)."

"He [James Callaghan] also rightly sensed that though the years of Roy Jenkins at the Home Office had been stellar in their action on discrimination – and he was fully supportive of that – liberalism was not necessarily the correct response to the growing disrespect and lawlessness that in the 1960s and 1970s saw crime rise... In this instance, we need less Jenkins and more Callaghan."

"Roy Jenkins made a classic speech, which I contributed to, in which among other things he defined integration not as a flattening process which would turn everybody out in some kind of mould of a stereotyped Englishman but would be a combination of equal opportunities accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of tolerance."

"I learned to admire his unflinching commitment to liberalism and his fastidiousness when it came to the corruption of language and ideas in modern public life. He was unquestionably a great man, and his biographies, as much as his political record, ensure that he will be remembered."

"The model we had was that everyone would share the broad values of being British. What we did not expect was there would be those who unwisely suggest that, for example, Sharia Law should be applied in this country, or that punishment of stoning for adultery might be looked at depending on the kind of stoning ... It never occurred to us that there would be those kind of unwise challenges to the broad values of a liberal democratic society. And I remember towards the end of Roy Jenkins' life him saying to me that we just didn't realise that in the struggle for race equality we would also have to struggle for a secular society and for the universal value of human rights."

"[Roy Jenkins] was one of the great figures in the Liberal and Social Democratic tradition in British politics. A great reforming home secretary, a much-admired chancellor, a great European and somebody whose values and life that in many ways I have followed"

"This was the era of Mary Whitehouse, an attempt to restore old fashioned values ... there was this enormous sort of mood, particularly amongst young people to sweep away all the rather old fashioned values which seemed to exist at that time ... and he, more than anybody else, lifted the barriers. It changed the face of the country, it modernised it, in a way that we would regard as perfectly normal today."

"Even the victor in a just cause is susceptible to the passions which war arouses. Every inhuman feeling is at once exacerbated. Truth, decency, morality, justice are the first casualties in any war. The accumulated effect makes a just settlement impossible. ... The pacifist treasures justice, liberty; but he believes that they can only be lastingly secured by peaceable means and that the use of force will only contaminate them. ... Armaments themselves provide an independent cause of war owing to the suspicion and fear which they breed. ... Unilateral disarmament offers the only way to escape once the policy of collateral disarmament has failed."

"Socialism with its ideal of the national control of consumption and production, its substitution of national barter for the processes of foreign trade, is by no means an international force. ... It looks inwards rather than outwards and sets up a national economy, which every true protectionist should envy. Russia is a powerful national state and has indulged in nationalist policies. ... Even a Socialist state cannot provide against war unless a world authority has been formed."

"I am a Liberal, first of all, because of the unfaltering resistance which liberalism is pledged to offer to those twin dangers of fascism and war."

"THE ARMAMENTS RACE IN EUROPE MUST BE STOPPED NOW. ... I am not in favour of going to war in order to defend the Foreign Investments of British financiers, or the protective tariffs of British industrialists. ... I am a young man. I appeal to the Youth of the Monmouth Division to consider what the world offers to our generation. WAR and POVERTY are the twin dangers which threaten our chances of a decent, happy life in the World. All over Europe youth is being recruited into the ranks of Fascism. Fascism represents the last attempt of those who control economic power to maintain their supremacy. ... I WANT TO SEE A GOVERNMENT IN THIS COUNTRY WHICH WILL SERVE THE INTERESTS OF THE DESERVING MANY, AND NOT THOSE OF THE WEALTHY FEW."

"The revolt against imperialism in the Colonies, therefore, even when it takes on a nationalistic form, is a revolt against British capitalism and colonial peoples in revolt must be looked upon by a Socialist movement in Great Britain as allies in the fight against the common enemy. This theory is fully developed in Stalin's Marxism and the National Question. The methods by which the Soviet Government has dealt with colonial peoples reveal a real basis for co-operation with so-called backward peoples as soon as the power of capitalism within the imperialist nation has been effectively broken."

"We've got to win it. We're in it. Politically it is impossible for anybody to withdraw. The British people would not stand it. We have got to beat Hitler... Chamberlain is not a war man. He's a man of peace. His heart is not in the war. The only hope is to put Churchill in charge and get rid of Chamberlain."

"[T]he England of the Conservative Party...condoned Fascism, consorted with Fascism, connived at imperialist war, abandoned any hope of building a sane and secure international society... Yet there was still another England. This other England detested Fascism from the day of its birth. It fought against the betrayal of Abyssinia. It denounced the policy which led to the massacre of Spain. It struggled in opposition throughout those years to build an international society and it understood that the chief enemy which must be fought was Fascism in whatever guise it might appear and in whatever land it might capture the apparatus of the State. This was the England of the Left, the England of Labour, the England which inherited and adapted to the modern age the European policy which made this country the leader of the nations in the nineteenth century. This England made errors too, but they were errors of a quite different nature from those crimes committed by the men who believed they could reach comfortable terms of settlement with the forces of Fascism which threatened to engulf the continent in a new Dark Ages... It was the resurrection of this other England which saved the world, and the hopes of the European revolution which must follow the defeat of our enemies on the battlefield will depend on which England rules as the fighting subsides."

"American capitalism is arrogant, self-confident, merciless and convinced of its capacity to dictate the destinies of the world."

"Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership?"

"Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology."

"Like it or not, one of the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the Communist economic systems. ... Do you seriously imagine that there is no challenge from the Communist States on this level? And who do you think will win the contest if we stumble on as we are—the Communist States, which are not afraid of full production, or the Western States, which have still never achieved for any considerable period full production and full employment without inflation? Yes, who will win—the Communist States, who are turning out trained technicians at an unexampled pace, or the Western powers, who contentedly spend more on advertising than education?"

"A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the United Nations and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us"

"The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress."

"Spain cut the knot of emotional and intellectual contradictions in which the Left had been tangled ever since Hitler came to power. Suddenly the claims of international law, class solidarity and the desire to win the Soviet Union as an ally fitted into the same strategy. These subconscious releases no doubt played their part in swelling the mood of sympathy for the Spanish Republic which swept so swiftly through the British working class. But no complicated explanations are required. The spectacle itself was stirring enough."

"President de Gaulle is a rebel against American leadership. Some of us who are also rebels have some sympathy with him on that account. ... [O]ne of his long-term aims is to secure a settlement between East and West in Europe. ... The whole situation is altering between East and West. The planet is trembling with alterations and differences in alliances and arrangements. I do not believe in the old configuration of the cold war. ... It is out of date. It is five years, even ten years, out of date. ... [W]e may, whatever may have been his motives and reasons, thank President de Gaulle for doing for us what the British Government had not the courage and energy to do for themselves."

"The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed."

"When I was a small boy, following the affairs of the House of Commons as closely as I could, I asked my father what a Royal Commission was. He said, "It is a broody hen sitting on a china egg"."

"It is a justifiable proposition that every wave of immigration we have had into this country has benefited this country."

"I am bitterly opposed to any form of legislation, particularly legislation introduced by a Labour Government, which involves an element of colour bar. It is an appalling thing to have happened. I want to see us returning as swiftly as possible to a situation where we wipe away this stain on the reputation of the Labour movement."

"Think of it! A second Chamber selected by the Whips. A seraglio of eunuchs."

"What we are doing is to ensure that for the next 20, 30 or 40 years the constitutional balance will be heavily weighted on the side of reaction, the elderly and the Establishment, those who in the main have exhausted the contribution which they can make to the political life of the country and who wish to sustain all the old institutions."

"The British Constitution is an interesting contraption. I hope that is not too Burkeian a sentiment for a Thomas Paine-ite like myself to utter. There are many parts of it which die of apathy or inanition, and at the proper moment such parts have to be lopped off. That is what I should like to do with the House of Lords."

"We in this country, particularly when we are arguing with the people of the United States, have a right to recall the part played by Chatham, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, who opposed a war waged by a great nation which did suffer defeat but survived its defeat because it was prepared to admit that the opposition to the war had justice on its side. This is the lesson to be learned. This is the lesson to be learned from these events. Although opinion in the United States may have reached this conclusion for a variety of reasons, just as opinion throughout the world has reached this conclusion for a variety of reasons, the conclusion is all the stronger and more certain. The conclusion is that the military machine of the United States, all-powerful almost though it may be, cannot win a civil war in Indo-China. It can kill. It can destroy. It can defoliate. It can bomb. It can exterminate. It can spread horror and devastation. But it cannot win a victory."

"I oppose Britain's entry into the rich nations' club, sometimes called the Common Market... In the interests of British democracy, of the health of our economy; in the interests of Wales and our fight against a return of unemployment; in the interests of a wider peace in Europe and links with countries in the Commonwealth, I believe Britain should keep out of this narrowly conceived, Little-European Common Market."

"I sometimes wonder whether hon. Members opposite really have any understanding of what hot industrial fires they are playing with and whether they understand what deep fissures they are driving into our society, at a time when we in this country, of all countries, should be showing how violent tensions can be relieved without violence... When I look across at the benches opposite, not only at the Front Bench but at those behind, it seems to me very often that what they speak for is...a narrow, blinkered, suburban England with no conception whatsoever of industrial Britain."

"[W]e are in for fierce and angry times in this country."

"The value-added tax is a derogation of the sovereignty of this Parliament. The House of Commons and the British people will have less power to protest against the value-added tax than John Hampden had to protest about ship money. If we go into the Community, that will be settled away from this House."

"The end of the era of cheap food is no small incident in British history, even if the Leader of the Liberal Party is not prepared to shed a single tear at the abandoned tomb of Richard Cobden. The instinct of the British people on these matters, particularly when it is sustained in the teeth of persistent opposition and propaganda from the main organisations and newspapers in the country, is not to be despised by those who aspire to govern them. I expect the right hon. Gentleman to take some account of these matters."

"I have respect for the history of this House. There is nothing reprehensible in people recalling that some of the liberties of the people of this country enshrined in this House go back not merely to the conflicts of the seventeenth century, which will certainly apply to many of the matters with which we have to deal—the power over taxation which resides, or is still to reside, in this House—but to the controversies which prevailed in the House of Commons during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. If people say to me that all these are remote, old-fashioned ideas, I reply that they are as up-to-date as the ideas that brought the Labour Party into being."

"[N]o one can dispute the proposition that the Bill is the most deliberate proposal for curtailing the powers of this House that has ever been put before Members of Parliament."

"If the Government say they are going to ram through this measure to reduce the power of the Commons it would be scandalous. It is one of the most shameful frauds ever perpetrated. It would break the control between government and the people and this would inflict serious injury on our democratic institutions. If they do that we will be nearer the day when people will say 'All right, let us settle things by violence'."

"If the Common Market Bill goes through, Parliament will have been deprived of some of the essential instruments for planning the nation's economy."

"How long will it be before the cry goes up: "Let's kill all the judges"?"

"What is even more dangerous is to set the cause of internationalism against the claims of freedom and democracy. That is a very dangerous course. What is necessary is that the two claims should be combined, and it is perfectly possible. It is so dangerous to set the cause of Europe against the cause of Parliament, but that is what the Bill does in every contemptible Clause and every pusillanimous subsection. The Bill says that we have to choose between the ideal of entry into Europe on the terms which have been settled by the Government and sustaining our parliamentary freedoms and democratic rights. That is a very dangerous choice."

"The issue of sovereignty...was always intertwined with the issue of democracy. Many of us held that it was not only unwise but wanton for British MPs to surrender a part of our democracy to institutions which were so grotesquely undemocratic."

"What I do seek to do is contest the suggestion that the present arguments in the Labour Party can be categorized as those between Social Democrats and Marxists. This strikes me as misleading and indeed politically illiterate, since, historically speaking, many Social Democrats have regarded themselves as Marxists. Moreover, the idea implicit in this false distinction that Marxism is somehow inherently undemocratic or anti-democratic is a perversion of thought and language comparable with that perpetrated by the Stalinists. May I add that those engaged in destroying British Parliamentary democracy by the acceptance of the European Communities Act in all its immeasurable undemocratic manifestations are in no position to "lecture" others about how to preserve British democracy?"

"I certainly think that a Labour Government will have to have effective powers to control the outflow of capital."

"Some fool or some trigger happy judicial finger."

"[There are] judges who stretch the law...to suit reactionary attitudes."

"The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal"

"Disraeli was my favourite Tory. He was an adventurer pure and simple, or impure and complex. I'm glad to say Gladstone got the better of him."

"The consequences of withdrawal from the EEC had been exaggerated: he did not accept that Britain's problems could be solved only by our accepting an alien system whose legislative basis – the European Communities Act 1972 – it was to proposed to change. Policies which had stood Britain in good stead, for example on agriculture and the Commonwealth, had already been destroyed by attempts over the last decade to join the EEC. Continued membership would lead to the dismembering of the United Kingdom, and of the authority of Parliament which had already lost much of its power in EEC affairs. If we remained in the Community the seat of power would lie in future in permanent coalition in Brussels."

"In the Labour movement they said they would have no truck with coalition, but if Britain stayed in the EEC then for decades to come they would be enmeshed in various forms of coalition government than ever before. That was the most important issue of all. If in Britain the people did not like a government they could vote it out of office, but they had no similar recourse in the case of the institutions of the EEC, which had supreme powers and which were undemocratic."

"They had been told that those political disabilities, the delegations from our sovereignty and the dismemberment of Britain's parliamentary institutions, must be accepted because of economic circumstances; that there was no choice. But [I] did not believe that. I hope the message which will go out from this conference to our movement up and down the country is, 'Do not let this great Labour movement be afraid of those who tell us that we cannot run our own affairs, that we have not the ingenuity to mobilize our resources and overcome our economic problems'. Of course we have, and we can save our democratic freedom at the same time."

"Parliament (by which I mean, of course, the elected House of Commons stripped of all irresponsible encumbrances) is the institution which has played the central, liberating role in our history ever since Cromwellian or even Elizabethan times; no comparable institution certainly has shaped so continuously the life and society of any Western European state. It is the authority of our distinctive Parliament which is one of the stakes in the choice now before the people."

"The truth is that the dismemberment of the British Parliament, the calculated acquiescence in the decline in its authority deriving from entry into the EEC, has started. It will continue apace, until the British people call a halt... I believe it will be done sometime in some way when they discover how far-reaching and all-embracing is the anti-democratic counter-revolution involved in EEC membership."

"Whatever the outcome on June 5, historians looking back, and starting soon I believe, will be amazed that the British people were urged at such a time to tamper irreparably with their most precious institution; to see it circumscribed and contorted and elbowed off the centre of the stage... [W]e are assured that we shall be stronger...if we turn for salvation to institutions not our own, never devised to suit us, and not at all inspired from the sources which have so frequently given this country its renewal of democratic vigour. It is as if in 1940 we had set fire to the place, as Hitler did with his Reichstag. Instead, let it not be forgotten that what Parliament did in 1940 was effectively to throw out one government and put in another. Once we are snugly and irremovably in the Market, that effective power will have been cast away."

"I am asking this movement to exert itself as it has never done before, to show the qualities which we have, the socialist imagination that exists in our movement, the readiness to reforge the alliance, stronger than ever, between the government and the trade unions, and above all to show the supreme quality in politics, the red flame of socialist courage."

"The crisis afflicting this country, along with other countries of the Western world, is a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of the dominant economic system that prevails in all those countries."

"I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering...I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside...what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society."

"It's impossible to write the history of freedom in this country without telling how trade unions have contributed to it."

"People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement"

"[The constituency will be certain to return a socialist candidate] and this will help gain a socialist majority in the Commons and help Britain on the way to becoming a socialist republic."

"It does so happen to be the case that if the freedom of the people of this country—and especially the rights of trade unionists—if those precious things in the past had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country."

"There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate"

"The history of British Socialism cannot be written without constant reference to the Celts, and perhaps I may say in passing that this was one reason why I was so eager to see a Devolution Act passed through the House of Commons, to help keep the Celts within the United Kingdom. The blood of our Labour Movement cannot tingle properly without them, devolution or no devolution."

"Few words in our language have been more sadly debased than the name 'Radical'. Once it could strike terror into the ranks of wealth and privilege. Now it has been purloined even by the palest and pinkest critics of current orthodoxy. A Radical nowadays may merely be one who can be distinguished by his respectability from a Socialist."

"You just want the Tories in, and then we will be in the Common Market for life. You, with your halo of martyrdom. I've been anti-Market longer than you."

"It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a semi-house-trained polecat."

"The Leader of the Liberal Party—and I say this with the utmost affection—has passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever."

"What will once again be the choice at the next election? It will not be so dissimilar from the choice that the country had to make in 1945, or even in 1940 when the Labour Party had to come to the rescue of the country... It was on a motion of the Labour Party that the House of Commons threw out the Chamberlain Government in 1940. It was thanks to the Labour Party that Churchill had the chance to serve the country in the war years. Two-thirds of the Conservative Party at that time voted for the same reactionary policies as they will vote for tonight. It is sometimes in the most difficult and painful moments of our history that the country has turned to the Labour Party for salvation, and it has never turned in vain. We saved the country in 1940, and we did it again in 1945. We set out to rescue the country—or what was left of it—in 1974. Here again in 1979 we shall do the same."

"What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for them"

"If only my hon. Friend would conduct the novel experiment of listening with his ears instead of his voice, a whole new world would open to him."

"Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now, from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain."

"He was without any rival whatever, the first comic genius who ever installed himself in Downing Street"

"Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power"

"In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind"

"Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law"

"I first joined the Labour party in Liverpool because of what I saw of the poverty, the unemployment, and the endless infamies committed on the inhabitants of the back-streets of that city. I am horrified that the threat of unemployment and economic misery is now being deployed against the same kind of people once again."

"Since the matter has been raised, may I say that the individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party, and, so far as I am concerned, never will be endorsed? [Interruption.] May I add that, as the Labour Party has played the leading part in the establishment and sustenance of parliamentary democracy, we do not need any instructions on the matter from skin-deep democrats on the Conservative Benches or defectors on this side?"

"She has no imagination and that means no compassion"

"The rights and the circumstances of the people in the Falkland Islands must be uppermost in our minds. There is no question in the Falkland Islands of any colonial dependence or anything of the sort. It is a question of people who wish to be associated with this country and who have built their whole lives on the basis of association with this country. We have a moral duty, a political duty and every other kind of duty to ensure that that is sustained. The people of the Falkland Islands have the absolute right to look to us at this moment of their desperate plight, just as they have looked to us over the past 150 years. They are faced with an act of naked, unqualified aggression, carried out in the most shameful and disreputable circumstances. Any guarantee from this invading force is utterly worthless—as worthless as any of the guarantees that are given by this same Argentine junta to its own people."

"We are paramountly concerned, like, I am sure, the bulk of the House—I am sure that the country is also concerned—about what we can do to protect those who rightly and naturally look to us for protection. So far, they have been betrayed. The responsibility for the betrayal rests with the Government. The Government must now prove by deeds—they will never be able to do it by words—that they are not responsible for the betrayal and cannot be faced with that charge. That is the charge, I believe, that lies against them. Even though the position and the circumstances of the people who live in the Falkland Islands are uppermost in our minds—it would be outrageous if that were not the case—there is the longer-term interest to ensure that foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in our world. If it does, there will be a danger not merely to the Falkland Islands, but to people all over this dangerous planet."

"I know a fascist when I see one."

"“Think of it, a free Italy: it is the poetry of politics”, wrote Byron at a dark moment in the history of the Italian Risorgimento. Think of it, a free, democratic Socialist Spain – there is surely still some poetry in that kind of politics today, even if it is beyond the imagination of such stunted, pusillanimous souls as Bernard Levin."

"We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do."

"We had not the armour, the strength, the quickness in manoeuvre, yes, the leadership"

"One of the worst aspects of this incursion is the conspiratorial way in which the leaders of the Militant Tendency have sought to operate without a membership and thereby to circumvent the rules of the [Labour] party, with or without any proscribed list. It was for this reason that, on my initiative, we took steps, with the later full backing of the party conference, to exclude the Militant leadership from our ranks. ... The task of freeing the party from Militant and kindred pestilences is not an easy one. But it has to be done, and it has to be done by methods which are fair. I strongly support all the steps which Neil Kinnock has taken to this end."

"It is all the more necessary that we should prevent an extension of the powers of the European Assembly, however it may be elected. I have been opposed to the extension of those powers, and I remain so. ... We must preserve every precious part of the power that we retain in the House."

"The right hon. Member for Heseltine—[Laughter.]—well, that is what he is; he sticks to that principle more than he does to Henley."

"It's quite a change to have a prime minister who hasn't got any political ideas at all."

"No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist."

"I think the House of Lords ought to be abolished and I don't think the best way for me to abolish it is to go there myself"

"Foot has not built a wall of words so much as a battering ram. It is a lexicon of positive politics; an overtly partisan rhetoric that has been forged from an intimate acquaintance with three centuries of radical writing. ... It is based on a belief of our shared humanity across races, peoples and to a lesser extent classes. At the heart of Foot's political credo is the articulation of a burning desire for equality of outcome. But perhaps even more pressing is the unrelenting demand for a peace that means more than simply an absence of war: a peace based on justice and international accountability. ... Much of the writing in this collection is as much about literature for its own sake as about politics; as much about love as Labour; as much about passion as power. Indeed, Foot the great humanist has a credo based on a trinity: politics, poetry and passion."

"Michael Foot was a genuine British radical - one who possessed a powerful sense of community, a pride in our progressive past and faith in our country's potential for a radical future."

"I was caught on the hop in one of my interviews last week with the question: “Of all the people you have served with, who would you like to serve with again?” ... My reply was instinctive. Believe it or not, I said “Michael Foot”."

"[After Argentina's invasion of the Falklands] Michael Foot – popularly seen as a sentimental old pacifist – was demanding a military response to wipe away the stain of national humiliation... In fact Foot was not a pacifist at all. As an ardent young journalist he had been one of the authors of Guilty Men, the famous indictment of the Chamberlain Government's unreadiness for war in 1939, and he still harked back to 1940 as emotionally as any Churchillian. In his very different way he expressed the national mood of outraged patriotism as authentically as Mrs Thatcher herself."

"We remember Michael and celebrate his life not just as the life of an intelligent and principled politician but as a great British Humanist. A good life for all is a humanist aspiration, and Michael was one humanist who worked hard to make that a reality for every man and woman. His steadfast dedication to humanist and progressive ideals of freedom, peace, social justice was pursued in a life of both thought and action – another humanist ideal."

"Arriving for a recent away game at Selhurst Park, a steward asked the ninetysomething Foot whether he was carrying an offensive weapon, whereupon he produced a battered copy of Milton's selected poems, explaining that Milton's poetry represented one of the most potent weapons in English history."

"Farewell Michael Foot: Great orator, editor and thinker - the most decent leader Labour ever had."

"Michael Foot has been a great parliamentarian – perhaps the best I witnessed during my 33 years in the House of Commons. He had a particular talent for the spontaneous epigram. Jim Callaghan, he said, “does everything on purpose”. He loved the business of Parliament and believed in the Commons as a bastion of democracy. He would have been most at home in the Victorian Westminster when literature and learning were an essential requirement of success."

"Michael and I went together to Buckingham Palace in the year of the Prince of Wales's engagement to Princess Diana. ... As we stood awkwardly in line...the Queen said that ‘Carlos’ (by which she meant the king of Spain) was being difficult about the honeymoon yacht calling in Gibraltar. “I told him,” the Queen said, “it's my son, my ship and my dockyard.” There was a long pause before Michael responded: “The first Elizabeth could not have put it better.” On the way back to the Commons I expressed my surprise that a man whom I supposed to be a republican should have said such a thing. I expected him to plead good manners. Instead he told me – more by way of reproof than explanation – “She was standing up for England.” Michael Foot is a patriot."

"The fact is that if Michael had gone well before the [1983] election, we might have won. We had no chance whatever so long as he was Leader."

"Michael Foot, who has died aged 96, was a supreme parliamentary democrat who used his great gifts as an inspiring speaker and writer to urge peace, security, prosperity and opportunity for humanity and punishment for bigots and bullies of every kind. His bravery and generosity were unsurpassed. He used both to ensure that the Labour party survived as a political force when self-indulgent factionalism could have doomed it to irrelevance."

"Foot's ultimate task, as orator, pamphleteer, and communicator extraordinary, has been to educate, and to relate the British variant of socialism to a long, but still relevant, history of British libertarian protest—in other words, to the real world. In his respect for parliament, for the rule of law (subject to some very valid doubts about the judgement of judges), for representative democracy, for the pluralism and tolerance embedded in the culture of his people, he has been in the best sense a force for stability. … He has re-articulated and vindicated a long, creative legacy of protest which in the 1970s seemed close to being corrupted or destroyed."

"I revealed how, when in Government, Michael Foot never once sat with the four senior Ministers who made the decisions on nuclear policy. It reflected my very strong view that a man who had deliberately avoided sharing responsibility before was not fit to take the sole responsibility now. Under Michael Foot, Labour would not have been fit to govern."

"The great talents and the outstanding oratory which have made the hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Michael Foot) easily the first, facile princeps, among the parliamentarians of this day have been displayed for week after week and month after month in the opposition to the [European Communities] Bill. When the history of this episode comes to be written his part in it will be seen to have been at a level with those of the great figures of parliamentary history."

"Michael Foot is a master of English. Both in parliamentary debate and in the written word his diction has the qualities of purity and terseness which the Augustans admired and sought. Indeed, it is of the age of Dryden and Pope, Addison and Swift, where he personally feels most at home, that he is the foremost modern heir and representative. His writing, like his speaking, is almost invariably perspicuous and graceful, offering no avoidable impediment to the reader, and concealing its imaginative quality with the artist's art. … Foot's Bevan will be among the outstanding biographies of the twentieth century."

"He was without question the master, spell-binding orator in the House of Commons in my day. When his name came up on the ticker-tape, people would come to hear him. He had this capacity for immense passion laced with humour."

"Michael Foot is a highly principled and cultivated man, invariably courteous in our dealings. If I did not think it would offend him, I would say he was a gentleman. In debate and on the platform he has a kind of genius."

"I was very sorry to hear the news. He was a great parliamentarian and a man of high principles."

"If one asks who is the Backbencher who makes the greatest contribution to the life of Parliament, there can at present be only one conceivable answer: Mr. Michael Foot. He is a wonderful man to have in politics. He belongs to the native British tradition of radicalism, the tradition of the Parliament men in the 17th century; of Fox at the end of the 18th; and of the radicalism that moved from the Liberal Party into the Labour Party at the beginning of this century... Mr. Foot has great powers as a Parliamentary orator; he is certainly the best writer and one of the two or three best speakers in the place. He is a man nearly without enemies as it would be decent to be and has a sweetness of temper which is the preservative of the health of any Assembly. He is a good, talkative, likeable and honest man."

"Michael Foot was, and is, adored in the Labour movement, a movement he himself idealised. Neither the trades unions nor the many left-wing groups that found shelter within that big tent were as high-minded as Michael thought. They saw in Michael's kindly image of them what they would have liked to be, and they loved him for it. His own commitment to democratic socialism took the form of a passionate belief in social justice coupled with an equal passion for Parliament. Like the great nineteenth-century reformers, he linked the two, holding that the former could only be achieved through the latter. Michael was a radical, a reformer, an inspirer, but lacked the element of brutality political leadership requires. His judgements on national issues were too much affected by partisan proclivities. But he and I shared similar ideals. We trusted one another as people, even if we didn't trust one another's judgements. We were both optimists."

"I have no intention of slurring over the differences we have with socialism, nor concealing my belief that we are the National Party of Great Britain, representing not narrow class interest, nor the bigotry of the left wing intellectuals, but all those who support the British tradition of democracy, of personal freedom, of personal responsibility for one's own affairs and those of one's family, with the least possible interference from the State."

"If we give in to the terrorists we will have more skyjacking, and not merely from the Arabs...Whatever happenes to these hostages—and I could easily have been one of them—if we give in even more people will be taken hostage and more lives will be laid at risk."

"Most people know it [this election] is being fought because a tiny minority of communists and extreme leftists are trying to overthrow a legally elected Government and indeed Parliament itself by the use of the strike weapon...'Can the election solve the strike?' Yes. Agree or disagree with the result, the miners accept the verdict of their own national ballot. I believe they will accept the result of this national ballot too."

"Inside Britain there is a parallel threat from the Marxist collectivist totalitarians too. Small in number, those anti-democratic forces have gained great power through the trades union movement. Just to state that fact is to be accused of 'union-bashing'—often by people who know it to be true. Such people are to be found in the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties. Their politics may be different but such people share the morality of Laval and Pétain...they are willing not only to tolerate evil, but to excuse it...and to profit by so doing...Both Jim Prior and Keith Joseph know that George Ward and Grunwick are not perfect, nor was Czechoslovakia perfect in 1938. But if Ward and Grunwick are destroyed by the red fascists, then, as in 1938, we will have to ask, whose turn is it next? Yes, it is like 1938. We can all see the evil, but the doctrine of appeasement is still to be heard."

"I'm a hawk—but no kamikaze. And Jim's a dove—but he's not chicken."

"I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot; he got on his bike and looked for work and he kept looking 'til he found it."

"We need to create an enterprise culture, a society where successful entrepreneurs are respected and admired, not treated with suspicion and disdain. And in which we see less envy of other peoples' achievements and mistrust of commerce, and a greater readiness to get out there and join in the process."

"No one likes to see redundancies at home at the same time as he sees a surge of imports from abroad. The temptation to succumb to political pressure, to make a special case or to give respite is often overwhelming. But to do so, except in response to clearly unfair trading practices, is to court disaster. The temporary measure frequently becomes the permanent fixture and the special case, a precedent for more. And by shielding industry from fair competition in the short-term, long term decline is guaranteed."

"The path away from economic freedom is, as Hayek long ago demonstrated, the road to serfdom. The road may be a long one: the pace may be swift or slow: but the destination cannot be changed. State ownership, state monopolies, state regulation and state planning, through the centralisation of economic power, inevitably lead to economic failure. They inevitably increase both the temptation and the scope for abuses of political power until freedom itself is threatened. The planned economies, the controlled societies which socialism requires, pervert what are truly economic decisions for the market into political decisions for the politician or the bureaucrat. The fruits of centralised economics are corruption, poverty and servility—and in the socialist society the only medicine which may be prescribed is heavier doses of the same socialist poison."

"I had long believed that the Heath aberration of authoritarian centralist corporatism apart, most of the values, ethos and policies of Conservatism were strongly supported by working-class voters. Those voters—especially the socio-economic groups C1 and C2—I saw as natural Conservatives who nevertheless saw themselves for tribal reasons as Labour voters. However much we tried to reach them by argument, we always failed because they were unable to identify themselves with the representatives of the Tory Party they saw. I was determined to be a Conservative who spoke their language, not just what is often described as my flat North-London accent—which was after all my mother tongue—but their practical realism, lack of humbug and strong attachment to many traditional standards and values."

"I played my part in turning the sick country of Europe into one of the most successful and respected in the world. After ten years of Mrs. Thatcher's premiership the talk of the 'English disease' has been replaced by wonder at the 'Thatcher miracle'. Britain the laggard has become Britain the leader and our policies have become the standard against which others are measured."

"The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties."

"A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It is an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are? I think we have got real problems in that regard."

"The mark of a single currency is not only that all other currencies must be extinguished but that the capacity of other institutions to issue currencies must also be extinguished...In the case of the United Kingdom, that would involve Parliament binding its successors in a way that it has hitherto regarded as unconstitutional."

"I suspect that the only thing that will take Articles Two and Three out of the Irish Constitution is when the bombs begin to blow in Dublin in the way that they have been in Belfast and in London."

"[The poll tax] was a classic case of a good idea being entrusted to Chris Patten and becoming a terrible failure."

"Go away and have another heart attack!"

"I’m not sure. He ought to. Things would work better."

"A typical piece of BBC anti-Tory propaganda."

"He (John Major) has the mulishness of a weak man with stupidity."

"I don't think he's a liar, just a fantasist. He says whatever he likes, and then he believes it."

"The Muslim religion is so unreformed since it was created that nowhere in the Muslim world has there been any real advance in science, or art or literature, or technology in the last 500 years...we've leapt ahead in all material terms, but the Muslim world would say we have fallen down in all spiritual and moral terms. We have to accept our share of the blame and they have to accept theirs."

"My Lords, would it not be a good idea if the Chairman of Committees and all Members resisted the mad idea of this House being dragged into this century? It is a very disagreeable century. Would it not be a better idea to drag us back perhaps into the 19th century, which in many ways was a very much better one for this country?"

"They want to know if Mr Cameron has bought into the Blairite, ever-expanding, ever more costly, interfering nanny state, or whether he has proposals to strengthen family life, restore discipline in schools, combat crime, deal with the now almost universally recognised dangers of multiculturalism and the unlimited immigration of unassimilable minorities, raise standards in schools and the NHS, and bring back home powers lost to Brussels."

"I haven't got a racist bone in my little finger."

"If they (Muslim women) wish to cover their faces and isolate themselves from the rest of the community and so thoroughly reject our culture then I cannot imagine why they want to be here at all. Perhaps they should just push off back to their own countries."

"The BBC is another part of the destruction of Great Britain."

"It is really time for him to try to let the nicer side of his nature emerge. It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a semi-house-trained polecat."

"Norman is one of the bravest men I have ever met. He will never deviate on a point of principle—and those principles are ones which even the least articulate Tory knows he shares."

"The trend of employment is towards a high level, and a recurrence of chronic mass unemployment is most unlikely. The Keynesian techniques are now well understood, and there is no reason to fear a repetition of the New Deal experience of a government with the will to spend its way out of a recession, but frustrated in doing so by faulty knowledge. The political pressure for full employment is stronger than ever before; the experience of the inter-war years bit so deeply into the political psychology of the nation that full employment, if threatened, would always constitute the dominant issue at any election, and no right-wing party could now survive a year in office if it permitted the figures of unemployment which were previously quite normal."

"I am...wholeheartedly a Galbraith man."

"If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland."

"To say that we must attend meticulously to the environmental case does not mean that we must go to the other extreme and wholly neglect the economic case. Here we must beware of some of our friends. For parts of the conservationist lobby would do precisely this. Their approach is hostile to growth in principle and indifferent to the needs of ordinary people. It has a manifest class bias, and reflects a set of middle and upper class value judgements. Its champions are often kindly and dedicated people. But they are affluent and fundamentally, though of course not consciously, they want to kick the ladder down behind them. They are highly selective in their concern, being militant mainly about threats to rural peace and wildlife and well loved beauty spots: they are little concerned with the far more desperate problem of the urban environment in which 80 per cent of our fellow citizens live ... As I wrote many years ago, those enjoying an above average standard of living should be chary of admonishing those less fortunate on the perils of material riches. Since we have many less fortunate citizens, we cannot accept a view of the environment which is essentially elitist, protectionist and anti-growth. We must make our own value judgement based on socialist objectives: and that judgement must...be that growth is vital, and that its benefits far outweigh its costs."

"The great service of Keynes to recent history is that we now know, in the way that governments did not know in the 1930s, how full employment can be maintained."

"Nationalisation ... does not in itself engender greater equality, more jobs in the regions, higher investment or industrial democracy. The public knows this perfectly well, and so do the workers who have suffered from pit closures, steel redundancies and the run-down of the railways. It is idiotic to try to bamboozle them."

"Much more should have been achieved by a Labour Government in office and Labour pressure in opposition. Against the dogged resistance to change, we should have pitted a stronger will to change. I conclude that a move to the Left is needed."

"As a democratic Socialist profoundly committed to the rule of law, I could not condone, let alone encourage, defiance of the law."

"For the next few years times will not be normal. Perhaps people have used the words 'economic crisis' too often in the past. They have shouted 'wolf, wolf' when the animal was more akin to a rather disagreeable Yorkshire terrier. But not now. The crisis that faces us is infinitely more serious than any of the crises we have faced over the past 20 years...With its usual spirit of patriotism and its tradition of service to the community's needs, it is coming to realize that, for the time being at least, the party is over...We are not calling for a headlong retreat. But we are calling for a standstill."

"[T]o withdraw now would create in this country a mood of poor man's inchoate chauvinism, reviving old dreams of Empire and special relationships that have had such disastrous effects on British policy-making since 1945."

"I do not believe there is a long-term future for the privately rented sector in its present form."

"Unless the Arab states give Israel formal recognition, within secure, recognised and mutually agreed boundaries, as a permanent feature of the geography and politics of the Middle East. But if Israel is to obtain this recognition, she must, in a settlement, put an end to the territorial occupation which she has maintained since the war of 1967; the nine members of the European Community have declared that this is an essential element in a settlement. On behalf of the British Government I underline that need today."

"We conceive the function of Tribune to be the expression in popular form, and to as large a public as possible, of the views of the Left and Marxist wing of social democracy in this country. Its policy must be that of those who believe that the present leadership of the Labour Party is not sufficiently Socialist."

"We believe that the developing crisis in the capitalist system, by which we mean both economic stagnation, and the social and political conflicts to which it gives rise, makes it possible to think in terms of developing a sizeable and serious revolutionary socialist party in a way that was not possible 20 or even 10 years ago."

"I am sure that a definite limit exists to the degree of equality which is desirable. We do not want complete equality of incomes, since extra responsibility and exceptional talent require and deserve a differential reward. We are not hostile, as our opponents sometimes foolishly suggest, to 'detached residences in Bournemouth where some elderly woman has obviously more than a thousand a year'. I do not myself want to see all private education disappear; nor the Prime Minister denied an official car, as in one Scandinavian country; nor the Queen riding a bicycle; nor the House of Lords instantly abolished; nor the manufacture of Rolls-Royces banned; nor the Brigade of Guards, nor Oxford and Cambridge, nor Boodle's nor (more doubtfully) the Royal Yacht Squadron, nor even, on a rather lower level, the Milroy Room, lose their present distinctive character; nor anything so dull and colourless as this."

"We still retain in Britain a deeper sense of class, a more obvious social stratification, and stronger class resentments, than any of the Scandinavian, Australasian, or North American countries."

"Militant leftism in politics appears to have its roots in broadly analogous sentiments. Every labour politician has observed that the most indignant members of his local Party are not usually the poorest, or the slum-dwellers, or those with most to gain from further economic change, but the younger, more self-conscious element, earning good incomes and living comfortably in neat new council houses: skilled engineering workers, electrical workers, draughtsmen, technicians, and the lower clerical grades. (Similarly the most militant local parties are not in the old industrial areas, but either in the newer high-wage engineering areas or in middle-class towns; Coventry or Margate are the characteristic strongholds.) Now it is people such as these who naturally resent the fact that despite their high economic status, often so much higher than their parents’, and their undoubted skill at work, they have no right to participate in the decisions of their firm, no influence over policy, and far fewer non-pecuniary privileges than the managerial grades; and outside their work they are conscious of a conspicuous educational handicap, of a style of life which is still looked down on by middle-class people often earning little if any more, of differences in accent, and generally of an inferior class position.”"

"Objectively, class differences in accent, dress, manners, and general style of life are very much smaller; and one cannot, strolling about the street or travelling on a train, instantly identify a person’s social background as one can in England. Subjectively, social relations are more natural and egalitarian, and less marked by deference, submissiveness, or snobbery, as one quickly discovers from the cab-driver, the barman, the air-hostess and the drug-store assistant."

"(The) pattern of consumption is markedly more equal than in Britain. ‘Prestige-goods’ are widely distributed, and there is less conspicuous contrast between the standard of living of different income-groups. To take the most obvious example, almost every family owns a car; and this is significant not only because a car is the most conspicuous of all consumption goods, but also because universal car-ownership leads to the universal consumption of other conspicuous or semi-luxury goods – holidays, hotels, middle-class habits of shopping, etc. But the lack of external class-distinctions can be observed in many other spheres: e.g. clothes, eating-habits, drug-stores, the ownership of consumer durables, and so on."

"A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the ‘luxuries’ which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life."

"Your proposals are in fact far more revolutionary in their effects than an electoral promise to nationalise ICI and most of engineering. If I was perverse, I would say that they are diabolically and cunningly left-wing and Nye [Bevan] should have been clever enough to think them up. But you put them forward as ways of ensuring a calm evolution towards higher living standards and more personal freedom."

"Crosland died in February 1977, not living to see the disproof of all his doom-laden economic prophecies. He had never appreciated that an economy increasingly open to the world was inconsistent with the comfortable message of The Future of Socialism. The ideas that had provided the background to The Future of Socialism, that a high rate of growth could be relied on and that the problem of unemployment had been solved, were already at a discount. Contrary to The Future of Socialism, the economic problem had not been solved. The Keynesian techniques in which Crosland had deposited so much confidence had failed. It had proved impossible to reconcile full employment with stable prices."

"He had a mind of high perspective, yet cared little in a personal, as opposed to an aesthetic sense, about the past. He had practically no sense of nostalgia. He believed in applying highly rational standards to decision-making (he always thought me hopelessly intuitive) but he was full of strong emotions."

"Our friendship persisted on an intense but fluctuating basis for nearly four decades. Not only was his character engaging, his personality was dazzling and his intellect was of very high quality. He had maddening streaks of perversity, was in my view not at his best as a minister, but was the most exciting friend of my life."

"Each term we had a lively debate with the other political clubs at the Oxford Union, particularly the Labour Club, which at the time was very left wing and included some famous names like Anthony Crosland – who even in those days could condescend to a Duchess – and Tony Benn."

"The upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent. The struggle for socialism in Europe...has been hard, cruel, merciless and bloody. The penalty for participation in the liberation movement has been death for oneself, if caught, and, if not caught oneself, the burning of one's home and the death by torture of one's family. ... Remember that one of the prices paid for our survival during the war has been the death by bombardment of countless thousands of innocent European men and women."

"Britain's economic problem is fundamentally far greater than France's since France is much less dependent on foreign trade and imported raw materials. Moreover Britain has economic relations with her Commonwealth whose importance outweighs the potential benefits of economic co-operation with Europe. For example, by 1952 over half Britain's foreign trade will be with the Commonwealth as against 22 per cent with Europe. Also Britain's imports from the Commonwealth are mainly indispensable raw materials, whereas her imports from Europe are less essential."

"By his conduct of the campaign against the Labour Government Aneurin Bevan has destroyed a good chance of succeeding the Party's leadership. Whereas Bevan's proletarian virility has always hypnotised many middle-class intellectuals, the trade unionists tend to see in him the familiar figure of the self-seeking agitator... Bevanism is essentially a flight from reality into dogma. But its opponents have had little to offer as a positive alternative. The Great Debate in British Socialism has so far consisted in one side talking nonsense and the other side keeping mum. The Labour Party may hope to carry the Welfare State and planning further than the Tories, but for a long time physical and psychological factors will fix rigid limits. Further 'soaking the rich' will no longer benefit the poor to any noticeable extent. Further nationalisation no longer attracts more than a tiny fringe of the Labour Party itself; it positively repels the electorate as a whole. Even among Labour economists there is a growing revolt against physical controls in favour of the price mechanism. A policy based on class war cannot have a wide appeal when the difference between classes is so small as Labour made it."

"Nye [Bevan] thinks that the best way to win friends and influence people is to kick them in the teeth... But there is in the country and in the Party a great deal of real anti-Americanism and in my view it is a disgrace to Socialism and a menace to peace. A lot of it is just jingoism with an inferiority complex, trying to make foreigners a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in this country. We are Socialists; we are supposed to believe...in the brotherhood of man, and we cannot say all men are brothers except Americans... I ask you to throw away the stale mythology of these political Peter Pans... We cannot solve the problems of foreign policy on a diet of rhetorical candy-floss."

"'The owl of Minerva only flies abroad when the shades of night are gathering.' Speaking for Conservatism, Hegel was right. And nothing proves it better than the post-war crop of Tory intellectuals, sprouting like mushrooms in the damp cellars of Abbey House. Not until the stimuli which originally conditioned Conservative reflexes have finally disappeared can the intellectual emerge to provide a rationale for Conservative behaviour. So Conservative theory must always base itself on some form of historical restorationism. The moderate seeks the world of Joseph Chamberlain—or if he is daring, of Disraeli. The really advanced radical looks still further back, to Prince Rupert, or the Middle Ages, particularly if he is a Catholic."

"Hugh Gaitskell was absolutely right when he said yesterday that what gets cheers at this conference does not necessarily get votes at elections. If it did we would have won Devonport [the seat which Michael Foot had just lost]. There are far too many people who...want to luxuriate complacency in moral righteousness in Opposition. But who is going to pay the price for their complacency? You can take the view that it is better to give up half a loaf if you cannot get the whole loaf, but the point is that it is not we who are giving up the half loaf. In Britain it is the unemployed and old age pensioners, and outside Britain there are millions of people in Asia and Africa who desperately need a Labour Government in this country to help them. If you take the view that it is all right to stay in Opposition so long as your Socialist heart is pure, you will be 'all right, Jack'. You will have your TV set, your motor car and your summer holidays on the Continent and still keep your Socialist soul intact. The people who pay the price for your sense of moral satisfaction are the Africans, millions of them, being slowly forced into racial slavery; the Indians and the Indonesians dying of starvation. We are not just a debating society. We are not just a Socialist Sunday School. We are a great movement that wants to help real people living on this earth at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get power unless we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country."

"I think the Services can be rightly very upset at the continuous series of defence reviews which the Government has been forced by economic circumstances—and maybe economic mistakes too—to carry out..."

"I warn my hon. Friends...that once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders."

"We did not want middle class Robespierres."

"Do we really want to nationalise Marks and Spencers to make it as efficient as the Co-Op?"

"We are all agreed on a massive extension of public ownership...We are all agreed on establishing comprehensive planning control over the 100 or so largest companies in Britain. We are all agreed on the need for a national enterprise board to organise and extend public ownership in the profitable manufacturing industries."

"We shall increase income tax on the better off so that we can help the hundreds of thousands of families now tangled helplessly in the poverty trap by raising the tax threshold and introducing reduced rates of tax for those at the bottom of the ladder. I warn you, there are going to be howls of anguish from the rich. But before you cheer too loudly let me warn you that a lot of you will pay extra taxes too."

"Squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak"

"It has never been my nature, I regret to admit to the House, to turn the other cheek."

"It is far better that more people should be in work, even if that means accepting lower wages on average, than that those lucky enough to keep their jobs should scoop the pool while millions are living on the dole. That is what the social contract is all about."

"We are spending 6 per cent more than we are earning... You can also bankrupt a nation by excessive wage demands... That is why I said that it is better to have a lower standard of life for all workers than for some of them to be unemployed."

"The fact is that she [Margaret Thatcher] emerged in this debate as La Pasionaria of privilege."

"The borrowing requirement was 'terrifying'. He just had to cut back public expenditure. The Social Contract wasn't working. Inflation was getting out of control."

"I fully understand why I have been urged by so many friends both inside and outside the House to treat unemployment as the central problem and to stimulate a further growth in home consumption, public or private, so as to start getting the rate of unemployment down as fast as possible. I do not believe it would be wise to follow this advice today. As I have said, I did last July and November adopt reflationary measures whose full effect would only be felt this year. I cannot afford to increase demand further today when 5p in every £ we spend at home has been provided by our creditors abroad and inflation is running at its current rate. I do not believe anyone in Britain would thank me for producing an even larger deficit on our balance of payments and injecting a further massive dose of inflation through price and wage increases. Moreover a Rake's Progress of this nature could not last for long. The patience of our creditors would soon be exhausted. We would then face the appalling prospect of going down in a matter of weeks to the levels of public services and personal living standards which we could finance entirely from what we earned. I do not believe that our political or social system could stand that strain."

"The Budget I have presented today is a hard one for all of us in Britain. It is dictated by the harsh reality of the world we live in. A severe Budget is a necessary element in any strategy for improving the overall performance of our economy, which has been lagging increasingly behind most industrial economies for more than a single generation. Added to the need for measures to produce the essential structural changes in the balance of our economy are the burdens we carry with other countries because the explosion of world prices has cut our real income by 4 per cent. But in this situation the key to our immediate success is the rate of inflation inside Britain, and it is our failure here which is responsible for the special severity of this Budget. So long as pay and prices increase at their present rates, no Chancellor of the Exchequer who puts his country first would act otherwise than I have done this afternoon."

"No country would suffer more than Britain from an international trade war, since we depend more on world trade than any of our competitors. That is why we cannot accept the proposal made in some quarters that we should seek to solve our problems through imposing import controls for a long period over a whole range of manufactured consumer goods."

"He must be out of his tiny Chinese mind."

"By the end of next year, we really shall be on our way to that so-called economic miracle we need."

"If we can keep our heads—and our nerve—the long-awaited economic miracle is in our grasp. Britain can achieve in the Seventies what Germany and France achieved in the Fifties and Sixties."

"The alternative to getting help from the IMF would be economic policies so savage I think they would produce riots in the streets, an immediate fall in living standards and unemployment of three million."

"I am going to negotiate with the IMF on the basis of our existing policies, not changes in policies, and I need your support to do it. (Applause) But when I say "existing policies", I mean things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure (shouts from the floor) on which the Government has already decided. It means sticking to a pay policy which enables us, as the TUC resolved a week or two ago, to continue the attack on inflation. (Shout of, "Resign".)"

"No Government can produce an economic miracle. An economic miracle depends on people on the shop floor, in the board room, in the sales office, working a bit harder and more efficiently than they have worked in the past."

"Keynesianism has failed."

"The central problem of our economy for more than a generation has been that, although our productivity has grown more slowly than that of our competitors, we have seen annual wage increases of the same order as theirs. So our inflation has risen faster than in other countries and we have been able to maintain price competitiveness and full employment only by a series of devaluations which have further added to inflation and increased the pressure for excessive wage increases. In the era of North Sea oil it will be more difficult to devalue our currency to maintain price competitiveness. So unless we can keep wage increases close to the level of productivity increase we shall face rising unemployment and a further erosion of our industrial base."

"I start with the measures which the Government announced last Thursday, and which are the immediate occasion of today's debate, and to which the right hon. Gentleman finally came round - a trifle nervously, I thought - after ploughing through that tedious and tendentious farrago of moth-eaten cuttings presented to him by the Conservative Research Department. I must say that part of his speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep."

"Austria came to terms with its political and economic disadvantages after the war, jettisoned those parts of its Marxist ideological inheritance which were obviously no longer relevant, and turned a country which in the inter-war years had been suffering from an ex-imperial hangover into a model welfare state, without sacrificing any of its cultural attractions in the process. [I am offering no New Jerusalem], simply a country with stable prices, jobs for those who want them and help for those who need it."

"Our party can't be united unless it remains what it always has been till now: a broad coalition of men and women from all sections of our society, supporting many different approaches to democratic socialism, who tolerate their disagreements with one another, and defend the right of minorities to fight for changes in the policies they disagree with."

"I don't believe the party gains when a member of the last two Labour governments stumps round the country blackguarding the record of the governments as a betrayal of the British working class, and describing the Prime Ministers through whom he accepted office as medieval monarchs who turned Labour MPs into their puppets. What nonsense! Tell that to Eric Heffer or Jeff Rooker or any of the many Labour MPs who've made my life as Chancellor so difficult from time to time, and I never objected to that. No! Those who betray the working class of Britain are those who forced us for two whole years to fight one another when we should have been fighting the Tories and through a sort of ideological narcissism are helping to keep in power the most brutal government in living memory, a government which has commit itself to destroy our trade union movement. We didn't lose the last election because we failed to follow the advice of these elitists. It was Maggie Thatcher who won the last election, not Mick McGahey. And we're losing votes today not to the Socialist Workers Party or the IMG but to David Steel and Roy Jenkins."

"NATO's nuclear strategy is an essential part of that balance [between East and West]. To threaten to upset it by refusing to let America base any of her nuclear weapons in Britain would make war more likely, not less likely."

"I would fight to change the policy before the General Election. If I failed then I wouldn't accept office in a Labour Government."

"Faced with the difficulties of unilateral reflation, some socialists are tempted to seek salvation through trade restrictions or competitive devaluation. But such beggar-my-neighbour policies, if pursued on the scale required...are more likely to lead to a trade and currency war than to insulate their sponsors from the recession in the outside world."

"We will unilaterally get rid of Trident and cruise, and we will put Polaris into the arms talks with the Soviet Union and hope to phase it out in multilateral negotiations. If the Russians...fail to cut their nuclear forces accordingly it would be a new situation that we could consider at that time."

"[Margaret Thatcher] wraps herself in the Union Jack and exploits the sacrifices of our soldiers, sailors and airmen in the Falkland Islands for purely party advantage – and hopes to get away with it. It wasn't a very credible approach from the word 'go' because this Prime Minister, who glories in slaughter, who has taken advantage of the superb professionalism of our armed forces, is at this very moment lending the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires millions of pounds to buy weapons – including weapons made in Britain – to kill British servicemen. That is an act of stupefying hypocrisy."

"What almost halved the support for the Labour Party was the feeling that it has lost its traditional common sense and its humanity to a new breed of sectarian extremism."

"[W]ho is the Mephistopheles behind this shabby Faust? The answer to that is clear. The handling of this decision by—I quote her own Back Benchers—the great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed, the Catherine the Great of Finchley, the Prime Minister herself, has drawn sympathetic trade unionists, such as Len Murray, into open revolt. Her pig-headed bigotry has prevented her closest colleagues and Sir Robert Armstrong from offering and accepting a compromise. The right hon. Lady, for whom I have a great personal affection, has formidable qualities, a powerful intelligence and immense courage, but those qualities can turn into horrendous vices, unless they are moderated by colleagues who have more experience, understanding and sensitivity. As she has got rid of all those colleagues, no one is left in the Cabinet with both the courage and the ability to argue with her. I put it to all Conservative Members, but mainly to the Government Front Bench, that to allow the right hon. Lady to commit Britain to another four years of capricious autocracy would be to do fearful damage not just to the Conservative party but to the state."

"So long as the Soviet Union has nuclear weapons there have to be nuclear weapons somewhere in NATO to deter them from using them."

"The reason we were defeated in so far as defence played a role is that people believe we were in favour of unilaterally disarming ourselves. It wasn't the confusion. It was the unilateralism that was the damaging thing."

"We are going through a period of uncertainty, but we are in a good position to strengthen ourselves and win back a majority. We have already got rid of much deadwood and Kinnock is winning back younger voters. He is politically intelligent, has character and courage; but he has never been a minister, lacks experience, and people know it. In troubled times, the electorate looks for a strong leader and Mrs Thatcher is seen as one."

"The US, whether we like it or not, has nuclear weapons. The US is a member of NATO. Possession by the US of nuclear weapons is obviously a deterrent."

"No. Absolutely not. I think that the Russians are praying for a Labour victory...praying is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. I think that they would much prefer a Labour government and that the idea that they would prefer a Tory government, I think is utter bunkum, and they [the Soviets] authorized me to say so."

"I am a socialist who believes that the Labour Party offers the best hope for Britain's future."

"I wouldn't object strongly to leaving the EU. The advantages of being members of the union are not obvious. The disadvantages are very obvious. I can see the case for leaving – the case for leaving is stronger than for staying in."

"The trouble about Europe is what I call the Olive Line, the line below which people grow olives. North of the Olive Line people pay their taxes and spend public money very cautiously. South of it they fail to pay their taxes at all, but spend a lot of public money."

"[Referring to the "Olive line"] That division makes federation impossible – inconceivable, in my opinion."

"Denis Healey was a great champion for social justice, in and out of government, a stalwart of the Labour Party, a true patriot who fought for and cared deeply about his country and an extraordinary and vibrant character. ... He steered the Labour government and the country through some of the most difficult economic times; and in winning the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981, he probably saved the Labour Party as an instrument of government and social change. All of us in the Labour Party owe him a huge debt. Britain has lost a dedicated and faithful public servant."

"I always had a sneaking affection for Denis Healey, even at his most outrageous. I liked his rumbustiousness, a quality which adds richness to politics provided it is combined with intellectual insight and personal incorruptibility, as it was in Denis's case. He is an instinctive bully, but bullies always bring out the best in me and I enjoyed our clashes in Cabinet. His autobiography is a masterly piece of work and, as I read it, I chuckled over the cunning way he skates over his confessions of past mistakes, leaving the impression that they did not adversely affect events, though of course they did."

"Denis Healey was a giant of the Labour Party whose record of service to his party and his country stands as his testament. ... His wit and personality transcended politics itself, making him one of the most recognisable politicians of his era. Speaking personally, we had many interesting conversations when I was first elected to Parliament in 1983 and I found him a decent and very knowledgeable man who I enjoyed engaging with, particularly in his work as shadow foreign secretary."

"The art of John Dryden would be required to encompass the complex personality of the ambitious and many-sided politician who, in 1974, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. The most cultured of Chancellors, he could also be the greatest bully. Perhaps the most brilliant of Chancellors intellectually, he was possessed also of a common touch which attracted a wider public even when it most disliked his actions. His various disguises could confuse. A friendly commentator might attribute to him a deep seriousness worn lightly, sometimes perhaps flippantly. The flippancy could have been diagnosed as a defence mechanism for a man whose outward ebullience concealed inner doubts. Or it could have been interpreted as an expression of total self-confidence. The friendly commentator would have detected great courage, normally kept in reserve, as though courage was only for the decisive moment and it would be tedious to fight too hard when the issues appeared not of the first importance. A less friendly commentator might have criticised the flippancy, encountered not just in words but in deeds, as indicative of irresponsibility. Certainly it was not always to the taste of those who worked for him. By civil servants in the Treasury, he came to be admired for the excitement he generated and feared for his penetration of official work less than first class. But by those, Ministers and officials, who could not take his dismissive rudeness, he might even be hated. He came to dominate the international community of Finance Ministers by his intellectual brilliance and his committee skills."

"He had a clear idea of the objectives he wanted to secure, and mostly, from a socialist point of view, they were good ones. He would listen; he could be endlessly patient in negotiations, which is the only way to negotiate with would-be friends or allies; he had an irrepressible intellectual curiosity deriving partly from his interest in matters which touched only the fringe of politics."

"The greatest interest to economists of the Budget strategy will be in the way the Chancellor [Healey] has finally and totally broken with postwar economic orthodoxy, abandoned full employment as the sovereign purpose of the Budget, and decided that future stability of both prices and the foreign balance depended on achieving a better balance of the Budget itself."

"He has long carried light ideological baggage on a heavy gun carriage."

"He didn't suffer fools gladly or, indeed, at all. That partly explains why he was never leader of the party despite having rich political talent. He was brilliant in the Commons, an ebullient campaigner in the country, and his piano-thumping performances in by-election sing-songs were – like him – loud, lively, and uplifting. ... To know Denis Healey was to enjoy him."

"Healey is a strong fighter. He is intellectually gifted and capable of prodigious acts of endurance, but his aggressive approach is said to have alienated some of his potential supporters. In the 1976 leadership election he came a poor third behind Michael Foot and Jim Callaghan. By 1980, after a year of conflict and division within the Labour Party, he was portrayed by the left as one of those principally responsible for ignoring party policy. He looked increasingly, as one correspondent said, like a whale stranded on a beach being attacked by minnows."

"After the 1980 conference, at which the electoral college was accepted in principle, Healey refused to join the Gang of Three in meeting the left head on. He is a politician of the old school who prefers dining with, and talking to, trade union general secretaries and other leading figures in the Labour movement, in the hope that they will control the votes of their members, to involving himself directly in the day-to-day battle within the constituencies... Healey appeared to be in a safe position to hold the deputy leadership and stay above the battle. David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers seemed increasingly likely to start a new political party, but Healey appeared to have accepted his defeat [in the 1980 leadership election] and gave no indication that he would be prepared to join them. He also seemed unwilling to take on the left within the party, and his fighting instincts were not roused until Tony Benn began to make unexpected headway in the attempt to win the deputy leadership from him [in the 1981 deputy leadership election]."

"The only hope was Denis Healey. ... But my hopes were shortlived. Soon after the party conference in October [1980], it became evident that Denis Healey, whether he became leader or not, was not going to fight head-on the unilateralist and anti-European policy of the Labour Party. He was not going to make the party face up to the electoral incredibility of being both in effect anti-Nato and anti-European. ... So, Denis Healey was not going to fight the left. That became clear. Denis does not have good political judgement. In that sense he is not a good politician. He has a first-class brain, he is extremely well informed and he's got good judgement about many things, but he's not been a very good judge of feelings and moods within the Labour Party. I think he calculated that by taking the soft approach, the emollient approach, he could woo the left and win the leadership and, having secured it, would then fight for his policies. But he wasn't going to fight beforehand."

"We wanted Denis Healey to win, and Bill and I voted for him to win, but we wanted the right policies to win too. If he had fought for those policies and had lost we would have been bound to stick with him for a while and to have gone on fighting for them within the party. No question about it. Well, Denis did not heed our message. He stood as a ‘Peace’ candidate. It was just ludicrous. Everybody knew perfectly well, I think, that he didn't agree with a word of what he was supporting. His position was totally unconvincing. If he had fought on, so to speak, a ‘war ticket’, he would have probably lost, but I have no doubt that he would have been the leader of the Labour Party within two years. In retrospect that was the moment when the SDP was created."

"Of all the senior politicians I have known, Denis was by far the most loyal to decisions he did not like, to colleagues he served or who served him, to Labour Party policy he disliked and above all to his wife Edna and his family. This quality of his, more than any other, means that I have always measured Denis by a stringent but more generous yardstick than I use for any other politicians. He also has great style. I can hear him, as if it were yesterday, getting up from a dinner at Admiralty House and announcing with chuckle that he was off "to vote for the people against privilege". It was not just a joke. There was always a hint of "Denis the Menace" against privilege, and justly so. For all his faults he is a big man and I have been lucky to learn from him and to know him."

"On Wednesday 10 March [1976] members of the Tribune group of left-wing MPs launched their attack by abstaining on a motion from the Chancellor to 'level off' total public expenditure from April 1977... There were bitter exchange among MPs... Tribunites hurled vulgar abuse. Denis Healey...responded with characteristic vigour. 'Stalinist! Stalinist!' Eric Heffer shouted at him. 'Bastard! Bastard!' echoed Russell Kerr. Healey's own version is that, returning to the Chamber from the voting lobby, 'one of the rebels used demotic language to cast aspersions on my paternity, so I praised his virility in similar language several times.' According to one witness, the Chancellor's precise words to his critics were: 'Go and fuck yourselves.'"

"The Chancellor of the Exchequer has been—I know this because I have watched him over the years—a monetarist much longer than anyone has ever suspected of him. I used to listen with enjoyment to his speeches in the years 1972 to 1974, and I would shake my head and say to myself, "He will be a good Chancellor of the Exchequer, for he understands the real causes of inflation." Oh, he understands them all right."

"The right hon. Gentleman will be known for ever as the only Chancellor in the post-war period who brought this country to the brink of bankruptcy."

"[T]he defence budget is one of the very few elements of public expenditure that can truly be described as essential. The point was well-made by a robust Labour Defence Minister, Denis (now Lord) Healey, many years ago: ‘Once we have cut expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.’"

"Denis is a colourful, ebullient personality, combative and life-loving, with an unusually rich hinterland outside politics. He is an exceptionally gifted photographer...and is immensely knowledgeable about music... Yet he was never a serious candidate for the leadership. He was unpredictable, behaving rather like a strongly served tennis ball hitting a soft spot and then bouncing sideways. You could never be sure what he might do. He was a loner, enjoying his family and a few close friends, mainly not politicians, so predictions about his behaviour from colleagues were not particularly helpful. He had been brusque with many of them, or scorched them with his brilliant, brutal humour. He was not a popular figure in the Commons tea room. I liked him very much."

"He said things the way they were and you couldn't stop him from doing so. ... He was a mixture of incredible courage, lack of tact and not very good at playing in a way that would give him the advantage as distinct from party or the country. It was an impressive performance and I shan't forget it."

"Today 'nationalism' is out of fashion among the opinion-formers. Thanks to a superficial misreading of history, it is accused of having been responsible for two world wars and has widely come to be regarded as a political sin of the first magnitude, fortunately found only in such antiquated and obsolete figures as General de Gaulle. In fact the real danger comes from ideologies not nationalism; for while a nation may properly respect the nationhood of others, an ideology knows no frontiers... Once [the Tories] lose their claim to be, in the fullest sense, the 'national party', they are left, as they are in danger of being left today, either as the party of the 'individual' – a noble but to most people an austere and forbidding creed – or else as the party of the middle classes, which condemns them to a permanent minority."

"A national currency lies at the very heart of national sovereignty. A common currency is something that can only properly follow political union: it cannot precede it. It is significant that whereas the Zollverein or customs union paved the way to the German Federation a century ago, it was only after Prussia and Bismarck had achieved a political union, with blood and iron, that a common German currency could be born."

"The time has come for a wholly new approach to economic policy in Britain. The overriding need is for a long-term stabilisation programme to defeat inflation, recreate business confidence and provide a favourable climate for economic growth. At the head of such a programme must lie a firm commitment to a steady and gradual reduction in the rate of growth of the money supply, until it is consistent with our best guess at a potentially sustainable rate of economic growth. Only in this way can inflation be wrung out of the system. But this alone is not enough... An equally important part of a long term stabilisation plan has to be a reduction in the present Budget deficit... Indeed, something akin...to the old balanced Budget discipline needs to be restored: the secret of practical economic success, as overseas experience confirms, is the acceptance of known rules. Rules rule: OK?"

"The Conservative Party has never believed that the business of government is the government of business."

"No industry should remain under State ownership unless there is a positive and overwhelming case for it so doing. Inertia is not enough. As a nation, we simply cannot afford it."

"The successful sale of British Telecom...reveals a vast and untapped yearning among ordinary people for a direct stake in the ownership of British enterprise. Investment in shares has begun to take its place, with ownership of a home and either a bank or building society deposit, as a way for ordinary people to participate in enterprise and wealth creation. We are seeing the birth of people's capitalism."

"Economically and politically, Britain can get along with double digit unemployment."

"Those who, in the nineteenth century, argued the dangers of a mass democracy in which a majority of the voters would have no stake in the country at all, had reason to be fearful. But the remedy is not to restrict the franchise to those who own property: it is to extend the ownership of property to the largest possible majority of those who have the vote. The widespread ownership of private property is crucial to the survival of freedom and democracy. It gives the citizen a vital sense of identification with the society of which he is a part. It gives him a stake in the future—and indeed, equally important, in the present. It creates a society with an inbuilt resistance to revolutionary change."

"The acid test of monetary policy is its record in reducing inflation. Those who wish to join the debate about the intricacies of different measures of money and the implications they may have for the future are welcome to do so. But at the end of the day the position is clear and unambiguous. The inflation rate is judge and jury."

"It is here that Britain's weakness lies. The plain fact is that labour costs per unit of output in British business and industry continue to rise faster than is consistent with low unemployment and faster than our principal competitors overseas. Productivity is, certainly rising quite rapidly, but pay is rising faster still. It is this—and not our alleged dependence on oil—that constitutes the Achilles' heel of the British economy."

"Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that we have a choice between cutting tax and cutting unemployment, for the two go hand in hand. It is no accident that the two most successful economies in the world, both overall and specifically in terms of job creation—those of the United States and Japan—have the lowest level of tax as a proportion of GDP. Reductions in taxation motivate new businesses and improve incentives at work. They are a principal engine of the enterprise culture, on which our future prosperity and employment opportunities depend."

"It is worth recalling that during the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, Britain's growth rate was the lowest of all the major European economies. By contrast, during the 1980s, our growth rate has been the highest of all the major European economies. This greatly improved growth performance has been accompanied by falling inflation, which at 3½ per cent. in 1986 reached the lowest figure for almost 20 years."

"During the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, growth in manufacturing productivity in the United Kingdom was the lowest of all the seven major industrial countries in the world. During the 1980s, our annual rate of growth of output per head in manufacturing has been the highest of all the seven major industrial countries."

"But despite the undoubted success so far, there is still a barrier along Scotland's road to prosperity. That barrier is the pervasive presence of a hostile attitude to wealth creation, to the enterprise culture on which economic success in a free society depends. That is not to say there is no enterprise in Scotland: of course there is. Rather that it is frequently swamped by an overriding sense of dependence on the state. Large areas of Scottish life are sheltered from market forces, and exhibit the culture of dependence rather than that of enterprise."

"...this Budget represents a continuation of the policies which we have pursued consistently for nearly nine years, and which we will continue to pursue—a continuation of the steps that we have taken in nine previous Budgets, and of the major reforms that we have introduced in other fields, too, all of them designed to encourage and reward enterprise and so to liberate the energies of the British people. The tax changes in this Budget consolidate Britain's move from a high-tax country to a low-tax country, at all levels. Since 1979, the top rate of income tax has been cut from 83 per cent. to 40 per cent. The basic rate has been cut from 33 per cent. to 25 per cent. The corporation tax rate has been cut from 52 per cent. to 35 per cent. The small companies' rate has been cut from 42 per cent. to 25 per cent., and the 15 per cent. additional tax on savings income has been abolished altogether."

"...it is already clear that the policies that we have been pursuing have brought about a profound cultural change in this country. That, indeed, is what it is all about. For that cultural change is the only route to the economic success that we all wish to see, and which is no longer promise but reality. No longer do people accept that economic policy should be about regulating everyone's lives and imposing penal tax rates, in the illusion that that will benefit those on lower incomes. Instead, it is now widely recognised except on the Opposition Benches that one cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor and that there are enormous benefits in getting the state off people's backs, in transferring decision-making from the state to the people. And it is now abundantly clear that giving greater freedom and greater incentives has removed the shackles that have held back Britain for so many years and has liberated a great surge in enterprise."

"The policy that we have been pursuing has already brought economic success. This country is now experiencing an economic miracle, comparable in significance to that previously enjoyed by West Germany and still enjoyed by Japan."

"We had to dispel the notion that the way to economic success lies through a sort of fiscal levitation. That was the abiding post-war delusion—that governments could spend and borrow their way to prosperity, and fine-tune the performance of the economy through something known pretentiously as demand management... It used to be an establishment nostrum that you need a budget deficit to get economic growth. That was the belief which lay behind the notorious letter by 364 economists in March 1981. We have given the lie to that, decisively. There can no longer be any argument about it. Everyone—or almost everyone—now accepts that the proper role of macro-economic policy is to keep downward pressure on inflation and to maintain a stable framework in which the private sector can expand."

"Our achievement...has been to show that you can build far greater, and far more lasting, prosperity by letting people co-operate in the freedom of the market place than by making them submit to the coercion of Government regulations and state bureaucracy. If you look around the world today, East and West, even in Soviet Russia and Communist China, you will see that lesson being taken to heart... The truth is that a prosperous world based on free and open markets is a world of co-operation and interdependence between the people of all nations. By contrast, a world of closed, State controlled economies is a world disposed towards confrontation and conflict."

"The fears of recession in the aftermath of Black Monday have turned to fears of the economy racing ahead too fast, with inflation edging up and a substantial current account deficit...people understandably feel more confident about their future than they've done for decades, but as a result they have been borrowing more and saving less...coming on top of a massive income investment boom, it's all been just a bit too much of a good thing."

"Economic and monetary union...is incompatible with independent sovereign states with control over their own fiscal and monetary policies. It would be impossible...to have irrevocably fixed exchange rates while individual countries retained independent monetary policies...such a system could never have the credibility necessary to persuade the market that there was no risk of realignment. Thus EMU inevitably implies a single European currency, with monetary decisions...taken not by national Governments and/or central banks, but by a European Central Bank. Nor would individual countries be able to retain responsibility for fiscal policy. With a single European monetary policy there would need to be central control over the size of budget deficits and, particularly, over their financing. New European institutions would be required, to determine overall Community fiscal policy and agree the distribution of deficits between individual Member States... It is clear that Economic and Monetary Union implies nothing less than European Government...and political union: the United States of Europe. That is simply not on the agenda now, nor will it be for the foreseeable future."

"To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern."

"The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practice in it regarding themselves as a priesthood."

"While the strength of demand in the British economy should have elicited higher interest rates from early 1987 onwards, Lawson was so fixated with his DM-shadowing policy that he not only refused to raise rates but actually cut them, first in October 1987 and then again in February and March 1987... By the early spring of 1988, Mrs Thatcher was growing increasingly worried about Lawson's attempts to hold sterling down. A row erupted in March, when the Prime Minister rightly criticized Lawson's intervention tactics, saying at Prime Minister's Question Time in the Commons that "you can't buck the market." With the weight of foreign buying growing ever greater, and his Prime Minister by now very much alive to the problem, a reluctant Lawson was forced to call a halt to intervention. Sterling surged through the top range of DM2.90 to DM3.00 that he had imposed. In mid-May, in an effort to stem the rise in the pound without again resorting to intervention, the Chancellor cut interest rates one last time (the Labour Party, one should not forget, was pressing for even bigger cuts). But even Lawson could no longer ignore the mounting evidence of inflationary pressure (in the form of rapid increases in demand and output, in house prices and – as unemployment fell very rapidly – in wages and labour costs). Having reduced interest rates to 7.5% in mid-May to restrain sterling, at the end of May he raised them to restrain inflation, apparently unwilling to recognize that the inflationary pressure was the result of his DM-shadowing policy. Sir Alan Walters, in a radio interview, presciently remarked that the Chancellor, by having delayed far too long in tightening policy, had condemned Britain to much bigger increases in interest rates in the future."

"Nigel Lawson was certainly, in so far as anyone can be qualified in advance, the best qualified Chancellor of the postwar epoch. His memoirs are an outstanding record of life at the Treasury in the 1980s."

"The combined efforts of Government policy since 1979 have been not to improve but substantially to worsen our competitive position. We have gone from a huge manufacturing surplus of £5.5 billion in 1980 to a 1986 third quarter deficit of £8 billion a year... Even with oil production continuing for some time, the current account has gone from a £3 billion surplus to a deficit predicted by the Chancellor of £1.5 billion... Sadly, the Government's great contribution, having refused to stimulate the economy by more respectable means, is a roaring consumer boom, which there is not the slightest chance of their moderating before an election. A roaring consumer boom does not, to any significant extent, mean more employment. In our competitive position, worsening under the Government, it means overwhelmingly higher imports, a still worse balance of payments position and a classic path to perdition. To have produced, after seven and a half years, the combination of total monetary muddle, a worsened competitive position, a widespread doubt in other countries as to how we are to pay our way in the future, a desperately vulnerable currency and the prospect of an unending plateau of the highest unemployment in a major country in the industrialised world is a unique achievement over which the Chancellor is an appropriate deputy acting presiding officer."

"It was in the autumn of 1983...[that Lawson] replied, when I asked how he would wish to be remembered, that he would like to be seen as 'the British Erhard' – a reference to the man credited with the West German 'growth miracle' after the war."

"Something always goes wrong when Nigel goes abroad."

"I made Nigel Lawson Chancellor of the Exchequer – an enormous and to most people unexpected promotion. Whatever quarrels we were to have later, if it comes to drawing up a list of Conservative – even Thatcherite – revolutionaries I would never deny Nigel a leading place on it. He has many qualities which I admire and some which I do not. He is imaginative, fearless and – on paper at least – eloquently persuasive... I had by now come to share Nigel's high opinion of himself."

"I also said, 'You're in a dreadful position with wages going up at 8.4 per cent or more and inflation only by 3.5 per cent. We're pricing ourselves out of all the markets'. He [Lawson] said, 'Yes but it's very good electorally', to which I said, 'Yes but that's not the right view to take in the long run for the country'."

"The combination of the Liberal and Labour Parties is much stronger than the Liberal Party would be if there were no third Party in existence. Many men who would in that case have voted for us voted on this occasion as the Labour Party told them i.e. for the Liberals. The Labour Party has "come to stay"...the existence of the third Party deprives us of the full benefits of the 'swing of the pendulum', introduces a new element into politics and confronts us with a new difficulty."

"[I believe in] the throne...parliamentary institutions...private enterprise and individual opinion against the socialization of the state...equity in the distribution of public burdens and strict maintenance of public faith with the creditors of the state [and] a fresh guarantee of peace by an alliance with France and...Belgium for the defence of our common interests against unprovoked attack."

"The danger which threatens us comes from Labour... Those who think that the Conservative or Unionist Party, standing as such and disavowing its Liberal allies, could return with a working majority are living in a fools paradise and, if they persist, may easily involve themselves and the country in dangers the outcome of which it is hard to predict."

"The first thoughts of an Englishman on appointment to the office of Foreign Secretary must be that he speaks in the name, not of Great Britain only, but of the British Dominions beyond the seas, and that it is his imperative duty to preserve in word and act the diplomatic unity of the British Empire. Our interests are one. Our intercourse must be intimate and constant, and we must speak with one voice in the Councils of the world."

"The affairs of the world do not stand still...I could not go, as the representative of His Majesty's Government, to meeting after meeting of the League of Nations, to conference after conference with the representatives of foreign countries, and say, "Great Britain is without a policy. We have not yet been able to meet all the Governments of the Empire, and we can do nothing." That might be possible for an Empire wholly removed from Europe, which existed in a different hemisphere. It was not possible for an Empire the heart of which lies in Europe and next door to the Continent of Europe, and where every peril to the peace of Europe jeopardised the peace of this country."

"No British Government ever will and ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier."

"We have a peculiar interest because the true defence of our country, owing to scientific development, is now no longer the Channel...but upon the Rhine."

"Scratch me and you will find the Nonconformist."

"Revision is a dangerous word. Revision should never appear, I venture to think, in the mouth of a statesman or in the policy of a Government until they are prepared to define very closely the limits within which they think revision should take place. The long history of this country has in one sense been a history of the revision of Treaties. We have revised and revised and what have we got for it? What concession once made has any longer kept the value it had before it was revised? Of which of these concessions can it be said at this present moment that it has tempered feeling in Germany, that it has produced that friendly spirit that those who made it desired to promote? What is passing in Germany seems to me to render this a singularly inopportune moment to talk about the revision of Treaties."

"I beg the right hon. Gentleman to beware of what he is doing. After all, we stand for something in this country. Our traditions count, for our own people, for Europe and for the world. Europe is menaced and Germany is afflicted by this narrow, exclusive, aggressive spirit, by which it is a crime to be in favour of peace and a crime to be a Jew. That is not a Germany to which we can afford to make concessions. That is not a Germany to which Europe can afford to give the equality of which the Prime Minister spoke."

"No country is more exposed to danger than ours. We will all do our best, wherever we sit in this House, according to our lights, to preserve peace, but we can none of us guarantee it by fine phrases; we can none of us guarantee that the whole of the nations will combine in case of aggression. If war breaks out, if we become the victims of aggression or become involved in a struggle, and if the hon. Member for Limehouse (Mr. Attlee) and his friends be sitting on the Government bench while London is bombed, do you think he will hold the language that he held to-day? Do you think that that is the defence he will make? If he does, he will be one of the first victims of the war, for he will be strung up by an angry, and a justifiably angry, populace to the nearest lamp-post."

"It is all very well for the hon. Member for Limehouse and the right hon. Member for Darwen to paint the horrors of war, or, rather, for the right hon. Member for Darwen—the hon. Member for Limehouse did not descend to that—to draw pictures of what you might do with the money that you could save if only you kept your Army in barracks in their present inadequate condition, if only you left your Air Force insufficient for the protection even of this capital, if only you left your Navy without any sort of protection against aircraft bombing. It is all very well to do that, but the country will not accept those excuses or those picas if the day of trial comes. It is the business of this House, of men of courage in it, to tell the country the truth, to call upon them to bear these sacrifices, to tell them that they are necessary for our own defence, and that our membership of the League of Nations, our promises to contribute to collective security, and our guarantees under Locarno, are worthless unless we put our forces in a proper condition and maintain a strength comparable to the dangers which we may have to meet."

"Gentlemen do not behave in such a way."

"I wonder how many members can realise what [the remilitarisation of the Rhineland] means not merely to the excited politicians in Paris, but to the French peasant in his hovel, to the mother who feels that once again the...peril has come near and that once again her children will be mowed down by the scythe of war."

"Warm-hearted, considerate and generous...incapable of a mean action and conscientious to a fault."

"Chamberlain is a Liberal."

"His was rather the excellence of character than of capacity."

"It was cruelly said of Austen Chamberlain that he always played the game and always lost it. But that is really a tribute to his deep sense of honour and loyalty."

"Austen Chamberlain did not seem to me to be a man of first-rate mind, but he obviously possessed high character and the sort of disinterested goodness and amateur methods that now and then have enabled British statesmen to play notable roles in negotiations with foreign diplomats, even when the latter have been armed with subtler minds and the traditional techniques."

"The most famous and significant conference of the 1920s took place at Locarno, on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, in October 1925. The principals were the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany—Austen Chamberlain, Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann. Their great achievements were to guarantee the Rhineland borders of France and Germany and to bring Germany into the League of Nations. The so-called spirit of Locarno became a benchmark for diplomacy. In retrospect, however, Locarno looks more ambiguous. Stresemann had succeeded in bringing Germany in from the cold without abandoning any of its demands for lost territory in the east. These demands, particularly over Poland, were to prove the fuel for the next war."

"But at the time praise was showered on Chamberlain for brokering the deal. On his return from Locarno, he received a special welcome at Victoria Station and, in further similarity to Disraeli in 1878, was immediately made a Knight of the Garter. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin praised him for resolving an issue that had “so far defied the efforts of every statesman since the war.” One of Baldwin’s predecessors, Lord Arthur Balfour, said that Chamberlain’s name would be “indissolubly associated” with this probable “turning point in civilisation.” A few months later Chamberlain was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For a politician who had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, “Radical Joe,” it was an intoxicating apotheosis. “I am astonished and a little frightened by the completeness of my success and by its immediate recognition everywhere,” Chamberlain told his sister On October 22, 1925, he dined alone with his younger half-brother Neville, who noted in his diary that Austen "talked almost without stopping from 8 till 11.00 on Locarno. Very naturally, perhaps, the rest of the world does not exist for him . . . Looking back he felt that no mistake had been made from beginning to end." Neville found it hard to conceal his envy at Austen’s success. Nor, as we shall see, did he forget it."

"Instead of deluding public opinion with a notion that a sufficient application of force will provide a remedy, a wiser course would be to set about taking such steps as may be the means of recovering that consent without which society in Ireland cannot exist...[an offer should be made to the Irish] conceived on the most generous lines."

"In the name of Indian national life, in the name of religion, I appeal to all in each of the two countries who hold position...let them begin each in their own community to work untiringly towards this end: boldly to repudiate feelings of hatred and intolerance, actively to condemn and suppress acts of violence and aggression, earnestly to strive to exorcise suspicions...I appeal in the name of national life because communal tension is eating into it as a canker...I appeal in the name of religion because I can appeal to nothing nobler, and because religion is the language of the soul, and it is a change of soul that India needs today."

"Though I am, as you know, a pacifist by nature, I am not disposed to go to all lengths to meet people who seem to be behaving with utter unreason."

"I am authorized on behalf of His Majesty's Government to state clearly that in their judgment it is implicit in the declaration of 1917 that the natural issue of India's constitutional progress, as there contemplated, is the attainment of Dominion status."

"[It is] a question of personal appeal and conviction, rather than any argument. The cards I fancy are sympathy, understanding of his hopes, suspicions and disappointments, but above all, striving to convey to him, through what one says, a real echo of the sincerity that pervaded your doings in London."

"[The Hoare-Laval proposals] were not so frightfully different from those put forward by the Committee of Five [of the League of Nations]. But the latter were of respectable parentage: and the Paris ones were too much like the off-the-stage arrangements of nineteenth-century diplomacy."

"Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can't feel that it's either unnatural or immoral! I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay if we were in their position we might feel the same!"

"After a day in Berlin I was taken off to Berchtesgaden which we reached after a night in the special train, and were driven by what I assumed to be storm-troopers straight up to Hitler's chalet. Snow was on the ground and a path had been swept up to the steep steps to the house. As I looked out of the car window, on eye level, I saw in the middle of this swept path a pair of black trousered legs, finishing up in silk socks and pumps. I assumed this was a footman who had come down to help me out of the car and up the steps, and was proceeding in leisurely fashion to get myself out of the car when I heard Von Neurath or somebody throwing a hoarse whisper at my ear of ‘Der Führer, der Führer’; and it then dawned upon me that the legs were not the legs of a footman, but of Hitler."

"Hitler invited me to begin our discussion, which I did by thanking him for giving me this opportunity. I hoped it might be the means of creating better understanding between our two countries. The feeling of His Majesty's Government was that it ought to be within our power, if we could once come to a fairly complete appreciation of each other's position, and if we were both prepared to work together for the cause of peace, to make a large contribution to it. Although there was much in the Nazi system that profoundly offended British opinion, I was not blind to what he (Hitler) had done for Germany, and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping Communism out of his country."

"He [Hitler] did not challenge this and said that formal agreement between the four Powers [Britain, France, Germany and Italy] might not be very difficult to achieve. It would not, however, be worth much unless it took account of realities, even if unpleasant. Germany had had to recognise such a reality in the shape of Poland; and we all had to recognise such a reality in acknowledging Germany to be a great Power; we had to get away from the Versailles mentality and recognise that the world could never remain in statu quo. To this I replied that nobody wished to treat Germany as anything but a great Power, and that nobody in their senses supposed the world could stay as it was for ever. The whole point was how changes were to be brought about. This led him to say that there were two, and only two, alternatives: the free play of forces that meant war; and settlement by reason. The world had had experience of the first: was it able to prefer the second?"

"He [Hitler] then asked me what other problems there were between us... I replied that British opinion would be glad to know what might be his present attitude to the League of Nations and to Disarmament. There were no doubt other questions arising out of the Versailles settlement which were capable of causing trouble if they were unwisely handled:—Danzig, Austria, Czechoslovakia. On all these matters we were not necessarily concerned to stand for the status quo as of to-day, but we were very much concerned to secure the avoidance of such treatment of them as would be likely to cause trouble. If reasonable settlement could be reached with the free assent of those primarily concerned, we certainly had no desire to block them."

"Hitler was on the whole quiet and restrained, except now and again when he got excited; over Russia or the Press. I can quite see why he is a popular speaker; very much alive, eyes, which I was surprised were blue, moving about all the time, points in the argument reinforced by sharp gestures of the hands. And the play of emotion—sardonic humour, scorn, something almost wistful—is rapid."

"One had a feeling all the time that we had a totally different set of values and were speaking in a different language. It was not only the difference between a totalitarian and democratic state. He gave me the impression of feeling that, whilst he had attained power only after a hard struggle with present-day realities, the British Government was still living comfortably in a world of its own making, a fairy-land of strange, if respectable, illusions. It clung to shibboleths—‘collective security,’ ‘general settlement,’ ‘disarmament,’ ‘non-aggression pacts’—which offered no practical prospect of a solution of Europe's difficulties. He regards the whole conception embodied in a League of States equal in their rights of sovereignty as unreal, based on no foundation of fact; and consequently does not believe that discussions between large numbers of nations, with varying interests and of quite unequal value, can lead anywhere. Hence his preference for dealing with particular problems in isolation. With this goes the distrust of the democratic method, to him inefficient, blundering, paralysed by its love of talk, and totally unsuited to the rough world, constantly changing, in which we had to live."

"Nothing was more likely to aggravate the difficulties of the present situation than any suggestions that our ultimate objective was to unite France, Italy and ourselves against Germany."

"[W]e are all alike determined to throw all our weight on the side of securing world peace through respect for law based on just settlements. We have no use for a world society in which law would be expected to be the obedient handmaid of lawless force; and we are all resolved to preserve British rights and liberties against attack, from whatever quarter within or without the State these may come."

"[A] great mistake would be made abroad if it was ever thought that our domestic controversies upon the day-to-day conduct of foreign policy would in the least degree affect the primary instinct of our people to stand solidly together in any real emergency. Both our history and our character had given us a sense of community which, while enabling us to face facts and make peaceful changes, protected us from being revolutionary."

"Herr Hitler was possibly or even probably mad."

"[O]ne of the principal lessons of these events is that the diplomacy of any nation can only be commensurate with its strength, and that if we desire this country to exercise its full influence in world affairs, the first thing that we have to do is to ensure that it is in all ways fully and rapidly equipped to do so."

"In a time of crisis, with grave questions demanding urgent answer at every moment, no body of men would dare claim to be judged infallible. There was indeed no clear way, but almost always a hideous choice of evils. I can only know, for myself, that my mind will be at rest for having taken no decision inconsistent with what on all the facts I felt right."

"A year ago we had undertaken no specific commitments on the Continent of Europe, beyond those which had then existed. ... To-day we are bound by new agreements for mutual defence with Poland and Turkey; we have guaranteed assistance to Greece and Rumania against aggression. ... We know that, if the security and independence of other countries are to disappear, our own security and our own independence will be gravely threatened. We know that if international law and order is to be preserved, we must be prepared to fight in its defence."

"What is also now fully and universally accepted in this country, but what may not even yet be as well understood elsewhere, is that, in the event of further aggression, we are resolved to use at once the whole of our strength in fulfilment of our pledges to resist it."

"At this moment the doctrine of force bars the way to settlement and fills the world with envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. But if the doctrine of force were once abandoned, so that the fear of war that stalks the world was lifted, all outstanding questions would become easier to solve."

"The threat of military force is holding the world to ransom, and our immediate task is...to resist aggression."

"The racial doctrine, as interpreted in the Nazi creed, may be, and in my view is, sheer primitive nonsense; and we are no more prepared to admit German superiority of race than we are concerned to assert our own. ... when this doctrine is invoked in justification of the oppression of other races it becomes a crime against humanity."

"Not only does it deny the corporate claim to liberty of men and women organized in national societies, but it refuses the much more fundamental claim of men and women to the free expression of human personality, which rests upon the eternal value of every human soul. True pride of race may be tested by the behaviour of its possessors towards their own fellow citizens and towards others. It will forbid conduct to individuals of which they should be ashamed in their private lives. It is thus evidently something far removed from the ideal of a race which by the German philosophy of to-day is called to stamp out the civilization of another. Between these two conceptions there is a great gulf fixed. ... Until these false creeds are abjured, and replaced by a wider toleration, they must continue to excite resistance. The future of humanity must not be left in the hands of those who would imprison and enslave it."

"[T]he broad record of the British race stands to be judged on facts that are incontestable. It is the fact that during the nineteenth century, when the power of this country was unchallenged, there was no nation in Europe that felt for that reason insecure, or that did not recognize our power to be an instrument of peace. The Pax Britannica has been no empty or self-righteous boast of purpose. It is the fact too that in every corner of the world where men of British race have established influence, there by immutable law of nature you find established the seed and plant of liberty. It is the trail by which is marked their progress, interpreted to all by the standards of good faith, respect for law, and equal justice. Most truly, therefore, of our people was it said: “Their country's cause is the high cause of freedom and honour. That fairest earthly fame, the fame of freedom, is inseparable from the names of Albion, Britain, England.”"

"My message to you to-day...is to be so proud of the race to which you belong that you will be as jealous of its honour as you are of its safety, and that you will fight for both with equal determination. The struggle will be arduous, it may be long, and it will certainly demand of our nation that it should withhold nothing that may contribute to our strength."

"[W]e had to face the fact that it was not so much now a question of imposing a complete defeat on Germany but of safeguarding the independence of our own Empire and if possible that of France."

"[I]f he Mussolini] would use his influence [on Hitler] to get reasonable terms which did not menace our independence and offered a prospect of a just and durable settlement of Europe we would try and meet his own claims. ... If the terms were impossible we could always reject them."

"[I]f we got to the point of discussing the terms of a general settlement and found that we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them."

"Churchill's plan] meant that the future of the country turned on whether the enemy's bombs happened to hit our aircraft factories. ... he was prepared to take that risk if our independence was at stake; but if it was not at stake he would think it right to accept an offer which would save the country from avoidable disaster."

"[W]e should be prepared to say that we were prepared to fight to the death for our independence, but that, provided this could be secured, there were certain concessions that we were prepared to make to Italy."

"If only we could find out for certain where Hitler and Mussolini are meeting tomorrow, and get one well-placed bomb, then the world might really take on a different appearance."

"Bad faith, cruelty, crime become right by the fact that it is he, Hitler, who ordains them. That is the fundamental challenge of anti-Christ; which it is our duty as Christians to fight with all our power. The peoples of the British Commonwealth, along with all those who love truth and justice and freedom, will never accept this new world of Hitler's. Free men, not slaves; free nations, not German vassals; a community of nations, freely cooperating for the good of all—these are the pillars of the new and better order that the British people wish to see."

"Hitler may plant the swastika where he will, but unless he can sap the strength of Britain the foundations of his Empire are built on sand. In their hearts the peoples that he has beaten down curse him and pray that his attacks may be broken on the defences of our island fortress. They long for the day when we shall sally forth and return blow for blow. We shall assuredly not disappoint them. Then will come the day of final reckoning when Hitler's mad plans for Europe will be shattered by the unconquerable passion of man for freedom."

"As we begin to look beyond the war to the re-ordering of the world which must follow, we see three great Powers, the United States, Russia, and China. ... In the company of these Titans Britain, apart from the rest of the Commonwealth and Empire, could hardly claim equal partnership. ... If, in the future, Britain is to play her part without assuming burdens greater than she can support she must have with her in peace the same strength that has sustained her in this war. Not Great Britain only, but the British Commonwealth and Empire must be the fourth Power in that group upon which, under Providence, the peace of the world will henceforth depend."

"The advent of Hitler to power in 1933 had coincided with a high tide of wholly irrational pacifist sentiment in Britain, which caused profound damage both at home and abroad. At home it immensely aggravated the difficulty, great in any case it was bound to be, of bringing the British people to appreciate and face up to the new situation which Hitler was creating: abroad it doubtless served to tempt him and others to suppose that in shaping their policies this country need not be too seriously regarded."

"One such interlude early in June 1940 is for ever graven into my memory. It was just after the fall of France, an event which at the time it happened seemed something unbelievable as to be almost surely unreal, and if not unreal then quite immeasurably catastrophic. Dorothy and I had spent a lovely summer evening walking over the Wolds, and on our way home sat in the sun for half an hour at a point looking across the plain of York. All the landscape of the nearer foreground was familiar—its sights, its sounds, its smells; hardly a field that did not call up some half-forgotten bit of association; the red-roofed village and nearby hamlets, gathered as it were for company round the old greystone church, where men and women like ourselves, now long dead and gone, had once knelt in worship and prayer. Here in Yorkshire was a true fragment of the undying England, like the White Cliffs of Dover, or any other part of our land that Englishmen have loved. Then the question came, is it possible that the Prussian jackboot will force its way into this countryside to tread and trample over it at will? The very thought seemed an insult and an outrage; much as if anyone were to be condemned to watch his mother, wife or daughter being raped."

"Common sense and not bravado would dictate the British Government's policy."

"[I]f ever the day comes when the party which I lead ceases to attract to itself men of the calibre of Edward Wood, then I have finished with my party."

"The Viceroy [Halifax] is an earnest and an honest fellow—not quite stupid, but inexperienced in worldly affairs. He is a typical example of a "safeguarded" member of the Conservative party. He was brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth, and he has led a sheltered life. Bad speeches by him are praised as masterpieces of oratory; good speeches are looked upon as unprecedented in history. The Viceroy was continually spoken of during his House of Commons career as of Prime Ministerial timber. But he has never had to face the realities of the world. Honourable and trustworthy, his word can be relied upon, and his promises are always performed."

"I do not doubt that his viceroyalty was the greatest episode in a varied and distinguished career, and that the comprehending and enlightened policy he pursued, culminating in his Pact with Gandhi, was both realistic and right."

"In June [1931] I attended a meeting in the House of Commons of the India Committee, normally composed of those Conservative back-benchers with a special interest in Indian affairs. It was a sign of the times that most of the party had turned up. Irwin, gaunt and sombre, was flanked by Winterton, Lloyd and Churchill. His replies to their questions were agile and tinged with irony. But his speech, apparently unprepared and certainly unpolished, seemed disappointing, even disillusioning. He asked us to keep the account private, for fear of embarrassing Lord Willingdon, who was to be his successor as Viceroy. Despite this, the Daily Telegraph came out next morning with striking headlines. The speech in its entirety had, however, been even more striking. It began with references to the growth of nationalism and to the fact, as he put it, that owing to the Russo-Japanese war and the looseness of Western women as depicted in films, our prestige in the East was gone. An incredulous gasp greeted this sacrilege."

"On 16th March, 1939, the day after Czechoslovakia fell to pieces and Hitler occupied Prague, I lunched at No. 10 with Neville Chamberlain and Edward Halifax. The Prime Minister said with resignation, but with our solemn approval, "I have decided that I cannot trust the Nazi leaders again." Next day he made a speech to the Birmingham Unionist Association which I described to his P.P.S., Alec Douglas-Home, as being more like an oration by the younger Pitt. Halifax said later that it was he who had insisted on the need for this fighting speech as the prelude to a revolution in foreign policy. I am sure that this was true."

"I reflected on Halifax's extraordinary character; his high principles, his engaging charm and grand manner – his power to frighten people into fits – me sometimes – his snobbishness – his eel-like qualities and, above all, his sublime treachery which is never deliberate, and, always to him, a necessity dictated by a situation. Means are nothing to him, only ends. He is insinuating, but unlovable."

"Edward [Halifax] seemed to suggest that Winston was a handicap to the Conservative Party. At last I turned on him. "I don't know what you are getting at," I said rather hotly. "If the country had depended on you we might have lost the war." Edward was furious and demanded an apology. Later he talked to Winston, saying I ought to apologize. Winston replied he hoped I'd do nothing of the sort. You see, Charles, Edward Halifax has been spoilt. Baldwin was largely responsible."

"Halifax's virtues have done more harm in the world than the vices of hundreds of other people. And yet when I meet him, I can't help having friendly talk."

"To history, until yesterday, Halifax was the arch-appeaser. This, it is now recognised, was a mistake. His rôle, however, was complicated. In these pages he is not the man who stopped the rot, but the embodiment of Conservative wisdom who decided that Hitler must be obstructed because Labour could not otherwise be resisted."

"In the course of the great Viceroy's interview, he was told by Hitler that the proper way to deal with unrest in India was to shoot first Gandhi and then the leaders of the Congress. Halifax's sweet and Christian nature must have recoiled from this sort of barbarism; but he was too courteous to show his disgust. Unhappily, in the course of this long discussion, he did not reject with sufficient force Hitler's new thesis. This was that changes of territory and shifts of power in a changing world could come about only by one of two methods—either by war or by what he called the "higher reason"... Halifax should have rejected this argument with vigour. On the contrary, he referred to possible modifications which might come in due course over Danzig, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. All that England was interested in was to see that these changes should come about by peaceful evolution. This doctrine of peaceful evolution seemed dangerously near that of the higher reason. The Halifax visit did no good, and a great deal of potential harm."

"Edward Halifax was a man of extraordinary charm, strong religious convictions, and long experience of public affairs... [N]either Halifax nor Chamberlain had any real experience or knowledge of foreign affairs. If Chamberlain approached them from a somewhat provincial point of view and believed almost to the end in the possibility of a "business deal" with Hitler and Ribbentrop, Halifax, as a great gentleman and aristocrat, found it quite impossible to understand the minds of such men. He could hardly bring himself to accept that statesmen who were in charge of a great country could be so absolutely devoid of any sense of truth or honour."

"These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire."

"Chamberlain entered 10 Downing Street determined to reshape British foreign policy in order to confront the mounting threats to European peace. In January 1938 he managed to move Sir Robert Vansittart, the fiercely anti-Hitler permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, into a high-sounding but innocuous post as the government’s chief diplomatic advisor. Chamberlain replaced him with the more pliant Sir Alexander Cadogan. The following month, Chamberlain’s highly strung foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, resigned in irritation at the prime minister’s personal diplomacy. His successor was Lord Halifax, a tall, lugubrious Tory peer, whose basic instinct—whether as Viceroy of India dealing with Gandhi or as foreign secretary facing the dictators— was to seek a peaceful compromise. Chamberlain would later discover that Halifax had a will of his own, but initially they formed an effective team. “I give thanks for a steady unruffled Foreign Secretary who never causes me any worry,” the prime minister wrote privately that spring. After securing a rapprochement with Italy in April 1938, Chamberlain hoped to move on to an agreement with Germany, trading territorial concessions in Europe and colonial Africa for firm restrictions on the growth of German military power. This was all part of what he and his colleagues called the “appeasement” or pacification of Europe. And after the war scare of May 1938, it was clear that the Sudeten problem had to be resolved before further progress could be made. Accordingly the British government emerged from France’s shadow as would-be mediator."

"It is also clear that, left to themselves, Chamberlain’s political colleagues would eventually have undermined his summitry. To bypass Cabinet critics he moved key discussions into an inner circle, and his dramatic flight to Berchtesgaden silenced the skeptics. But his weakness there as a negotiator—conceding Sudeten secession on the spot—disconcerted many in the Cabinet. Even his inner circle warned that the next meeting must involve concessions by Hitler as well and they kept him under pressure throughout the Godesberg meeting. The revolt led by Halifax after Chamberlain returned is not surprising when one remembers that, as early as September 4, the foreign secretary had been inclined to issue a warning to Hitler. What does remain puzzling is Halifax’s failure to keep reasserting himself during the rest of the crisis. Having seen what happened when he was twice excluded from summitry, he might have been expected to claim a seat on the plane to Munich. But perhaps the euphoria in the Commons on September 28 carried all before it, catapulting Chamberlain back to the dominant position he enjoyed on the eve of Berchtesgaden."

"Lord Halifax in his personal qualities more closely resembles Sir Edward Grey than any of his predecessors as Foreign Secretary. Like him he is impressive in presence and manner; universally respected, even reverenced; and he has a deep and sincere ethical and religious foundation for his character. Like him, too, he is quite obviously in politics under the impulse of a sense of duty and not of personal ambition; he would sooner live the life of a country gentleman. In India he showed an insight into the aspirations of another race and constructive qualities of a rare order; and in his relations with Mr. Gandhi he was able to find in a similarity of religious temper a bridge for the wide gulf between different civilisations and creeds... Those who hesitate about his suitability for the office of Prime Minister at a time like the present do so because they doubt whether his personal force is sufficient, whether he has a tough enough fibre in his will. The general force of his personality is less than that of Grey, and while he shares all the same personal qualities they are most of them on a somewhat lesser scale; and for a particular objective he has a less concentrated strength than Mr. Chamberlain. Partly, however, for this very reason he is less compromised by his association with Mr. Chamberlain's earlier policy and less handicapped in any attempt to secure the co-operation of the Left."

"The photographs in this book suggest that if Halifax had not been a great nobleman, he would have made an excellent butler. As indeed he did. Halifax was the Jeeves of the British Empire. Though he often opened the door on ill-tidings, he remained himself unruffled. He never doubted his own superior wisdom."

"Irwin was a friend of many years' standing whose serene career I had always admired. His striking personality, easy and distinguished manners, human and humane outlook on life, had, since his Oxford days, marked him out for great positions. Essentially a peacemaker, it was his mission as Viceroy to humanise the Government of India after Reading's chapter of rigid ceremony and cautious legalism. It was typical of him that almost his first word to his military secretary had been "we are in India to keep our tempers.""

"Irwin possessed the qualities that were needed for a reconciliator. Alone of the Viceroys who had dealings with Gandhi, he saw the springs that gave the Mahatma his astounding power."

"Halifax was Eden's obvious successor [as Foreign Secretary]. Universally respected, and possessing many of the qualities that had established the reputation of his ancestor, Lord Grey, and his kinsman, Sir Edward Grey, he was pre-eminent among the Conservative Ministers for character and judgment. In India he had shown his wisdom in reconciling bitter differences. Communal troubles had become less acute under his mediating influence, Gandhi had become his personal friend. Might he not have the same success in Europe that he had won in Asia? In any case, his qualities were exactly those that Chamberlain needed for his considered and concentrated programme of appeasement."

"The army of brokers, jobbers and other quaintly named parasites."

"Devolutionary reform will not provide a factory, a machine or jobs, build a school, train a doctor or put a pound on pensions."

"The House of Lords must go - not be reformed, not be replaced, not be reborn in some nominated life-after-death patronage paradise, just closed down, abolished, finished."

"[T]he only reason why I espouse centralism now, the central organisation and co-ordination and government of our resources in this country, and would like to see much more of that co-ordination and organisation and control and democracy of resources in a Socialist country, is that I think that it is a structure that can give the best advantage to the people—the people I think I am here to represent, working-class people, irrespective of their nationality."

"In my right hon. Friend's reply to the right hon. Lady the Leader of the Opposition, was he not rather unsympathetic, especially now that she appears to be the last pro-Marketeer in Britain? Is not this disturbance manifested by her use of the word "abrasiveness"? For the right hon. Lady to protest a dislike of abrasiveness is rather like Count Dracula professing a distaste for blood. Will my right hon. Friend give an undertaking to increase his abrasiveness until he rubs out altogether the common agricultural policy?"

"We live in a country afflicted by a senile and selfish capitalist system...where families are homeless, sick people unattended, children untaught whilst building workers, nurses and teachers are unemployed"

"[Labour has] always believed that the community as a whole should have a greater control over these “commanding heights of the economy”."

"[Labour's] socialist argument recognised that the system of economic gambling, commercial whim, speculative profiteering and profligate waste of the earth's resources that is dignified by the title 'private enterprise' is increasingly demonstrating its inability to meet human needs for food, employment, security and fulfilment."

"We must not look for some kind of Messiah."

"By emphatically pressing the view that it is only possible to support radical Labour policies by supporting Tony Benn, Tony's associates have turned the contest into a gamble with policies, [yet any] disagreement with those claims has been slandered as 'opportunism', 'careerism' and evidence of every kind of departure from socialist conviction and purpose. That is the truly dangerous product of these months of contest."

"Heckler: At least Mrs Thatcher has got guts. Neil Kinnock: It's a pity that other people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it."

"If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as prime minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can't pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old."

"The roots of defeat which were put down by some of the elements of our party in the two or three years after 1980 made victory difficult to achieve."

"I don't believe that the policies on which we fought the [1983] election ought to be ejected like some sort of spent cartridge."

"I didn't come to it intellectually, I came to it pragmatically. What intellectual appeal there was came initially entirely from Bevan mainly because of the way in which Bevan, in speech and writing, articulated exactly what I was feeling."

"When I started to encounter Marxism at 16, the elementary truths of the surplus value theory and more than anything else, the logical argument that he produced that labour was the source of all wealth, gave me a political and intellectual justification for what I believed in a way that nothing else did."

"Someone up there likes me."

"If anyone wants to know why we must conduct ourselves [with commonsense and realism], just remember at all times, with all temptations, how you, each and every one of you sitting in this hall, each and every Labour worker watching this conference, each and every Labour voter, yes, and some others as well, remember how you felt on that dreadful morning of the tenth of June. Just remember how you felt then, and think to yourselves: 'June the ninth, 1983, never ever again will we experience that.'"

"We support the efforts to keep the pits open until exhausted."

"[Margaret Thatcher is a] stubborn Salome who wants the miners' heads on a plate."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services. The people will not abide posturing."

"We believe there should be reforms in the EEC which would benefit all the members. If these were not achieved, our policy is to preserve the ultimate option of withdrawing Britain. That option would not, this time, need a referendum, as it did before."

"I'm a father. And no matter how much I try to convince myself towards the course of 'enlightenment' I know damn well that, put to the test, I'm what people would call a reactionary. I know it. I try and rationalize it but it's no good. I come to the same conclusion all the time. My children stand a chance of being hurt in the forseeable future by what's called permissiveness."

"Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics."

"That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion."

"Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand."

"David Frost: If you haven't got nuclear weapons, the choice in that situation would be to subject your forces to an unfair battle. Neil Kinnock: Yes, what you're suggesting is that the alternatives are between the gesture, the threat, or the use of nuclear weapons, and surrender. In these circumstances the choice is posed, and this is a classical choice, between exterminating everything you stand for and the flower of your youth, or using all the resources you have to make any occupation totally untenable."

"What has happened is that there are people who, for reasons best known to themselves, have voted for maintaining division in our country."

"In the years between our defeat in 1979 and our defeat in 1983 Labour was increasingly seen to be a party slipping towards impossiblism, succumbing to fads, riven by vicious divisions, speaking the language of sloganised dogma – and usually voicing it in the accents of menace. It was almost as if sections of the party measured the purity of their socialism by the distance which they could put between it and the minds of the British people."

"[A]lterations in policy had to be made with continual reference to the need to be elected in order to be able to put principles into power. I repeatedly had to reinforce the message that the real penalty for our defeat was paid by the unemployed, the poor, the sick, the young and the old that the Labour Party existed to help."

"I manifest no paranoia when I say that there has been in the Labour Party an element which has treated realism as treachery, regarded appeals to party unity as an excuse for suppression of liberties and scorned any emphasis on the importance of winning elections as a contaminating bacillus called 'electoralism'."

"Oh I detest him. I did then, I do now, and it's mutual. He hates me as well. And I'd much prefer to have his savage hatred than even the merest hint of friendship from that man."

"I celebrated this by going to the PLP meeting [and saying], "I'd like to congratulate the parliamentary party on this real step forward for proper recognition of women in politics. And nobody's willy has dropped off.""

"Never mistake the enthusiasm of the minority for the support of the majority."

"Wankers and whingers."

"In the Financial Times this morning Mrs Thatcher was reported as saying that two more terms of office would exterminate socialism. I saw Clare Short, who asked if I had seen it, and I replied, "Yes, but I think she'll have a job to outdo Kinnock.""

"It has been one of Mr Kinnock's themes that Labour has to modernise itself, that it has to appeal not only to the man on the dole but to the man with a mortgage, not only to a manual labourer, but to a computer expert; it has to redefine its idea of class to accommodate social trends."

"The press – the popular press – is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon."

"The tabloids are like animals, with their own behavioural patterns. There’s no point in complaining about them, any more than complaining that lions might eat you."

"Lawyers are like rhinoceroses: thick-skinned, short-sighted, and always ready to charge."

"And I'd like to say this to [Sir James Goldsmith] ... who has got nothing to be smug about, and I would like to say that 1,500 votes is a derisory total. We have shown tonight that the Referendum Party is dead in the water, and Sir James can get off back to Mexico knowing your attempt to buy the British political system has failed."

"There is no design involved. It would look tawdry down the wrong end of a beach in Torremolinos. This isn't a case of just not wanting it in my backyard. This area is historically significant with listed buildings and it's next to the Tower of London, which is a world heritage site."

"The Minister for Fun."

"Since the great days of Jimmy Greaves, it's the only time anyone's managed to score five times in a Chelsea shirt."

"This is the first time in ages that David Mellor has done the decent thing."

"Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying."

"The green shoots of economic spring are appearing once again."

"There are going to be no devaluations, no leaving the ERM. We are absolutely committed to the ERM. It is at the centre of our policy. We are going to maintain sterling's parity and we will do whatever is necessary, and I hope there is no doubt about that at all."

"As a result of uncertainties caused by the French referendum, massive speculative flows have continued to disrupt the functioning of the exchange rate mechanism. As Chairman of Ecofin I have tonight called an urgent meeting of the EC's monetary committee to consider how stability might be restored to the markets over the next few days. In the meantime the Government has decided that Britain's best interests would be best secured by suspending our membership of the ERM with immediate effect. As a result, the second of the two interest rate rises announced today will not take effect."

"My wife said she'd never heard me singing in the bath until last week."

"John Pienaar (BBC reporter): Which do you regret more, singing in the bath when forced to withdraw from the ERM, or talking prematurely of green shoots last autumn? Norman Lamont: I .. Je ne regrette rien."

"There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours' publicity."

"What is the right exchange rate at one point is not necessarily the right exchange rate at another."

"Jonathan Ross: Good to see you - how's it hanging? Julian Clary: Oh, very well thank you. Very nice of you to recreate Hampstead Heath for me here [laughter]. As a matter of fact, I've just been fisting Norman Lamont … [prolonged laughter] Ross: Let me ask you Julian ... Clary: Talk about a red box."

"If it is the case that one Department of this Government deliberately organised a leak to frustrate a Minister in the same Government, that is not only dirty tricks but a habit that is inimical to the practice of good government in this country."

"In the course of a few weeks the one policy with which the Prime Minister was uniquely and personally associated, the contribution to policy of which he appears to have been most proud, has been blown apart, and with it has gone for ever any claim by the Prime Minister or the party that he leads to economic competence. He is the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government."

"The fundamental flaw in the individualism of the classical writers, and their modern counterparts in today's Conservative Party, is, I believe, their assumption that human beings conduct their lives on the basis of self-interested decisions taken in radical isolation from others. This thesis grotesquely ignores the intrinsically social nature of human beings and fails to recognize the capabilities that all people have to act in response to commitments and beliefs that clearly transcend any narrow calculation of personal advantage."

"We ought, therefore, in the battle of ideas which is at the centre of the political struggle, to be confident in the strength of our intellectual case. But I believe we must also argue for our cause on the basis of its moral foundation. It is a sense of revulsion at injustice and poverty and denied opportunity, whether at home or abroad, which impels people to work for a better world, to become, as in our case, democratic socialists."

"In response to the plummeting popularity of the Administration itself, revealed at Newbury and in the shire county elections, we have the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle. If we were to offer that tale of events to the BBC light entertainment department as a script for a programme, I think that the producers of "Yes, Minister" would have turned it down as hopelessly over the top. It might have even been too much for "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em". The tragedy for us all is that it is really happening—it is fact, not fiction. The man with the non-Midas touch is in charge. It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea."

"The opportunity to serve our country—that is all we ask."

"The Scots are a more moral people [than the English]."

"He performed a completely different function from Neil Kinnock – he healed the wounds of the Party."

"Smith would have been a better leader than Tony Blair. It would have been a completely different party."

"It can fairly be said of John Smith that he had all the virtues of a Scottish presbyterian, but none of the vices."

"John was essentially a fudge leader. Tony Blair was the linear descendant of Neil Kinnock as a modernising Labour leader. John Smith was not."

"He is ready to embrace whatever changes are necessary, whether it be in policy or the party's internal structures. But his core values – a very Scottish species of practical Christian socialism – are not negotiable."

"[I]f John Smith had lived I think it would have been a very great advantage for the party. I think he had a better understanding of the Labour movement than others do."

"[Smith's death was] one of the greatest tragedies to beset the Labour Party...the country was robbed of a great Prime Minister."

"John was a product of the Labour Party of Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan, and he had a deep commitment to preserving it, realising that certain things had to be done, like introducing OMOV in order to secure that kind of Party. In that sense, he was a moderniser, but it had to be done in a way that would not offend the traditional principles of the Party. He liked the way the Labour Party did things. New Labour felt that they couldn't make that old system work, and made significant changes – like Clause IV – wholesale reform of which John had rejected."

"John unified and therefore massively strengthened the Party by being completely unsectarian. Because he knew himself and was at ease with himself he treated everyone with respect."

"John gave the Party a feeling of what we were about. The best and only way of achieving Labour's values was through social justice. Social justice was what drove him, and he gave it back to the Labour Party."

"He is hesitant about what they will do on the unions. I say, "You owe Mrs Thatcher a great deal. She has made it possible for unions to become led by moderates who will support the Labour leadership and you will hold the Conference and stop them passing dotty things." He agreed."

"I talked to John Smith... I asked him whether Labour would raise the top rate of forty per cent [in income tax] if they became the government and he was the Chancellor. He said, "No, not exactly, but we would have it graded upwards as they do in Germany and other countries. But we would not go back to the old penal rates.""

"I talked to John Smith. He said, "I don't know if it has percolated down to people like you yet but we would run a very tough government, not a reckless one as there was before.""

"The great difficulty of all schemes for leagues of nations and the like has been to find an effective sanction against nations determined to break the peace. I will not now discuss at length the difficulties of joint armed action, but every one who has studied the question knows they are very great. It may be, however, that a league of nations, properly furnished with machinery to enforce the financial, commercial, and economic isolation of any nation determined to force its will upon the world by mere violence, would be a real safeguard for the peace of the world. In any case that is a subject that may well be studied by those sincerely anxious to put an end to the present system of International anarchy."

"Let me beg my readers to do their utmost for the success of the Peace Ballot. There is no single thing which they can do of greater value for Peace. … Every vote is wanted and may contribute to prevent war and save the lives of countless thousands of our fellow citizens."

"The Germans really conceive of their country as always under war conditions in this respect. No one expects a belligerent to tell the truth and, to the German mind, they are always belligerent. The Germans take the view that war is only intensified peace."

"But supposing there is a German guarantee, of what is its value? It is unnecessary to accuse Germany of perfidy. Not only the Nazi Government but all previous German Governments from the time of Frederick the Great downwards have made their position perfectly clear. To them an international assurance is no more than a statement of present intention. It has no absolute validity for the future."

"The truth is, I was never a very good Party man. Probably but for the War of 1914, I should have gone on fairly comfortably as a Conservative official. But those four years burnt into me the insufferable conditions of international relations which made war the acknowledged method — indeed, the only fully authorized method — of settling international disputes. Thenceforth, the effort to abolish war seemed to me, and still seems to me, the only political object worth while."

"I thought you meant that religious belief involved the substitution of the ordinances for the moral law. That no doubt came to be true in a degree with certain of the pharisees, may be true in a degree with some Christians. But it is not true with the Xtianity in which I was brought up. To Xtians of that kind God's law and the moral law are and must be identical. Hence if it could be shewn that Pacifism was in accordance with the moral law I should have to hold that all war was prohibited by Xtianity. If on the other hand, it can be shewn as I think it can that there is no such prohibition by the Xtian law I cannot admit that the moral law forbids me to support my country in a just war."

"The League is dead; long live the United Nations!"

"Patriotism or any other version of the herd instinct seems to me an entirely inadequate basis of virtue. Christianity is from that point of view an explanation of and a support for an essential ingredient in man's nature—far the best, though necessarily imperfect."

"I was brought up from my earliest youth to believe in the enormous importance of peace. I have often heard my father, the late Lord Salisbury, say that, though he did not see how it was possible under the then existing circumstances to avoid wars altogether, yet he had never been able to satisfy himself that they were in principle morally defensible. Indeed, particularly in the latter part of his life, he made more than one speech in which he expressed the hope that, by some international combination, wars could in the future be prevented. He did not hesitate to express his belief that some such organization as we have since then attempted and erected in the League of Nations might furnish the solution of what he conceived to be the terrific evil of war."

"During the earlier years of the League we were fortunate in having many statesmen of outstanding ability who were convinced supporters of international cooperation under the League Covenant. … It is enough to say that under the leadership of those great men the first ten years of the League of Nations was a period of almost unbroken prosperity. The League moved from strength to strength. It established its organization and its Secretariat — a very remarkable achievement which has worked extremely well. Then, too, came the Permanent Court of International Justice, which has also been a very marked success and which, I trust, will establish ultimately the rule of law in all international affairs."

"In 1932 when the Disarmament Conference, after many years of preparation, at last assembled, it really looked as if we were approaching something like stabilized conditions in the world. I am still convinced that with a little more courage and foresight, particularly among those who were directing the policy of the so-called Great Powers, we might have achieved a limitation of international armaments, with all the enormously beneficial consequences which that would have given us. … No doubt the work has not succeeded; but I like to believe that it has not been altogether lost. We have laid a foundation on which, ultimately, we may build something in the nature of reform. And I am perfectly satisfied that the attempt to limit and reduce armaments by international action must be resumed and the sooner the better, if the world is to be saved from a fresh and bloody disaster."

"When one comes to try and analyse why the League succeeded so well in its first ten years of existence, no doubt the chief reason must be found in the immense horror which the War of 1914 had created amongst the human race. Almost all those engaged in the work at Geneva had personal knowledge of the vast slaughter and destruction which the war had produced. Many had been face to face with what looked like a vivid danger of relapse into barbarism in their own countries, and there was a tremendous urge to discover some effective prevention of future wars. It was under the impulse of these feelings that we worked in those days and that we made our appeal, not in vain, for the support of the public opinion of the world."

"In my own country, and perhaps in some others, the workers for the League of Nations are sometimes reproached with attaching too much importance to collective security and the forcible prevention of war. That only shows how short people's memories are in political affairs. As a matter of fact, during the first ten years of the League very little was said about these subjects. We dwelt on the social and humanitarian sides of the League. We urged disarmament and treaty revision. Great reliance — particularly in England — was placed not upon forcible action but upon public opinion. We preached — and, I am glad to say, preached successfully — the enormous importance of publicity in the actions of the League, so that the world might know not only what was being done but why it was being done at Geneva. We attached perhaps even too great importance to the conception that no nation would be so rash or so wicked as to set itself against the public opinion of the world."

"Unfortunately, the Manchurian crisis arose at a time when those nations who might have been expected to have perceived most clearly the necessity of preventing aggression were themselves in a condition of great internal difficulties owing to the financial crisis of those days. … And perhaps it was inevitable in such circumstances that our people should take little interest in any foreign questions. It was partly for these reasons, no doubt, that the conquest of Manchuria and the other northern provinces of China came to be consummated, and all the ambitious statesmen of the world were given an object lesson of how, in spite of the League and in spite of the Covenant, the old military policies could be successfully carried out. And may I venture to emphasize at this point a lesson which must never be forgotten: how much one problem in international affairs affects the whole conduct of those affairs. It was no doubt the failure of the League to check aggression in the Far East which first struck a blow at the whole system which we were trying to establish and which facilitated even greater attacks on international security."

"We see the world as it is now, after these defeats of the League, and we can compare it with what it was six or seven years ago. The comparison is certainly depressing; the contrast is terrible. And we have not yet reached a time when we can estimate the full material losses and human suffering which have been the direct result of the ambitions of one set of powers and the weakness of the others. Nor is there any purpose in attempting to do so. Let us, rather, examine where we now stand and what steps we ought to take in order to strengthen the international system and thrust back again the forces of reaction. In the first place, let us admit that the first ten years of the League were in a sense unnatural. The horror of war to which I have already alluded was necessarily far more vivid than it can be expected long to remain. That tremendous argument for peace, the horror of war, was a diminishing asset. Most of us, at that time, were, I think, quite well aware that unless we could get the international system into solidly effective working order in the first ten years, we were likely to have great difficulties in the succeeding period, and so it has proved."

"Don't think that I underrate the very great debt we owe to the old diplomacy. Before the new system came into existence, diplomacy was the only protection we had against war; and its achievements were of the utmost importance and value to the human race. But perhaps it is natural that, with rare exceptions, the whole strength of this very powerful organization has been against the new ideas and new principles at Geneva. The old diplomat liked to move with deliberation, in secret, following well-established traditions and working through what he loved to describe as "the usual channels". To him, the open debate carried on, not by professional diplomats, but by politicians and statesmen having little regard for the use of the technical phraseology of diplomacy and intent merely on reaching results which would make diplomacy unnecessary, was offensive to all his instincts."

"Professional opinion is almost inevitably against changes. It has been the operation of these and similar influences which has brought about, as I fear, a return to the old conception of what is called power diplomacy. To these conceptions, it is not too much to say, the idea of the complete opposition of war and peace was really foreign."

"During all the period before 1914, Europe and, in a degree, the whole world lived under the perpetual shadow of war, as we are doing, I am afraid, at the present time. No doubt after it had been going on for a certain time, people became callous. They thought war had been so often avoided that it would continue to be avoided. But nevertheless, all international policy was carried on on the basis that sooner or later war might and probably would have to be faced. This has again become true, and it casts its shadow over every form of human activity. The civil life of every nation is deformed and weakened and obstructed by this threat of war. We are wasting gigantic sums, sums far greater than we have ever wasted before, on preparations for war, because war has again become a very present possibility and, at the same time, its horrors and dangers are enormously greater than they were before 1914."

"The world is spending some three or four thousand million pounds sterling every year on preparations for what we all know will be, if it comes to pass, a tremendous danger to the whole of our civilization, whoever wins and whoever loses. And again we see rising up as the active principle of policy the idea that might is right; that the only thing that counts in international affairs is force; that the virtues of truth and mercy and tolerance are really not virtues at all, but symptoms of the softness and feebleness of human nature; and that the old conception of blood and iron is the only thing that is really true and can really be trusted. Accompanied by and causing this kind of revival of reaction, we see the revival of that extreme form of nationalism which believes not only that your own nation is superior to other nations but that all other nations are degenerate and inferior, and that the only function of the government of each country is to provide for the safety and welfare of that country, without regard to what may happen to other countries, adopting the ancient, pernicious, and devilish text: "Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost." At present these doctrines have not been accepted by the great majority of the peoples of the world. And even in those countries where they have most acceptance, they are put forward with a certain hesitation and coupled with the advocacy of peace — but, alas, peace based on the triumph of nationalistic ideas."

"Do not let us underrate the danger. It threatens everything we care for. For if it does succeed, it will not only bring us back to 1914 — in itself bad enough — but to something far worse even than that. For instance, it is now apparently part of the normal doctrine of those who advocate this system that no distinction can be made between combatants and non-combatants, and that a perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary method of warfare will be the wholesale destruction of unfortified cities and their inhabitants. No doubt there will be countervailing efforts to prevent such things happening; but there is, at any rate, one section of military thought which believes that the only way to stop the bombardment of the cities belonging to one belligerent will be the bombardment of the cities belonging to the other."

"The vast majority of the peoples of the world are against war and against aggression. If they make their wishes known and effective, war can be stopped. It all depends on whether they are willing to make the effort necessary for the purpose. For, that it will require an effort, no one who considers the history of the world on these subjects can doubt."

"Collective effort can produce collective security and that if such effort is not made, it is because the will and the courage to make it are not there. It is therefore still more important than it ever was to realize that the real choice before us in this matter is: are we going to permit uncontrolled nationalism to dominate civilized Europe, or are we going to say that the European countries (I don't deal with the whole world, but it applies to that, too) are really part of one community with a common interest in international peace?"

"No doubt there is a good deal that is attractive about the nationalist idea. It has a great history and it has a great deal of appeal to sentiment in itself admirable. But if we examine what it leads to, I do not doubt that we shall all agree that it must be rejected as a guiding principle of the nations of the world. For it necessarily leads to an exaggeration of the authority and dignity of the state to an extent which practically destroys individual action and individual responsibility. Nationalism leads to totalitarianism, and totalitarianism leads to idolatry. It becomes not a principle of politics but a new religion and, let me add, a false religion. It depends partly on a pseudoscientific doctrine of race which leads inevitably to the antithesis of all that we value in Christian morality. On the other hand, if we accept the view that all nations are interdependent, as individuals in any society are, we get precisely the opposite result. Such a principle leads to friendliness and good neighbourhood and, indeed, it is not too much to say that it leads to everything that we have hitherto understood as progress and civilization."

"The acceptance of the principle of international cooperation is of immense importance for all states. Even the states which are most tempted to believe that they can stand by themselves have very much to gain by such cooperation. And for the smaller states — the weaker states — it is vital to all their hopes of liberty and justice. It is necessary, when we say all this, to remind ourselves that the difference between uncontrolled nationalism and international cooperation does not necessarily depend on the form of government prevailing in the different states. It depends on the spirit in which those governments operate. There have been autocracies which have shown themselves liberal and just, even to other countries. There have been democracies which have been inspired, apparently, by feelings of bitter hatred for all foreigners."

"In some states of society it may even be that a form of dictatorship is necessary. No doubt in the hands of an able man it may possibly be more efficient than a democratic form of administration. But in the end, I am confident that a free government is best for free people. The old phrase, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people"*, represents a true ideal. It is best for the people as a whole. It is even more clearly the best for the development of the individual man and woman. And since in the end, the character and the prosperity of the nation depend on the character of the individuals that compose it, the form of government which best promotes individual development is the best for the people as a whole."

"We have gained very much from foreign sources and even from foreign immigration. The modern conception of keeping out all alien immigrants may be an economic necessity, but I am satisfied it is a psychological evil. The democratic principle is just as important in international as in national affairs."

"That these ideas will ultimately triumph, I have no doubt. Nor is it open to question that by the combined efforts of the peace-loving peoples they can be made to triumph now, before Europe has been again plunged into a fresh bloodbath. May Heaven grant that the statesmen of the world may realize this before it is too late and, by the exertion of the needed courage and prudence, restore again to the position of authority which it had only a few years ago, that great institution for the maintenance of peace on which the future of civilization so largely depends. I mean, of course, the League of Nations."

"Growing foreign perils were perceived and promptly and fully reported, first to London and then to ministers. Some permanent officials, such as Crowe in his time and later Vansittart, struggled hard to convince governments of the need for a strong foreign policy, and to puncture the prevailing euphoria with a bodkin of realism. They failed. They failed because there was another, competing influence on politicians, a more congenial and therefore in the end a more effective influence: a constellation of moralising internationalist cliques, each with its ideas-peddlers, its contact-men in high places, and its tame press. These busy romantics – from Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lord Robert Cecil on the Right, through liberals like Smuts and Gilbert Murray in the middle to Kingsley Martin and Clifford Allen on the Left – not only believed, admirably enough, that morality rather than power ought to govern relations between states but acted as though it did... The internationalists successfully imposed on governments their pretension to speak for the inarticulate and unsounded body of the British nation; that is, to represent public opinion at large."

"If the workers see themselves faced with defeat through starvation, they will prefer to go down fighting rather than fainting — and whether or not we leaders agree."

"The most conservative man in the world is the British Trade Unionist when you want to change him."

"What I say is this, and I am not afraid of saying it. I sit on a Colonial Development Committee under an Act passed by the Labour Government, and I see the expenditure of millions of pounds going on for the development of areas where native races have not yet begun to be industrialised. You talk about the coal trade. Ought there not to be some control against the possible development of coal in Tanganyika and in East Africa, which might come into competition with your coal here at a time when the world does not want it?"

"It is placing the Executive and the Movement in an absolutely wrong position to be taking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it."

"From the day Hitler came to power, I have felt that the democratic countries would have to face war... I cannot see any way of stopping Hitler and the other dictators except by force."

"The kind of middle-class mentality which actuates both those responsible for strategy and government has little knowledge of the new psychology and organizing ability of the totalitarian States. The forces we are fighting are governed neither by the old strategy nor follow the old tactics."

"They say Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930. I'm going to be Minister of Labour from 1940 to 1990."

"If anyone asks me who was responsible for the British policy leading up to the war, I should, as a Labour man myself, make a confession and say: "All of us". We refused absolutely to face the facts. When the issue came of arming or rearming millions of people in this country...we refused to face the real issue at a critical moment. But what is the good of blaming anybody? We cannot make our action retrospective whatever we do. We have to start from now and try to do the best we can."

"The fact of it is that all of us agreed to save 6d. in the Income Tax by breaking up the Army in peace-time and not having it prepared when war broke out...I will never be a party to it again."

"So long as I have any power at all I will never be a party to treating the Army in the future as it has been treated in the past. They broke up in peace-time the very foundations of the Army structure, and expected to build it up during war-time with the enemy at the gates."

"We need 720,000 men continuously employed in this industry... This is where you boys come in... [O]ur fighting men will not be able to achieve their purpose unless we get an adequate supply of coal."

"There should be a study of a house directly elected by the people of the world to whom the nations are accountable."

"I think that in the little argument going on now in New York and the differences that have arisen there are emerging three very fundamental principles. One is that it is improper to negotiate or attempt to negotiate or attempt to gain concessions by a great Power out of a little Power by means of occupying that country with your forces. It is the tradition — and I am not saying of one or other country only they have done it — but it is nineteenth-century imperialism that really must be left behind, and I believe that a solution will be found and the principle accepted that those of us who represent the great Powers will not do that."

"If I may again refer to the different political concepts, there is, I think rather unfortunately, running through all the speeches and writings of our Soviet friends the theory that they alone represent the workers — that they alone are democratic."

"I come now to the question of diplomatic personnel... It is said that I am admitting to the service Eton and Harrow. I am not one of those who decry Eton and Harrow. I was very glad of them in the Battle of Britain—by God, I was!—those fellows paid the price in the Royal Air Force on those fatal days. If the Universities are to be criticized, well, put up a vote of censure on Harold Laski, because it is the product of the Universities I have got to accept."

"That won't do at all .. we've got to have this .. I don't mind for myself, but I don't want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked to or at by a Secretary of State in the United States as I have just had in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs .. We've got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it."

"His Majesty's Government have thus been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles. There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine."

"[T]his Pact is a purely defensive arrangement for the common security of the countries who join it, and it is not directed against anyone. If we are accused of ganging up against any country or group of countries I should say simply: "Examine the text. There is no secrecy about it, and there are no secret clauses. You will not find in the text any provision which threatens the security or the well-being of any nation." No nation innocent of aggressive intentions need have the slightest fear or apprehension about it."

"[T]he Pact must be regarded as a concrete expression of the identity of view long held among the Western nations. It recognises the common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law between nations. It is not elaborate; its simplicity is apparent, but I can assure the House that it is based on an understanding and determination to preserve our way of life."

"(b) Under existing policy, however, we cannot agree to any proposals which mean our getting involved in the economic affairs of Europe beyond the point at which we could, if we wished, disengage ourselves. There are no grounds for abandoning this policy. (c) Any surrender of political sovereignty in matters of vital importance would jeopardise our ability to maintain the policy at (b). We must therefore maintain a very strict reserve in regard to schemes for the pooling of sovereignty or the establishment of European supra-national machinery."

"Our relationship with the rest of the Commonwealth and, almost equally important, our new relationship with the United States ensure that we must remain, as we have always been in the past, different in character from other European nations and fundamentally incapable of wholehearted integration with them."

"My policy is to be able to take a ticket at Victoria station and go anywhere I damn well please!"

"I should like to see in any reconstructed Government a strong Labour leader like Bevin."

"There is no doubt that the continuity of foreign policy—which caused one Labour man to remark of Ernest Bevin, "Hasn't Anthony Eden grown fat?"—blunted the blood-letting edge of party warfare during much of the Attlee government's tenure. Bevin was among several prominent Labour politicians who in the 1945 election had promised that Anglo-Russian relations would be better with a left-wing British Government: "Left can speak to left in comradeship and confidence", he had claimed. In office he proved a man big enough to eat his own unguarded words, and will rank high in history as one of the chief organisers of Western resistance against the advance of revolutionary Communism from the East. Particularly in the latter part of the 1945–50 Parliament I spoke with some frequency on foreign affairs against Bevin―or, rather, with Bevin; for, not only was our private relationship friendly, but on the major public issues arising from the "cold war" there was rarely much between us save a difference of emphasis or detail. I remember his taking me into the Smoking Room one evening and saying, "’Ave a beer, Rab, I'm worried about the A-rabs.""

"Bevin will, I think, do well. He knows a good deal, is prepared to read any amount, seems to take in what he does read, and is capable of making up his own mind and sticking up for his (or our) point of view against anyone. I think he's the best we could have had. He effaces Attlee, and at Big 3 meetings he does all the talking while Attlee nods his head convulsively and smokes his pipe."

"[Bevin is] far the most distinguished man the Labour Party have thrown up in my time."

"Ernest Bevin had many of the strongest characteristics of the English race. His manliness, his common sense, his rough simplicity, sturdiness and kind heart, easy geniality and generosity, all are qualities which we who live in the southern part of this famous island regard with admiration."

"Tizard was fond of describing an incident round a conference table at which the technical pros and cons of Britain starting her own nuclear power industry were being debated. It appeared that the cons were winning when Bevin suddenly intervened: “What!” he said. “Do you mean to say that our kids are going to have to grow up without the benefits of nuclear energy?” Tizard, explaining that no-one could really avoid answering such blunt questions, would add: “Fine man, Bevin.”"

"[T]he [Labour] Party's success electorally has depended upon its historical identification with working-class interests. Sidney and Beatrice Webb helped, but it was the trade unions that made Labour a major party of state. Ernest Bevin, not Methodism or Marxism, is Labour's heritage."

"Ernest Bevin died in April. I was deeply moved. By then I had come to regard him, as I still do, as one of the two greatest democratic politicians this century; the other is Franklin Roosevelt. The American patrician and the British trade unionist had two things in common – a powerful sense of direction which was rooted in moral principle, and a street-wise pragmatism in choosing the best route forward. Both men, too, had a constructive approach to politics. They were builders, not destroyers."

"In him [Winston Churchill] Bevin found at least one Minister willing to treat the trade unionists on an equal footing with the employers. It must be stressed that the readiness of the trade unions to support the Government and to set aside their old quarrels with Churchill was due in large measure to the fact that in Bevin they had a personality who could meet the Prime Minister on level terms. Bevin, as Minister of Labour, was a necessary condition for the partnership which, despite all strains, lasted until the Nazis were defeated."

"Hitherto I had regarded him with great admiration: from now onwards, I regarded him with great affection. He was intensely human, warm-hearted, simple and brave, and his common sense was as massive as his shoulders. He threw his whole heart and soul into the war, and no Englishman of any political party had a deeper love for his country, a greater pride in her past, or a surer faith in her future. At the same time he loved his fellow men the world over, and was very internationally minded. As Foreign Secretary in the years of Soviet expansion westwards he was one of the principal architects of the North Atlantic Alliance."

"[H]e was in every sense a big man, who concerned himself only with essentials. "You know my mind" meant that one could go away and take the necessary action without any further reference to him. If the subsequent telegrams and despatches did not quite meet his views, he never complained so long as they conformed broadly to his instructions. This made him very easy and pleasant to work for. He was equally magnanimous in negotiation. When dealing with the Russians he never pulled his punches, but he showed the utmost consideration for his Western associates... But he never allowed himself to be bounced into doing anything against his better judgement. Indeed it was misguised to try to bounce him into anything at all. "I will not be rushed", was his reply. He required time to read the files and to subject his experts to a penetrating cross-examination. Since he had the memory of an elephant, it behoved the expert to be careful. "That's not what you told me a year ago", might be his retort to an ill-considered piece of advice."

"He was interested in his predecessors in office and particularly Lord Curzon. He saw clearly that what hampered him most in the field of foreign affairs was the precarious state of our economy. So he envied his predecessors and he often asked me: "What would Lord Curzon do if he were in my shoes?" This led to reminiscences of the old Foreign Office, and I once told him a story of Lord Curzon's witty reply to an inappropriate telegram from an Ambassador abroad. More than a year later I went to see him on some Nato problem, but before I could broach my subject he said with a wicked grin: "I behaved like Lord Curzon this morning." "Oh, indeed," I replied. "What did you do?" "I saw a telegram from our Ambassador in Ruritania, reporting that reputable people in Ruritania were criticising the King's matrimonial antics. So I telegraphed back, 'Where have you found reputable people in Ruritania?'""

"In general his attitude was robust and British; and one could foretell exactly what it would be in any given circumstance. He was a rock."

"One thing which left its mark upon him was the bellicose attitude of the German Social Democrats in 1914, for which he never forgave them. He felt betrayed and it made him more anti-German than anything else the Germans ever did. His post-war experience confirmed him in his gloomy view of German Social Democracy and he found Dr. Adenauer much less difficult than Dr. Schumacher. But to the end he remained just as suspicious and resentful of Germany as he had ever been, although he never allowed his feelings on this subject to take command of his head."

"He is a powerful fellow, with a bull neck and a huge voice – a born leader...if there is trouble, mark my words! You will hear more of Bevin!"

"Some of us do not think that passports are the same since they were introduced by the words, "We, Ernest Bevin"."

"Putting all this together during March 1945, British and American leaders detected a fundamental and sinister shift of Soviet policy. Why it had happened, however, seemed less clear. Most attempts at explanation took as their premise the continued good faith of Stalin himself: that seemed to be one of the lessons of Yalta, indeed of wartime summitry as a whole. Therefore the change of heart was presumed to lie with his advisors—those sinister forces supposedly swirling around in the shadowy recesses of the Kremlin. British Cabinet Minister Ernest Bevin (soon to become foreign secretary) suggested that blame for the turnaround should be ascribed to Molotov. Alternatives postulated by the Foreign Office were the “Party bosses behind the scenes” or “Army marshals at the front” who were throwing their weight about amid the chaos of Eastern Europe. Churchill was similarly unwilling to blame Stalin. On 5 April he wrote darkly to FDR about “the Soviet leaders, whoever they may be.”"

"Churchill could therefore leave the Home Front, the organisation of the total man-power of the country, of its industrial and war production and supplies, the rationing of food, the financing of it all, to his colleagues. In all this, the most Churchillian figure among Labour leaders, Ernest Bevin, played a part second only to Churchill in winning the war."

"Both [Ernest Bevin and Winston Churchill] were as English as the oak and neither was afflicted with the tiresome form of intellectualism which is the curse of many of the younger Socialists."

"One of the biggest surprises the Soviets got in 1945 was the Labour Party victory in the British general election. Stalin may have distrusted Winston Churchill and seen in him the embodiment of British upper-class rule, but Winston was the devil he knew, just as he knew, through his spies, that the old Conservative had formed a bit of a sentimental relationship with Stalin as a fellow survivor and victor in World War II. Besides, there was already bad blood between British Labour and Soviet Bolshevism. The leaders of the Labour Party—Clement Attlee, who now became prime minister, and Ernest Bevin, who became foreign secretary—detested the Communists within their own trade union movement; Moscow’s supporters were responsible, both thought, for splitting the movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Bevin, an unskilled worker who had come to prominence as the head of the biggest of the British trade unions, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had fought Communist influence there and elsewhere relentlessly. In his postwar dealings with Stalin and Molotov, Bevin saw many of these battles repeated on an international scale. Molotov, said Bevin later, was like a Communist in a local Labour Party branch: if you treated him badly, he made the most of the grievance, and if you treated him well, he put up the price next day and abused you. A cabinet colleague viewed Bevin as “full of bright ideas, as well as earthy sense, but dangerously obsessed with Communists.""

"All political decisions are taken under great pressure, and if a treaty serves its turn for ten or twenty years, the wisdom of its framers is sufficiently confirmed."

"It is easier for eight or nine elderly men to feel their way towards unanimity if they are not compelled to conduct their converging maneuvers under the microscopes and telescopes of the press, but are permitted to shuffle about a little in slippers."

"I can see … only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen."

"Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels."

"Politics is the art of human happiness."

"One of the main purposes of university is to encourage people to think. But education for its own sake is a bit dodgy, too. The idea that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right... If we had less people studying philosophy, that would be unfortunate. I feel very less occupied by classics."

"I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the State to pay for them."

"I am not in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin)."

"The fact is, we're looking for a very small number of very evil needles in a very large haystack, which is the city of London."

"Unless during the first five years so great a degree of change has been accomplished as to deprive Capitalism of its power, it is unlikely that a Socialist Party will be able to maintain its position of control without adopting some exceptional means, such as the prolongation of the life of Parliament for a further term without an election."

"The [Labour] Government's first step will be to call Parliament together at the earliest moment and place before it an Emergency Powers Bill to be passed through in all its stages on the first day. This Bill will be wide enough in its terms to allow all that will be immediately necessary to be done by ministerial orders. These orders must be incapable of challenge in the Courts or in any way except in the House of Commons."

"In 1919 we pledged our honour as a country that we would disarm as soon as possible, and other countries did the same. In the face of that Germany accepted the Treaty of Versailles. We had done nothing. We had offered a Disarmament Conference which might well make the gods laugh if they desired the destruction of the human race. We had got to realize the extraordinary gravity of the European situation—the pass to which the National Government had brought the world. The worst Foreign Secretary for 200 years had led this country into folly after folly in the international field. They ought to warn the Government that in no circumstances would they break any of the pacts they had made not to go to war. There was only one effective way in which they could make that threat effective...and that was to call a general strike. It was for the people of this country, in answer to that call, to put themselves behind the trade unions and to compel the trade unions to draw up plans immediately for that great resistance."

"I do not believe in private armies but if the Fascists started a private army it might be for the Socialist and Communist Parties to do the same. When the Labour Party come into power they must act rapidly, and it will be necessary to deal with the House of Lords and the influence of the City of London. There is no doubt that we shall have to overcome opposition from Buckingham Palace and other places as well...There must not be time to allow the forces outside to gather and to exercise their influence upon the Legislature before the key-points of capitalism have been transferred to the control of the State, and I look upon these two key-points myself as being the land and finance. If other people become revolutionary, then the Socialist Government, like any other Government, must take steps to stamp out the revolution. The Socialist Government must not be mealy-mouthed about saying what they mean. They must make it perfectly clear that it is their intention to carry out the mandate they have been given by the people."

"The problem of dealing with the armed forces of the Crown is the most difficult one we will have to face when we do get into power. The Labour Party will have to face the fact that it is a class Party...It has to be prepared to take steps more forceful than even the steps taken at the time of the Ulster Rebellion."

"But it is a fallacy, if one is examining the methods by which security can be attained, to start upon the assumption, as so many hon. Members do, that we get security by an increase of air armaments or an increase of any other form of armaments."

"I cannot imagine the Labour Party coming into power without a first-rate financial crisis. That is why we ask for full emergency measures."

"It must be the duty of the next Labour Government in power to make an immediate challenge to the capitalist system and take the banks and the land into the custody of the people. The time had come to drop all hesitancy and to be bold. If they returned a Socialist Government next time, it was going to "do things," whatever it cost."

"We will have nothing to do with Imperialist or capitalist wars. If the time comes, as we hope it will, when the workers of this country own England as they do not own England to-day; if their policy is a policy of international socialism, then it may be that we may have to defend the system and the country against the marauders of some capitalist Power...the majority of the workers would be prepared to defend the system, but so long as they were being asked to defend something with which they profoundly disagreed, something which they believed to lie at the root of the dangers of the world to-day, then it was their duty to say that they would have nothing to do with the armed forces or with war. It was no exaggeration to say that to-day we were far more in danger of a holocaust than we were in 1913...in 1931 Lombard Street determined that it was time to finish the life of the Labour Government. It was finished not by the traditional method of a hostile vote in the Commons, but by means which [I] dared to mention in Nottingham—and caused a considerable uproar in the Press—the Buckingham Palace influence."

"You have only got to look at the pages of British imperial history to hide your head in shame that you are British."

"It is fundamental to Socialism that we should liquidate the British Empire as soon as we can."

"The National Government's only remedy for a difficult national problem was to arm and arm and arm, regardless of the lessons of history and the proved fact that armament racing could only end in war. ... If we are plunged in war I devoutly hope that the workers of this country will use it for the purpose of revolution. I hope that the present government can be made to understand that that will happen. It will be a very healthy thought for them to have in the back of their mind."

"Every possible effort should be made to stop recruiting for the Armed Forces. This may, and probably would, lead to some form of conscription being proposed or introduced. Thus would be provided a most favourable political platform upon which to fight the National Government."

"I do not believe it would be a bad thing for the British working-class if Germany defeated us. It would be a disaster for the profit-makers and capitalists, but not necessarily for the working-class."

"All sorts of excuses were being given why we should uphold rearmament, including the old-fashioned "For God, King and Country" patriotism, assisted by all the tomfoolery of jubilees and coronations."

"The reactionaries of our Movement are keen to prevent Socialists from coming into it. The last thing anyone should do is to pander to the reactionaries by staying out. James Maxton and Harry Pollitt should be the Leaders of the Labour Movement today"

"Money cannot make armaments. Armaments can only be made by the skill of the British working class, and it is the British working class who would be called upon to use them. To-day you have the most glorious opportunity that the workers have ever had if you will only use the necessity of capitalism in order to get power yourselves. The capitalists are in your hands. Refuse to make munitions, refuse to make armaments, and they are helpless. They would have to hand the control of the country over to you."

"The workers must now make it clear beyond all doubt that they will not support the Government or its armaments in its mad policy which it is now pursuing."

"I want to see the end of the British Empire in the world."

"Emphatically no, and I never have been."

"...we must avoid a competitive raising of wages and conditions in a scarce labour market, which raises prices. ... If we allow prices to rise because of internal costs rising, we shall lose and not gain our overseas markets, or at least not be able to gain new ones in the competition. Therefore, incentives must be strictly limited to increased production so that more earnings mean more production. We cannot in any circumstances afford to pay more for the same or less production. We must await the further raising of the levels of earnings until we can provide the goods upon which those earnings can be spent. In the same way, let me point out, that large profits drawn from industry today are just as inimical because they, too, raise the price levels and, furthermore, they offer an immediate temptation for the demand for greater salaries."

"We must bring home to the people the seriousness of the country's present plight and the future problems that we face. We must convince them of their power to overcome all difficulties by common effort. We must draw out from people that courage and determination which have always been the hallmarks of the British character."

"Production, and production alone, can find us relief in our immediate situation. It is no part of the British character to resign ourselves to such difficulties or to fail to take the measures, however hard, to overcome them. It has been truly said that by our faith we can move mountains. It is by our faith in ourselves, in our country, in the free democratic traditions for which the people of this country have for centuries fought and battled, and for which they must fight again as willingly on the economic front as upon the oceans, on the land and in the air, it is by our faith in the deep spiritual values that we acknowledge in our Christian faith, that we shall be enabled and inspired to move the present mountains of our difficulties, and so emerge into that new and fertile plain of prosperity which we shall travel in happiness only as the result of our own efforts and our own vision."

"...we do not contemplate taking any action to alter the rate of sterling in relation to other currencies, as we do not believe that this will be rendered necessary or advisable."

"[In the case of sterling devaluation was] neither necessary nor will it take place."