Conservative Party Uk Politicians

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"You'll lose."

"A tragedy for the party. He's got no ideas, no experience and no hope."

"Do you know what Margaret Thatcher did in her first Budget? Introduced VAT on yachts! It somewhat ruined my retirement."

"I am sure that entering the exchange rate mechanism was absolutely right and is still right. I regret that we did not do so five years earlier, but that is history. Economic monetary union must come as soon as possible, and with it the single currency. Industry wants the single currency, and we must pay attention to the requests and demands of industry."

"The end of the negotiations is a blow to the cause of the wider European unity for which we have been striving. We are a part of Europe, by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilization … There have been times in the history of Europe when it has been only too plain how European we are; and there have been many millions of people who have been grateful for it. I say to my colleagues: they should have no fear. We in Britain are not going to turn out backs on the mainland of Europe or the countries of the Community."

"Action, not words."

"Robin Day: But how low does your personal rating, among your own supporters, have to go before you consider yourself a liability to the party you lead? Edward Heath: Well, popularity isn't everything. In fact it isn't the most important thing. What matters is doing what you believe to be right, and that's what I've always tried to do and I shall go on doing. The question doesn't arise."

"I have told Mr Powell that I consider the speech he made in Birmingham yesterday to have been racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions. This is unacceptable from one of the leaders of the Conservative Party"

"That, although a century out of date, would certainly be a distinctive, different policy. But it would not be a Conservative policy and it would not provide a Conservative alternative. For better or worse the central Government is already responsible, in some way or another, for nearly half the activities of Britain. It is by far the biggest spender and the biggest employer."

"If there are any who believe that immigrants to this country, most of whom have already become British citizens, could be forcibly deported because they are coloured people...then that I must repudiate, absolutely and completely."

"I have always had a hidden wish, a frustrated desire, to run a hotel."

"My position has remained the same. I have had more to do, at first hand, with European policy than any other person in politics today."

"It would not be in the interests of the Community that its enlargement should take place except with the full-hearted consent of the parliaments and its peoples of the new member countries."

"Everyone who is already here must be treated as equal before the law."

"The conclusion of Mr. Powell's latest speech as I understand it—certainly its implication—is that we should do nothing to help boroughs and cities like Birmingham and Wolverhampton that have these problems, in the hope that if only we let the housing get bad enough, the schools overcrowded enough, and the social services overburdened enough, the immigrants will go away of their own accord, and the problems will disappear. It is an example of man's inhumanity to man which is absolutely intolerable in a Christian, civilized society."

"He Mick McGahey] has made it quite plain over the weekend—as has another miners' leader—that the object of what they are doing is not a wage negotiation... Its purpose is...to get rid of the elected government of the day. Now that is entirely a political approach and, he has said quite openly, he wishes to do it in order to get a left-wing government and obviously he expects a left-wing government to toe the line as far as he is concerned."

"We shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war."

"As Prime Minister, I want to speak to you, simply and plainly, about the grave emergency now facing our country. In the House of Commons this afternoon I announced more severe restriction on the use of electricity. You may already have heard the details of these. We are asking you to to cut down to the absolute minimum the use of electricity for heating, and for other purposes in your homes. We are limiting the use of electricity by almost all factories, shops, and offices, to three days a week."

"The miners' leaders have said more than once that they are confronting the Government, not the National Coal Board. I believe they may not yet have fully understood the implications of this approach. For it is just not the government—it is the expressed will of the elected representatives of the people in Parliament. That is the main difference between the dispute in 1972 and the dispute in 1973 and I believe that it will prove decisive. For the authority of the elected Parliament is the cornerstone of our democracy, and is recognized as such by the overwhelming majority of people in this country"

"Our problem at the moment is a problem of success."

"The British government and the British people have been through a searching debate during the last few years on the subject of their relations with Europe. The result of this debate has been our present application. It was a decision arrived at, not on any narrow or short-term grounds, but as a result of a thorough assessment over a considerable period of the needs of our own country, of Europe and of the free world as a whole. We recognise it as a great decision, a turning point in our history, and we take it in all seriousness. In saying that we wish to join the EEC, we mean that we desire to become full, whole-hearted and active members of the European Community in its widest sense and to go forward with you in the building of a new Europe."

"It is the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism, but one should not suggest that the whole of British industry consists of practices of this kind."

"Government, management and unions...have now...jointly embarked for the first time in Britain, on the path of working out together how to create and share the nation's wealth for the benefit of all the people. It is an offer to employers and unions to share fully with the Government the benefits and the obligations involved in running the national economy."

"There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty, even that we shall begin to lose our national identity. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified and exaggerated. We shall, of course, be accepting the common procedures of Community life, just as we accept those of other organizations which we have joined. But within the framework of a developing Community the identity of national states will be maintained."

"Do we have the courage to forget the dissensions and the suspicions that have divided us, and to learn to work together for lasting peace and prosperity, not just for our country but for a continent? Do we have the wisdom to achieve by construction and cooperation what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by destruction and by conquest? ... Let us all recognise the opportunity that is now presented to us for what it is: the chance to unite Western Europe."

"[I]ncreasingly the use of violence has become not the last resort of the desperate, but the first resort of those whose simple unconstructive aim is anarchy. That we must all surely resist. Anarchy is not a prescription for peace, justice and progress. It achieves nothing but the suffering of innocent men and women."

"[W]e must recognise a new threat to the peace of the nations, indeed to the very fabric of society. We have seen in the last few years the growth of a cult of political violence, preached and practised not so much between states as within them. It is a sombre thought but it may be that in the 1970s civil war, not war between nations, will be the main danger we will face."

"We will have to embark on a change so radical, a revolution so quiet and yet so total, that it will go far beyond the programme for a parliament."

"No one can deny that today the major cause of the inflation from which we are suffering is the excessive wage demands... It is the responsibility of an employer, direct or indirect...if they go their own way and accede to irresponsible wage demands which damage their own firms and create a loss of jobs for those who work in them, then the Government are certainly not going to step in and rescue them from the consequences of their own actions."

"You will see that our strategy is clear. It is to reorganise the functions of Government, to leave more to individual or to corporate effort, to make savings in Government expenditure, to provide room for greater incentives to men and women and to firms and businesses. Our strategy is to encourage them more and more to take their own decisions, to stand on their own feet, to accept responsibility for themselves and for their families."

"One lonely voice still shouting labour!"

"It was wildly exciting. It certainly wasn't the highest feeling I've ever had, but it was one of them. In those days, security was not as good as today. Just afterwards, some chap was able to get at me and stab the back of my neck with a cigarette. It wasn't very pleasant."

"This was a secret meeting on a secret tour which nobody is supposed to know about. It means that there are men, and perhaps women, in this country walking around with eggs in their pockets, just on the off-chance of seeing the Prime Minister."

"This would, at a stroke, reduce the rise in prices, increase production and reduce unemployment."

"We may be a small island. We're not a small people... For the last six years the Government of this country...have let us be treated as second rate. They even plan for us to stay second rate. Because that's what Labour policies mean... Now I don't intend to stand by and see this happen... Do you want a better tomorrow? ... That's what I will work for with all my strength and with all my heart. I give you my word and I will keep my word."

"I see it stated on good authority that there are no less than 12 millions of men, of armed men, maintained by the five Powers of Continental Europe. I do not say that this should diminish our confidence in peace, but I feel that there is a general impression pervading the community—one of those wide public impressions affecting every mind and every class which carries by its very universality the warrant of its truth—which tells us that in the midst of so much preparation we must not remain unprepared. (Cheers.) ... Your preparation is for the purpose of meeting any force which, by any sinister and unforeseen contingency, may be brought against you; and in proportion as the forces which might be brought against you increase in volume and in power, in that proportion is laid upon you the stern and inevitable necessity of increasing your preparations also. (Cheers.)"

"Shortly before he died, I invited Clement Attlee to Chequers ... I asked him, parties and politics apart, whom he regarded the best prime minister qua prime minister since he first took an interest in politics. He had no hesitation – "Salisbury"."

"He is haughty and proud, of an intractable temper. He cannot submit to party discipline...he is too Conservative for modern times. He is a High Churchman. In politics he is a Tory. His motto in politics and religion is "No Surrender!" ... In short he is a man of a past age, has no sympathy with the life, the stir and growth of the present, and no belief in the future."

"Lord Salisbury was a student, a man of intellectual, religious and scientific interests, an aristocrat by upbringing and by nature, averse from all methods of réclame. He stood for the old traditions of the British political nobles, bearing the load of public care with a sense of inherited responsibility. He had indeed accepted without reserve the new democratic conditions of political power, although in earlier years he had put up the last open resistance to Disraeli's Bill for household franchise. His gravity was relieved by a pungency in epigram, and a more than royal indifference to the effect of any words that fell from his lips. Though astute in his sense of what was practical, and appealing less often than Gladstone to ideal motives, he stood for character, principle and tradition, maintained public life on a high level, and despised the sensationalism of the journalist and the tricks of the politician."

"I remember there was a very well-known speech of Salisbury's—the great Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister for thirteen years, a remarkable man, I often look back at his work—saying ‘You must never rely on the rightness of your cause. It isn't enough; it will not see you through. You are governing a country; trust only in your own defence’. And of course it was very very good advice."

"There is nothing in the history of our foreign policy to compare with the prolonged and patient way in which Salisbury solved the difficulties of the British position in Egypt, isolating Egypt first from one country and then another, and finally staging the open challenge to France at Fashoda in 1898. Indeed, I would say that Salisbury laid down the lines on which British foreign policy was to develop for many years after his death: he saw that so long as we were quarrelling with France and Russia all over the world...we were dependent on German favour, and he was determined to escape this favour... At the very basis of his thoughts was the fact that has been brought home to us by two great wars: if England and Russia, the two Great Powers on the edge of Europe, fall out, they will have Europe, in the shape of Germany, on their backs. That is why Salisbury, greatest of our foreign secretaries, was the greatest advocate of Anglo-Russian cooperation."

"He was a first-rate writer. His letters and dispatches are still, after half a century, a delight to read – no one could say the same of Peel or even of Gladstone. His political journalism is as fresh as when it was written. His essay on the Polish question, for instance, written in 1863, is the most sensible thing ever written on Poland and Russia."

"Salisbury's ideas on international society and politics were just as much influenced as his views on internal questions by his pessimism about human nature and his overriding desire for stability and security. He started from the observation that international relations were something like a Hobbesian state of nature, the nations existing in a condition of virtual anarchy, without a common law. It was this that made it ridiculous and dangerous to follow what he lampooned as "the preaching school of politicians" in wishing to direct the country's foreign policy according to the mild and precise morality that was properly applicable to the conduct of individuals... So-called international law helped to mitigate disputes, but it could not stop aggression... A nation had to look after itself: its policy had to be egoistical, and the statesmen who conducted that policy held a trust to act accordingly, even if this meant pursuing in the interest of the state a course of selfishness which their principles would preclude in private life. Salisbury saw that the central factor in international politics was power, and expressed his vivid contempt for the type of thinking about external relations common among his political opponents, which, lulled by years of apparent insular security, had become so abstract and moralistic that it was doubtful whether it could grapple with the hard problems involved in maintaining England's position in an era when her relative physical force in the world was declining."

"[H]e had small taste for theorising, and did not set out to be a political thinker in any large or systematic sense. Yet his fundamental feelings and beliefs, if they were never consciously organised into a political philosophy, were necessarily prime determinants of his political action. Moreover, they represent very well an important strain of Conservative thought. It is not, despite large elements in common and a virtual identity of practical outcome, typical Toryism: Salisbury was too utilitarian, too lacking in reverence for authority, prescription, and tradition, too cynical and pessimistic perhaps, for that. It is an intellectual and sophisticated Toryism, which employs an apparatus of close empirical reasoning to support the conclusions at which it is programmed by instinctive predilection to arrive. It is, or desires to be, a clear, hard, logical creed, realistic and sceptical, seeking an argumentative basis for resistance to radical change not in the sentimental or mystical idealisation but in the rational justification of the existing order. It is, in short, Toryism for the clever man."

"Into the 'progressive' strain of modern Conservatism he simply will not fit."

"Calm, sardonic, and pessimistic, Salisbury in many ways matched the spirit of the times. He did not, like Gladstone, assert the importance of moral principle in international life. His objective, in an increasingly dangerous world, was to protect essential British interests (the defence of the Raj against Russian incursions and the protection of the sea lanes to India through the Suez Canal and through the longer route via South Africa across the Indian Ocean), but to do so by preserving the peace and thus minimizing expenditure in the cause of domestic stability. To this difficult task Salisbury brought two great diplomatic skills. He clearly saw the interconnections between imperial issues and shifts in the European power game; and he showed a remarkable aptitude for isolating whichever foreign power happened, at any moment, to be Britain's principal enemy."

"He took over the Foreign Office in January 1887... Salisbury quickly restored Britain's prestige, earning the grudging respect even of Bismarck, who found him a wily and elusive negotiator."

"Salisbury was animated by the knowledge that it is easier to lose good things than to create them, and that the task of politics is to understand an inheritance of laws and institutions, and to protect it from unnecessary experiment. That vision of politics is perhaps peculiar to the English-speaking world. And it comes to us precisely from our great tradition of political amateurism. It is ambition and the lust for power that inspires people to march to the drum of progress. The person who acquires political power by the accident of birth, who has nothing to gain from its exercise in the way of money, status or recognition, and who regards the business of government as the wise disposition of inherited goods, is a great force for stability. If an explanation is needed of the peace that prevailed in England, when the whole of Europe was eager for revolution and war, then it is to be found in people like Lord Salisbury."

"As Kipling predicted, all the pomp of her imperial yesterday "is one with Nineveh and Tyre". His countrymen can, however, take solace from the knowledge that in Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the great Marquess of Salisbury, they had a leader who brought Britain to a pitch of greatness never seen before or since."