British Peers

"Let me make one thing absolutely clear. The National Health Service is safe with us."

"The spirit of the South Atlantic was the spirit of Britain at her best. It has been said that we surprised the world, that British patriotism was rediscovered in those spring days. Mr. President, it was never really lost."

"The battle for women's rights has been largely won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone for ever. And I hope they are. I hated those strident tones that you still hear from some Women's Libbers'."

"The battle of the South Atlantic was not won by ignoring the dangers or denying the risks. It was achieved by men and women who had no illusions about the difficulties. We faced them squarely and we were determined to overcome...What has indeed happened is that now once again Britain is not prepared to be pushed around. We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new-found confidence—born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away...we rejoice that Britain has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won."

"When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts. The people who thought that Britain could no longer seize the initiative for herself. The people who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did. Those who believed that our decline was irreversible—that we could never again be what we were. There were those who would not admit it—even perhaps some here today—people who would have strenuously denied the suggestion but—in their heart of hearts—they too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in courage, and in resolution. We have not changed. When the demands of war and the dangers to our own people call us to arms—then we British are as we have always been: competent, courageous and resolute."

"We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag. We fought with the support of so many throughout the world: the Security Council, the Commonwealth, the European Community, and the United States. Yet we also fought alone – for we fought for our own sovereign territory."

"I do not believe that people who go on strike in this country have a legitimate cause. Throughout the period of the Labour Government and this one, I have never supported any strikes in this country."

"The battle of the Falklands was a remarkable military operation, boldly planned, bravely executed, and brilliantly accomplished. We owe an enormous debt to the British forces and to the Merchant Marine. We honour them all. They have been supported by a people united in defence of our way of life and of our sovereign territory."

"The fact is that the two major nuclear powers have not gone to war against each other—because, I believe, nuclear weapons are achieving their purpose as a deterrent that makes the prospect of war too horrific. It is noteworthy that, since the last world war, there have been 140 conventional wars, fought with ordinary weapons, which are themselves horrific, and that nuclear weapons have been a deterrent to war. I therefore believe that we should keep them."

"Difficult days lie ahead, but Britain will face them in the conviction that our cause is just and in the knowledge that we have been doing everything reasonable to secure a negotiated settlement. The principles that we are defending are fundamental to everything that this Parliament and this country stand for. They are the principles of democracy and the rule of law...Britain has a responsibility towards the islanders to restore their democratic way of life. She has a duty to the whole world to show that aggression will not succeed and to uphold the cause of freedom."

"Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the marines... Rejoice."

"I am not talking about failure, I am talking about my supreme confidence in the British fleet...superlative ships, excellent equipment, the most highly trained professional group of men, the most honourable and brave members of Her Majesty's Service. Failure? Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? “Failure—the possibilities do not exist”. That is the way we must look at it, with all our professionalism, all our flair and every single bit of native cunning, every single bit of professionalism and all our equipment and we must go out calmly, quietly, to succeed."

"We have to recover those islands, we have to recover them for the people on them are British and British stock and they still owe allegiance to the Crown and want to be British. We have to do what is necessary to recover those islands...When you stop a dictator there are always risks but there are great risks in not stopping a dictator. My generation learned that a long time ago."

"The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own allegiance. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. It is the wish of the British people and the duty of Her Majesty's Government to do everything that we can to uphold that right. That will be our hope and our endeavour and, I believe, the resolve of every Member of the House."

"I must tell the House that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government's objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and are returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment...We cannot allow the democratic rights of the islanders to be denied by the territorial ambitions of Argentina."

"I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure."

"The principle that adequate health care should be provided for all, regardless of ability to pay, must be the foundation of any arrangements for financing the Health Service."

"I count myself among those politicians who operate from conviction. For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word “consensus”. When I asked one of my Commonwealth colleagues at this Conference why he kept saying that there was a “consensus” on a certain matter, another replied in a flash “consensus is the word you use when you can't get agreement”! To me consensus seems to be—the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects.—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner “I stand for consensus”?"

"My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day's work for an honest day's pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police."

"In this country over the last five years pay has doubled, whereas output has slightly fallen. That is totally different from the position with many of our competitors. Pay in those countries has gone up hand in hand with productivity. Consequently, they have the jobs and we have a larger proportion of the unemployment."

"Margaret Thatcher was beyond argument a great Prime Minister. Her tragedy is that she may be remembered less for the brilliance of her many achievements than for the recklessness with which she later sought to impose her own increasingly uncompromising views."

"Oh yes, she is dramatically exciting! She has an openness, a frankness, an enthusiasm and an unwillingness to be cowed and overcome by tiredness which makes her enormous fun to work with. You can never be quite sure on issues you have never discussed with her what her instinctive reaction will be, but it's bound to be interesting. She is as willing as any politician to be pre-occupied with the difficulties of the situation. Britain has not been winning for many years and the business of turning us round so that we begin to become winners again instead of losers is very difficult and there are many days when you go into the office and yet again the cards seem to fall in the wrong way. In politics as in any other walk of life, you just wonder when your lucky breaks are going to come back again. Now Margaret is quite undaunted by that. She is willing to be pre-occupied with the difficulties and discuss them because they have to be discussed, but you never feel that she is being overborne by them and she is able to show that even on the days when it isn't fun, she thinks it's well worth while having a try!"

"She was motivated by a real sense of shame at what her country had become, and a manic sense of mission that never left her. She showed phenomenal energy and stamina, a readiness to fight rather than compromise, and, once engaged, an absolute refusal to haul up the white flag. Her achievements, judged simply in terms of what faced her in 1979, were truly astonishing. She knew what was happening to the country, but, unlike most of her contemporaries, she believed it could be saved. Ten years later she had been proved right about the country, the unions, the 1981 Budget, the Falklands, the miners, and right – in my view – about Europe and the single currency. She had transformed Britain's prospects where other politicians who had appeared cleverer, more experienced and more sophisticated had failed."

"You've got to put her in the same category as Bloody Mary, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Anne and Queen Victoria. However, she reminds me most of Queen Elizabeth I out of these four. Her handling of men is not dissimilar. I mean, if you had been a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I you would never have known quite whether you were going to get the treatment of an admired friend, or a poke in the eye with an umbrella."

"She comes from a certain social background, one step up the ladder of economic success, with it, a lot of the characteristics that you associate with people who've just made it. A certain intolerance of those who haven't, a certain suspicion of those who are further up the ladder, a certain bigotry. Slightly over-simplistic solutions about the nature of the society in which they live. And then she went to university and got a fantastic degree and she had a fine mind."

"I have always admired you, because you are a true commitment politician, as I trust I am... Politically, I cannot be sorry that you are no longer PM. Yet in a personal sense I am terribly sorry as although I disagreed with you, no one could say you were not honest, courageous and with great integrity."

"A mixture of a matron at a minor public school and a guard in a concentration camp."

"It is Mrs Thatcher's great merit that she has broken with the Keynesian immorality of 'in the long run we are all dead' and to have concentrated on the long run future of the country irrespective of possible effects on the electors. Keynesian irresponsibility naturally appeals to the timid wets... Mrs Thatcher's courage makes her put the long run future of the country first. After being much too long restrained by the believers in the Muddle of the Middle, her new stature ought to enable her to guide us by her true vision."

"Margaret Thatcher was the hardest-working head of Government I ever met. Her application was prodigious and she was always extraordinarily well briefed for every meeting. Whatever the subject, she could press her sometimes jarring and belligerent viewpoints with great authority, and for that I deeply respected her."

"[N]o British Prime Minister for whom I worked would have got a better deal than Margaret Thatcher and several would probably have settled for something inferior."

"She does have a very natural understanding of what the people, the majority, the good hearted, the people who really care about the country, think... She doesn't actually have that superior feeling about ordinary people's views. She does have a real belief that they are worthwhile. She isn't in any way snooty, intellectually snooty, she has a simplicity which enables her to feel for people who say, "I don't want old ladies mugged on the street. If we hanged the muggers then they wouldn't be mugged on the street." She managed to disentangle herself from the rather artificial reactions of the House of Commons, of government, of metropolitan man. She can react as ordinary people do to a series of events, and that's tremendous strength."

"[Thatcher] began by asking what benefits ordinary people had received after 3½ years of Socialism. The Government should do what any good housewife would do if money was short—look at their accounts and see what was wrong."

"I am the rebel head of an establishment government."

"There really is no alternative."

"The only way to do the best you can is to work as hard as you can."

"They don't patronize me for being a woman. Nobody puts me down."

"To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. [laughter] The lady's not for turning."

"If simply printing and spending more money would cure our problems we should by now be one of the wealthiest nations in the Western world.—In the lifetime of the last Labour Government the amount of money in the economy went up by £20 thousand million but the number of jobs did not increase. Indeed, unemployment doubled and prices more than doubled too.—In the last three years (1976–79) the amount of money in the economy went up by 50%; but yet only 4%; went into output, the rest into higher prices and imports. The record is clear, printing money doesn't create jobs, it only creates more inflation. But there is another word for printing money—they call it “reflection”. It is a cosy word but a fraudulent device. It cuts the value of every pound in circulation, of every pound the thrifty have saved. It means spending money you can't afford, haven't earned and haven't got. You would accept that it is neither moral nor responsible for a family to live beyond its means. Equally it is neither moral nor responsible for a Government to spend beyond the nation's means, even for services which may be desirable. So we must curb public spending to amounts that can be financed by taxation at tolerable levels and borrowing at reasonable rates of interest."

"Let me make one point about the hunger strike in the Maze prison. I want this to be utterly clear. There can be no political justification for murder or any other crime. The Government will never concede political status to the hunger strikers, or to any others convicted of criminal offences in the Province."

"It's like a nurse looking after an ill patient. Which is the better nurse? The one who smothers the patient with sympathy and says ‘never mind, dear, there there, you just lie back and I'll bring you all your meals. I'll bring you all your papers. Just lie back, I'll look after you’? Or the nurse who says ‘Now, come on. Shake out of it. I know you've had an operation yesterday. It's time you put your feet to the ground and took a few steps. That's right, dear, that's right. Now get back and take a few more tomorrow’...Which is the one most likely to get results? The one who says, come on you can do it. That's me."

"I love argument, I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job."

"To many of us it seems that there is precious little difference between the policies of the Communist Party and the policies of the Labour Party."

"May I make one point absolutely clear; the time we went there was a hunger strike on in the Maze, no-one has asked me, no-one in official authority or in high places has ever asked me to give political status to people who've been convicted of terrible crimes like murder, wounding, maming, causing explosions. That used to be asked. I think one of the reasons why we're not asked now is because we have got over our viewpoint and because everyone knows that this government will not budge on things which it regards as vital. There is no such thing as political murder. There is murder. There is no such things as causing explosions for political purposes and risking the lives of innocent men women and children. It is causing explosion, it is a crime, and they know that neither I, nor any member of my government will be moved on this. And we won through on that. And everyone knows it."

"For years there was a widespread belief that we could have inflation and a high level of employment at the same time. For years there was a belief that we could secure more jobs if we were prepared to put up with a little more inflation—always a little more, it was thought. The experience of the past 25 years has taught us on the Government Benches that those beliefs were a most damaging illusion. Inflation and unemployment, instead of moving in opposite directions, rose inexorably together. As Governments tried to stimulate employment by pumping money into the economy they caused inflation. The inflation led to higher costs. The higher costs meant loss of ability to compete. The few jobs that we had gained were soon lost; and so were a lot more with them. And then, from a higher level of unemployment and inflation, the process was started all over again, and each time round both inflation and unemployment rose. In Parliament after Parliament, each new Government had a higher average rate of inflation and unemployment than the preceding Government. It is that cycle that we have set out to break."

"The nation is but an enlarged family."

"Those terrorists will carry their determination to disrupt society to any lengths. Once again we have a hunger strike at the Maze Prison in the quest for what they call political status. There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status."

"I am a great admirer of Professor Hayek. Some of his books are absolutely supreme—“The Constitution of Liberty” and the three volumes on “Law, Legislation and Liberty”—and would be well read by almost every hon. Member."

"In the past our people have made sacrifices, only to find at the eleventh hour their government had lost its nerve and the sacrifice had been in vain. It shall not be in vain this time. This Conservative Government, not yet two years in office, will hold fast until the future of our country is assured...This is the road I am resolved to follow. This is the path I must go. I ask all who have the spirit—the bold, the steadfast and the young in heart—to stand and join with me as we go forward."

"There can be no question of political status for someone who is serving a sentence for crime. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political. To give concessions on political status would put many people in jeopardy."

"Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul."