People From London

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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.’"

"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."

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"The Empire has stood together! My father is vindicated."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"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.)"

"The day of small nations has passed away; the day of Empires has come."

"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.)"

"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."

"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.)"

"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."

"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.)"

"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."

"London is the clearing-house of the world."

"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."