"Disraeli has become a code name for "collectivist" or, as they now put it, rather inaccurately, "corporatist" policies. He is the mascot of the "wets". This is a grievous distortion of history. It is true that, in his romantic youth, he wrote the only phrase which the majority of his present-day admirers have ever read from his pen – about there being a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor. His paternalism, however, was superficial. In so far as he ever favoured authoritarian measures for the defence of what are now ludicrously called the "under-privileged" he favoured them not so much in the name of abstract social justice as in that of national cohesion. What he believed in was the Nation which he tended in those benighted days to call the Race. This is his one, valid, surviving contribution to Conservative thinking. He was an imperialist."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandNovelists from EnglandEssayists from EnglandJews from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Sources
T. E. Utley, 'Peel's misplaced mantle', The Times (9 February 1988), p. 16
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli
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Benjamin Disraeli
1804 – 1881
britischer Politiker
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