Members Of The Parliament Of The United Kingdom

"A wonderful mixture of Rasputin and Tommy Cooper."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

""Moderates" behind whom Red Fascism spreads."

"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."

"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."

"Monetarism is not enough."

"We are over-governed, over-spent, over-taxed, over-borrowed and over-manned."

"Keynes was certainly not a Keynesian."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"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."

"[The NHS is] a great national blessing enabling people to live longer and happier lives."

"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."

"I hope you have read the election programme of the Labour Party...this is not socialism. It is Bolshevism run mad."

"I would like to see the word 'nationalization' banned from the socialist vocabulary."

"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."

"Truth," it has been said, "is the first casualty of war."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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 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."

"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."

"Keir Hardie's socialism [was] idealistic in character, drawn more from Methodism and Robert Burns than from Karl Marx."