Political Leaders

"The English state was the only one which finally resolved the great debate of the Middle Ages by the principle of supremacy, that is, by refusing to recognise that there could be any power or right of human compulsion over its members which derived from a source outside the realm, or that there could be concurrent sources of compulsion within the realm. This solution reflects, and no doubt emphasises, a characteristic of this nation which differentiates it from other European nations on either side of the Atlantic more than we or they commonly recognise. On the European mainland and in America concurrence of powers and limitation of sovereignty are taken for granted; in Britain we simply do not imagine them... In the United Kingdom the ultimate sovereignty resides in one person, upon whose authority when in Parliament the law knows no limitations."

"Once got within the walls, physical and liturgical, of the Church of England, I was proud enough and English enough to see that it was a goodly inheritance from which, like a prodigal son, I had so long deliberately exiled myself. However, like someone who returns after long absence to an ancestral home, I looked at the half-familiar scenes with new eyes. Here was yet another kind of truth which I had not suspected. For all the wonders of the national church and its mother tongue, there was no stopping-place there, no rest for the soles of the feet. I discovered that whoever entered the south door of a parish church had stepped inside the Church Universal. The more he laboured to understand and to render intelligible the inheritance of his own church, the more plainly he would confront the fact of the Catholic Church: that the truth of the Gospel and the truth of the Church, the existence of the Gospel and the existence of the Church, the knowledge of the Gospel and the knowledge of the Church, are indivisible, and the one unthinkable without the other. I had been compelled to acknowledge a truth that is corporate, and when I had done so, I noticed that the loyalties I had lived with in war and peace had been corporate too."

"I remember in the winter of 1945–46 cycling by myself along an open road near Muttra, when a young Brahmin drew alongside me and after some conversation in Urdu between us, pointed to his home some hundred yards from the road and suggested I go there with him for a drink of water. While my hosts used a brass vessel, I drank from a rough earthen tumbler, which, on thanking them and taking my leave, I smashed on the ground to show that I knew it could not anyhow be used again. 'He is a Hindu,' they said to one another with a smile. There is a sense in which it had been true: the British were married to India, as Venice was married to the sea."

"I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me...it is something I cannot alter."

"Now there are a lot of people about whom it behoves to be very cautious in accusing their political opponents of past or prospective U-turns. In acrobatics Harold Wilson, for all his nimbleness and skill, is simply no match for the breathtaking, thoroughgoing efficiency of the present Prime Minister [Heckler: "Judas!"] Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!"

"The question is: can they now be prevented from taking back into their own hands the decision about their identity and their form of government which truly was theirs all along? I do not believe they can be prevented: for they are now, at a general election, provided with a clear, definite and practicable alternative, namely, a fundamental renegotiation directed to regain free access to world food markets and recover or retain the powers of Parliament, a renegotiation to be followed in any event by a specific submission of the outcome to the electorate, a renegotiation protected by an immediate moratorium or stop on all further integration of the UK into the Community. This alternative is offered, as such an alternative must be in our parliamentary democracy, by a political party capable of securing a majority in the House of Commons and sustaining a Government."

"It is for me supremely that kind of question on which, if there be a conflict between the call of country and that of party, the call of country must come first. Curiously, it so happens that the question 'Who governs Britain?' which at the moment is being frivolously posed, might be taken, in real earnest, as the title of what I have to say. This is the first and last election at which the British people will be given the opportunity to decide whether their country is to remain a democratic nation, governed by the will of its own electorate expressed in its own Parliament, or whether it will become one province in a new European superstate under institutions which know nothing of the political rights and liberties that we have so long taken for granted."

"Could my right hon. Friend explain why the increase in oil prices is deflationary but the increase in all other international prices has apparently been inflationary?"

"The Government know perfectly well that, in order to cope with the rising inflation and disastrous trade balance, it is indispensable to budget for a severe increase in taxation and a further reduction in the rate of growth of public expenditure. They have the majority and the authority to do this now. They do not need an election in order to act in the national interest. Nor do they need an election to get the country back to full-time work. Neither the miners nor the other trade unions have broken the law or threatened to break it. There is nothing sacrosanct about stage 3 or the Government's interpretations of it. A settlement will have to be found in the mining industry – and in every other industry – which will get the necessary labour into the necessary jobs."

"What I have learned and what I fervently believe is that neither high and stable levels of employment nor prosperity nor anything that a nation can desire is to be obtained by debauching its currency; that the mere manufacture of additional money, the mere process of inflation, though it may create temporary euphoria, is no basis upon which, for any class in the community, security or prosperity can be built. It is in that belief and in the belief that it is demonstrated by history that I speak as I do."

"Our present experience and our present predicament was foreseen and forecast in principle. It was exactly what we had seen happen before. It was exactly what had led us to renounce the very course of action upon which we subsequently entered. We are, therefore, obliged not to seek an escape by accusing external events, such as the movement of forces and prices in the outside world, for the crisis with which we have to deal. More important still, we are freed from the danger of supposing that either we or the country at large are the victims of the perversity of a group of our fellow citizens... It is salutary to be reminded that it is an impasse which was always implicit in the course of statutory control of prices and wages upon which we engaged. When we renounced that course we did not do so merely as a contrast to a voluntary prices and wages policy. The accent was not specially upon the word statutory or compulsory. We renounced it because our whole conception of the cause and, therefore, the cure of the scourge of inflation was such that the attempt to regulate individual prices and wages, either by compulsion or by agreement, was irrelevant. In a sense, we have the grim satisfaction of seeing the realisation and verification of what we ourselves predicted."

"I make no apology for once again reminding the House, and particularly my right hon. and hon. Friends, of what was our view not so long ago on the policies which have led us to this stage. I do so in no spirit of criticism or of recrimination, but because I believe that there are practical and important deductions to be drawn from recalling the fact that when the Conservative Party was elected by a majority we told the country that we utterly rejected the philosophy of compulsory control of wages. We said that we had seen the Labour Government's statutory control of wages fail and that we did not intend to repeat it. We did not make those statements as a matter of mere theory. We did not make them, as it were, in the margin or idly. They arose not only from theory but from the observation, both in this country and elsewhere, that the attempt to combine Government policies which in themselves are inflationary with the endeavour to regulate and control prices and wages has invariably and inevitably led to an impasse and to irresolvable conflict between the demands of Government on the one hand and the realities, as the private citizen sees and knows them, on the other. We were speaking not merely from theory but from experience."

"[T]o reduce the rate of inflation in an economy from something like 10 per cent. to any figure which we would dare to regard as tolerable, cannot but be accompanied by severe stresses, one of which will be an increase in unemployment. That does not derive from the method by which it is done. It derives from the fact that it is done."

"In 1970 my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, and all of us who sit on these benches on the Government side of the House, said to the country "We utterly reject the philosophy of compulsory wage control," or again—"Labour's compulsory wage control was a failure...and we will not repeat it." Why did we say those things so emphatically, over and over again, to the country in 1970? We said them on the basis of what we had argued, experienced, seen and watched over the preceding years. We said them out of a conviction, often stated, that the inevitable result of combining inflation with the attempt to control it by compulsory control of wages was bound to be the most damaging and irresolvable conflict between State and citizens. We said them because...we were convinced in those days that inflation was the result, overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, of actions and policies which were within the power and control of Government. It was because we were convinced that if Government, for their part, would so manage the finances of the nation, if they would so frame the policies within their control, within their hands, there would, indeed, be industrial conflicts, there would be collective bargaining, carried no doubt sometimes to the use of the strike weapon, and there would be the attempt, natural and inevitable, to reassess and reassess again the real relativities between the wages of one industry and another and those of one job and another, but we would not be bringing into the arena of direct conflict between Government and citizen every wage dispute, every bargain, every price and every wage that was fixed. We were convinced that responsibilities would lie where they ought to lie—the responsibility of management and the responsibility of trade union leadership could be exercised where they belonged—if Government would exercise the responsibility which is theirs."

"The wounds from which this country is bleeding today have not been inflicted by an external enemy. They are self-inflicted wounds; they are what we have done to ourselves... Over what, then, is it, that there is conflict between the unions and the State, so dangerous, so deep, that it threatens to create massive unemployment and a massive fall in the production of this country? It is the determination, incessantly repeated, of Her Majesty's Ministers that their interpretation of what can be extracted by logic from the interstices of the stage 3 price and pay code shall be the ne plus ultra, the law of the Medes and Persians, and that nothing beyond that shall be regarded as in any way reconcilable with the national interest and the national salvation. It is in pursuit of the Ministers' interpretation of statutory control of wages that we have been brought into this conflict, the conflict of which the consequences are not merely before us but are bringing anxiety to every family in the country."

"It is deeply worrying that at a time when past budgetary policies have carried Britain deeper and deeper into inflation, and when the world is waiting to see whether we have the resolution to deal with inflation at its source, more and more symptoms appear that the Government has withdrawn into a world of make-believe of its own, in which disasters are transferred into successes, and responsibility and blame are transferred from where they belong on to synthetic obstacles and enemies."

"[More than a year ago I] ventured to inquire of the Prime Minister in the House of Commons whether he had taken leave of his senses. In the circumstances it was a solicitous but not unreasonable inquiry. The Government had suddenly embarked upon a course on which their predecessors had shipwrecked; which in Opposition they had consistently opposed and denounced; on which at the general election they had promised not to embark; and which ministers had been unanimously and indignantly repudiating until a few weeks before... The rate of inflation has not been lower during the period of the statutory counter-inflation policy: it has been higher. So official apologists have had to resort to the last refuge of the disconcerted: to claim that things would have been even worse without the policy... The greater evil still of all statutory counter-inflation policies is the antagonism, at once futile and disastrous, which they inevitably set up between the state on one side and the various classes and interests in the community on the other side. The danger of this was frighteningly illuminated by the Prime Minister's outburst last week against the miners, who, whether or not they are wisely led by their trade unions, have neither done nor threatened to do anything which is against the law. Yet the accusation was brought against them that, because the House of Commons had approved a government White Paper and a code which, in terms of law, is binding (if it all) only upon the Price Commission and the Pay Board, therefore the miners are defying Parliament and the people's elected representatives and placing themselves beyond the pale of the constitution. To say this is to blur, indeed to deny, the very distinction on which constitutional liberty rests, the distinction between law and not-law. If possible, more breathtaking still was the Prime Minister's assertion that (in his own words) the responsibility of the Government "expressed in the price and pay code, is not the responsibility we sought; it was a responsibility which Parliament gave us because there is no other way of containing inflation in this country". One cannot but entertain fears for the mental and emotional stability to whom such language can appear rational."

"They have a duty either to say to the country, "We propose to continue with inflation at its present level and to maintain or 'contain' it at that level, because otherwise there would be at least a temporary loss of growth and unemployment", or, alternatively, to say, "So great and intolerable are the consequences, direct and indirect, social, moral and economic, of on-going inflation at a cumulative rate of nearly 10 per cent. per annum, that we intend to bring that rate down steadily, consistently, perceptibly, and...we tell you that the price which we shall have to pay for that will be some reduction in growth and in employment." ... I am prepared to say, as I have done over and over again, that I believe inflation at 10 per cent. per annum cumulative to be an evil far more dangerous, far exceeding in its consequences the cost of the temporary dislocation which is involved in terminating it. I have said that time and again... We either go on at present with the present rate of inflation or else we deal with inflation and incur the temporary cost in terms of output and employment. In the real world there is no third choice. What the Government are doing with their counter-inflation policy is declining to take that decision in the open, declining to come forward and make clear which decision it is that they have taken, and using the counter-inflation policy as a means of pretending that a third course exists when they know that it does not."

"The dilemma is this: they know, and we know, that if the rate of inflation is to be reduced, at whatever rate my right hon. and learned Friend later this afternoon announces is the Government's intention, then the result of that, for the time being, must be a slowing down of the rate of economic growth and a slowing down, to put it mildly, in the fall in unemployment. That is the known and certain consequence of reducing the rate of inflation—not of the way in which it is done but of the fact that it happens."

"The whole basis and justification of the resort to statutory control of wages and prices was that the exorbitant demands and monopoly powers of the trade unions were the cause of the rate of inflation with which we were afflicted. Never, not even in pantomime, has the demon king been so speedily whipped back into the wings. His place is now occupied by what is called world prices. World prices, we are assured, are the principal if not the sole cause of the continuing inflation and the justification therefore for the continuance of a statutory policy to control in detail prices, wages, dividends, and the rest... But what has that to do with inflation? Prices change relatively to one another whether there is inflation or not. Changes in the economic world reflect themselves in real, that is relative, changes in prices. But a relative change in prices, even of a group of requirements so important as those which this country habitually imports, is not the same as inflation, and it does not cause inflation."

"I was born ambitious, I suppose I shall die ambitious. I can no more change it than the colour of my eyes."

"Parties come and go, governments come and go. But if we lose the power to make and unmake governments, to make and unmake parliaments, then everything else is changed. Even if I were convinced that the result of doing what Michael Foot has described—regaining what we ought never to have given away—even if I were convinced that the result of that would be that we would have Labour administrations for the rest of my lifetime, I would say: well, so be it. But at least we have retained the power to decide under what general principles this nation is going to be governed."

"The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not to account for what is, and what is accepted."

"Independence, the freedom of a self-governing nation, is in my estimation the highest political good, for which any disadvantage, if need be, and any sacrifice are a cheap price. It is worth living for; it is worth fighting for; and it is worth dying for."

"We must judge ourselves, but we may not judge others, even though I find it difficult to understand how those who argued, as we did in the last Parliament, against something essentially indistinguishable from this Bill, who denounced it in principle and who forswore anything of the sort when they presented themselves to the electorate, can support it now. Still, we must all answer ourselves. Therefore, I answer the question now, as I shall in the Lobby tonight, by saying that for myself I can not."

"I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable."

"Then, about the same time, there was the detonation of Sartor Resartus... It was not only the revelation of Carlyle; it was headlong precipitation into the ocean of German reading and German thinking, where I was destined to voyage long after romantic and uncritical enthusiasm had perished for ever with the rise of Nazism... The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books—confess it I must—have been with German books... there was Schopenhauer, carried up and down daily for months on the Sydney trams. There was Lessing, Hölderlin even; above all, and above all, there was Goethe. Was, and still is; for a spare 10s. note is as likely to this day to be exchanged for a volume of Goethe as for anything else that sits on a book-seller's shelves."

"[T]he memory of big experiences in the world of books is flavoured with the tang of the physical setting in which they happened. I shall never be able to dissociate Ecce Homo from the old flying-boat route to the Antipodes... Or again, the long avenues of thought that have led from Frazer's Golden Bough seem to start physically in front of the dining-room fireplace of the home where as a boy of 15 I sat hour after hour absorbing first the one-volume abridgement and then the three-volume edition. I cannot imagine how different my mental and religious life would have been if the impact of J. G. Frazer had come at another time or not at all."

"In my early twenties I read all Nietzsche—not just the main works but the minor works as well, all of them, and every scrap of published correspondence. Nietzsche alone of men out of books has a share in the loyalty and affectionate gratitude which otherwise belongs only to living teachers."

"If the activities of the health services are thus neither justifiable by economic calculation, nor assessable in comparative statistical terms, these are characteristics which they share with all the highest activities of man."

"For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishman—how the word “instinct” keeps forcing itself in again and again!—is for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, “her other realms and territories”, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history."

"One thing above all they assuredly would not forget; Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England, and its emblems everywhere visible. The immemorial arms, gules, three leopards or, though quartered late with France, azure, three fleurs de lis argent; and older still, the crown itself and that sceptred awe, in which Saint Edward the Englishman still seemed to sit in his own chair to claim the allegiance of all the English. Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England's. The unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries."

"Thus our generation is one which comes home again from years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of English, generations before the “expansion of England”, who felt no country but this to be their own... Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the seventeenth, back through the brash adventurous days of the first Elizabeth and the hard materialism of the Tudors, and there at last we find them, or seem to find them, in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel. From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their inscrutable silence. “Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.” What would they say? They would speak to us in our own English tongue, the tongue made for telling truth in, tuned already to songs that haunt the hearer like the sadness of spring. They would tell us of that marvellous land, so sweetly mixed of opposites in climate that all the seasons of the year appear there in their greatest perfection... They would tell us too of a palace near the great city which the Romans built at a ford of the River Thames...to which men resorted out of all England to speak on behalf of their fellows, a thing called “Parliament”, and from that hall went out their fellows with fur-trimmed gowns and strange caps on their heads, to judge the same judgments, and dispense the same justice, to all the people of England."

"That power and that glory have vanished, as surely, if not as tracelessly, as the Imperial fleet from the waters of Spithead—in the eye of history, no doubt as inevitably as “Nineveh and Tyre”, as Rome and Spain. And yet England is not as Nineveh and Tyre, nor as Rome, nor as Spain. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country. So we today at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the spring, England herself."

"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside—the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day. Do not for a moment underestimate their powers of resistance to our assault."

"I would say that it is a fearful doctrine, which must recoil upon the heads of those who pronounce it, to stand in judgment on a fellow human-being and to say, "Because he was such-and-such, therefore the consequences which would otherwise flow from his death shall not flow." ... Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, "We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home." We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility."

"There is no possibility of arguing that the present composition of the House of Lords can be justified either by logic or by reference to any preconceived constitutional theory. It is the result of a long, even a tortuous, process of historical evolution. Its authority rests upon the acceptance of the result, handed down to our time, of that historical process. It is the authority of acceptance, the authority of what Burke called "prescription". The House of Lords shares that characteristic with many of our most cherished and important institutions. Trial by jury, for example, is not to be justified in logic; it does not rest upon statute; it came to us by a strange historical evolution out of the sworn witnesses of a neighbourhood. Neither logic nor statute nor theory is a basis of that other hereditary institution by which it comes about that a young woman holds sway over countless millions. The authority of this House itself does not, in the last resort, rest upon any logic in the principles upon which we are formed or elected: it rests upon the acceptance by the nation of an institution the history of which cannot be divorced or torn out of the context of the history of the nation itself."

"Perhaps the most insidious danger today is the notion, which many accept unreflectingly and others propagate sedulously, that a stable value of money is incompatible with economic progress or with a high level of employment. Theory and experience alike refute such a notion. I have already reminded you that throughout sixty years of Britain's golden age of expansion in every sphere, the value of money remained virtually constant. So far from it being true that inflation and a high level of employment hang together, the fact is that, for a nation in Britain's situation, dependent on world trade and commercial dealings with other countries for its livelihood, continued inflation is the greatest threat to full employment. It would be a tragedy if the Government or the nation allowed themselves to be diverted by these false fears from the single-minded pursuit of plain and elementary duty: the duty to secure and preserve the integrity and stability of the medium of exchange, on which depend all the economic dealings of man with man."

"I believe a second factor which has weighed heavily in this matter is the attitude, or supposed attitude, of the United States. I confess that I am not greatly moved by this. Whatever may be the attitude of the American Government and public to the United Kingdom as such, my view of American policy over the last decade has been that it has been steadily and relentlessly directed towards the weakening and the destruction of the links which bind the British Empire together. [Cyril Osborne: "No!"] We can watch the events as they unfold and place our own interpretation on them. My interpretation is that the United States has for this country, considered separately, a very considerable economic and strategic use but that she sees little or no strategic use or economic value in the British Empire or the British Commonwealth as it has existed and as it still exists. Against the background I ask the House to consider the evidence of advancing American imperialism in this area from which they are helping to eliminate us."

"We describe a Monarch by designating the territory of which he is Monarch. To say that he is Monarch of a certain territory and his other realms and territories is as good as to say that he is king of his kingdom. We have perpetrated a solecism in the title we are proposing to attach to our Sovereign and we have done so out of what might almost be called an abject desire to eliminate the expression "British." The same desire has been felt—though not by any means throughout the British Commonwealth—to eliminate this word before the term "Commonwealth." ... Why is it, then, that we are so anxious, in the description of our own Monarch, in a title for use in this country, to eliminate any reference to the seat, the focus and the origin of this vast aggregation of territories? Why is it that this "teeming womb of royal Kings," as Shakespeare called it, wishes now to be anonymous?"

"The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions...for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it...Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading...In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful...[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state."

"You have never expressed any decided political opinions, and indeed I do not know if or how far you assent to the proposition that almost unlimited sacrifices of individual life and happiness are worth while to preserve the unique structure of power of which the keystone (the only conceivable and indispensable keystone) is the English Crown. I for my part find it the nearest thing in the world to an absolute (as opposed to a relative) value: it is like the outer circle that bound my universe, so that I cannot conceive anything beyond it."

"The thought struck me for the first time today that our duty to our country may not terminate with the peace – apart, I mean, from the duty of begetting children to bear arms for the King in the next generation. To be more explicit, I see growing on the horizon the greater peril than Germany or Japan ever were; and if the present hostilities do not actually merge into a war with our terrible enemy, America, it will remain for those of us who have the necessary knowledge and insight to do what we can where we can to help Britain be victorious again in her next crisis."

"It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors."

"Now, there is one set of market forces, supremely important to Britain, which lie outside the reach of even a Socialist government. These are world market forces. Whatever government we have in this country, the rest of the world will only buy from us what it cannot get elsewhere cheaper and better. If our prices are high or our goods not the right ones, it will be no use saying: “Oh, but we have decided not to be ruled by market forces beyond our control.” The rest of the world would laugh in our faces. And what sheer nonsense and utter hypocrisy it is for a country dependent on selling a fifth of its product abroad to pretend not to “be ruled by market forces”!"

"The economic losses are those which are common to all monopolistic and restrictive practices. Whenever relatively more is paid for one set of services, and therefore less for all the rest, than would be paid in the absence of restrictive practices, the result is that the pattern of production is not as nearly as "right" as it would otherwise be: we waste part of our resources—human as well as material—by not putting them to the uses which yield the best return. In the modern state this is corrected not, as in the past, by unemployment and the forcing down of money wages, but by inflation and the devaluation of money: if one group succeeds in raising the price of its services by restrictive methods, then everyone else will also get around to being paid more for theirs, until a pattern which corresponds with the balance of supply and demand is again restored. The resultant inflation not only has the familiar inconvenient consequences for a country with a fixed parity of exchange. It also creates injustice for those persons and classes whose expectations are defined in fixed money terms."

"Contrary to popular belief there is no reason whatever to suppose that the remuneration of labour in general has been raised by the combination of labour through the trade unions to a higher level than it would have stood at otherwise. The rising standard of living of the employed population is due to many causes; but restrictive practices are not among them. No doubt in individual occupations combination has from time to time succeeded in raising real wages above what they would have been in its absence; but any such gain, which is invariably at the expense of workers in other employments and of the general public, is always temporary and usually brief. After more or less inconvenience and, in recent times, by dint of more or less inflation, the pattern of real wages reverts to one which corresponds with the balance of supply and demand for labour in the various employments in different parts of the country."

"It will be seen that all these difficulties attach to those aspects of trade unionism which involve restriction and coercion... I would hope and believe that it will not be impossible to disentangle the coercive and restrictive activities of trade unionism from all the rest of its long tradition, so closely entwined with our economic and social history. I can only say this: once the basic question is posed...as to the justification of private force in the pursuit of ends whether private or public, real or imaginary, that question has to be answered openly and fearlessly... If the conclusion is that no such justification can be shown to exist, either generally or in our own society and times, then sooner or late, however long and wearisome the process, however many inquiries and Royal Commissions we must live through, the law of this land will have to be brought into accord with what can be defended by its people as right and just."

"I am not of course suggesting that combination cannot force up the price of labour in a particular employment above the market level. What I am saying is that this advantage is demonstrably often more or less short-lived: indeed, in the inflationary conditions which we have experienced in the last twenty years, any such gain has been neutralised and obliterated exceptionally quickly. But wherever and as long as there is an advantage, it is always at the expense not only of the community at large but of other workers: of the community at large, because its pattern of production and consumption is thereby less satisfactory than it otherwise would be—the standard effect of all monopoly and restriction; of other workers, because the higher cost of labour in that employment reduces demand for it and results in workers either being unemployed or being employed less remuneratively than they otherwise would be."

"Anyone who believes that the rise in the standard of living of the working classes in this country in the last twenty years or the last hundred and twenty years is due to the existence and actions of the trade unions, will believe anything. It is the kind of absurdity which people only entertain when they are desperately determined to do so, for fear of the consequences of disbelief. The rise in that standard is due to the greater productivity of labour, proceeding in turn from a whole host of causes—greater scientific and technical knowledge, more capital, better organisation, and so on. We all know this, and we all know that it has nothing whatever to do with restraint of trade or restriction of competition."