Education Ministers Of The United Kingdom

"It's incumbent on politicians to make the case that it is not for blaming immigrants about jobs and housing. Actually, it is up to us to provide the solutions and support to people."

"We would have been better off if we had stayed, but that is what democracy is all about and the British people have been clear and I will accept that decision."

"If parents and grandparents vote to leave, they'll be voting to gamble with their children and grandchildren's future. At a time when people are rightly concerned about inter-generational fairness, the most unfair decision that the older generation could make would be to take Britain out of Europe and damage the ability of young people to get on in life."

"It's clear, that if Britain leaves Europe it will be young people who suffer the most, left in limbo while we struggle to find and then negotiate an alternative model. In doing so we risk that lost generation becoming a reality."

"We are always influenced by the work that we do. Having worked in manufacturing you are always inspired by it, whether it’s the design that goes into products, the production, the science, the technology."

"[Williamson speaking to The Telegraph.] Everyone is obsessed with Palmerston and Larry the cat, but in the Whip’s office we have a proper pet. I’ve had Cronus since he was a spider-ling, so I have a very paternal sort of approach. It’s very much the same sort of love and care that I give to my spider as I give to all MPs."

"It’s often described as a cool war that we are entering – I would say it is feeling exceptionally chilly at the moment."

"Every parent wants to know their child is getting a great education and I will leave no stone unturned in my drive to deliver that."

"All children should be in school and not out protesting and anyone who says otherwise is being very irresponsible."

"They school strikers] should be learning, they shouldn't be bunking off and it's very irresponsible for people to encourage children to do so."

"Could be juvenile, he could be ridiculous, he could be horrid and at times he wore his ambitions too brazenly and revelled too much in the dark arts and his reputation for skulduggery. Despite the pithy name-calling, brutal caricatures and wild accusations levelled against him, there is a good person under Gavin’s Machiavellian facade. But if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. And he appreciates that more than most."

"I am delighted that a new secretary of state for education was not just educated within the state system but attended a comprehensive school."

"Natural justice demands that the evidence be produced so his reputation can be salvaged - or utterly destroyed!"

"It is easier for eight or nine elderly men to feel their way towards unanimity if they are not compelled to conduct their converging maneuvers under the microscopes and telescopes of the press, but are permitted to shuffle about a little in slippers."

"All political decisions are taken under great pressure, and if a treaty serves its turn for ten or twenty years, the wisdom of its framers is sufficiently confirmed."

"I can see … only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen."

"Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels."

"Politics is the art of human happiness."

"He always got the big questions right."

"I feel Hogg (with all his absurdities and posturings and emotions) represents what Stanley, and John Loder, and Boothby, and Noel Skelton and I tried to represent from 1924 onwards. Those who clamour for Butler and Home are really not so much shocked by Hogg's oddities as by his honesty. He belongs both to this strange modern age of space and science and to the great past – of classical learning and Christian life. This is what they instinctively dislike."

"I am beginning to feel that I haven't the strength and that perhaps another leader cd do what I did after Eden left. But it cannot be done by a pedestrian politician. It needs a man with vision and moral strength – Hailsham, not Maudling. Yet the "back-benchers" (poor fools) do not seem to have any idea, except "a young man". Admirable as Maudling is, I doubt if he cd revive our fortunes as well as Hailsham. (I sent H. to Moscow on purpose, to test his powers of negotiation etc. He did very well.)"

"A very able man, Lord Hailsham. I understand that he is going to be promoted as a result of what he is doing here."

"I had watched Quintin under pressure during the Suez crisis where he had shown admirable calm at the Admiralty in testing circumstances; and while I had some misgivings about his famous "judgement" I felt that he could take on the leadership and the job of Prime Minister, and make a success of it."

"That he is one of the most brilliant people of his age in England there can be no possible doubt; in my judgment that he is more certainly ear-marked for success than any man I know."

"I am concerned least we should be accused of being ideologues. This country is practical-minded, and it is a charge we should not find difficult to rebut. We must explain our policies, not by reference to ideological concepts but by reference to practical necessities."

"Nothing has shown so clearly the evils of elective dictatorship as the past few weeks, which had culminated in the Lib–Lab pact."

"We live under an elective dictatorship, absolute in theory if hitherto thought tolerable in practice. How far it is still tolerable is the question I want to raise."

"What is urgently needed is some limitation on this nominally elected dictatorship. It is here that I join hands with the conventional Bill of Rights enthusiasts, of whom...I am not one."

"I believe inflation in that sense and on that scale corrupts a country in its moral as well as in its economic life, undermines law and order and threatens our free institutions."

"There is the break-up gang, the "Break Up Britain" gang, of the "Scot-Nats." and the "Welsh-Nats.", apparently wishing to strip the assets of the United Kingdom as if it were a kind of shell company and deprive us all of our nation, which is Britain, and perhaps to go back to the days of Flodden or Owen Glendower. There is class divided notoriously against class... There is union against management and there is even union against union: interest against interest—town against country; and even individual against individual. Until we can recapture the spirit of service, perhaps the spirit of sacrifice, certainly the spirit of patriotism, this is to my mind the longer-term and perhaps the more dangerous crisis of the two."

"Until 25 years ago this country, by which I mean the United Kingdom and in particular Great Britain, has I suppose by common consent been one of the most successful human communities ever seen upon the face of this planet. It is notorious but worth reminding ourselves in the present situation that we almost alone, I think absolutely alone, among the peoples of Europe have been immune from foreign invasion, have been practically secure from civil war, have defended the liberties of Europe against one tyranny after another; that we have excelled in peace no less than war; that we pioneered modern industry, and that we led the advance of modern science; that we largely founded modern commerce, and even, to compare what is perhaps ridiculous with the sublime, invented almost every known human recreation and sport, with the possible exceptions of polo and chess. I do not think that these things happened by chance. I believe that they happened because the peoples of these islands had learnt to live together in harmony and to treat the interest of each as the interest of the whole."

"[The Labour Party's leadership is] dominated by rather rootless intellectuals or obviously bourgeois eccentrics like Mr Michael Foot and Mr Wedgwood Benn."

"It is not a point of which I am much ashamed. Having grown up in the 1930s, I have a hatred of unemployment. The reason why we over-reacted, if over-reacted we did, was because we hoped that, if it could be shown that we were doing our best to deal with avoidable unemployment, the unions would voluntarily restrain their demands and prevent suffering in the community. The truth is that Mr Powell is so intent for personal reasons on ruining Mr Heath that no attack, however violent, however irrational, or however evilly intentioned, is beyond him in his present frame of mind."

"It is an excellent thing that Mr Powell has joined the Ulster Unionists. They have found a new leader to desert, and he a fresh cause to betray."

"Experience shows that at this rate of inflation, democracy cannot survive... A middle-class backlash is inevitable. A populist movement. In the end people will not put up with the law being broken and factions of the workers getting away with it with impunity. People will take control into their own hands, or a strong government will use the public forces to seize control. People will get hurt. Quite likely there will be a lot of violence one way or another. But in the end there is a limit to what middle-class people will tolerate."

"No democracy has been defeated by a dictatorship from inside or from out because it has been itself too disciplined. It has been destroyed in the end by force or fraud. It is not strength but weakness which kills democracy. It has been overthrown or it has been taken over. It has not been eroded, or undermined: it is not decisiveness but dither which undermines the prestige and its will to resist. It is not inaction but inability to act that destroys the authority of democratic institutions. It is no use masking anarchy or indecisiveness under the bland names of liberalism and permissiveness."

"There is a sense in which all law is nothing more nor less than a gigantic confidence trick."

"Moderation is the hallmark of our country and the burden of our Conservative faith. ... [I]n an age of violence the Conservative watchwords must be law, justice, moderation and humanity."

"If you can tell me there are no adulterers on the front bench of the Labour Party you can talk to me about Profumo."

"If the British public falls for this, I think it would be stark, staring bonkers."

"Lord Hailsham: But to try to turn it into a party issue, is really beyond belief contemptible. Robert McKenzie: Do you feel that the others that have spoken out, the Bishops, The Times and so on, have tried to turn it into a party issue? Hailsham: I think you have!"

"A great party is not to be brought down because of a scandal by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar."

"Being Conservative is only another way of being British."

"It was the Tory Party which took its stand in the nineteenth century against the principles of laissez faire Liberalism, of which it is now accused by its more ignorant opponents of being the sole inventor and patentee. More still, it did so on what would now be considered the orthodox Socialist ground that capitalism was an ungodly and rapacious scramble for ill-gotten gains, in the course of which the richer appeared to get richer and the poor poorer."

"Obviously, here there is nothing of logic; there can be no claim to legitimacy if one goes back far enough. But, historically speaking, the development of large areas of law and order depending upon the authority of some established organ of government has been the means whereby civilization has grown up. It was the same in the ancient as in the modern world, the same in legend as in history. We do not hear of Menes uniting the Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt by any superiority in title or wisdom, and we read how Deioces, the founder of ancient Media, resorted to guile. The title of Rome to the greatest system of ordered government the Western World has known was by arms alone. Legitimacy is only one of the matters which constitute authority, prescription another. Neither is indefeasible, but both in the absence of a stronger claim are to be respected. Constitutional authority remains the first article of a Conservative creed."

"The first stage in the progress of a society from barbarism to civilization has been the creation of a system, always more or less imperfect, in which anarchy and lawlessness have given place to law and order."

"We, who have seen the collapse of the authority of the French Republic precisely because it lacked the mystique and prestige of the British monarchy, can ill afford to deny the advantage which attends the possession of a traditional, as distinct from a revolutionary, constitution. The one may be more logical; the other appears to keep out the weather more successfully. Conservatives therefore believe, in the main, in the acceptance of established authority, wherever it is found, without enquiring too closely into its documents of title."

"There are few more popular or successful institutions than the British monarchy. There are few more important practical guarantees of the happiness or security of this country or the unity of the Commonwealth than its continuance."

"The great glory of Britain has not consisted only in her internal policies and constitution. Again and again her blood and treasure has been shed against absolutism on the continent of Europe. Her hatred of absolutism has been impartial as between right and left. Neither Louis XIV, Napoleon, Robespierre, nor Hitler could count Britain amongst their friends. We were not put off by specious and bogus crusades against Bolsheviks or aristocrats. A human being is a human being, and minorities, classes, and small nations have their rights. These are the rights which Britain’s intervention has vindicated again and again. But for Britain, Europe would have reverted to spiritual and political dictatorship long ere this."

"The nation, not the so-called class struggle, is therefore the base of Conservative political thinking. Harmony, not struggle, is its ruling political objective. The health, security, and prosperity of Britain and of all its people is its first guiding political principle. Conservatives place patriotism at the top of the list of civic virtues."