People From London

"Social discipline—that surely is a more fruitful and warding theme for contemporary conservatism than individual freedom. Libertarian arguments forged at a time when there were still slaves and serfs to be freed from monarchical despotism, peasants from domineering landlords, or proletarians from brutal bosses, simply do not apply plausibly to the kind of social problems facing Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Britain is not the Soviet Union, and when Mrs Thatcher bends her knee to Solzenytsin, she is worshipping at the wrong shrine and going wrong where George Orwell went so wrong with his nightmare predictions of 1984. The spectre haunting most ordinary people in Britain is neither of a totalitarian State nor of Big Brother, but of other ordinary people being allowed to run wild. What they are worried about is crime, violence, disorder in the schools, promiscuity, idleness, pornography, football hooliganism, vandalism and urban terrorism. The film Clockwork Orange, with its terrible portrait of a gang of juvenile thugs bereft of all moral restraint, terrorising the old and the weak without mercy, is what most people fear today."

"Sir, In considering whether a racist should be allowed a seat on Question Time, it is chastening to remember that most of my octogenarian generation of British, high as well as low, believed in white superiority, which in no way meant that they were necessarily fascists. Indeed, most of us had fought in the war against Nazism. As it happens, I am no longer a racist, but the arguments that made me one in the relatively recent past still do not seem to me to be so abhorrent as to be out of order in civilised debate. Unquestionably, the leader of the BNP — an unsavoury character — is not the right man to do such arguments justice, but that is because of his bigotry rather than the views themselves. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne Hedgerley, Bucks"

"Perhaps this is special pleading, an anticipatory apologia for what may have to be done in this country if the far left ever comes to power, using the Parliamentary system to encompass what will be, in effect, a coup d'état. In that event, the question will not be who are "the Fourth and Fifth men," since their number will, I trust, be too numerous to count. But in our case, their will be a transfer of allegiance, not to the world's bastion of oppression [the Soviet Union], but to the world's greatest buttress of freedom [the United States]. That will make all the difference."

"The liberal-progressive view, so beloved of the intellectual community, is that the most crucial battle in the world today is in the field of race, and that Britain, for reasons of morality and expediency, must throw in its lot with the coloured peoples, for all their imperfections. But one can only doubt whether any Government in fact will pay more than lip-service to this view. During its last period of office Labour was able to blur the issue in a way that gave some satisfaction to both the realists and the idealists, backing the liberal-progressive view in words but only very partially in actions. It did not sell arms to South Africa, but it carried on cynically enough with trade and defence co-operation."

"[I]t is not the importance of the Cape route...that forces Britain to support a hateful white supremacist state. It is the fact of white supremacy which makes the relationship so peculiarly irresistible. Of course it would be much less embarrassing if white supremacy was exercised in a less morally obnoxious manner. But if it was not exercised at all, the relationship would lose much of its point. The harsh truth, which will become clearer and clearer as time passes, is that Britain, far from being neutral in the race struggle, let alone on the coloured side, is positively on South Africa's side, since in the crucial battle in the world today—which is not between North and South but between East and West—Britain has no alternative but to throw in its lot with the white peoples, in spite of their imperfections."

"I went to an English boarding school where homosexuality, perhaps faute de mieux, was very much a practice and it was touch-and-go, I think, with a number of people whether they continued to be homosexual or ceased, and this could be very much affected by a glamourous master, by particular teaching. I do think that you can be affected in this way."

"It [Britain] is faced by a different kind of colour problem: that the centre of many of our major cities should become civilized communal oases of men and women who are proud of not being British—foreign oases with their own culture, their own language, political leaders and separate destinies. It is faced, in short, by a form of coloured power which will not (one hopes) be mad or violent or evil, but which will be all the more significant precisely because of being perfectly respectable and legitimate. But foreign... For what will emerge as the result of their and our best efforts is a much more intractable problem than that faced in America—coloured foreign communities, in key areas of the country, who are economically and administratively integrated into the country, essential parts of its physical life, but emotionally, culturally and mentally still belonging to other lands."

"What is becoming clear is that apartheid is not at the heart of the racial issue. At the heart of it is the fact of Western superiority, resentment of which would remain even if revolution came to South Africa. This is what the liberal-progressive ideology so dangerously overlooks... The struggle for racial equality will be seen as a power struggle and because of this intimately bound up with all those revolutionary forces, both within these shores and outside them, aimed at weakening the West. The West in short can never hope to win the hearts of the Third World except by ceasing to be the West, since in reality it is its virtues, quite as much as its vices, that cause the hostility. It is in this sense that the liberal-progressive obsession with Britain's being on the right side of the race war is so unrealistic. It inculcates a Western inclination to self-abasement that plays into Soviet hands."

"I supported the legalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults in '67 and still do so. I think that anything which would increase… I regard homosexuality as being a great misfortune. I see it as something the less frequent it is in any society, the better for that society. All I am saying is that at schools, and I do think one has to emphasise at schools, I think that it shouldn't be something which anybody should be allowed to encourage or promote, certainly not any schools which are funded by the local authorities and where people have to go to by law."

"I think a good deal more discretion on the part of homosexuals and a good deal more understanding that the majority of the country does worry about homosexuality and does fear that their children might become homosexuals, the old-fashioned traditional attitude to homosexuality is being undesirable. I think that the majority of homosexuals ought to understand this and oughtn't to push their luck."

"The truth will get harder and harder to burke: racial equality will never be achieved by raising the Third World up; it can only be achieved by casting the Western world down. The Soviet Union knows this full well, which is why it supports the coloured cause."

"Just as the British in India and Africa sought to create oases in those continents where they could live according to their own mores and values, so will the Africans, West Indians and Asians seek to do the same in Britain. I see no reason to suppose that the coloured immigrants in these islands now will be more prepared to become British than the British emigrants to their own continents then were prepared to become Indian or African. The fact has to be faced that large-scale coloured immigration has taken place at a time when the African and Indian races are rediscovering pride in their own ancestries; when the impulse to demonstrate the quality of their own cultures is growing stronger all the time. Indeed the dynamism of cultural pride, even of colour consciousness, is much more marked today among the black and brown races, who feel that their glories lie ahead, than among the whites—at least the European whites—who feel that their glories lie in the past."

"In 2001 I was in London when [redacted] met a number of friends of mine including Prince Andrew. A photograph was taken as I imagine she wanted to show it to friends and family."

"My second encounter with Prince Andrew took place about a month later, at Epstein's townhouse in New York. Epstein greeted Andrew and brought him to the living room, where Maxwell and I were sitting. Another one of their victims, Johanna Sjoberg, arrived soon afterward. Maxwell then announced to the prince that she'd purchased him a joke gift, a puppet that looked just like him. She suggested we pose for a photo with it. The prince and I sat down next to each other on the couch, and Maxwell put the puppet in my lap, positioning one of its hands on one of my breasts. Then she put Sjoberg on the prince's lap, and the prince put his hand on Sjoberg's breast. The symbolism was impossible to ignore. Johanna and I were Maxwell and Epstein's puppets, and they were pulling the strings."

"On 10 March 2001 we were in London, staying at [Ghislaine] Maxwell’s pied-à-terre – a white mews house a short walk from Hyde Park."

"I don't know exactly when I had sex with Prince Andrew for the third time, but I do know the location: a 72-acre island Epstein owned in the US Virgin Islands. The private sanctuary, right next to Saint Thomas island, was called Little Saint James, but Epstein liked to call it "Little Saint Jeff's". I also know that it was not just the two of us this time; it was an orgy. "I was around 18," I said in a sworn declaration in 2015. "Epstein, Andy, and approximately eight other young girls and I had sex together. The other girls all appeared to be under the age of 18 and didn't really speak English. Epstein laughed about how they couldn’t really communicate, saying they are the easiest girls to get along with." Since I gave that account, Epstein’s pilot has said in a deposition that a coded notation ("AP") that he made on his flight log for 4 July 2001, referred to Prince Andrew. He said that Epstein, the prince, another woman and I flew from Saint Thomas that day back to Palm Beach. I guess it's possible that the orgy I remember occurred in the days leading up to that flight, which would mean I was still 17. I'll probably never know the date for certain. What I do know, because Epstein told me, is that Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modelling agent who was also in attendance, supplied the other girls who took part."

"In the years since, I've thought a lot about how he behaved. He was friendly enough, but still entitled – as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright. I drew him a hot bath. We disrobed and got in the tub, but didn't stay there long because the prince was eager to get to the bed. He was particularly attentive to my feet, caressing my toes and licking my arches. That was a first for me, and it tickled. I was nervous he would want me to do the same to him. But I needn't have worried. He seemed in a rush to have intercourse. Afterward, he said thank you in his clipped British accent. In my memory, the whole thing lasted less than half an hour. The next morning, Maxwell told me: "You did well. The prince had fun." Epstein would give me $15,000 for servicing the man the tabloids called “Randy Andy”."

"Is this a Marie-Antoinette moment for the British monarchy? What first triggered animosity against the queen of France was a slew of excited publications stressing her extravagance and indulgence in flagrant luxury, as well as her alleged sexual decadence (an entirely false claim). Before being guillotined, her name was humiliatingly demoted – just like Andrew's – to "the Widow Capet"."

"I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office. What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation. Let me state clearly: the law must take its course. As this process continues, it would not be right for me to comment further on this matter. Meanwhile, my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all."

"[Explaining why he stayed at the New York home of Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, in 2010.] It was a convenient place to stay... At the end of the day, with the benefit of all the hindsight one can have, it was definitely the wrong thing to do. But at the time, I felt it was the honourable and right thing to do. And I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable but that is just the way it is."

"[Explaining why Virginia Giuffre's allegations against him of sexual assault couldn't be believed.] I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War, when I was shot at ... it was almost impossible for me to sweat."

"[Explaining that he could not have had sex with Virginia Giuffre (then Roberts) at the London home of Ghislaine Maxwell] I was with the children and I’d taken Beatrice to a Pizza Express in Woking for a party at I suppose four or five in the afternoon. And then because the duchess [Sarah Ferguson] was away, we have a simple rule in the family that when one is away the other is there."

"[Asked on how the photograph might have been faked] I don't believe it's a picture of me in London because . . . when I go out in London I wear a suit and tie. [...] Nobody can prove whether or not that photograph has been doctored but I don't recollect that photograph ever being taken. [...] I'm at a loss to explain this particular photograph."

"If you're a man it is a positive act to have sex with somebody [...] You have to … take some sort of positive action and so therefore if you try to forget it’s very difficult to try and forget a positive action and I do not remember anything."

"[On the 2001 photograph of himself with Giuffre (then Roberts) and Ghislaine Maxwell] I have absolutely no memory of that photograph ever being taken."

"I met him [Prince Andrew] several times, including once at a state banquet where after dinner, I and my husband and another Labour cabinet minister had a drink with him, and I have to say the conversation left us slack-jawed with the things that he felt it was appropriate to say."

"My reflection makes me think even harder and pray even more fervently for those in conflict today, for those family’s [sic] torn apart by the horrors they have witnessed."

"[T]he people that I met and the opportunities that I was given to learn either by him or because of him were actually very useful."

"[On his military service during the Falklands War in 1982] So whilst I think back to a day when a young man went to war, full of bravado, I returned a changed man."

"I put away childish things and false bravado and returned a man full in the knowledge of human frailty and suffering."

"I kick myself for, on a daily basis, because it was not something that was becoming of a member of the royal family [...] And we try and uphold the highest standards and practices and I let the side down, simple as that."

"[On his alleged meetings with Virginia Giuffre, his accuser] I don't know if I've met her but no, I have no recollection of meeting her."

"(Former royal protection officer Paul Page speaking about the duke’s private apartment) It had about 50 or 60 stuffed toys positioned on the bed. And, basically, there was a card the inspector showed us in a drawer, and it was a picture of these bears all in situ on the bed. And the reason for the laminated picture was that, if those bears weren’t put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream and become verbally abusive."

"Andrew, unfortunately, exhibited classic symptoms of what is scientifically recognised as the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias in which people come to believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. The combination of minimal self-awareness and dim wattage leads sufferers of this condition to overestimate their own capabilities. Years of enjoying unearned obeisance to his royal position allowed Andrew to bang on with a combination of overweening self-confidence and unchallenged ignorance. It also made him an easy mark for con men and crooks."

"It’s a simple answer. That’s my life. That’s what I expect. Right? That is because of who I am and that is because of the life of the family within which I’ve been brought up. So to me this state of affairs is not extraordinary. To anybody else who looks in, they think I’m bloody mad! But that’s what we do."

"Well, if you’ll pardon the expression, that really is the n***** in the woodpile"

"Please make sure that every statement or legal letter states clearly that I am NOT involved and that I knew and know NOTHING about any of these allegations. I can't take any more of this my end."

"I could have worse tags than ‘Air Miles Andy’, although I don’t know what they are."

"[A]s Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao perceived, the basic concept of war as a continuation of politics by other means can be applied to any form of rivalry between human groups, be they class, racial or ideological. In these contexts "war", or the use of force to compel an opponent to fulfil one's will, has far broader meanings than a traditional punch-up between nation states or alliances, or the kind of "absolute" or "total" war which Clausewitz saw as conceptually the purest form and which we have witnessed twice this century. Thus we saw anti-nuclear protesters employ force at military installations in pursuit of the political aim of persuading Western governments into unilateral nuclear disarmament. We saw Greenpeace employ force against Shell plc over the disposal of the Brent Spar platform. We saw Arthur Scargill's troops attempt by coercion to bring down an elected government, only to be defeated in, quite literally, pitched battles. We may note in these encounters and, for that matter, in the street brawls during the World Cup, another fundamental factor that is unlikely to change in the future – the dark well of aggressiveness that lies within human nature and finds release in the pleasurable adrenalin surge that comes from violence, risk and danger."

"It is Northern Ireland that provides the classic contemporary demonstration of Clausewitzian principles in action. In 1974 the Ulster Protestants rejected powersharing under the 1973 Sunningdale agreement to the point of launching a general strike which the British army warned the British government it could not handle. The government thereupon abandoned the project. But in 1998 the majority of Unionist political parties and at least half the Unionist electorate have come to accept power-sharing under the deal brokered by Mo Mowlam. Wherein lies the essential difference between 1973–74 and 1998? It lies in the profound yearning on the island of Ireland and on the British mainland (including Whitehall and Westminster) for "peace" after the intervening 25 years of unrelenting "war" on the part of the IRA, years of violence of the most extreme kind intended (to quote Clausewitz) "to compel our opponent to fulfil our will". Thus all the talk of compromise and reconciliation in Northern Ireland is just so much small-l liberal blather disguising the Clausewitzian reality that by their "continuation of politics by other means" the IRA have indeed compelled their opponents to fulfil their will."

"It must be left to Cunningham himself to sum up the success of "Operation Judgment": "Taranto, and the night of November 11th–12th, 1940, should be remembered for ever as having shown once and for all that in the Fleet Air Arm the Navy has its most devastating weapon. In a total flying time of about six and a half hours – carrier to carrier – twenty aircraft had inflicted more damage upon the Italian fleet than was inflicted upon the German High Seas Fleet in the daylight action at the Battle of Jutland". Taranto indeed marked the dethronement of the battleship as the arbiter of seapower after four centuries, and the opening of a new era of naval warfare."

"That Clausewitz lives, and will live, is equally shown in such cases as the former Yugoslavia, where Nato has simply frozen a war which will certainly break out again if and when the intervention forces leave; or Israel–Palestine, where the political relations between Jew and Arab reflect the military outcome of past wars, where the conflict of interest is essentially irreconcilable, and where therefore policy and violence will continue to go hand in hand. What may therefore be safely predicted is that over the next 170 years the world will continue to be an arena of complex rivalries and direct collisions of interest rather than a "world order" or a "world community", and that human groups engaged in such rivalries will from time to time resort to force as an instrument of their politics. What weapons will be then available, and what tactics will consequently be employed, only a fool would pretend to guess. It will be remarked that so far I have not mentioned the United Nations Organisation, that expensive figment of liberal wishful thinking. I have done so now."

"Except in rare cases such as Robert Owen's paternalistic management at New Lanark, the brutality of indoctrination into the life of a coolie in a vast camp for coolies, performing coolie work in service to machines, was unsoftened by positive care and control by the state. Not until the great uprooting and resettlement had been largely completed did Parliament belatedly begin to mitigate the squalor, chaos and exploitation by reforms in local government and public health, and by regulating working conditions by successive Factory Acts... This was the environment, then, which moulded the character of the new British working class: a home life in a mean brick hovel without piped water in an unpaved street with open drains, much like the townships in which the Bantu coolies of South Africa still live today; a working life at the mercy of a "practical-man" master who believed that the profitability of his business depended on low wages and long hours. It was, after all, from the study of the British working class that Marx and Engels principally derived their conception of the alienated proletariat."

"[W]hereas American workers during the industrialisation of the United States after 1850 never accepted they were permanent members of a coolie class, but believed instead that, true to the American myth, they were merely passing through on their way to prosperous middle-class status, British "coolies" came to accept that working-class they were, and working-class they and their children would always remain; and proud of it. In Hoggart's judgement in 1957, "Most working-class people are not climbing; they do not quarrel with their general level; they only want the little more that allows a few frills." In fact it was an aspect of their conformism that social ambition was positively discouraged as "giving y'self airs", quite apart from an individual's fear anyway of becoming isolated from social roots and family. It is apparent that none of these lasting characteristics, beliefs and attitudes of the British urban working class make for maximum industrial productivity or for maximum speed in adapting to new technologies; indeed the very opposite. Was it not the boss's factory, the boss's product, the boss's market and the boss's profit; and in the boss's interest to bring in new machines? Did not the boss exact – or try to exact – the most work for the least wage? It followed that the worker's only connection with the productive process was to fight the boss as best he could through trade unions or through simple skiving, in order to do as little for as much money as possible; or to protect his job or craft by restrictive practices. So deeply ingrained in the worker was this sense that the productive process, let alone success in the market, was no responsibility of his that it determined his actions even in the midst of the Second World War."

"It is impossible to exaggerate the long-term consequences, social and psychological, of the experiences of the new industrial workforce in the raw factory settlements of the late Georgian and early Victorian England under conditions of ferocious competition and unbridled exploitation. It was in that era, when men, women and children were flooding into these settlements from the countryside and exchanging the slow, natural rhythms of the land or self-employed crafts (however hard that life might have been) for the harsh mechanical discipline and the pace and clamour of the mill, exchanging the village for the back-to-back terrace, that the British industrial working class, with its peculiar and enduring character as a culture apart, an alienated group often embittered and hostile, was created. It happened that water power and coal and iron largely existed in the bleak, wild landscapes of northern England, South Wales and lowland Scotland – regions hitherto lacking the numerous population and rich civilisation of the south; indeed regions traditionally turbulent and remote from the government of the Crown since the middle ages. Rare it was for the new factory settlements to cluster round an established city, as later would German industries develop round Leipzig and Dresden, Düsseldorf and Cologne: instead villages like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, Halifax, Middlesbrough proliferated into vast brick-built industrial camps; nothing but mean dwellings, drink-shops and "works"."

"In Britain the pattern was early established, and forever continued, whereby at best management and workforce confronted each other in a state of suspended hostilities, like armies of observation: hardly a pattern that encouraged spontaneous zeal at the bench. In 1879 William Morris, himself a romantic and a socialist, could write: "It is true, and very sad to say, that if anyone nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by a gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he gets it well done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men's rights..." It was Hoggart's judgement in the early 1950s that fundamentally nothing had changed since Morris's day. And certainly the cumulative evidence about lacklustre output, absenteeism, stoppages and go-slows during the Second World War in industries ranging from coal and shipbuilding to aircraft manufacture bears this out, as does the appalling record for low productivity, strikes and shoddy workmanship which in the 1970s helped to destroy the British motor-vehicle industry. So the degree of motivation explains the performance; the performance demonstrates the degree of motivation; and the nature of the historical experience of the working class accounts for both."

"The 1902 Act led to a major expansion in secondary education, so that by 1914 there were 1,123 such schools, of which 500 were directly run by the local authorities while the remainder was denominational. Unfortunately, the prestige of a "grammar school" education, itself derived from the Arnoldian public school, with its emphasis on the academic approach to both the arts and science, impressed itself on parents, local authorities, and the Board of Education alike, so excluding a system of alternative secondary education of equal standing, like the German Realschule, more related to Britain's existence as a commercial and technical power."

"The approach of European countries to industrialisation and the role of education was different from Britain's from the start, and it sprang from a fundamentally different concept of the role of the state itself. Even in the pre- or post-industrial area of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European monarchies had regarded it as their function to promote commercial and industrial progress by interventionist measures, including the setting up of training schools for particular crafts and professions. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it became entirely natural for European governments to follow their older traditions and seek to guide and foster their countries' industrialisation. In particular they saw that the state alone could bring about a structure of national education at all levels which would feed industry with well-educated and trained personnel."

"Industrialisation in Britain had been a "bottom-upwards" grass-roots transformation brought about by the initiative of the individual "practical man", and without benefit of state guidance or intervention. This was in accordance with British political and commercial attitudes already deeply ingrained by the time that the Industrial Revolution got under way. For the British had come to prize individualism and localism, as against a strong and effective state, which they saw as the essential feature of the European despotisms they feared and hated... This traditional British dislike of the state was sharpened and given fresh doctrinal justification during the Industrial Revolution by the laissez-faire political economists, laissez-faire becoming, by 1850, a universal article of political faith. Even with regard to education, all must be left to private enterprise or private charity. In any case, it was thought, state intervention in education could lead towards tyranny. A national education system devised and directed by the state was therefore unthinkable."

"The European states, and above all Germany (newly united in 1871), therefore entered the second Industrial Revolution, that of science-based industries like chemicals and electrical goods, very well equipped by education, training, and research systems to take the lead. Britain, on the other hand, could only deploy a sorry militia of the ignorant led by the "practical man". Not merely did Britain lack a modern educational and research structure, it lacked the necessary national understanding and will to create one. Here then is the leitmotiv in British education for the next sixty years: the painful effort against the very grain of national prejudices to remedy what was already by 1870 a half-century of backlog."