Anglicans From The United Kingdom

"Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”"

"The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils."

"I could not vote for any legislation which would legalise a constitution for Southern Rhodesia under which there would not be evident and relatively early advance to majority rule."

"Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger. Because there can be no such thing as compulsory compassion or vicarious compassion, therefore it is a humbugging abuse of language, intended to deceive, to talk about a 'compassionate Government' or a 'compassionate party'—or even a 'compassionate society', unless one simply means by that a society which happens to contain a lot of compassionate individuals. Nor let anyone protest: 'Oh, but when I vote for a party which will "make provision on an unprecedented scale for those in need of help", it means I too shall have to pay my whack and so I am being compassionate after all'. Nonsense! The purpose of your vote is not to make yourself subscribe—that you can freely do at any time—but to compel others."

"Trevor Huddleston: [W]hat I still want to know from you, really, is why the presence of a coloured immigrant group is objectionable, when the presence of a non-coloured immigrant is not objectionable. Enoch Powell: Oh no, oh no! On the contrary, I have often said that if we saw the prospect of five million Germans in this country at the end of the century, the risks of disruption and violence would probably be greater, and the antagonism which would be aroused would be more severe. The reason why the whole debate in this country on immigration is related to coloured immigration, is because there has been no net immigration of white Commonwealth citizens, and there could be no migration of aliens. This is merely an automatic consequence of the facts of the case; it is not because there is anything different, because there is anything necessarily more dangerous, about the alienness of a community from Asia, than about the alienness of a community from Turkey or from Germany, that we discuss this inevitably in terms of colour. It is because it is that problem."

"Once you go nuclear at all, you go nuclear for good; and you know it. Here is the parting of the ways, for from this point two opposite conclusions can be drawn. One is that therefore there can never again be serious war of any duration between Western nations, including Russia—in particular, that there can never again be serious war on the Continent of Europe or the waters around it, which an enemy must master in order to threaten Britain. That is the Government's position. The other conclusion, therefore, is that resort is most unlikely to be had to nuclear weapons at all, but that war could nevertheless develop as if they did not exist, except of course that it would be so conducted as to minimise any possibility of misapprehension that the use of nuclear weapons was imminent or had begun. The crucial question is whether there is any stage of a European war at which any nation would choose self-annihiliation in preference to prolonging the struggle. The Secretary of State says, "Yes, the loser or likely loser would almost instantly choose self-annihiliation." I say, "No. The probability, though not the certainty, but surely at least the possibility, is that no such point would come, whatever the course of the conflict.""

"They tell us we must be prepared to contemplate, in fact to welcome, the alteration and alienation of our towns and cities. They tell us there is no such thing as our own people and our country. Indeed there is, and I say it in no mean or arrogant or exclusive spirit. What I know is that we have an identity of our own, as we have a territory of our own, and that the instinct to preserve that identity, as to defend that territory, is one of the deepest and strongest implanted in mankind. I happen also to believe that the instinct is good and that its beneficent effects are not exhausted... In our time that identity has been threatened more than once. In the past it was threatened by violence and aggression from without. It is now threatened from within by the foreseeable consequences of a massive but unpremeditated and fortunately, in substantial measure, reversible immigration."

"There is a limit to the number of (and I'm going to use this word in an entirely neutral sense) aliens who can be brought into a nation, particularly as close-knit and concentrated a nation as Britain is, without breaking the bounds of that society and setting up intolerable frictions and stresses as damaging to one side as to the other. Now, this is a question of number. But the relationship between number and difference is clearly important, because the more different they are – and colour is a signal, an outward signal of differences (not significant in itself, but it signalizes other differences that one can't deny) – the greater the difference, the smaller the numbers that can at any one time be accepted without breaking, or being thought to break (which comes to the same thing if we're talking about psychology), the framework of a nation and a society. So it's numbers."

"It depends on how you define the word "racialist." If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatically "No.""

"Enoch Powell: Now, we were invaded by the Danes, they did alter the country and we fought them for two hundred years. If that's what is meant – to be allowed to happen? Marghanita Laski: Were we wise to do so? Didn't they add to us in the end? Wasn't there much more suffering and misery because we fought them? Enoch Powell: Only because we fought them, and eventually subjugated them and Christianised them. (applause)"

"[I]t depends indeed on whether the immigrants are different, and different in important respects from the existing population. Clearly, if they are identical, then no change for the good or bad can be brought about by the immigration. But if they are different, and to the extent that they are different, then numbers clearly are of the essence and this is not wholly – or mainly, necessarily – a matter of colour. For example, if the immigrants were Germans or Russians, their colour would be approximately the same as ours, but the problems which would be created and the change which could be brought about by a large introduction of a bloc of Germans or Russians into five areas in this country would be as serious – and in some respects more serious – than could follow from an introduction of a similar number of West Indians or Pakistanis."

"It would be different if there were some great widespread public indignation and demand: "Away with the prescriptive upper house of Parliament". There is not. There was recently carried out by Mr. McKenzie and a colleague of his a survey of working-class political attitudes called Angels in Marble. They found that "only one-third of the entire working class sample, and only a slightly higher proportion of Labour voters, favoured abolishing the Lords or altering it in any way…About a third of the whole sample" of working-class voters in the country "see the Lords as an intrinsic part of the national tradition or of the government of the country." As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people—the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive."

"The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or Asian still. Unless he be one of a small minority—for number, I repeat again and again, is of the essence—he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one. Time is running against us and them. With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing ‘in England's green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the United States."

"...on such a matter it is the duty of a politician to make and to declare his judgement. I do so, I hope, not unduly moved – though why should I not be moved? – by the hundreds – no, thousands – of my countrymen who speak to me or write to me of their fear and foreboding: the old who rejoice that they will not live to see what is to come; the young who are determined that their children shall not grow up under the shadow of it. My judgement then is this: the people of England will not endure it. If so, it is idle to argue whether they ought to or ought not to. I do not believe it is in human nature that a country, and a country such as ours, should passively watch the transformation of whole areas which lie at the heart of it into alien territory."

"I hope those who shouted "Fascist" and "Nazi" are aware that before they were born I was fighting against Fascism and Nazism."

"Too often today people are ready to tell us: "This is not possible, that is not possible." I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts."

"All government rests upon consent, and consent is not to be had without taking counsel with the most eminent or influential or representative of the governed, and seeking their advice: the act of taking counsel cannot be separated from the act of exercising authority. All government rests also upon habit, upon being exercised in the same way or a similar way to that in which the governed remember or believe that it was exercised before. Brute force can break with habit; but as soon as brute force begins to turn into government, it does so by starting to observe habitual modes of behaviour. Habitual forms or institutions for counsel and consent are thus of the essence of government."

"What I would take 'racialist' to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief. So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is 'no'—unless, perhaps, it is to be a racialist in reverse. I regard many of the peoples in India as being superior in many respects—intellectually, for example, and in other respects—to Europeans. Perhaps that is over-correcting."

"It is no kindness on the part of politicians to minimize the size which those problems will assume, even if from now onwards every possible legislative and administrative action is taken to limit it. To draw attention to those problems and face them in the light of day is wiser than to apply the method of the ostrich which rarely yields a satisfactory result – even to ostriches. We have just been seeing in Wolverhampton the cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the shape of communalism. Communalism has been the curse of India and we need to be able to recognize it when it rears its head here. Large numbers of Sikhs, who had been serving the Wolverhampton Corporation voluntarily and contentedly, have found themselves against their will made the material for communal agitation. They have the same right as anyone else to decide which if any of the rules of their sect they will keep, and they had found no difficulty in entering the Corporation's employment and complying with the same rules as their fellow employees. For those who took a different and a stricter view there were plenty of other opportunities of employment. It will be the opposite to the equal treatment of all persons within the realm if employers are placed in the position of adjudicating upon the requirements of their employees' religion. The issue in this instance, is not racial or religious discrimination: it is communalism."

"Some problems are unavoidable. Some evils can be coped with to a certain extent, but not prevented. But that a nation should have saddled itself, without necessity and without countervailing benefit, with a wholly avoidable problem of immense dimensions is enough to make one weep. That the same nation should stubbornly persist in allowing the problem, great as it already is, to be magnified further, is enough to drive one to despair."

"There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response. This is the kind of feeling which you in Walsall and we in Wolverhampton are experiencing in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns. We are of course in a minority – make no mistake about that. Out of over 600 parliamentary constituencies perhaps less than 60 are affected in any way like ourselves. The rest know little or nothing and, we might sometimes be tempted to feel, care little or nothing. Only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school. He looked at me as if I were a Member of Parliament for central Africa, who had suddenly dropped from the sky into Westminster. So far as most people in the British Isles are concerned, you and I might as well be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances."

"Often when I am kneeling down in church, I think to myself how much we should thank God, the Holy Ghost for the gift of capitalism."

"Integration of races of totally disparate origins and culture is one of the great myths of our time. It has never worked throughout history. The United States lost its only real opportunity of solving its racial problem when it failed after the Civil War to partition the old Confederacy into a "South Africa" and a "Liberia"."

"I find in my constituency in the last few weeks an ominous deterioration, which is taking the form not of discrimination by white against coloured but of insolence of coloured towards white and corresponding fearfulness on the part of white. It is this which will be exacerbated by the projected legislation on discrimination and which we shall have to take into account in making up our minds on our attitude."

"In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that."

"In my own constituency (where I estimate that about 10 per cent of the population are immigrants from Asia or the Caribbean) I have the impression that, as no doubt elsewhere, the first phase, the sudden impact of Commonwealth immigration, is over. I am going to prophesy, however, that there will be subsequent phases, when the problem will resume its place in public concern and in a more intractable form, when it can no longer be dealt with simply by turning the inlet tap down or off. Long before the coloured population reaches 5 per cent of the total, a proportion will have filtered into the general population, mingled with it in occupation, residence, habits and intermarriage. On the other hand, the rest, numerically perhaps much the greater part, will be in larger or smaller colonies, in certain areas and cities, more separated than now in habits, occupation and way of life. The irregular pattern of population and living which grew up higgledy-piggledy in the early years of immigration will have been tidied up. It is for these colonies, and the problems thereby entailed on our descendants, that they will curse the improvident years, now gone, when we could have avoided it all."

"For over ten years, from about 1954 to 1966, Commonwealth immigration was the principal, and at times the only, political issue in my constituency in Wolverhampton. Between those dates entire areas were transformed by the substitution of a wholly or predominantly coloured population for the previous native inhabitants, as completely as other areas were transformed by the bulldozer. My uppermost feeling on looking back upon those years is of astonishment that this event, which altered the appearance and life of a town and had shattering effects on the lives of many families and persons, could take place with virtually no physical manifestations of antipathy. This speaks volumes for the steadiness and tolerance of the natives. Acts of an enemy, bombs from the sky, they could understand; but now, for reasons quite inexplicable, they might be driven from their homes and their property deprived of value by an invasion which the Government apparently approved and their fellow-citizens – elsewhere – viewed with complacency. Those were the years when a ‘For Sale’ notice going up in a street struck terror into all its inhabitants. I know; for I live within the proverbial stone’s throw of streets which ‘went black’."

"The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books."

"Under the Labour Government in the last eighteen months Britain has behaved, perfectly clearly and perfectly recognizably, as an American satellite."

"If the Western nations were to confer on the rest of mankind not, as at present, just a tiny fraction of their goods and capital, but were, literally, in the words of the epistle, to ‘bestow all their goods to feed the poor’ their wealth would only disappear, like a snowflake on boiling water, into the maw of these vast and astronomically increasing populations, and the outcome would be a common level of poverty and incompetence. Whence, then, if from anywhere, are the means of improvement to come? There is only one possible answer: essentially from within. The investment and the initiative which made possible the development of the Western economies was not subscribed or donated from outside; it came from within. The rise of Japan, in far less than a century from Admiral Perry's arrival, to challenge the Western countries in technology and production, was not because she was spoon-fed with grants and uneconomic loans from a benevolent Europe or America: it was due to the spirit and character of her people and their aptitude and appetite to learn. The great, the only truly beneficent gift we have to offer is the example of that which has made the West productive – capitalism and enterprise. But it is a gift which implies the power and will to receive it: and that, although we can teach and demonstrate by precept and by example, it is not in our power simply to confer. In short, the secret of aid to the developing countries is not capital itself: it is capitalism."

"The right of free association, which is pleaded on behalf of collective price-fixing by trade unions, means nothing unless there is an equal right of non-association. It is contrary to the Rule of Law that any private association of citizens should be permitted to exercise, let alone to be endowed with the positive power to exercise, coercion over those who do not choose to belong to it. This power of coercion derives primarily from the legal privileges which trade unions, and trade unions uniquely, have enjoyed for the last sixty years, privileges which enable them to behave in ways that for any other associations would be unlawful and would result in damages for those who suffered injury at their hands... [N]o one has succeeded in showing that today these coercive powers are other than superfluous at best and at worst harmful, and that...the state of the law on which those privileges rest is ripe for urgent reform. The law of picketing, intimidation, contracting-out, immunity from process is not at this day defensible, either in itself or in its economic consequences. When combination to fix the price of labour enjoys no privileges which are denied to combinations for the purpose of fixing other prices, then the right of free association will be a reality and not a phrase, and one of the most serious obstacles will have been removed which impede at present the use of this nation's abilities and resources for the benefit of all her people."

"I sometimes hear the suggestion made, even in the Conservative Party, that one would wish to see the official, responsible trade union leaders encouraged and strengthened, given the power to make binding contracts on behalf of their members, and placed under liability to penalties if their members break them. This would be the diametrically wrong direction in which to move. It would entrench and give legal sanctions to collective price-fixing itself, which is the essential economic evil. But there are more objections than on economic grounds alone; there are also grave political objections. If unions are to contract to deliver a stipulated quantity, and presumably quality, of labour at a stipulated price, then they would need to be endowed with disciplinary powers over their members, in order to secure the performance of the contract: the members would have to be subject, besides the general law, to a kind of private law or code. A trade union would cease to be in any sense a voluntary association; for only union members, and that, members of a specific trade union, would in practice be employable. This is the union shop and the closed shop—which the Tory Party has always repudiated—with a vengeance. The idea would carry us far down the road to the fascist, corporate state, where the economic life and decisions of the individual are regulated by corporations of employers and unions."

"[T]o the extent that collective bargaining does succeed in distorting costs, it must rank among the obstacles to improvement in the standard of living of the British worker; and the more effective it is, the greater the obstacle. The British industrial worker today works longer hours for less real wages than his counterpart in West Germany, and that will soon be true, if it is not already, of his counterparts in a number of other European countries. This is not because the British trade unions are not strong enough, any more than it is because the monopolies and restrictive practices among buyers and sellers of goods and services are not tight enough. It is because industrial effort is being more efficiently used elsewhere than here. This is what gives the immediacy and urgency to this whole question of the trade unions. The people of this country cannot afford to allow themselves the luxury of practices and habits, however encrusted with sentiment and benevolent superstition, which place obstacles in the way of more efficient use of our resources."

"The effect of any combination to fix the price of labour in a particular employment by restraining those who would be prepared to pay more or accept less—that is what collective bargaining means if it means anything at all—is the same as the effect of any other restrictive practice: it makes everybody worse off in the end."

"So let us make this our resolve: we will not be tempted, or frightened, or cajoled into turning aside from our plain duty and common-sense necessity: so to control and limit and guide our public expenditure that it no longer entails upon this country the recurrent menace of inflationary crises or the more insidious but in the long run dangerous atrophy of an increasingly state-dominated economy."

"Public and private expenditure are not the same in their financial and economic effects. There is a very important difference between your expenditure and mine and the Government's expenditure. If you and I intend to spend but find we have not enough money, we have no choice but to think better of it. Not so the Government; if they are short, they can either make you and me pay more in taxation, or else they can actually create additional money... For politicians to increase public expenditure is easy and sweet; to refrain from increasing it, let alone to reduce it, is hard and uncomfortable. Thus it is that government intentions to spend get carried through, irrespective of whether this results in money being created faster than goods and services—irrespective, in other words, of the inflation which ensues. That is why Lord Cromer was perfectly right in saying that a high level of public expenditure causes inflation."

"The explosion in productive energy which capitalism unleashed in the nineteenth century was accompanied by social evils and hardships which have since been outgrown and abolished. It has been possible to do so by means of that very increase in production itself, just as future social improvement will depend on the rate of our future economic advance. What tragic folly it would be if modern Britain were to cast away the subtlest and most efficient system mankind has yet devised for setting effort and resources to their best economic use, and were to go right back to the clumsy methods and crude fallacies which our forefathers thought they had left behind for ever."

"The present-day Socialist would be perfectly at home in the France of Louis XIV, where officials decided what industries should be created and located in what parts of France and her colonies, minutely regulated the imports and exports, subsidised and controlled prices, and managed the economy even down to prescribing the patterns which were to be woven in the state-owned tapestry works of Aubusson. There is the spiritual home of the Socialist planner. If Louis XIV could read Signposts for the Sixties, with its promise of the powers of government used to enforce a national plan of investment and production...it would win his full approval and support. There are no doubt some points of dissimilarity between Mr. Harold Wilson and Louis XIV; but in their economic policies they are twin souls. And the psychology and attitude of mind behind their common policy is not at all unlike. "The state?" said Louis, "Why, that is myself!" Was it not a Socialist minister who within living memory proclaimed, "We are the masters now"?"

"The idea of the State-controlled economy is not modern at all. It is very old; and not only very old, but refuted and superseded long ago. It is quite true that the great principles of capitalism and free enterprise were expounded and explored around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Newton discovered gravitation in the seventeenth century. Copernicus proved in the sixteenth century that the earth revolves round the sun. But these truths are not thereby "out-of-date". They are not refuted by the lapse of time. The errors which they replaced are errors still. It is the Socialists and the economic planners who are the Ptolemaics and the flat-earthers of the modern world. They have not moved on beyond capitalism: they have moved back before it. In order to find the parallels to their faith in state regulation and control of the economy you have to go back behind Adam Smith and his contemporaries to the elaborate management of trade in the guilds and boroughs of the Middle Ages or to the French bureaucrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

"Before more months or years are spent by Ministers, by economic staffs, by industrialists and by trade unionists, in a pursuit which is as foredoomed to futility as filling a sieve or making a rope of sand, it is time to call a halt, and to declare in round and unmistakeable terms that an incomes policy, in any relevant or useful sense, does not and cannot exist—except perhaps in a communist dictatorship."

"Immigration was, and is, an issue. In my constituency it has for years been question number one, into which discussion of every other political topic—housing, health, benefits, employment—promptly turned."

"In conditions of free enterprise and competition, one does not have to contrive modernisation or introduce it by government decree. It happens, and keeps on happening, of its own accord. A firm or an industry or an attitude which is no longer modern simply does not survive; it goes under and is replaced by others which are modern. Our motor industry, our chemical industry, yes, our steel industry, do not have to be told to modernise themselves. They keep on doing it because they have to, in order to export and meet the challenge of a fiercely competitive and rapidly changing world. If Britain wants to be modern, there is no substitute for the system of competitive free enterprise by which the Tory Party stands."

"When a man offers to sell you something at less than its market price, it is a pretty good sign that you are about to be swindled."

"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."

"The creative forces in a nation lie in the people themselves—in their determination, their effort, their hopefulness, their thrift, their readiness to venture and to change. Only in proportion as they show and apply those qualities can the economy advance. The truly creative policies are the policies which enable the nation to put forth the effort and to take the decisions upon which, alone, the rate of its advance depends."