Harold Wilson Quotes

A second devaluation would be regarded all over the world as an acknowledgement of defeat, a recognition that we were not on a springboard, but a slide. I myself have always deprecated—perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly—in crisis after crisis, appeals to the Dunkirk spirit as an answer to our problem, because what is required in our economic situation is not a brief period of inspired improvisation, work and sacrifice, such as we had under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill), but a very long, hard, prolonged period of reorganisation and rededication. It is the long haul, not the inspired spurt, that we need.

I get a little nauseated, perhaps, when I hear the phrase "freedom of the Press" used as freely as it is, knowing that a large part of our proprietorial Press is not free at all

The greatest enemy that lies in our path in creating the kind of Britain we want to create is conservatism in all its forms. We cannot afford Tory conservatism, with its smug preoccupation, complacently looking on while the rest of the world passes us by.

This country cannot afford now—if it ever could afford—unofficial strikes, wasteful stoppages, long, weary arguments about industrial demarcation, any more than we can afford out-of-date industrial methods, industrial promotion based on influence and connexion rather than technical ability, or management attitudes which give a higher priority to tax avoidance or the earning of quick, uncovenanted capital profits than to modernization and innovation in industrial production methods, or aggressiveness in exports.

I have always said about Tony [Benn] that he immatures with age.

There are three groups on the Left. There is what is now called the "soft" Left, to which you and I and Michael always belonged. There is a middle group and then there are the really vicious group.

[Tory domestic policies were directed to four aims:] To force up food prices; to force up prices of other essentials; to cut down the welfare services to means-tested levels; to force up rents in a free-for-all in housing. ... In borough after borough, city after city, we have learnt what Tory housing policy means. In many areas—not in all—cuts in the housing programme for basic needs; in all areas, higher rents.

The answer is to increase industrial efficiency, to build up our exports, and to substitute home production for imports wherever this can be achieved competitively and economically, to broaden the base of our economy with capital investment, through the training of skilled manpower and the encouragement to accept change, to enable us to expand without running into strains and stresses such as have revealed themselves in past periods of expansion.

This odious doctrine of apartheid at 11-plus. ... We reject it because as a nation we cannot afford artificially to segregate three-quarters of our children, and virtually cut them off from the normal chance of higher education.

President Reagan is likely to be more successful in dealing with the Soviet Union than any recent American leader. ... he had been impressed with Mr Reagan's instincts and style.

From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn't mean, of course, that the Pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.

Roy Jenkins? ...tended to knock off at 7 o'clock...a socialite rather than a Socialist...The SDP. It's not a party, it's a clique or a click, as they say up 'ere. As for Dr Owen and Mr Rodgers, I never thought of them as Cabinet calibre...perfectly good junior ministers. Jim [Callaghan] took a different view. I had retired by then—voluntarily—which is a very unusual thing in politics.

Traders and financiers all over the world had been listening to the Chancellor. For months he had said that if he could not stop the wage claims, the country was "facing disaster". Those were his own words. Rightly or wrongly these people believed him. For them, 5th September—the day that the Trades Union Congress unanimously rejected the policy of wage restraint—marked the end of an era. And all these financiers, all the little gnomes in Zurich and the other financial centres about whom we keep on hearing, started to make their dispositions in regard to sterling.

This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

We are more interested in the monthly trade returns than in Debrett, more preoccupied with what is said by the industrial correspondents and economic editors than what is said by William Hickey; more concerned with modernizing the machinery of government and the action that will need to follow the report of the Estimates Committee on the Civil Service than in altering the layout of Burke's Landed Gentry.