I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book. I'm not in favour of Moslems executing death threats or using violence, and they have to observe the law when they're here, but I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. Some thinking Moslems take a view of the nature of religion, and the incompatibility between Islam and liberalism, which runs parallel to what I'm saying in Mill and Liberalism.
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It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939... [F]rom the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.
The Conservative party has a serious social purpose which cannot be satisfied by the mere expression of opinion. Its task – in opposition as well as in office – is to do what it can to prevent governmentally controlled changes in the existing social structure. This objective is fundamental. In relation to it everything else is tactical... [T]he Conservative party has a particular commitment to private property – and to inequalities in ownership – as the linchpin of the social and economic order and one of the buttresses of the moral order that is under attack, and this has been so ever since the Labour party became the chief party of opposition.
This country is overtaxed and over-governed, and will be more so if the Prime Minister leads, or allows, the Labour Party to have its way. Taxation has got to be reduced, not as a bribe, but as a national necessity.
Serious damage will be done to the whole structure of British life from new, vexatious and unnecessary extensions of governmental power at the hands of a party which believes that government alone can make the decisions on which the national life depends.
Admire Mr. Wilson's manner as we may, these are things that need to be said. If the Conservative party will not say them, Mr. Wilson will be there (and there rightfully) with a large majority for a long time yet.
The objection of substance to this position is that, in the hands of those who actually believe it, as Mr Lane has shown at the Race Relations Board, it becomes an exercise in liberal fascism, dedicating itself to the improvement of the nation's mind whether the nation's mind wishes to be improved or not, and showing itself only too willing to suppress expressions of opinion that conflict with it.
[T]he [Conservative] party has to do two things. It has not only to propose policies which derive from principles, it has also to create a pork-barrel interest which will persuade groups of electors severally and in detail that they would gain financially from a Conservative government. Secondly, as beneficiary of the public's dislike of the euro, it has to avoid giving offence to electors who agree with it on this issue only and at the same time has to respond to the culture of political mistrust which is the most important feature of the present situation – more important, probably, than hostility to the euro, because it strikes at the new era of sincerity and good feelings of which Mr Blair and Mr Ashdown have been the leaders.
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The object of this volume is to suggest respects in which Mrs Thatcher's stance may be open to improvement. Its message is that a Conservative stance should not only be different from the liberal conservatism of the 1950s but should also avoid the class resentments of the converted socialists of the seventies. It should treat Liberalism and Marxism as similar sorts of doctrine and should approach the former more even that it approaches the latter with satire, ridicule and incredulity. It should feel impelled towards a diffidence, irony or detachment which, whether Christian or cynical, will enable it to avoid ethical earnestness; and it should do this not because ethical earnestness is dangerous but because it is earnest and, as Mr Heath discovered, provides no route to that unity of national sentiment for which Conservatives need to seek.
To history, until yesterday, Halifax was the arch-appeaser. This, it is now recognised, was a mistake. His rôle, however, was complicated. In these pages he is not the man who stopped the rot, but the embodiment of Conservative wisdom who decided that Hitler must be obstructed because Labour could not otherwise be resisted.
Mr Powell attaches the highest value to working-class opinion. It is one of his special audiences and one, moreover, that he thinks deserves a better diet than the awful pieties with which Mr Jenkins and his allies had hoped to lead it into a liberal future. Even without the exigencies of his own Irish situation, he would obviously regard it as a sympathetic support both to his stated opinions about Europe and immigration and to the conception of a unity of national sentiment transcending the divisions of the classes.
As the indication of a political position, this would be admirable if it were propounded from inside the Conservative party. It would, indeed, be a form of 'traditional Conservatism', indicating the duties of the elite, demanding from it a rhetorical commitment and establishing resonances between it and the body of the electorate in a way which no other Conservative has succeeded in doing in the last twenty-five years. If Mr Powell were still, or showed signs of wishing once more to become, a party Conservative, he would be in a position to complete the work he begun before he left—of manufacturing a spiritual glue that would bind down the elite and force it to use a language that would bind it to everyone else.
[W]hat Mrs Thatcher seems to have sensed—is that that part of the liberal intelligentsia which grew up in the shadow of Hitler, Spain and Unemployment is deeply alienated from the Labour party. It has never liked trades unions even though, in the form of the 'ragged-trouser generation' (as Mr Stuart Hampshire calls it), it was willing, when young, to profess sympathy for the working classes whom it idolized in ignorance and at a distance and, quite wrongly, regarded as its natural ally in the fight against illiberal, reactionary, capitalistic Conservatism.
As to Solzhenitsyn it is necessary to remark that there is every reason to avoid involvement. He is a Russian, bearing on himself the marks of the Russian experience. There is no common ground between him and us or between his experience and ours. We know well enough without him that the Soviet Union may be dangerous, but we ought also to know that the reason why we should fear her is not the illiberality of her regime but any danger that may arise from her expansion. We know, too, that the Labour party is not Bolshevism, that at its worst it is East German socialism.
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I mean the permissive, metropolitan liberalism which uses the language of protest, progress and the open mind but which has by now become orthodox, predictable and is in many cases the mindless slogan of empty minds. Above all I mean the liberalism which over the last twenty years has encountered virtually no opposition and for which the events of the last six weeks have come as a particularly nasty revelation of the state of public thinking.
I mean a liberal doctrine and condescending manner which is particularly strong amongst undergraduate politicians and higher journalists, which is to be found in parts of all political parties and which, having its heroes in each generation, in this generation favours Messrs Jenkins, Crosland, Grimond and certain Conservatives whose names can easily be guessed.