Peregrine Worsthorne Quotes

Yes, settlers. This is what they are, and it is contemptuous to see them as anything else. They do not want to be dissolved into the great pool of British life. In time it must be assumed that political leaders will emerge who will articulate this sense of separateness and that this in turn will lead to tensions which are much more serious than street rioting and ghetto violence, since they will be the result not of economic grievance, or of social deprivation—although these can be expected to play some part—but of straight communal rivalry: that most fateful canker in the body politic. I am paying the immigrants the courtesy of seeing them as they ought to be seen, not as they are now, weak, vulnerable and in need of protection, but as they will become—strong, purposeful and potentially disruptive. With the benefit of hindsight it is now clear that British emigrants should never have been financially encouraged to settle in Africa, that they should long ago have been encouraged financially to come home. To urge that this lesson by applied to the problem of coloured immigrants in this country is the opposite of racialism. It is a tribute to their future strength.

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.

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.

Powellism is now part of the English intellectual and moral tradition; part of the nation's mythology. The man, too, is a legend in his lifetime. So in a sense his work is done. For whatever eventually happens to him his ideas have now entered the bloodstream of the British body politic, guaranteeing them a kind of immortality. Of no other living British statesman could the same be said.

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.

[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.

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

[T]he only way for a Labour Government to bring about economic growth was through socialism, since only socialism could bring about that upsurge of working-class enthusiasm to compensate for the loss of business confidence... But...such policies are outside the range of any Labour Government, however large its majority, for the most compelling reason of all: Labour Governments lack the authority to take the international risks inherent in such a policy, to set the country against the prevailing international trends; lack the authority, that is, to summon up from the deep the forces of nationalism and put them behind socialism. The history and composition of the Labour Party precludes such risks... Yet without a leader able to spark the flame of nationalism, socialism will not work in this country.

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.

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.

All right, a military dictatorship is ugly and repressive. But if a minority British Socialist Government ever sought, by cunning, duplicity, corruption, terror and foreign arms, to turn this country into a Communist State, I hope and pray our armed forces would intervene to prevent such a calamity as efficiently as the armed forces did in Chile.

Can there really be any doubt that on any issue where Third World interests clash with those of the West, the immigrant population will side with the Third World? This is not a criticism. It is perfectly natural that they should. But it would be wholly unrealistic not to conclude that problems of race are going to be at the centre of British politics for many years to come, and that they will not easily be resolvable in a fashion acceptable to liberal-progressive ideology.

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.

It is not "socialism" that Britain is suffering from; nor syndicalism, nor corporatism, nor any other form of coherent organisation. What Britain is suffering from is "riotous disorder" and to argue, as Mrs Thatcher does, that "setting the people free" will cure it is as senseless as trying to smooth raging waters with a stick of dynamite or to quieten hubbub with a brass band. The urgent need today is for the State to regain control over "the people", to re-exert its authority, and it is useless to imagine that this will be helped by some libertarian mish-mash drawn from the writings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and the warmed-up milk of nineteenth-century liberalism.

Second only to peace in Northern Ireland, the most desirable political development which I should like to see in the New Year is the emergence of a healthy-looking British Communist party. This would mean that the significant Marxist minority in this country would have a vehicle of their own, instead of continuing to "back-seat" drive the Labour party. The absence of such a Communist party is really a luxury which Britain can no longer afford, since it allows us to suppose that the Marxist threat is much less serious than it really is. In France and Italy, for example, where the Communists are immeasurably powerful, nobody is in any doubt about the strength of the forces arrayed against the idea of a free society, or the need to fight them tooth and nail. The danger of a Communist takeover is overt, visible and never forgotten for long.