Top 15 Peregrine Worsthorne Quotes

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

Ever since Hiroshima, the mushroom cloud had been a nightmarish possibility hanging over all our imaginations, and now, quite suddenly, it was threatening to materialise. Oddly enough, fear did not come into it, so there was no need to keep a stiff upper lip; no need to ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. For if everybody was going to die, then nobody was going to die, since dying involves leaving loved ones behind and this time there were going to be no loved ones left behind. No need, therefore, for tears or sadness. It was more a question of intense excitement; of being in on not the creation but the destruction of the world; in on, that is, the drama to end all dramas.
From the moment of announcing the exclusion zone, President Kennedy and his small team of advisers had gone into purdah in the White House, making no appearances and issuing no statements. This unprecedented hush lasted for several days during which there was nothing much to do except wait and pray and hope for the best. I think we all knew by then that if anybody was going to flinch from this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, it would not be President Kennedy. How we knew that I do not know, but we did, and somehow or other the total public silence from the White House had succeeded in communicating determination more effectively than any number of official communiqués.

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 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 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.

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.

If one thing is certain about the next Tory government, it is that it will need, sooner or later, to impose its will on large groups of rebellious workers to an extent which Socialist governments have proved unable to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]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.