Peregrine Worsthorne Quotes

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.

Imagine what would have happened to the Labour Party in 1964 or 1966 if it had appealed to the country in these terms: "We appeal to you, the people of Britain, to give us your votes so that we may wind up the empire, reduce Britain to the status of a minor power, and devalue the national currency." It would have been political suicide. It might have helped the Labour candidate in Hampstead and in a handful of other constituencies where progressive intellectuals reside in large numbers. But throughout the rest of the country, particularly in working-class areas, it would have disastrously confirmed the deep-seated suspicion among all classes that in fact the Labour Party does not stand for Britain.

[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.

[T]he State, which the Labour Party is seeking to exalt...has seldom meant less to ordinary people. Its natural authority and prestige have never been so low. Paradoxically, this is to a large extent the fault of the socialists themselves. They have persistently denigrated the national institutions, derided the concepts of rank and hierarchy on which the State depends, deplored the spirit of national pride from which it draws its strength. The Tory idea of the State, rooted in history and tradition, pomp and circumstance, at least had some popular appeal. But in the language of socialism the State spells bureaucracy and bureaucracy spells all those aspects of the past which the working class find least palatable—bowler-hat-and-rolled-umbrella values, rigid hierarchy, orders from on high that have to be obeyed, impersonal authority. A socialist State in practice if not in theory, turns out to be the very last kind of State likely to appeal to the British working class.

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.

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.

Nobody should suppose that the slightly ridiculous picture painted of the Wilson kitchen cabinet by Mr. Haines or his real Cabinet by Mr. Crossman, is the result of some particular flaw in the character of a specially contemptible Prime Minister. Wilson's character merely compounded a danger common to all Labour Governments, perhaps to all Governments in an increasing egalitarian age: that of containing too high a proportion of men and women near the seats of power who have no feel for the appearance of office, none of that effortless cohesion and mutual trust of a ruling class for long accustomed to rule, no sense of public dignity or decorum and, in some ways, no instinctive flair for excluding those likely to let the side down by telling all for money.

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.

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.

These brown British citizens are in danger. Kenya is still a largely savage country, led by a man who a few years ago was involved in atrocities of indescribable horror. There are certainly as many signs in Kenya today of the fate being prepared for the Asian minority as there were in Germany in the early 1930s of the fate being prepared for the Jews. Yet in this case the potential victims are British citizens, and instead of urging them to hurry home, which would seem to be the sensible course, the British government is ordering them to keep out.
Why, then, so little sense of shame among the normally highly decent British people? The reason, of course is very simple. They do not see this the situation in this light at all. To them, the Asian Kenyans are no more British citizens than Ian Smith is a genuine British traitor. Just as they refuse to feel angry about Rhodesia's so called rebellion—which they regard as a legal fiction—so they refuse to feel guilty about the Kenyan Asians, who right of entry into Britain strikes them as flying in the face of common sense. ... They do not feel guilty, because they do not regard themselves as having any part in the mad world which supposes that the white Rhodesians really should hand over power to the black majority or that large-scale coloured immigration in Britain is a good idea. ... They no longer feel responsible for "lesser breeds without the law."