Had the British electorate ever been asked plainly whether it wanted to belong to a European state or to remain British, it would have said, with unm… - T. E. Utley

One obvious and continuous function of the monarchy is to confer approbation by word and deed on those things which, in the common judgement of most men and women of British stock, are still deemed honourable – the bonds of family love and loyalty, care for the unfortunate, respect for human personalities as distinct from dedication to the abstract rights of mankind, even hard work and enterprise. To the various scruffs who assault the monarchy these things are anathema either because they are incompatible with the total transformation of society they want or, at the very least, because they tend to make that transformation less urgently desirable than it otherwise might appear.
By upholding these simple pieties, which have worn thin among politicians, the Crown exerts a continuous subtle restraint on reckless and ruthless innovation. Hence the particular venom inspired among the dregs of radicalism by the Duke of Edinburgh, who can speak on such matters with greater freedom than the Queen and who wields that influence, not perhaps with unerring instinct, but with a beneficent effect which is the greater for not being muffled by immaculate conception.

There is...the...argument that under PR extremist minorities, like the Front Nationale in France, get a look in which otherwise would be denied them. But is it thoroughly unhealthy to pretend that such minorities do not exist?
I am no fascist, but I represent a brand of Toryism, at once traditionalist and populist, which holds sway in every public bar in the kingdom and is almost entirely denied parliamentary expression by the Establishment.
Above all, PR would increase the independence of MPs both from their constituency associations and their party machines. I would give it a try.

It would be equally disastrous to ignore the truth that the theories of classical liberal economics, for all the truth they contain, appear to the average British elector to be profoundly shocking. The notions that a man's wage should be determined entirely by the law of supply and demand, that distributive justice has no place in the organisation of the economy and that the pursuit of profit is not only legitimate but the only proper motive of economic activity, fly in the face not only of modern egalitarian prejudice but also of all the assumptions of a society which is still largely based on the idea of status.