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[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 bee… - Peregrine Worsthorne
" "[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.
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About Peregrine Worsthorne
Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (22 December 1923 – 4 October 2020) was a British journalist, writer, and broadcaster. He spent the largest part of his career at the Telegraph newspaper titles, eventually the editor of The Sunday Telegraph from 1986 to 1989. He left the newspaper in 1997. Worsthorne was a conservative-leaning political journalist, who wrote columns and leaders for many years.
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Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne
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Sir Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne
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Additional quotes by Peregrine Worsthorne
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.
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.
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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.
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