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Mr Powell attaches the highest value to working-class opinion. It is one of his special audiences and one, moreover, that he thinks deserves a better… - Maurice Cowling
" "Mr Powell attaches the highest value to working-class opinion. It is one of his special audiences and one, moreover, that he thinks deserves a better diet than the awful pieties with which Mr Jenkins and his allies had hoped to lead it into a liberal future. Even without the exigencies of his own Irish situation, he would obviously regard it as a sympathetic support both to his stated opinions about Europe and immigration and to the conception of a unity of national sentiment transcending the divisions of the classes.
As the indication of a political position, this would be admirable if it were propounded from inside the Conservative party. It would, indeed, be a form of 'traditional Conservatism', indicating the duties of the elite, demanding from it a rhetorical commitment and establishing resonances between it and the body of the electorate in a way which no other Conservative has succeeded in doing in the last twenty-five years. If Mr Powell were still, or showed signs of wishing once more to become, a party Conservative, he would be in a position to complete the work he begun before he left—of manufacturing a spiritual glue that would bind down the elite and force it to use a language that would bind it to everyone else.
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About Maurice Cowling
Maurice John Cowling (6 September 1926 – 25 August 2005) was a British historian and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
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Maurice John Cowling
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Additional quotes by Maurice Cowling
It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939... [F]rom the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.
I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book. I'm not in favour of Moslems executing death threats or using violence, and they have to observe the law when they're here, but I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. Some thinking Moslems take a view of the nature of religion, and the incompatibility between Islam and liberalism, which runs parallel to what I'm saying in Mill and Liberalism.
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Moral tolerance has not been a dominant feature of Conservative thinking in the past and, however desirable, is unlikely to become one of its dominant features, or indeed a dominant feature of the thinking of Labour voters so long as the gay and lesbian lobbies remain rancid and militant. Aspiration and choice, on the other hand, are qualities which every Conservative leader since Baldwin has applauded without embarrassment or affectation and the Conservative instinct for "social cohesion" has been as central as the search for a new prosperity and "new opportunities for millions of people" in the last 18 years.
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