The Prime Minister [<nowiki/>Margaret Thatcher], shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the "Iron Lady". It arose in the contex… - Enoch Powell

The collective wisdom and the collective will of the nation resides not in any little Whitehall clique but in the whole mass of the people—in the producers, listening to the voice of the customer at home and abroad; in the savers and investors, using their eyes and their brains to lay out their resources to best advantage; in the consumers themselves, expressing through all the complex nervous system of the market their wishes, their needs, their expectations. In short, the true national economic plan is being made all the time by the very people and institutions which the intellectual arrogance of the Socialist affects to despise. "Under Tory free enterprise" says Labour's policy, "no limit is set to the amount of our national resources and intellectual talent consumed by the popular newspaper, the glossy magazine, the cinema, commercial television and the advertising industry." What a world of contempt for the ordinary man and woman breathes in that haughty sentence!

"Parliament" is a word of magic and power in this country. We refer to "parliamentary sovereignty." We live under the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament. Our history and political life would be unintelligible if Parliament were removed from that history. There is no other European nation of which the same can be said. There is no other European nation at the heart of whose identity and history lies its parliamentary assembly.

The idea of the State-controlled economy is not modern at all. It is very old; and not only very old, but refuted and superseded long ago. It is quite true that the great principles of capitalism and free enterprise were expounded and explored around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Newton discovered gravitation in the seventeenth century. Copernicus proved in the sixteenth century that the earth revolves round the sun. But these truths are not thereby "out-of-date". They are not refuted by the lapse of time. The errors which they replaced are errors still. It is the Socialists and the economic planners who are the Ptolemaics and the flat-earthers of the modern world. They have not moved on beyond capitalism: they have moved back before it. In order to find the parallels to their faith in state regulation and control of the economy you have to go back behind Adam Smith and his contemporaries to the elaborate management of trade in the guilds and boroughs of the Middle Ages or to the French bureaucrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.