The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not t… - Enoch Powell

Our present experience and our present predicament was foreseen and forecast in principle. It was exactly what we had seen happen before. It was exactly what had led us to renounce the very course of action upon which we subsequently entered. We are, therefore, obliged not to seek an escape by accusing external events, such as the movement of forces and prices in the outside world, for the crisis with which we have to deal. More important still, we are freed from the danger of supposing that either we or the country at large are the victims of the perversity of a group of our fellow citizens... It is salutary to be reminded that it is an impasse which was always implicit in the course of statutory control of prices and wages upon which we engaged. When we renounced that course we did not do so merely as a contrast to a voluntary prices and wages policy. The accent was not specially upon the word statutory or compulsory. We renounced it because our whole conception of the cause and, therefore, the cure of the scourge of inflation was such that the attempt to regulate individual prices and wages, either by compulsion or by agreement, was irrelevant. In a sense, we have the grim satisfaction of seeing the realisation and verification of what we ourselves predicted.

We obey our laws because we feel them to be our laws; we submit to be governed by our institutions because we feel them to be our institutions. They are identified with us, intuitively and emotionally, because we are, we think, part and parcel of them and they of us.

I refer to the misunderstanding of Soviet Russia as an aggressive power, militaristically and ideologically bent upon world domination—'seeing', to quote a recent speech of the British Prime Minister, 'the rest of the world as its rightful fiefdom.' How any rational person, viewing objectively the history of the last thirty-five years, could entertain this 'international misunderstanding' challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension. The notion has no basis in fact... If Russia is bent on world conquest, she has been remarkably slothful and remarkably unsuccessful.