[T]he only way for a Labour Government to bring about economic growth was through socialism, since only socialism could bring about that upsurge of w… - Peregrine Worsthorne

Social discipline—that surely is a more fruitful and warding theme for contemporary conservatism than individual freedom. Libertarian arguments forged at a time when there were still slaves and serfs to be freed from monarchical despotism, peasants from domineering landlords, or proletarians from brutal bosses, simply do not apply plausibly to the kind of social problems facing Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Britain is not the Soviet Union, and when Mrs Thatcher bends her knee to Solzenytsin, she is worshipping at the wrong shrine and going wrong where George Orwell went so wrong with his nightmare predictions of 1984. The spectre haunting most ordinary people in Britain is neither of a totalitarian State nor of Big Brother, but of other ordinary people being allowed to run wild. What they are worried about is crime, violence, disorder in the schools, promiscuity, idleness, pornography, football hooliganism, vandalism and urban terrorism. The film Clockwork Orange, with its terrible portrait of a gang of juvenile thugs bereft of all moral restraint, terrorising the old and the weak without mercy, is what most people fear today.

Just as the British in India and Africa sought to create oases in those continents where they could live according to their own mores and values, so will the Africans, West Indians and Asians seek to do the same in Britain. I see no reason to suppose that the coloured immigrants in these islands now will be more prepared to become British than the British emigrants to their own continents then were prepared to become Indian or African. The fact has to be faced that large-scale coloured immigration has taken place at a time when the African and Indian races are rediscovering pride in their own ancestries; when the impulse to demonstrate the quality of their own cultures is growing stronger all the time. Indeed the dynamism of cultural pride, even of colour consciousness, is much more marked today among the black and brown races, who feel that their glories lie ahead, than among the whites—at least the European whites—who feel that their glories lie in the past.

Second only to peace in Northern Ireland, the most desirable political development which I should like to see in the New Year is the emergence of a healthy-looking British Communist party. This would mean that the significant Marxist minority in this country would have a vehicle of their own, instead of continuing to "back-seat" drive the Labour party. The absence of such a Communist party is really a luxury which Britain can no longer afford, since it allows us to suppose that the Marxist threat is much less serious than it really is. In France and Italy, for example, where the Communists are immeasurably powerful, nobody is in any doubt about the strength of the forces arrayed against the idea of a free society, or the need to fight them tooth and nail. The danger of a Communist takeover is overt, visible and never forgotten for long.