Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you. - Margaret Thatcher

This Party of ours has been on the defensive for too long. The time has come to counter-attack...The intellectual counter-attack is as important as the counter-attack in Parliament and in the constituencies. If we can win the battle of ideas, then the war will already be half-won.

The restoration of the confidence of a great nation is a massive task. We do not shrink from it. It will not be given to this generation of our countrymen to create a great Empire. But it is given to us to demand an end to decline and to make a stand against what Churchill described as the “long dismal drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses”. Though less powerful than once we were, we have friends in every quarter of the globe, who will rejoice at our recovery, welcome the revival of our influence, and benefit from the message and from the example of our renewal.

We had to make certain that violence and intimidation and impossible demands could not win. There would have been neither freedom nor order in Britain if we had given in to violence. There would have been no hope for any prosperous industry if people had gone on strike, really, for bigger and bigger subsidies from the tax-payers, because in the end it is the tax-payers who pay these subsidies. So that is over.