Could my right hon. Friend explain why the increase in oil prices is deflationary but the increase in all other international prices has apparently b… - Enoch Powell

Although there are aspects of mugging which are continuous, permanent, old-fashioned, the new word is describing a typically new thing. That new thing, as is recently being admitted, is connected with the change in the composition of the population of certain of our great cities. To use a crude but efficient word for it, it is racial. Its prevalence is due to the fact that an implant into our society has changed a community that was previously homogeneous into a community which is no longer homogeneous and self-identifying... I was delighted with the terminology of the Metropolitan Police report to the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration: ‘Experience has taught us the fallibility of the assertion that crime rates amongst those of West Indian origin are no higher than those of the population at large’. Splendidly expressed! Beautifully expressed!

The people who founded the Working Men's College understood all this very well. The working men for whom this institution was created had a thirst for education in a way we can scarcely imagine today. It was not to pass examinations and qualify for better wages nor to raise themselves into a higher social class—though these are respectable ambitions and no doubt many of those early students felt them—but to get at knowledge for its own sake because without it their existence would be less worth to them, that the working classes demanded education and got it. This was part of the good life, and they were not to be denied it. To read and write, to borrow books and debate, to study the sciences and learn a foreign tongue—all these were so many steps not of economic advancement but of human dignity.

The Prime Minister [<nowiki/>Margaret Thatcher], shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the "Iron Lady". It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.