I was born a Tory, am a Tory and shall die a Tory. It is part of me...it is something I cannot alter. - Enoch Powell

The Tory principle is the opposite: to trust the people. This has been expressed in practical terms in our actions in the last twelve years. We dismantled and abolished the economic controls, licensing, rationing and powers of direction inherited from the war and post-war Socialism; we restored a market for savings and abandoned the rigging of artificial rates of interest, which had been a fruitful cause of inflation; we imposed on the nationalised industries, apart from those restored to the free economy, the discipline of making comparable profits with what similar investments elsewhere would produce, and we undertook a major surgical operation on the railways to enable them also to earn profits; in our trade policy we sought the widest and most competitive markets for our exports... in taxation policy we have aimed at leaving to the individual earner and the individual firm the free disposal of as large a proportion as possible of their income or profits; finally there is our determined and increasingly successful effort to keep for our money that stability of value which enables people to take their own decisions about spending and saving in terms which have a meaning.

The whole basis and justification of the resort to statutory control of wages and prices was that the exorbitant demands and monopoly powers of the trade unions were the cause of the rate of inflation with which we were afflicted. Never, not even in pantomime, has the demon king been so speedily whipped back into the wings. His place is now occupied by what is called world prices. World prices, we are assured, are the principal if not the sole cause of the continuing inflation and the justification therefore for the continuance of a statutory policy to control in detail prices, wages, dividends, and the rest... But what has that to do with inflation? Prices change relatively to one another whether there is inflation or not. Changes in the economic world reflect themselves in real, that is relative, changes in prices. But a relative change in prices, even of a group of requirements so important as those which this country habitually imports, is not the same as inflation, and it does not cause inflation.

The TUC are about as desirous of providing an alternative government to the Crown in Parliament as the Chiefs of Staff... The fear of domination by trade union power is among the most divisive and the most spurious.