It's an open secret that I am STILL a big Maggie fan, which will, of course, infuriate my socialist friends. So for good measure here are some quotes from Sir Keith Joseph (19.10.1974), a conviction politician, the likes of which are no longer on the scene. His complete speech is worth a read.
Here is a list of quotations:
1. "We are opposed to using children as guinea pigs or spare parts for social engineers to experiment with"
2. "...the family and to civilised values. They are the foundation on which the nation is built; they are being undermined. If we cannot restore them to health, our nation can be utterly ruined - whatever economic policies we might try to follow"
3. "We do not follow that interpretation of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage that teaches that man, left to himself, is innocent and pure. We take the more traditional and still widely held view that men and women are born with a capacity for good and evil, to make the best use of their talents or to waste them; and that upon our early upbringing - the standards and the self-discipline to which we are brought up first at home and then at school - much of our whole future depends "
4."Such words as good and evil, such stress on self-discipline and on standards have been out of favour since the war with the new establishment. They have preferred the permissive society, and, at the same time, the collectivised society"
5. "The Socialist method would take away from the family and its members the responsibilities which give it cohesion. Parents are being divested of their duty to provide for their family economically, of their responsibility for education, health, upbringing, morality, advice and guidance, of saving for old age, for housing. When you take responsibility away from people you make them irresponsible. Hand in hand with this you break down traditional morals, the framework of behaviour, concepts of right and wrong; it is easier to subvert the social framework and replace it by their new monolithic edifice."
6. "Real incomes per head have risen beyond what anyone dreamed of a generation back; so have education budgets and welfare budgets, so also have delinquency, truancy, vandalism, hooliganism, illiteracy, decline in educational standards. Some secondary schools in our cities are dominated by gangs operating extortion rackets against small children. Teenage pregnancies are rising; so are drunkenness, sexual offences, and crimes of sadism. For the first time in a century and a half, since the great Tory reformer Robert Peel set up the metropolitan police, areas of our cities are becoming unsafe for peaceful citizens by night, and even some by day."
7. "We see how the demand for absolute equality turns into the new inequality"
8. "In the universities, which should be sanctuaries for the pursuit of truth, the bully-boys of the left have been giving us a foretaste of what leftwing dictatorship would endeavour to achieve, actively cheered on by the casuistry of some members of the university staffs, cuckoos in our democratic nest, and by the pusillanimity of others, by the apathy of many and, I must add, by moral cowardice in public life."
9. "If equality in education is sought at the expense of quality, how can the poisons created help but filter down?"
11."Some abuse their power and authority to urge or condone antisocial behaviour either on political grounds - against an ‘unjust society’, against ‘authority’ or as ‘liberation from the trammels of the outmoded family’... None of these phenomena is at all modern, or liberated; they are the very opposite of freedom which begins with self-discipline"
12. "The facile rhetoric of absolute liberty has become a cover for irresponsibility; instant social protest an excuse for antisocial behaviour"
13. "The worship of instinct, of spontaneity, the rejection of self-discipline, is not progress - it is degeneration. It was Freud who argued that repression of instincts is the price we pay for civilisation. He considered the price well-paid"
West is no longer best; we have reached a new low, where Anythingism is the creed of the day.
