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Heath: 'Millions mill rejoice
Nixon: 'Ait revoir'
403
In the member countries of the Community support membership of the Community just as much as the governing parties ...
Surely we must consider the consequences of staying out. We cannot delude ourselves that an early chance would be given us to take the decision again. We should be denying ourselves and succeeding generations the opportunities which are available to us in so many spheres; opportunities which we ourselves in diis country have to seize. We should be leaving so many aspects of matters affecting our daily lives to be settled outside our own influence. That surely cannot be acceptable to us. We should be denying to Europe, also — let us look outside these shores for a moment — its full potential, its opportunities of developing economically and politically, maintaining its security, and securing for all its people a higher standard of prosperity.
All die consequences of that for many millions of people in Europe must be recognized tonight in the decision the House is taking. In addition, many projects for the future of Europe have been long delayed. There has been great uncertainty, and tonight all that can be removed - {Hon, Members: Wo.')
Throughout my political career it is well known that I have had the vision of a Britain in a united Europe; a Britain which would be united economically to Europe and which would be able to influence decisions affecting our own future, and which would enjoy a better standard of life and a fuller life. I have worked for.a Europe which will play an increasing part in meeting the needs of those parts of the world which still lie in the shadow of want... 1 want Britain as a member of a Europe which is united politically, and which will enjoy lasting peace anďthe greater security which would ensue.
Nor do I believe that the vision of Europe - and the Right Hon. Gentieman raised this specific point — is an unworthy vision, or an ignoble vision or an unworthy cause for which to have worked — {Interruption) I have always made it absolutely plain to the British people that consent to this course would be given by Parliament — {Hon. Members: 'Resign. *) Parliament is the Parliament of all the people.
When we came to the end of the negotiations in 1963, after the veto had been imposed, the negotiator on behalf of India said:
| When you left India some people wept. And when you leave
[ Europe tonight some will weep. And there is no other people
I in the world of whom these things could be said.
That was a tribute from the Indian to the British. But tonight \j: when diis House endorses this Motion many millions of people right | across the world will rejoice that we have taken our rightful place in
I3Ik      a truly united- Europe.
Sixty-seven labour MPs defied tbe party whip mid voted with the Tories. Another tiventy abstained. Acceptance of applying for entry to Europe was passed by a majority of 112, Tbe European Community Bill passed through the Commons in 1972 by
j.":-T'f->       seventeen votes. Britain became a member of the European Economic Community on 1.
\SB      January 1973.
it
j RICHARD NIXON
| Washington, DC, 9 August 1974
!'Ail revoir'
The Watergate scandal arose after employees of a Republican Party organisation were caughtseeking to removebuggingdevicesfrvm theDemocratic Party campaign headquarters in the Watergate apartment block in 1972. As the scandal grew, mainly because of the '■*t<       reporting of the Washington Post, it became clear that Richard Nixon had secretly taped all conversations in his Wlrite House office. Marry also became convinced that be S|i       was either implicated in illegal activities or so abnormally suspicions that he was not fit !!!!       to be president.
Steps were taken to secure his removal by impeachment — but Nixon became the first United States president to resign from office. Gerald Ford, his successor, gave him a ;       comprehensive pardon.
As he left the White House, Nixon made this speech to tbe staff.
You are here to say goodbye to us, and we don't have a good word for it in English — the best is an revoir. We will see you again .. .
404
Nixon*. Au revoir
Joseph: 'Our human stock is threatened'
405
Sure, we have done some things wrong in this Administration, and the top man always takes the responsibility, and I have never ducked it. But I want to say one thing: We can be proud of it — five and a half years. No man or no woman came into this Administration and left it with more of this world's goods than when he came in. No man or no woman ever profited at the public expense or the public till. That tells something about you.
Mistakes, yes. But for personal gain, never. You did what you believed in. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong. And I only wish that I were a wealthy man — at the present dme, I have got to find a way to pay my taxes — (laughter) - and if I were, I would like to recompense you for the sacrifices that all of you have made to serve in government.
But you are getting something in government — and I want you to tell this to your children, and I hope the Nation's children will hear it, too — something in government service that is far more important than money. It is a cause bigger than yourself. It is the cause of making this the greatest nation in the world, the leader of the world, because without our leadership, the world will know nodiing but war, possibly starvation or worse, in the years ahead. With our leadership it will know peace, it will know plenty ...
We think sometimes when diings happen that don't go the right way; we think that when you don't pass the bar exam the first time — I happened to, but I was just lucky; I mean, my writing was so poor the bar examiner said, We have just got to let the guy through.' We think that when someone dear to us dies, we diink that when we lose an election, we think that when we suffer a defeat that all is ended.
Not true. It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.
SIR KEITH JOSEPH j.;f, Birmingham, 19 October 1974
J-If; ■
'Our human stack is threatened'
Sir KeithJoseph {1918-94) was Seen far}' of Statefor Social Services in Edward Heath's iisfe Conservative government from 1970 to 1974. He was an intellectual, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a One-Nation Tory who became disillusioned by Heath's policies- which led to defeat in 1974. He founded the Centre for Policy Studies with Margaret Thatcher and challenged Conservative economic and socialphilosophy from the
:S=- Joseph was a serious candidate to lead the party in the event of a challenge to Heath
hut the uproar created by this speech, mostly on the moral or spiritual state of the nation, in which he advocated restraint on the breeding capacities of the poorest social classes, \f      effectively ended any ambition he may have held to lead his part)'. 'Our human stock, is | Wv      threatened,' he declared. {Joseph protested that he had been referring to children born to \ unmarriedorsingle-parent, teenage households NOT NOT NOT- as he wrote in
capital letters in The Times — because they were in solo-economic classes 4 and 5, but the damage was done and he hadfailed to check, his statistic?}.
foseph became the main supporter of Margaret Thatcher who beat Heath in the 1975 Tory leadership election. He was her first Industry Secretary from 1979 to 1981 and was Secretary of State for Education from 1981 to 1986.
The Facile rhetoric of absolute liberty has become a cover for irresponsibility; instant social protest an excuse for anti-social behaviour.
The old virtues of patriotism and national pride have been denigrated in the name of internationalism, love of all our fellow men. But no one can love mankind if he does not love his own countrymen.
It was the radical socialist writer and patriot, the late George Orwell, who described the left-wing intellectuals as men motivated primarily by hatred of their own country. Socialists who spoke most |||; about brotherhood of man could not bear their fellow Englishmen, he complained. Their well-orchestrated sneers from their s trongpoint in the educational system and media have weakened the national
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Joseph: 'Our human stock is threatened'
Joseph: 'Our human stock is threatened'
407
will to transmit to future generations those values, standards and aspirations which made England admired the world over.
It is just because their message is that self-discipline is out of date and diat the poor cannot be expected to help themselves, that tiiey want the state to do more. That is why they believe in state ownership and control of economic life, education, health. Their wish to end parental choke in where and how their children shall be educated, in spending their money on better education and health for their, children instead of on a new car, leisure, pleasure, is all part of the attempt to diminish self and self-discipline and real freedoms in favour of the state, ruled by socialists — the new class, as one disillusioned Communist leader called them.
Of course I shall be misrepresented, but let me ward off what misunderstanding I can. I am not saying that we should not help the poor, far from it But the only real lasting help we can give to the poor is helping them to help themselves; to do the opposite, to create more dependence, is to destroy them morally while throwing an unfair burden on society. The populist rulers of Rome thought they had hit on a foolproof method of achieving a permanent curb on their patrician rivals when they created a dependent proletariat relying on them for bread and circuses: but in the end it destroyed the political stability of Rome, and so Rome itself fell, destroyed from inside.
Are we to be destroyed from inside too, a country which successfully repelled and destroyed Philip of Spain, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hider, are we to be destroyed by ideas, mischievous, wrongheaded, debilitating, yet seductive because they are fashionable and promise so much on the cheap?
It is up to us. History is not made by abstract forces, or classes; it is made by people. If we have the moral courage to say what we believe to be true, right and good, the people will be with us.
Let us take inspiration from that admirable woman Mary Whitehouse. I do not accept all her ideas, she will not accept all mine. Yet we can see in her a shining example of what one person can do singlehandedly when inspired by faith and compassion. An unknown middle-aged woman, a schoolteacher in die Midlands, set
out to protect adolescents against die permissiveness of our time.
Look at the scale of the opposing forces: On die one side, die whole of the new establishment with their sharp words and sneers poised; against diem stood this one middle-aged woman. Today her name is a household word, made famous by the very assaults of her by her enemies. She has mobilized and given fresh heart to many who see where this current fashion is leading. Her hook, Wlm Does She Think She Is?, took its tide from the outraged cry of an acolyte of die new hierarchy, who asked how an unknown woman dare speak up against the BBC, die educators and false shepherds.
We too can take courage from her, and dedicate ourselves to fighting back on issues which will decide the nation's future far more dian economics, however important it remains. And I welcome the opportunity to express my admiration for another brave woman with us tonight, Mrs Jill Knight, who speaks up when others prefer discretion in public and speak their minds only in private.
What are we to do? Are we to place it all in die lap of the government, die police, die courts? No, not all.
Gladstone, who entered politics as a field for moral endeavour, and never forgot the supremacy of the moral over die expedient, put the matter cogendy: he argued that his colleagues were right in thinking that 'there are great evils in die state of society, but wrong when they diink diem so superficial that they can be cured by legislation'. How well he understood matters too serious to be left to government!
We must do more as Tories to make our voices heard and our influence felt, as a party, as people in public life, high or lowly, in religious life, on councils, voluntary bodies, educational institutions. The arguments are on our side and we have good friends among the teachers, the sociologists, the psychologists, if only, we will call on diem, give the lead for them to follow.
We must fight the batde of ideas in every school, university, publication, committee, TV studio even if we have to struggle for our toehold there. We have the truth — if we fail to make it shine clear, we shall be to blame no less than the exploiters, the casuists, the commercializers.
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Joseph: 'Our hitman stock is threatened'
Thatcher: 'Let me give you my vision'
409
There is much for government to do as well. But we shall need intellectual as well as moral courage to grapple with the dilemmas inherent in the remoralization of public life. I shall confine myself to one example here, because I have been talking longer than you may have bargained for already.
The balance of our population, our human stock is direatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes four and five. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment.
They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness which are more important than riches. They are producingproblem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet, these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, ftom classes four and five, are now producing a third of all births. A high proportion of these births are a tragedy for the mother, die child and for us.
Yet what shall we do? If we do nothing, the nation moves towards degeneration, however much resources we pour into preventative work and the over-burdened educational system. It is all the more serious when we think of the loss of people with talent and initiative through emigration as our semi-socialism deprives them of adequate opportunities, rewards and satisfaction.
Yet proposals to extend birth control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried girls, the potential young unmarried-mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition: Is it not condoning immorality? I suppose it is. But which is the lesser evil, until we are able to' remoralize whole groups of classes of people, undoing the harm done when already weak restraints on strong instincts are further weakened by permissiveness in television, in films, on bookstalls? ...
[According to the Press Association, Sir Keith, at this point in his speech, added a passage to the prepared text 'in view of misunderstandings'.] "
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 civilization. He considered the price well paid. So can we, now. But we must see the dilemmas, we must argue it out among ourselves to find a way through these moral dilemmas, while we fight for our ideals in wider form through words and deeds. But you may ask what can fallible politicians in short-lived governments do in the face of all these tidal forces? Most of what needs to be done, I have stressed, is for individuals as themselves, and as members of all manner of bodies. But some tasks are for government, and to these I will return on a future occasion.
This could be a watershed in our national existence. Are we to move towards moral decline, reflected and intensified by economic decline, by the corrosive effects of inflation? Or can we remoralize our national life in which die economy is an integral part? It is up to us, to people like you and me.
MARGARET THATCHER Brighton, 10 October 1975
'Let tne give you my vision'
Margaret Thatcher (1925—) became the first woman leader of the Conservative-Party when she beat Edward Heath in the leadership ballot of February 1975. Her election marked a significant shift within the party towards a more radical version of Toryism and away from the consensual centrist/! of the Keyuesian mixed-econa/tty policies of the previous thirty years. Monetarism, denationalisation, tax cuts and control of the money supply were the policies that were soon to be espoused.
She set out the new Thatcherite political stall in her first speech as leader to the Conservative Party conference and was greeted by rolling breakers of cheers, shouts and
410
Thatcher: 'Let we give you nry vision'
Thatcher: 'Let rue give you my vision'
411
foot-stamping. Tlx speech bad a difficult birth. Sir Ronald Millar, her principal speechwriter, has described how it was not finished until ten past five on the morning it was to be delivered as Airs Thatcher sought a peroration that satisfied her. ' Oh no! No, that won't do at all,' she said at one stage. 'Sorry, what's wrong with it?' 'It's just not me, dear.'
Whenever I visit Communist countries their politicians never hesitate to boast about their achievements. They know them all by heart; they reel off the facts and figures, claiming this is the rich harvest of the Communist system. Yet they are not prosperous as we in the West are prosperous, and they are not free as we in the West are free.
Our capitalist system produces a far higher standard of prosperity and happiness because it believes in incentive and opportunity, and because it is founded on human dignity and freedom. Even the Russians have to go to a capitalist country — America — to buy enough wheat to feed their people - and that after more than fifty years of a State-controlled economy. Yet they boast incessandy, while we, who have so much more to boast about, for ever criticize and decry. Is it not time we spoke up for our way of life? After all, no Western nation has to build a wall round itself to keep its people in.
So let us have no truck with those who say the free-enterprise system has failed. What we face today is not a crisis of capitalism but of Socialism. No country can flourish if its economic and social life is dominated by nationalization and State control.
The cause of our shortcomings does not, therefore, lie in private enterprise. Our problem is not that we have too little Socialism. It is that we have too much. If only the Labour Party in this country would act like Social Democrats in West Germany. If only they would stop trying to prove dieir Socialist virility by relendessly nationalizing one industry after another.
Of course, a halt to further State control will not on its own restore our belief in ourselves, because something else is happening to this country. We are witnessing a deliberate attack on our values, a deliberate attack on those who wish to promote merit and excellence, a deliberate attack on our heritage and our great past, and there are
those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure — as days of hopelessness, not days of hope. And others, under die shelter of our education system, are ruthlessly attacking die minds of the young . .. blatant tactics of intimidation designed to undermine the fundamental beliefs and values of every student, tactics pursued by people who are the first to insist on their own civil rights while seeking to deny them to the rest of us.
We must not be bullied or brainwashed out of our beliefs. No wonder so many of our people, some of the best and the brightest, are depressed and talking of emigrating. Even so, I think they are wrong. They are giving up too soon. Many of the things we hold dear are threatened as never before, but none has yet been lost, so stay here, stay and help us defeat Socialism so that the Britain you have known may be the Britain your children will know.
These are the two great challenges of our time — the moral and political challenge, and the economic challenge. They have to be faced together and we have to master them both.
What are our chances of success? It depends on what land of people'we are. What kind of people are we? We are die people that in the past made Great Britain the workshop of the world, the people who persuaded odiers to buy British, not by begging them to do so but because it was best.
We are a people who have received more Nobel Prizes than any other nation except America, and head for head we have done better than America, twice as well in fact.
We are the people who, among other things, invented the computer, the refrigerator, the electric motor, the stethoscope, rayon, the steam turbine, stainless steel, the tank, television, penicillin, radar, the jet engine, hovercraft, float glass and carbon fibres, et cetera — and the best half of Concorde.
We export more of what we produce than either West Germany, France, Japan or the United States, and well over ninety per cent of these exports come from private enterprise. It is a triumph for the private sector and all who work in it, and let us say so loud and clear.
With achievements like that who can doubt that Britain can have
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Thatcher: 'Let me give yon tiiy vision'
Herzog: 'Hate, ignorance and evil'
413
a great future, and what our friends abroad want to know is whether that future is going to happen.
Well, how can we Conservatives make it happen? ' Let me give you my vision: a man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the State as servant and not as master — these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.
. But we want a free economy, not only because it guarantees our liberties, but also because it is the best way of creating wealth and prosperity for the whole country, and it is this prosperity alone which can give us the resources for better services for the community, better services for those in need.
By dieir attack on private enterprise, this Labour Government has made certain, that there will be next to nothing available for improvements in our social services over the next few years. We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery, not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help die old and die sick and die handicapped. And the way to recovery is dirough profits, good profits today leading to high investment, leading to well-paid jobs, leading to a better standard of living tomorrow. No profits mean no investment and that means a dying industry geared to yesterday's world, and that means fewer jobs tomorrow.
Some Socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals. We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is quite like anyone else, however much the Socialists may pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal. But to us, every human being is equally important. Engineers, miners, manual workers, shop assistants, farmworkers, postmen, housewives — these are the essential foundations of our society, and without them diere would be no nation. But there are others with special gifts who should also have their chance, because if the adventurers who strike out in new directions in science, technology, medicine, commerce and industry are hobbled, there can be no advance. The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.
Everyone must be allowed to develop the abilities he knows he has within him, and she knows she has within her,In the way diey choose.
Freedom to choose is something we take for granted until it is in danger of being taken away. Socialist Governments setoutperpetually to restrict the area of choice, and Conservative Governments to increase it. We believe that you become a responsible citizen by making decisions for yourself, not by having them made for you. But they are made for you by Labour all right!
CHAIM HERZOG New York, 10 November 1975
'Hate, ignorance and evil'
The United Nations offered the state of Israel almost immediate recognition in 1948.
By the 1970s, however, the hventy Arab states, the Soviet Union and a majority of Tl)ird World countries tinder dictatorships, controlled most of the votes in the UN General Assembly, and on 10 November 1975, Resolution 3379, calling on all nations to combat Zionism as aform ofracism, was passed by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions. Allfen's became vulnerable to the charge of racism.
One of the most dramatic moments in the UN's history occurred when Chaim Her%Qg(1918—97), Israel's ambassador to the UN, after making this speech opposing the resolution, tore it in half and left the podium.
I do not come to this rostrum to defend the moral and historical values of the Jewish people. They do not need to be defended. They speak for themselves. They have given to mankind much of what is great and eternal. They have done for the spirit of man more than can readily be appreciated in a forum such as this one.
I come here to denounce the two great evils which menace society in general and a society of nations in particular. These two evils are hatred and ignorance. These two evils are the motivating force behind the proponents of this draft resolution and their supporters. These two evils characterize those who would drag this world organization,
414 Herzog: Hate, ignorance and eviľ
'the idea of which was first conceived by die prophets of Israel, to die depths to which it has been dragged today.
The key to understanding Zionism lies in its name. In the Bible, the easternmost of the two hills of ancient Jerusalem was called Zion. The period was the tenth century B c. In fact, the name 'Zion' appears 152 times in the Old Testament, referring to Jerusalem. The name is overwhelmingly a poetic and prophetic designation. The religious and emotional qualities of the name arise from the importance of Jerusalem as the Royal City and the City of the Temple. 'Mount Zion' is the place where God dwells according to die Bible. Jerusalem or Zion is a place where the Lord is King according to Isaiah and where he has installed his King, David, as quoted in the Psalms.
King David made Jerusalem the capital of Israel almost 3,000 years ago, and Jerusalem has remained the capital ever since. During the centuries the term 'Zion' grew and expanded to mean the whole of Israel. The Israelites in exile could not forget Zion.
The Hebrew psalmist sat by the waters of Babylon and swore If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand fotget her cunning.1 This oath has been repeated for thousands of years by jews throughout the world. It is an oath which was made over 700 years before the advent of Christianity and over 1,200 years before the advent of Islam.
In view of all diese connotations, Zion came to mean the Jewish homeland, symbolic of Judaism, of Jewish national aspirations.
Ever}'Jew, while praying to his God, wherever he is in the world, faces towards Jerusalem. These prayers have expressed for over 2,000 years of exile the yearning of the Jewish people to return to its ancient homeland, Israel. In fact, a continuous Jewish presence, in larger or smaller numbers, has been maintained in the country over die centuries.
Zionism is the name of the national movement of the Jewish people and is the modern expression of the ancient Jewish heritage. The Zionist ideal, as set out in the Bible, has been, and is, an integral part of the Jewish religion.
Zionism is to the Jewish people what the liberation movements of Africa and Asia have been to their peoples. Zionism is one of the
Herzog: 'Hate, ignorance and evil' 415
most stirring and constructive national movements in human history. Historically, it is based on a unique and unbroken connection, extending some 4,000 years, between the People of the Book and the Land of the Bible.
In modern times, in the late nineteentii century, spurred by die twin forces of anti-Semitic persecution and of nationalism, the Jewish people organized the Zionist movement in order to transform its dream into reality. Zionism as a political movement was die revolt of an oppressed nation against the depredations and wicked Discrimination and oppression of the countries in which anti-Semitism nourished. It is indeed no coincidence at all and not surprising that die sponsors and supporters of this draft resolution include countries which are guilty of the horrible crime of anti-Semitism and discriinination to this very day.
Support for the aim of Zionism was written into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, and was again endorsed by die United Nations in 1947 when the General Assembly voted by an ovenvhelrning majority for the restoration of Jewish independence in our ancient land.
The reestablishment of Jewish independence in Israel after centuries of struggle to overcome foreign conquest and exile is a vindication of the fundamental concepts of the equality of nations and self-determination. To question the Jewish people's right to national existence and freedom is not only to deny to the Jewish people the right accorded to every other people on this globe but is also to deny the central precepts of the United Nations.
For Zionism is nothing more - and nothing less - than the Jewish people's sense of origin and destination in the land linked eternally with its name. It is also the instrument whereby the Jewish nation seeks an authentic fulfilment of itself. And the drama is enacted in the region in which the Arab nation has realized its sovereignty in twenty states comprising a hundred million people in four and a half million square miles, with vast resources. The issue therefore is not whether the world will come to terms with Arab nationalism. The question is at what point Arab nationalism, with its prodigious glut of advantage, wealth, and opportunity, will come to terms with the
416
Herzog: 'Hate, ignorance and evil'
Herzog; 'Hate, ignorance and evil'
417
modest but equal rights of another Middle Eastern nation to pursue its life in security and peace ...
Over the centuries it has fallen to the lot of my people to be the testing agent of human decency, the touchstone of civilization, the crucible in which enduring human values are to be tested. A nation's level of humanity could invariably be judged by its behaviour towards its Jewish population. It always began with the Jews but never ended with them.
The anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia were but the tip of the iceberg which revealed the inherent rottenness of the regime which was soon to disappear in the storm of revolution. The anti-Semitic excesses of the Nazis merely foreshadowed the catastrophe which was to befall mankind in Europe.
This wicked resolution must sound the alarm for all decent people in die world. The Jewish people as a testing agent has unfortunately never erred. The implications inherent in this shameful move are tern fying indeed.
On this issue, the world as represented in this hall has divided itself into good and bad, decent and evil, human and debased. We, the Jewish people, will recall in history our gratitude to those nations who stood up and were counted and who refused to support diis wicked proposition. I know that this episode will have strengthened the forces of freedom and decency in the world and will have fortified them in their resolve to strengthen the- ideals they so value. I know diat this episode will have strengthened Zionism, as it has weakened the United Nations.
As I stand on this rostrum, the long and proud history of my people unravels itself before my inward eye, I see the oppressors of our people over the ages as they pass one after another in evil procession into oblivion. I stand here before you as the representative of a strong and flourishing people which has survived diem all and which will survive this shameful exhibition and the proponents of this resolution. I stand here as the representative of a people one of whose prophets gave to this world the sublime prophecy which animated the founders of this world organization and which graces the entrance to this building:'.., nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall diey learn war any more' (Isaiah 2:4). In the verses before that, the prophet Isaiah proclaimed: 'And it shall come to pass in the last days .. . for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem' (Isaiah 2:2-3).
As I stand on this rostrum, the great moments of Jewish history come to mind as I face you, once again outnumbered and the would-be victim of hate, ignorance and evil. I look back on those great moments. I recall the greatness of a nation which I have the honour to represent in this forum. I am mindful at this moment of the Jewish people throughout the world wherever they may be, be it in freedom or in slavery, whose prayers and thoughts are with me at this moment.
I stand not here as a supplicant. Vote as your moral conscience dictates to you. For the issue is not Israel or Zionism. The issue is the continued existence of the organization, which has been dragged to its lowest point of discredit by a coalition of despotisms and racists.
The vote of each delegation will record in history its country's stand on anti-Semitic racism and anti-Judaism. You yourselves bear the responsibility for your stand before history, for as such will you be viewed in history. But we, the Jewish people, will not forget.
For us, the Jewish people, this is but a passing episode in a rich and an event-filled history. We put our trust in our Providence, in our faith and beliefs, in our time-hallowed tradition, in our striving for social advance and human values and in our people, wherever they may be. For us, the Jewish people, this resolution, based on hatred, falsehood, and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more tiian a piece of paper, and we shall treat it as.such.
The resolution was rescinded in 1992.
418 Foot: 'The red flame of Socialist courage'
MICHAEL FOOT / Blackpool, 29 September 1976
'The red flame of Socialist courage'
Michael Foot (1913-) is one of the great dissenters and romantics of British politics, a man whose heroes are Swift, Ha^litt and Byron. He identifies with the Levellers as well as Cromwell and "Wings as well as nonconformists. According to the British historian Kenneth 0, Morgan, he embodies a powerful creative thrust of popular radicalism thai has been constant in British public life for two centuries.
Foot is also a magnificent orator, at his best when defying and denouncing Tories and defending his beloved Labour Party against the slurs and sneers of its opponents. Afteryears as a rebel on the left wing of the Party, be became Secretary of State for Employment in Harold Wilson's third government in 1974.
Trade unionists were angry with the Labour government in 1976. It was dealing with an inflation rate of twenty per cent and the unions were opposing government intervention in collective wage bargaining and wanted utterly to reject statutory incomes control.
On the first day of the Labour Party conference, Foot, for many years the idol of the conference as the bitterest critic of official policies but now a cabinet minister, made a dramatic appeal to the conference to endorse the Wilson government's anti-inflation policy. If theyfailed to support the government'spolicy, he said in a passionate speech, they could bring about the end of the Labour government.
No one is Jess surprised than myself that this Conference has been dominated, arid will continue to be dominated in my judgement, by the rising anxieties and fears and anger of our people about unemployment up and down.this country ... Unemployment on this level is totally unacceptable to the Labour Movement. Of course, our unemployment is part of an affliction affecting the whole Western wodd; the Western world is gripped by the most complex and perilous recession which we have seen since 1945. It is indeed, in my judgement, a crisis of Capitalism of a most formidable character, and we have to muster all our energies, all our skill, to deal with it
Foot: 'The red flame of Socialist courage' 419
Let me start therefore by telling you what is my deepest instinct about the whole of this situation; it is of first importance for our country, and no less for our Labour Movement, that this crisis should be faced and surmounted by a Labour Government acting in the closest alliance and good faith with the trade-union movement of this country. (.Applause.) If we were to fall apart, I shudder to diink what would be the consequences for our people, for our young people and old alike, in unemployment and in all the other associated consequences. I shudder to think also what would be the consequence for our democratic institutions themselves. It is only three or four years ago that a Conservative Government used the opportunity which we gave them after 1970 to introduce the most insidious attack on trade unionism in this country which we have seen in this century.
If we were ever fools enough to allow them to get the levers of power again, the whips would be changed to scorpions for our chastisement. Let us not make any mistake about that. ..
People sometimes say: we will agree to some arrangement between the Government and the trade unions about wages, but only when you have die full panoply of Socialist measures actually put into full operation. I understand the argument, but I say it is unworkable. There is not a single Government in the world aspiring to change society that could work upon that system of transition, whether it is Communist, Maoist, Yugoslav, anything. Of course you could not work on that basis, and so I say, for anyone to argue that there shall be no concession to a Labour Government on these measures until all the other measures are in operation, that is not merely a recipe for the destruction of this Labour Government, it is a recipe for the destruction of any Labour Government. That has to be faced, too. - I am very glad that this Conference is going to be dominated also by the demand for new systems of investment, in the National Enterprise Board and die planning agreements and all the odier matters that we have discussed and which we have had in our Party programmes. Of course, that is of paramount importance. But do not let anybody imagine that investment is a soft option. Investment is not a soft option. You can learn it from Das Kapital as well as from anywhere else, and I hope I will not be convicted for that. You
420
Foot: 'The red jlavie of Socialist courage'
Solzhenitsyn: 'What is the joy about?'
421
can read it all there. Investment means very often, almost always, forgoing present claims in order to have future benefits. And you can do it by not so many mediods. You can do it by the brutal capitalist mediods of die nineteenth century, or you can do it by die equally brutal, or maybe even more outrageous, methods of twendeth-centufy Stalinism, or you can do it by die politics of persuasion, by the Social Contract. You can do it that way. You can do it the democratic way, which is the heart and soul of our Labour Movement, and always has been. And it is that method by which we are going to seek for our success.
We must face the crisis, beat the inflation, start the regeneration of British industry, lift this scourge of unemployment from our people. This is what we must do. It is the greatest summons that has come to our Labour Party in die seventy-five years of its existence.
We face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Joseph Conrad wrote a book called Typhoon, and at the end he told people how to deal with it. He said, 'Always facing it, Captain McWhirr: that's the way to get through.' Always facing it, that is the way we have got to solve this problem. We do not want a Labour Movement that tries to dodge. it; we do not want people in a Labour Cabinet to try to dodge it We want people who are prepared to show how they are going to face it, and we need the united support of the Labour Movement to achieve it
I believe that we can make tiiis Conference one of the greatest in our history, not by stifling dissent or criticism or debate, however ferociously the criticisms may be put: of course not. Indeed, there would not be any life left in this Party if it had not been for those prepared to come along and advocate sometimes unpopular opinions and stand up for them, and discover that those unpopular opinions sometimes became accepted. So I am not asking for any dull uniformity or anything of the sort I am asking this Movement to exert itself as it has never done before, to show the qualities which we have, the Socialist imagination that exists in our Movement, the readiness to re-forge the alliance, stronger tiian ever, between the Government
and the trade unions, and above all to show the supreme quality in politics, the red flame of Socialist courage. That is what we have got to do to save our country, and that is what can come from this Conference. [Applause. A standing ovation')
Wljen Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, James Callaghan defeated Michael Foot for the leadership of the Labour Party and became prime minister. Foot became leader of the House of Commons and succeeded Callaghan in 1980 as leader of the party which had been defeated in the 1979 general election by Margaret Thatcher. Foot ivas beaten by Margaret Thatcher in the election of 1983. He retired from the Flouse of Commons in 1992.
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN Cambridge, Massachusetts, 8 June 1978
' What is the joy about!'
After serving in the RedArmj and being decorated for bravery during the Second World War, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1919—) was sent fa a labour camp from 1945 to 1953 after making critical remarks about Stalin in letters to a friend. He was then sent into exile in Siberia until 1956.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his novel exposing the misery of Stalin's 'gulags', was published in' 1962 and approved by Khrushchev. His experience of the gulags also inspired Cancer Ward, The First Circle and The Gulag ArchipelagOj all of which were banned.
Although Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Pri^efor Literature in 1970, he was harangued in the Soviet press, charged with treason and sent into exile in 1974 after The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West.
As this speech at Harvard University's annual commencement ctremotry demonstrated, Solzhenitsyn did not trumpet his gratitude to the West. Instead he denounced a Western way of life that be saw as spoilt, silly and empty of spiritual values.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has
'422
Solzhenitsyn: 'Wlsat is the joy about?'
Solzhenitsyn: 'What is the joy about?'
423
lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice ...
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?-...
When die modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state. Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. (In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life, and the struggle to this end imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.) The individual's independence from many types-of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them towards physical bloom, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, towards an almost unlimited freedom in
the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one's precious life in defence of the common good, and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one's nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?
Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious- mask ...
Should I be asked whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.
A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West, while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of. Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper and more interesting personalities dian those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points. Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smoodi plane of legalism as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by tv stupor and by intolerable music.
All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of
424 Jenkins: 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'
Jenkins: 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'
425
our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.
There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The centre of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive; you can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?
Safyjenitsytt mas pardoned in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
ROY JENKINS London, 22 November 1979
'Horns Thoughts from Abroad'
The 1979 Dimbieby Lecture, broadcast annual/)' by the BBC in memory of the great broadcaster Richard Dimbieby, helped to change the course of British politics.
Rqyfenkins had resigned as the Labour government's Home Secretary in 1976 to prepare for his appointment as president of the European Economic Community commission and had left the Labour Party. He used the opportunity of the Dimbieby Lecture to voice his disenchantment with the warring ideologies of the tivo main British political parties and offered the hope of a new part)1 of the centre based on European models.
fenkins offers in his memoirs afascinatmg insight into the hard work of writing such a speech. His first attempt at composition occurred on 14 August and by 15 October he had a text, nearly sufficient to fill the forty-eight minutes required. But it was not
right. 'It was far too long and leisurely on historical analysis and not nearly strong enough on prescription.' On 1 November he wrotefrom 9.15 a.m. to 1.00 and then from 3.15 to 8.15 p.m. and had a comprehensive text, about fifteen hundred words too long.
Six days later he read a tautened and typed version through during a train journey and did a run-through of the full text at a BBC studio on 12 November. He then continued to titivate the lecture in Brussels until he had to seal it up for the release of copies to the press.
On the day of the lecture, he also made three speeches in Brussels before departing for London.
A few decades ago tiiere were quite a lot of people who believed that a single election victory could be the beginning of the millennium. It was a view perhaps more prevalent, because of greater optimism or utopianism, on the Left than on the Right. It was certainly held by many Labour supporters in 1945. More recentiy, however, I have the impression that it applies equally or more strongly on die Right.
A. governing party must have the self-confidence to want power and to believe tiiat its exercise of it can tilt the country in the right direction. But it should also have the humility to recognize on any likely projection of the past, its power will come to an end, probably in about six years, maybe less, only exceptionally more. The test of its statesmanship in the context of history will not therefore be how many trees it pulls up by die roots but how it fits into a continuous process of adaptation in which leadership is combined with sensitivity to national mood ...
This is not a recipe for inaction or for the avoidance of controversy. Some of die most bitterly contested measures of the past 150 years — the electoral reform bills, die repeal of the Corn Laws, die curbing of the powers of the House of Lords, die initiation of social security, or, to take an example from the Right, the setting up of independent television — have been inviolate once they were on the statute book because they quickly became part of the social fabric and could only have been undone at the cost of unacceptable electoral damage to the opposing party.
All this implies a certain respect by politicians for the opinions
426 J enkins: 'Home Thoughts from A broad'
Jenkins: 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'
427
of.their opponents. But that is surely both possible and desirable. In their memoirs, written with the benignity of old age, it generally comes through. Indeed, where bitterness remains, it is more often directed against previous colleagues than against previous opponents.
Yet when they are seeking or exercising power there is only too often a shrill and unconvincing attempt to portray almost everyone on die other side as either a Fool or a knave. Each successive Tory government is the most reactionary since that of Lord Liverpool, or some otiier hobgoblin Figure shrouded in the past. Each successive Labour government has been the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain. Either might, I suppose, be true in the future, but it cannot all have been true in die past, and I do not believe that it eitiier convinces or pleases the electorate.
One major disadvantage of excessive political.partisanship is that it fosters precisely the sort of industrial mood which is rapidly turning Britain into a manufacturing desert. If, on the House of Commons floor, it is always die fault of the other side, how can politicians preach convincingly against the prevalence of such a mood on the shop-floor?
This, some people will say with horror, is an unashamed plea for the strengthening of the political centre. Why not? The vocation of politicians ought to be to represent, to channel, to lead the aspirations of the electorate. These aspirations, not on every issue, but in essential direction, pull far more towards the centre than towards the extremes. The general mood is not that of reaction or of putting the clock back.Butnorisitoneofsupportforclassselfishnessorfor revolution, whether it be Utopian or malevolent.
Our great failure, now for decades pas t, has been lack of adaptability. Sometimes this rigidity is a source of strength. It was very good not to be too adaptable in 1940. But overall it is a source of weakness. Some societies — France in the second half of the Third Republic, pre-revolutionary Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire - have been still less adaptable than our own. But they hardly provide grounds for comfort. Compared with post-war Germany, post-war Japan,
Fifth Republican France (industrially at least), the United States for virtually the whole of its history, compared'for that matter with early Victorian Britain — modern Britain has been sluggish, uninventive and resistant to voluntary change, not merely economically but socially and politically as well. We cannot successfully survive unless we can make our society more adaptable; and an unadaptable political system works heavily against diis. Politicians cannot cling defensively to their present somewhat ossified party and political system while convincingly advocating the acceptance of change everywhere else in industry and society. 'Everybody change but us' is never a good slogan.
The paradox is that we need more change accompanied by more stability of direction. It is a paradox but not a contradiction. Too often we have superficial and quickly reversed political change without much purpose or underlying effect This is not the only paradox. We need the innovating stimulus of the free-market economy without' either die unacceptable brutality of its untrammelled distribution of rewards or its indifference to unemployment. This is by no means an impassible combination. It works well in a number of countries. It means that you accept the broad line of division between die public and the private sectors and do not constandy direaten those in the private sector with nationalization or expropriation.
You encourage them without too much interference to create as much wealth as possible, but use the wealth so created both to give a return for enterprise and to spread die benefits throughout society in a way that avoids the disfigurement of poverty, gives a full priority to public education and health services, and encourages cooperation and not conflict in industry and throughout society. You use taxation for this purpose, but not just to lop off rewards. The state must know its place, which should be an important but far from an omnipotent one. You recognize that there are certain major economic objectives, well beyond merely regulatory ones like the control of the money supply, which can only be achieved by public action, often on an international scale. Two clear contemporary examples are first the breaking of the link, now fairly long-standing, but by no means inevitable, between economic growth and the consumption
428 Jenkins: 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'
of oil; and second, by coordinated government purchasing policy, ensuring that this country and Europe as a whole is a major producer and not merely a passive purchaser of the products of the electronic/ telecommunications revolution. Success or failure on these two points will largely determine whether we with our partners are a leading or second-rate industrial group in die world of the 1990s. You use market forces to help achieve such objectives but do not for a moment pretend that they, unguided and unaided, can do the whole job.
You also make sure that die state knows its place, not only in relation to the economy, but in relation to the citizen. You are in favour of the right of dissent and the liberty of private conduct. You are against unnecessary centralization and bureaucracy. You want to devolve decision-making wherever you sensibly can. You want parents in the school system, patients in the health service, residents in the neighbourhood, customers in both nationalized and private industry, to have as much say as possible. You want the nation to be self-confident and outward-looking, rather than insular, xenophobic and suspicious. You want die class system to fade without being replaced either by an aggressive and intolerant proletarianism or by the dominance of the brash and selfish values of a 'get rich quick' society. You want the nation, without eschewing necessary controversy, to achieve a renewed sense of cohesion and common purpose.
These are some of the objectives which I believe could be assisted by a strengthening of the radical centre. I believe that such a development could bring into political commitment the energies of many people of talent and goodwill who, although perhaps active in many other voluntary ways, are at present alienated from the business of government, whether national or local, by die sterility and formalism of much of the political game. I am sure this would improve our politics. I think the results might also help to improve our national performance. But of that I cannot be certain. I am against too much dogmatism here. We have had more than enough of it But at least we could escape from the pessimism of Yeats's 'Second Coming', where
Edward Kennedy: 'The dream shall never die' 429
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity
and
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
Two Saturdays later both Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers, who with Jenkins were to be three of the Gang of Four who founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981, visited Jenkins. Neither had been frightened off Iry the lecture and both were prepared in certain circumstances to break with the Labour Party.
Jenkins's lecture proved to be the single most important event in placing on the agenda Jor serious discussion the idea of a new party in the middle ground of British politics; it was a seminal text of what a new pari)1 could stand for.
After the SDP was formed, initially with fenkins as leader, it subsequently entered an alliance with the Liberal Party — and the alliance briefly threatened to overtake the Labour Party and become the dominant party of opposition to the Tories. After the 1987 general election, the SDP faded away and many members joined a new Liberal Democrat Party. But the threat from the alliance transformed the Labour Party, whose policies became similar to those that fenkins espoused in his Dimbleby Lecture.
EDWARD KENNEDY New York, 12 August 1980
'The dream shall never die'
Senator Edward Kennedy's campaignforpresident in 1980 ended when he was dedsively beaten by President fimt/jy Carter at the Democrat convention. Yet although Carter won the nomination, it was Kennedy (1932—) who made the best speech and who got the loudest cheers when he and Carter appeared together on the platform.
On the day after his defeat, Kennedy brought the convention alive with a brilliant defence of the Democrats' traditionalpolicies, a scathing attack on Ronald Reagan, and a moving and defiant statement of the Kennedys' faith.
430 Edward Kennedy: 'The dream shall never die'
Heseltine: 'We are reaping the whirlwind of all our yesterdays' 431
There were hard hours on our journey, and often we sailed against the wind. But always we kept our rudder true, and there were so many of you who stayed the course and shared our hope. You gave your help; but even more, you gave your hearts.
Because of you, this has been a happy campaign. You welcomed Joan, me and our family into your homes and neighbourhoods, your churches, your campuses, your union halls. When I think back of all the miles and all the months and all the memories, I think of you. I recall the poet's words, and I say: What golden friends I have.
Among you, my golden friends across this land, I have listened and learned.
I have listened to Kenny Dubois, a glassblower in Charleston, West Virginia, who has ten children to support but has lost his job after thirty-five years, just three years short of qualifying for his pension...
I have listened to die grandmother in East Oakland who no longer has a phone to call her grandchildren because she gave it up to pay the rent on her small apartment.
I have listened to young workers out of work, to students without the tuition for college, and to families without the chance to own a home, I have seen the closed factories and the stalled assembly lines of Anderson, Indiana and South Gate, California, and I have seen too many, far too many idle men and women desperate to work. I have seen too many, far too many working families desperate to protect the value of their wages from the ravages of inflation.
Yet I have also sensed a yearning for new hope among the people in every state where I have been. And I have felt it in their handshakes, I saw it in their faces, and I shall never forget the mothers who carried children to our rallies. I shall always remember the elderly who have lived in an America of high purpose and who believe that it can all happen again.
Tonight, in their name, I have come here to speak for them. And for their sake, I ask you to stand with them. On their behalf I ask you to restate and reaffirm the timeless truth of our party.
I congratulate President Carter on his victory here. (Applause)
I am confident that die Democratic Party will reunite on the basis of Democratic principles, and that togedier we will march towards a Democratic victory in 1980. (Applause)
And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down, and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith. May it be said of our party in 1980 that we found our faith again.
And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now: 1 am a part of all that I have met/Tho' much is taken, much abides/That which we are, we are —/One equal temper of heroic hearts/strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.3
For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all .. those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
MICHAEL HESELTINE Blackpool, 15 October 1981
'We are reaping the whirlwind of all ouryesterdays'
As Secretar}* of State for the Environment in Margaret Thatcher's first government, Michael Heseltine (1933-), one of the outstanding orators of the contemporary British Tory Party, was charged with studying the problems of Mersey side, the region around the declining seaport of Liverpool, after the summer riots of 1980. Heseltine always sat uncomfortably in -Thatcher governments: he still believed in what had become the unfashionable view that state intervention could help to reverse decades of decline in Britain's inner cities.
Speaking to the Conservative conference a year later, he made an impassioned call that Conservative politics must deny rioters and wreckers any fertile ground to sow the seeds ofdiscontent. He appealed to the one-nation doctrines of Disraeli and Iain Macleod that had kept the Tory Party in theforefront ofBritish politics. Self-help (the Thatcherite
432   Heseltine: 'We are reaping the whirlwind of all our yesterdays*
Heseltine: 'Wc are reaping the whirlwind of all our yesterdays* 433
creed) had a limited meaning in an inner-city community where forty per cent of young kids were without work, he declared.
Then he moved into the main thrust of his speech.
I come from South Wales. This nation is still suffering from the legacies, from the folklore and from the memories of those bitter inter-war years. They have fuelled a venom in the Labour Party and in the trade unions that has set back our industrial society almost beyond redemption.
This is the great challenge for our party, for we alone believe in politics as a process of healing, of drawing together and of building together on common strengths. There is not a person here who has not cheered to the echo the great names, the great phrases that secured for our party a well-nigh incredible record of governing Britain over so long a period.
It required great courage when Disraeli first talked of one nation. It did not represent a conventional view of the time. It flew in the teeth of much that was contemporary experience. But he led die Tory Party tiirough the great traumas of his day because he, in advance of his time, had die vision to lead in his time. Today we cheer the memory of that man. When I joined this party Iain Macleod was a deeply controversial politician, fighting against bitter criticism to keep us close to those same traditions of compassion and tolerance. Those traditions are not ours to squander or abuse, For a brief time they are entrusted to us to make relevant in today's world. They are the traditions that have kept our party in die forefront of British politics in the centre of power.
In our generation we must show the same courage and vision as the leaders whose memories we so frequendy applaud. What talk of equality of opportunity? What do those words actually mean in the inner cities today? What do they mean to the black communities? We now have large immigrant communities in British cities. Let this parry's position be absolutely clear. They are British. They live here. They vote here. However tight the immigration legislation - and in everyone's interests it should be tight - there will be a large black community in this country tomorrow, just as there is today. There
are no schemes of significant repatriation that have any moral, social or political credibility.
I will and I do condemn the handful of blacks who rioted. But I condemn just as strongly die whites who rioted alongside them. I totally support die police in their brave and unenviable task of restoring stability in our society.
But the rioters were a tiny section of die black and white populations, die overwhelming majority of whom deplore the riots as vehemendy as we do. But the fact remains that of those black communities, who stand for the same values that I have described, far too many - our people — know that the education they obtain, the jobs they are offered and the careers diat are opened to them do not match up to the finest traditions upon which we pride ourselves.
There is a challenge here in the conditions that we took on from the Labour Party - because it totally failed to match the scale of the challenge to be found in the inner cities ...
Few of us can remember such testing times for this nation ... we are reaping the whirlwind of all our yesterdays. Decade after decade we have denied our industry the climate for sufficient innovation and investment. Too often we have slaughtered the capital programmes to pay for the over-burgeoning consumption of the public sector. We have extracted as wages today whatwe should have left as investment for tomorrow. We have, too often, squandered our inheritance, and our inner cities are just a signpost of a journey of despair.
There will be no recovery without more resources. Preferably those resources will be in the form of investment from the private sector or from the better use of existing public programmes. But if the case can be made it may also be from extra public expenditure. From wherever it comes it will require an effort of will by a community of people for a common purpose.
. You will say to me, 'What of the wreckers? What of those who will not work, those who strike without cause, those who thump the elderiy, smash in the windows and thrive on a life of crime?' Every generation has its wreckers. There have been riots in odier times, but our faith has always told us that one cannot sow the seeds of
434 Thatcher: 'Tie Falklands Factor'
discontent on a stable society. They can flourish only if they find fertile ground. Our politics and policies must deny that fertile ground. Yes, of course, our political opponents will fight us - as soon as they stop fighting each other. But we have the mettie for diat fight.
Heseltine won a standing ovation. He resigned from Margaret Thatcher's government in 1986 and challenged her for the leadership of the Tory Party in 1990. On the first ballot he won more votes than Mrs Thatcher and precipitated her downfall, but last to John Major, whose Cabinet he subsequently joined.
MARGARET THATCHER \
Cheltenham, 3 July 1982 ' f.:j
■ ■■. i
'The Falkland's Factor' ■:; I
I
■ s
JPZimj Margaret Thatcher decided to send a task force of 10,000 men to recapture the '. \ Falkland Islands after they had been invaded by Argentina, she playedfor the highest .'. j stakes and won triumphantly. The British success was attributed to Mrs Thatcher's ''}'. j nerve and determination. The' 'Iron Lady'' oj'Sovietpropaganda proved'iron indeed. From j being the least popular British prime minister of modem times, Mrs Thatcher became j the new Boadieea, the embodiment of toughness and resolve.
The 'Falklands Factor', noted in this nationalistic speech to a rally of Conservative women, ensured that she won the general election of 1983, her second election victory.
Today we meet in the aftermath of the Falklands Batde. Our country has won a great victory and we are entided to be proud. This nation had the resolution to do what it knew had to be done - to do what it knew was right.
We fought to show that aggression does not pay, and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag. We fought with ' the support of so many throughout the world; the Security Council, the Commonwealth, the European Community, and the United States. Yet we also fought alone — for we fought for our own people and for our own sovereign territory.
Thatcher: 'The Falklands Factor' 435
Now that it is all over, things cannot be the same again, for we have learnt somediing about ourselves—a lesson which we desperately needed to learn. When we started out, there were die waverers and the faint-hearts: the people who thought that Britain could no longer seize the initiative for herself; the people who thought we could no longer do the great tilings which we once did; and those who believed that our decline was irreversible — that we could never again be what we were. There were those who would not admit it - even perhaps some here today — people who would have strenuously denied the suggestion but - in their heart of hearts - they too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world.
Well, they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in courage, and in resolution. We have not changed. When the demands of war and the dangers to our own people call us to arms — then we British are as we have always been — competent, courageous and resolute.
When called to arms - ah, that's the problem. It took the batde in the Soudi Adantic for die shipyards to adapt ships way ahead of time; for dockyards to refit merchantmen and cruise liners, to fix helicopter platforms, to convert hospital ships — all faster than was diought possible; it took the demands of war for every stop to be pulled out and every man and woman to do their best.
British people had to be threatened by foreign soldiers and British territory invaded and then - why then - the response was incomparable. Yet why does it need a war to bring out our qualities and reassert our pride? Why do we have to be invaded before we dirow aside our selfish aims and begin to work together as only we can work, and achie've as only we can achieve?
That really is the challenge we as a nation face today. We have to see that the spirit of the South Adantic - the real spirit of Britain -is kindled not only by war but can now be fired by peace.
We have the first prerequisite. We know we can do it - we haven't
436 Runde: 'Our neighbours are indeed like its'
lost the ability. That is the Falklands Factor. We have proved ourselves to ourselves. It is a lesson we must not now forget. Indeed, it is a lesson which we must apply to peace just as we have learnt it in war. The faltering and the self-doubt has given way to achievement and pride. We have the confidence and we must use it.
Just look at the Task. Force as an object lesson. Every man had his own task to do and did it superbly. Officers and men, senior NCO and newest recruit - every one realized that his contribution was essential for the success of the whole. All were equally valuable - each was differendy qualified. By worldng together, each was able to do more dian his best. As a team they raised the average to the level of the best and by each doing his utmost together they achieved the impossible. That's an accurate picture of Britain at war - not yet of Britain at peace. But the spirit has stirred and the nation has begun to assert itself. Tilings are not going to be die same again.
ROBERT RUNCIE London, 26 July 1982
'Our neighbours are indeed like us'
Although it continued to lose members during the 1970s and 1980s, the Church of England remained a powerful source of social criticism and often ipse! Conservative ministers,
Dr Robert Runcie (1921-), who won the Military Cross during, the Second World War, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Margaret Thatcher but their relationship was uneasy. After her own triumphalism over victory in the Falklands war, she was said to be particularly upset by this muted and moderate sermon from Dr Runcie at a service of thanksgiving in St Paul's Cathedral, although she never commented publicly on her views of the sermon, Runcie dared to suggest that people were mourning Argentina as well as Britain - and that they should also be remembered in the nation's prayers.
Runcie: 'Our neighbours are indeed like us' 437
Our hope as Christians is not fundamentally in man's naked goodwill and rationality. We believe that he can overcome the deadly selfishness of class or sect or race by discovering himself as a child of the universal God of love. When a man realizes that he is a beloved child of the Creator of all, then he is ready to see his neighbours in the world as brodiers and sisters. That is one reason why those.who dare to Interpret God's will must never claim him as an asset for one nation or group radier than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God-substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.
This is a dangerous world where evil is at work nourishing the mindless brutality which killed and maimed so many in this city last week. Sometimes, with the greatest reluctance, force is necessary to hold back the chaos which injustice and the irrational element in man threaten to make of the world. But having said that, all is not lost and there is hope. Even in the failure of war there are springs of hope. In that great war play by Shakespeare, Henry V says: 'There is some soul of goodness in things evil, would men observingly distill it out.' People are mourning on both sides of this conflict. In our prayers we shall quite righdy remember diose who are bereaved in our own country and the relations of the young Argentinian soldiers who were killed. Common sorrow could do something to reunite those who were engaged in this struggle. A shared anguish can be a bridge of reconciliation. Our neighbours are indeed like us.
I have had an avalanche of letters and advice about this service. Some correspondents have asked 'why drag God in?' as if the intention was to wheel up God to endorse some particular policy or attitude rather than another. The purpose of prayer and of services like diis is very different and there is hope for the world in the difference. In our prayers we come into the presence of the living God. We come with our very human emotions, pride in achievement and courage, grief at loss and waste. We come as we are and not just mouthing opinions and thanksgiving which the fashion of the moment judges acceptable. As we pour into our prayer our mourning, our pride, our shame and our convictions, which will inevitably differ
f
438 Runcie: 'Our neighbours are indeed like us'
from person to person, if we are really present and really reaching out to God and not just demanding his endorsement, dien God is able to work upon us. Heis able to deepen and enlarge our compassion and to purify our thanksgiving. The parent who comes mourning the loss of a son may find here consolation, but also a spirit which enlarges our compassion to include all those Argentinian parents who have lost sons.
Man without God finds it difficult to achieve tliis revolution inside himself. But talk of peace and reconciliation is just fanciful and theoretical unless we are prepared to undergo such a revolution. Many of the reports I have heard about the troops engaged in this war refer to moments when soldiers have been brought face to face with what is fundamental in life and have found new sources of strength and compassion even in the midst of conflict. Ironically, it has sometimes been those spectators who remained at home, whether supporters or opponents of the conflict, who continue to be most violent in their attitudes and untouched in their deepest selves.
Man without God is less tthan man. In meeting God, a man is shown Ms failures and his lack of integrity, but he is also given strength to turn more and more of his life and actions into love and compassion for other men like himself. It is necessary .to the continuance of life on this planet that more and more people make this discovery. We have been given the choice. Man possesses the power to obliterate himself, sacrificing the whole race on the altar of some God-substitute. Or he can choose life in partnership with God the Father of all. I believe that there is evidence that more and more people axe waking up to the realization that this crucial decision peers us in the face here and now.
Cathedrals and churches are always places into which we bring human experiences - birth, marriage, death, our flickering communion with God, our fragile relationships with each other, so that they may be deepened and directed by the spirit of Christ. Today we bring our mixture of thanksgiving, sorrows and aspirations for a better ordering of this world. Pray God that he may purify, enlarge
Kinnock: 'I warn you' 439
and redirect these in the ways of his kingdom of love and peace. Amen.
Dr Runcie retired in 1991.
NEIL KINNOCK Bridgend, 7 June 1983
7 warn you'
The Labour Party, led by Michael Foot, was in deep disarray during the British general election of 1983 and its manifesto mas described as the longest suicide note in history. One of Foot's most devoted lieutenants was Neil Kinnock {1942-), a Welsh Labour MP on the left wing of the party and a rising star.
Kinnock showed in this speech, delivered on the eve of the election, that he is a natural orator. It was clear, he declared, that a new Thatcher government would cut spending on health, education, and pensions and increase unemployment, taxes and interest rates. 7 warn you,' he went on . ..
If Margaret Thatcher is re-elected as Prime Minister, I want you
I warn you that you will have pain -
When healing and relief depend upon payment
I warn you that you will have ignorance -
When talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right.
I warn you that you will have poverty -
When pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a Government that won't pay in an economy that can't pay.
I warn you that you will be cold -
440 Kinnock: 'I warn you'
When fuel charges are used as a tax system that die rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.
I warn you that you must not expect work -
When many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies.
I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the . streets in large crowds of protest in the light.
I warn you diat you will be quiet -
When die curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient.
I warn you diat you will have defence of a sort -With a risk and at a price diat passes all understanding.
I warn you that you will be home-bound -
When fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up.
I warn you that you will borrow less —
When credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income.
If Margaret Thatcher wins, she will be more a Leader dian a Prime Minister. That power produces arrogance and when it is toughened by Tebbitry and flattered and fawned upon by spineless sycophants, the boot-licking tabloid Knights of Fleet Street and placemen in the Quangos, die arrogance corrupts absolutely.
If Margaret Thatcher wins -
I warn you not to be ordinary.
I warn you not to be young.
fir ■■
Pope John Paul H: 'We do not'wanta Poland'which costsits nothing' 441
|I warn you not to fall ill.
I warn you not to get old.
I -
I :: The successful resolution of the Falklands conflict was still vivid in the British memory |        and Margaret Thatcher won an easy election victory.
Four months later Neil Kinnock was elected leader of the Labour Party.
if *
! POPE JOHN PAUL II
Czestochowa, Poland, 18 June 1983
'We do not want a Poland which costs tts nothing'
John Paul II, the Polish pope, made three visits to his native laud. Tim third of time, in 1983, when Solidarity, the Polish workers' union, bad been banned, was the most i        significant. On this visit, John Paid II said he had come to cry out before Europe and |        the worldfor the forgotten people of Eastern Europe.
On Saturday, 18 June, the Pope's helicopter took him to C^stochowa where he spoke, often in code, to what the London Times described as 'a ragamuffin aniiy of a million jonngpilgrims'from the weather-worn battlement of the Jasna Gora monastery.
Dozens of Solidarity banners sprouted in the crowd as the Pope uttered certain trigger words - 'workers', or 'solidarity' (with a small's") - or made any reference to truth or oppression or human rights.
He was greeted by huge applause, applause that was almost frightening, according to The Times, when voiced by so many people in such a confined space.
Our Lady of Jasna Gora is the teacher of true love for all. And this is particularly important for you, dear young people. In you, in fact, is decided that form of love which all of your life will have and, through you, human life on Polish soil: die matrimonial, family, social and national form - but also the priesdy, religious and missionary one. Every life is determined and evaluated by the interior form of love. Tell me what you love, and I will tell you who you are.
442 Popejohn Paul II: 'We do not mailt a Poland which costs us nothing'
Pope J ohn Paul H: 'We do not want a Poland which costs its nothing' 443
I watch! How beautiful it is that this word is found in the call of Jasna Gora. It possesses a profound evangelical ancestry: Christ says many times: 'Watch' (Matt. 26: 41). Perhaps also from the Gospel k passed into the tradition of scouting. In the call of Jasna Gora it is the essential element of the reply that we wish to give to the love by which we are surrounded in die sign of die Sacred Icon.
The response to diis love must be precisely the fact that I watch!
What does it mean, 1 watch?
It means that I make an effort to be a person with a conscience. I do not stifle this conscience and I do not deform it; I call good and evil by name, and I do not blur them; I develop in myself what is good, and I seek to correct what is evil, by overcoming it in myself. This is a fundamental problem which can never be minimized or put on a secondary level. No! It is everywhere and always a matter of the first importance. Its importance is all the greater in proportion to the increase of circumstances which seem to favour our tolerance of evil and the fact that we easily excuse ourselves from this, especially if adults do so.
My dear friends! It is up to you to put up a firm barrier against immorality, a barrier — I say — to those social vices which I will not here call by name but which you yourselves are perfecdy aware of. You must demand this of yourselves, even if otiiers do not demand it of you. Historical experiences tell us how much die immorality of certain periods cost the whole nation. Today when we are fighting for the future form of our social life, remember that this form depends on what people will be like. Therefore: watch!
Christ said to the aposdes, during his prayer in Gethsemane; ■Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation' (Matt. 26: 41).
1 watch' also means: I see another. I do not close in on myself, in a narrow search for my own interests, my own judgements. 1 watch5 means: love of neighbour; it means: fundamental interhuman solidarity.
Before the Mother of Jasna Gora I wish to give thanks for all the proofs of this solidarity which have been given by my compatriots, including Polish youth, in the difficult period of not many months
ago. It would be difficult for me to enumerate here all die forms of this solicitude which surrounded those who were interned, imprisoned, dismissed from work, and also their families. You know this .better than 1.1 received only sporadic news about it.
May diis good thing, which appeared in so many places and so many ways, never cease on Polish soil. May there be a constant confirmation of that 'I watch' of the call of Jasna Góra, which is a response to the presence of the Mother of Christ in die great family of the Poles.
'I watch' also means: I feel responsible for this great common inheritance whose name is Poland. This name defines us all. This name obliges us all. This name costs us all.
Perhaps at times we envy the French, the Germans or the Americans because their name is not tied to such a historical price and because they are so easily free: while our Polish freedom costs so much.
My dear ones, I will not make a comparative analysis. I will only say that it is what costs that constitutes value. It is not, in fact, possible to be truly free without an honest and profound relationship with values. We do not want a Poland which costs us nothing. We watch, instead, beside all that makes up the authentic inheritance of the generations, seeking to enrich it. A nation, then, is first of all rich in its people. Rich in man. Rich in youth. Rich in every individual who watches in the name of truth: it is truth, in fact, that gives form to love.
My dear young friends! Before our common Modier and die Queen of our hearts, I desire finally to say to you that she knows your sufferings, your difficult youth, your sense of injustice and humiliation, the lack of prospects for the future that is so often felt, perhaps the temptations to flee to some other world.
Even if I am not among you every day, as was the case for many years in the past, nevertheless I carry in my heart a great solicitude. A great, enormous solicitude. A solicitude for you. Precisely because 'on you depends tomorrow'.
I pray for you every day.
It is good that we are here together at the hour of the call of Jasná Góra. In the midst of the trials of the present time, in the midst of
444      Healey: 'The great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed'
Healey: 'The great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed' 445
the trial through which your generation is passing, this call of the millennium continues to be a programme.
In it is contained a fundamental way out. Because the way out in whatever dimension - economic, social, political - must happen first in man. Man cannot remain with no way out.
Mother of Jasna Góra, you who have been given to us by Providence for the defence of the Polish nation, accept this evening tills call of the Polish youth together with die Polish Pope, and help us to persevere in hope! Amen.
Wlienfreedom came to Eastern Europe in 19S9, the Pope's speeches in Poland in 1983 were considered as one of the main contributions in bolstering the defiant human spirit that brought the walls of oppression tumbling down.
DENIS HEALEY . London, 27 February 1984
'The great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed'
One ofthe earliest and most memorable attacks on theprime ministerial style of Margaret Thatcher was made by Denis Healey [1917-), one of the most combative and bruising speakers in the House of Commons. Healey, a former Labour Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, was speaking during a debate on a proposal by the Thatcher government to abolish the right of workers at GCHQ, the British intelligence ■ eavesdropping station at Cheltenham, to belong to a union.
Every trade unionist in Britain feels threatened by what the Government have done. The anger felt by trade unionists was felt deeply by everyone, not least Mr Murray [Lionel Ten' Murray, leader of the Trades Union Congress], who attended the meeting with the Prime Minister last week, because she was felt to be accusing trade unions of lack of patriotism, of being prepared to risk people's lives and to break their promises. The Foreign Secretary made it crystal clear in his speech that that, in his view, is what trade union membership at
GCHQ must imply. I ask the Government to recognize diat they really cannot talk in those terms to people such as Terry Duffy and Kate Losinska, who are now leading the campaign against the Government. What a miracle the Government have achieved in the trade union movement.
I have not wasted time on the Foreign Secretary this afternoon, although I am bound to say that I feel that some of his colleagues must be a bit tired by now of his hobbling around from one of the doorsteps to another, with a bleeding hole in his foot and a smoking gun in his hand, telling them that he did not know it was loaded.
The Foreign Secretary, however, is not the real villain in this case; he is the fall guy. Those of us with long memories will feel that he is rather like poor van der Lubbe in the Reichstag fire trial. We are asking ourselves die question that was asked at the trial: who is the Mephistopheles behind this shabby Faust? The answer to diat is clear. The handling of this decision by - I quote her own Back Benchers — the great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed, die Catherine the Great of Finchley, the Prime Minister herself, has drawn sympathetic trade unionists, such as Len Murray, into open revolt. Her pig-headed bigotry has prevented her closest colleagues and Sir Robert Armstrong from offering and accepting a compromise.
The Right Hon. Lady, for whom I have a great personal affection, has formidable qualities, a powerful intelligence and immense courage, but those qualities can turn into horrendous vices, unless they are moderated by colleagues who have more experience, understanding and sensitivity. As she has got rid of all those colleagues, no one is left in the Cabinet with both the courage and the ability to argue with her.
I putit to all Conservative Members, but mainly to the Government Front Bench, that to allow the Right Hon. Lady to commit Britain to another four years of capricious autocracy would be to do fearful damage not just to die Conservative Party but to the state. She has faced them with the most damaging of all conflicts of loyalty. They must choose between the interests of their country, our nation's security and our cohesion as a people and the obstinacy of an individual. I hope that they resolve this conflict in the interests of
Prince Charles: A monstrous carbuncle'
Prince Charles: 'A monstrous carbuncle'
447
the nation. If not, they will carry a heavy responsibility for the tragedies that are bound to follow.
PRINCE CHARLES London, 30 May 1984
'A Monstrous carbuncle'
It was the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the anniversary dinner was being held in the historic setting of Hampton Court, a few miles s~ from central London, The hall was tit by caudles, the evening was graced by the first masque commissioned since the eighteenth century — and the annual gold medal was being presented by Britain's future King, Charles, Prince of Wales.
The 700 architects were in for a shock if they were expecting princely platitudesfrom their honoured guest. Instead the prince launched into a forthright attack on architects who designed houses for the approval of fellow architects instead of the tenants. Ever since, however, the speech has been rememberedfor his damning indictment of a proposed extension to the National Gallery in London's Trafalgar Square as a 'monstrous carbuncle'.
At last people are beginning to see that it is possible, and important in human terms, to respect old buildings, street plans and traditional scales and at die same time not to feel guilty about a preference for facades, ornaments and soft materials. At last, after witnessing the wholesale destruction of Georgian and Victorian housing in most of our cities, people have begun to realize that it is possible to restore old buildings and, what is more, that there are architects willing to undertake such projects.
For far too long, it seems to me, some planners and architects have consistendy ignored the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people in this country. Perhaps, when you think about it, it is hardly surprising as architects tend to have been trained to design buildings from scratch — to tear down and rebuild... A large number of us have developed a feeling that architects tend to design houses
for the approval of fellow architects and critics, not for the tenants.
To be concerned about the way people live, about die environment diey inhabit and die land of community that is created by that environment should surely be one of the prime requirements of a really good architect It has been most encouraging to see the development of community architecture as a natural reaction to die policy of decanting people to new towns and overspill estates where die extended family patterns of support were destroyed and the community life was lost. Now, moreover, we are seeing the gradual expansion of housing cooperatives, particularly in the inner-city areas of Liverpool, where die tenants are able to work with an architect of their own who listens to tiieir comments and their ideas and tries to design die land of environment they want, rather than the ldnd which tends to be imposed upon them without any degree of choice ...
What I believe is important about community architecture is that it has shown ordinary people that their views are worth having; that architects and planners do not necessarily have die monopoly of knowing best about taste, style and planning; that tiiey need not be made to feel guilty or ignorant if their natural preference is for the more traditional designs — for a small garden, for courtyards, arches and porches — and that there is a growing number of architects prepared to listen and to offer imaginative ideas . . .
It would be a tragedy if the character and skyline of our capital city were to be further ruined and St Paul's dwarfed by yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London. It is hard to imagine that London before the last war must have had one of the most beautiful skylines of any great city, if diose who recall it are to be believed. Those who do, say diat the affinity between buildings and die earth, in spite of die city's immense size, was so close and organic that the houses looked almost as though diey had grown out of the earth and had not been imposed upon it — grown, moreover, in such a way diat as few trees as possible were thrust out of die way. Those who knew it then and loved it, as so many British love Venice without concrete stumps and glass towers, and those who can imagine what it was like, must associate
448
Prince Charles: 'A monstrous carbunck'
with the sentiments in one of Aldous Huxley's earliest and most successful novels, Antic Hay, where the main character, an unsuccessful architect, reveals a model of London as Christopher Wren wanted to rebuild it after the Great Fire and describes how Wren was so obsessed with the opportunity the fire gave the city to rebuild itself into a greater and more glorious vision. What, then, are we doing to our capital city now? What have we done to it since the bombing during the war? What are we shortly going to do to one of its most famous areas — Trafalgar Square? Instead of designing an extension to the elegant facade of the National Gallery which complements it and continues the concept of columns and domes, it looks as if we may be presented with a kind of vast municipal fire station, complete with the sort of tower that contains the siren.
•I would understand better this type of High Tech approach if you demolished the whole of Trafalgar Square and started again with a single architect responsible for the entire layout, but what is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend. Apart from anything else, it defeats me why anyone wishing to display the early Renaissance pictures belonging to the gallery should do so in a new gallery so manifesdy at odds with the whole spirit of that age of astonishing proportion. Why can't we have those curves and arches that express feeling in design? What is wrong with them? Why has everything got to be vertical, straight, unbending, only at right angles - and functional?
The 'monstrous carbuncle' was never built. The plan by Peter Abrends was scrapped and Robert Ventnri, an American architect, won a competition to design the gallery's new Sainslmry wing. In 1988 Prince Charles wrote andproducedA Vision of Britain, a television documentary about his views on architecture which was later published as a book.
Reagan: 'Let us make a vow to the dead'
449
RONALD REAGAN Pointe du Hoc, Normandy, 6 June 1984
'Let us make a vow to the dead'
According to his speech-writer Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan would and did read out anything she put in front of him. Even so, there was a quality to Reagan's speeches, whatever their cosy folksiness or the showbi\ schmatt% that so infuriated his detractors, that touched hearts and made people weep genuine tears — as they did on this occasion commemorating the Normandy invasion of the Second World War.
It was an emotional day which became a celebration of heroism and sacrifice, Reagan wrote in his retirement. 'I stood there on that windsweptpoint with the ocean behind me. Before me were the boys who forty years before hadfought their way up from the ocean. Some rested under the white crosses and Stars of David that stretched out across the landscape. Others sat right in front of me. They looked like elderly businessmen, yet these were the kids who climbed the cliffs.'
We're here to mark that day in history when die Allied peoples joined in batde to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here die Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertalting unparalleled in human history.
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off die British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.
450
Reagan: 'Let its make a vow to the dead'
Kinnock: 'You can't play politics with people'sjobs' 451
The Rangers looked up and saw die enemy soldiers — at the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine-guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting only ninety could still bear arms.
Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put diem there.
These ate the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent ' These are the heroes who helped end a war.
Gendemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life . .. and left the vivid air signed with your honor' .. .
Forty summers have passed since the batde that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more-than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take diese cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith, and belief; it was loyalty and love.
The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt
You all knew diat some tilings are wordi dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.
NEIL KINNOCK Bournemoudi, 1 October 1985
'Yon can't play politics with people'sjobs'
As Labour leader from 1983, Neil Kinnock, by insisting on the modernisation of the party, prepared the ground which led to New Labour's historic election victory under Tony Blair in 1997. Kinnock made his reputation as leader in this scornful denunciation of the militants of Merseyside in his address to the party conference.
Forty-eight hours before the conference the Militant Tendency, which effectively controlled Liverpool City Council, hired a fleet of taxis to send redundancy notices to all council employees. For Militant, led by Derek Hatton, the tactic was a consciousness-raising element of its strategy of confronting the Thatcher government, but Kinnock saw it as cynical extremism that would give Labour a bad name.
When the conference met, with Hatton sitting only twenty feet away, Kinnock made a searing denunciation of Militant tactics. Hatton rose to his feet, shouting 'Liar, liar', which only heightened the drama of the leader's declaration of war on the Trotskyists.
If socialism is to be successful in this country, it must relate to the practical needs and the mental and moral traditions of the men and women of this country. We must emphasize what we have in common with those people who are our neighbours, workmates and fellow countrymen and women — and we have everything in common with them — in a way we could not do if we were remote, if, like the Tories, we were in orbit around the realities of our society, if, like the Social Democrats and the Liberals, we stood off from those realities, retreated from them, deserted them. But we are of, from, for the people. That Is our identity, that is our commitment, that is
' 452 Kinnock: 'Y on can'tplay politics with people's jobs'
how much we have in common with the people. Let us emphasize that, let us demonstrate it, let us not hide it away as if itwas something extraordinary or evidence of reaction. Let us emphasize what we have in common with the people of this country.
We must not dogmatize or browbeat. We have got to reason with people; we have got to persuade people. That is their due. We have voluntarily, every one of us, joined a political party. We wish a lot more people would come and join us, help us, give us their counsel, their energies, their advice, broaden our participation. But in making the choice to join a political party we took a decision, and it, was that, by persuasion, we hoped that we could bring more people with us. So that is the basis on which we have got to act, want to act., .
[There is] something else you know. There is anger in this country at the devastation brought about by these last six years of Tory government, but strangely that anger is mixed with despair, a feeling that the problems are just too great, too complex, to be dealt with by any government or any policy. That feeling is abroad. We disagree with it, we contend it, we try to give people the rational alternatives, but it exists. If our response to that despair, anger and confusion amounts to litde more than slogans, if we give the impression to the British people that we believe that we can just make a loud noise and the Tory walls of Jericho will fall down, they are not going to treat us very seriously at all — and we won't deserve to be treated very seriously . ..
I shall tell you again what you know. Because you are from the people, because you are of the people, because you live with the same realities as everybody else lives with, implausible promises don't win victories. I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start witii far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council — a Labour council— hiring taxis to scutde round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I am telling you, no matter how entertaining, how fulfilling to short-term egos — I'm telling you, and you'll listen — you can't
Kinnock: 'You can't play politics with people's jobs'
play politics with people's jobs and with people's services or with dieir homes. Comrades, the voice of the people — not the people here; the voice of die real people with real needs - is louder than all the boos that can be assembled. Understand that, please, comrades. In your socialism, in your commitment to those people, understand it. The people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect die gesture-generals or the tendency-tacticians.
Comrades, if seems to me lately that some of our number have become like latter-day public school-boys. It seems it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game. We cannot take that inspiration from Rudyard Kipling, Those game players get isolated, hammered, blocked off. They might try to blame others -workers, trade unions, some other leadership, the people of the city — for not showing sufficient revolutionär)' consciousness, always somebody else, and then tiiey claim a rampant victory. Whose victory? Not victory for the people, not victor)' for them. Isee the casualties; we ail see the casualties. They are not to be found amongst the leaders and some of the enthusiasts; they are to be found amongst the people whose jobs are destroyed, whose services are crushed, whose living standards are pushed down to deeper depths of insecurity and misery. Comrades, these are vjle times under diis Tory government for local democracy, and we have got to secure power to restore real local democracy.
But I look around this country and I see Labour councils, I see socialists, as good as any other socialists, who fought the good fight and who, at the point when they diought they might jeopardize people's jobs and people's services, had the intelligence, yes, and die courage to adopt a different course. They truly put jobs and services first before other considerations. They had to make hellish choices. I understand it. You must agonize with diem in the choices diey had to make — very unpalatable, totally undesirable, but they did it. They found ways. They used all their creativity to find ways diat would best protect diose whom they employed and those whom they were elected to defend. Those people are leaders prepared to take decisions, to meet obligations, to give service. They Itnow life is real, life is earnest — too real, too earnest to mistake a Conference Resolution
454        Reagan: 'The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted'
Reagan: 'The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted' 455
for an accomplished fact; too real, too earnest to mistake a slogan for a stratég}'; too real, too earnest to allow them to mistake their own individual enthusiasms for mass movement; too real, too earnest to mistake barking for biting. I hope diat becomes universal too.
Comrades, I offer you this counsel. The victory of socialism, said a great socialist, does not have to be complete to be convincing. I have no time, he went on, for those who appear to threaten the whole of private property but who in practice would direaten nothing; they are purists and tiierefore barren. Not the words of some hypnotized moderate, not some petrified pragmatist, but Aneurin Bevan in 1950 at the height of his socialist vision and his radical power and conviction. There are some who will say that power and principle are somehow in conflict. Those people who think that power and principle are in conflict only demonstrate the superficiality, the shallowness, of their own socialist convictions; for whilst they are bold enough to preach those convictions in litde coteries, they do not have the depth of conviction to subject those convictions, those beliefs, that analysis, to the real test of putting them into operation in power.
Most delegates were delighted by the speech. Kinuock's rating in a Harris poll two days later climbed fourteen points and he overtook Thatcher.
RONALD REAGAN Oval Office of the White House, 28 January 1986
'The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted'
A few hours after the spectacular Challenger space shuttle disaster, President Reagan delivered this address to the nation. If was a characteristic example of the Reagan style - homely, almost conversational but achieving exactly the right emotion. The speech was memorable for its closing lines, which were from the poem 'High Flight', a sonnet written by J'aim Gillespie Magee, a Canadian pilot who flew Spitfires from Britain during the Second World War and who was killed at the age of nineteen in December 1941.
This was a classic case of a speech-writer- Peggy Noonan, who learned the poem at school- remembering the appropriate quotation at the right moment, Reagan was present when the actor Tyrone Power returned from the war and recited 'High Flight' from memory at a homecoming party. The poem was usedfor years as the close-down reading of a Washington television station.
Nineteen years ago, almost.to die day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shutde; but. they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliandy. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of die seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel die loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We've grown used to wonders in this century.. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space programme has been doing just that. We've grown used to die idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to die schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of die shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's allpartofdieprocess of exploration and disco very. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them . ..
There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama.
456   Kinnock: ' 11%' am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations.
In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.
The crew of the space shutde Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived dieir lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of eardi' to 'touch the face of God.'
NEIL KINNOCK Llandudno, 15 May 1987 -
'Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?'
Even his rivals acknowledged that Neil Kinnock, in his first election as leader of the Labour Party in 1987, fought an energetic and effective campaign. That wasparticularly true on television when his party political broadcasts were made by Hugh Hudson, the celebrated director of the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire.
The most memorable of the television broadcasts showed Kinnock and Glenys, his mfe, strolling in the hills above IJanduduo on the North Whales coast, and included extracts from this speech to the Welsh Labour Party,
The rousing passion of his speech and the emotional atmosphere in the packed conference hall became a hallmark of Kinnock's election rallies and demonstrated that, when he spoke from the soul rather than a sanitised scriptprepared so as not to frighten away potential voters with the bogy of a socialist government, he was the greatest British orator of his generation.
We are democratic socialists. We care all the time. We don't think it's a soft sentiment, we don't think it's 'wet'.
We think that care is the essence of strength.
And we believe that because we know that strength without care is savage and brutal and selfish.
Kinnock: 'If% am I the. first Kinnock in a thousand generations.,.' 457
Strength with care is compassion - the practical action diat is needed to help people lift themselves to their full stature.
That's real care - It is not soft or weak. It is tough and strong.
But where do we get that strength to provide that care?
Do we wait for some stroke of good fortune, some benign giant, some socially conscious Samson to come along and pick up the wretched of the earth?
Of course we don't.
We cooperate, we collect together, we coordinate so that everyone can contribute and everyone can benefit, everyone has responsibilities, everyone has rights. That is how we put care into action. That is how we make die weak strong, diat is how we lift the needy, that is how we make the sick whole, diat is how we give talent the chance to flourish, that is how we turn the unemployed claimant into the working contributor.
We do it together. It is called collective strength, collective care. And its whole purpose is individual freedom.
Whenwe speakof collective strength and collective freedom, collectively achieved, we are not fulfilling that nightmare that Mrs Thatcher tries to paint, and all her predecessors have tried to saddle us with.
We're not talking about uniformity; we're not talking about regimentation; we're not talking about conformity - that's their creed. The uniformity of the dole queue; the regimentation of die unemployed young and their compulsory work schemes. The conformity of people who will work in conditions, and take orders, and accept pay because of mass unemployment that they would laugh at in a free society with full employment.
That land of freedom for the individual, that kind of liberty can't be secured by most of the people for most of the time if they're just left to themselves, isolated, stranded, with dieir whole life chances dependent upon luck!
Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?
Was it because all our predecessors were 'thick'? Did they lack talent - those people who could sbg, and play, and recite and write
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poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands; those people who could dream dreams, see visions; those people who had such a sense of perception as to know in times so brutal, so oppressive, that they could win their way out of that by coming together?
Were those people not university material? Couldn't diey have knocked off all their A-Ievds in an afternoon?
But why didn't they get it?
Was it because they were weak? - those people who could work eight hours underground and dien come up and play football?
Weak? Those women who could survive eleven childbearings, were they weak? Those people who could stand with their backs and their legs straight and face the people who had control over their lives, the ones who owned their workplaces and tried to own them, and tell them, TMo. I won't take your orders.' Were they weak?
Does anybody really think that tiiey didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment?
Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand; no arrangement for their neighbours to subscribe to their welfare; no method by which the communities could translate their desires for those individuals into provision for those individuals.
And now, Mrs Thatcher, by dint of privatization, and means test, and deprivation, and division, wants to nudge us back into the situation where everybody can either stand on their own feet, or live on their knees.
The 1987 British general election marked the high noon of Margaret Thatcher's three governments and she won her third victory - but Kinnock destroyed the Alliance of the Liberals and the Social Democrats as the main alternative to the Tories, The American politician, foe Biden, was later to pinch a theme from Kinnock's speech and ask: 'Wlyy am I the fourteenth foe Biden ,. . V Kinnock lost his second general election in 1992 and subsequently resigned as leader of the Labour Party.
EDWARD KENNEDY i Adanta, 19 July 1988
i 'Now is the time'
At the Democrat convention in Atlanta in 1988, Senator Edward Kennedy introduced by his nephew fohn Fitzgerald Kennedy jr, spoke in support of Michael Dukakis, who had been chosen to fight George Bush.
As his speech ended, he pledged 'every resource' of his mind and spirit to the Democrat cause - and then movingly recalled the dream, and the dreamers, who had inspired Democrats since the 1960s,
I You and I have stood together many times, but no time has been \ff    more important than this.
\f- The campaign tiiat stretches before us now is a struggle for the I-f souls and the future of America. For we are more than a political j coalition, more than a collection of programmes, more than the sum
I of our prospects and our strategy. Most of all, we are die trustees of
a dream.
Twenty years ago, in 1968, we lost two of the most powerful voices of that dream. But they left us their vision, their values, and the hopes they awakened.
In die coundess millions of people whose hearts they touched, we remember them now to remind ourselves that the American journey is unfinished, that we stand for change in order to march again towards enduring ideals, that we do not have to setde for things as they are.
Martin Luther King Jr told us something we need to hear anew. He said, "We are now faced with the fact diat tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now, in the unfolding life and history. There is'such a thing as being too late.' {Applause)
And Dr King also said, We must work unceasingly to lift this Nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion.'
And in that time there was another voice, only briefly heard, but
460 Jackson: 'Keep hope alive'
whose words too have oudasted all die loss in years. Robert Kennedy said, Tiach time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve die lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.3 {Applause.)
He was my brother. But he and Dr King were also in the deepest sense brothers to us all. These two, these valiant two, lived for the same dream and were gone only months apart.
And if they were here with us, two decades later, I think I know what they would say: TSlow is the time. Some men see things as they are and say, why? We dream things that never were and say, why not? Now is the time.' {Spontaneous demonstration)
JESSE JACKSON . Adanta, 19 July 1988
'Keep hope alive'
As a charismatic preacher and black activist, Jesse Jackson (1941-) worked with Martin Luther King and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, the year King was assassinated. He subsequently assumed King's mantle as America's most articulate spokesman for black rights and established PUSH {People United to Save Humanity) in 1971 to promote the economic advancement of black people.
He was the first black American to mount a serious campaign for the presidency when in 1984 he constructed a 'rainbow coalition' of minority groups. He lost to Walter Mandate.
Four years later he came second to Michael Dukakis. He made this memorable speech, of which this is the peroration, as he accepted the nomination as nice-president.
I'm often asked, 'Jesse, why do you take on these tough issues? They're not very political. We can't win that way.'
If an issue is morally right, it will eventually be political. It may be political and never be right. Fannie Lou Hamer didn't have the
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most votes in Adantic City, but her principles have oudasted every delegate who voted to lock her out. Rosa Parks did not have the most votes, but she was morally right. Dr King didn't have the most votes about the Vietnam war, but he was morally right. If we're principled first, our politics will fall in place.
'Jesse, why did you take diese big bold initiatives?' A poem by an unknown author went somediing like this: We mastered the air, we've conquered the sea, and annihilated distance and prolonged life, we were not wise enough to live on this earth without war and without hate. (
As for Jesse Jackson, I'm tired of sailing my litde boat, far inside the harbor bar. I want to go out where the big ships float, out on the deep where the great ones are. And should my frail craft prove too slight, the waves that sweep those billows o'er, I'd rather go down in a stirring fight than drown to death in the sheltered shore.
We've got to go out, my friends, where the big boats are.
And then, for our children, young America, hold your head high now. We can win. We must not lose you to drugs and violence, premature pregnancy, suicide, cynicism, pessimism and despair. We can win.
Wherever you are tonight, I challenge you to hope and to dream. Don't submerge your dreams. Exercise above all else, even on drugs, dream of the day you're drug-free. Even in the gutter, dream of the day that you'll be upon your feet again. You must never stop dreaming. Face reality, yes. But don't stop with the way things are; dream of things as they ought to be. Dream. Face pain, but love, hope, faith, and dreams will help you rise above the pain.
Use hope and imagination as weapons of survival and progress, but you keep on dreaming, young America. Dream of peace. Peace is rational and reasonable. War is irrational in this age and unwinnable.
Dream of teachers who teach for life and not for living. Dream of doctors who are concerned more about public health than private wealth. ■ Dream of lawyers more concerned about justice than a judgeship. Dream of preachers who are concerned more about prophecy than profiteering. Dreaman the high road of sound values.
And in America, as we go fordi to September, October and
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November and then beyond, America must never surrender to a high moral challenge.
Do not surrender to drugs. The best drug policy is a no first use. Don't surrender with needles and cynicism. Let's have no first use on the one hand, or clinics on the other. Never surrender, young America.
Go forward. America must never surrender to malnutrition. We can feed the hungry and clothe the naked. We must never surrender We must go forward. We must never surrender to illiteracy. Invest in our children. Never surrender; and go forward.
We must never surrender to inequality. Women cannot compromise ERA [EqualRights Amendment] orcomparable worth. Women are making 60 cents on die dollar to what a man makes. Women cannot buy milk cheaper. Women deserve to get paid for the work that you do. It's right and it's fair.
Don't surrender, my friends. Those who have AID S tonight, you deserve our compassion. Even with AIDS you must not surrender in your wheelchairs. I see you sittinghere tonight in those wheelchairs. I've stayed with you. I've reached out to you across our nation. Don't you give up. I know it's tough sometimes. People look down on you. It took you a Utile more effort to get here tonight.
And no one should look down on you, but sometimes mean people do. The only justification we have for iooldng down on someone is that we're going to stop and pick diem up. But even in your wheelchairs, don't you give up. We cannot forget fifty years ago when our backs were against die wall, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. I would rather have Roosevelt in a wheelchair than Reagan and [George] Bush on a horse. Don't you surrender and don't give up.
Don't surrender and don't give up. Why can I challenge you tills way? Jesse Jackson, you don't understand my situation. You be on television. You don't understand. I see you with the big people. You don't understand my situation.' I understand. You're seeing me on TV but you don't know the me tiiat makes me, me. They wonder why does Jesse run, because they see me running for the White House. They don't see the house I'm running from.
I have a story. I wasn't always on television. Writers were not always outside my door. When I was born late one afternoon, October 8th, in Greenville, SC, no writers asked my mother her name. Nobody chose to write downher address. My mama was not supposed to make it. And I was not supposed to make it. You see, I was born to a teenage modier who was bom to a teenage mother.
I understand. I know abandonment and people being mean to you, and saying you're nothing and nobody, and can never be anything. I understand. J esse Jackson is my third name. I'm adopted. When I had no name, my grandmother gave me her name. My name was Jesse Burns until I was twelve. So I wouldn't have a blank space, she gave me a name to hold me over. I understand when nobody knows your name. I understand when you have no name. I understand.
I wasn't born in the hospital. Mama didn't have insurance. I was born in the bed at the house. I really do understand. Born in a three-room house, bathroom in the backyard, slop jar by the bed, no hot and cold running water. I understand. Wallpaper used for decoration? No. For a windbreaker. I understand. I'm a working person's person, that's why I understand you whether you're black or white.
I understand work. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hand. My mother, a working woman. So many days she went to work with runs in her stockings. She knew better, but she wore runs in her stockings so that my brodier and I could have matching socks and not be laughed at at school.
I understand. At three o'clock on Thanksgiving Day we couldn't eat turkey because mama was preparing someone else's turkey at three o'clock. We had to play football to entertain ourselves and then around six o'clock she would get off the Alta Vista bus when we would bring up the leftovers and eat our turkey - leftovers, the carcass, the cranberries around eight o'clock at night. I really do understand.
Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects, on the
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465
corners, I understand. Call you outcast, low down, you can't make it, you're nothing, you're from nobody, subclass, underclass - when you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.
I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it wasn't born in you, and you can make it. Wherever you are tonight you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don't you surrender. Suffering breeds character. Character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint.
You must not surrender. You may or may not get there, but just know that you're qualified and you hold on and hold out. We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. On tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive.
I love you very much. I love you very much.
Tile presidential election was won by George Bush, the Republican candidate.
MARGARET THATCHER Bruges, 20 September 1988
'77m frontiers of the State'
Margaret Tljatcher's attitude to the European Community, which constantly made Britain appear the odd nation out, split her Cabinet, led to the resignation of both Nigel Lawsou, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir Geoffrey Howe, Foreign Secretary, and was one of the main reasonsfor her downfall in .1990. Thatcher was suspicious that the European Community was a recipe for the creeping state socialism a/id trade-union power that she had seen off in Britain.
No speech by Mrs Thatcher provoked more controversy during her eleven years as prime minister of Britain than her address - drafted by Sir Charles Powell, her adviser on foreign affairs - to the.College ofEurope in Bruges. The Bruges speech set out in the sharpest focus her opposition to any form of European federalism that would undermine
the sovereignty of the nation state - the F-word issue that has since been a dominant theme of principle in British politics.
Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the -European idea the property of any group or institution. We British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history. For 300 years we were part of the Roman Empire and our maps still trace the straight lines of the roads the Romans built. Our ancestors — Celts, Saxons and Danes — came from the continent
Our nation was — in that favourite Community word - 'restructured' under Norman and Angevin rule in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
This year we celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution in which the British crown passed to Prince William of Orange and Queen Mary.
Visit the great churches and cathedrals of Britain, read our literature and listen to our language: all bear witness to the cultural riches which we have drawn from Europe - and other Europeans from us.
We in Britain are righdy proud of the way in which, since Magna Carta in 1215, we have pioneered and developed representative institutions to stand as bastions of freedom. And proud too of the way in which for centuries Britain was a home for people from the rest of Europe who sought sanctuary from tyranny.
, But we know that without the European legacy of political ideas we could not have achieved as much as we did. From classical and medieval thought we have borrowed that concept of the rule of law which marks out a civilized society from barbarism. And on that Idea of Christendom — for long synonymous with Europe — with its recognition of the unique and spiritual nature of the individual, we still base our belief in personal liberty and other human rights.
Too often the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels. Yet from bur perspective today surely what strikes us most is our common experience. For instance, the
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story of how Europeans explored and colonized and - yes, without apology - civilized much of the world is an extraordinary tale of talent, skill and courage.
We British have in a special way contributed to Europe. Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. We have fought and we have died for her freedom, Only miles from here in Belgium lie the bodies of 120,000 British soldiers who died in the First World War. Had it not been for that willingness to fight and to die, Europe wan/dhzve been united long before- now - but not in liberty, not in justice. It was British support to resistance movements throughout the last war that helped to keep alive the flame of liberty in so many countries until the day of liberation.
All these things alone are proof of our commitment to Europe's future.
The European Community is one manifestation of that European identity. But it is not the only one. We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain peoples who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from dieir roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.
Nor should we forget that European values have helped to make the United States of America into the valiant defender of freedom which she has become.
This is no arid chronicle of obscure facts from the dust-filled libraries of history. It is the record of nearly two thousand years of British involvement /;; Europe, cooperation with Europe and contribution to Europe, a contribution which today is as valid and as strong as ever. Yes, we have looked also to wider horizons - as have others - and thank goodness for that, because Europe never would have prospered and never will prosper as a narrow-minded, inward-looking club.
The European Community belongs to ail its members. It must reflect the traditions and aspirations of all its members.
And let me be quite clear. Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our
destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community. That is not to say that our future lies only in Europe. But nor does that of France or Spain, or indeed any other member.
The Community is not an end in itself. Nor is it an institutional device to be constandy modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept. Nor must it be ossified by endless regulation.
The European Community is the practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people in a world in- which there are many other powerful nations and groups of nations ...
To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardize the objectives we seek to achieve.
Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.
Some of the founding fathers of the Community thought that the United States of America might be its model.
But the whole history of America is quite different from Europe. People went tiiere to get away from the intolerance and constraints of life in Europe. They sought liberty and opportunity; and their strong sense of purpose has, over two centuries, helped create a new unity and pride in being American - just as our pride lies in being British or Belgian or Dutch or German.
I am the first to say that on many great issues the countries of Europe should try to speak with a single voice. I want to see us work more closely on.the things we can do better together than alone. Europe is stronger when we do so, whether it be in trade, in defence, or in our relations with the rest of the world.
But working more closely together does not require power to be centralized in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy.
Indeed, it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre,
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Havel: 'A contaminated moral environment'
are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, some in the Community seem to want to move in die opposite direction.
We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-State exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose. But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one's own country; for these have been the source of Europe's vitality dirough the centuries.
VACLAV HAVEL Prague, 1 January 1990
'A contaminated ttioral environment'
Communism in Eastern Europe died in 1989 as one by one the Communist regimes in Poland, Chechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria collapsed. The year ended with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. It was the springtime of nations, the most exciting year in European history since 1848.
Tl)e motto of the year was 'Truth shall prevail' and it was ajear of truth for Communism. As Timothy GartonAsh, an eyewitness to the events, puts it: 'There is a real sense in which these regimes lived by the word andperished by the word. For what, after all, happened? A few thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands went on to the streets. They spoke a few words. "Resign," they said "No more shall we be slaves!" "Free elections." "Freedom!" And the walls of fericha fell. And with the walk, the communist parties simply crumbled.'
That sense that truth will prevail is what made the first speech by Vaclav Havel, the playwright who was elected C^ech president on 29 December 1989, so moving and iplifting in its expression of the defiant human spirit that conquered Communism during that memorableyear.
One theme of Havel's work was that under Communism almost everybody lived a double life, saying one thing in public and another in private. It was a theme to which
Havel: 'A contaminated moral environment'
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he returned in this speech on New Year's Day, broadcast on radio and television, with his comments on the 'contaminated moral environment' under the Communist regime.
My dear fellow citizens, for forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.
1 assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.
Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods which are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete econ-' omy is wasting the little energy we have available. A country that once could be proud of die educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. We have polluted our soil, our rivers and forests, bequeadied to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adult people in our country die earlier than in most odier European countries ....
But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally El because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from" ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loud diat the powers that be should not be all-powerful, and that special farms, which produce ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children's homes, and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer tiiem to all. The previous regime — armed with its arrogant
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and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people,"skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone. It cannot do more tiian slowly but inexorably wear down itself and all its nuts and bolts.
When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about die gendemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to die totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators.
Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as somediing alien, which some distant relative bequeathed us. On die contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt die duty that each o f us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independentiy, freely, reasonably, and quickly. Let us not be , mistaken: die best government in die world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general remedy from them only. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.
If we realize tiiis, dien all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.
In the effort to rectify matters of common concern,'we have somediing to lean on. The recent period — and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution - has shown the enormous human, moraL and spiritual potential and civic culture that slumbered
in our society under die enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where diose meek, humiliated, sceptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovalda found die marvellous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke. And let us ask: from where did the young people who never knew another system take dieir desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents - the very generation that had been considered as lost - joined them? How is it possible that so many people immediately knew what to do and none of them needed any advice or instruction? ...
Masaryk* based his politics on morality. Let us try in a new time and in a new way to restore this concept of politics. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of die community rather dian of a need to cheat or rape the community. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics can be not only the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it can even be the art of die impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves and the world . . .
There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gende revolution. Let us not allow the sympathies of the world which we have won so fast to be equally rapidly lost through our becoming entangled in the jungle of skirmishes for power. Let us not allow the desire to serve oneself to bloom once again underthe fair mask of the desire to serve die common good. It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moraL
+ Thomas Masaryk (1850-1937) was the first president of Czechoslovalda after it won independence in 1918. The name was anathema to the Communist regime.
472 Mandela: 'Our march to freedom is irreversible'
civic, political, and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations. The future policies and prestige of our state will depend on die personalities we select and later elect to our representative bodies ....
In conclusion, I would like to say diat I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will not only look out of the windows of his airplane but who, first and foremost, will always be present among his fellow citizens and listen . to them well.
You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I - dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn, Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.
The most distinguished of my predecessors opened his first speech with a quotation from the great Czech educator Comenius. Allow me to round off my first speech with my own paraphrase of the same statement:
People, your government has returned to you!
NELSON MANDELA Cape Town, 11 February 1990
'Our march to freedom is irreversible'
Twenty-sevenyears after he was first imprisoned, Nelson Mandela, a worldwide symbol of resistance to apartheid, now seventy-one and white-haired, walked out of prison with a smile on his face, raised his hand in the clenched-fist salute of the African National Congress, and made his first speech since he stood in the dock accused oftreason. Speaking to a crowd of50,000 under the majestic shadow of Table Mountain, and watched by a global audience ofmillions on television, he placed the remainingyears of his life in the hands ofhis people and ended his speech with the wore he had uttered from the dock in 1964.
Mandela: 'Our march to freedom is irreversible' 473
Friends, Comrades and fellow South Africans. I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all. I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, die people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands...
Today the majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize diat apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organization and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy.
The apartheid destruction on our subcontinent is incalculable. The fabric of family life of millions of my people has been shattered. Millions are homeless and unemployed. Our economy lies in ruins and our people are embroiled in political strife.
Our resort to the armed struggle in 1960 widi the formation of die military wing of the ANC, Umkhonta we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), was a purely defensive action against the violence of apartheid. The factor which necessitated the armed struggle still exists today. We have no option but to continue ...
Negotiations on the dismantling of apartheid will have to address die overwhelming demand of our people for a democratic, non-racial and unitary South Africa.
There must be an end to white monopoly on political power, and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that die inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratized.
It must be added that Mr de Klerk himself is a man of integrity, who is acutely aware of die dangers of a public figure not honouring his undertakings. But as an organization, we base our policy and strategy on the harsh reality we are faced with. And this reality is that we are still suffering under the policies of the Nationalist government.
Our struggle has reached a decisive moment. We call on our people to seize diis moment, so that the process towards democracy is rapid and uninterrupted.
474 Mandela: 'Our march to freedom is irreversible'
We have waited too Jong for our freedom! We can no longer wait Now is thé tíme to intensify the struggle on all fronts. To relax our efforts now would be a rnistaJte which generations to come will not be able to forgive. The sight of freedom looming on die horizon should encourage us to redouble our efforts. It is only dirough disciplined mass action that our victory can be assured.
We call on our white compatriots to join us in the shaping of a new Soutii Africa. The freedom movement is a political home for you, too. We call on the international community to continue the campaign to isolate the apartheid regime. To lift sanctions now would be to run the risk of aborting the process towards the complete eradication of apartheid.
Our.march to freedom is irreversible. We must not allow fear to stand in our way. Universal suffrage on a common voters' roll in a united, democratic and non-racial South Africa is the only way to peace and racial harmony.
In conclusion I wish to go to my own words during my trial in 1964. They are as true today as they were then. I quote:
T have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished die ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons Jive together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for wliich I am prepared to die. Amandla (power)!'
Ajear later President de Klerk of South Africa announced proposals to dismantle the structure of apartheid. Mandela and de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Pri^e in 1993, and Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president in May 1994. He retired in 1999.
Howe: 'A conflict of loyalty' 475
SIR GEOFFREY HOWE London, 13 November 1990
j
A conflict of loyally'
Sir Geoffrey Howe (1927-) served throughout the eleven years of Margaret Tljatcher's three administrations, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer, then as Foreign Secretary andfinally as Leader of the Commons. By 1990 he was the sole survivorfrom her first Cabinet. Yet their relationship, which had never been founded on mutual admiration, had sharply deteriorated, mainly because of Mrs Thatcher's distn/sf of the instincts of the Foreign Office, and herfrequent humiliations of Howe, who was also her deputy. The apparently faithful and imperturbable Howe finally snapped and he resigned on 1 November, saying he could no longer serve her with honour.
Howe's pedestrian style was once memorably summed ip. Being attacked by him was like being savaged by a dead sheep, said his opponent Denis Healey. Yet in his resignation speech the dead sheep became a Hon, drawing audible gasps of surprise from fellow Conservatives (who included Mrs Thatcher). It was 'an act of brilliantly executed matricide', says Sir Ronald Millar, Mrs Thatcher's principal speechwriter, 'each word honed with Aesculapiau skillfor maximum effect'.
\ It has been suggested - even, indeed, by some of my Right Hon. and Hon. Friends - that I decided to resign solely because of ques tions of style and not on matters of substance at all. Indeed, If some of my former colleagues are to be believed, I must be the first minister in history who has resigned because he was in full agreement with government policy. The truth is that, in many aspects of politics, style and substance complement each other. Very often, they are two sides of the same coin ...
It was a great honour to serve for six years as Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and to share with my Right Hon. Friend [Margaret Thatcher] in some notable achievements in the European Community. But it was as we moved on to consider the crucial monetary issues in the European context that I came to feel increasing concern. Some of the reasons for that anxiety were made very clear
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by ray Right Hon. Friend the Member for Blaby [Nigel Lawson] in his resignation speech just over twelve months ago. Like him, I concluded at least five years ago that the conduct of our policy against inflation could no longer rest solely on attempts to measure and control the domestic money supply. We had no doubt that we should be helped in that batde, and, indeed, in other respects, by joining the exchange rate mechanism of the European monetary system.
There was, or should have been, nothing novel about joining the ERM; it has been a long-standing commitment For a quarter of a century after die Second World War, we found that the very similar Bretton Woods regime did serve as a useful discipline. Now, as my Right Hon. Friend die Prime Minister acknowledged two weeks ago, our entry into the ERM can be seen as an 'extra discipline for keeping down inflation'. However, it must be said that the practical conclusion has been achieved only at the cost of substantial damage to her Administration and, more serious still, to its inflation achievements.
It was the late Lord Stockton, formerly Harold Macmillan, who first put the central point clearly. As long ago as 1962, he argued that we had to place and keep ourselves widiin the Community. He saw it as essential then as it is today not to cut ourselves off from the realities of power, not to retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past and so diminish our control over our own destiny in the future,
The pity is that the Macmillan view had not been perceived more clearly a decade before in the fifties. It would have spared so many of the struggles of die past twenty years had we been in the Community from die outset, had we been ready, in the much too simple phrase, to 'surrender some sovereignty' at a much earlier stage.
Had we been in from the start we should have had more not less influence over the Europe in which we live today. We should never forget the lesson of that isolation, of being on the outside looking in, for the conduct of today's affairs.
We have done best when we have seen die Community not as a static entity to be resisted and contained, but as an active process
which we can shape often decisively provided we allow ourselves to be fully engaged in it widi confidence and enthusiasm and in good faith.
We must at all costs avoid presenting ourselves yet again with an over-simplified choice, a false antithesis, a bogus dilemma, between one alternative starkly labelled 'cooperation between independent sovereign states' and a second equally crudely labelled alternative 'a centralized federal super-state' as if tiiere were no middle way in between.
We commit a serious error if we think always in terms of'surrendering' sovereignty and seek to stand pat for all time on a given deal by proclaiming, as the prime minister did two weeks ago, that we have 'surrendered enough'. The European enterprise is not and should not be seen like that, as some land of zero sum gain.
Sir Winston Churchill put it much more positively forty years ago when he said: 'It is also possible and not less agreeable to regard [this sacrifice or merger of national sovereignty] as the gradual assumption by all the nations concerned of that larger sovereignty which can alone protect dieir diverse and distinctive customs and characteristics and their national traditions?'
I find Winston Churchill's perception a good deal more convincing and encouraging for the interests of our nation dian the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by die Prime Minister who sometimes seems to. look out on a Continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people scheming, in her words, to 'extinguish democracy', to 'dissolve our national identities', to lead us 'through the back door into a federal Europe".
What kind of vision is that for our business people who trade there each, day, for our financiers who seek to make London the money capital of Europe, or for all die young people of today? These concerns are especially important as we approach the crucially important topic of EMU. We must be positively and centrally involved in diis debate and not fearfully and negatively detached. The cost of disengagement here could be very serious indeed . . .
The tragedy is - and it is for me personally, for my party, for our whole people, for the Prime Minister herself a very real tragedy - that
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Benn: 7 catwot hand amy powers lent to me'
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the Prime Minister's perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation. Itrisks minimizing our influence and maximizing our chances of being once again shut out.
We have paid heavily in the past for late starts and squandered opportunities in Europe. We dare not let that happen again. If we detach ourselves completely as a party or as a nation from the middle ground of Europe, the effects will be incalculable and very hard ever to correct.
In my letter of resignation, which I tendered with the utmost sadness and dismay, I said: 'Cabinet government is about trying to persuade one another from within.' That was my commitment to government by persuasion, persuading colleagues and the nation.
I have tried to do that as Foreign Secretary and since, but I realize now that the task has become futile, of trying to stretch the meaning of words beyond what was credible, and trying to pretend there was a common policy when every step forward risked being subverted by some casual comment or impulsive answer.
■ The conflict of loyalty, of loyalty to my Right Hon. Friend the Prime Minister - and, after all, in two decades together that instinct of loyalty is still very real - and of loyalty to what I perceive to be die true interests of the nation, has become all too great. I no longer believe it possible to resolve that conflict from within this government. That is why I have resigned. In doing so, I have done what I believe to be right for my party and my country. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wresded for perhaps too long.
Howe's speech led to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. Shortly aftenvards, Michael Heseltine announced that be would stand against her in the annual leadership election. Mrs Thatcher failed to muster enough votes to win on the first count, subsequently withdrew, and foim Major won on the second ballot.
TONY BENN London, 20 November 1991
'I cannot band away powers lent to me'
Although he is one of the most controversial politicians in Britain, described by one historian as a populist gum of the left, a dissident, an individualist, almost an anarchist, even his most dedicated political opponents acknowledge the power andpersuasiveness of Tony Bean's oratory.
That is particularly true of his speeches on Europe. Benn (1925-) campaigned againstjoining the European Community from the outset of the British debate and has consistently warned against what he sees as the perils of federalism.
As the debate in Britain over a federal Europe intensified towards the end of 1991, with the signing of the Maastricht treaty imminent, Benn, Labour MP for Chesterfield, made this speech to the House of Commons. It was admired by many Conservatives, some his fiercest critics, who believed that on this occasion he spoke for England, Norman Tebbit, a staunch ally of Margaret Thatcher, said it was the best speech he had ever heard in the House.
Some people genuinely believe that we shall never get social justice from the British Government, butwe shall get it from Jacques Delors. They believe that a good Idng is better than a bad Parliament. I have never taken diat view. Others believe that die change is inevitable, and that die common currency will protect us from inflation and will provide a wage policy. They believe that it will control speculation and that Britain cannot survive alone. None of those arguments persuade me because the argument has never been about sovereignty.
I do not know what a sovereign is, apart from the one that used to be in gold and the Pope who is a sovereign in the Vatican. We are talking about democracy. No nation - not even the great United States which could, for all I know, be destroyed by a nuclear weapon from a third-world country - has the power to impose its will on other countries. We are discussing whether the British people are to be allowed to elect those who make the laws under which they are
480 Benn: 7 cannot hand away powers lent to me'
governed. The argument is nothing to do widi whedier we should get more maternity leave from Madame Papandreou than from Madame Thatcher. That is not the issue.
I recognize that when the members of the three Front Benches agree, I am in a minority. My next job therefore is to explain to the people of Chesterfield what we have decided. I will say firs t, 'My dear constituents, in future you will be governed by people whom you do not elect and cannot remove. I am sorry about it. They may give you better creches and shorter working hours but you cannot remove them.'
I know that it sounds negative but I have always diought it positive to say that the important thing about democracy is that we can remove without bloodshed the people who govern us. We can get rid of a Callaghan, a Wilson or even a Right Hon. Lady by internal processes. We can get rid of the Right Hon. Member for Huntingdon jMr Major]. But that cannot be done in the structure that is proposed. Even if one likes the policies of the people in Europe one cannot get rid of them.
Secondly, we say to my favourite friends, the Chartists and suffragettes, 'All your struggles to get control of the ballot box were a waste of time. We shall be run in future by a few white persons, as in 1832,' The instrument, I might add, is the Royal Prerogative of treaty making. For the first time since 1649 the Crown makes the laws ~ advised, I admit, by the Prime Minister,
We must ask what will happen when people realize what we have done. We have had a marvellous debate about Europe, but none of us has discussed our relationship with the people who sent us here .. .
If people lose the power to sack their Government one of several things happens. First, people may just slope off. Apathy could destroy democracy. When the turnout drops below 50 per cent, we are in danger...
The second thing that people can do is to riot. Riot is an old-fashioned method for drawing the attention of the Government to what is wrong. It is difficult for an elected person to admit it, but the riot at Strangeways produced some prison reforms. Riot has historically played a much larger part in British politics than we are ever allowed to know.
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Thirdly, nationalism can arise. Instead of blaming the. Treaty of Rome, people say, Itis those Germans' or 'Itis the French'. Nationalism is built out of frustration that people feel when they cannot get their way through the ballot box. With nationalism comes repression, I hope that it is not pessimistic — in my view it is not — to say that democracy hangs by a thread in every country of die world. Unless we can offer people a peaceful route to the resolution of injustices through the ballot box diey will not listen to a House that has blocked off that route.
There are many alternatives open to us. One Hon. Member said that he was young and had not fought in the war. He looked at a new Europe. But there have been five Europes this century. There was one run by the King, the Kaiser and die Tsar - they were all cousins so thatwas very comfortable. They were all Queen Victoria's grandsons. And there was no nonsense about human rights when Queen Victoria's grandsons repressed people. Then there was the Russian revolution. Then there was the inter-war period. Then diere was the Anglo-Soviet alliance. Then there was the cold war. Now we have a Boris Yeltsin who has joined the Monday Club. There have been many Europes. This is not the only Europe on offer .. ,
Another way would be to have a looser, wider Europe. I have an idea for a Commonwealth of Europe. I am introducing a bill on the subject. Europe would be rather like the British Commonwealth. We would work by consent widi people. Or we could accept this ghasdy proposal, which is clumsy, secretive, centralized, bureaucratic and divisive. That is how I regard the Treaty of Rome, I was bom a European and I will die one. But I have never put my alliance behind the Treaty of Rome. I object to it. I hate being called an anti-European. How can one be anti-European when one is born in Europe? It is like saying diat one is anti-British if one does not agree with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. What a.lot of nonsense it is.
I ask myself why the House is ready to contemplate abandoning its duties, as I fear diat it is. I was elected forty-one years ago this month. This'Chamber has lost confidence in democracy. It believes that it must be governed by someone else. It is afraid to use the powers entrusted to it by its constituents.-It has traded power for
482 Rushdie: 'What is my single life worth?'
status. One gets asked to go on the telly if one is a Member of Parliament. The Chamber does not want to use its power. It has accepted the role of a spectator and joined what Bagehot called .the dignified part of the constitution, leaving the Crown, under the control of the Prime Minister, to be the Executive part.
If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotsltyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield, I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights.
Therefore, there is only one answer. If people are determined to submit themselves to Jacques Delors, Madame Papandreou and the Council of Ministers, we must tell the people what is planned. If people vote for that,. they will all have capitulated. Julius Caesar said, We are just merging our sovereignty.' So did William the Conqueror.
It is not possible to support the Government's motion. I have told the Chief Whip that I cannot support die Labour motion. I invite the House to vote against the Government's motion and not to support a motion which purports to take us faster into a Community which cannot reflect the aspirations of those who put us here. That is not a nationalist argument nor is it about sovereignty. It is a democratic argument and it should be decisive in a democratic Chamber.
SALMAN RUSHDIE New York, December 1991
'Wliat is my single life worth?'
After publication of bis novel'The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie became the first Western writer to become the victim of a Fatwa, a death sentence issued byAyafollah-Kljomeiui ofIran, who decreed that his book was a blaspheny on the Muslim faith. For
Rushdie: 'What is my single life worth?' 483
several years after 1989 he lived in hiding under 24-hour-a-day protection ly British Special Branch bodyguards.
Rushdie spent the day of this speech, honouring the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment, in a fourteenth-floor suite with twenty armed bodyguards. The windows were blocked by bullet-proof mattresses. At the Columbia Graduate School offountalism the audience were frisked before entry and the bomb squad was outside the hall. At the end three plain-clothed policemen escorted Rushdie back into hiding.
A hot-air balloon drifts slowly over a bottomless chasm, carrying several passengers. A leak develops; the balloon starts losing height. The pit, a dark yawn, comes closer. Good grief! The wounded balloon can bear just one passenger to safety; the many must be sacrificed to save the one! But who should live, who should die? And who could make such a choice?
In point of fact, debating societies everywhere regularly make such choices without qualms, for of course what I've described is die given situation of that evergreen favourite, die Balloon Debate, in which, as the speakers argue over the relative merits and demerits ■of the well-known figures they have placed in disaster's mouth, die assembled company blithely accepts the faindy unpleasant idea that a human being's right to life is increased or diminished by his or her virtues or vices — that we may be born equal but thereafter our lives weigh differendy in the scales.
It's only make-believe, after all. And while it may not be very nice, it does reflect how people actually diink.
I have now spent over a thousand days in just such a balloon; but, alas, this isn't a game. For most of these thousand days, my fellow-travellers included the Western hostages in the Lebanon, and the British businessmen imprisoned in Iran and Iraq, Roger Cooper and Ian Rkhter. And I had to accept, and did accept, that for most of my countrymen and countrywomen, my plight counted for less than the odiers'. In any choice between us, I'd have been die first to be pitched out of the basket and into the abyss. 'Our lives teach us who we are,' I wrote at the end of my essay 'In Good Faith'. Some of the lessons have been harsh, and difficult to learn.
Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to redescribe
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it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble, within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off. The bubble floats .above and through die world, depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction. For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an 'affair'. Bullet-proofed bubbles, like this one, are reality-proof, too. Those who travel in them, like those who wear Tolkien's rings of invisibility, become wraith-like if they're not careful. They get lost In this phantom space a man may become the bubble that encases him, and dien one day - pop! - he's gone forever.
It's ridiculous - isn't it? - to have to say, but I am a human being, unjusdy accused, unjusdy embubbled. Or is it I who am being ridiculous, as I call out from my bubble, I'm still trapped in here, folks; somebody, please, get me out?
Out there where you are, in the rich and powerful, and lucky West, has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? ... The original metaphor has reasserted itself. I'm back in the balloon, asking for the right to live.
What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: TSlot a lot.' But I refuse to give in to despair.
I refuse to give in to despair because I've been shown love as well as hatred. I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the crazy, upside-down logic of the post-/2r//w world, in which a single novelist can be accused of having savaged or 'mugged' a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its tarred and feathered victim) and the scapegoat for all its discontents. Many people do ask, for example: When a white pop-star-turned-lslamic-fanatic speaks approvingly about killing an Indian immigrant, how does the Indian immigrant end up being called the racist?
Or, again: What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?
I refuse to give in to despair even tiiough, for a thousand days and more, I've been put through a degree course in worthiessness, my own personal and specific worthiessness. My first teachers were die mobs marching down distant boulevards, baying for my blood,
and finding, soon enough, dieir echoes on English streets. I could not understand the force that makes parents hang murderous slogans around their children's necks. I have learned to understand it. It burns books and effigies and tiiinks itself holy. But at first, as I watched the marchers, I felt diem trampling on my heart.
Once again, however, I have been saved by instances of fair-mindedness, of goodness. Every time I learn that a reader somewhere has been touched by The Satanic Verses, moved and entertained and stimulated by it, it arouses deep feelings in me. And there are more and more such readers nowadays, my postbag tells me, readers (including Muslims) who are willing to give my burned, spurned child a fair hearing at long last.
Sometimes I think that, one day, Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times, will find the 'Rushdie affair' as improbable as die West now finds martyr-burning. One day they may agree that - as the European Enlightenment demonstrated - freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control, freedom from accusations of blasphemy.
Maybe diey'U agree, too, that the row over The Satanic Verses was at bottom an argument about who should have power over the grand narrative, the Story of Islam, and that diat power must belong equally to everyone. That even if my novel were incompetent, its attempt to retell the story would still be important. That if I've failed, others must succeed, because those who do not have power over die story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. One day. Maybe. But not today.
Today, my education in worthlessness continues, and what Saul Bellow would call my 'reality instructors' include: the media pundit who suggests that a manly death would be better for me than hiding like a rat; the letter-writer who points out that of course the trouble is that I look, like the Devil, and wonders if I have hairy shanks and cloven hooves; the 'moderate' Muslim who writes to say that Muslims find it 'revolting' when I speak about the Iranian death threats (it's not xhcfahva that's revolting, you understand, but my mention of it);
486 Rushdie: 'What is mj single life worth?'
the'rather more immoderate Muslim who tells me to 'shut up', explaining that if a fly is caught in a spider's web, it should not attract the attention of die spider. I ask the reader to imagine how it might feel to be intellectually and emotionally bludgeoned, from a thousand different directions, every day for a thousand days and more.
Back in the balloon, something longed-for and heartening has happened. On this occasion, mirabile dicta, the many have not been sacrificed, but saved. That is to say, my companions, die Western hostages and the gaoled businessmen, have by good fortune and the efforts of others managed to descend safely to eardi, and have been reunited with their families and friends, with their own, free lives. I rejoice for them, and admire dieir courage, their resilience. And now I'm alone in the balloon.
Surely I'll be safe now? Surely, now, the balloon will drop safely towards some, nearby haven, and I, too, will be reunited with my life? Surely it's my turn now?
But the balloon is over the chasm again; and it's still sinking. I realize that it's carrying a great deal of valuable freight. Trading relations, armaments deals, the balance of power in die Gulf- tiiese and other matters of great moment are weighing down die balloon. I hear voices suggesting that if I stay aboard, this precious cargo will be endangered. The national interest is being redefined; am I being redefined out of it? Am I to be jettisoned, after all?
When Britain renewed relations with Iran at die United Nations in 1990, the senior British official in charge of the negotiations assured me in unambiguous language that sometiiing very substantial had been achieved on my behalf. The Iranians, laughing merrily, had secredy agreed to forget the jattva. (The diplomat put great stress on this cheery Iranian laughter.) They would 'neither encourage nor allow' their citizens, surrogates or proxies to act against me.
Oh, how I wanted to believe tiiat But in the year-and-a-bit that followed, we saw the fatwa restated in Iran, the bounty money doubled, the book's Italian translator severely wounded, its Japanese translator stabbed to death; there was news of an attempt to find and kill me by contract killers worldng direcdy for the Iranian government through its European embassies. Another such contract
Rushdie: 'Wljat is mj single life worth?' 487
was successfully carried out in Paris, die victim being die harmless and aged ex-Prime Minister of Iran, Shapour Bakhtiar.
It seems reasonable to deduce that the secret deal made at die United Nations hasn't worked. Dismayingly, however, the talk as I write is all of improving relations with Iran still further, while the Tlushdie case' is described as a side-issue.
Is this a balloon I'm in, or the dustbin of history?
At the end of 1990, dispirited and demoralized, feeling abandoned, even then, in consequence of the British government's decision to patch things up with Iran, and with my marriage at an end, I faced my deepest grief, my unquenchable sorrow at having been torn away from, cast out of, the cultures and societies from which I'd always drawn my strengtii and inspiration - that is, the broad community of British Asians, and the broader community of Indian Muslims. I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by whatl did perhaps failed to see that I was not some deracinated Uncle Tom Wog.
To these people it was apparendy incomprehensible that I should seek to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul - and that I should seek to do so in a spirit of humility, instead of the arrogance so often attributed to me.
In 'In Good Faith' I wrote: 'Perhaps a way forward might be found through die mutual recognition of [our] mutual pain', but even moderate Muslims had trouble with this notion: what pain, they asked, could I possibly have suffered? Wimt was I talking about? As a result, the really important conversations I had in this period were with myself.
I said: Salman, you must send a message loud enough to be heard all over the wodd. You must make ordinary Muslims see diat you aren't their enemy, and make the West understand a litde more of the complexity of Muslim culture. It was my hope that Westerners might say, well, if he's the one in danger, and yet he's willing to acknowledge the importance of his Muslim roots, then perhaps we ought to start thinking a litde less stereotypically ourselves. (No such luck, though. The message you send isn't always the one that's received.)
488 Rushdie: 'Whit is my single life worth?'
I reminded myself diat I had-always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the 'secular Muslim', who, like the secular Jews, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from die dieology. I had recendy read the contemporary Muslim philosopher Fouad Zakariya's Laicite on fslamisme, and been encouraged by. Zakariya's attempt to modernize Islamic thought But, Salman, I told myself, you can't argue from outside the debating chamber. You've got to cross the tiireshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim.
I recalled my near-namesake, die twelfdi-century philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who argued that (to quote the great Arab historian Albert Hourani), 'not all the words of the Qu'ran should be taken literally. When die literal meaning of Qu'ranic verses appeared to contradict the truths to which philosophers arrived by the exercise of reason, those verses needed to be interpreted metaphorically.'
But Ibn Rushd was a snob. Having propounded an idea far in advance of its time, he qualified it by saying that such sophistication was only suitable for the elite; literalism would do for the masses. Salman, I asked myself, is it time to pick up Ibn Rushd's banner and carry it forward; to say, nowadays such ideas are fit for everybody, for the beggar as well as die prince?
It was with such things in mind — and with my thoughts in a state of some confusion and torment — that I spoke the Muslim creed before witnesses. But my fantasy of joining die fight for the modernization of Muslim thought, for freedom from the shackles of the Thought Police, was stillborn. It never really had a chance. Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In die West, some 'friends' turned against me, called me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them.
I also found myself up against the granite, heardess certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestiy power structure that ptesentiy dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere
Rushdie: 'What is my single life worth?' 4S9
on earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favour of one.
Suddenly I was (metaphorically) among people whose social attitudes I'd fought all my life — for example, tiieir attitudes about women (one Islamicist boasted to me that his wife would cut his toenails while he made telephone calls, and suggested I found such a spouse) or about gays (one of the Imams I met in December 1990 was on TV soon afterwards, denouncing Muslim gays as sick creatures who brought shame on their families and who ought to seek medical and psychiatric help). Had I truly fallen in among such people? That was not what I meant at all.
Facing the intransigence, mephilistine scorn of so much of Actually Existing Islam, I reluctandy concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into the Muslim culture Fd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, sceptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid'culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. Not me, not in this lifetime, no chance. Actually Existing Islam, which has all but deified its Prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification; which has supplanted a priest-free religion by a priest-ridden one; which makes literalism a weapon and redescriptions a crime, will never let the likes of me in.
Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recendy destroyed 'Actually Existing Socialism' of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the Utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit.
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed the point, but others have thought otherwise.
I have never disowned my book, nor regretted writing it. I said I was sorry to have offended people, because I had not set out to do so, and so I am. I explained that writers do not agree with every word spoken by every character they create — a truism in the world of books, but a continuing mystery to The Satanic Verses' opponents. I have always said that this novel has been traduced.
490 Rushdie: 'What is my single life worth?'
It has now been more than three years since The Satanic Verses was published; that's along, long 'space for reconciliation'. Long enough. I accept that I was wrong to have given way on this point. The Satanic Verses must be freely available and easily affordable, if only because if it is not read and studied, then these years will have no meaning. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
'Our lives teach us who we are.' I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own - and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world-view is the easiest to keep hold of; whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.
Yet I must cling with all my might to diat chameleon, that chimera, that shape-shifter, my own souk must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
'Free speech is a non-starter,' says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
That's the end of my speech from this ailing balloon. Now it's time to answer the question. What is my single life worth?
Is it worth more or less than the fat contracts and political treaties that are in here with me? Is it worth more or less than good relations with a country which, in April 1991, gave 800 women seventy-four lashes each for not wearing a veil; in which the eighty-year-old writer Miriam Pirojiz is still in gaol, and has been tortured; and whose Foreign Minister says, in response to criticism of his country's lamentable human-rights record, International monitoring of the human rights situation in Iran should not continue indefinitely .., Iran could not tolerate such monitoring for long*?
Elizabeth II: 'Annus Hombilis' 491
You must decide what you think a friend is worth to his friends, what you think a son is worth to his mother, or a father to his son.
You must decide what a man's conscience and heart and soul are worth. You must decide what you think a writer is worth, what value you place on a maker of stories, and an arguer with the world.
Ladies and gendemen, the balloon is sinking into the abyss.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II London, 24 November 1992
'Annus Hombilis'
As Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her fortieth jear on the throne in 1992, the British monarchy was in unprecedented disarray and under unprecedented attack. The Princess Royal bad divorced, the Duke and Duchess of York had separated, and the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales had been exposed as a sham. Meanwhile, critics of the monarchy accused the Queen of being aloofand out oftouch. The bill for the monarchy was too high, they said. The Queen should pay tax.
On 20 November Windsor Castle, one of the Queen's main homes, caught fire. Photographs of the blading castle had a ring of the apocalypse. Sympathy for the Queen was dissipated, however, when the government said that she would not have to foot any of the bill to restore the castle.
Four days later the Lord Mayor of London, clad in brilliant ermine, was the Queen's host at a City of London lunch to celebrate the Queen's anniversary. The Queen was dressed in darkest navy, as if in mourning and was snfferingfrom a cold. She was almost croaking as she delivered the first unforgettable speech of her reign in which she accepted criticism but urged that it should be tempered with gentleness, good humour and understanding.
Nineteen ninety-two is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an 'Annus Hombilis'. .   I suspect that I am not alone in'd-iinking it so. Indeed, I suspect that there are very few people or institutions unaffected by these last
492 Elizabeth II: 'Annus Horribilis'
months of worldwide turmoil and uncertainty. This generosity and wholehearted ldndness of the Corporation of die City to Prince Philip and me would be welcome at any time, but at this particular moment, in the aftermadi of Friday's tragic fire at Windsor, it is especially so. And, after this last weekend, we appreciate all the more what has been set before us today. Years of experience, however, have made us a bit more canny than the lady, less well versed than us in the splendours of City hospitality, who, when she was offered a balloon glass for her brandy, asked for 'only half a glass, please'. It is possible to have too much of a good tiling. A well-meaning Bishop was obviously doing his best when he told Queen Victoria, "Ma'am, we cannot pray too often, nor too fervendy, for the Royal Family.' The Queen's reply was, 'Too fervently, no; too often, yes.'
I, like Queen Victoria, have always been a believer in that old maxim 'moderation in all tilings'. I sometimes wonder how future generations will judge the events of this tumultuous year. I dare say that history will take a slightiy more moderate view than that of some contemporary commentators. Distance is well known to lend enchantment, even to the less attractive views. After all, it has the inestimable advantage of hindsight. But it can also lend an extra dimension to judgement, giving it a leavening of moderation and compassion — even of wisdom — that is sometimes lacking in die reactions of those whose task it is in life to offer instant opinions on all things great and small.
No section of the community has all the virtues, neither does any have all the vices. I am quite sure that most people try to do their jobs as best they can, even if the result is not always entirely successful. He who has never failed to reach perfection has a right to be the harshest critic. There can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life. No institution — City, Monarchy, whatever — should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it dieir loyalty and support, riot to mention those who don't. But we are all part of die same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humour and understanding. This sort of questioning, can also act,
Elizabeth II: 'Annus Horribilis' 493
and it should do so, as an effective engine for change. The City is a good example of the way the process of change can be incorporated into die stability and continuity of a great institution. I particularly admire, my Lord Mayor, the way in which the City has adapted so nimbly to what the Prayer Book calls 'the changes and chances of this mortal life'. You have set an example of how it is possible to remain effective and dynamic without losing diose indefinable qualities, style and character. We only have to look around this great hall to see the truth of that.
Forty years is quite a long time. I am glad to have had the chance to witness, and to take part in, many dramatic changes in life in this country. But I am glad to say that the magnificent standard of hospitality given on so many occasions to the Sovereign by the Lord Mayor of London has not changed at all. It is an outward symbol of one other unchanging factor which I value above all — the loyalty given to me and my family by so many people in this country, and the Commonwealth, throughout my reign. You, my Lord Mayor, and all those whose prayers - fervent, I hope, but not too frequent — have sustained me through all these years, are friends indeed. Prince Philip and I give you all, wherever you may be, our most humble thanks.
// was as if the Queen was begging far sympathy and baring her soul in public about the most horrible year of her reign, said the commentators. Annus horribilis., a phrase probably suggested by Sir Robert Fellowes, her private secretary, entered the language and was a gift to headline writers, even though the sceptical headline writers of the Sun, Britain's biggest-selling daily newspaper, rendered her message as 'One's Bum Year'. Within weeks it was announced that the Queen would pay tax and that the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, and the Princess of Wales were to separate.
494 Clinton: 'If Martin Lather King were to reappear'
BILL CLINTON Memphis, 13 November 1993
Tf Martin Luther King mere to reappear'
William fiefferson {Bill) Clinton {1946—) was born in Hope, Arkansas, educated at Georgetown, Yale and Oxford and became the youngest ever governor of Arkansas in 1978. He served five terms as governor before be defeated George Bush on a platform of hope and change in the presidential election of 1992.
Clinton was reared in a religious home. He made this speech to 5,000 ministers ten months after his inauguration at the Church of Gad in Christ in Memphis from the pulpit where Martin Luther King preached his last sermon before his assassination. Clinton started the speech by describing some of the achievements of his presidency. Then. he turned to what he really wanted to say, speaking impromptu..
William Safire, the distinguished American columnist, himselfaformer White House speech-writer, describes it as quintessential Clinton: personal, impassioned, anecdotal, self questioning, colloquial and, with Bible-quoting Southern Baptist cadences, uplifting'.
What I really want to say to you today, my Fellow Americans, is that we can do all of this and still fail unless we meet die great crisis of the spirit that is gripping America today . ..
I tell you, unless we do somediing about crime and violence and drugs that is ravaging die community, we will not be able to repair this country.
If Martin Luther King, who said, Tike Moses, I am on the mountaintop, and I can see the promised land, but I'm not going to be able to get there with you, but we will get there' - if he were to reappear by my side today and give us a report card on the last twenty-five years, what would he say? You did a good job, he would say, voting and electing people who formerly were not electable because of the color of their skin. You have more political power, •and that is good. You did a good job, he would say, letting people who have die ability to do so live wherever they want to live, go wherever they want to go in this great country. You did a good job,
Clinton: 'If Martin Luther King were to reappear' 495
he would say, elevating people of color into the ranks of the United States Armed Forces to die very top or into the very top of our Government. You did a very good job, he would say. He would say, you did a good job creating a black middle class of people who really are doing well, and the middle class is growing more among African-Americans than among non-African-Americans. You did a good job: you did a good job in opening opportunity.
But he would say. I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see diirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for die kick of it. I did not. live and die to see young people destroy their own lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. That is not what I came here to do. I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to loll each other with reckless abandon, not for the freedom of children to have children and die fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anydiing. I fought for people to have the right-to work but not to have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for.
My fellow Americans, he would say, I fought to stop white people from being so filled with hate that diey would wreak violence on black people. I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon.
The other day die Mayor of Baltimore, a dear friend of mine, told me a story of visiting the family of a young man who had been lulled — eighteen years old — on Halloween. He always went out with Htde bitty kids so they could trick-or-treat safely. And across the street from where they were walking on Halloween, a fourteen-year-old boy gave a diirteen-year-old boy a gun and dared him to shoot the eighteen-year-old boy, and he shot him dead. And the Mayor had to visit the family.
In Washington, D C, where I live, your nation's Capital, die symbol of freedom throughout the world, look how diat freedom is being exercised. The other night a man came along the! street and grabbed a one-year-old child and put the child in his car. The child may have been the child of the man. And two people were after him, and diey
496 Clinton: 'If Martin Luther King were to reappear1
Clinton: 'If Martin Luther King were to reappear' 497
chased him in the car, and they just kept shooting with recldess abandon, knowing that baby was in the car, And they shot the man dead, and a bullet went through his body into the baby's body, and blew the little bootie ofFthe child's foot.
. The other day on the front page of our paper, the nation's Capital, are we talking about world peace or world conflict? No, big article on the front page of the Washington Post about an eleven-year-old child planning her funeral: 'These are the hymns I want sung. This is the dress I want to wear. I know I'm not going to live very long.' That is not the freedom, the freedom to die before you're a teenager is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for.
More than 37,000 people die from gunshot wounds in this country every year. Gunfire is the leading cause of death in young men. And now that we've all gotten so cool that everybody can get a semiautomatic weapon, a person shot now is three times more likely to die than fifteen years ago, because they're likely to have three bullets in them. A hundred and sixty thousand children stay home from school every day because they are scared they will be hurt in their schools.
The other day I was in California at a town meeting, and a handsome young man stood up and said: TMr President, my brother and I, we don't belong to gangs. We don't have guns. We don't do drugs. We want to go to school. We want to be professionals. We want to work hard. We want to do well. We want to have families. And we changed our school because the school we were in was so dangerous. So when we stowed up to the new school to register, my brother and I were standing in line and somebody ran into the school and started shooting a gun. My brother was shot down standing right in front of me at the safer school' The freedom to do that kind of thing Is not what Martin Luther King lived and died for, not what people gathered in this hallowed church for the night before he was assassinated in April of 1968. If you had told anybody who was here in that church on that night that we would abuse our freedom In that way, they would have found it hard to believe. And I tell you, it is our moral duty to turn it around ...
I read a wonderful sp eech the other day given at Howard Univetsity
in a lecture series funded by Bill and Camille Cosby, in which die speaker said, 1 grew up in Anacostia years ago. Even then it was all black, and itwas a very poor neighborhood. But you know, when I was a child in Anacostia, a 100 percent African-American neighborhood, a very poor neighborhood, we had a crime rate that was lower than the average of the crime rate of our city. Why? Because we had coherent families. We had coherent communities. The people who filled the church on Sunday lived in the same place they went to church. The guy that owned the drugstore lived down the street. The person that owned the grocery store lived in our community. We were whole.' And I say to you, we have to make our people whole again.
This church has stood for that. Why do you tliink you have 5 million members in this country? Because people know you are filled with the spirit of God to do the right thing in this life by them. So I say to you, we have to make a partnership, all die Government agencies, all the business folks; but where there are no families, where there is no order, where there is no hope, where .we are reducing the size of our armed services because we have won the cold war, who will, be there to give structure, discipline, and love to diese children? You must do that. And we must help you. Scripture says, you are the salt of the Earth and the light of the world, diat if your light shines before men they will give glory to the Father in heaven. That is what we must do.
That is what we must do. How would we explain it to Martin Luther King if he showed up" today and said, yes, we won the cold war. Yes, the biggest threat that all of us grew up under, Communism and nuclear war, Communism gone, nuclear war receding. Yes, we developed all these miraculous technologies. Yes, we all have got a VCR in our home; it's interesting. Yes, we get fifty channels on the cable. Yes, without regard to race, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get into a service academy or a good college, you'll do just great. How would we explain to him all these kids getting Icilled and killing each other? How would we justify the things that we permit that no other country in die wodd would permit? How could we explain that we gave people die freedom to succeed, and
498 Mandela: 'Let freedom reign'
we created conditions in which millions abuse that freedom to destroy the things that make life worth living and life itself? We cannot.
And so I say to you today, my fellow Americans, you gave me this job, and we're making progress on the things you hired me to do. But unless we deal with the ravages of crime and drugs and violence and unless we recognize that it's due to the breakdown of the family, the community, and the disappearance of jobs, and unless' we say some of this cannot be done by Government, because we have to reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul, and the truth of human nature, none of the other things we seek to do will ever take us where we need to go.
So in this pulpit, on this day, let me ask all of you in your heart to say: We will honor the life and die work of Martin Luther King. We will honor the meaning of our church. We will, somehow, by God's grace, we will turn this around. We will give these children a future. We will take away their guns and give them books. We will take away their despair and give them hope. We will rebuild the families and die neighborhoods and the communities. We won't make all die work that has gone on here benefit just a few. We will do it together by the grace of God.
NELSON MANDELA Johannesburg, 10 May 1994
'Letfreedom reign1
Nelson Mandela was released hventy-sevenyears after be was imprisoned, in February 1990. Four years later, after President William de Klerk initiated a historic peace accord with the black majority of South Africans, led by Mandela, he was elected president in South Africa's first democratic elections. This was his inaugural address.
Today all of us do, by our presence here, and by our celebrations in other parts of our country and the world, confer glory and hope to newborn liberty.
Mandela: 'Letfreedom reign' 499
Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster diat lasted too long must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.
■ Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
All this we owe both to ourselves and to the peoples of the world who are so well represented here today. .
To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld.
Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal. The national mood changes as the seasons change.
We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the grass turns green and the flowers bloom.
That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of die pain we all carried in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible conflict, and as we saw it spurned, oudawed and isolated by the peoples of the world, precisely because it has become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression.
We, the people of South Africa, feel fulfilled that humanity has taken us back into its bosom; that we, who were oudaws not so long ago, have today been given the rare privilege to be host to the nations of the world on our own soil. We thank all our distinguished international guests for having come to take possession with the people of our country of what is, after all, a common victory for justice, for peace, for human dignity.
We trust that you will continue to stand by us as we taclde the challenges of building peace, prosperity, non-sexism, non-racialism and democracy.
We deeply appreciate the role that the masses of our people and their political mass democratic, religious, women, youth, business,
500
Mandela: 'Letfreedom reign'
Blair: 'A modem constitution'
501
traditional and other leaders have played to bring about this.conclusion. Not least among them is my second deputy president, the honourable F. W. de Klerk.
We would also like to pay tribute to our security forces, in all their ranks, for die distinguished role they have played in securing our first democratic. elections and the transition to democracy, from bloodthirsty forces which still refuse to see the light
The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us. We have, at last, achieved our political emancipation. We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.
We succeeded to take our last steps to freedom in'conditions of relative peace. We commit ourselves to the construction of a complete, just and lasting peace.
We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in die breasts of die millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity — a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.
As a token of its commitment to the renewal of our country, the new interim Government of National Unity' will, as a matter of urgency, address the issue of amnesty for various categories of our ■people who are currentiy serving terms of imprisonment.
We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in this country and the rest of the world who sacrificed in many ways and surrendered their lives so that we could be free. Their dreams have become reality. Freedom is their reward.
We are both humbled and elevated by the honour and privilege that you, the people of South Africa, have bestowed on us, as the first president of a united, democratic, non-racial and non-sexist Soudi Africa, to lead our country out of the valley of darkness.
We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success.
We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world. Let there be justice for all. Let diere be peace for all. Let tiiere be work, bread, water and salt for all.
Let each know tiiat for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfil tiiemselves.
Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world.
Let freedom reign. The sun shall never set on so glorious a human achievement. God bless Africa. Thank you.
TONY BLAIR Blackpool, 4 October 1994
'A modem constitution'
After leaving Oxford and starting bis career as a barrister specialising in trade union and employment law, Touj Blair {1953—) entered parliament as Labour MP for Sedgefield in 1983. He became prominent as shadow Home Affairs spokesman under Neil Kinnock by promoting law and order and saying that governments should be 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'. After the death ofJohn Smith, he became leader of the Labour Party in 1994 and swiftly speeded up the strategy of modernisation of the party which had been instituted by Neil Kinnock.
His determination to succeed was shown in his first speech as leader to the party conference. Nearly forty years after Hugh Gaitskell had failed to reform the party's constitution, Blair signalled, albeit in code, that Clause 4, dealing with public ownership and incorporated in 1918, had to be rewritten if Labour was to be a modem party and beat the Tories after four successive election defeats. A 'new politics' was required.
A belief in society. Working togetiier. Solidarity. Cooperation. Partnership. These are our words.
This is my socialism. And we should stop apologizing for using die word.
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It is not the socialism of Marx or state control. It is rooted in a straightforward view of society. In the understanding that the individual does best in a strong and decent community of people witii principles and standards and common aims and values.
We are the party of die individual because we are the party of community.
It is social-ism.
Our task is to apply those values to the modern world. It will change the traditional dividing lines between right and left And it calls for a new politics. Without dogma and without swapping our prejudices for theirs.
It is time to break out of the past and break through with a clear and radical and modern vision for Britain.
Today's politics is about the search for security in a changing world. We must build the strong and active society that can provide it-
That is our project for Britain.
Market forces cannot educate us or equip us for this world of rapid technological and economic change. We must do it together.
We cannot buy our way to a safe society. We must work for it together.
We cannot purchase an option on whether we grow old. We must plan for it together.
We can't protect the ordinary against the abuse of power by leaving them to it; we must protect each other.
That is our insight
The people of this country are not looking to us for a revolution. They want us to make a start
I want you with me in that task. I want you with me. Head and heart.
Because this can only be done together. Leaders lead, but In the end the people govern. Some of you will think we are too modest in our aims, too cautious.
Some of you support me because you think I can win. But it is
not enough. We are not going to win despite our beliefs. We will only win because of them.
I want to win not because die Tories are despised, but because we are understood, supported, trusted.
We should win and we can win. There is no choice between being principled and unelectable; and electable and unprincipled. We have tortured ourselves with tills foolishness for too long. We should win because of what we believe.
The task of renewing our nation is not one for the faint hearted, or the world weary, or cynical. It is not a task for those afraid of hard choices, for those with complacent views, or those seeking a comfortable life.
At the next election, the voters will have had this Tory government for seventeen or eighteen years. They may hate them, but tiiey know them. I want them now to know us. Our identity. Our character as a party.
And change is an important part of that.
We have changed,. We were right to change. Parties that do not change die, and this party is a living movement not an historical monument.
If the world changes, and we don't, then we become of no use to the world. Our principles cease being principles and just ossify into dogma.
We haven't changed to forget our principles, but to fulfil diem. Not to lose our identity but to keep our relevance.
Change is an important part of gaining the nation's trust. We were right to introduce One Member One Vote last year, and that change is now done.
And look at how the Regeneration Project being run from party HQ has begun die task of taking the party closer to those communities.
Are we not right to reach out and touch the people in this way, to show them that politics is not some byzantine game played out over screeds of paper in wintry meeting rooms but a real and meaningful part of their lives?
This week we reach out further. On Friday John Prescott will
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announce the biggest programme of political education undertaken by any party in Britain for a generation.
John's efforts will be central not just to building our membership but in engaging those members - new and old — to help shape this party's future.
Let us have the confidence once again that we can debate new ideas, new thinking, without forever fearing the taunt of betrayal.
Let us say what we mean and mean what we say.
Not just what we are against. But what we are for.
No more ditching. No more dumping. Stop saying what we don't mean. And start saying what we do mean, what we stand by, what we stand for.
It Is time we had a clear, up-to-date statement of the objects and objectives of our party. John Prescott and I, as Leader and Deputy Leader, will propose such a statement to the NEC.
Let it dien be open to debate in die coming months. I want die whole party involved. I know the whole party will welcome that debate. And if it is accepted, then let it become the objects of our part)' for the next election and take its place in our constitution for the next century.
This is a modern party living.in an age of change. It requires a modern constitution that says what we are in terms the public cannot misunderstand and the Tories cannot misrepresent.
We are proud of our beliefs. So let's state them. And in terms that people will identify with in every workplace, every home, every family, every community in our country.
And let this party's determination to change be the symbol of the trust they can place in us to change the country.
The British people are a great people:
— We have proud democratic traditions.
— We are a nation of tolerance, innovation and creativity.
— We have an innate sense of fair play.
— We have a great history and culture.
— And when great challenges face us, as they have twice this century, we rise to them.
But if we have a fault, it is that unless roused, we tend to let tilings be..
We say 'tilings could be worse' rather than 'things should be better'. And the Tories encourage this fault. They thrive on our complacency.
I say it is time we were roused.
Let us be blunt.
— Our system of Government has become outdated.
— Our economy has been weakened.
— Our people have been undereducated.
— Our welfare state and public services have been run down.
— And our society has been made more divided than at any time for 100 years.
But our politics need not be like this. Our country need not be like this.
Ours is a project of national renewal, renewing our commitment as a nation, as a community of people in order to prepare and provide for ourselves in the new world we face.
I want to build a nation with pride in itself. A thriving community, rich in economic prosperity, secure in social justice, confident in political change. A land in which, our children can bring up their children with a future to look forward to.
That is our hope. Not just to promise change — but to achieve it.
Our Party. New Labour. Our mission. New Britain. New Labour. New Britain.
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ELIE WIESEL Auschwitz, 27 January 1995
'Listen to the silent screams'
As a teenager Elie Wiesel (1928--) was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Bnchenwald where his parents and sister died. He became a journalist after the war and a United States citizen in 1963. All his novels and plays have recalled the horror of the Na%i concentration cat/rps. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
The fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was marked by a special ceremony attended by thirteen presidents, three kings and many Nobel laureates to pray for its 1.5 million victims. Tlie Polish president, Lech Walesa, was flanked by tiro survivors. One was Simone Veil, the French social minister. Tlie other was Wiesel, who delivered this haunting address.
I speak to you as a man who fifty years and nine days ago had no name, no hope, no future and was known only by his number, A 70713.
I speak as a Jew who has seen what humanity has done to itself by trying to exterminate an entire people and inflict suffering and humiliation and death on so many others.
In this place of darkness and malediction we can but stand in awe and remember its stateless, faceless and nameless victims. Close your eyes and look: endless nocturnal processions are converging here, and here it is always night. Here heaven and earth are on fire.
Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, die prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children, Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they quiedy walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.
All these men and women and children came from everywhere, a gathering of exiles drawn by death.
Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba.
In this kingdom of darkness there were many people. People who
came from all die occupied lands of Europe, And then there were the Gypsies and the Poles and the Czechs ... It is true that not all the victims were Jews. But all the Jews were victims.
■ Now, as then, we ask the question of all questions: what was the meaning of what was so routinely going on in this kingdom of eternal night. What kind of demented mind could have invented this system?
And it worked. The killers killed, the victims died and die world was die world and everything else was going on, life as usual. In die towns nearby, what happened? In the lands nearby, what happened? Life was going on where God's creation was condemned to blasphemy by the killers and their accomplices. Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba.
Turning point or watershed, Birkenau produced a mutation on a cosmic scale, affecting man's dreams and endeavours. After Auschwitz, the human condition is no longer the same. After Auschwitz, nodiing will ever be the same.
Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba.
As we remember the solitude and the pain of its victims, let us declare this day marks our commitment to commemorate dieir death, not to celebrate our own victory over death.
AswereflectuponthepastjWemustaddressourselvestothepresent, and die future. In the name of all that is sacred in memory, let us stop die bloodshed in Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechenia; the vicious and ruthless terror attacks against Jews in the Holy Land. Let us reject and oppose more effectively religious fanaticism and racial hate.
Where else can we say to the world 'Remember the morality of the human condition,' if not here?
For the sake of our children, we must remember Birkenau, so diat it does not become their future.
Yitgadal veyitkadash, Shmay Rabba: Weep for Thy children whose death was not mourned then; weep for them, our Father in heaven, for tiiey were deprived of dieir right to be buried, for heaven itself became their cemetery.
SOS        Spencer: 'The most bunted person of the modem age'
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EARL SPENCER Westminster Abbey, 6 September 1997 •
'The most hunted person of the modern age'
People don't clap at funerals but they did — and inside WestminsterAbbe}' — at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, the divorced wife ofPrince Charles, who had been killed with Dodi Fayed in a Paris car crash. The occasion was the tribute to his sister by Princess Diana's brother Earl Spencer over her catafalque. Thefuneral was broadcast live across the world and almost certainly reached the largest audience in history.
Spencer delivered a deep-felt attack on the press and then flung down a challenge to the royalfamily over the upbringing of the Princess's hvo sons,. William and Harry. As be finished his oration, his voice broke. The masses outside, most of whom had been critical of the Queen's response to the Princess's death, started applauding. The sound of the applause penetrated the Abbey and the congregation joined in. It was utterly unprecedented and the Oueen sat immobile as her subjects made their brief revolt.
I stand before you today the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning before a world in shock.
We are all united not only in our desire to pay our respects to Diana, but rather in our need to do so.
For such was her extraordinary appeal diat the tens of millions of people talcing part in this service all over the world, via television and radio, who never actually met her, feel that they, too, lost someone close to them in the early hours of Sunday morning. It is a more remarkable tribute to Diana than I can ever hope to offer her today.
Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world, a standard-bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal tide to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.
Today is our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives, even though God granted you but half a life. We will all feel cheated always that you were taken from us so young, and yet we must learn to be grateful that you came along at all. Only now that you are gone do we truly appreciate what we are now without and we want you to know diat life without you is very, very difficult.
We have all despaired at our loss over the past week, and only the strengdi of die message you gave us through your years of giving has afforded us the strength to move forward.
There is a temptation to rush to canonize your memory. There is no need to do so. You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities not to need to be seen as a saint. Indeed, to sanctify your memory would be to miss out on die very core of your being, your wonderfully mischievous sense of humour with a laugh that bent you double.
Your joy for life transmitted wherever you took your smile and the sparkle in those unforgettable eyes. Your boundless energy, which you could barely contain,
But your greatest gift was your intuition, and it was a gift you used wisely. This is what underpinned all your other wonderful attributes, and if we look to analyse what it was about you that had such a wide appeal, we find it in your instinctive feel for what was really important in all our lives. Without your God-given sensitivity we would be immersed in greater ignorance at the anguish of-AIDS and HIV sufferers, the plight of die homeless, die isolation of lepers, the random destruction of landmines.
Diana explained to me once that it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made i t pos sible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected.
And here we come to another truth about her. For all the status, the glamour, the applause, Diana remained throughoutavery insecure person at heart, almost childlike in her desire to do good for others so she could release herself from deep feelings of unworthiness, of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom.
The world sensed this part of her character and cherished her for her vulnerability while admiring her for her honesty.
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The last time I saw Diana was on 1 July, her birthday, in London, when typically she was not talcing time to celebrate her special day witii friends but was guest of honour at a special charity fund-raising evening.
She sparkled of course, but I would ratiier cherish the days I spent with her in March when she came to visit me and my children in our home in South Africa.
I am proud of the fact that, apart from when she was on display meeting President Mandela, we managed to contrive to stop the ever-present paparazzi from getting a single picture of her — that meant a lot to her.
These were days I will always treasure. It was as if we had been' transported back to our childhood when we spent such an enormous amount of time together - the two youngest in the family.
Fundamentally, she had not changed at all from die big sister who mothered me as a baby, fought with me at school and endured those long train journeys between our parents' homes with me at weekends. It is a tribute to her level-headedness and strength that despite the most bizarre-like life imaginable after her childhood, she remained intact, true to herself.
There is no doubt that she was looking for a-new direction in her life at this time. She talked endlessly of getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment she received at the hands of die newspapers. I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why tiiere appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling.
My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is direaten-ing to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was diis - a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in die end, the most hunted person of-the modern age.
She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.
And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.'
We fully respect die heritage into which diey have both been born, and will always respect and encourage them in their Royal role.
But we, like you, recognize the need for them to experience as many different aspects of life as possible to arm them spiritually and emotionally for the years ahead. I know you would have expected nothing less from us.
William and Harry, we all care desperately for you today. We are all chewed up with sadness at the loss of a woman who was not even our mother. How great your sufferingis we cannot even imagine.
I would like to end by thanking God for the small mercies he has shown us at this dreadful time; for taking Diana at her most beautiful and radiant and when she had joy in her private life.
Above all, we give thanks for die life of a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister: the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds.
TONY BLAIR Brighton, 30 September 1997
'A beacon to the world'
Tony Blair became the third youngest prime minister in British history {after Pitt the Younger and Lord Liverpool) when New Labour won a landslide victory aver fohu Major's Conservatives in the 1997 general election. He was the most popular prime minister since opinion polls began.
There was an element of triumphalism in his speech to the first party conference held under a Labour government since 1979 but it also demonstrated how far the Labour
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Party bad tranel/ed in the previous eighteen years. There was no mention of socialism or equality or nationalisation. Instead Blair emphasised duty over rights, the importance of family life, %era tolerance on crime and a more positive approach to European unity as he appealedfor Britain to become a beacon to the world. Even right-wing commentators hailed the speech as a historic statement of intent.
It has been a very long time waiting for this moment and all I can tell you is that after eighteen long years of Opposition, I am deeply proud — privileged — to stand before you as the new Labour Prime Minister of our country.
I believe in Britain. I believe in die British people. One cross on die ballot paper. One nation was reborn.
Today, I want to set an ambitious course for this country: to be nodiingless than the model twenty-first-century nation, a beacon to the world. It means drawing deep into the richness of the British character. Creative. Compassionate. Outward-looking. Old British values, but a new British confidence.
We can never be the biggest. We may never again be the mightiest. But we can be the best. The best place to live. The best place to bring up children, the best place to lead a fulfilled life, the best place to grow old.
Fourteen years ago, our party was written off as history. This year we made history. And Jet our first tiianks be to the British people. You kept faith with us. And we will keep faith widi you. Thank you to the party organization, the volunteers, die professionals who fashioned the finest political fighting machine our country has ever known.
Ours was not a victory of politicians but of people. The people took their trust, and gave it to us. I want them to say, this week as they watch us here in Brighton, % did the right thing.* I want the British people to be as proud of having elected us as we are to serve them. We won because we are new Labour, because we had the courage to change ourselves, and the discipline to take hard decisions, whilst remaining united.
But I want to do more than keep our promises. I sense the British people demand more of us, too. People ask me the highlight of die election. Mine was driving from home to Buckingham Palace, along
streets we had driven hundreds of times, past soulless buildings and sullen faces on thru: way to work, This drive was so different As we turned into Gower Street, people watching our journey on TV came pouring out of the doorways, waving and shouting and clapping, with an energy and excitement that went beyond anything I imagined would happen.
They were liberated. Theirs were die smiles of tolerant, broad-minded, outward-looking, compassionate people and suddenly they learnt that they were in the majority after all. As one woman put it to me: "We've got our Government back.' And with them I could sense confidence returning to the British people, compassion to the British soul, unity to the British nation, and that all three would give us new-found strength.
You see, the people were yearning for change in their country, at a time when they could see we had had the guts to modernize our party. The two came together.
The result is a quiet revolution now taking place. Led by the real modernizer: not me, the British people. They were the ones who had the guts to do it. And I say die size of our victory puts a special responsibility on us. To be a Government of high ideals and hard choices. Not popular for one time, but remembered for all time. Not just a better Government than the Tories but one of the great, radical, reforming governments of our history.
The British don't fear change. We are one of the great innovative peoples. From the Magna Carta to the first Parliament to the Industrial Revolution to an Empire that covered the world. Most of the great inventions of modern times with Britain stamped on them: the telephone; the television; the computer; penicillin; the hovercraft; radar.
Change is in the blood and bones of the British. We are by our nature and tradition innovators, adventurers, pioneers. As our great poet of renewal and recovery, John Milton, put it, we are 'a nation not slow or dull, but of quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtie and sinewy to discourse, not beneath die reach of any point that human capacity can soar to'.
Even today in Britain we lead the world, in design, pharmaceuticals,
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financial services, telecommunications. We have the world's first language, English. Britain today is an exciting, inspiring place to be. And it can be much more, if we face the challenge of a world around us today that has its finger on the fast-forward button; where every part of the picture of our life is changing, changing constantiy.
So today I say to the British people the chains of mediocrity have broken, the tired days are behind us, we are free to excel once more. We are free to build that model twenty-first-century nation, to become that beacon to the world.
Creative. Compassionate. Confident of our place in the world. And you know, when people say, 'Sorry, that's too ambitious. Sorry, it can't be done,' I say: this is not a sorry country, we are not a sorry people. It can be done: if you have the will, the courage and determination to do it...
It's pretty simple, the type of country I want. It's a country where our children are proud and happy to grow up, feeling good not just about themselves, but about the community around them.
I don't want them living in a country where some of them go to school hungry, unable to learn because their parents can't afford to feed them; where they can see drugs being traded at school gates; where gangs of teenagers hang around street corners, doing nothing but spitting and swearing and abusing passers-by.
I don't want diem brought up in a country where the only way pensioners can get long-term care is by selling their home, where people who fought to keep that country free are now faced every winter with the struggle for survival, skimping and saving, cold and alone, waiting for death to take them.
And I will not rest until that country is gone, until all our children live in a Britain where no child goes hungry, the young are employed, and the old are cherished and valued to the end of their days. -
But let me spell out some facts. After eighteen years of Tory Government, of cuts and closures, of declining public services, the country was taxed more than under the last Labour Government.
This country, any country today, will not just carry on paying out more in taxes and getting less. Our new society that we want to create will have the same values as it ever did. Fighting poverty and
unemployment. Securing justice and opportunity. It should be a compassionate society. It must be a compassionate society.
But it is compassion with a hard edge, because a strong society canno t be built in th e real world on so ft ch oices. It means fundamental reform of our welfare state, of the deal between citizen and society. It means getting money out of social breakdown and into schools and hospitals where we want to see it.
The new welfare state must encourage work, not dependency . .. We want single mothers with school-age children at least to visit a job centre, not just stay at home waiting for the benefit cheque, every week until the children are sixteen.
We cannot be that beacon to the world in the year 2005 with a welfare state built for the very different world of 1945. Our tax system should reward hard work. In the eighties, the Tories took down high marginal tax rates for high earners. It is time we did the same for Britain's working-poor. .
And we need to bring a change to die way we treat each other as citizens of our society. I tell you: a decent society is not based on rights. It is based on duty. Our duty to each other. To all should be given opportunity, from all responsibility demanded. The duty to show respect and tolerance to others.
I make no apology. I back zero tolerance on crime. I back powers to tackle antisocial neighbours; to make parents responsible for their children; to overhaul the youth justice system so that youngsters stop thinking they can commit a crime, get a caution and carry on being a criminal. At every level of the fight against crime - today acting on serious organized crime - this new Labour Government is taking it on. But to those who say it's all a threat to our civil liberties, I say the threat to civil liberties is of women afraid to go out, and pensioners afraid to stay in their own homes because of crime, And when we give opportunities to people, we can demand responsibility.
And we cannot say we want a strong and secure society when we ignore its very foundation: family life. This is not about preaching to individuals about their private lives. It is addressing a huge social problem. Attitudes have changed. The world has changed. But I am a modern man leading a modern country and this is a modern crisis.
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Nearly 100,000 teenage pregnancies every year. Elderly parents with whom families cannot cope. CliUdren growing up without role models the)' can respect and learn from. More and deeper poverty. More crime, More truancy. More neglect of educational opportunities. And above all, more unhappiness. That unhappiness we must change . ..
My vision for post-Empire Britain is clear. It is to make this country pivotal, a leader in die world. Witii the US our friend and ally. Widiin the Commonwealth. In die United Nations. In Nato. To use the superb reputation of our Armed Forces, not just for defence, but as an instrument of influence in a wodd of collective security and co-operation.
And for Britain to lead in Europe again. Not so that we 'don't get left behind'. That is a weak reason. It is "because for four centuries or more we have been a leading power in Europe. And we have at times been absolutely critical to the survival of, not just Europe, but of the whole world. It is our destiny to lead in Europe,
And Europe needs us. For we have a vision of Europe. We want a people's Europe: free trade, industrial, strength, high levels of employment and social justice, a democratic Europe. And against that vision is die bureaucrat's Europe: the Europe of thwarting open trade, unnecessary rules and regulations, the Europe of the CAP and the endless committees leading nowhere. But we cannot shape Europe unless we matter in Europe.
I know diere will be a hard choice to come over a single currency. And our policy, based as it is on the British national interest, remains unchanged. But in or out, we will be affected by it and must remain able to influence the way that it works . . .
So much to do. So much to change. So hard to do it. But the vision is as old as humanity. Modernization is not an end in itself. It is for a purpose. Modernization is not die enemy of justice, but its ally.
Progress and justice are the two rocks upon which the new Britain is raised to die heights. Lose either one and we come crashing down until we are just another average nation, scrabbling around for salvation in die ebbing tide of die twentieth century.
That is why we changed the Labour Party. To make new Britain.
It is why we will carry on changing. It is why it was right yesterday to take another historic step on the road to reform of our party so diat never again will a Labour Government be torn about by divisions between leadership in Parliament and the party in the country.
And let me tell you this direcdy. Yes, we are new Labour. Yes, our policies and attitudes have changed. But diere are no old Labour or new Labour values. There are Labour values. They are what make us the party of compassion; of social justice; of the struggle against poverty and inequality; of liberty; of basic human solidarity; and die day we cease to be those things is the day we keep the name of the Labour Party but lose the reason for its existence. And ours, you know, is a simple enough vision. But it will require a supreme national effort. It is a task for a whole people, not just a government. Great challenges. But great rewards for all of us if we can rise to them as we can.
And rise as one nation. Held together by our values and by the strength of our character. We are a giving people. In the face of crisis or challenge, we pull togedier, strengthened by unity. It says nothing about our politics. It speaks volumes about our character.
You remember how your parents, like mine, used to say to you: 'Just do your best' Well, let us do our best. On May 1, the people entrusted me with the task of leading their country into a new century. That was your challenge to me. And proudly, humbly, I accepted it.
Today, I issue a challenge to you. Help us make Britain that beacon shining throughout theworld. Unite behind our mission to modernize our country for all our people. For there is a place for all the people in new Britain, and there is a role for all the people in its creation. Believe in us as much as we believe in you.
Give justas much to our country as all of us intend to give. Give your all. Make this the giving age.
■By the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more togedier than we can alone.' On May 1 1997, it wasn't just the Tories who were defeated. Cynicism was defeated. Fear of change was defeated. Fear itself was defeated. Did I not say it would be a batde of hope against fear? On May 1 1997, fear lost. Hope won. The Giving Age began.
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Now make the good that is in the heart of each of us serve the good of all of us. Give to our country the gift of our energy, our ideas, bur hopes, our talents. Use them to build a country each of whose people will say that 'I care about Britain because I know that Britain cares about me.3
Britain, head and heart, will be unbeatable. That is the Britain I offer you. Thatis the Britain that together can be ours.
MICHAEL PORTILLO Blackpool, 9 October 1997 ■
'The causes of defeat'
Few defeats provoked more joy among labour supporters in the 1997general election than the humiliation of Michael Portiilo (1953-) at Enfield Soutkgate. Yet his dignity in defeat earned new respectfor Portiilo who was the standard-bearer of the Euro-sceptic Tory right wing and who would otherwise have been a serious candidate to win the leadership of the Conservative Party after John Major stepped down.
. William Hague became leader but many Tories saw Portiilo as the leader in exile. That was why this speech to the Centre for Policy Studies at a fringe meeting during the party conference was important.
Much of the speech was devoted to Portiilo's analysis of the continuing attractiveness of the Conservative message. But it was the opening explaining why the party had lost, his section on compassion (of which he had seemed the antithesis), and his denunciation of Tory Blair's New Labour that attracted most attention.
Let us begin by recognizing the scale of our defeat and of our problem. Perhaps as one who went in an instant from being in the Cabinet to being a member of the general public, I am qualified to offer an opinion. I do not accept the view that the Conservatives' lost the election of 1997 because we abandoned one-nation Toryism or split the nation. We did not I will return to that point in a moment The causes of our defeat were different I would like to identify what I believe to have been the four principal factors.
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First, the party became associated increasingly with die most disagreeable messages and. thoughts. Much of that linkage was unjustified, but since it is what people thought — what people still diink — it must be appreciated as a deeply felt distaste, rather than momentary irritation. We cannot dismiss it as mere false perception. Tories were linked to harshness: thought to be uncaring about unemployment, poverty, poor housing, disability and single parenthood; and considered indifferent to the moral arguments over landmines and arms sales. We were tiiought to favour greed and the unqualified pursuit of the free market, witii a 'devil rake die hindmost' attitude.
Second, we abandoned almost completely the qualities of loyalty and the bonds of party without which party effectively ceases to exist. Some of this was ideological. Passions about the future of our country righdy fired people up, but wrongly led them to attack and despise their colleagues. Part of it was egotistical. There were MPs anxious to oblige whenever die media came looking for dissent, seizing the opportunity' to be famous for fifteen minutes. But now we are out of government, their views are sought more rarely, and dieir once-famous faces are fading in the public memory.
We must rediscover the old instincts that led Tories to support one anodier and to rally round. Loyalty was never a secret weapon: it was because it was so visible in public, and reinforced in private, tiiat it was so effective. The impact of disunity upon us is clear to see. The party must in the very near future learn again to display the camaraderie and common purpose that are fundamental to a party's prospects. Our new leader, William Hague, has every right to expect our loyalty' publicly and privately. If he does not get it, we stand no chance of being re-elected. He has shown tiiat he will lead. Now the party must show that it can be led.
Third, we were thought to be arrogant and out of touch. Much of it may have been no more dian personal mannerisms that grated on the public after years in office. Some of it was insensitivity - using the language of economics and high finance when people's jobs and self-esteem were at stake. And when people looked at the composition of our party, they thought it too elderly, or too vulgar, or too out of touch
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in vocabulary and perceptions, or in some other way, unfamiliar and unrepresentative.
Fourth, there was sleaze. I did not believe all that Conservatives were accused of. Even today, I do not think that wrongdoing was any more prevalent in our party than in others, and I expect the rotten boroughs of the Labour Party to prove as much in corning months. But it was certainly bad enough. Sleaze disgraced us in the eyes of the public. Their perception was of corruption and unfitness for public service. Such distasteful perceptions can endure and do us damage for a long time.
We should face these issues head on and deal with them. The last years profoundly disappointed our supporters, and disgusted many others. Those of us who were in the parliamentary party, and those of us who were in the government, bear a particular responsibility ...
Compassion is an essential ingredient in Conservatism. We have never lost it, but the world does not believe that. Our reputation has suffered because Conservatives don't wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don't like humbug or display. Their compassion is largely of a practical sort: what can we actually do about the problems that we see around us? That is why Conservatives are to be found in such large numbers working forvoluntary organizations. Conservatives have a scepticism about panaceas and about the possibility of government solving problems with a flourish of a pen. But that common sense approach must not mask the fact that concern for others and magnanimity are important qualities of Conservatism, and die instinct for social cohesion transcends the nation ...
Now, a word about tactics. There are two things that the Conservative Party needs very badly. One, I mentioned, is loyalty. If we cannot reinvent it we cannot govern. The other is patience. I read somewhere that there was frustration with William Hague for not yet coming up with the next big idea. I accord that remark the prize for the silliest thing said since the election.
The public is not yet ready for such an innovation from us, even if a big idea were a thing to be conjured up at will. People need a rest from us, and we need time to reflect and listen and come to understand one another better than we have of late. We certainly
need to do a lot about ourselves. We need better and different organization. We need a broad and stable financial base. We need to spread our appeal and attract different sorts of people: different ages, social types, ethnic groups and cultures.
As for policies, we should be in no great hurry. Get straight what are our core beliefs. Sort out die confusions and false signals that arose while we were in government. Take a fresh look in die new circumstances.
Our party will renew Itself. The new intake of MPs is of extremely high quality. Just as happened with Labour, those new people will be the engine of our revival. Ministerial office will be theirs, but they must bide dieir time patiendy too.
On die night of the election I wished our new government well, and I do so again. Conservatives are patriots and we wish to see our country succeed. You will not see us gloat over national reverses, nor talk down their successes, as Labour did when we were the government. We wish to see Britain behaving honourably, being an influence for good in Europe and the world. We wish to see die economy remain strong. We do not look to defeat Labour on die back of national failure. There will be sufficient grounds without that to argue for their removal.
I do not underestimate Mr Blair or his achievements. In the years before the election he skilfully laid bare the areas of life and policy where the public felt dissatisfied and angry with the Conservatives. He did not win merely by default, but because of his talent for capturing the public mood. We will learn from that.
Today the Labour Government looks very strong and confident. But problems lie ahead. They don't know where they are headed, and that is dangerous. Mr Blair's great achievement is directionless leadership: he appears to be in control, but no one knows to where he is leading. I have made many mistakes in my career. I suppose we all have. But few people have been consistently wrong on all the great issues that faced our nation over the last fifteen years, as Mr Blair was. Last week, in a speech which was much acclaimed, Mr Blair failed to define the purpose of his government. I perceive no ideological roots. I can detect no sense of direction. Labour has a
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strong sense that it cannot undo what we did. But they do. not understand why it was right to do it. They do not accept the politics of freedom and choice that lay behind our agenda. Labour grasped that it had to adopt our rhetoric. But they will in the end be judged not on what they say but on what they do.
Labour has been guided by the wish to destroy us; and by die determination to be re-elected. Thatis nota recipe for governingwell. You cannot run an administration forever on the principle that you are unwilling to do anything that offends. You cannot substitute focus-group government for Cabinet government. Labour is a coalition brought about to win power. That will to win power is the one idea that the members of the government hold in common. But with the passage of time, that will prove an insubstantial glue. The signs of division may today be no bigger than a small crab in a jar, but they will grow.
This government is too bossy, too contemptuous of parliament, too self-satisfied and too litde criticized in the media for its own good or for ours. The wheel of fortune turns and that which once appeared fresh, with the passing of time goes to seed ...
What the Tories need is patience. Principles we already have. Opportunities there will be. Our time will come again.
BORIS YELTSIN St Petersburg, 17 July 1998
'May they rest in peace'
Tsar Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia, and his entire family were shot at Yekaterinburg by the Red Guards in 1918, nearly ayear after Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in the Russian Revolution.
Eighty yearslaterto the day, Boris Yeltsin {1931-), who became president of Russia til 1990 after the breakup of the Soviet Union, led his nation in official apology for the murder of the Tsar at a moving ceremony in the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress where his Romanov ancestors were buried.
Watched by mil/ions of Russians, Yeltsin, a sick man, stood in sombre silence before
the vault, while his wife, Naina, crossed herself Yeltsin said he had no option but to be present to tell the truth.
It's an historic day for Russia. Eighty years have passed since the slaying of the last Russian emperor and his family. We have long been silent about this monstrous crime. We must say die trudi: the Yekaterinburg massacre has become one of the most shameful pages of our history.
By burying die remains of innocent victims we want to expiate die sins of our ancestors. Guilty are those who committed this heinous crime and those who have been justifying it for decades — all of us.
We must not lie to ourselves, explaining this senseless cruelty with political goals. The execution of the Romanov family was the result of an irreconcilable split in Russian society. Its results are felt to this day. The burial of die victims' remains is an act of human justice, an expiation of common guilt.
We all bear responsibility for the historical memory of the nation; and that's why I could not fail to come here. I must be here as both an individual and the president.
1 bow my head before the victims of the merciless slaying. While building a new Russia we must rely on its historical experience. Many glorious pages of our history are linked with the Romanovs. But also connected with dieir name is one of the most bitter lessons - tiiat attempts to change life by violence are doomed.
We must finish this century, which has become the century of blood and lawlessness for Russia, with repentance and reconciliation irrespective of political and religious views and edinic origin. This is our historic chance. On the eve of die third millennium, we must do it for the sake of our generation, and those to come. Let's remember those innocent victims who have fallen to hatred and violence. May they rest in peace.
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BILL CLINTON" Washington, 17 August 1998
'This has hurt too many innocent people'
Onejear after he started his second tenu as president in fannary 1997, President Clinton teamed that Kenneth Starr was investigating accusations that he had conducted a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, in 1995 and then tried to coper it up. After months of investigation, rumours and Clinton's denial that he had had sexual relations with 'that woman', Clinton wasforced to admit to a relationship that was 'not appropriate' with the hventy five-year-old Miss Lewinsky. The confession was made in a four-minute speech seen by nearly two-thirds of Americans. No president had ever been forced to address such personal issues in a nationally televised speech. Clinton was as defiant as he was contrite.
This afternoon in this room, from this chair, I testified before-the Office of Independent Counsel and the grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.
Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.
As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.
Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.
But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence or to take any other unlawful action.
I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression.
I misled people, including even my wife, I deeply regret that
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I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct. I was also very concerned about protecting my family. The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit, which has since been dismissed, was a consideration, too.
In addition, I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings twenty years ago, dealings, I might add, about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago.
The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life. And now the investigation itself is under investigation. This has gone on too long, cost too much and hurt too many innocent people.
Now, this matter is between me, the two people 1 love most — my wife and our daughter — and our God.
I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so. Nothing is more important to me personally.
But it is private, and I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It's nobody's business but ours.
Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.
Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time - in fact, it is past time - to move on. We have important work to do, real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.
And so tonight, I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of die next American century. Thank you for watching. And good night.