(no subject)

[me_geneva]

...I was shocked and upset. I returned to Grantham to see more results coming through on the screen at the Picture House cinema. The prospect did not improve. I simply could not understand how the electorate could do this to Churchill. On my way back home I met a friend, someone who I had always thought was a staunch Conservative, and said how shocked I was by the terrible news. He was not shocked at all. In fact, he said he thought the news was rather good. Incomprehension deepened. At the time I felt that the British electorate’s treatment of the man who more than anyone else secured their liberty was shameful. But was it not Edmund Burke who said: ‘A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world’? In retrospect, the election of the 1945–51 Labour Government seems the logical fulfilment of the collectivist spirit that came to dominate wartime Britain. It was to be about thirty-five years before this collectivism would run its course — shaping and distorting British society in the process, before it collapsed in 1979’s Winter of Discontent. ...