Thatcher - Quote for today

Glad I did not use up the category, because ConHome reminded me about Thatcher's eloquent address at Monash University on 6 October 1981.

To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects. [It is] the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?

Choice is the basis of ethics. Societies which deny this fundamental right and which substitute a set of rules which have been decided as a matter of political expediency are states where freedom has been extinguished. They are countries which have elevated the State above all human rights and above the laws of natural justice. They permit neither opposition to their diktat within, nor escape for their citizens without.

Shame she didn't/couldn't put her policy money where her mouth was. It was her friend and political guide Keith Joseph (Education Minister 1981-86) who decided not to implement school choice "because people might make the wrong choices".