Enoch Powell on Justice

"The right finds it easy to explain what is and to justify what is, but not to account for change. The left finds it easy to justify change, but not to account for what is, and what is accepted."

"I would sooner receive injustice in the Queen's courts than justice in a foreign court. I hold that man or woman to be a scoundrel who goes abroad to a foreign court to have the judgments of the Queen's courts overturned, the actions of her Government countermanded or the legislation of Parliament struck down."

"The British Labour Party has always been nationalist, if not insular, and...not just democratic but parliamentarian. But it is confrontation with the EEC that has presented the Labour Party with an uninhibited appeal to patriotism. Internationalist it may be in phrases; when it comes to policy, it is nationalist."

"I don't think that would be entirely unfair. There are some things which get on one's nerves and some things that don't. And I'm, to use a rather journalistic word, allergic to the things that are typically American. I think that's fairly natural to someone who has just been described as a Tory and is always ready to describe himself as a High Tory."

"Christianity does not, repeat, not, look forward to a gradual betterment of human behaviour and society or to the progressive spread of peace and justice upon earth. Still less does Christianity purport to offer a scheme or general outline for bringing that about. Quite the reverse, it uniformly teaches, as if to emphasize the point for good measure, that things will get worse rather than better before we are through."

"The rights of a freeborn Englishman, which used to be secured to him by his native institutions, are no longer good enough. On pain of displeasing an outside world that lived under horrid tyrannies long after England was self-governing, we petition foreign judges sitting on the continent to declare and enforce our rights by interpreting at their discretion a document which no English lawyer...would imagine in a nightmare. We tolerate these judges telling the House of Commons what the House of Commons shall or shall not do. Bitterest of all, and freshest in our minds today, the English, who once were wont, if allies failed, to defend themselves alone against ‘the three corners of the world in arms’, accept with apparent docility the occupation of their soil in time of peace by self-appointed protectors, as though the Roman legions were still stationed at York and Caerleon, and we pay them the humiliating tribute of conforming ourselves to their policies, their strategies, and their philosophy. England has forgotten itself."

"The omnipotence of Parliament is for the British what for other nations is represented by the constitution, the declaration of independence and the law of human rights all rolled into one. That division of powers which was wrongly deduced from observation of Britain in the eighteenth century is unknown to Britain: just because we have no written constitution, the control of Parliament over both law and government has to be unlimited. In order for Britain to join the Community, the House of Commons has to be told, and to accept, that it will progressively lose its exclusive power to control legislation and government."

"It is conventional to refer to the United Nations in hushed tones of respect and awe, as if it were the repository of justice and equity, speaking almost with the voice of God if not yet acting with the power of God. It is no such thing. Despite the fair-seeming terminology of its charter and its declarations, the reality both of the Assembly and of the Security Council is a concourse of self-seeking nations, obeying their own prejudices and pursuing their own interests. They have not changed their individual natures by being aggregated with others in a system of bogus democracy...Does anybody seriously suppose that the members of the United Nations, or of the Security Council, have been actuated in their decisions on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands by a pure desire to see right done and wrong reversed? That was the last thing on their minds. Everyone of them, from the United States to Peru, calculated its own interests and consulted its own ambitions. What moral authority can attach a summation of self-interest and prejudice? I am not saying that nations ought not to pursue their own interests; they ought and, in any case, they will. What I am saying is that those interests are not sanctified by being tumbled into a mixer and shaken up altogether. An assembly of national spokesmen is not magically transmuted into a glorious company of saints and martyrs. Its only redeeming feature is its impotence...The United Nations is a colossal coating of humbug poured, like icing over a birthday cake, over the naked ambitions and hostilities of the nations."