“Those who, in the nineteenth century, argued the dangers of a mass democracy in which a majority of the voters would have no stake in the country at all, had reason to be fearful. But the remedy is not to restrict the franchise to those who own property: it is to extend the ownership of property to the largest possible majority of those who have the vote. The widespread ownership of private property is crucial to the survival of freedom and democracy. It gives the citizen a vital sense of identification with the society of which he is a part. It gives him a stake in the future—and indeed, equally important, in the present. It creates a society with an inbuilt resistance to revolutionary change.”

— Nigel Lawson

Maurice Macmillan Memorial Lecture (June 1985), quoted in The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), p. 206.

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British Conservative politician and journalist 1932

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