Radio Personalities

"[On Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech] His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham. But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong. [Referring to another participant in the discussion, Owen Jones, author of Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes] What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black."

"[The governments "British values" should include] queuing, drunkenness, nostalgia, loving pets, self-loathing, wit and eccentricity."

"We're at great risk of dying of niceness [...] I hate niceness."

"Freedom of speech wasn’t won by being nice, it has been won by struggle with religion."

"[Shakespeare's date of birth (23 April) as a potential English national day] If we decide to go down this route of an English national day, it will mean we have become a feeble little country, just like the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish [...] We do not make a great fact about Shakespeare, like the Scots do about that deeply boring, provincial poet Burns, and we do not have national music like the awful bagpipe. The Scots and the Welsh are typical small nations with a romantic 19th-century-style nationalism."

"In fact, they go so far as to differentiate their status between inner scholarii – who have been inducted into the mysteries as Elton's own students – and discipuli, an outer and less privileged band who have only sat at his feet, without the benefit of formal instruction. Long ago, in my own very happy days in Elton's seminar, we used to divide the group into Eltonians and Eltonettes. These were roughly to be equated with 'us' and 'them', English and Americans. Eltonians, we thought, grasped the essence of what Elton was trying to do without needing to imitate the style; Eltonettes reproduced the form to the last perfection of pedantry, but caught nothing of the substance. There is too much in this volume that confirms our arrogance."

"[Advocating for 'leave' in the then forthcoming EU membership referendum] We have a very large trade deficit with Europe, we have a decent trade balance with the rest of the world. Is Europe going to cut off its nose to spite its face? It seems to me so infinitely unlikely. There's no risk. There would be a risk if we were running a German-style trade surplus with Europe. But we're not. The problem of our leaving Europe is a problem for the Germans and not us."

"The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together. This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country."

"Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be. They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition. The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this. The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust."

"The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery."

""By their fruits you shall know them." I always thought Jesus was a rotten theologian, but he is jolly good at politics."

"The entire machinery of academic promotion and academic endorsement and of academic advancement has been taken over, and therefore heretics like me have to be routed out. It's very similar to what happened to German universities under Hitler. The group that is most vulnerable, I'm afraid, are intellectuals. Right over the country, you have these kinds of implantations of Metropolitan wokeness. The universities are acting rather like Covid spreaders, these are the super spreaders. These people wear a cloak of impenetrable virtue. We've been here before. This is Robespierre."

"There’s no point in arguing against globalisation or Western civilisation – they are all products of it. We are all products of it [...] The honest teaching of the British empire is to say it was the first key stage of world globalisation. It was probably the most important moment in human history and it is still with us. As for the idea that slavery is this terrible disease that dare not speak its name. It only dare not speak its name because we settled it 200 years ago. Do you know what, we had Catholic emancipation at pretty much the exact same time we got rid of slavery – in the 1830s - we don’t go on about that."

"I've always had a naughty streak. I've always challenged authority. I'm on the right but it's kind of ironic on the right. I've studied kings, so I’m very aware of the feet of clay of authority."

"[The English, particularly some on the left, are] incapable of recognising that this is national socialism. And the nationalism is much more important than the socialism, as it was in Germany. The socialism is a very fragile, superficial thing. The nationalism is very real."

"You have as a symbol the twisted cross: the saltire or the swastika. You have a passionate belief in economic self-sufficiency: known by the Nazis as autarky and the Scots as oil. And also you have the propensity of your elderly and middle-aged male supporters to expose their knees."

"Slavery was not genocide otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived."

"In the name of acceptance, of broadening, of anti-discrimination, we're at the risk of undoing what is our only claim to survive in the future. The only thing that's made these little islands what they are is this astonishing burst of creativity of the last 500 years. It is our individualism, it's our bloody mindedness, our awkwardness, our refusal to fit into categories that has made us, dare I use the word, great. And if we lose that we are lost, we have absolutely nothing else. The world that my enemies are trying to create is one that we will just go down the tubes, we are finished. I believe in going down fighting."

"What are the points of comparison? Well, we have a political movement that has a single historic explanation for why your country is facing such terrible oppression; it’s either Versailles or the Treaty of the Union. You have a particular group of people who are responsible for this; it is either the English or the Jews."

"[Responding to a suggestion Prime minister Rishi Sunak appeared to be "detached, or at least semi-detached, from this coronation" from journalist Andrew Pierce] Invisible. I think one of the reasons that I think a lot has gone wrong, for example, why parliament has not been properly represented at the coronation of a parliamentary monarchy, is because the government isn't interested in the constitution. The prime minister, the man of immense talent, of extraordinary skill, but really, not fully grounded in our culture [...] I know that's a difficult and controversial thing to say, but I think it's true. And, again, this coronation is going to highlight far too much our differences rather than what unites us."

"It is an almost universal characteristic among autocrats that they cling compulsively to power, to the detriment alike of their subjects and their reputation."

"Insufferable, patronising, misogynistic wanker"

"What difference does it make what colour the person you buy your milk off is?"

"I want to read you something from Amber Rudd's speech yesterday. "For the state must draw a sharp line of distinction between those who, as members of the nation, are the foundation and support of its existence and greatness, and those who are domiciled in the state, simply as earners of their livelihood there." .... No, that wasn't from Amber Rudd's speech yesterday, I'm really sorry, that's from Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler."

"What is the law? You know you were going to take short-term economic damage ... Every single customer in the country is going to be potentially worse off than they were before the vote. So I'm just wondering what those laws are that you won't have to obey any more that made you vote for this short-term economic hit. Can you name one?"

"Suella Braverman is now perilously close to making Priti Patel look like the second most callous and ignorant Home Secretary in living memory."

"Boris Johnson, surrounded by the usual brain-dead ERG headbangers and DUP tub thumpers, Boris Johnson is threatening Rishi Sunak because Rishi Sunak is minded to abide by the terms of the treaty that Boris Johnson signed."

"So you think we have to leave the EU to get three-pin plugs?”"

"I Have Contempt For The Conmen and Compassion For The Conned."

"Other foes made their intentions clear by denunciations of one’s family or religion, and by ravaging the countryside and plundering the towns. The British, generally so restrained in their language and so disciplined in the field, were very different. They could make hostility look like friendship and conquest like a favor. It was difficult to rally support against such tactics."

"The constant ingestion of fear about shit that will never happen is ruining our society."

"Once you become a famous famous celebrity, like me, and people start writing about you in the press, you'll notice just how incompetent reporters are. [...] Everyone should have a reporter follow them around and interview them for an article in the newspaper. Then sit back and watch how much stuff is inaccurate."

"RoboCop had less technology on him than your average cop does today. And there are guys jousting at medieval times wearing less armor. But the more we focus on them being racist, the less we focus on them turning into the Terminator. I see a lot of fat cops out there. Much like my idea that for every $100 spent over a $1000 baseline, the bride must be able to fit into her wedding dress for one year. I think all cops should be issued one, and only one, vest on the first day after graduating the academy."

"How about we stop with the stories about how it's open season on black people for racist white cops and talk about the real thing killing young black men? Other young black men. No? Well, that would be part of an honest dialog that everyone is always asking for but runs from when some intellectually honest person, like myself, brings up the crisis of fatherhood in the black community. You know who certainly won't do that? The so-called community leaders."

"I have a simple policy: If the combined age of the two people feuding is over 100, they should move on."

"I definitely feel the world lacks a sense of humour"

"I don’t think all women need to birth themselves"

"I write for myself and then I edit for the reader, to make things easier for them, to refine the ideas"

"It’s always the youth that are making the sacrifices. When I think about the Soweto riots in 1976 in South Africa, it wasn’t people that stopped working and said, we are going to fight against these policies, it was the school children"

"I try as a reader to put myself in places I’ve never been to, in the shoes of people I would never meet"

"It seems as if the whole country is falling apart, so why be a good person, why be good to yourself, when the country is not being good to you, it’s not giving you the opportunities you need"

"I do like this idea of time. For me there is no before or after. It’s all during. It’s just a bunch of “durings.” I don’t think of myself as someone in the past, I’m a person going through something. I do like to see how these “durings” influence the future."

"It’s fantasy when white people write it. When black and brown people write it, it’s magic realism"

"Things that lurk in the shadows do not like the light. People get used to one tiny light and begin to seek out more of it in the world and in themselves – that’s how the light liberates us."

"Being liked is not nearly as great as being happy with the decisions I make. I'm not money, so I know not everyone likes me"

"Koko and I somehow had the ability to walk alongside our hurt and disappointment; we never let it get ahead of us or lead us astray.’"

"How could he possibly describe anything when the world around him had lost its colour"

"I birthed myself; it was bloody and painful but now I’m standing on the roof of a city as something new."

"The city is like that: it loves new and shiny things; which also leads it to be a graveyard of previously beautiful relics."

"“Find something that forces you to be a better version of yourself.”"