Essayists From England

"Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism. In an ideal Polly Toynbee world, private sector broadcasting would be banned, Rupert Murdoch would be nationalised, and the BBC would hire thousands more taxpayer-funded social affairs correspondents to psalm the benefits of social democracy."

"The punishment block is aptly named Bleak House, and known just as Bleak. Several of the solitary cells inside this separate compound, hidden behind the coal sheds, were opened for me to inspect the inmates, a procedure that made me feel extremely uncomfortable. ... Inside one cell a big, red haired girl sat on her bed, the only furniture, and the officer said she was there for her own protection. She can hardly have been twenty, but her arms, legs and face were covered in old scars. New stitches stood out on the pale flesh from a long cut across her arm. She cut herself often. She was also agoraphobic and didn't want to leave the cell. "I'm glad you've come to talk to me," she said warmly as I sat down beside her. She sounded like a young child. "No one's been to talk to me all day. I don't want to be free but I'd like to be in mental hospital, where I was before. But they sent me out, so I stole a social security cheque and went straight to the police, and then I got put here." Her mother had been in the same mental hospital. Her father and two uncles had killed themselves, and she had slashed herself countless times. Her father had assaulted her when she was six and when she was sixteen. She, too, though visited by a doctor every day, as are all Bleak inmates, said she was receiving no psychiatric treatment, and no drugs."

"[At HMP Styal, a women's prison in Cheshire, near Manchester] Since mental hospitals began to shed their patients into what is euphemistically called the community, the prison ranks have swelled to accommodate them."

"[At HMP Pentonville where the visitors centre was closing] There was, for example, the case of a youngish woman with a large family who visited her husband every fortnight. Each time they came they returned to the centre in a more miserable state. One day they were in tears and the youngest child was sick. The woman said her husband was clearly ill. He had been wild and violent. Each visit he seemed to be getting worse. He was receiving no treatment. The centre called the assistant governor and asked for an urgent inquiry. He acted at once. The man was found to be in appalling state. He was rushed to the medical wing where he was diagnosed as having Huntington's Chorea, an hereditary disease which strikes suddenly in middle age, bringing insanity followed by death. The whole family had been watching, visit by visit, as their father went mad before their eyes. No doubt the prison officers did not like the implied criticism of their negligence. There were many other such incidents, though the centre was as careful as possible not to make the officers feel they were being criticised."

"He came from a public school, was the son of an old student of the dean ... [and] the only one with a distinctly sour school report. He was a big shambling clumsy looking young man. When asked, he said he had already been guaranteed an unconditional place at his father's hospital "Well, they could hardly turn you down. Could they?" said the Dean drily. ... Picking up the report, which indicated laziness... [d]id he really want to be a doctor? "Yes, I'm dead serious." What sort of doctor? "A country GP working on my own. I couldn't stick the routine of hospital life" ... [After the candidate left, the Dean and Consultant surgeon conducting the interviews discussed him] "What do you think?" the Dean asked the surgeon. "I knew his father, and he was just the same, but he's a very good doctor now." The surgeon laughed. "I would say that under no circumstances whatever would I admit him if it wasn't that you knew his father and you say he was the same." The Dean said, "Well, I'm happy to have him." I was surprised at the decision."

"The last candidate of the day was also the son of a doctor. The Dean knew his father too. "His father is a bright chap, but completely incomprehensible," he said. The boy was intense and serious but with a speech impediment. He spoke a great deal about the need for doctors to "Co-communicate" with their patients, which afterwards made the Dean smile. He spoke enthusiastically about the role of doctor as counsellor, pointing out that recent research indicated that GPs had to deal with people's psychological ailments as much as their physical wellbeing. ... Analysis of the school's drop-outs showed that the desire to do social work and a wish to bring about change in society to help the roots of patients problems was one of the main reasons for students failing to stay the course. This boy was turned down outright."

"If the Divis Complex in Belfast isn't the vilest housing estate in Britain, I am willing to accept nominations for the award. Catholic West Belfast is a wedge-shaped slice of the city, and the Divis Complex is perched on the tip of the triangle, its 13 battered blocks nudging up against the check points of the city centre. Built only ten years ago, the flats have degenerated into a festering heap, crushed by the weight of their human density ... The troubles have contributed to the plight of the estate, but wherever it had been thrown up, it would have sunk under its own architectural and design faults, the cheapness of the materials used, the lack of repairs and amenities. ... The patches of ground between the flats are muddy heaps, scattered withy rubbish, with the stumps of old playground furnishings, bare ends of wires protruding where lamp posts once stood, and large rat holes everywhere. Rats have taken a grip on the place according to a recent estimate, the rat population was about 17,000 and out of control. ... There are no lights in the complex. Vandals knocked some out, and soldiers smashed the rest with their rifle butts, needing the cover of darkness for their patrols. The army has an observation tower at the top of the tower block, and patrols, running and covering one another chase up and down the balconies. One lunchtime when I was there, the soldiers had been into the estate five times that day. They had been knocking on doors and questioning people. Sometimes at night they knock front doors down. The flats stand on the front line next to the Shankill Protestant area, and there have been countless murders. ... The stairways are pitch dark even in the daytime — so dark that everyone counts the stairs as they go, remembering which flights have seven and which have ten steps. Some stairs have large chunks of concrete missing, so a stranger might well break a leg. ... It all takes its toll. With so many children in such a place, I didn't see much kindness. Brutalisation is inevitable. A mother wanted to show me her crippled child couldn't walk. "Come on Patrick show the lady how you move about," she urged him, but he shook his head. "Come on," she shouted, cuffing him."

"[A reopening of a water fountain in London, Wimbledon] I was there because the fountain was erected in 1868 in memory of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Toynbee, otologist and ear-syringer to Queen Victoria: he died young in his laboratory experimenting on himself with chloroform for tinnitus. He was a radical local campaigner who fought to save Wimbledon Common from the rapacious Earl Spencer's attempt to privatise and enclose it. He set up the Wimbledon Village Club, a working men's institute for edification, entertainment, refreshments and a library, in much community use now. Family history records that his rigorous selflessness included dragging his nine children across Wimbledon Common on Christmas Day to make them donate their Christmas dinner to a Travellers' encampment. The plaque on the fountain says that working men of Wimbledon and those "interested in the public good" paid for this memorial."

"That baby on the bath mat, who so decisively put me off the idea of teen motherhood, grew up to be the most disgraced prime minister under his ludicrously changed name of Boris: he looks much the same."

"As for Boris Johnson, I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen him naked."

"Yet again we are to be treated to the disgusting spectacle of the virtually all-male House of Commons pontificating sanctimoniously on when and how women must or must not give birth to children. The greatest number of abortions happen because men abandon women at pregnancy, so the sight of a large collection of men deciding when and how women should have babies is especially unedifying."

"The Labour question is always the same – how far can you go and still bring enough voters with you? As Labour’s divide deepens, those of us not supporting Corbyn have been assailed as "neoliberal", "siding with the elite", "betraying the poor", "hypocrite" and worse. Like many Labour people, free to dream I’d go further than Corbyn: I’d go for a windfall wealth tax to pay off the deficit, make the Queen be Elizabeth the Last, abolish faith schools, private schools and inheritance, tax millionaires at 70%: add your wishlist here. I don’t know how far you can go – but you have to win power to get anywhere at all. Once in power, with the levers of persuasion, you can take people further than you dare tread in opposition."

"High rolling countries run other risks when the exchequer itself gets addicted to the revenues. The Australian government now draws over 10% of its income from gambling: however much destruction it causes to families, the government would fear action that cut gambling habits. The UK Treasury gets only £1.4bn from gambling: on household losses of £9.7bn, that sounds as if the industry is escaping its fair UK dues."

"No-one is suggesting banning gambling or casinos, any more than I would ban pornography, or drugs or all manner of things that might do people harm. But there is an important social difference between freedom to do what adults please if they deliberately seek out those things from regulated places - and aggressively thrusting them at everyone in everyday life."

"Dominic Cummings was brought in by Johnson to swing a wrecking ball at Whitehall, local councils, the BBC and anything that smelled of good government. No surprise that those who don't believe in the state have made the worst possible fist of running it in a crisis. Brexit embodied their mindset: break away, break things and disrupt."

"The greatest motor behind the anti-abortion campaign has always come from the Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant churches and within all churches there has always been the strongest streak of misogyny. Telling infertile women that they should not benefit from test tube bay techniques or telling pregnant women they must give birth springs from a fount of woman hating passion that begins with the first chapter of Genesis and Eve in the Garden of Eden."

"Sometimes it seems as if a tidal wave of the worst Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant strawberry milkshake. How it oozes over the planet, sweet, sickly, homogenous, full of 'E' numbers, stabilisers and monosodium glutamate, tasting the same from Samoa to Siberia to Somalia. A traveller across the desert wastes of the Sahara arrives at last at Timbuktu, where the first denizen he meets is wearing a Texaco baseball cap. Pilgrims to the Himalayas in search of the ultimate wilderness in the furthest kingdom find Everest strewn with rubbish, tins, plastic bags, Coca-Cola bottles and all the remnants of the modern global picnicker. Explorers of the Arctic complain that empty plastic bottles of washing-up liquid are embedded in the ice. Global culture and its detritus wash up everywhere, nothing sacred, nothing wild, nothing authentic, original or primitive any more. These modern travellers' tales tell of cultural vandalism, Western Goths contaminating ancient civilisations and traditions untouched for centuries. If the West were to set out on a mission of global imperialism deliberately planned we would surely choose better cultural ambassadors. It is not pages from Shakespeare or scores of Mozart that litter steppe and savannah but some marketing man's logo from last year's useless, meretricious product, or a snatch of that maddening theme tune from Titanic. Was ever an empire so monstrously self-assured and ambitious? Western cultural imperialism reaches right into the hearts and souls, the sexual behaviour, the spirit, religion, politics and the nationhood of the entire world. It happens haphazardly with no master plan or empire-building blueprint, but with a vague and casual insouciance that drives its detractors to despair. So when we consider the globalisation of culture most of us bring to the subject a jumble of deep-seated alarms - moral, intellectual, political, spiritual, artistic and nationalistic, melting into a great pot of 'globalisation panic'. It causes deep pessimism about the cultural future of a world turning homogeneously horrible."

"Research published this month into OECD countries shows the poor gamble away a larger proportion of their income than the better off. Inevitably the temptations are greater when a £4,000 jackpot feels life-changing to someone on the minimum wage. So countries with more poor people - like the UK - are likely to gamble more. Britain is already the fifth highest gambler among developed nations."

"[On the Bruges Group, informally a thinktank for the Conservatives] They spread Europhobia through their party until all candidates had to test positive for Brexit."

"By instinct, I like the French revolutionary tradition commanding absolute secularism in schools and state institutions. But French secularism tends to cause less social harmony, not more, used as an easy pretext for far-right anti-Muslim attacks. Humanists defend people's right to private beliefs and religious practices, as long as they impose on no one else."

"I think of two deaths. The last stages of my mother’s liver and bowel cancer were dreadful: don’t imagine morphine is a gentle floating away – it detaches the mind, but not always the pain, while blocking the gut until an undignified death, obsessed by constipation. By the time her state was bad enough to long for death, it was far too late for her plea to go to Dignitas in Switzerland: those who take that grim and expensive path to a desolate death room need to go early, long before life becomes insufferable. Some people might never have reached that point, but fear accelerates their departure. My mother, despite good palliative care, begged her GP to help her die. It might have been done once upon a time, he said, but since Harold Shipman’s multiple murders of elderly patients, every ampoule is counted, making it far too dangerous for a doctor to do anything of the kind. "Oh, where’s Dr Shipman when you want him!" she said to him, with what was left of her laugh. So she suffered on needlessly to the bitter end, and we suffered with her helplessly."

"[Remembering life events in 1964 or 1965] But as he was about to go to Oxford, I was appalled to find I was pregnant and even more appalled at his anti-abortion mother pressing us to marry. She suggested we would live in an Oxford flat, where I would bring up the baby while he studied: the end of my own future worried her not at all. We paid a visit to his newly married sister, who was living in Oxford’s Summertown, up the road from my great-aunts. I was pleased to see her, this lively, funny and magnetic character. But she was living, as far as I could see, the life their mother expected me to live, married and cooped up in an Oxford flat with a baby. Though she was herself a student, wifedom and life with a baby looked to me like a brutal curtailment of studenthood, locked in at home. There was her baby, Alexander, a few months old, lying naked on a bath mat, kicking his feet in the air, round, pink and fat, with a remarkable shock of electrically bright blond hair. As I gazed at him, I didn't find that baby at all appealing, too pink and too noisy. I shuddered at the prospect of this motherly existence, threatening an end to my life before it had even begun. Afterwards, as we both contemplated this scene, looking at his sister and at the vision of our future stretching out ahead of us, he broke off with me. [Toynbee had a then illegal abortion.]"

"This is where the housing pressure-cooker explodes. This is Manchester's civil court, like others all across England, where people are made homeless, hundreds every day. Those unable to pay rocketing mortgages have houses repossessed here. Tenants unable to cope with stagnant incomes lose their homes here when budgets no longer cover rising rents. From here, court bailiffs are sent to remove them. The great scandal is the spiralling number of tenants evicted on "no-fault" section 21 orders: these allow a landlord to turn someone out even if they have always paid their rent on time, however many years they have been there, however well-behaved they have been."

"Her class identity has clearly caused her much confusion and soul-searching. She is particularly acute on the uncomfortable space that the radical middle and upper-middle classes have always occupied in our culture. The charge of hypocrisy is so easily made against affluent campaigners and reformers who must suffer "the cognitive dissonance of failing to live up to the beliefs we profess." It’s a fate, Toynbee notes with irritation, that no smug wealthy Conservative ever has to endure."

"It is not my practice to engage in local political activity on the grounds that I have quite enough of that sort of thing without doing it in the evenings or at weekends. My wife, Ms Polly Toynbee, who is a member of the SDP's National Steering Committee, intends to put up for the Lambeth Borough Council. That is her affair and I shall go canvassing on her behalf if weather permits. I expect, in the fulness of time, to become the Denis Thatcher of the SDP."

"The underlying reason for remorseless social disadvantage remains a silent subject in Blair politics."

"We might let Auberon Waugh rest in peace were it not for the mighty damage his clan has done to British political life, journalism and discourse in the postwar years. They have perpetuated the myth of the superior cultured English gent as an archetype. Although Waugh's loathing of American culture made him uniquely amongst this bunch a pro-European, (he loved to be a "maverick"), this coterie has lead the spirit of anti-Europeanism that pervades Tory party and country. Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and the rest posit a brave little England of crusty country-living upper-class eccentrics versus the dread (another of their words) bureaucracy of Brussels. It's the old world charm of Whisky Galore mischief-making and John Buchan plucky patriots against the humourless foreign swine. They have contributed to a nation afraid of change or modernity, peddling false, sentimental tradition and an upper-class yesterday unavailable to virtually everyone else."

"The trouble with the monarchy is not that it is too powerful but that it is utterly useless. So much is spent on ceremonial trappings to disguise its inner nothingness."

"Here comes the coronation in a few weeks, not much changed since I was waving at the last one, pleading in vain for a Dinky Toy gold coach."

"Yet, as ever, he will sound considerably tougher on crime than on its causes because that is where his true feelings lie. The toughness comes easy but the underlying social justice theme comes but once a year at party conference."

"(In referring to simple pleasures) These are arts that those who ridicule should not so readily despise, since they lighten melancholy and foster friendship."

"(Said in the context of semi-abstract art) Every time I look at a work of art, however good or bad, I always begin with the principle of "graceful acceptance." You always get so much more that way."

"(In reply to his most magical experience in Venice) ...a fish flew out of the Adriatic and went hurtling over our heads. It was startlingly romantic. I can still see it: the streak of gold and silver; the glistening, feral texture of the scales; the fish’s eye like a jewel; the mad, mock-Byzantine riot of the Excelsior’s turrets and minarets against the azure sky; beyond that, in the mind’s eye, the dark labyrinths of San Marco – and, beyond them, the Euganian Hills."

"Every man that has felt pain, knows how few the comforts are that can gladden him to whom health is denied. I fed Hodge valerian to ease his agonies. I bought oysters for his delight, these being soft, and the best meat for his toothless jaws. I went for them myself."

"(In referring to Venice) It took a Frenchman and a Russian to give us clearer verbal snapshots of what the city-as-organism really is: Proust, “a chain of marble cliffs…”; Brodsky, “innumerable strands of coral reefs…” I think if one can successfully invite people to make a comparison between the cliffs/reefs, and the organic development of the Gothic city, then one has done a reasonably good job."

"(Referring to Hodge the cat) His rumbles of content, and warm black fur, thawed the frost of my soul, and dispelled the torpor of despondency."

"In her early writings in the 1840s and 1850s she had been an ardent supporter of women's rights and even free love, and had received particular notoriety with her shocking 1851 novel Realities. In her middle years, however, she modified her radical views, and her novels such as The Rebel of the Family (1880) reflect her growing conservatism and ambivalence about women's rights."

"We landed at the Ferry House, and struck off into the woods full of globe flowers by the lake side, and of yellow poppies by the wood wall; of hyacinths beneath the trees; of the curved crozier heads of the sprouting bracken; of young foxglove spathes, thick, downy, and as yet flowerless; of tufts of mountain fern like Indians' head-dresses; of trailing brambles and yet more delicate sprays of wild-raspberry; of bird's-eye, blue and lustrous, of violets and wood-sorrel; of lady's-mantles, green, gold-spotted; of delicate wind-flowers and starry stitchwort,—full of all manner of sweet wood-flowers; and then, returning, we saw two large carts and two large horses put into the ferry-boat, which a man nearly as large rowed leisurely across, according to the mode and manner of the place."

"In re-reading these pages I am now more than ever convinced that I have struck the right chord of condemnation, and advocated the best virtues and most valuable characteristics of women. I neither soften nor retract a line of what I have said."

"Ideologies are like arseholes: everyone's got one, we use it every day, but you very rarely look at your own unless something's gone wrong."

"If you ask three philosophers how social constructs work, you'll get four theories."

"I look inside myself and I ask, "Do I feel like a man or a woman?" And the answer is... I feel happy."

"One of the advantages of facing the overwhelming, grief-like nature of climate change, is that once we realize it’s all one problem, we have a lot more allies than we thought. If you campaign for migrants’ freedom of movement, you are fighting climate change. If you support indigenous people’s rights to self-determination, if you support your local antifascists and people fighting police brutality, if you support demilitarization and nuclear disarmament… it’s all one planet."

"The real meaning of the text, or at least one possible meaning of it, is given by something that is not present in the text itself. Basically, meaning is like jazz. It's about the notes you don't play."

"When you leave the classroom, politics and metaphysics will come at you at the same time. We're not just doing philosophy for the hell of it. We are tinkering with the engine of the world here."

"It's always good to squat over the mirror and take a good, hard look at your own ideology sometimes. 'Cause if you don't do the thinking someone else will do the thinking for you."

"The other problem with saying that people like that are just a product of their time is that not everyone at that time did think like that, and it kinda lets them off the hook. A lot of people thought that slavery was okay, but you know what: The slaves didn’t. And they said so, pretty loudly and often. So if other people thought that slavery was alright, it wasn’t ‘cause they didn’t know, it’s because they chose not to listen to that. They chose not to know."

"Harry Potter is a bit of a bourgeois fantasy."

"Racism is a full-blown normative theory in its own right. Writing it off as just “hate” which needs “love” to combat it can be a little bit reductionist; it can stop us from understanding it."

"Trauma isn’t always like a lightning bolt where you know that you’ve been hit. Sometimes trauma is like poison that someone slips into your food in little doses and you sit down every night and you eat that poison and you don’t realize that it’s building up inside you until suddenly you stop functioning."