socialists-from-england

"I never cared a bit for philology; my chief aim has been throughout to illustrate the social condition of the English people in the past."

"[On the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election] I'll be totally honest, when I heard Andy Burnham wasn't being selected, I punched the air and I thought it's very probable we can win this. I wasn't complacent but I knew we could do it."

"[On standing as a parliamentary candidate] I have lived in London for more than 20 years. As soon as a by-election comes up in London, I would definitely consider it."

"Whether we're talking about the cost of living crisis, whether we're talking about the genocide in Gaza, or generally the feeling that they were voted in on one word, change - and they've not offered a whole lot of it. The Green Party are here, and we're ready to give them that change."

"[On drug legalisation] I've actually never taken a drug in my life, or even drunk alcohol, but I still don’t sit here as the fun police. I very clearly believe people should be able to do what they want to do. It just wasn’t for me.""

"The biggest threats we all face today aren't military invasions. It's the rise of the far right, it is global pandemics, it is climate catastrophe and economic crises. And NATO cannot solve any of these."

"I had never previously thought of myself as privileged, but I realised that because of the sheer accident of where I was born and what passport I held, I was treated differently by the Israeli authorities. I watched as they harassed and abused Palestinians and then related to me as a regular human being."

"The people running Labour at the moment need to ask themselves why a young, articulate, talented, extremely dedicated socialist feels she now has no home in the Labour Party and has to leave."

"We should be becoming a more decentralised country because that's where people feel like they can actually change things. Otherwise, things seem distant; things seem like they just happen in Westminster. If we could give combined authorities more power at local government, then that would be really positive."

"Billionaires already have three parties fighting for them. It's time the rest of us had one."

"I'll continue to use the platform [i.e. TikTok] because I think it's really effective in reaching out to newer audiences, younger audiences and getting out political messages."

"My grandparents came to this country after Britain's rulers looted their homeland. We're here, as Sivanandan said, because you were there."

"We're not here to beg for crumbs off the table, we're taking the fucking lot."

"What are our long-term goals? More time with our loved ones, more green space, universal childcare, free public transport, not worrying about bills. These are things that Farage and Starmer don't talk about."

"The only way we can actually change things is to have a Labour government that is bold and ambitious. … I think it's really important to take inspiration from previous governments, especially the Attlee government of '45. We saw a country that was completely destroyed by war and the answers of that Labour government weren't to tinker around the edges."

"Between 2015 and 2019 I had friends and colleagues who worked at the top of the Labour Party, and they can tell you that in parts it was a highly dysfunctional working environment with toxicity and bullying – not from Jeremy, but from some people around him. Power was too centralised. This is not what we need for this emerging project. … Everyone has to feel that they’re involved and the organisation has to be representative of wider society. That also means we can’t soft-pedal our anti-racism. Some people want us to focus solely on the 'economic issues'. But if the politics of class is detached from the politics of race then it is bound to fail – because when our neighbours are being simultaneously targeted for eviction and deportation, that struggle is one and the same."

"What we need is a politics of fun and joy. We're not interested in meetings where everyone's got a point of order and they talk for twenty minutes each. Do you think the sixteen year-olds who are soon to get the vote will want to sit through that? The new project should engage that generation by embedding itself in mass culture."

"She had an intellect masculine in its range and detachment—a type of intellect possessed by some women in all ages, not, as they are apt to suppose it, the peculiar possession of modern women."

"He’s got tired of her now, has Martin. He said she took so much worshipping she made his knees sore."

"Many hundreds of years before the coming of the English, the nations of India had been a collection of wealthy and highly civilized people, possessed of a great language with an elaborate code of laws and social regulations, with exquisite artistic taste in architecture and decoration, producing beautiful manufactures of all kinds, and endowed with religious ideas and philosophic and scientific conceptions which have greatly influenced the development of the most progressive races of the West. One of the noblest individual moralists who ever lived, Sankya Muni was a Hindu; the Code of Manu, dating from before the Christian era, is still an essential a study for the jurist....and there are in India, in this later age, worthy descendants of the great authors of the Vedas, of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana... And yet, nine-tenths of what has been written by the British about India is so expressed that we are made to believe the shameful falsehood that stability and civilized government in Hindustan began only with the rule of the British."

"The Conservative Party have an aim to break up our country. They aim to destroy our NHS and we will say no. We will fight them in the Parliament, we will fight them in the courts, we will fight them in the workplaces and we will fight them in the streets."

"I wasn't going to struggle with someone wearing a huge sword on their hip."

"I genuinely felt that my work was beginning to help shape the potential Labour Government's stance on housing, energy, and climate issues, as well as scrutinising the Cabinet Office and constitutional matters. We were making steady progress. I am disappointed not to have been able to continue this important work."

"This complaint has had a deep and lasting impact on me and my health, but with this ordeal now over, I am looking forward to putting this year behind me with my reputation restored."

"I did not plan to say this, but during the pandemic, my second cousin—a 15-year-old boy—died in a tragic accident of auto-asphyxiation. It devastated the family, as can be imagined, and happened in the pandemic when we were only allowed six people at the funeral. If he had been taught about risky sex acts—he was 15, not a pre-pubescent child—and how to make sure he did things safely, rather than just learning something from the internet that then led to the end of his life, he might still be around and his family might not be devastated. So, actually, because of that personal experience I do have a problem with saying that we should not teach any of this to our children."

"[M]y folly was to believe movies were like plays; that you can fight for your vision. Forget it. A movie doesn't belong to you at all."

"[Estimating the proportion of the script for Reds that he wrote] I'd say 45 per cent. My first draft was 320 pages. The second involved co-writing with [[w:Warren Beatty|[Warren] Beatty]]. The third I had nothing to do with."

"[On his grandmother] She was blind and her legs went gangrenous, but she was the most important woman I've ever known, untutored and very strong."

"'Strategic penetrations' is a phrase I use a lot for the work of socialists and Marxists in bourgeois cultures ... I simply cannot understand socialist playwrights who do not devote most of their time to television. That they can write for the Royal Court and the National Theatre, and only that, seems to me a wilful self-delusion about the nature of theatre in a bourgeois culture now ... It's just thunderingly exciting to be able top talk to large numbers of people in the working class, and I can't understand why everybody doesn't want to do it."

"I heard a noise, but didn't know it was gunfire."

"It's as if they're saying that Neil without my ideological fanaticism wouldn't have the courage of his convictions. [...] They can't imagine a relationship of partnership. There has to be one person forcing an opinion on the other."

"Are you the man from the Socialist Society?"

"[On Margaret Thatcher, then the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom] I can only think of one thing she has done for women [...] and that is to prove that being a woman is not an electoral liability."

"[Speaking in Buka, Papua New Guinea after flying from the Solomon Islands] As we were taking off, the militia were at the end of the runway, firing at us."

"We (or, more precisely, I) got it wrong. The cover was not intended to be anti-Semitic; the New Statesman is vigorously opposed to racism in all its forms. But it used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the New Statesman was following an anti-Semitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation. I doubt very much that one single person was provoked into hatred of Jews by our cover. But I accept that a few anti-Semites (as some comments on our website, quickly removed, suggested) took aid and comfort when it appeared that their prejudices were shared by a magazine of authority and standing. Moreover, the cover upset very many Jews, who are right to feel that, in the fight against anti-Semitism in particular and racism in general, this magazine ought to be on their side."

"For our issue dated 14 January, the New Statesman published a cover showing the Star of David standing on a Union Jack, with the words: "A kosher conspiracy?"

"They [Jews] no longer routinely suffer gross or violent discrimination; indeed, in the US and Europe at least, Jews today are probably safer than most minorities."

"[T]he US government and media (along with their British cheerleaders) themselves raise the ideological stakes when they claim that we have seen attacks on freedom and democracy. That is one way of putting it: another is to say that these attacks, using deeply symbolic targets, have hit a civilisation that has grown complacent, selfish and in some respects decadent."

"The death of the Soviet Union also deprived the global poor of something more intangible: not exactly hope, perhaps, but the sense of an alternative, of possibility."

"When I watched the murderous attacks on New York and Washington, my first reactions were of incredulity horror and sympathy for the victims and their families But when I came to write my weekly editorial for The New Statesman the following day (knowing that most readers would not see it until that Friday), I thought I should raise wider issues. I suggested that billions of poor people throughout the world would support the attacks because they blamed America for their plight and saw no alternative but to strike out in rage."

"If it had been known at the time that he'd got 'previous convictions' the context of the case would have been very different."

"[Editorial on the September 11 attacks published shortly afterwards] American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the United States often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader."

"[Y]ou may be sure that, if the Soviet Union were still a reality and a threat, the debt crisis, which now affects some 50 countries and has reached previously unimagined levels (some countries have to use a quarter of their export earnings to service debt), would not exist."

"[[Nick Cohen|[Nick] Cohen]] assures me that he has no intention of following [[Paul Johnson|[Paul] Johnson]]'s long political journey. Since he is a personal friend, whose journalism I admire (I hired him twice, once on the Independent on Sunday, once on the NS), I believe him. But I don't underestimate the sense of betrayal on the left. When the rest of the press was cheering on [[Tony Blair|[Tony] Blair]], particularly in new Labour's early days, Cohen was his most virulent critic and almost the only coherent voice asserting "real left" values. Now, in some eyes, he has deserted the cause when it needs him most."

"What makes a great journalist?"

"Some "victims" will make false allegations, often prompted by lawyers, in the hope of substantial payments."

"Wilby argued for "nuance" in these matters, while denigrating those who dared complain of abuse. There was nothing nuanced in the material Wilby collected and created over his career – they were crime scene photographs of our most vulnerable children being raped for his pleasure."

"[W]hile those who allege abuse should be heard, accepting what they say as self-evidently true is not better than dismissing it as childish fantasy. It is just another form of not listening, and relying instead on prejudices and preconceptions. It also leads to a new set of victims. Abused children may suffer mental illness and suicidal thoughts. But so may those falsely accused."

"The New Statesman has now completed an internal review of all articles related to child sexual abuse that were published during Wilby’s editorship, or subsequently contributed by Wilby as a writer. Approximately 19,000 articles were published during Wilby's seven years as editor, of which 126 have a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 126 articles, 12 contain comments or arguments that could reasonably be interpreted as either minimising the seriousness of child sexual abuse, or as questioning the integrity of victims, whistle-blowers, police or journalists investigating allegations of sexual abuse of children. Four of the 12 remained available on newstatesman.com as of 18 August, and they have now been taken down. Subsequent to his time as editor, Wilby contributed 659 columns or pieces to the New Statesman from 2006 to 2022, of which 37 contain a significant reference to child sexual abuse or paedophilia. Of those 37 articles, four contain arguments that the degree of public concern around child sexual abuse is out of proportion to the actual scope and scale of the horrendous crime. Those four articles have been taken down."

"My reactions to 9/11 were, from the start, different from everyone else's. As we watched on the office television, somebody said with horror, "I can't believe this is happening in Manhattan!" To which, I thought, why not? Many countries had, at some point in the previous 90 years, experienced the effects of aerial bombardment, sometimes from American forces. Why should we regard Americans as uniquely immune from such barbarity? The US, after all, had become the world's sole great power and it revelled in this status."