people-from-birmingham

"It’s important for businesses to reach out but also for universities to reach into business and really understand what skills and capabilities those businesses are looking for.""

"We’ve had to work hard at helping people understand that jobs at McDonald’s are good quality jobs with prospects. Over half of my executive team started off working in restaurants"

"Get some practical experience that will help you place in context some of the learning you’ve had and apply it in the real world. That gives you a real start in being able to decide what you want to do.""

"What we tend to do is spot trends and then democratise them. An example would be cappuccinos and lattes – we saw these were growing as a trend and we thought there was an opportunity to [provide] great tasting, ethical, good quality coffee but at exceptional prices, more conveniently than some of our competitors.""

"Bill Ward's incredible work in Black Sabbath features the best mixture of jazz and rock drumming out there. He has been defined as the mastermind behind the unholy birth of heavy metal drumming."

"When the producers first submitted the idea, they had me down to play this Axl Rose-type character [...] I told them we haven’t got our heads up our arses and there’s no way that we’d behave that way."

"One thing that bothers me about TV is the way that teenagers are portrayed. It’s down to the fucking Daily Mail‘s war on teenagers. They stigmatise young kids and it’s bullshit. The thing I like about Skins is it gives a genuine perspective on growing up."

"I don’t think I could act my way out of a paper bag!"

"We don't want to see conflicts breaking out anywhere, but when the next conflict breaks out this particular weapon in the cruel armory of man will not be used because the potential perpetrators know that they can't get away with it."

"[What is Keir Starmer's Labour government for?] Is it for social justice? Equality? Liberalism? Freedom? No one knows, and Starmer actively dislikes talking in these terms. To return to [[Harold Wilson|[Harold] Wilson]]'s aphorism, from [[Jeremy Corbyn|[Jeremy] Corbyn]] to Starmer, Labour has gone from being nothing but a moral crusade to anything but. And by forgoing the theory of politics, Starmer is leaving himself open to the most obvious post-election day attack: now the Tories are gone, his principal argument for the necessity of himself has gone with it. What is the point of Starmer? What gels a wide but shallow coalition together without the Tory bogeyman at the door? What will the Starmer coalition be for as well as against? That question has not been answered in the election campaign."

"I have seen again and again how women's lives are considered a niche issue rather than the main event. If there are no powerful women in the room, it will continue to happen. I can already hear the rebuttal that Liz Truss was a woman and she was dreadful, but that argument only holds if you think that Liz Truss is the embodiment of all women and her failure belongs to us all. Liz Truss didn't fail because she was a woman, she failed because she was a right-wing ideologue who was unfit for the job. I can see plenty of those left around the cabinet table so they can't be too fussed about that."

"Assange has, for seven years, evaded accusations of sexual violence in Sweden."

"We punish mothers for falling prey, rather than see how we can help them be the best moms that they can be and support them. We treat people terribly – we tell people that it's their fault that they're victims and that they're going to have their children removed because they haven't protected them."

"In the Johnson and [[Dominic Cummings|[Dominic] Cummings]] era of government, it was often assumed that anything that happened in Westminster was a group of political geniuses playing 3D chess and laying traps for the Labour Party (or opponents from within the government) to fall in to. It did sometimes feel true, although it was my experience that it was more by accident than design. I think it might be fair to say that they were playing 2D chess with quite some skill – until they weren't. Liz Truss, it would seem, cannot even play 1D chess. In fact, I am not sure her particular operation could be compared to the shape-sorting toys a one-year-old can master."

"You get low-level sexism all the time. I've defended other women in the chamber. I know women who work for me, certainly Black women, have found Westminster to be oppressive. Lots of men shush me because I'm quite rowdy. I get lots of comments like "calm down, the honourable lady acts with her heart". In the post-Me Too world, you get joking comments like "am I allowed to ask you to pass the milk?" or "I don't know if I'm allowed to say this to me, but you look lovely". ... Quite a lot of Tory men treat me like I'm some sort of exotic bird. People act like I'm either a pain or something to be marvelled at. You can see sometimes in meetings, women are asked to do things like get the tea. The expectation of them being stupid and annoying is quite common – that is very irritating. There is a power imbalance, there is an element of impunity."

"[To pro-Palestinian hecklers] I will carry on with my speech. I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence."

"I roundly told her to fuck off .... She fucked off. People said to me they had always wanted to say that to her, and I don’t know why they don’t as the opportunity presents itself every other minute."

"I would do anything that I felt was going to make the Labour party win the general election because if I don't have that attitude then all I’m doing is colluding with the Tories. If that means making Jeremy better, I'll roll my sleeves up. If that's not going to happen – and I've said [this] to him and to his staff to their faces: 'The day that ... you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I’ll knife you in the front.'"

"The trouble is that many of those who like what Assange did with WikiLeaks are willing to look the other way about the accusations against him. The same people who would march for women's rights wearing pussy hats and waving banners about what a sexist pig Trump is are not feminist allies when their gods are found to be fallible. Platitudes about how we should never say women are lying when they come forward about rape suddenly don't fit any more and now women are making up sexual violence as part of an American conspiracy."

"But what mattered most to [[w:Karen Ingala Smith|[Karen] Ingala Smith]] were women’s names, not numbers. So in 2016 she was delighted when the Labour MP Jess Phillips – who’d previously worked for Women's Aid – asked to read them out on International Women's Day. Now this roll call of more than 120 stolen lives, recited to a hushed House of Commons, has become an annual commemoration. "Dead women is a thing we’ve all just accepted as part of our daily lives," Phillips said last year, when among the names was Sarah Everard. The list not only put male violence in the national spotlight but, says Ingala Smith, "Family after family have said how important it is to hear their loved one’s name read out in parliament, and know it is recorded in Hansard for ever.""

"She compares activist-journalist Owen Jones and Novara Media writers to noisy, overexcited children who have had too much sugar – "Who cares what they think, frankly.""

"[The UK is] in desperate need and our politics [is] in even greater need of cleaning up and I thank everyone in this room for making a really good spectacle of proving that for me."

"This week has been one of the toughest weeks in politics since I entered parliament. I have tried to do everything that I could to make it so that this was not the outcome, but it is with a heavy heart that I will be leaving my post in the shadow Home Office team. On this occasion I must vote with my constituents, my head, and my heart which has felt as if it were breaking over the last four weeks with the horror of the situation in Israel and Palestine. I can see no route where the current military action does anything but put at risk the hope of peace and security for anyone in the region now and in the future."

"The Russell Brand exposé by the Sunday Times and Dispatches for Channel 4 would have not long ago been overwhelmingly applauded as thorough, well-sourced and sensitively managed journalism. Instead, we have seen the exact reason why women don't speak up."

"I am, however, still dubious about the need for an international men's day in and of itself. For me it is up there with needing a white history month, or able body action day. Men are celebrated, elevated and awarded every day of the week on every day of the year. Being a man is its own reward. You hit the jackpot when you are born a boy child. Yes within your group things are tough for all sorts of reasons. None of them are because you are a man. You might be a poor man, a sick man, a marginalised minority ethnic man. Brother, I'm with you. I'll carry your banner, sing your song of freedom, I'll even carry your coats and make the sandwiches."

"One of the things I want to achieve in the potentially short time I'm in Westminster is to stop people thinking we're all the same. Because while they believe that, the establishment stays in the same people’s hands. Nothing changes. It is awful to hear people on the doorstep saying: "You politicians are all in it for yourselves." But that's nowhere near as bad as hearing that people feel they have no one to represent them. That's the disaster, not the fact that I have to weather a Twitter storm."

"All the talk about rebuilding the economy post-pandemic, post-Brexit, post-austerity, is always about diggers [...] I mean, do something to make sure everyone gets to play with the digger. What have they done to get more women signed up to digger courses? Make sure I can control a digger."

"[Referring to domestic violence.] It took until the third [statement during the first lockdown] for the prime minister to even mention it. And the first penny that reached the frontline was five months after the crisis started. It’s not for the want of people like me, in the beginning, being like "we should think about this". When Covid-19 was still just a thing in China, we were talking about rising rates of domestic abuse that were being reported by Chinese charities."

"Reading out the list of names of women killed by men compiled by the femicide census as I do every year on International Women's Day will, no matter what I do in the future, never be rivalled by anything else in my political life. It is the thing most strangers approach me about when I am out and about. I've been told so many times that I read out the name of someone's daughter, sister, friend or mother. It catches me off guard whenever this happens. I'm struck by the honour that families feel to see their loved one's name exists forever on the public record; a roll call akin to that of fallen soldiers."

"[M]aking women as important as bins."

"[Entering the elevator in Portcullis House] My husband's a lift engineer and he always takes the stairs."

"[The vandalising of cars used by Phillips' team were filmed for social media postings] The reason they're filming is to drive content, to incite more intimidation [...] In my constituency, the humiliation was by men, to women. And they wish to drive content ... that's what our politics has become - humiliation. Content-driven grift."

"My only ambition in politics is to halve the levels of violence experienced by women and girls in a decade. Despite two women dying every week there is still no strategy or target around femicide. We live in a patriarchy still. It is 2024 but all our institutions are based on a 1950s, or 1850s or even 1750s ideal that doesn’t work for women"

"Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes."

"Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection."

"I actually wanted to be an astronaut more than an astronomer for a quite a long time. Then I learned this would require I somehow become a US citizen (at the time Brits could not be ESA Astronauts because of the UK’s refusal to fund the human spaceflight part of ESA – although this has recently changed), and I also discovered how much detail I would be required to know about the space shuttle and just how fit I would have to be. I’m not really a detail oriented person, and I’m not that keen on the gym, so I gently switched my goal to becoming an astronomer! This also has the advantage of letting me keep my feet on the ground!"

"He was essentially Teutonic in his whole personality, physical, as well as moral and mental; in his square sturdy frame, his ruddy hair, his fair complexion, his plain and simple habits of life, no less than in his love of truth, and straightforwardness in deed and word. For the pure Celt he entertained a kind of natural antipathy, mingled with something like contempt, which often manifested itself in odd and amusing ways, suggestive of Dr. Johnson's attitude towards the Scotch."

"See, ladling butter from alternate tubs Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs."

"What was really uncommon in Freeman was the...entire absence of any pretence of caring for things which he did not really care for. He was in this, as in all other matters, a singularly simple and truthful man, never seeking to appear other than as he was, and finding it hard to understand why other people should not be equally simple and direct. This directness made him express himself with an absence of reserve which sometimes gave offence; and the restriction of his interest to a few topics—wide ones, to be sure—seemed to increase the intensity of his devotion to those few."

"His Historical Geography has been for years the stumbling-block between us, as I had told him openly that I did not find much geography in the book, but rather a mess that had been made especially on German matters and a vague predilection for Slav and other barbarian stepchildren of his. I rather expect that William Rufus is more in his line, though radicalism and republicanism will continue to peep through the monarchical constellations of the twelfth century."

"I know that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the day. I have heard some speak against him who have a right to speak; I have heard many more who have none. I at least feel that I have none; I do not see how any man can have the right who has not gone through the same work through which Macaulay went, or at least through some no less thorough work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great and obvious faults as well as any man; I know as well as any man the cautions with which his brilliant pictures must be studied; but I cannot feel that I have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and to whom I owe more than to any man as the master of historical narrative. Read a page of Macaulay; scan well his minute accuracy in every name and phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has run over into our books; dwell on the style which finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth every thought, the style which never uses a single word out of its true and honest meaning; turn the pages of the book in which no man ever read a sentence a second time because he failed to catch its meaning the first time, but in which all of us must have read many sentences a second or a twentieth time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clearness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just relation of every word to every other, on the happily chosen epithet, or the sharply pointed sarcasm ."

"Remember on the other hand that, though neither Reformers in the sixteenth century or Puritans in the seventeenth century strove in any sense for "religious liberty," or for anything but to set up one intolerant system instead of another, yet every blow of the kind was a gain for religious liberty in the long run."

"I am fuming at all this jew humbug. It is simply got up to call off our thoughts from Armenia and Crete. If I were to say that every nation has a right to wallop its own jews I might be misunderstood, for I don't want to wallop anybody, even jews. The best thing is to kick them out altogether, like King Edward Longshanks of famous memory. But I do say that if any nation chooses to wallop its own jews 'tis no business of any other nation. Whereas if the Turk wallops Cretans and Armenians it is our business, because we have promised to make them do otherwise. And, besides, if you simply want to abuse Russia there is Bulgaria bullied and Finland threatened. What can jews matter beside either of these?"

"Freeman is really a first-rate man, and knows about Federal Republics as well as about the Roman conquest."

"One can speak of Freeman as forming a view of English history based on his political prejudices; it would be at least equally justifiable and perhaps more accurate to speak of his forming political prejudices based on his view of English history. For The Norman Conquest was certainly not, as Round's criticism may be taken to imply, written primarily to support a political case. Freeman's Teutonic racialism, his liberal-democratic bias, and his general view of early English history were inextricably entangled to form a general view of the world. The Norman Conquest was the precipitate of the enthusiasms, obsessions, and prejudices of a lifetime... [I]t would be truer to say that Freeman admired Gladstone because he admired Harold than, as Round insinuates, vice versa."

"[I]t may be doubted whether any work of comparable importance in English historical literature has ever been more easy to criticize than Freeman's Norman Conquest. It was in Green's phrase "far too rhetorical and diffuse", and yet despite its excessive length, it concentrated too exclusively upon strictly political events. Nor was the treatment of the authorities itself comprehensive, so that a generation which has been taught to value the record sources of history, and which pays perhaps even an excessive reverence to material which has not yet been printed, is inevitably sceptical of an historian who neglected records, who misinterpreted Domesday Book, and who positively boasted his contempt for manuscripts. Freeman was, in fact, more erudite than critical, and even the narrative sources which were the sure foundation of his work were sometimes by him mishandled. Generally, as J. R. Green remarked, he tended to be unjust to the Norman writers, but otherwise he often gives the impression of giving equal credence to all his authorities and of blending together their contradictory accounts into an unreal synthesis. In this way his account of the crisis of 1051–2 is, for instance, incomprehensibly confused. It must, moreover, be added that, having made up his mind, he could show most obstinate bias towards his sources, selecting only those which could best illustrate his point of view... Freeman's Norman Conquest was, in short, magisterial without being definitive."

"It is not too much to say that Mommsen has no notion whatever of right and wrong. It is not so much that he applauds wrong actions, as that he does not seem to know that right and wrong have anything to do with the matter. No one has set forth more clearly than Mommsen the various stages of the process by which Rome gradually reduced the states round the Mediterranean to a state of dependence—what he, by one of the quasi-technicalities of which we complain, calls a state of clientship. It is, for clear insight into the matter, one of the best parts of the book. But almost every page is disfigured by the writer's unblushing idolatry of mere force. He cannot understand that a small state can have any rights against a great one, or that a patriot in such a state can be anything but a fool."

"Now the position for which I have always striven is this, that history is past politics, that politics are present history. The true subject of history, of any history that deserves the name, is man in his political capacity, man as the member of an organized society, governed according to law."

"This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it."

"But here comes the nuisance of the seventeenth century. One can't go unreservedly with any side, as one can with our friends in the thirteenth. My political and my religious sympathies are divided. I go with the Parliament as Parliament; but I can get up no sympathy with the Puritan as Puritan. I don't like his particular form of religion, and he is no more tolerant than anybody else. Surely Gardiner shows that in matters of opinion Laud was immeasureably more liberal than his enemies, and to the little that he really enforced in matters of ceremony there is the best witness, namely, that it has long been universally accepted without anybody of any party objecting, and that, though the letter of the law still allows something else."