Journalists From England

"We need to secure resources for large-scale economic transformational change. That can be achieved by a government committed to subordinating markets in money, goods and services to regulatory democracy – in other words, to the interests of the democratic societies and the ecosystems in which they operate. 'Free-market' neoliberal economic policies that detach markets from society's oversight achieve the reverse. They are designed to subject markets to private, not public, democratic authority."

"Clive Lewis is unusual for a Labour MP – not least among Labour’s left flank – for being a former serviceman. He joined the Territorial Army in 2006 and served in Afghanistan in 2009, where he remembers soldiers' boots melting because of the heat. There was a "bit of a macho camaraderie" and "Man up, cupcake" was an expression he heard a lot."

"So this is our plan for growth. We want the words: ‘Made in Britain, Created in Britain, Designed in Britain, Invented in Britain’ to drive our nation forward. A Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers. That is how we will create jobs…We have put fuel into the tank of the British economy."

"Osborne seems to reserve his choicest weapons for Theresa May, the beleaguered prime minister. On his first day as editor, the front page of the Standard announced "Brussels twists knife on Brexit [as] EU chief mocks PM May with her own 'Strong and Stable' leadership slogan". The attacks on May have become only more intense since then. (One clinical sentence in a Standard editorial from 21 June simply read: "Enough of this nonsense.") Osborne's animus against May is complicated in origin — personal, political, ideological, tactical — but purely felt. When I met him at the Standard this past spring, he was polite enough about the prime minister. But according to one staffer at the newspaper, Osborne has told more than one person that he will not rest until she "is chopped up in bags in my freezer"."

"We are going to try to persuade rebel MPs from other parties to back us. And look, when the dust settles people can see that the Conservative Party wants to give the British people an 'in-out' choice on our membership in Europe."

"[Leaving the EU is] the biggest economic crisis that our country will have faced for many, many generations."

"[Brexit is] the first instance that I can think of in living memory of a government pursuing a policy that they know is going to make our economy smaller and reduce people's livelihoods and life chances and I cannot understand why we in Labour would support that."

"If we insist on leaving the EU then there is realistically only one way to honour our obligations under the Good Friday Agreement and that is to remain members of both the customs union and the single market"

"He [Prince Harry] demands accountability for the press, but refuses to accept any for himself for smearing the royal family, his own family, as a bunch of callous racists without producing a shred of proof to support those disgraceful claims. He also says he's on a mission to reform the media, but it's become clear his real mission, along with his wife, is to destroy the British monarchy, and I will continue to do whatever I can to stop them. Merry Christmas."

"He thinks it’s OK to spout a load of venomous, hateful things, which he then tries to back up with statistics. I really, really don't like Piers Morgan [...] And also, through that whole hacking thing, he got away with murder. I just think he’s a bit of a heinous human being."

"As I've said before, I’m ashamed of some of the inappropriate language I used in The Sun thirty years ago about gay stars. They were different times, but that’s no excuse – it was offensive, it was wrong, and I apologise for it."

"The liberals get what they want, which is a humorless void where nothing happens, where no one dare do anything, or laugh about anything, or behave in any way that doesn't suit their rigid way of leading a life. No thanks."

"It's hardly worth dignifying this man with a response. In any case, all he's been offering for information about my private life is a £50 reward. My friends think that's not nearly enough."

"Right, now all you have to do – and I know it's hard because celebrities don't like doing anything for themselves – is actually change your security number."

"I had more complaints from people who wanted to be in who weren't than from those who were in. Given that there was a lot of score-settling, I was surprised no one took me on, and disappointed actually."

"There was a spate of stories that came out because of mobile phones. When they first came out, mobile phones ... journalists found out that if the celebrity hadn't changed their pin code ... You can access, access their voicemail. Just by tapping in a number. Are you really telling me that journalists aren't going to do that? If they know they can ring up Charlotte Church's mobile phone, listen to all her messages?"

"I've always made it a strict rule in life to ingratiate myself with three categories of people: newspaper owners, potential newspaper owners and billionaires. This is a despicablle, shameless but often successful modus operandi that hasn't to date done me much harm."

"I actually didn’t care that much about the [[Jeremy Clarkson|[Jeremy] Clarkson]] stuff until he began behaving ridiculously, smacking me round the head. He’s perfectly entitled to smack me around the head, but the idea that smacking editors will help your PR is rather short-sighted."

"[On journalism] It is full of lying, cheating, drunken, cocaine-sniffing, unethical people. It's a wonderful profession."

"I like waging feuds [...] They get me going and make me perform better. I don't start them but I always finish them."

"Don't chase women, they will chase you… They are like horses in a pasture: if you don't go drooling over her, she is going to want to know why."

"There is a certain advantage to the British accent. I do notice that Americans love it; they think that we Brits are smarter than perhaps we are."

"There is a type of snobbish, pompous journalist who thinks that the only news that has any validity is war, famine, pestilence or politics. I don't come from that school. I certainly appreciate those kinds of stories. I've certainly devoted a lot of time on my show to them. But I also have a much broader spectrum of what I think is interesting, relevant, current or newsworthy."

"Liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal and it’s a massive problem. What’s the point of calling yourself a liberal if you don’t allow anyone else to have a different view? You know, this snowflake culture we operate in, this victimhood culture that everyone, has to think in a certain way, behave a certain way. Everyone has to have a bleeding heart… You say a joke 10 years ago that offended somebody you can never host the Oscars… So what’s happening around the world? Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They’re fed up with the snowflake culture. They’re fed up with everyone being offended by everything… They just want to tell people, not just how to lead their life but if you don’t lead it the way I tell you to. It’s a kind of version of fascism."

"As I left, Jimmy Savile came up to me. "Your TV shows are BRILLIANT!" he exclaimed. "And as I’ve been in the telly business for 50 years, you can take that as an informed view." I’ve always loved Jimmy Savile. (Mail on Sunday "Night and Day" column, 2009)"

"The Jimmy Savile scandal grows more horrific by the minute [...] I never met him... (Mail on Sunday column October 2012)"

"[On revealing a pop star's adultery] If X is singing about love and marriage, and sleeping with the nanny, then he deserves to be exposed."

"[On the fake photos of British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners for which he was fired as editor of the Mirror] I refused to apologize or accept that we had necessarily been duped. I still don’t accept it — I’ve never seen the evidence"

"Bill O’Reilly is like a comfortable pair of shimmeringly angry slippers, but you know every night what you’re going to get."

"There are many different ways of categorizing news. It doesn't have to be just war and famine and serious politics."

"It is almost always impossible to get the fascist party together without using some anti-capitalist slogans, in the early stages at any rate, of the necessary propaganda. And this type of propaganda may have so coloured the minds of the rank and file of the Fascist party as to make them difficult adequately to control."

"The retention of power by the capitalist class by means of the success of a fascist party necessarily implies the scrapping of all democratic institutions. It involves revelation, without any attempt at a democratic disguise, of capitalist dictatorship. And a wise capitalist class will certainly not dispense with the serviceable mask of democracy, which has stood it in good stead, until no other course is open to it."

"The institutions of democracy will be gradually and, if possible, imperceptibly withdrawn. The Press will become a better and better directed and drilled servant of the capitalist class. All other methods of disseminating information, notably the cinema and the wireless, will be more and more consciously monopolized. Power may be gradually withdrawn from a democratically elected Chamber (cf . Reform of the House of Lords in Britain) or alternatively the franchise may be gradually curtailed (cf. the proposals of the British Conservative party for withholding the franchise from persons in receipt of poor relief). At the same time, the habitual regime of police violence will be increased (cf. the present heavy sentences on working-class militants in Britain passed almost openly, not for any specific offence but because the accused were working-class militants, as notably in the case of Arthur Homer; the increasing use of terror in all American wage disputes ; the police regime in France, etc., etc.). This method applies the principle of " the inevitability of gradualness " to the introduction of an open capitalist dictatorship."

"[Did he enjoy his first year as editor of the News of the World?] Very much. It's been a very interesting year. At my age, I probably wasn't expected to survive, but I'm glad to be still here. Oh, if you don't mind, I'd rather not be seen in the photograph with a drink in my hand, if you don't mind"

"Strachey [was] the most persuasive Marxist who has ever influenced this country's thinking."

"[As editor of the Bizarre feature in The Sun newspaper] I became the Friend of the Stars, a rampant egomaniac, pictured all the time with famous people - Madonna, Stallone, Bowie, Paul McCartney, hundreds of them. It was shameless, as they didn't know me from Adam. The Sun had had a bad time, after losing an action with Elton John, but this was harmless and funny. The publicity people from the record companies were all in on the joke."

"The fascist method essentially implies the attempt to create a popular mass movement for the protection of monopoly capitalism. Its adoption means that the directing capitalist groups consider that the regular State forces at their disposal are inadequate or unsuitable for repressing the workers. Thus, an attempt is made to create, by the employment of skilled demagogues, the expenditure of large sums of money, and the reckless dissemination of propaganda designed to play on every prejudice, a mass party composed of a petty bourgeois nucleus, combined with such backward workers and peasants as can be successfully deceived. This party is then used for the destruction by terror of working-class organizations of struggle, the workers' defence organizations, clubs, trade unions, newspapers and party machines."

"[On his promotion to editor of the News of the World] I got a call one day, asking me to see Rupert Murdoch in Miami. I suspected it must be something good, but I never expected this. I was flabbergasted. Obviously, Kelvin [MacKenzie] had helped, but you have to realise I was filling the column five days a week, running it like a mini newspaper. I had a staff of four and my own budget. I had been offered promotion, as features editor of the Sun, but turned it down, feeling I wasn't ready yet to be a faceless executive."

"There is a nice story which is rather revealing about the power of Keynes's arguments and their political content. It is about John Strachey, a Marxist. He was a cousin of Lytton Strachey ― they both had the same skill in writing. John Strachey wrote a book called The Coming Struggle for Power. In the 1930s this book was so influential in Cambridge, England, that, when I got there, every person had it on his bookshelf, prominently displayed. It was an exciting book, intellectually exciting to read. It was the Bible of Cambridge students. In my last year at Cambridge Strachey was invited by the Marshall Society, which was the general undergraduate society for economics student, to give a talk. In this talk he argued that Marx showed us the way to make the system work, an argument that met a very, very strong favorable response ― as his earlier writing had done. I had been asked in advance to move a vote of thanks at the end of the lecture; say a few words, if I could, about his lecture, but essentially to move a vote of thanks. I did, except I took the occasion to say that there would appear ― this was in November 1935 ― within a few months a book that would set out a superior method of analysis. It had been written by John Maynard Keynes. I didn't know whether Strachey would know the name. He motioned to me and said, "I'd like to thank you for your vote of thanks," and so on; "I'd like to find out more about the book by Keynes." And I told him, and he took down the name. At the time, I did not realize the connection between Keynes and Lytton Strachey and Lytton and John Strachey. A couple of years later I received a new book by John Strachey in the mail from the Left Book Club. I was astounded; it was absolutely Keynes. I mean, he was so much influenced by Keynes ― he had been so strongly influenced by Keynes that he became an instant, overnight, follower. Strachey really understood Keynes; it's a brilliant exposition and application to the British situation. It's rather more interesting than Keynes and deserves to be reprinted. It shows how Keynes had refuted Communism and how John Strachey, an extreme Marxist whose life up to then had been devoted to Marx and the Marxian course, had been completely changed by Keynes. Given that history, the later attacks on U.S. Keynesians, accusing them of being Communists, were incomprehensible to me."

"If the burden of working for little reward in an isolating society stripped of any overriding purpose can be recognised to have an effect on individuals, how could it not also be said to have an effect on society as a whole? Or to put it the other way around, if enough people in a society are suffering from a form of exhaustion, might it not be that the society they are living in has become exhausted?"

"A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future."

"Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair."

"Humza Yousaf, as far as I can see, is not the First Minister of Scotland [...] He's become the First Minister of Gaza, or an ambassador for Gaza, or something like that. But people like Humza Yousaf, I say it carefully, have infiltrated our system. He does not seem to be much bothered by the situation of the Scottish people, or the people of Glasgow who have one of the lowest life expectancies not just in Britain but anywhere in Europe. He does not seem to care about that or if he does, he does nothing about it. But my word if you look at his social media proclamations … you would think that he was indeed First Minister of Gaza. This is a problem that the Scots must sort out, the Scottish electorate must sort out, indeed the British electorate must sort out."

"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century. In Europe, in particular, nationalism after all sounds different depending on the country you're in. Nationalism in Israel sounds different to nationalism in America, sounds different to nationalism in Italy, sounds different to nationalism here in Britain."

"[T]his is one occasion when saying that some people are worse than the Nazis is not hyperbole. Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler's were rarely proud of their average days' work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up. Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff "morale"."

"We do live in a society in which victimhood is the main goal. To be a victim and to be on the victim hierarchy, to have the delicious opportunity to be the most victimized person is clearly the aspiration. We've all seen it in our lives when people pick up the microphone in a Q&A and say 'Speaking as...', and I think 'Ah, everything that is going to come afterwards is going to be garbage.' And then they'll say something about their 'lived experience', as if there is any other kind of experience. 'In my unlived experience...'?"

"Compare this with the behaviour of Hamas on October 7 [2023]. As those of us who have viewed the raw footage from the day have seen and heard for ourselves, these terrorists were not just pleased with what they were doing. They were elated. They spent the whole time screaming "Allahu Akbar" with delight. As they decapitated bodies and shot terrified civilians, they were grinning, congratulating each other and seeking acclaim from others."

"[Friedrich Nietzsche] said somebody must stand over the life of the person of resentment and say to them at some point: 'You are right. You have reason to be resentful. There is somebody who has ruined your life. There is somebody who has held you back. The person is you.' Now, that is probably the least pleasant thing to hear and probably one of the hardest things to ever say. How can a politician, should a politician, say to certain people 'You know, you have screwed up your life, and it's been your responsibility and your fault. You can turn it around, but if you don't want to, you'll still be the only person to blame.'"

"There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell. So in general, I begin to feel in good company. If government agencies are going to compile lists of suspect books, then I am very happy to stand condemned alongside these fine people, both living and dead."

"So it was that Biden ended up choosing Kamala Harris, a senator and former state attorney general who had distinguished herself most in the primaries by attacking him as a racist. On the sole occasion this was raised after she joined the ticket Harris laughed her special laugh. You are lucky if you have not heard this laugh. It is of a type rarely heard outside a penitentiary: a sort of wild, false, exaggerated impersonation of how a human being might laugh. Harris laughs like Mark Zuckerberg moves — as though he has studied these humanoids and is hoping to stay undercover until cyborg D-Day."