Journalists From England

"Hello, good evening and welcome."

"Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-to-day struggles of working people."

"[On Foot's housemaster at Shrewsbury School (1952–1955)] Trench made his name as a great innovator, especially in corporal punishment. He would select certain younger boys for special tuition in Greek prose, in which he was a recognised scholar. Less than three mistakes and a bar of chocolate; more than three a beating. But Trench was no ordinary flogger. He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn't. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant's trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt. He achieved the rare distinction of being hated and despised by every boy who came in contact with him, and was therefore an obvious choice to be the youngest ever headmaster of Bradfield, and then of Eton. At Eton he made the mistake of whipping the heirs of earls as though they were run-of-the-mill manufacturers' sons at Shrewsbury or Bradfield. One sensitive young viscount limped home and bared his tattered bum to his outraged father. Trench was sacked. He was appointed headmaster of Fettes."

"I'd been impressed, too, more than I dared admit at the campaign by Tony Benn and his supporters. Why, I wonder? I'd never been an admirer of him personally. I suppose I've bashed him in print just as much as anyone else in the country, even the Daily Mirror leader writers. It wasn't even that I was specially keen on the specific policies he was advocating. As you know, I don't much go for a 'siege economy' and import controls, which I regard as a lot of nationalist claptrap. And I certainly didn't like all those eulogies about Russia which were starting to creep into Tony Benn's speeches, and which reminded me of the sort of windy fellow-travelling which polluted the Left in the 1940s and 1950s. I suppose what I liked was the straight appeal to socialist solutions – the open attack on capitalism and all its works."

"Change does not just happen, and it certainly doesn't just come because one day Tony Benn might be prime minister at the head of a left-wing Labour government. It comes when people fight for it. And that is why we, with our four thousand members and a fighting newspaper, are more optimistic and confident than you with your quarter of a million paper members, with your resolutions, intrigues, doubts and dilemmas. How much more confident and optimistic we would both be if we were members of the same organisation. And remember, it is no good appealing to me to join the Labour Party. I would not be let in. My application alone would probably cost you a dozen more defections from the Parliamentary Labour Party to the SDP and another couple of points drop in the opinion polls. No, I'm afraid there is only one possible way in which we can now come together: for you to come to us."

"There appears to be a link between the enormity of a crime and the ignominy which attaches to any journalist or investigator who publicly questions the guilt of those convicted for it. This has been especially true in the case of Irish people convicted of bombings in Britain. Anyone who questions the verdict against an Irish bomber is assumed to be a bomber himself. As a result of this extraordinary logic, the authorities have been able to get away with mistakes, inconsistencies and far worse."

"I am sorry to read in this book that Ian Botham is an 'independent Tory' and (worse) that he admires Mrs Thatcher. But I am not inclined to mix politics with sport. Indeed, the worst damage done to cricket since the war has been that mixing of politics with sport which knocked South Africa out of international cricket. The supporters of apartheid mixed politics with sport so shamefully that they banned people from playing cricket with one another because of the colour of their skin. This outrage, which brought the entire sport into disrepute, was greeted with unconcern by the same MCC gentlemen who have apoplexy when cricketers say they smoked pot when they were kids. Racialism is a million times more damaging to cricket than cannabis. Where does Ian Botham stand on that? He was offered, literally, a million pounds if he and his friend Viv Richards went to South Africa as part of the public relations circus for that country’s racialist politics. He refused point blank."

"Which is the more subversive: a group of senior people in the security services who are giving secrets to the enemy, or a group of senior people in the security services who are working systematically to bring down the elected government here? The question would worry most democrats, but for the authors of books about the security services it is no worry at all. To a man, they are absorbed with the first danger. The second danger, they protest, does not exist. Or rather, if it does exist, it is best not to mention it."

"The first I heard of Tony Cliff, who has died aged 82, was from Gus Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, Minister of Transport. ... In late 1961, he reckoned it was time the Young Socialists took some serious lessons in Marxist theory, and arranged a weekend school to be addressed by two leaders of an obscure Trotskyist sect called the International Socialists. Gus and I met the couple in an airport lounge. I can still see them coming in: Mikhael Kidron, smart, suave, urbane, and Tony Cliff, short and scruffy, looking and sounding like a rag doll. As we mumbled through the niceties of introductions, the rag doll looked irritated and shy. We climbed into a taxi. As we did so, I saw a newspaper poster about events in the Congo, and remarked, partly to break the silence, that I'd never really understood the Congo. Quick as a flash, the rag doll came to life, and started jabbering with amazing speed and energy. I can't remember exactly what he said, but I do remember my clouds of doubt and misunderstanding suddenly disappearing and the role of the contestants in the Congo, including the United Nations, becoming brutally clear."

"Shelley wrote that some atrocity on the part of the wealthy set "the blood boiling in indignation in my veins". Ever since I first read that, I've subjected any new political analysis to a BBIV (blood boiling in veins) test. Do these two books pass? The unequivocal answer in both cases is 'yes'. The blood boils all right, both at the corporate exploiters and the politicians who dance to their tune."

"Who says history doesn't repeat itself? Twenty-seven years ago, in 1977, a Birmingham Labour MP, Roy Jenkins, scuttled off to a well-paid job in Europe, and resigned his seat. The Labour candidate who lost the subsequent byelection was Terry Davies. He later won the seat but is now scuttling off to a well-paid job in Europe, causing another byelection. And there the historical repetition ends. I was the Socialist Workers party candidate in that 1977 byelection, and came bottom of the poll with 0.8 per cent of the vote. My friend John Rees, who is standing there now for the Respect coalition, promises me he will do better."

"[On George Kennedy Young, a former deputy head of MI6, and (later a) merchant banker] The intellectual integrity which he guarded most assiduously was that of the Far Right. He was a racialist to his very core. He detested black people, whose immigration into this country in the Fifties and Sixties drove him into paroxysms of fury. He took the side of the Arabs in the Middle East for the only reason which has never been justified: their antagonists were Jews. He believed that the postwar Tory Party was riddled with treacherous moderates, crypto-Communists and homosexuals. He spent many years fighting in the Tory Party for a leadership which stood up for the Old Order he believed in. He was chairman of Tory Action, which campaigned so successfully in 1974 and 1975 to remove Edward Heath as Tory leader and replace him with Thatcher. He even stood for Parliament himself. But he was, as the [previously cited] memo makes clear, deeply suspicious of anything which smacked of democracy."

"[[w:Michael Crick|[Michael] Crick]] cannot discover whether Archer really believes in God. The evidence of his book, however, is heavily weighted against God's existence. Any omnipotent deity with a grain of mercy would surely have preserved us from Jeffrey Archer."

"Add to these anecdotes and quotations [[Andrew Neil|[Andrew] Neil]]'s writing style, which is dour and monotonous, that in all its 481 pages there is not the slightest trace of a joke nor a sign that the greatest young journalist of his generation ever enjoyed a single book he didn't serialise, and you might conclude that Full Disclosure should be consigned to everlasting fire. You would be quite wrong. The book is thoroughly absorbing. It is a dark tragedy the chief fascination of which is that its author does not realise he is in a tragedy at all."

"It is not Neil Kinnock's fault that he is unconvincing. He is unconvincing because he represents a formula for changing society which has been proved, over sixty years more, to have failed in its central purpose. Compare Kinnock in any age to [[Clement Attlee|[Clement] Attlee]] in any age, and on every conceivable count Kinnock is the more impressive. Attlee, for all the ridiculous hero-worship of history, was really a mean-minded bore, whose only political quality was cunning. He had none of Kinnock’s passion, none of his oratory, none of his charisma. But Attlee (and Wilson, in the same sort of way, with the same sort of qualities) won elections while Kinnock loses them. The difference is not in the quality of the men, but in the huge history of failure with which Kinnock – but not Attlee, and Wilson rather less – has had to wrestle."

"All the gifts which providence had showered on Jonathan Aitken were devoted to pimping for the billionaires from Riyadh."

"No decision in business provides greater potential for the creation of wealth (or its destruction, come to think of it) than the choice of which innovation to back."

"All businesses operate below their true potential. That is unavoidable, given the fallibility of human beings."

"Common sense suggests that some factors in a [risk management] process are more important than others — and analysis supports this. In reality, only 20 percent of activities. In reality, only 20 percent of activities may account for up to 80 percent of results. This is known as Pareto's law, the “80/20 rule”...Pareto's law concentrates on the significant 20 percent and gives the less important 80 percent lower priority."

"Letting I dare not wait upon I would is a mug's game, and those who play it usually get mugged."

"Decisions should be pushed down as far as possible, to the level of competence. This allows senior managers more time for making decisions of a more complex nature"

"Decision tree - The most picturesque of all the allegedly scientific aids to making decisions. The analyst charts all the possible outcomes of different options, and charts all the latters' outcomes, too. This produces a series of stems and branches (hence the tree). Each of the chains of events is given a probability and a monetary value."

"When I left university I had two objectives; I wanted to write and I wanted to get married. The only way I could afford both was to get a job as a journalist. At that time, the National Union of Journalists was very powerful and would not allow the direct recruitment of journalists from college except under special circumstances. The Financial Times was deemed special and duly recruited a cadre of very bright young people. I joined the FT as part of that now celebrated intake and, as a result, found myself working on a business newspaper."

"Management — The definition that includes all the other definitions in this book and which, because of that, is the most general and least precise. Its concrete, people meaning — the board of directors and all executives with the power to make decisions — is no problem, except for the not-so-little matter of where to draw the line between managers who are part of "the management" and managers who are not."

"Management is a far more homely business than its would be scientists suggest, more closely allied to cookery than any other human activity. Like cooking, it rests on a degree of organisation and on adequate resources. But just as no two chefs run their kitchens the same way, so no two managements are the same."

"What goes wrong [in long-range planning] is that sensible anticipation gets converted into foolish numbers: and their validity always hinges on large loose assumptions."

"Never ignore a gut feeling: but never believe that it's enough on its own"

"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that's enough."

"My first book “The Naked Manager”, a big success in 1971, had been followed by many others, and I wanted to write still more. Writing books is very interesting as each new project takes you in a different direction. You learn a lot – especially about what you yourself really think."

"Although he reputedly hated the label of ‘guru’, Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the ‘the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow’ and Robert Heller described him as ‘the greatest man in the history of management’, praise indeed for a man who described himself as ‘just an old journalist’."

"CEO of General Electric for 30 years, Jack Welch was declared the greatest manager of the 20th century. Focusing firmly on results, he revolutionized management to achieve phenomenal growth for his company."

"Effective management always means asking the right question."

"Managers are to information as alcoholics are to booze. They consume enormous amounts, constantly crave more, but have great difficulty in digesting their existing intake."

"The difference between management and administration (which is what the bureaucrats used to do exclusively)... is the difference... between choice and rigidity."

"Marx argued that all human history was dominated by a tussle for the wealth between classes, one of which took the wealth, and used it to exploit the others. As science and technology developed, so one exploiting class was replaced by another that used the resources of society more efficiently. The necessity for exploitation, he observed, had ended with capitalism. If the working class, the masses who cooperate to produce the wealth, could seize the means of production from the capitalist class, they could put an end to exploitation forever and run society on the lines of the famous slogan: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’"

"Two of my favourite current management writers are Americans – Clayton Christensen and Peter Senge. My all-time favourite gurus are Peter Drucker, who became a greatly admired friend, and W. Edwards Deming. The thing that set these people apart from many other business commentators is that they didn’t propose any all - encompassing theories, they simply told it like it is. The fact is that life cannot be summarised as a simple set of rules; it’s far too complicated for that and it’s always changing. Unfortunately, all-encompassing panaceas do seem to be popular and certainly sell books, which is why I so value the objectivity of thought that each of these people brought to the debate."

"The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill."

"Robert Heller can rightly be credited with promoting "management" as a skill that could be learned and perfected – and written about."

"Socialist society can only come about by a revolution; if the masses, through general strikes and mass agitation, seize the means of production from their present owners.‘But doesn’t that involve violence? Surely you’re not prepared to use violence to achieve your political ends?’This cry is always flung in the face of revolutionaries, usually by people who are only too prepared to accept without complaint the recurring and brutalising violence of the class society in which we live. It comes from people who ignored or supported the orgy of destruction which the government of America launched for more than a full decade against the people of Vietnam; from people who offer sympathy and succour to the regime of the Shah of Persia, which is founded on the torture of dissenters; of from people who hardly raise a word of protest about the deep violence of tyrannical governments all over the world – from Thailand, to South Africa to South Korea; or from people who never turn a hair at the institutionalised violence of everyday life – of people being maimed and battered in factories and building sites through negligence and greed of employers; of old people tormented by hunger and cold."

"I fear many working men will tell Mrs. Besant that the greatest hindrance to their political and social activity is the apathy of their wives."

"Women in general are not interested in questions of principle as such, but at most only in so far as they affect particular personalities. They require the dramatic element to evoke their interest. With many men, on the contrary, though this element of course enhances interest, it is not the indispensable condition of interest."

"I think she understates in favour of her own sex the inequality which she admits to exist between the male and female intellect."

"Modern Feminism has two distinct sides to it: (1) an articulate political and economic side embracing demands for so-called rights; and (2) a sentimental side which insists in an accentuation of the privileges and immunities which have grown up, not articulately or as the result of definite demands, but as the consequence of sentimental pleading in particular cases. In this way, however, a public opinion became established, finding expression in a sex favouritism in the law and even still more in its administration, in favour of women as against men."

"From all we have said, it will now be evident, one would think, to the most prejudiced reader that modern English Law, following obsequiously a deluded or apathetic stage of public opinion, has solved the problem of the division of rights and duties between the sexes, by conceding to woman all rights, and imposing on man all duties."

"Certain Socialist writers are fond of describing the Social-Democratic State of the future as implying the "emancipation of the proletarian and the woman." As regards the latter point, however, if emancipation is taken to include domination, we have not to wait so long. The highest development of modern capitalism, as exemplified in the English-speaking countries, has placed man to all intents and purposes, legally under the heel of woman. So far as the relations of the sexes are concerned, it would be the task of Socialism to emancipate man from this position, if sex-equality be the goal aimed at. The first step on the road towards such equality would necessarily consist in the abolition of modern female privilege."

"There is a trick with which votaries of Feminism seek to prejudice the public mind against its critics, and that is the “fake” that any man who ventures to criticise the pretensions of Feminism, is actuated by motives of personal rancour against the female sex."

"Christianity also owes me an explanation... For the bigotry, the wickedness, the inhumanity and the wilful ignorance which has also characterized much of its history."

"I OWE Christianity a debt, and so, I believe, does the world we have lived in for the last 2000 years."

"The "Theatre of the Absurd" has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement — and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world. Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise."

"The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation."