political-commentators-from-england

"[T]he case for PR has been ratcheted up enormously by how disproportionate the outcome of the election was, up against a Labour-ist mindset that means justify ends and it doesn’t really matter, democratically, how you get there."

"We need a political class that can spend and regulate in the right way, that knows its job isn't to usher in a better world for us, but to create the conditions in which we can build it ourselves. [[Caroline Lucas|[Caroline] Lucas]] knew that, but our political and democratic system is so broken it fails to people like her; it wears them down and spits them out."

"The alternative is to appeal to the country's latent progressive majority that goes back decades. Last Thursday, this progressive vote amounted to over 60%, while the Tories scored just 29%. To mobilise it means recognising that difference and diversity, within a broadly common value set, is a strength not a weakness and that the best future is negotiated not imposed. Critically it allows us to win elections by speaking to the interests of the centre and left, not the right."

"It is tempting to linger over some of the confusions and contradictions in the various pronouncements at the conference. We need to reduce immigration because immigrants place too great a pressure on public services and housing. But we also need women to give birth to more children. Presumably, these will not be children who will be born in hospitals, attend schools and live in houses. We need more British people to work so we need fewer immigrants. But we certainly should not be funding childcare support to help mothers enter the labour market. In fact, we are not that keen on mothers entering the labour market at all."

"First, at the Treasury and subsequently at International Trade and then at the Foreign Office, she became adept at self-promotion. Not that one would pick that up from her account. She rails at the “trivialisation” of politics but was known as much for her Instagram posts as her policy positions; she complains of her time as prime minister about “a growing culture of leaks” but was widely suspected by her colleagues of being the most prolific leaker of cabinet meetings, presumably because she hoped to win favourable press coverage."

"The tone is pinched and narrow and disapproving but, above all, rather foreign (to use a phrase that might be understood by its contributors). It feels like an agenda for a different country or a different time. And that, of course, is what it is."

"In Moscow, the warrant officer radio operator removed his headphones and nodded toward the teleprinter. "Faint but clear," he said. The printer began to chatter, sending out a screed of paper covered with a jumble of meaningless letters. When it fell silent, the officer beside the radio tore off the sheet and fed it through the decoder, already set to the formula of the agreed one-time pad. The decoder absorbed the sheet, its computer ran through the permutations, and it delivered the message in clear. The officer read the text and smiled. He telephoned a number, identified himself, checked the identity of the man he was addressing, and said: "Aurora is 'go.'""

"Rawlings was a burglar and a thief, but like much of the London underworld he would not have anyone "trash" his country. It is a fact that convicted traitors in prison, along with child molesters, have to be kept in seclusion because professional "faces," if left alone with such a man, are likely to rearrange his component parts."

"The man with ten minutes to live was laughing."

"The British Secret Intelligence Service works out of Century House, a rather shabby building south of the Thames between the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. It is not a new building and not really up to the job it is supposed to do and so labyrinthine inside that visitors really do not need their security passes; within seconds, they get lost and end up screaming for mercy."

"Martin laughed. "President Bush," he said, "and all the people around him will act according to their upbringing. Which is based on the Judeo-Christian moral philosophy supported by the Greco-Roman concept of logic. And Saddam will react on the basis of his own vision of himself.""

"Uh-unh. Islam has nothing to do with it. Saddam doesn't care a fig for the hadith, the codified teachings of the Prophet. He prays on camera when it suits him. No, you have to go back to Nineveh and Assyria. He doesn't mind how many have to die, so long as he thinks he can win."

"Not really. There's a quantum leap in moral philosophy when you cross the Jordan."

"What you are saying," suggested Martin, "is that Iraq decided to use Model-T Ford technology, and because everyone assumed they'd go for Grand Prix racers, no one noticed."

"You got it, son. People forget—the old Model-T Ford may be old, but it worked. It got you there. It carried you from A to B. And it hardly ever broke down."

"They also drew their £1000 in five gold sovereigns and the "goolie chit." This remarkable document was first introduced to the Americans in the Gulf War, but the ritish, who have been flying combat in those parts since the 1920s, understood them well. A goolie chit is a letter in Arabic and six kinds of Bedouin dialect. It says in effect, "Dear Mr. Bedou, the presenter of this letter is a British officer. If you return him to the nearest British patrol, complete with his testicles and preferably where they ought to be and not in his mouth, you will be rewarded with £5000 in gold." Sometimes it works."

"The purpose of sketching out these half-dozen areas of risk is not to claim to know how bad they would turn out to be, but simply to point out how little thought the Brexotics have given to them, or to the suspicions and fears they have roused, not just in their own country but across the whole continent. There remains the last and to me the worst suspicion: that they would be quite happy to put their supposedly beloved country through a period of prolonged turmoil and stagnation simply for the exhilaration of being on their own at last."

"What still puzzles some people is that so many old-fashioned Tories should have fallen for such a seedy, treacherous chancer. In fact, I think [[Boris Johnson|[Boris] Johnson]] has succeeded because of his amorality, not despite it. The transgressive sayer of the unsayable breaks through the carapace of conventional politics with a mixture of humour and vituperation, slang and high-flown rhodomontade. Clowning is part of the act for the leader who wants to reach beyond good and evil in the fashion Nietzsche recommended. A cartoon Superman? Yes, but they all are. See Charlie Chaplin, passim. How long will he last – five weeks, five years? I have no idea. All I can say is what I see. And it is not a pretty sight."

"Ramadan typically brings a spike in violence in Middle East. I get grumpy when I don't eat - but I don't blow things up. Religion of peace?"

"The difference between most mothers and me is that I didn't sit around drinking coffee at baby group for 12 months after the birth of my baby. No, in three weeks I was back in my suit, back at my desk earning profit for my business and I don’t see why other women shouldn't do the same."

"Would I employ you if you were obese? No I would not. You would give the wrong impression to the clients of my business. I need people to look energetic, professional and efficient. If you are obese you look lazy."

"I'm not sorry for stealing my husband from his wife."

"Women don’t want equal treatment, they couldn’t handle it if they got it. It’s a tough world out there. What a lot of women are actually looking for is special treatment. What women need to realise is that they have to toughen up."

"Former lefties can make a good living in the media by attacking their ex-comrades – I'd do it myself if the price was right."

"[Proposals for multiple Las Vegas-style "super casinos" in the UK were under discussion at the time] Yet, to date, it is far from clear if the casino will give money to Blackpool or Blackpool give money to the casino. ... It [Blackpool council] is promising to compulsorily purchase the land for the casino, which is currently occupied by the police station and law courts. In a sign of the times, the council will agree to demolish public buildings that once embodied law and order to clear the ground for a gambling den and then spend public money on new homes for the police and judges. It gets better. The council already has spent public money on designing the new casino and finding a developer to put it up."

"Informed that seven women had come forward with sexual misconduct complaints, Mr. Cohen exclaimed, "Oh, God." "I assume it's stuff I was doing when I was drunk," said Mr. Cohen, a recovering alcoholic."

"Mr. Cohen's reputation was widely known in the newsroom, according to 10 former colleagues, both male and female. One former colleague said she and other female journalists had used a different entrance to a pub to avoid being groped by him. Another woman said she had avoided the bar downstairs from the newsroom after Mr. Cohen grabbed her knee during work drinks."

"Seven women told The New York Times that Mr. Cohen had groped them or made other unwanted sexual advances over nearly two decades. Four insisted on anonymity, fearing professional repercussions. In each case, The [New York] Times reviewed documents or otherwise corroborated their accounts."

"In an unintentionally revealing moment, Brand describes attending a trade union march against austerity. He complains that the protesters are not like Islamic State terrorists but "flaccid" and placid. He has a case. For all its many faults, the British left does not imitate Isis. It does not commit genocide and practise sexual slavery. Its "revolution", when and if it comes, will consist of boring, gradual attempts to restrain an economic system that is running amok. Russell Brand will want no part of its tedious reforms and will go off in search of bigger thrills. The sooner he leaves the better."

"The reason why Blackpool has to pay out gets to the heart of the delusion behind New Labour's thinking. It's not the scale of the poverty that puts the casino operators off the town, but that Blackpool's poverty is not great enough. ... Blackpool, like most seaside towns, is too far from the big centres of population to provide enough poor, addicted, desperate or foolish gamblers to allow the casinos to operate seven days a week, 52 weeks a year."