Owen Jones Quotes

A victory is scored when your opponents are forced to debate issues they would rather leave ignored

Demonisation is the ideological backbone of an unequal society.

May you always look as beautiful as this last time I saw you.

One day, this Establishment will fall. It will not do so on its own terms or of its own accord, but because it has been removed by a movement with a credible alternative that inspires. For those of us who want a different sort of society, it is surely time to get our act together.

Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants and private equity directors had disappeared, society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So,

The modern Establishment relies on a mantra of 'There Is No Alternative': potential opposition is guarded against by enforcing disbelief in the idea that there is any other viable way of running society.

But as the late socialist politician Tony Benn would often put it, social change is a combination of two things: ‘the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope for a better world’.

When Art struggles, it succeeds; when revelling in its own successes, it as singularly fails.

The Establishment is amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it.

Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents.

Chav-bashing draws on a long, ignoble tradition of class hatred. But it cannot be understood without looking at more recent events. Above all, it is the bastard child of a very British class war.

We bar girls don't cheat on wives, we are just the rope that cheating husbands hang themselves with.

It is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live,’ he argued. ‘If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street.

George Orwell observed: ‘If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole … the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the corners of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief.’2

The objective is to change the system and the behaviour it encourages, rather than replacing 'bad' people with 'good' people.

Perhaps the Irish are so rich in the voice because twas the only thing the English could not take from them. It is why the Welsh sing.

Only by making common cause with the burgeoning workforces of India and China can British workers hope to stem the consequences of a global ‘race to the bottom’ in pay and conditions.

I'm very critical of political parties. I don't think they're needed in the world as it is now. They impede the development of individuals, they encroach on creativity and they impose absurd structures of discipline.

Taken together, New Labour policies have helped to build a series of overlapping chav caricatures: the feckless, the non-aspirational, the scrounger, the dysfunctional and the disorderly. To hear this sort of rhetoric from Labour, rather than the Tories, has confirmed the stereotypes and prejudices many middle-class people have about working-class communities and individuals. But it can be far subtler than outright attacks. Many of New Labour's underlying philosophies were steeped in middle-class triumphalism. They were based on the assumption that the tattered remnants of the working-class were are on the wrong side of history - and must be made to join 'Middle England' like the rest of us.

What does the case of Jade Goody show us, other than the capacity of the British media for crassness and cruelty? Above all it demonstrated that it is possible to say practically anything about people from Jade’s background. They are fair game.

As well as a shared mentality, the Establishment is cemented by financial links and a 'revolving door' culture: that is, powerful individuals gliding between the political, corporate and media worlds - or who manage to inhabit these various worlds at the same time. The terms of political debate are in large part dictated by a media controlled by a small number of exceptionally rich owners, while think tanks and political parties are funded by wealthy individuals and corporate interests.

Citizens are equal to government. They should be at the same height as government. Citizens have to know that the government is at their service, the government is the servant of people. But citizens know it's not like this. This is the theory, but in reality it's the other way.

We are like the RCMP, we are Mountees and we always get our man to come, just not always quietly.

She was crushed by society like a mosquito fending for its unborn young

Cavalrymen and horses deserve each other.

A stack overflow error caused cabin fever and the reset button was Pattaya.

Under the modern Establishment, the function of the state has been reconfigured. Now, it exists to support private interests, including sectors - like the City - which have nothing but contempt for the state.

As a non-believer, I want the atheist case to be made. I want religious belief to be scrutinised and challenged. I want Britain to be a genuinely secular nation, where religious belief is protected and defended as a private matter of conscience. But I feel prevented from doing so because atheism in public life has become so dominated by a particular breed that ends up dressing up bigotry as non-belief. It is a tragedy. And that is why it is so important that atheists distance themselves from those who undermine our position. Richard Dawkins can rant and rave about Muslims as much as he wants. But atheists: let's stop allowing him to do it in our name.

Do you know this place, Lek?" he shouted in her ear. “Stop. Stop here. I want to go shopping." He didn't. He wanted to look for a bar, but he knew the word 'shopping' had more stopping power than the word 'bar' – the word 'shopping' was the verbal equivalent of a 44 Magnum.

I would like Britain - and indeed other countries - to be run in the interests of people's needs and aspirations, rather than on the basis of profit for a small elite; for democracy to be democratically managed by working people; for democracy to be extended as far as possible, including in the workplace and the economy.

Benefit fraud – costing an annual £1.2 billion, or 0.7 per cent of social security spending – is treated as a despicable crime, while tax avoidance – worth an estimated £25 billion a year – is even facilitated by the state, with accountancy firms that promote such tax avoidance seconded to government to draw up tax laws.

She handed Mrs. Hines, the librarian, a list of college textbooks. “Could you please help me find The Principles of Organic Chemistry by Geissman, Invertebrate Zoology of the Coastal Marsh by Jones, and Fundamentals of Ecology by Odum . . .” She’d seen these titles referenced in the last of the books Tate had given before he left her for college.

Political power is small, although from outside it can seem very large. Economic power is much more important, as is the power of media communication. They are true powers. What does political power do? Changes the laws. And what effect does that have? It's very relative. We know very little about how many laws are adhered to, and if they are followed what effect that has. We have to manage to create a change in attitudes and changes of attitude are obtained more through campaigns, through attitudes that set an example, than through laws, through sanctions etc. A change in attitudes of communication, cultural change, has an absolutely unstoppable effect. I have lived in a Spain when if you were gay you would be thrown in prison. Realistically, they haven't especially changed the laws, until we cleared up the possibility of marriage, but at the start of the democracy gay people were thrown in prison. The law barely changed but people's attitudes did. It was in films, on television, it was in novels, it was examples - gay people who came out of the closet, they were kind, we loved them; there was a change.

La difícil situación de algunas personas de clase trabajadora se presenta comúnmente como una «falta de ambición» por su parte. Se achaca a sus características individuales, más que a una sociedad profundamente desigual organizada en favor de los privilegiados. En su forma extrema, esto ha llevado incluso a un nuevo darwinismo social. Según el psiquiatra evolutivo Bruce Charlton, «los pobres tienen un coeficiente de inteligencia más bajo que el de gente más adinerada… y esto significa que un porcentaje mucho menor de gente de clase trabajadora que de clase profesional podrá cumplir los requisitos normales para entrar en las universidades más selectivas»

Pinochet shared one of the main aims of his ideological soulmates in Britain: to erase the working class as a concept. His goal, he declared, was to ‘make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs’.

Morality is personal. There is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness, collective gentleness, collective freedom,’ she planned to argue. ‘To talk of social justice, social responsibility, a new world order, may be easy and make us feel good, but it does not absolve each of us from personal responsibility.’ It was clearly too much for her speechwriters and did not make the final cut. However, they were not able to stop her infamous declaration several years later (in lifestyle magazine Woman’s Own, of all places): ‘There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.

just as I told Kathleen that very first day when I seen ’er, all looking fresh and pert as the flowers in May . . . I said to ’er, ‘One at a time and easy does it, and wash up proper after.’ Dr. Carr keeps telling them, but it’s a battle to get them to listen, and the careless ones pay the price.” Mrs. Walker had chatted herself into a disheartened state. “It’s rare to meet a proper young lady these days. Though Kathleen Boland could ’ave passed for a princess. Until she opened that shanty-Irish mouth of ’er’s.” I

Our gentlemen visitors ain’t allowed no more than a smile and a squeeze in the public rooms, for I won’t ’ave Sodom and Gomorrah under my roof. I always tell my girls, I tell them, ‘Ladies, just show the boys enough to give them a proper ’int of what they’re in for. And close your door be’ind you when you’re entertaining, for a gentleman is easily embarrassed.

Peter Owen Jones really helped me to see how I can be both. I do not need to choose and I do not need to mix them either.

the whole Iraq episode ‘permanently undermined the credibility and authority of the British state’.

Today’s Establishment is made up – as it has always been – of powerful groups that need to protect their position in a democracy in which almost the entire adult population has the right to vote. The Establishment represents an attempt on behalf of these groups to ‘manage’ democracy, to make sure that it does not threaten their own interests. In this respect, it might be seen as

Paul Staines puts it approvingly: ‘We’ve had nearly a century of universal suffrage now, and what happens is capital finds ways to protect itself from – you know – the voters.

Yet there is a logical flaw at the heart of Establishment thinking. It may abhor the state – but it is completely dependent on the state to flourish. Bailed-out banks; state-funded infrastructure; the state’s protection of property; research and development; a workforce educated at great public expense; the topping up of wages too low to live on; numerous subsidies – all are examples of what could be described as a ‘socialism for the rich’ that marks today’s Establishment.

MPs have become corporate politicians, envious of the hyper-wealthy elite they helped to create, frustrated at missing out on the spoils of their own policies. It is hardly stretching a point to say that many MPs now see their role not as a vocation, a duty or a service – but, rather, as just another upper-middle-class career option that is not being remunerated as well as other comparable professions.

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change,’ as Milton Friedman put it. ‘When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas lying around’ and ‘the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable’.

Tax avoidance was just one symptom of a broader dramatic shift in favour of big business that accompanied the rise of Britain’s Establishment. The transfer of public assets to the private sector; the reduction of corporate taxes; the entry of corporate lobbyists into the heart of power; untrammelled globalization; and the defeat of the traditional trade-union enemy – all fuelled a deep sense of entitlement and triumphalism, as well as an ever more unequal distribution of wealth.

As a report by the High Pay Centre in 2013 showed, at the turn of the millennium, the average FTSE 100 chief executive was paid forty times more than an ordinary worker; by 2011 it had surged to 185 times higher – even though share prices were lower.

It is a matter of bitter irony that the biggest global wave of nationalizations happened in the age of neo-liberal free markets. As Blanchflower puts it: ‘The private sector failed and had to be rescued by the public sector, and there was no alternative.’ This was socialism for the rich on an epic scale. It was not free-market dogma that came to the rescue of these banks: it was the state.

And so the nature of modern capitalism is exposed: a publicly subsidized racket, where the real ‘scroungers’ are to be found not at the bottom of society, but at the top. The great fire sale of state assets includes even an institution once described by a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, as the ‘closest the English have to a religion’ – namely, the NHS.

The Establishment is amassing wealth and aggressively annexing power in a way that has no precedent in modern times. After all, there is nothing to stop it. There

There is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second child—or third, or whatever—while living off state benefits

They were ‘good-for-nothing scroungers who have no morals, no compassion, no sense of responsibility and who are incapable of feeling love or guilt.

During the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown, prominent newspaper columnists defended their right to have someone clean their homes, even at significant risk to their health, on dubiously feminist grounds. Their argument was that without outsourcing domestic work it would be women who had to do the bulk of it. We might wonder if their cleaners were not also women. When the journalist Owen Jones criticised the cavalier attitude that employers of cleaners were taking to workplace safety, he was accused of sexism. His accusers claimed to be fighting the idea that women have some natural duty or propensity to cleaning but the upshot of their argument was that it is fine for some other – i.e. poorer, usually migrant – women to pick up after them. Escaping the confines of the domestic feminine was their individual prerogative, not a shared horizon for all women.

down. ‘Good evening,’ he said innocently. ‘Just checking why you’re parked here at 10.30 p.m. on a Saturday night,’ the security guard said suspiciously, eyeing our baby wipes in the middle of the seats. ‘We’re just out for a drive,’ Dan replied. ‘Seeing the sights.’ ‘Round ’ere? Good luck finding them,’ he scoffed, taking a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt. ‘Not to worry, mate. Drive on. Just checking you’re not up to no good.’ He winked, slapping the side of the van as he walked back to his post. Dan started the knackered engine of the scruffy Volkswagen. ‘Let’s get all this food back to the fridge at the kitchen. We can sort through it in the morning,’ he said. His hand brushed mine as I reached over to turn the radio on, and he changed gear. ‘Sorry,’ we mumbled at the same time, but I couldn’t ignore the rush of excitement I felt when our skin touched. I averted my eyes from Dan to the window and watched his reflection in the driver’s seat as we trundled through the dark streets. ‘You survived your first dumpster diving trip then,’ Dan said, breaking the tension between us. ‘It appears so,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t suppose you’re free tomorrow afternoon, after work, are you?’ My stomach did a teeny flip.

and

state subsidies – and consequently have not been implemented.

He recalls sympathetically the words of The Observer after Britain’s disastrous military intervention over the Suez Canal in 1956: ‘We had not realized that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.

The Establishment represents the institutional and intellectual means by which a wealthy elite defends its interests in a democracy. This was, after all, once far more straightforward to do. Before 1918, there were still property qualifications that prevented many working-class people from voting; and before Parliament extended the suffrage under pressure from below in 1832, 1867 and 1884, only the very privileged could vote. Because those without property were denied the right to vote, the political system was the plaything of the elite, existing simply to serve its interests.

most people are in favour of higher taxes on the rich and against running public services and utilities for profit, for example, and trust in key institutions is at an extremely low ebb. But promoting a sense of ‘there is no alternative’ – or so the unofficial slogan of the Establishment goes – has proved a tremendous ideological victory, fostering widespread acceptance and resignation, and sapping a will to resist.

The Establishment is also shielded by the deflection of popular anger directed at those at the bottom of society, rather than those at the top. Low-paid workers are encouraged by the media and politicians to envy the supposedly luxurious conditions of benefit-claiming unemployed people, rather than resent their employers for paying them insufficient wages. Private-sector workers with no pensions are encouraged to envy public-sector workers whose pensions are still intact. Those who cannot get council housing – because governments have refused to build it – or get secure jobs – because politicians of all stripes have allowed them to be stripped from the economy – are encouraged to envy immigrants supposedly getting what is rightfully theirs.

This big wolf, somewhere out in the dark with him was a hunter. It was born to be a predator, at home in the darkness that would not hinder it. He was just an old man riddled with doubt.

Perhaps that was what the war was really about. Twas an entire nation of runaways, America in 1861, and your place in society depended on what you had run from and when. Perhaps General McClellan was right that the war was not really about slavery. Perhaps it was a struggle between the dreams of men who would run no more.

Even if their magic is of the flesh? I cannot say if there are spells and curses, but I have known enchantment in my life.

That summer, Corbyn and his supporters pushed against a door they thought was made of reinforced steel; as things proved, it was made of cardboard.

I do not seek to walk in the footsteps of the wise people of old, I seek what they sought" Matsuo Busho

You can argue whether it's right or wrong,' says Halfon about the scrapping of Connexions, 'and yes I believe we should be balancing the economy, but nevertheless the think-tank people never consider how it actually impacts on the front, although they do create an intellectual framework.

High Priestess of the Slagocracy

Yet there is a logical flaw at the heart of Establishment thinking. It may abhor the state - but it is completely dependent on the state to flourish.

If we want kids with 'aspiration', we need to give them something to aspire to.

But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. It is a class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don't to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means.

Every Bhutto was enemy of every other Bhutto.

It is said that every day after covering a considerable distance, Napier would ask his Sindhi guide, ‘Who owns this land?’ and every time the answer would be ‘The Bhuttos’. At one stage he told the man, ‘I’m tired and want to sleep. When we come to the place where the Bhutto lands finish, wake me up.’ The guide didn’t have to do so, and as Napier got up from a long spell of sleep he was amazed to learn that they were still in ‘Bhutto territory’.

The story of the Bhutto dynasty since Pakistan was created has been, to a significant extent, the story of the conflict between it and the army and of the Bhuttos’ failed attempts to reach a compromise with the generals.

He had become the writers' equivalent of a goldfish after years of writing 500 word articles and wondered whether mind-expanding drugs would help him hold a full-length plot in his head, because he was having problems with continuity.