Home > Author > Selina Todd
1 " But the lesson of those years is that the ruling class can't be relied upon to redistribute wealth and power. "
― Selina Todd , The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
2 " That the strike lasted so long was a testament to the support the miners received from within and outside their communities. Their ardent supporters included many miners’ wives, most of whom had not previously been involved in political activism "
3 " in the case of the miners, there was an alternative. It did not make economic sense to close the mines. The Oxford economist Andrew Glyn convincingly argued that even if the pits were as uneconomic as the NCB suggested (and in fact many still had sufficient resources to merit mining for decades to come), the resulting unemployment would oblige the NCB and the taxpayer funding larger retirement pensions, thousands of redundancy payments and millions of pounds in unemployment benefit. It was cheaper to keep the miners in work. "
4 " Thatcher’s government ‘showed themselves prepared to encourage any and every method available – from the secret financing of strikebreakers to mass electronic surveillance, from the manipulation of agents provocateurs to attempts to “fit up” miners’ officials – in order to undermine or discredit the union and its leaders’. "
5 " Twenty-two-year-old Bristolian Bert Sheard was on active service abroad when the Blitz began. A former factory worker, ‘it annoyed me when I used to see the papers and they had headlines like “We can take it, let them send it”. I didn’t hear anyone say that when I came home. They were all saying “We can’t stand much more of this”.’ To Bert, the press reports ‘were just propaganda’ which suggested that victory depended on the people affected to keep smiling through, rather than on government investment in medical support, shelters and troops.52 Bert considered such reports patronizing "
6 " In 1941 Emily Swankie’s brother Charlie, who had been made unemployed in 1928, had had his dole money cut by the means test in 1932, and had had to spend years pretending to live away from his parents’ flat, ‘was lost at sea when his ship was torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay’.57 Far from being feckless or hysterical, Charlie and millions more like him kept the war effort "
7 " He appeared on Workers’ Playtime, the BBC variety show established in 1941 that was broadcast from a factory canteen ‘somewhere in Britain’. Variety shows like this made use of the talents they found in the factories they visited, with workers being invited to sing a song or tell jokes to a live national audience. "
8 " Widows and women who had separated from their husband found making ends meet a great strain. In the late 1940s, nineteen-year-old Norman Lewis was living on Lancaster’s Marsh estate with his younger sister, a schoolgirl, and his mother. Norman’s father, a bargeman, had died in 1943: ‘He fell in the canal and drowned. What a romantic death. Company gave us nothing.’ A few years later Norman’s mother fell ill ‘and the doctor kept calling to the house … I grabbed him one day and asked him what on earth was wrong with Mum. He said in no uncertain terms, “She’s starving herself to feed you two. "
9 " as long as economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of a minority – through differential wage rates and selective entry to the universities and the professions – then most people’s opportunities would be limited, however hard they worked. Just as the ‘people’s war’ had not been classless, so the ‘people’s peace’ was riven by class. "
