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41 " The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better. "
― Frankie Boyle , The Future of British Politics
42 " Of course, reactionary ‘anti-woke’ types are operating in ignorance at best, and often in bad faith. Their basic position is ‘some people are so marginalised that they have to build a language to describe their oppression, but the real victim is me, who has to learn a new word every nine months’. "
43 " He seems to be viewed as electable by Labour members largely because he looks like someone playing a prime minister in an old Spice Girls’ video. "
44 " The British left online seems to see trending on Twitter as an end in itself. Really, you can only be politically active online in the same way you can be sexually active online, and the far right sees all its online activities as staging posts to recruitment. "
45 " Since being born on a sunbed, this furious boiled potato has nurtured Britain’s sense of racial grievance with the patience and care you only see in someone who truly believes that they can monetise it. "
46 " Obviously, there’s more hatred on the hard right, but they do seem to have mastered something the left seems to find so hard – directing it outwards. "
47 " The far right in Britain are using social media to recruit while the left use it to berate people for liking problematic music videos. I think a problem for the left is their essentialism: they see people as either good or bad, and the role of activism focuses on energising the good ones. "
48 " One thing that’s useful to remember when trying to understand British politics is that for even the politically engaged English person it seems to require an act of will to remember that Scotland, Wales, and particularly Northern Ireland, exist. For those countries, it can be a little like being locked in the basement of someone who doesn’t fancy you anymore. In England, for Conservatives and Labour alike, an instinctive rejection of independent nationalism is part of the imperial hangover. This is so pronounced that broad elements of Labour will often fret over how to re-engage with the sort of nationalism that doesn’t like immigrants, while maintaining that the Scottish ones that want a bit more investment in public services are an evil too great to even acknowledge. "
49 " The Union was about a lot of things. One that’s rarely mentioned is the need for imperial manpower: England needed more bodies to serve in its armies. Although it wasn’t immediately obvious how they could increase their population by aligning with a country which was, at that point in history, burning anyone with a womb and a cat. "
50 " When your nihilists are reduced to altruism, it’s probably a bad sign. "
51 " What really stands out now is how, on the whole, the authors seemed to feel freer to be imaginative about the future than our contemporaries tend to be when they make predictions. "
52 " despair is really a failure of perspective. Despair is a moment that pretends to be permanent. There are good reasons to be hopeful; there is a place beyond this moment, and we can, if we choose to, get up off our knees and go there together. "
53 " They say that the sun never set on the British Empire. I mean it did, but it was hard to see behind the huge pile of dead Indians. "
54 " The argument of Brexit is in some ways a sublimated, and quite correct, recognition that Britain’s relationship with the EU is actually about trade, and doesn’t offer it opportunities for exploitation. Because of the Empire, we developed an elite class addicted to enormous returns on investment, only possible through constant growth. As this becomes impossible, Brexit happens so profits can be delivered through cannibalising previously protected resources, including people. "
55 " One of the privileges of whiteness is being able to see racists as entirely laughable (indeed, it’s hard to think of anything more laughable than people who suffer from inbreeding moaning about diversity), because for us racism is always abstract. "
56 " Left-wing liberals (like me, to be honest) are often blind to their own ideology in the same way that they perceive middle-class people speaking English as not having an accent. "
57 " I think this mindset comes in part from a misconception that the Empire represented some kind of moral journey: that it begins in slavery and conquest and ends in reconciliation and Commonwealth. Slavery was abolished against a background of slave rebellions and increasing industrialisation. As so often happens, a moral course was found to be possible only once the business got difficult. Much in the way that Hollywood sex cases have found themselves on trial now that cinema has been replaced by YouTube videos of people unboxing blenders. The only true reconciliation the Empire cared about was with the slave owners, who were fully compensated. "
58 " Non-representation is just the cultural equivalent of not being able to meet someone’s gaze. "
59 " This year scientists reported a record 18 degrees in the Arctic. Which is particularly shocking to people from Glasgow because we’ve sunbathed in colder temperatures than that. "