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1 " For a quarter-century British governments had tried and failed to combine economic growth, increased social service provision and a high level of employment. The second depended ultimately on the first, but when difficulty arose, the first had always been sacrificed to the other two. The United Kingdom was, after all, a democracy whose votes, greedy and gullible, had to be placated. "
― , The New Penguin History of The World
2 " We reign over the united kingdom of time and eternity "
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon , Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
3 " ...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name.If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it.The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led. "
― , Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
4 " The asylum years taught me a lot about myself. Bear in mind I’m the only lunatic in the United Kingdom who spent time in all three max secure asylums, which you should now know are…Rampton, Broadmoor and Ashworth. Don’t ask me which is the best or the worst, as how do you compare insanity with insanity? "
― , Insanity: My Mad Life
5 " drugs, hard. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the law was changed in the United Kingdom to ensure that the production and supply of dangerous drugs should henceforth be in the hands of criminal organisations. Some people have argued that this is not an ideal arrangement. "
6 " It has been suggested at various times that I should start an operation in the United Kingdom but - bearing in mind my age and medical history - I think this would be not a very sensible way to go forward. "
7 " We link our future to the euro, to the euro zone, and to the European Union while being the nearest neighbor of the United Kingdom with, obviously, a common travel area and a very close working relationship with the U.K. "