Alwyn Turner > Quotes

“And then things got worse.”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

“In this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man,’ and he quoted in full a letter that claimed to recount the experience of another constituent of his, an elderly white woman terrorized by her black neighbours: ‘Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox.”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

“World War II has turned from history into myth,’ commented Gerald Glaister, the producer of TV series Colditz and Secret Army. ‘It is our last frontier, the English equivalent of the western.”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

“The more I hear commercial radio the more repellent I find it,’ shuddered the comedian Kenneth Williams. ‘The din created by the half-baked talking to the half-educated is horrible.”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

“A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master – these are the British inheritance”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

“When Vanessa Redgrave, an active member of the Workers Revolutionary Party, was rehearsing her appearance on the Morecambe and Wise show, she attempted to engage the two men in political debate, arguing that they too were part of an exploited working class. ‘Do you own the BBC?’ she asked fervently. ‘No,’ replied Ernie Wise, casting a casual glance around the studio, ‘but we’re willing to make them an offer.”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

“If Mrs Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.”
― Alwyn Turner, Rejoice! Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s

“The stand-up comic Bernard Manning used to tell a joke about Alexey Kosygin being shown round a British factory by Edward Heath, and being shocked by the slack working hours and the prevalence of tea breaks: ‘In Russia,’ he boasts, ‘we work from six in the morning till ten o’clock at night.’ ‘You couldn’t get these lads to do that,’ says Heath. ‘Why not?’ demands the Soviet premier, and Heath replies: ‘Because they’re all communists.”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.”
― Alwyn Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s