Owen Jones > Quotes

“A victory is scored when your opponents are forced to debate issues they would rather leave ignored”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“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,”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“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.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“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’.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“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”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“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.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“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.”
― Owen Jones

“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.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“The objective is to change the system and the behaviour it encourages, rather than replacing 'bad' people with 'good' people.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“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.”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“state subsidies – and consequently have not been implemented.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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.”
― Owen Jones

“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»”
― Owen Jones (journalist), Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“the whole Iraq episode ‘permanently undermined the credibility and authority of the British state’.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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.”
― Owen Jones, This Land: The Struggle for the Left

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“and”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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.”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“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”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it

“High Priestess of the Slagocracy”
― Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

“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”
― Owen Jones, The Establishment: And how they get away with it