Selina Todd

“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.”
― Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010

“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”
― Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010