Thatcherism Quotes

“I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life or the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Part of this rise of individualism is evident in the mistrust about the social support of vulnerable social groups, such as lone parents, and elderly, or unemployed, people, and in the suggestion that a 'nanny state' was emerging because 'too many' people were dependant on state benefits. (This is in context of a world economy that is creating mass unemployment, where support for the family has consistently been undermined, where elderly people have had services withdrawn that allowed them to be cared for by their families, and so on.) In other words, the ethic of social support being undermined by 'rugged individualism' results in blaming the victim for their own difficulties.”
― Anne Kearney, Counselling, Class and Politics: Undeclared Influences in Therapy

“This government has represented benefits as somehow shameful. The point about universal benefits is that they affirm the value of such social tasks as having children, rearing them, or caring for relatives; they make benefits themselves an expression of collective approval for the endeavour, not begrudged hand-outs, stigmatising the recipients as beggars and failures.”
― Marina Warner, Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs

“Comparisons with the past are of limited help: The ending of hanging won't make suicides in youth remand centres go away; the mortality, famine, rickets, scabies of Victorian slum children don't turn free school milk into a excessive luxury.”
― Marina Warner, Into the Dangerous World: Some Reflections on Childhood and Its Costs

“They say life expectancy shortens by a year for each stop travelled east from Westminster on the tube. Given that in South London proper there is no tube, it's a miracle any of us are still alive. And yet we are, full of piss and vinegar. And stories.”
― Koushik Banerjea, Category Unknown