Quotes of the month
"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."- Antonio Gramsci
"In the 1980s Tory minister Norman Tebbit organised against craft unionism, seeking to replace collectivism with individualism. He praised the corrupt practice known as lump Labour and promoted what then became bogus self-employment. Crucially, this was accepted in the electrical contracting industry by the EETPU leadership. Bogus self-employment was then gradually forced on other trades in building and maintenance. The neoliberal onslaught since the 1980s has totally transformed British trade unionism".- Stevie Stevenson,
CLPD EC member and former member of the EETPU, 20th June 2020
"We now have had 51 days of unbelievable levels of abuse... I simply say this; if you wish to inhabit the gutter, I will not be joining you there"- Jeremy Corbyn,
eve of election speech, Guardian , 12th December 2019
"The more I hear Tory MPs fawn over NHS staff, the more I think of those same MPs in 2017 cheering as they voted down a proper pay rise for nurses"- Dr. Rachel Clarke,
palliative care doctor, , Observer 3rd May 2020
"The callous neglect of older people in nursing homes is a national scandal, but it is the predictable result of the long-term neglect of the care sector, compounded by the cuts to local authorities under Tory austerity"- Prof. Alan Walker,
Guardian, , 14th April 2020
"The proportion of people with a job who live in poverty went up for the third consecutive year in 2018 to a record high" - The Joseph Rowntree Foundation. "Tackling poverty will always be a priority for this government" - Department of Work and Pensions. (Utter hypocrisy! - ed.)Quotes from Guardian, 7 February 2020
"Under the Tories the UK has just had its worst decade for productivity growth since the early 1800s, which was the early years of the Industrial Revolution"- Guardian, 23 December 2019
"This is a party that was founded for working people, this is a party that I strive every day to make the party of working people"- Ed Miliband, 21st November 2014
"Left parties have lost office in Europe because of their inability to articulate an alternative to austerity and cuts. The right offers individualism, a huge and growing wealth gap and a mean and divided society. Socialism is the sharing of wealth, the contribution of ability for the common good, and unity in defending our achievements against attack. It's also our only hope"- Jeremy Corbyn, 6 January 2012
"The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done"- Arthur Balfour,
a former Tory prime minister, quoted, Guardian, 7 November 2019
"If you allow a small minority to live in luxury and so arrange things that the maintenance of that luxury is directly dependent on the poverty of the majority, as we have done in the capitalist world, then undeniably the riches of the few are responsible for the poverty of the many"- George Lansbury, 1937, reprinted in the October 2017 issue of Chartist
"Had we achieved the necessary TUC unity, the 1980s could have been very different. The Thatcher government's most effective ally was a union inside the TUC, the EETPU (general secretary Frank Chapple). That's what should be properly recorded in the TUC history, as we prepare for the TUC's 150th Anniversary"- Stevie Stevenson,
former EETPU activist, who took on Chapple and his bag carrier, John Spellar (now an MP and the guru of the hard right Labour First), Morning Star, 11 August 2017