Callaghan also became the creative source of sharp, catchy phrases for the premier to use against his political opponents. It’s a long list but includes some very effective ones: “death-adder unions – they strike first”; “when you go to the unemployment office tell ‘em Gough sent you”; “help Tom Burns fight air pollution – give […]
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Tags:conservatives·Lines·media·Politics·Queensland·Quotes·socialism
when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
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Tags:communism·Politics·progressive politics·socialism·Working Class
Then I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when […]
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Tags:communism·Ideology·Politics·progressive politics·socialism
The space limitations of (Old Parliament House) imposed an egalitarian rule in the lavatories. Ministers, MPs, staffers, journalists and cleaners all used the same lavatories. Years after the move to the permanent parliament building, Mick Young returned to the House of Representatives chamber of Old Parliament House to speak at an event. I cannot remember […]
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(Isaiah) Berlin takes his analysis a step further. He writes that such a “search for perfection does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heard… To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed in schemes is almost […]
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Tags:extremism·Humanism·Ideology·philosophy·Politics·pragmatism·Quotes
The proportion of political arrests in the Red Army doubled from 1944 to 1945, a year when the Soviet Union was effectively at war for little more than four months. In that year of victory, no fewer than 135,056 Red Army soldiers and officers were condemned by military tribunals for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’…. Over 1.5 million […]
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In the post-Marxist age, we can no longer believe that redistribution solves anything, that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer. It is the death not just of ideology but of ideas. Nothing in the national debate has nay strong conviction. On the right, a vague belief in foreign investment; on the left, […]
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Tags:Ideology·India·poverty·progressive·progressive politics·socialism
The NKVD’s grip on Stalingrad had not slackened. German prisoners working from both banks of the Volga had noticed that the first building in the city to be repaired was the NKVD headquarters, and almost immediately there were queues of women outside with foodparcels for relatives who had been arrested. Former Sixth Army soldiers guessed […]
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Some twat with a Trot poster came up to me on the way in and yelled ‘Butcher!’ Traitor!’ at me. I stopped and mustered as much visual contempt as I could, then assured him that if we win the general election then don’t worry, thanks to wankers like him, there will always be another Tory […]
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Tags:Electoralism·extremism·Ideology·progressive politics·The Left
David Marquand calls this the progressive dilemma: ‘How to transcend Labourism without betraying the labour interest; how to bridge the gap between the old Labour fortresses and the potentially anti-Conservative but non-Labour hinterland; how to construct a broad-based and enduring social coalition capable of not just giving it a temporary majority in the House of […]
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Tags:Democracy·Electoralism·extremism·Ideology·Labour·policy·Politics·progressive politics