John McDonnell Quotes

Blair - except at the edges - was a Thatcherite. Brown, in contrast, regarded Thatcherism as something that had to be taken on board while at the same time seeking to retain as much as possible of the Labour legacy, or 'Labour values,' as he would put it.

For a quarter-century, and changing only very recently, the main IMF prescription has been budgetary belt-tightening for patients much too poor to own belts. IMF led austerity has frequently resulted in riots, coups, and the collapse of public services.

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.

While Labour Party orators readily remember the 1980s for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's free-booting variety of entrepreneurial meritocracy, what gets forgotten is that Thatcher also gave the heave-ho to the old establishment's notion of merit - good breeding, a posh school, and so on.

Retired public service workers make up the backbone of the middle class in so many of our communities.

If I were transported into my father's shoes, I would have been a Labour supporter, too, because in the 1960s and even in the 1970s, the Conservatives weren't standing up for working people; there was too much of an interest in corporatism, and that didn't start to change till Margaret Thatcher came along.

The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.

Thatcher was the motivation for my entire political career. I hated everything she stood for.

Margaret Thatcher was not a malicious person. She was a person who couldn't see, or didn't want to see, the unfairness and disadvantaging consequences of the application of what she thought to be a renewing ideology.

Spare me this sanctimony about politeness, please. There are millions of people in this country who hate the very word 'Thatcher' and 'Thatcherism,' which continues until this day.

Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism strip education of its public values, critical content, and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to consumerism, risk-free relationships, and the destruction of the social state.

Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.

I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

Instead of ideological objectives of a political nature, today we are faced with ideological objectives of economic nature.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

I have watched as the Government stepped up the process of dismantling the State, throwing thousands of people onto the scrapheap, abolishing job creation and training programs.... I watched them maniacally cutting back programs ranging from industry R&D to family planning to dental hospital services for the poor. I watched this Government create a crisis of confidence in the higher education sector and attack our public school system.

The working class’s share in the national product is constantly diminishing – there is not a shade of doubt about that. The working class is becoming poorer not only relatively, but absolutely too; its income, far from increasing in the same progression as those of other classes in society, is falling; the real wages of the modern proletarian (the quantity of consumer goods falling to his share) are less than the worker’s pay was five hundred years ago

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

If anyone’s declared class warfare, it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street … They have declared it on average workers.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

Europe’s conservative parties, like Republicans in the United States, have for the most part, turned into shrill apostles of austerity at almost any social cost.