Scott McKie > Scott's Quotes

“She's joking, of course, but as with all the best jokes, it contains more than a grain of truth”
― Bryony Gordon, Mad Girl

“Female self-loathing has been handed down throughout the generations”
― Bryony Gordon, The Wrong Knickers: A Decade of Chaos

“If you’re an alien, how come you sound like you come from the north?’ ‘Lots of planets have a north.’ Doctor Who, 2005”
― Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice: In search of the North

“What was so terrible about properly funded hospitals, student grants, decent working conditions, affordable houses, trains that ran for convenience not profit, water that poured from the tap whose function was to slake your thirst not to make shareholders a dividend. What exactly was so wicked about public libraries, free eye tests and council houses? We may be coming to realise that the people who complain about the nanny state are the people who had nannies.”
― Stuart Maconie, The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save it

“I have no desire to eat it beneath pictures of the proprietor sulking in a bandana, which is why I tend to avoid Marco Pierre White’s places. I agree with the singer Paul Heaton, who remarked recently, ‘women have been cooking for a thousand years and no one ever mentioned it. Men have been cooking for ten minutes and they never stop bloody going on about it’.”
― Stuart Maconie, The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play

“Kurt Schumacher, the Hanover-based anti-Nazi who quickly became the leading figure in the post-war Social Democratic Party, was outraged. ‘Wir sind kein Negervolk’ (‘We are not blacks’) the fiery former concentration-camp inmate told Annan.”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“raving maniacs, half paralysed with hunger and fear’. In collaboration with an UNRRA team, the soldiers took over a former Napola School at Feldafing, drafted many of its German staff, including cooks and medical personnel, and turned it into a refugee camp, with a nearby hotel requisitioned as hospital accommodation. The number of inmates rapidly grew to some 4,000. By the end of May 1945, the camp had experienced its first survivor wedding and those in the hospital – now moved to a former monastery – had been treated to a concert by the Kovno Ghetto orchestra, dressed in their striped concentration-camp pyjamas.”
― Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

“involved”
― Jane Futa, Crossdressing: 20 Story Bundle: Transgender, Feminization, Cross-dressing

“we have come to invest so much attention on something so shallow.”
― Mark Radcliffe, Thank You for the Days: A Boy's Own Adventures in Radio and Beyond

“I’m sure the topography of our lawn dictated how I batted in the years to come. There was a greenhouse at mid-wicket and a privet hedge, about two or three feet high, beyond a path on the offside. So it was dangerous to hit anything to mid-wicket or there would be the grim tinkle of broken glass; but there were no such hazards on the offside.”
― Vic Marks, Original Spin: Misadventures in Cricket

“home on 25 November 1854. He settled down in Surrey, married and continued to serve in the militia. He died in 1889. Temple Godman He was born in 1832 into a wealthy Surrey landed family and was educated at Eton. He joined the 5th Dragoon Guards in 1851 as a Cornet – the commission cost £840. He bought his promotion to Lieutenant in March 1854 and to Captain just over a year later. (The latter promotion cost £3,225 – about £150,000 at today’s prices.)”
― Clive Ponting, The Crimean War: The Truth Behind the Myth

“My best friend’s father is at least six foot eight and every inch of him is rock hard and rippling. Barefoot. God, that intense glower. It makes me want to confess to crimes I haven’t committed”
― Jessa Kane, The Loner's Lady

“So I took and took, yanking her off that bike and replacing that popsicle in her mouth with my dick. I’ve been burning to fuck Delilah”
― Jessa Kane, Pound of Flesh

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Society, you're a crazy breed.”
― Eddie Vedder

“in 1762, Rousseau argued that puberty had such fundamental emotional and mental effects that it represented “a second birth.”
― Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945

“By the time he found fame with his syndicated television show in 1953, he had refined his act down to an art, involving his family, talking to the audience through the camera and embracing a dizzying array of costume changes and dramatic gestures.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“. In the May 1955 cover story, ‘The Margin of Masculinity’, James Douglas Margin evolved his ‘Theory of Masculine Deportment’, in detailed phrases that could have come straight out of Henry Willson’s remodelling of Rock Hudson. Setting the tale in a gay bar, the writer gave programmatic instructions to a fictional friend, Johnnie. In order to hide his homosexuality, Johnnie was advised ‘to avoid the limp wrist as you would the plague’, while cultivating a firm handshake and watching out for any tendency of the little fingers to wave about.”
― Jon Savage, The Secret Public: How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream

“And as we walk back down the street, me gingerly clutching what at this point constitutes my entire collection, my father says, ‘One day, when you’re all grown up and I’m not here any more, you’ll remember the sunny day we went to the market together and bought a boat.’ My throat feels tight because, as soon as he says it, I am already there. Standing on another street, without my father, trying to get back. And yet I’m here, with him. So I try to soak up every aspect of the moment, to help me get back when I need to. I feel the weight of the chunky parcel under my arm, and the warmth of the sun, and my father’s hand in mine. I smell the flowers with their sharp undertang of cheap hot dog, and taste the slick of toffee on my teeth, and hear the chattering hagglers. I feel the joy of an adventurous Saturday with my father and no school, and I feel the sadness of looking back when it is all gone. When he is gone.”
― Victoria Coren, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker

“While I’m here, I’m making notes for a magazine article about the giant tournament. As I sit scribbling in my notebook, the producer of the Sky coverage beckons me over to the bar. He says, ‘We’re going live for the final on Sunday and we really need an attractive woman to interview the players, someone who knows her stuff and would look good on camera, and we suddenly realized it would be obvious to ask you, Victoria . . . can you think of anyone?’ He wasn’t kidding.”
― Victoria Coren, For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker

“We are young,beautiful scum,pissed off with the world…We are the suicide of the non-generation.We are as far away from anything in the 80s as possible, e.g. 80s' pop automation, the long running saga of the whimsical pop essay and the intrinsic musical sculptures of post-modernism…We are the only young kids in UK Channel Boredom to realise the future is in tight trousers, dyed hair and NOT the baggy loose attitude scum fuck retard zerodom of Madchester”
― Simon Price

“In an era when most bands were about nothing, the Manics were about everything: an eloquent scream, a j'accuse to the entire moribund millennium.”
― Simon Price

“We live in a culture right now that pits girls against each other. We are brought up socially to be in competition with each other -who has the best body, more boyfriends, better clothes. And this kind of competition can be devastating on female friendships because it emphasizes a mentality that there isn’t enough to go around, Enough love. Enough attention. Enough success. But there is . There is enough to share with your girlfriends.”
― Jessica Weiner

“In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent.

Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs.

More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members.

From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment.

Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater.

This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms.

When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed.

To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.”
― John Rees

“All this is merely internal Labour Party politics of course. And Labour Party politics in opposition at that. The real power of the state, as opposed to the skirmishing line of the establishment which is the Labour right, will be deployed later. We have not yet even seen the forces that were deployed to stop Scotland voting Yes in the referendum. There has been no public statement by the banks and the bosses of the supermarkets, no speech by the Governor of the Bank of England, no moment when the politically neutral Queen ‘lets her views be known’~all of which happened during the referendum campaign.

Nor, since a Corbyn led Labour Party is still a long way from government, has there been the kind of moment where the governor of the Bank of England tells a Labour prime minister to dump his economic policy, as Lord Cromer instructed Harold Wilson in the 1960s, or where the IMF imposes austerity, as it did on an all too willing Denis Healy in the late 1976s.

Anyone who wants an analysis of how this will all work can still do no better than read two books by Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. Or to read how the left wing rapture for former Nye Bevan supporter Harold Wilson turned to despair there is no better account than the one written by Paul Foot. For a contemporary example of the same disastrous process we need look no further than the defenestration of Tsipris’ Syriza in Greece.

These are endgames, not the immediate prospect of the coming months. But they should warn us that we need to prepare alternatives now and not allow the excitement of current advance to blind us to the real dangers ahead. They should also serve to warn us that if we are to avoid these dangers it will be mass movements and political organisations outside the Labour Party which will play a decisive role.”
― John Rees

“I'd like you to meet my new girlfriend," said Erik. "I think someone's trying to kill her.”
― Andrew Cartmel, Low Action

“The land of the 45rpm record is the land of chaos.”
― Andrew Cartmel, The Run-Out Groove

“The real distinction between being great and being less great seems to be the extent to which we are willing to be pushed along by our own desires.”
― Melanie Brown, Attaining Personal Greatness: One Book for Life

“live life to the fullest as if it was your last”
― melanie brown