The Future of British Politics Quotes

“(Oxbridge is a compound term formed from the words obnoxious and privilege).”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“despair is really a failure of perspective. Despair is a moment that pretends to be permanent. There are good reasons to be hopeful; there is a place beyond this moment, and we can, if we choose to, get up off our knees and go there together.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“What really stands out now is how, on the whole, the authors seemed to feel freer to be imaginative about the future than our contemporaries tend to be when they make predictions.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“When your nihilists are reduced to altruism, it’s probably a bad sign.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“The Union was about a lot of things. One that’s rarely mentioned is the need for imperial manpower: England needed more bodies to serve in its armies. Although it wasn’t immediately obvious how they could increase their population by aligning with a country which was, at that point in history, burning anyone with a womb and a cat.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“One thing that’s useful to remember when trying to understand British politics is that for even the politically engaged English person it seems to require an act of will to remember that Scotland, Wales, and particularly Northern Ireland, exist. For those countries, it can be a little like being locked in the basement of someone who doesn’t fancy you anymore. In England, for Conservatives and Labour alike, an instinctive rejection of independent nationalism is part of the imperial hangover. This is so pronounced that broad elements of Labour will often fret over how to re-engage with the sort of nationalism that doesn’t like immigrants, while maintaining that the Scottish ones that want a bit more investment in public services are an evil too great to even acknowledge.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“The far right in Britain are using social media to recruit while the left use it to berate people for liking problematic music videos. I think a problem for the left is their essentialism: they see people as either good or bad, and the role of activism focuses on energising the good ones.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Obviously, there’s more hatred on the hard right, but they do seem to have mastered something the left seems to find so hard – directing it outwards.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Since being born on a sunbed, this furious boiled potato has nurtured Britain’s sense of racial grievance with the patience and care you only see in someone who truly believes that they can monetise it.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“The British left online seems to see trending on Twitter as an end in itself. Really, you can only be politically active online in the same way you can be sexually active online, and the far right sees all its online activities as staging posts to recruitment.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“He seems to be viewed as electable by Labour members largely because he looks like someone playing a prime minister in an old Spice Girls’ video.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Of course, reactionary ‘anti-woke’ types are operating in ignorance at best, and often in bad faith. Their basic position is ‘some people are so marginalised that they have to build a language to describe their oppression, but the real victim is me, who has to learn a new word every nine months’.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Perhaps the gig economy can help out with social care, so that anyone with a bike can underbid to spend the day squirting soup through a pensioner’s letterbox; and how silly that police armed response teams still take out lethal suspects, when, once cornered, the shot could be sold to an American safari tourist.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Self-employed may mean no pension, sick or holiday pay but you are Your. Own. Boss! Have to get down to Tesco for when they put on the yellow stickers? Who do you need permission from? That’s right… YOU! You’re the BOSS!”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“In previous generations the Conservatives hoped that young people would become more conservative as they got mortgages, or advanced up the career ladder, or something else that none of them will ever do again.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Many Conservative politicians are little more than a collection of personality defects developed in an attempt to lure their father out from behind the Daily Telegraph during the six days a year they weren’t using the top bunk at school as the forced sodomy equivalent of a life raft during a shark attack”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“MI5 have denied claims that they’ve withheld intelligence from the Home Secretary. If anyone is guilty of that, it’s God.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Perhaps a modern concept of sovereignty might involve owning the property in your capital city, or your own railway system. At the moment Britain is in a strange position where we seem to be sanguine about foreigners owning our infrastructure, but we just don’t want them picking our fruit.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“In South Wales racist attacks went up 77 per cent after the referendum vote. I’m not certain whether to be appalled at their racism or admire that they managed to keep such a tsunami of hatred inside until they thought it was allowed.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“One of the problems with left-wing discourse in Britain is that it seeks to moralise its opponents without ever considering what they really think.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“What we often think of as the self-belief instilled by an elite education is really a kind of class exceptionalism, a belief that privilege is earned through talent and hard work, against all of the available evidence. If you doubt this, simply ask the most left-wing Oxbridge graduate you can find what role they think their background played in their success.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Well, this whole section actually hasn’t turned out to be as upbeat as I’d hoped. Let’s move on.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“The much-ballyhooed Internet of Things (what is a smart bin? In my day that was a dog) will see a surge in demand for rare metals, forcing up their price. Combine that with the invention of the brain-computer interface and there will be times when the spare capacity of human consciousness will be a cheaper option for processing and storage. For a nutritious bowl of soup we’ll be plugged in, with a thousand others, running algorithms to more precisely push a new wonder mop to lonely housewives idly googling through a Valium comedown.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“A more mundane threat is the sociopathy of giant Silicon Valley corporations. What can we learn from their rise? Possibly that Hitler might have just about made it if only he’d fitted out the Reichstag with a ping-pong table and some hammocks.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Mark Fisher, the cultural theorist whose 2017 suicide seems increasingly prescient, coined the term ‘capitalist realism’ to describe the way that we could imagine the end of the world more easily than we could imagine the end of capitalism. I think that has gone now, and that people can, increasingly, imagine a future shaped by something other than capitalism.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“This year scientists reported a record 18 degrees in the Arctic. Which is particularly shocking to people from Glasgow because we’ve sunbathed in colder temperatures than that.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Non-representation is just the cultural equivalent of not being able to meet someone’s gaze.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“I think this mindset comes in part from a misconception that the Empire represented some kind of moral journey: that it begins in slavery and conquest and ends in reconciliation and Commonwealth. Slavery was abolished against a background of slave rebellions and increasing industrialisation. As so often happens, a moral course was found to be possible only once the business got difficult. Much in the way that Hollywood sex cases have found themselves on trial now that cinema has been replaced by YouTube videos of people unboxing blenders. The only true reconciliation the Empire cared about was with the slave owners, who were fully compensated.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“Left-wing liberals (like me, to be honest) are often blind to their own ideology in the same way that they perceive middle-class people speaking English as not having an accent.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics

“One of the privileges of whiteness is being able to see racists as entirely laughable (indeed, it’s hard to think of anything more laughable than people who suffer from inbreeding moaning about diversity), because for us racism is always abstract.”
― Frankie Boyle, The Future of British Politics