So They Say!

Nuclear blackmail and foreign policy

It is our total dependence on the US for the technology of Trident and the geo-positioning satellite guiding system which explains why Britain takes all its orders from the White House, since any deviation from that stance would risk our long-standing pretence that we are an independent nuclear power. (Tony Benn, Socialist Campaign Group News, July 2005)

More than my job’s worth

The Establishment, which includes officials and many office-holders, also comprises leaders in all walks of life who hope for promotion, who want to safeguard their standard of living or safeguard their pensions. They could be characterised as the ‘nomenclatura’ – a much-critisised feature of the former Soviet establishment – those for whom ‘discretion is the better part of valour’. (Jim Addington, explaining why pressure for reform is more liklely to come from outside the entrenched Establishment, Morning Star, 14/10/05)

Lower the Voting Age?

I did some circletime work with a class of 9- to 11-year olds the other day. I went in specifically because they are supposed to be a difficult and aggressive class but they showed concern over ‘all these wars we keep starting’, as one of them put it. I remember before March 2003 a group of similar aged children worried because ‘Tony Blair is trying to make a war’. Ten year olds seem so much less gullible than Labour MPs. (Letter to the editor from our member, teacher and child psychologist Jane Gilmour, March 2006)