#britain

New Labour was the most short-sighted, self-serving, incompetent, useless, and ineffective government that Britain has ever known. Make no mistake, Labour's economic policies were a national security liability. ↗

— Liam Fox

#economic #economic policies #ever #government #incompetent

If you go on TV and say there's no other country in the world where you can be born poor and become rich, you get a huge megaphone. If you tell the truth, which is that most of the studies show actually the United States is worse than anybody except Britain in upward mobility, there is no audience for you. ↗

— David Frum

#anybody #audience #become #born #britain

It is a cliche these days to observe that the United States now possesses a global empire - different from Britain's and Rome's but an empire nonetheless. ↗

— Robert D. Kaplan

#cliche #days #different #empire #global

Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt. ....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street. ↗

— Zadie Smith

#nhs #age

Whoever would have guessed that in the land of cheap sausages and mashed potatoes there could be such a change which would actually bring the French from Paris every weekend to invade Britain en masse to eat great food and drink great wine. ↗

— Robin Leach

#bring #britain #change #cheap #could

I think I owe it to myself and my fans in Britain to play one more Wimbledon. ↗

— Goran Ivanisevic

#fans #i #i think #more #myself

Today, Labour has a disruptive economic narrative - that Britain needs fundamental change in its market structure and culture to compete in the modern world. ↗

— David Miliband

#change #compete #culture #disruptive #economic

The first war zone was declared by Great Britain. She gave us and the world notice of it on the 4th day of November, 1914. The zone became effective Nov. 5, 1914. ↗

— George William Norris

#britain #day #declared #effective #first

In terms of language, yeah we get bleeped and blurred and things, but in terms of content, I would probably say we're getting away with more here than we could get away with in Britain. And that surprised us so much! ↗

— Graham Norton

#blurred #britain #content #could #get

Britain is a textbook case of how growing inequality leads to economic crisis. The years before the crash were marked by a sharp rise in remortgaging and the growth of 0 percent balance transfer credit cards. By 2008 the UK had the highest ratio of household debt to GDP of any major economy. ↗

— Frances O'Grady

#balance #before #britain #cards #case