Polly Toynbee Quotes

Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism. In an ideal Polly Toynbee world, private sector broadcasting would be banned, Rupert Murdoch would be nationalised, and the BBC would hire thousands more taxpayer-funded social affairs correspondents to psalm the benefits of social democracy.

No-one is suggesting banning gambling or casinos, any more than I would ban pornography, or drugs or all manner of things that might do people harm. But there is an important social difference between freedom to do what adults please if they deliberately seek out those things from regulated places - and aggressively thrusting them at everyone in everyday life.

If the Divis Complex in Belfast isn't the vilest housing estate in Britain, I am willing to accept nominations for the award.
Catholic West Belfast is a wedge-shaped slice of the city, and the Divis Complex is perched on the tip of the triangle, its 13 battered blocks nudging up against the check points of the city centre. Built only ten years ago, the flats have degenerated into a festering heap, crushed by the weight of their human density ...
The troubles have contributed to the plight of the estate, but wherever it had been thrown up, it would have sunk under its own architectural and design faults, the cheapness of the materials used, the lack of repairs and amenities. ...
The patches of ground between the flats are muddy heaps, scattered withy rubbish, with the stumps of old playground furnishings, bare ends of wires protruding where lamp posts once stood, and large rat holes everywhere. Rats have taken a grip on the place according to a recent estimate, the rat population was about 17,000 and out of control. ... There are no lights in the complex. Vandals knocked some out, and soldiers smashed the rest with their rifle butts, needing the cover of darkness for their patrols. The army has an observation tower at the top of the tower block, and patrols, running and covering one another chase up and down the balconies. One lunchtime when I was there, the soldiers had been into the estate five times that day. They had been knocking on doors and questioning people. Sometimes at night they knock front doors down. The flats stand on the front line next to the Shankill Protestant area, and there have been countless murders. ...
The stairways are pitch dark even in the daytime — so dark that everyone counts the stairs as they go, remembering which flights have seven and which have ten steps. Some stairs have large chunks of concrete missing, so a stranger might well break a leg. ...
It all takes its toll. With so many children in such a place, I didn't see much kindness. Brutalisation is inevitable. A mother wanted to show me her crippled child couldn't walk. "Come on Patrick show the lady how you move about," she urged him, but he shook his head. "Come on," she shouted, cuffing him.

[At HMP Styal, a women's prison in Cheshire, near Manchester] Since mental hospitals began to shed their patients into what is euphemistically called the community, the prison ranks have swelled to accommodate them.

Research published this month into OECD countries shows the poor gamble away a larger proportion of their income than the better off. Inevitably the temptations are greater when a £4,000 jackpot feels life-changing to someone on the minimum wage. So countries with more poor people - like the UK - are likely to gamble more. Britain is already the fifth highest gambler among developed nations.

We might let Auberon Waugh rest in peace were it not for the mighty damage his clan has done to British political life, journalism and discourse in the postwar years. They have perpetuated the myth of the superior cultured English gent as an archetype. Although Waugh's loathing of American culture made him uniquely amongst this bunch a pro-European, (he loved to be a "maverick"), this coterie has lead the spirit of anti-Europeanism that pervades Tory party and country. Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams and the rest posit a brave little England of crusty country-living upper-class eccentrics versus the dread (another of their words) bureaucracy of Brussels. It's the old world charm of Whisky Galore mischief-making and John Buchan plucky patriots against the humourless foreign swine. They have contributed to a nation afraid of change or modernity, peddling false, sentimental tradition and an upper-class yesterday unavailable to virtually everyone else.

[A reopening of a water fountain in London, Wimbledon] I was there because the fountain was erected in 1868 in memory of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Toynbee, otologist and ear-syringer to Queen Victoria: he died young in his laboratory experimenting on himself with chloroform for tinnitus. He was a radical local campaigner who fought to save Wimbledon Common from the rapacious Earl Spencer's attempt to privatise and enclose it. He set up the Wimbledon Village Club, a working men's institute for edification, entertainment, refreshments and a library, in much community use now. Family history records that his rigorous selflessness included dragging his nine children across Wimbledon Common on Christmas Day to make them donate their Christmas dinner to a Travellers' encampment. The plaque on the fountain says that working men of Wimbledon and those "interested in the public good" paid for this memorial.

[At HMP Pentonville where the visitors centre was closing] There was, for example, the case of a youngish woman with a large family who visited her husband every fortnight. Each time they came they returned to the centre in a more miserable state. One day they were in tears and the youngest child was sick. The woman said her husband was clearly ill. He had been wild and violent. Each visit he seemed to be getting worse.
He was receiving no treatment. The centre called the assistant governor and asked for an urgent inquiry. He acted at once. The man was found to be in appalling state. He was rushed to the medical wing where he was diagnosed as having Huntington's Chorea, an hereditary disease which strikes suddenly in middle age, bringing insanity followed by death. The whole family had been watching, visit by visit, as their father went mad before their eyes.
No doubt the prison officers did not like the implied criticism of their negligence. There were many other such incidents, though the centre was as careful as possible not to make the officers feel they were being criticised.

High rolling countries run other risks when the exchequer itself gets addicted to the revenues. The Australian government now draws over 10% of its income from gambling: however much destruction it causes to families, the government would fear action that cut gambling habits. The UK Treasury gets only £1.4bn from gambling: on household losses of £9.7bn, that sounds as if the industry is escaping its fair UK dues.

He came from a public school, was the son of an old student of the dean ... [and] the only one with a distinctly sour school report.
He was a big shambling clumsy looking young man. When asked, he said he had already been guaranteed an unconditional place at his father's hospital "Well, they could hardly turn you down. Could they?" said the Dean drily. ... Picking up the report, which indicated laziness... [d]id he really want to be a doctor? "Yes, I'm dead serious." What sort of doctor? "A country GP working on my own. I couldn't stick the routine of hospital life" ... [After the candidate left, the Dean and Consultant surgeon conducting the interviews discussed him] "What do you think?" the Dean asked the surgeon. "I knew his father, and he was just the same, but he's a very good doctor now." The surgeon laughed. "I would say that under no circumstances whatever would I admit him if it wasn't that you knew his father and you say he was the same." The Dean said, "Well, I'm happy to have him." I was surprised at the decision.

All I can say is that when I had come out of my faint, and read what Greg was saying, I saw, naturally, that he was absolutely right. In spite of all she gets wrong, there are things that Polly says that are serious and true, and that any Conservative government should be saying.

The greatest motor behind the anti-abortion campaign has always come from the Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant churches and within all churches there has always been the strongest streak of misogyny. Telling infertile women that they should not benefit from test tube bay techniques or telling pregnant women they must give birth springs from a fount of woman hating passion that begins with the first chapter of Genesis and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

I think of two deaths. The last stages of my mother’s liver and bowel cancer were dreadful: don’t imagine morphine is a gentle floating away – it detaches the mind, but not always the pain, while blocking the gut until an undignified death, obsessed by constipation. By the time her state was bad enough to long for death, it was far too late for her plea to go to Dignitas in Switzerland: those who take that grim and expensive path to a desolate death room need to go early, long before life becomes insufferable.
Some people might never have reached that point, but fear accelerates their departure. My mother, despite good palliative care, begged her GP to help her die. It might have been done once upon a time, he said, but since Harold Shipman’s multiple murders of elderly patients, every ampoule is counted, making it far too dangerous for a doctor to do anything of the kind. "Oh, where’s Dr Shipman when you want him!" she said to him, with what was left of her laugh. So she suffered on needlessly to the bitter end, and we suffered with her helplessly.

Sometimes it seems as if a tidal wave of the worst Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant strawberry milkshake. How it oozes over the planet, sweet, sickly, homogenous, full of 'E' numbers, stabilisers and monosodium glutamate, tasting the same from Samoa to Siberia to Somalia. A traveller across the desert wastes of the Sahara arrives at last at Timbuktu, where the first denizen he meets is wearing a Texaco baseball cap. Pilgrims to the Himalayas in search of the ultimate wilderness in the furthest kingdom find Everest strewn with rubbish, tins, plastic bags, Coca-Cola bottles and all the remnants of the modern global picnicker. Explorers of the Arctic complain that empty plastic bottles of washing-up liquid are embedded in the ice. Global culture and its detritus wash up everywhere, nothing sacred, nothing wild, nothing authentic, original or primitive any more. These modern travellers' tales tell of cultural vandalism, Western Goths contaminating ancient civilisations and traditions untouched for centuries. If the West were to set out on a mission of global imperialism deliberately planned we would surely choose better cultural ambassadors. It is not pages from Shakespeare or scores of Mozart that litter steppe and savannah but some marketing man's logo from last year's useless, meretricious product, or a snatch of that maddening theme tune from Titanic. Was ever an empire so monstrously self-assured and ambitious? Western cultural imperialism reaches right into the hearts and souls, the sexual behaviour, the spirit, religion, politics and the nationhood of the entire world. It happens haphazardly with no master plan or empire-building blueprint, but with a vague and casual insouciance that drives its detractors to despair. So when we consider the globalisation of culture most of us bring to the subject a jumble of deep-seated alarms - moral, intellectual, political, spiritual, artistic and nationalistic, melting into a great pot of 'globalisation panic'. It causes deep pessimism about the cultural future of a world turning homogeneously horrible.

Here comes the coronation in a few weeks, not much changed since I was waving at the last one, pleading in vain for a Dinky Toy gold coach.