Polly Toynbee Quotes

Yet, as ever, he will sound considerably tougher on crime than on its causes because that is where his true feelings lie. The toughness comes easy but the underlying social justice theme comes but once a year at party conference.

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.

The punishment block is aptly named Bleak House, and known just as Bleak. Several of the solitary cells inside this separate compound, hidden behind the coal sheds, were opened for me to inspect the inmates, a procedure that made me feel extremely uncomfortable. ...
Inside one cell a big, red haired girl sat on her bed, the only furniture, and the officer said she was there for her own protection. She can hardly have been twenty, but her arms, legs and face were covered in old scars. New stitches stood out on the pale flesh from a long cut across her arm. She cut herself often. She was also agoraphobic and didn't want to leave the cell.
"I'm glad you've come to talk to me," she said warmly as I sat down beside her. She sounded like a young child.
"No one's been to talk to me all day. I don't want to be free but I'd like to be in mental hospital, where I was before. But they sent me out, so I stole a social security cheque and went straight to the police, and then I got put here." Her mother had been in the same mental hospital. Her father and two uncles had killed themselves, and she had slashed herself countless times. Her father had assaulted her when she was six and when she was sixteen. She, too, though visited by a doctor every day, as are all Bleak inmates, said she was receiving no psychiatric treatment, and no drugs.

As for Boris Johnson, I look back with a morbid incredulity at what that baby grew up to be. It’s a not particularly good joke to surprise people with the fact that I am one of the many women to have seen him naked.

The last candidate of the day was also the son of a doctor. The Dean knew his father too. "His father is a bright chap, but completely incomprehensible," he said. The boy was intense and serious but with a speech impediment. He spoke a great deal about the need for doctors to "Co-communicate" with their patients, which afterwards made the Dean smile.
He spoke enthusiastically about the role of doctor as counsellor, pointing out that recent research indicated that GPs had to deal with people's psychological ailments as much as their physical wellbeing. ... Analysis of the school's drop-outs showed that the desire to do social work and a wish to bring about change in society to help the roots of patients problems was one of the main reasons for students failing to stay the course. This boy was turned down outright.

It is not my practice to engage in local political activity on the grounds that I have quite enough of that sort of thing without doing it in the evenings or at weekends. My wife, Ms Polly Toynbee, who is a member of the SDP's National Steering Committee, intends to put up for the Lambeth Borough Council. That is her affair and I shall go canvassing on her behalf if weather permits. I expect, in the fulness of time, to become the Denis Thatcher of the SDP.

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

Her class identity has clearly caused her much confusion and soul-searching. She is particularly acute on the uncomfortable space that the radical middle and upper-middle classes have always occupied in our culture. The charge of hypocrisy is so easily made against affluent campaigners and reformers who must suffer "the cognitive dissonance of failing to live up to the beliefs we profess." It’s a fate, Toynbee notes with irritation, that no smug wealthy Conservative ever has to endure.

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.

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.

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.

[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.