Socialist society can only come about by a revolution; if the masses, through general strikes and mass agitation, seize the means of production from … - Paul Foot

It is not Neil Kinnock's fault that he is unconvincing. He is unconvincing because he represents a formula for changing society which has been proved, over sixty years more, to have failed in its central purpose. Compare Kinnock in any age to [Clement] Attlee in any age, and on every conceivable count Kinnock is the more impressive. Attlee, for all the ridiculous hero-worship of history, was really a mean-minded bore, whose only political quality was cunning. He had none of Kinnock’s passion, none of his oratory, none of his charisma. But Attlee (and Wilson, in the same sort of way, with the same sort of qualities) won elections while Kinnock loses them. The difference is not in the quality of the men, but in the huge history of failure with which Kinnock – but not Attlee, and Wilson rather less – has had to wrestle.

I am sorry to read in this book that Ian Botham is an 'independent Tory' and (worse) that he admires Mrs Thatcher. But I am not inclined to mix politics with sport. Indeed, the worst damage done to cricket since the war has been that mixing of politics with sport which knocked South Africa out of international cricket. The supporters of apartheid mixed politics with sport so shamefully that they banned people from playing cricket with one another because of the colour of their skin. This outrage, which brought the entire sport into disrepute, was greeted with unconcern by the same MCC gentlemen who have apoplexy when cricketers say they smoked pot when they were kids. Racialism is a million times more damaging to cricket than cannabis. Where does Ian Botham stand on that?
He was offered, literally, a million pounds if he and his friend Viv Richards went to South Africa as part of the public relations circus for that country’s racialist politics. He refused point blank.

I'd been impressed, too, more than I dared admit at the campaign by Tony Benn and his supporters. Why, I wonder? I'd never been an admirer of him personally. I suppose I've bashed him in print just as much as anyone else in the country, even the Daily Mirror leader writers. It wasn't even that I was specially keen on the specific policies he was advocating. As you know, I don't much go for a 'siege economy' and import controls, which I regard as a lot of nationalist claptrap. And I certainly didn't like all those eulogies about Russia which were starting to creep into Tony Benn's speeches, and which reminded me of the sort of windy fellow-travelling which polluted the Left in the 1940s and 1950s.
I suppose what I liked was the straight appeal to socialist solutions – the open attack on capitalism and all its works.