#britain

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world. ↗

— Tony Blair

#american #britain #driven #evil #friends

I fear that the rising personal bankruptcies and repossessions are the first signs of bigger problems to come and personal debt - Gordon Brown's legacy to millions of Britain's families - will hang like a millstone around the neck of the British people for years to come. ↗

— Vince Cable

#bigger #britain #british #british people #brown

The thing about politicians in Britain is that they are out there, you can lobby them, get close to them, there are loads of ways you can protest against them, and booing is a pretty weak way of doing it. ↗

— Alastair Campbell

#against #booing #britain #close #doing

The political health of Britain has deteriorated very sharply. The Conservative Party must do something about it. I am the man to do it. ↗

— Kenneth Clarke

#am #britain #conservative #conservative party #deteriorated

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

In Britain you're more used to challenging drama. In America, TV is just boring, and numbing, and bloody terrible. ↗

— Michael Imperioli

#bloody #boring #britain #challenging #drama

I certainly didn't concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other allegiances that can be stress-tested in comparable ways. It used to be a slight hallmark of being English or British that one didn't make a big thing out of patriotic allegiance, and was indeed brimful of sarcastic and critical remarks about the old country, but would pull oneself together and say a word or two if it was attacked or criticized in any nasty or stupid manner by anybody else. It's family, in other words, and friends are family to me. I feel rather the same way about being an American, and also about being of partly Jewish descent. To be any one of these things is to be no better than anyone else, but no worse. When confronted by certain enemies, it is increasingly the 'most definitely no worse' half of this unspoken agreement on which I tend to lay the emphasis. (As with Camus’s famous 'neither victim nor executioner,' one hastens to assent but more and more to say 'definitely not victim.') ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#britain #britishness #camus #edward-said #family

When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British. ↗

— Michael King

#britain #british #child #coherence #commonwealth

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps. ↗

— Johann Hari

#britain #elizabeth-ii #monarchy #monarchy-of-the-uk #postage-stamps

It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#britain #british-empire #cold-war #conservative-party-uk #crisis