I Want More

Greed

This is the text for this song that was ommitted from the North American version of the "Tubthumper" album:

This is Tearoom England: the class system in microcosm. The worst bigotry can have the best table manners.

"The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force." --Albert Einstein

"There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class." --Leonard Sidney Woolf

"What do you think the effect of the Beatles was on the history of Britain?" - "I don't know about the history. The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same except there is a lot of middle class kids with long hair walking round London in trendy clothes and Kenneth Tynan's making a fortune from the word 'fuck'. But apart from that, nothing happened except that we're all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin' everything, it's exactly the same. They hyped the kids and the generation. We've grown up a little, a lot of us, and there has been a change and we're a bit freer and all that, but it's the same game, nothing's really changed. They're doing exactly the same things, selling arms to South Africa, killing blacks on the street, people are living in poverty with rats crawling over them, it's the same. It just makes you puke. And I woke up to that, too. The dream is over. It's just the same only I'm thirty and a lot of people have got long hair, that's all." --John Lennon, 1970

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, can never bring about a reform." --Susan B Anthony

"Everybody knows that the influence of social class is much less than it used to be - except that it isn't. Scrutiny of General Household Survey figures shows, for example, that sons and daughters of unskilled workers are no more likely to go to university now than they were two decades ago." --Observer, January 26, 1997

"With the benefit of hindsight, most historians of sport recognise that the concern with the seperation between amateur and professional was a semantic masking of class divisions. Such segregation served the objective of retaining power over the control and allocation of resources through the exclusion of the majority. The formation of the Amateur Football Association in 1907 - originally called the Amateur Football Defence Foundation - over the issue of admittance of professionals to county football associations, was essentially a southern-based, public school reaction to the growing economic might of the Northern, working-class professional clubs. The amateur/professional debate used language that betrayed a political agenda, the double standards and selective application of the rules were breath-taking in their hypocrisy. The elitist, amateur Corinthians often charged more in expenses to play than the weekly wage bill of their professional opponents; amateur cricketers could receive unlimited income from benefit matches. Amateurs didn't need or want to earn a living from sport. Thus their performance didn't carry the same practical or symbolic value. If they played badly the disadvantages were metaphysical - a loss to pride not to the pocket. Loss of form didn't have the demon material consequences that shadowed the exploits of the working class professional. Shamateur clubs were snobs: They wanted to compete, to use the same devices as professional clubs to build a successful team, but at the same time remain unsullied by the grubby practice of openly paying hirelings to beat opponents." --From 'Walter Daniel Tull, 1888-1918: Soldier, Footballer, Black', by Phil Vasili

"The use of legislation, however, should not be allowed to muffle the noise and directness of class conflict. Indeed, legislation cannot be understood without being seen as part of that conflict. Commissioner of Police, Sir Charles Warren said, in relation to the Feltham fair of 1887, "the abolition of the fair is a class question on which as commissioner of police I can say little beyond the fact that it gives the police trouble to keep order, and while one class certainly enjoy it, its existence is a cause of annoyance to others." --Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590-1914, edited by Eileen and Stephen Yeo, 1981