Britain is entering a new constitutional period after a gigantic reduction of local government democracy, also the biggest sale of public property since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, the abolition of common land in the 1820s.  Even Britain’s public water supply, the greatest achievement of Victorian socialism, has been privatised … Despite protests by librarians the best of branch library stock have been sold and replaced by the kind of cheap paperback most newsagents sell.  Despite protests by teachers our local school buildings are sold to private property developers, and schools in poor areas cannot supply their pupils with proper books …

I consider this anthology a memorial to the kind of education British governments now think useless, especially for British working class children.  But it has been my education, so I am bound believe it one of the best in the world.

I no longer think social improvements inevitable anywhere. I still believe (as my dad and grandads did) that good co-operative working brings us closer to liberty, equality, fraternity: the only state in which we are happy and sane.

From The Book of Prefaces (2000), by Alasdair Gray.