Politics & Power Quote by John Burns

Burns is doing something sharper than calling his critics hypocrites: he’s diagnosing a convenient form of moral theater. “Advocate the unobtainable” isn’t praise for lofty ideals; it’s an indictment of people who choose impossible demands precisely because impossibility comes with innocence. If you campaign for what can’t happen, you never have to govern, compromise, or be blamed for outcomes. Utopia becomes a loophole.

The sentence is built like a prosecutor’s brief. Burns concedes “opposition,” then narrows the suspect pool to “a number of men,” making it personal without naming names. The real blow lands in the three-part charge: “moral courage, administrative ability, and political prescience.” He’s not arguing policy details; he’s attacking the character and competence required to turn ethics into institutions. “Immediately possible” is the key phrase: Burns elevates incremental, implementable reform as the real test of conviction. In his framing, courage isn’t how loudly you denounce the world; it’s whether you can stomach the unglamorous work of making things better now.

Context matters. As a labor organizer turned statesman (a rare trajectory in British politics), Burns was often wedged between purists who wanted maximalist transformation and establishment figures wary of any reform at all. This line reads like a self-defense against the left’s puritan wing as much as against conservative obstruction: you can’t build a welfare state, improve working conditions, or pass municipal reforms on vows alone. Burns’ subtext is brutal: some radicals aren’t too good for incrementalism; they’re too afraid of responsibility.