Politics & Power Quote by Edward Bond

A threat disguised as reassurance: the line frames the state not as a guardian of people but as a maintenance crew for “the economy,” a machine presumed to have its own survival instincts and moral priority. Bond’s phrasing is bluntly bureaucratic - “whatever,” “needs,” “maintain” - language that sounds like policy brief prose while quietly smuggling in a doctrine of limitless permission. If the goal is maintenance, then any action can be justified: austerity, policing, war, bailouts, propaganda. The subject isn’t citizens; it’s the system.

The sting is in “will do it,” a promise that reads like inevitability. Bond collapses democratic choice into automatic response. Government becomes an instrument, not an arena of competing values. That’s classic Bond: his plays often treat violence not as individual pathology but as a rational output of social structures. Here, violence can be administrative. The economy “needs” something, the state supplies it, and the human cost is recategorized as collateral bookkeeping.

Context matters: Bond comes out of postwar Britain, amid the rise of welfare-state idealism and, later, the hard turn toward market-first governance. The quote feels like a distillation of late-20th-century disillusionment: even when politicians speak the language of care, the underlying covenant may be with stability, growth, credit ratings - abstractions that don’t bleed. Bond’s intent is less to predict specific policies than to expose the quiet theology underneath them: the economy as a god, government as its priesthood, and ordinary life as the offering.