Daily Inspiration Quote by Polly Toynbee

A neat piece of left-of-center realism hides inside Toynbee's plain phrasing: she’s not romanticizing work, she’s arguing that employment is one of the few parts of life governments can actually shape at scale. “Working lives are for the state to influence” is a rebuke to the modern habit of treating jobs as a private matter - a contract between employee and employer, sealed off from politics. Toynbee drags it back into the public realm, where wages, hours, security, and bargaining power are policy outcomes, not personal quirks.

The second line does double duty. “Unemployment makes people unhappy” sounds obvious, almost banal, but that’s the point: she’s smuggling an ethical claim through a statement that’s hard to dispute. If mass unemployment is predictably miserable, then tolerating it becomes a political choice, not a weather event. Then she widens the frame with “So does instability,” aiming at the gig economy’s permanent probation: work that exists, but never quite counts. The subtext is that a headline unemployment rate can flatter an economy while people still live in a constant state of financial vertigo.

Toynbee’s context is contemporary Britain’s long argument about austerity, labor-market “flexibility,” and the state’s proper size. She’s pushing back against the idea that the best government is the one that leaves people alone. Her claim is sharper: in labor, leaving people alone often means leaving them exposed.