Education Quote by Anita Roddick

Roddick frames “the economic ticket” as a relatively new political costume, and that phrasing matters: a “ticket” isn’t an ideology so much as a sales pitch, a bundling of promises designed to win a seat. Coming from a business figure who built The Body Shop on activist branding, the line lands as an insider’s accusation. She’s not condemning commerce from the outside; she’s warning that market logic has colonized everything, including the way politicians justify their authority.

The first move is nostalgia with a purpose. “Years ago” sketches a past where education and health were treated as self-evident public goods rather than line items. Whether or not the history is perfectly tidy, the rhetorical effect is: we used to argue about what kind of society we wanted; now we argue about what will “grow” and “compete.” That shift smuggles in a moral critique: once “economic values” become the universal solvent, other priorities survive only if they can be translated into GDP, productivity, or consumer confidence.

Her sharpest claim is the last one: economics hasn’t merely become important; it has “superseded every other human value.” The provocation is deliberate. She’s pointing at the 1980s-2000s drift toward neoliberal common sense, when “the economy” became a master keyword capable of ending debates. If health is framed as cost, education as workforce training, and citizens as consumers, politics narrows into managerial triage. Roddick’s subtext is a dare: stop treating economics as neutral physics and admit it’s ethics by another name.