Brian Gerrish - Annie Besant - Lee Kuan Yew - G Edward Grifin - Edward R Pease - David M Hart -
The Fabians to most people are a debating society, and they do debate all sort of things, but behind the facade is a very nasty organisation. Its emblem is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s got another one which is of men hammering the world into shape. And their effective technique is that they are going to change us, but they are going to do it so slowly we won’t know it’s happening ... He [Tony Blair] was a chairman of the Fabian Society. Brian Gerrish, State of the Nation
Their actual logo is a wolf in sheep’s clothing! Fabians, from Fabia Maximus, a Roman general who won his battles by guerrilla tactics. Brian Gerrish, Alternative View II conference
A democratic Socialism, controlled by majority votes, guided by numbers, can never succeed; a truly aristocratic Socialism, controlled by duty, guided by wisdom, is the next step upwards in civilisation. Annie Besant
They [Fabian Socialists] were going to create a just society for the British workers – the beginning of a welfare state, cheap council housing, free medicine and dental treatment, free spectacles, generous unemployment benefits. Of course, for students from the colonies, like Singapore and Malaya, it was a great attraction as the alternative to communism. We did not see until the 1970s that that was the beginning of big problems contributing to the inevitable decline of the British economy. Lee Kuan Yew, first prime minister of Singapore
The Fabians originally were an elite group of intellectuals who formed a semi-secret society for the purpose of bringing socialism to the world. Whereas communists wanted to establish socialism quickly through violence and revolution, the Fabians preferred to do it slowly through propaganda and legislation. The word socialism was not to be used. Instead, they would speak of benefits for the people such as welfare, medical care, higher wages, and better working conditions. In this way, they planned to accomplish their objective without bloodshed and even without serious opposition. They scorned the communists, not because they disliked their goals, but because they disagreed with their methods. To emphasize the importance of gradualism, they adopted the turtle as the symbol of their movement. The three most prominent leaders in the early days were Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw. A stained-glass window from the Beatrice Webb House in Surrey, England is especially enlightening. G Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island
We have a festering mass of human wretchedness in all our great towns, which is the natural hotbed of such anarchical movements: all the great continental countries are full of this explosive material. Can we depend on our country keeping free from the infection when we have far more poverty in our midst than the neighbouring European States? Edward R Pease, The History of the Fabian Society
The Fabian Society has been enormously influential in British and Australian politics over the past 120 years: it used a bequest to found the London School of Economics in 1895 (it is rather ironic then that this is where Friedrich Hayek taught from 1931 to 1950), it joined with the trade unions to found the British Labour Party in 1900, it founded the magazine the New Statesman in 1913, it laid the intellectual foundations for the creation of the welfare state after the Second World War (over 220 Labour MPs elected in the landslide victory of 1945 were members of the Fabian Society), and it was important in the revitalisation of the Labour Party in the 1990s by publishing Tony Blair’s pamphlet on the Third Way. David M Hart 2003