There are some of us … who will fight and fight and fight again to save the Party we love. Hugh Gaitskell, speech Labour Party Conference 5th October 1960
The idea that a party leader should be accountable to the party he leads and not just to Labour members of parliament … Tony Benn, interview William Buckley, ‘Firing Line, The Crisis in Labour’
It is the hope of the right in Britain that the Labour party will split … The Labour Party will not split. ibid.
This week a meeting of the Labour Party executive and once again Tony Benn walks his own path and dominates the proceedings. Tony Benn, Thames TV 1981
The battle for Labour’s soul takes flight this summer. ibid.
‘A return to full employment by the use directly of the North Sea oil revenues … We want access to the nation’s savings … This question of where the growth is to come … public services: that’s where the work is needed.’ ibid. Tony
The Left were castigated by Healey in aggressive form. ibid.
There’s a very exciting debate going on. Tony Benn, Afternoon Plus, Thames TV 1982
The party has to work together in order to really I believe honestly to save this country from the disaster of unemployment, the threat of war, and the tyranny of the Common Market. ibid.
I think we should keep everyone in the party. ibid.
At the moment anyone who is to the left of The Guardian is treated as if he is in some way wicked or evil or an extremist or a revolutionary or dangerous, and that deprives people at home of access to the full range of information. ibid.
The SDP is a very right-wing party. ibid.
Massive oil price increases in 1973 followed by industrial action by mineworkers in the winter of that year had led the prime minister to call a three day week. The Labour party, under the leadership of Harold Wilson, had spent over three years in opposition. With Tony Benn as shadow minister for Trade and Industry, Labour had developed alternative policies to fight Britain’s economic decline including a radical industrial strategy. Against the Tide: a record of Labour’s retreat from those policies is based on Tony Benn’s diaries for those crucial years. Tony Benn, Against the Tide, Youtube 53.24
Angry Business Chiefs Turn on Benn & Foot: We’ve Had Enough! ibid. Evening Standard headline
The British establishment cares more about locking Britain into the EEC than other single thing for the very simple reason that they see it as the final guarantee that Britain under any government will never adopt socialist policies because it would be illegal under the Treaty of Rome. ibid.
Nuclear power: What I learned by hard experience was it wasn’t cheap … it isn’t safe … and it isn’t peaceful, most important of all … Plutonium that had come out of our civil power stations was going to America to go to make warheads … The cost of the nuclear power programme was really fraudulent … They never compared like with like … the decommissioning costs … all these ongoing costs have still to be borne … ibid.
I did not enter the Labour Party forty-seven years ago to have our manifesto written by Doctor Mori, Doctor Gallup and Mister Harris. Tony Benn
If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists the media – having tasted blood – would demand that it expel its socialists and form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which would be allowed to take office now and again when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British capitalism would be made safe. Tony Benn
He was once described in the press as the most dangerous man in Britain. A Viscount’s son, the public schoolboy, who became the champion of the working class. Tony Benn: Labour’s Lost Leader, BBC 2014
A clever fluent performer with broadcasting experience. ibid.
The most dangerous man in Britain today. Tony Benn, Last Will & Testament ***** Youtube 1.31.36, Daily Mail headline
The whole deterrent argument is a fraud. ibid. Benn
Basically, he’s a dreamer. ibid. Harold Wilson
I met Caroline in 1948 at Worcester College. ibid. Benn
I was brought up in the non-conformist radical tradition. ibid.
It would never be right or practical ever to use the hydrogen bomb. ibid. old black and white film
Nuclear weapons are so dangerous that you have to keep quiet about them, and at the end of the War Attlee continued building nuclear weapons and he never told parliament or the cabinet what he’d done. And so in a way the very existence of nuclear weapons destroys democratic accountability. ibid.
You mustn’t confuse parliament with democracy. ibid.
When I arrived in the House of Commons the speaker wouldn’t allow me to enter the chamber. ibid.
When Mrs Thatcher came to power she sold off the oil we had and used it to pay for redundancy pay for people she’d sacked. ibid.
If I reflect on the way our society is organised – democracy ought to be a means by which we change the system to meet people’s needs: and it’s been subtly transformed into changing people to meet the needs of the system. And that is the great failure. ibid.
It was those cuts that led to the Winter of Discontent that led to the election of Mrs Thatcher. ibid.
Whether you win or lose a battle in the long run doesn’t matter: the question is did you fight it hard. ibid.
When people look back on her [Thatcher] life now, the divisions and suffering she caused and injustice she perpetuated are much more remembered than the triumphs she claimed. ibid.
The period of the press persecution. ibid.
It’s the right that’s always got us into trouble. ibid.
I think of Neil as the grandfather of New Labour. ibid.
It’s all about power and where it is. Too much power is in the hands of too few people … It’s secret powerful people who’ve got positions in industry and in society. And unless that power is exposed, it’ll continue to exercise undue influence of few people … It’s secret powerful people who’ve got positions in industry and in society. And unless that power is exposed, it’ll continue to exercise undue influence and maintain the underclass and the injustices we’ve seen. ibid.
This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. Harold Wilson, speech Labour Party Conference October 1962
Those who seriously believe we cannot improve on words written for the world of 1918 when we are now in 1995 are not learning from our history but living it. Tony Blair, re proposed revision of Clause IV
The worry is that New Labour, even in government, will remain imprisoned by the ideas it has learned to ape, and govern too much within the parameters laid down by its predecessors. Will Hutton, The State to Come
I’m still batting away on my politics for the Labour Party. I’m much further to the left of them than I used to be, but that’s because they’ve moved, not me. Billy Bragg
A bloody Labour Club – what did you learn there, eh? Alan Bleasdale, GBH IV: Message starring Robert Lindsay & Lindsay Duncan & Michael Palin & Julie Walters & Tom Georgeson & Andrew Schofield & Jane Danson & David Ross et al, director Robert Young, Laura to Jim, Channel 4 1991
You’d catch something – Ed-bola. Rory Bremner’s Coalition Report, BBC 2015
The situation of our country grows daily, indeed almost hourly, worse. Under Labour the Land of Hope of Glory has become the Land of Beg and Borrow. Margaret Thatcher
I’ll start with the happy ending; I don’t like Tony Blair or New Labour. I’ve never liked them and I knew all along I didn’t like them.
This is the optimistic outcome of the twenty-five years covered in this book. Not that many other people like them, though lots thought they did, because they didn’t feel anything better was possible. So polls showed Blair as the most popular Prime Minister of the 20th century. But who do you know who liked him? No one. He was the most unpopular person there had ever been. He reminded me of an irritating idiot at a party, who everyone wishes would leave, but no one dares tell him to because everyone thinks he’s everyone else’s friend. Mark Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful
So what did they [Labour Party] say about the hunger strikes? On 1st May, four days before Bobby Sands died, Don Concannon, Labour’s spokesman for Northern Ireland, flew especially to Belfast and travelled to the H-Blocks to visit him. As Sands lay blind, Concannon told him the Labour Party firmly supported Thatcher on the issue of political status, and he’d come to tell him personally so there could be no doubt in any prisoner’s mind where Labour stood. ibid.
Even then, the result would mean Labour now had a policy of curbing police powers or cutting arms spending, but everyone knew they weren’t going to do it. So why did they bother having the conference at all? ibid.