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Tony Benn Quotes
1925–2014 England
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician and diarist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001.
England Activists Autobiographers Feminists Non-fiction authors Also known as: Benn, Tony
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48 quotes
Multinational companies now aim to run the world... by buying both political parties in America and expecting a pay-off whichever one wins — and that is totally anti-democratic.
The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.
The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.
When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered.
Ideas are more powerful than guns.
In Labour Governments we did our best to make capitalism work in a civilised way. And we failed. It never can work. It will always exploit and oppress the people.
It is wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his
The Benn Heresy (1982)
Through me the energy policy of the whole Common Market is being held up. Without opening old wounds, it pleases me no end.
TB: It’s anti-capitalist, it’s anti-capitalist.
People say that if we work for the Single European Act, women will get their rights, the water will be purer, and training will be better. That is rubbish. It is part of the attempt to consolidate the EEC.
The big question today is 'Will globalisation allow democracy to survive?' On one side we have the multinationals, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. I want to help to redress the balance on the other side.
[O]n balance Britain would have far less influence on world events if she were inside [the EEC] than she could have if she remained outside.
I never liked meat - and my son Hilary, 30 years ago, said, 'If the world ate the grain instead of feeding it to animals and killing them, there would be enough food for everybody,'
I think that having 24 people around the Cabinet table whose future depends upon maintaining the good will of one man is fundamentally undemocratic and it would be far better if Cabinet ministers were accountable to the Parliamentary Labour Party.
People in debt become hopeless and hopeless people don’t vote. They always say that that everyone should vote but I think that if the poor in Britain or the United States turned out and voted for people that represented their interests there would be a real democratic revolution.
Interview with Michael Moore in the movie Sicko (2007)
It is we, on this side, who object to dreams of empire, because we think in terms of free association and we believe that the empire that was built up was based on force and domination by this country.
[M]en who would rather go to jail than betray what they believe to be their duty to their fellow workers and the principles which they hold.
[T]he 1983 Labour manifesto commanded the loyalty of millions of voters and a democratic socialist bridge-head in public understanding and support can be made.
[The Labour Party]'s never been a socialist party, but it's always had socialists in it, just as there are some Christians in the Church, it's an exact parallel.
Britain's continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation and the end of our democratically elected Parliament as the supreme law making body in the United Kingdom.
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