I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world: “Do your worst”.

Answer to a Star reporter who put the question to Lansbury, “What would you do if you were Dictator?” (23 October 1933), during the Fulham East by-election, quoted in Edgar Lansbury, George Lansbury, My Father (1934), p. 175 and Robert Rhodes James, Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910–1937 (1969), p. 398