British politician (1925-2014)
It is no use blaming working people or the unions if they have to work in ancient factories with obsolete equipment producing old-fashioned goods at unecomonic prices and earning low wages as well. Working people not only are not responsible for the weakness of British manufacturing industry. They have hitherto been denied the tools and tackle that they needed to put it right.
TONY BENN
speech in the House of Commons, February 17, 1975
Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves.
TONY BENN
speech to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, October 2, 1972
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.
TONY BENN
The Times, February 11, 1980
The fact is that the British constitution, parliamentary system and machinery of government are far from democratic in both theory and practice and they are full of obstacles for those who want to use them to bring about reform by democratic means. The Crown prerogatives, most of which are exercised by ministers, confer immense powers which can, if abused, frustrate the wishes of the electorate.... The use of either prerogative power in a controversial manner in Britain would draw the monarchy into the heart of the political debate.
TONY BENN
The Times, August 27, 1982
I never remember politics being quite as unpleasant as this before; but maybe this is what life is like at the top.
TONY BENN
The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990
Workers now have, through interdependence, enormous negative power to dislocate the system. Workers' control--if it means the power to plan their own work and to hire and fire the immediate plant management just as M.P.s are now hired and fired by the voters--converts that existing negative power into positive and constructive power. It thus creates the basis of common interest with local managers struggling to make a success of the business and to get devolved authority from an over-centralized bureaucratic board of management now perhaps sitting on them from above.
TONY BENN
"Towards workers' control", The Times, September 5, 1970
What we lack in Government is entrepreneurial ability.
TONY BENN
speech in London, June 6, 1974
Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.
TONY BENN
Yorkshire Post, November 22, 1976
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.
TONY BENN
interview with Michael Moore, Sicko
It is an indisputable historical fact ... that Marxism has, from the earliest days, always been openly accepted by the party as one of many sources of inspiration within our movement, along with--though much less influential than--Christian Socialism, Fabianism, Owenism, trade unionism, or even radical Liberalism. Marxism is not synonymous with communism and it is not true that there is growing up in the Labour Party a dominant group which believes in violent revolution, the one-party state and suppression of democratic rights.
TONY BENN
statement in defense of Andy Bevan, a Marxist who had been appointed Labour's National Youth Officer, The Times, December 16, 1976
I was the first MP to table a motion condemning apartheid in South Africa. When I first met Nelson Mandela he was a terrorist, when I next saw him, he was a Nobel Prize winner and the President of South Africa.
TONY BENN
interview with Andrew Walker, March 10, 2001
I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralize them.
TONY BENN
interview with Michael Moore, Sicko
I don't make mistakes. I make predictions which immediately turn out to be wrong.
TONY BENN
Arguments for Socialism
I do not think we have a free press in Britain today. There is not a single newspaper that I can buy, not one in Britain that reflects my political position. And The Times, dare I say to you, is really disreputable. It does not print truthfully and faithfully what happens and it pretends, because it is printed in small print that it is above argument. But it is a political propaganda instrument like The Sun, but it is printed in rather better print and rather shrewder language.
TONY BENN
The Times, March 13, 1982
An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.
TONY BENN
interview with Michael Moore, Sicko
A quotation is what a speaker wants to say--unlike a soundbite which is all that an interviewer allows you to say.
TONY BENN
letter to Antony Jay, August 1996
Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he'd come to the conclusion about capitalism which I'd come to much later, and I was a bit angry he'd thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that's what 'Das Kapital' was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, 'Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet.
TONY BENN
interview with John Cleary, February 23, 2003
Office is something that builds up a man only if he is somebody in his own right.
TONY BENN
diary, April 12, 1976
Democracy is what we do here and now, and not what somebody else does for us, later, when they get into the seats of power.
TONY BENN
Fighting Back: Speaking Out for Socialism in the Eighties
Choice depends on the freedom to choose and if you are shackled with debt you don't have the freedom to choose.
TONY BENN
interview with Michael Moore, Sicko