Aneurin Bevan Quotes

We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land.

We say that Great Britain has always stood for civilised principles, and for humanity and justice. How do we answer now, when we drop bombs on helpless people? [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Yes, when we drop bombs. How do we answer now at whatever judgment seat any hon. Member likes to mention? A nation more powerful than us may drop even worse bombs on British cities. How answer that? With bombs? Bombs with bombs? That is the bankruptcy of statesmanship. The world has travelled that way in my own lifetime twice. We dare not travel that way again, because this time there will be no return.

The function of parliamentary democracy, under universal franchise, historically considered, is to expose wealth-privilege to the attack of the people. It is a sword pointed at the heart of property-power. The arena where the issues are joined is Parliament.

There can be no immaculate conception of socialism.

The introduction of Italian labour into the mines is not a solution. It is merely an escape from present headaches and a precursor of worse ones to come. In our crowded island no one should pretend that a shortage of labour in a particular industry is solved by bringing workers in from abroad. The problem is one of mal-distribution of our own labour force, and this, in its turn, is the consequence of a capital and wages policy that obeys no long term purposive intention.

That so many people suffer from preventable privation, whilst others enjoy privileges and material advantages that do not on any reasonable reckoning flow from personal accomplishments, is evidence of dangerous social instability.

It has been suggested, I think by the hon. Member for East Aberdeenshire (Mr. Boothby) that the most constructive suggestion he could make was to urge an early General Election and a return of a Tory Government in Britain. Why on earth should he want to prophesy what might result from a Tory Government when history has the record for him? Why read the crystal when he can read the book?

The challenge is going to come from Russia. The challenge is not going to come from the United States. The challenge is not going to come from West Germany nor from France. The challenge is going to come from those countries who, however wrong they may be – and I think they are wrong in many fundamental respects – nevertheless are at long last being able to reap the material fruits of economic planning and of public ownership. ... Our main case is and must remain that in a modern complex society it is impossible to get rational order by leaving things to private economic adventure. Therefore I am a Socialist. I believe in public ownership.

I could quote almost all the ultimatums given by Hitler to countries that he invaded where he used exactly the same kind of language as the Prime Minister used the other day. The same language was used to Norway. ... We have only to substitute Egypt for Norway, because what did the right hon. Gentleman say? He said that he expected the Egyptian Government to peacefully permit the re-occupation of bases on the [Suez] Canal by the British Forces, and if they resisted they would be overcome with all necessary force. That is exactly what he said. Quite honestly, this is the language of the bully. There is no semblance of legal justification behind it.

Lloyd George was a bigger man than Churchill, and one of the biggest things about Churchill was that he knew it.

I have never been able to reconcile the obscene conduct of the Russian Communists under Stalin—the assassinations, tortures, imprisonments and the impounding of helpless people in camps—with their philosophy, and I have never understood how the Russians could do so. The only explanation is that it is not part of their Communism at all, but of Byzantinism.

Economics, said Mr Stanley, is 50% psychology … What we need, apparently, is not statesman but hypnotists, not scientists, but witchdoctors, not confidence born of scientific prediction of the future, but confidence created by a political Confidence Trick. There is nothing surprising in this. It is the kind of mystic Mumbo-Jumbo to which capitalism is driven when austere reason pronounces sentence of death upon it. It is the primitive recoil from reality and the burdens of reality which lies at the root of Fascist psychology.

The spiv has entered into modern literature not only as a by-product of a rationing system. He is the modern equivalent of the smuggler. He is the prototype of the evader of taxes. All this occasions the bitterest resentment among those citizens whose social situation forces them to pay in full. The consequences from a Socialist point of view of what really amounts to a penalisation of the honest and of those whose job does not permit evasion is exceedingly serious. The power and prosperity of tax evaders thwarts one of the main aims of Socialism: the establishment of just, social relationships.

Bevan described the proposal for a free trade market for Europe as a "will-of-the-wisp" which they were expected to spend their time following in Westminster. The whole idea was purely a nineteenth-century conception.

I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating-machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice, he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine.