Herbert Morrison Quotes

We must not be rigid. We must not become conservative as is the unhappy state of some of our Liberal leaders to-day, as did the French Revolution of 1789, as has, in many respects, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We need the fresh air and free challenging thought of my favourite poet, Robert Burns, who was, I think, a Socialist agitator before an organised Socialist movement was born.

The Government leaders were all urging a policy of rearmament, and Mr. Chamberlain was ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction. He had not money, however, for the unemployed, the depressed areas, and social services. He would spend on the means of death, but not on the means of life, and that was the sort of fellow he looked like, too.

A vote for the Tories is a vote for war.

The bridge was not of such great importance or social significance, but it was symbolical that Labour was capable of decision, that the machinery of democratic public administration would work if the men and women in charge were determined that it should work.

He would be prepared to say himself that no individual state should have Crown Colonies at all, and that French, Italian, and British colonies should be handed over to the League to administer under mandates controlled by the League itself. It did not follow that British Crown Colonies would no longer be under British administration. He hoped he was not a Jingo, but he still felt that the British were the best Colonial administrators of any government in the world. It would make a vital difference, however, if instead of being governed as Crown Colonies the possibility should be removed of their exploitation by British capitalism.

Some of you would prefer a Tory Government. We know our enemies. I have come across a coalition of Conservatives and Communists before. Tories have a very warm place in their hearts for Communists and so have the Communists for the Tories.

Our own British Communist Party – if it is our own and British – might at any time suffer a change of heart and go back to bloody revolution. For all I know it may there already, underground. Anything is possible for a party which at one and the same time shouts for a United Front and puts up candidates against us with a view to splitting the Labour vote. All this is alien to our honest, straightforward, native, Socialist thought. ... But you can't all the time say 'No, No, No' to the Communists. The real answer to the Communists is a positive answer. We have to show more vigorous fighting enthusiasm, more faith, more sense of high adventure.

The fact that the House of Lords has many irrational features is not, in itself, fatal in British eyes for we have a capacity for making the irrational work, and if a thing works, we tend to like it, or at any rate to put up with it.

Never again while the risk of war remained must we allow ourselves to neglect our land weapon.

You will see, therefore, that Socialism does not consist of nationalisation alone, important though that element is. It has other and very important aspects... The alternative is Tory reaction. And Tory reaction—as we have seen in other countries—breeds depression, muddle, Communism, and Fascism.

The good Socialist works with religious zeal for the redemption of mankind from the evils of poverty and ignorance. ... He is conscious of the beauty of the ideal ... he works on ... for the deliverance of the human spirit from the enslavement of material things.

It is because I have confidence in the reasoned appeal the Socialist Party can make to all sections of the community – manual workers and black coats alike – that I have decided to go to East Lewisham, if I am selected, emphasizing by this action my conviction that the soundest socialist appeal is that which is most universal in its scope.

What the resolution does not contemplate being done is the lining up behind the government and voting for its rearmament programme.

It is a bright idea that when you get a National Government in office, a mixed and assorted Government, it is to be assumed that the opposition must suddenly cease to function, and that it must discharge the duties of the Opposition and carry the burden of the baby of the Government as well. This Bill is the Government's business, and it is for us to attack it and to tear it to pieces if we like, and we are going to do what we think proper in this respect.

Socialism is what a Labour government does.