I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them. - Tony Benn

I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to see that what is said about us is true.

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.

TONY BENN: Well, I think there were a lot of problems. There was the oil crisis, and we may have another one. We're talking, remember, about the end of the year 2000. With a war in the Middle East, rising oil prices could throw the whole world economy into collapse again. So you have to recognize, as [Prime Minister Harold] Macmillan once said, that events can often change things. But what we did at the end of the war, to employ everybody, was a remarkable achievement. We built 400,000 houses. We built a health service, absolutely free when you needed it. You paid for it when you were well, and you got it for free when you were ill. Everything. No charge for spectacles or prescriptions or anything. That was a huge advance in human improvement. And now, increasingly, they're trying to privatize the health service so the rich will be able to afford to be looked after, but other people won't.