INTERVIEWER: According to one analysis, the economic history of the last 20 years is a story about governments retreating from the marketplace and al… - Tony Benn

We are socialists because we believe that these rights cannot be fully realised in any society under capitalism, which, as in Britain now, has entrenched by law, the power of Capital over Labour, and subordinated human values to the demand for profit, at the expense of social justice and peace.

Those who argue that constitutional questions such as party democracy are irrelevant top the political struggle against Mrs Thatcher's Government are misreading the whole history of our movement. If constitutional issues are irrelevant, why did the Chartists have to fight so hard in the nineteenth century? Were the twentieth century suffragettes engaged in irrelevant activity when they were fighting for the vote? Constitutional questions are the key to power in a parliamentary democracy and have played a crucial role in the development of our movement.

INTERVIEWER: But the nationalized industries, do you think they were a success in the late '70s?