The Americans would not allow an anti-American government to be elected in Britain - I mean an anti-capitalist government, a socialist government, to… - Tony Benn
" "The Americans would not allow an anti-American government to be elected in Britain - I mean an anti-capitalist government, a socialist government, to be elected in Britain. So how would you ever make a change, unless you put on such pressure that the system falls and then people take over. The idea that a little debate in Parliament will change things is really an illusion. I’m not in favour of a bloody revolution, because we saw what happened with Stalin, but I’m not in favour of surrendering, step by step, the right of people to dec ide the policies that the elected government follows, because otherwise you might just as well hang the whole thing up. That is the issue that interests me very much, and Paul Foot’s book, The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined, is highly relevant to it.
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About Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician and diarist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001. He later served as President of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to 2014.
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Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn
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Additional quotes by Tony Benn
The issues raised in the historic conflict between Charles I, resting his claim to govern Britain on the divine right of kings, and Parliament - representing, however imperfectly, a demand for the wider sharing of power - concerned the use and abuse of state power, the right of the governed to a say in their government, and the nature of political freedom. The Levellers grew out of this conflict. They represented the aspirations of working people who suffered under the persecution of kings, landowners and the priestly class, and they spoke for those who experienced the hardships of poverty and deprivation. They developed and campaigned, first with Cromwell and then against him, for a political and constitutional settlement of the civil war which would embody principles of political freedom, anticipating by a century and a half the ideas of the American and French revolutions.
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