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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Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn
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Viscount Stansgate
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2nd Viscount Stansgate
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Additional quotes by Tony Benn
I must tell the House quite frankly that if I were confronted with a Japanese at this present moment and were asked to tell him that I believed that he was wrong in the treatment of those British prisoners in his hands, I could not but accept a similar criticism from him on the question of the atom bomb. I should be quite unable to avoid it. I am afraid I must say on the question of principle here involved—this question of moral principle—that I believe it to be humbug, when so many people, women, children, old folk, were killed by the atom bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. For every individual photograph that could be produced of a wounded and battered British prisoner of war in Japanese hands, I think one could find an equally horrible photograph of a victim of the atomic bomb. [Interruption.] An hon. Friend of mine says that the two things are not comparable. I do not myself believe that it is possible to draw any distinctions in war between the brutalities on both sides.
I rang John Rees because I heard that George Galloway had attacked the Respect party at some conference, so I thought it would be useful to know what was going on. John said that George was very much a loner, but that he was in contact with some fundamentalist Muslims in his constituency; that on a left-right basis he was on the right, not the left.
I suppose I ought to put my reflections down. It was a remarkable two days. The NEC has abandoned socialist aspirations and any idea of transforming society; it has accepted the main principles not only of capitalism but of Thatcherism, and it thinks that now the Party has a chance of winning office.
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