[The Conservatives' Industry Act contains] the most comprehensive armoury of government control that has ever been assembled for use over private ind… - Tony Benn

The plain fact is that every single policy that has been attempted by British cabinets has failed — partition, Stormont, power sharing, direct rule, internment without trial, "supergrass" trials, CS gas, strip searching, even the Anglo-Irish Agreement. ... I have long held the view that what we are discussing is not so much an Irish problem as a British problem in Northern Ireland. ... The real problem can be traced to the continued British presence in Northern Ireland. ... by the end of the century I believe Britain will have withdrawn from Northern Ireland just as it has done from so many colonies in the past.

Of course, Mao made his mistakes, because everybody does, but at least he allowed working people to smoke, even in the most trying circumstances, such as when, for one reason or another, they found themselves up before the firing squad.

The Morning Star had an article by George Galloway, and in it he said, "Britain is currently run by a blood-splattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals." Now, first of all I think that's a totally ineffective way of getting your case across, but secondly, last November George pleaded with me to try to persuade the National Executive to let him stay in the party. So if I'd succeeded, he would have been still a member of a party currently run by a "blood-splattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals". It put me off George Galloway in a fairly fundamental way.