Tony Benn was known as an eloquent and inspirational speaker. Here are ten of his most memorable quotes, as picked by Guardian readers
1) “If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”
Tony Benn was interviewed in Sicko, Michael Moore’s documentary film about the health industry in the US. Explaining the post-war creation of the welfare state, he said the popular mood of the 1945 election was: “If you can have full employment by killing Germans, why can’t we have full employment by building hospitals, building schools?”
2) His “Five questions” for the powerful.
Tony Benn’s final speech to the House of Commons as MP was an appropriately eloquent farewell, in which he talked widely on his view of the role of parliament and the wider question of democracy. As Hansard records, he said:
In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.
3) “Making mistakes is how you learn.”
I made every mistake in the book, but making mistakes is how you learn. I would be ashamed if I ever said anything I didn’t believe in, to get on personally.
4) “I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so”
With a typically memorable turn of phrase, Tony Benn signalled the end of his parliamentary career in 1999, when he announced he would not be standing for re-election at the next general election. Asked whether he would be taking his place in the House of Lords, the former Viscount Stansgate - Benn renounced his peerage back in 1963 - replied: “Don’t be silly.”5) “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”
Given the above, this quote is not especially surprising, but worth repeating. Tony Benn was a lifelong campaigner for constitutional reform, and introduced a bill that would have allowed him to renounce his peerage as early as 1955.
6) “I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.”
Another quote from Tony Benn’s interview with Michael Moore in Sicko, in which he highlighted poverty and healthcare inequality as a democratic issue. “The people in debt become hopeless, and the hopeless people don’t vote... an educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern,” he said.
7) “Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself”
Tony Benn thought any meaningful change could only come from below, and felt apathy was openly encouraged by those in positions of power. “The Prime Minister said in 1911, 14 years before I was born, that if women get the vote it will undermine parliamentary democracy. How did apartheid end? How did anything happen?”
8) “We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.”
Blamed by many for contributing to Labour’s lack of electoral success during the 1980s, Tony Benn was a totem for those who rejected the shift to the right widely seen as necessary if the party was to regain power. This shift was eventually completed under Tony Blair, who pushed through the abandonment of clause IV and redefined Labour as a party comfortable with privatisation and free market economics. The quote above indicates why Benn resisted such a move.
9) “There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.”
10) “A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.”
Tony Benn’s calcified view of the US as an imperialist force left him on the margins of mainstream opinion during the cold war, but a voice of reason to many after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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