“The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.”

— Tony Benn

'More equality and more democracy', The Times (1 October 1973), p. 16
1970s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945." by Tony Benn?

Tony Benn 69

British Labour Party politician 1925–2014

Related quotes

“The Labour Party has now been taken over by extremists…The Labour Party is now committed to a programme which is frankly and unashamedly Marxist, a programme initiated by its National Executive and now firmly endorsed by its official Party Conference. In the House of Commons the Labour Left may still be outnumbered, but their votes are vital to the continuance of Labour in office, and that gives them a strength out of proportion to their numbers. And make no mistake, that strength, those numbers, are growing. In the constituency Labour parties, in the Parliamentary Labour Party, in Transport House, in the Cabinet Room itself, the Marxists call an increasing number of tunes…let's not mince words. The dividing line between the Labour Party programme and Communism is becoming harder and harder to detect. Indeed, in many respects Labour's programme is more extreme than those of many Communist parties of Western Europe.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (8 October 1976) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103105
Leader of the Opposition

“I hope you have read the election programme of the Labour Party…this is not socialism. It is Bolshevism run mad.”

Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden (1864–1937) British politician

BBC radio broadcast (17 October 1931)

“Every left of centre party that gets into power is doomed to disappoint – more so, probably, than governments of the right, since the left aspires more definitively to reshape society. It is a phenomenon found around the world in democratic countries. Once into the grind of day to day government, the left’s erstwhile supporters will be quick to say that the party lacks direction, or it has betrayed its values, or that its policies are not radical enough, or all three together. The 1945 Attlee government is fondly remembered by many activists as the most radical and accomplished of all Labour regimes. Yet at the time it was vociferously denounced for its timidity and its lack of purpose.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Ten Years of New Labour edited by Matt Beech and Simon Lee (2008), pp. xi.

“The problem of dealing with the armed forces of the Crown is the most difficult one we will have to face when we do get into power. The Labour Party will have to face the fact that it is a class Party…It has to be prepared to take steps more forceful than even the steps taken at the time of the Ulster Rebellion.”

Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) British politician

The Manchester Guardian (28 May 1934), quoted in Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years. Memoirs 1931-1945 (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1957), p. 150.

“Let us look back on the conduct of Mr. Attlee and his friends in the years before the war. The Labour Party denounced the Baldwin Government for "planning a vast and expensive rearmament programme"… Mr. Attlee said on November 10, 1935: "The National Government is preparing a great programme of rearmament which will endanger the peace of the world". Mr. Morrison, in the same month, said "the Government leaders are all urging a policy of rearmament, and Mr. Chamberlain is ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction". I suppose those must have been the aeroplanes which saved us in the Battle of Britain. And, again: "Every vote for the Unionists would be a vote for an international race in arms, and a vote for that was a vote for war". Such was the language of the Socialist leaders in the years while Hitler's Germany was rearming night and day…. And yet… at the election of 1945, the Labour Party gained great credit by denouncing the Chamberlain Government as guilty men for not having made larger and more timely arrangements.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Woodford (12 October 1951), quoted in The Times (13 October 1951), p. 9
Post-war years (1945–1955)

“Not since the Black Panthers sailed into their Upper East Side tea party has there been so daffy an exercise in radical chic.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

On Mark Halperin’s inclusion of a lengthy quote by convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbott in his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality.
Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf

“The Labour Party is the sister Party for the Democrats and their progressive views are the ones that we are most aligned with.”

Harriet Harman (1950) British politician

On Question Time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etg5lm92Io8, 18 September, 2008.

“ISIS and an abstract ideology called 'radical Islamic terrorism'—a redundancy, if ever there was one, since Islam unreformed is radical—are not attacking us. Men and women upon whom we've conferred the right to live among us are.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Manchester Massacre And The Immigration Vexation," http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/05/manchester_massacre_and_the_immigration_vexation.html American Thinker, May 25, 2017
2010s, 2017

“The general election of 1983 has produced one important result that has passed virtually without comment in the media. It is that, for the first time since 1945, a political party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million people. This is a remarkable development by any standards and it deserves some analysis … the 1983 Labour manifesto commanded the loyalty of millions of voters and a democratic socialist bridge-head in public understanding and support can be made.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

The Guardian (20 June 1983).
1980s

“As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America….”

Utah Phillips (1935–2008) American labor organizer, folk singer, storyteller and poet

on a CD called The Long Memory (1996)

“The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Tony Benn 69

Related quotes

Related topics