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The left of the Labour Party are nice, decent people and it was a privilege to meet them. The right of the Labour Party are some of the most fucking horrible people – vile, gruesome people. I’ve never met such awful people as those on the right of the Labour Party. Alexie Sayle
We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work. Rachel Reeves
We are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on Earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise of the top are deprived of their initiative, I would answer, ‘To hell with them!’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do. Michael Foot
He’s [Keir Starmer] returning the Labour Party to a party that’s reliably obedient to power, that will be Thatcher-like in the style of Tony Blair and that won’t ruffle the feathers of either the US or anyone who’s important in Britain. Noam Chomsky
I think if Corbyn had been elected, Britain would be pursuing a much more sane course. I think his general positions were very reasonable. And I think that’s probably the reason for the extraordinary attack on him pretty much across the spectrum, with mostly fabricated charges of antisemitism. Anything that could be thrown at him was, it was a major assault. Again, pretty much across the spectrum, The Guardian, right-wing press, ‘we got to get rid of this guy’. Noam Chomsky, interview Adam Turner 24 April 2021
Anything that could be thrown at him was, it was a major assault. Again, pretty much across the spectrum, The Guardian, right-wing press, ‘we got to get rid of this guy’. Noam Chomsky, interview Adam Turner 24 April 2021
Immigrants? We sent out search parties to get them to come … and made it hard for Britons to get work, says Mandelson: former minister admits Labour deliberately engineered mass immigration; Between 1997 and 2010 net migration to Britain totalled 2.2 million … Labour sent out ‘search parties’ for immigrants to get them to come to the UK, Lord Mandelson has admitted. In a stunning confirmation that the Blair and Brown governments deliberately engineered mass immigration, the former Cabinet Minister and spin doctor said New Labour sought out foreign workers. He also conceded that the influx of new arrivals meant the party’s traditional supporters are now unable to find work. Tim Shipman, Daily Mail online news article 14 May 2013
The Labour Party’s victory in the election of 1945 put in hand a visionary project by Sir William Beveridge. Michael Wood, The Great British Story: A People’s History 8/8: Modern Britain, BBC 2012
I think for too long the Labour Party has viewed television as our persecutor; well I want to use television as our tool, our servant. Peter Mandelson, televised interview
The trade unions and the Labour Party ... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing. Arthur Scargill
The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they’re quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain. Arthur Scargill
We just have to be crystal clear that if we were to abandon all the reforms made over some very painful years in the Labour party, we would be consigned back to opposition. Patricia Hewitt
Labour, on the other hand, respects the law above all other considerations. Its own supporters, its fighters and its martyrs must suffer in the interests of a ‘neutral’ law which imposed the suffering in the first place.
Labour behaves in this ridiculous way because its leaders hate the idea of class struggle.
Crosland likes to imagine that capitalist society can be checked and changed by well-educated Labour ministers giving orders to well-educated civil servants and laying down laws to be carried out by well-educated judges.
So he and those who think like him have to order their supporters to obey those judges and those civil servants. Any revolt against the law or the civil servants has to be suppressed.
As each revolt is suppressed, so the class power of the institutions grow greater until it snuffs out the Labour politicians themselves.
In the interests of gradual, legal, constitutional reform, Crosland and his henchmen are digging graves for reform and for themselves.
The stand of the 11 councillors at Clay Cross represented the last embers of organised resistance to capitalism within the British Labour Party. The embers have now been doused – by the Labour leaders. We must build a new fire with entirely different fuel. Paul Foot, article April 1974, ‘Clay Cross Double-Crossed’
Rich and powerful people have always cherished their bogeymen. They like to reduce what Marx and Engels called ‘the spectre of communism’ to human shape: to a personality who can be pilloried in their Press and patronised at their table. For the unfortunates who get singled out for this honour, life is hard. The assailants are well-practised in the art of character assassination and blackmail. Every public statement of their prey, however harmless, can rapidly be translated into the language of someone who rapes nuns on Fridays and nationalises a bank every day before breakfast.
Tony Benn has played the role of chief bogeyman for the rich men of Britain for a good time now. He has been treated perhaps more shamefully even then his predecessors in the Parliamentary Labour Left, men like John Wheatley. George Lansbury and Aneurin Bevan. In the past year, the abuse has risen to a crescendo, deafening even his most tenacious attempts to argue back. Yet its effect is not all as intended. For as the society splits wider apart, so the abuse from the halls of the powerful boosts their bogeyman’s radical and socialist credentials ...
It is worth saying at once that Tony Benn’s credentials for Chief Bogeyman of the Tories are a little difficult to understand. For eleven out of the last fifteen years he has been a loyal and for the most part silent member of a Labour government which has systematically torn up the pledges on which it was elected. Paul Foot, article March 1980, ‘The Labour Left’s Brightest Star’
Both experiments have called themselves socialist (though neither Communist nor Labour parties are inclined to use the word any more). Both have made a mockery of the planned economy and a sick joke of equality. The reason is simple. In both cases ‘socialism’ was attained or attempted without the involvement of the exploited class. The soul of socialism, the self-emancipation of the working class and the democratic control of society from below, was missing. What masqueraded as socialism was either state capitalism, or ‘reforms’ which left capitalism intact, if not stronger. Paul Foot, The Case For Socialism ch5
Then the IMF, in the shape of brilliant young men from investment banks in Massachusetts, made their final demand. They wanted prescription charges imposed on medicines. Wilson’s ministers begged, wheedled, and offered all sorts of other cuts in exchange. Free medicine, they whined, was the sacred cow of the Labour Party. Of all the policies they bad introduced when they first came into office four years previously, they were proudest of their removal of the health charges. The great Aneurin Bevan, along with Harold Wilson, had resigned from a former government on the issue. Could they please, they implored, be spared the health charges?
The IMF, sensing its certain victory, and knowing well how important it was to humiliate the government in the eyes of its socialist supporters, stuck firm. Though the health charges were only peanuts in the context of total government spending – some £8 million+ – it insisted on them. The Labour ministers surrendered. A great portrait of them with their hands in the air should be unveiled at Labour Party headquarters and dedicated to all those who suppress their socialist opinions so that the next Labour government can do the ‘little things’. ibid. ch6
How far they have come, these Labourites, from the hopes of their origins! How mean and miserable are their aspirations compared even with what their most right-wing supporters were saying thirty or forty years ago!
… This huge slippage in aims, aspirations and policies is a warning of what is to come. At no time since the war has Labour called the tune in politics. Throughout, it has responded to events, shamefacedly shuffled off what it now calls the ‘baggage’ of its heritage, and settled for a new society which, in all but the faces on the government front bench, is largely indistinguishable from the old one. ibid.
The decline in Labour’s aspirations and the weakness of its policies become, by this token, positive advantages. People say (without even realising how cynical they sound) that ‘if Labour promises a little, it won’t sell out.’ They stress again and again that they will be satisfied with ‘just a little’. They denounce their few socialist critics as saboteurs of practical and possible reform.
At the root of all these arguments is the notion that the political spring which waters society is parliament; that political measures, reformist or reactionary, all flow from parliament and therefore nothing can be done to emancipate labour unless parliament is won for Labour. If Labour is elected, laws and measures flow from parliament which are friendly to labour. If Labour loses, those laws and measures will be hostile to labour. It follows that everything must be subordinated to securing a Labour government. ibid.