"The entrenched left cannot identify with Tawney in honesty for several reasons: The patriotic old wounded soldier from the Somme was always contemptuous of those of us who were in CND, and he strongly supported Gaitskell's "fight, fight and fight again" speech; Tawney never accepted that conference decisions should overrule the judgment of the Parliamentary Labour Party or individual conscience... He did not accept majorities based on what he considered the total non-democracy of the block vote... The right would hesitate to vote for Tawney's ghost because his commitment to Clause 4, to extensive public ownership, to his philosophical attack on the sanctity of private property... The ghost of Tawney, the whole Tawney, would shake them all."
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Historians from EnglandAcademics from EnglandSocial criticsEconomists from EnglandEducators from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
Lena Jeger, letter to The Guardian (c. June 1981), quoted in Michael Foot, Loyalists and Loners (1986), pp. 93-94
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._H._Tawney
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R. H. Tawney
Richard Henry Tawney (30 November 1880 – 16 January 1962) was an English academic, economist, historian, and a leading advocate of Christian socialism.
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