"TONY BENN: Well, they were much better than what was there before, and they were better than what we have now. I mean, the pits, the mining industry has been privatized, and there are no pits left, and we've got 1,000 years of coal under our territory. When I was minister of energy, secretary of state by the time I left office, one-quarter of the North Sea was owned by the government. [It was owned by the] BNOC, British National Oil Corporation. It's all been sold off by Thatcher. So in the middle of the fuel crisis, you suddenly realize that the policies being pursued by a socialist government were in the interests of the public. And people see that now, you know. They're beginning to understand it now. But during the Cold War, of course, what they said was if you're against capitalism you must be an agent for the KGB; you must be working for the Kremlin; we're about to be invaded by the Red Army -- all of which was rubbish, but they used that to frighten people away from policies that really were in their own interest."
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomAnti-war activistsLGBT rights activistsActivists from EnglandDemocratic socialists
Original Language: English
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Excerpts from a Commanding Heights interview conducted on October the 17th 2000.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tony_Benn
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Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician and diarist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between [
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