Tony Benn Quotes
When we have a majority we will do it. I think the days of the Lords are quite genuinely numbered.
Benn, Tony. The Benn Diaries. Hutchinson, 1995.
The fact that public opinion was initially against the reform measures, he regarded as an opportunity to change their minds. That took time and In 1832, the reform bill was passed.
The Prime Minister and his Tory Party was calling for Senate Reform
Paine was totally wrong on this count. It is true that monarchy and aristocracy were never the same as they had been, but the American and French Revolutions were catalysts for the monarchs and aristocrats to reform. In a Darwinian sense, monarchy and aristocracy evolved, and the early members would hardly recognize the modern aristocracy of Britain and other European countries that still have them and the Constitutional monarchs of today have almost evolved into a new specie.
The Liberals had not won enough seats to form a majority government, and in the Parliamentary system, they had to form an alliance with a smaller party and govern with a minority.
In Dolgoff’s era, his argument was that the political parties were so powerful that it was they who controlled who held public office, not the voters. And the parties were controlled by a few party leaders. However, when the system was reformed in the latter part of the 20th century, the individual incumbent member of Congress in America was so hard to dislodge due to the role of money and the advantage of incumbency, that the class of professional politicians was still very powerful. Reform had reduced the control of political parties but not politicians.
At the time of this quotation, Thompson was campaigning for the Republican Presidential Nomination for which he did not make a good showing in the primaries.
This has been the conventional wisdom in American politics. However, George W. Bush not only had a small majority in Congress but he had garnered fewer popular votes than his opponents, but won with the electoral college. None the less, he massively cut taxes, mostly for the rich, and changed from the balanced budget to huge deficit spending. He pushed a major drug insurance program through and even tried to privatize Social Security. Obama, the next president had a substantial majority for his party and had a broad mandate, but in his reform issues he had very slim majorities. He went ahead anyway and in his first term he passed stunning and substantial reforms including Health Care Reform and Financial Regulation Reform. These reforms may or may not be able to be enforced in the future. See {625493} for a similar view.
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn was a British politician, writer and diarist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. A member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001. He later served as President of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to 2014.
