Barbara Castle Quotations

Another example of that was that even during the economic problems of the 1945 government, we managed to carry out other aspects of our policy and other ideals. Through the establishment of national parks, for instance.

There was no welfare state, and people had to rely mainly on the Poor Law - that was all the state provided. It was very degrading, very humiliating. And there was a means test for receiving poor relief.

I remember people who'd had a lot of hardship during the war. They'd thought we'd won.

And that will increasingly dawn on people. The demand for controlling the commanding heights will grow.

And what always struck me about that war period was how even Churchill had to talk socialism to keep up people's morale.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

It is true that they paid much more attention to the trade unions because the trade unions were after all speaking for the rights and conditions of working men and women in their employment.

Why not pool your resources? And so we broke into the concept of the sacredness of private property.

Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.

Those were the ideals that drove us to nationalization of the health service.

You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation.

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.

It might have been offset for us if the revenue from our own oil and natural gas that was just developing had been available to the Labor Government, but the oil revenues were just coming in when Labor fell in '79.

I remember a big meeting with the hosiery trade in Harold's ministerial room.

That was not what men and women fought for during the war.

And that had a powerful appeal, particularly to those who had been denied the choice to stay on at school, to go to university, to be something else, other than going down the pit.

It was very much a cry for democratic control at that time. Above all, breaking the accomplished power of a few people to rule the lives of everybody else.

Then, with lots of people doing that without ever looking over their shoulders to see how they were affecting anybody else, it couldn't work, and it didn't work, and it just came to a standstill.

What we set out to do was to ensure that this system of fair shares and the planning and controls continued after the war, and when we won, that's what we did.

I think we're going to get a lot of unrest showing itself in all sorts of demonstrations, and you never quite know what would come out of it.

We were not putting the wages or the money on investment into the industries to which our mass of people would want to turn, and the money was going.

Now a company's power is becoming bigger and less accountable than it ever was before. It was bad enough when it was just a big, national industry.

Do you know one of the most interesting things is, when we lost office in '51 we did so on a higher vote that we'd been elected to in '45.

That's what we meant - a society which was held together by the sense of our being members, one of another, interdependent, and we did.

There was nobody putting a floor in their lives to give them some kind of basic economic security. That was contrary to the philosophy.

Their idea was that competition would bring out the best in the entrepreneur and that the customer would benefit from that competition.

I remember she said, 'Keep government out of people's lives. Let them go ahead and catch as catch can, that's the way to maximum wealth.'