politician and a former MP
and Cabinet Minister.
His successful campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage
was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963
. In the Labour Government of 1964–1970 under Harold Wilson
, he served first as Postmaster General, where he oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, and later as a notably "technocratic" Minister of Technology
, retaining his seat in the cabinet.
[I am against] the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method.
The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen.
Change from below, the formulation of demands from the populace to end unacceptable injustice, supported by direct action, has played a far larger part in shaping British democracy than most constitutional lawyers, political commentators, historians or statesmen have ever cared to admit. Direct action in a democratic society is fundamentally an educational exercise.
Workers are not going to be fobbed off with a few shares...or by a carbon copy of the German system of co-determination.
We want industry to be in the public sector, to change the power structure of our society...We have not yet carved out of public enterprise a wide enough area of management decision which ought properly to be brought within the ambit of the workers themselves.
[Men] who would rather go to jail than betray what they believe to be their duty to their fellow workers and the principles which they hold.
Britain is the only colony in the British Empire and it is up to us now to liberate ourselves.
I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to see that what is said about us is true.
The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.
The [pay] policy is principally designed to hold down wages rather than to check inflation. Inflation is being used as an excuse to destroy free trade union bargaining.