Tony Benn Articles

The Progress editorial this month has correctly identified that the absence of a distinctive Labour project for the British economy has made it difficult for us to re-establish our credibility and take George Osborne successfully to task. All politicians claim to be...

I interviewed Denis Healey as part of the research for my biography of Aneurin Bevan in February 2011. He immediately seized on Bevan’s remark that ‘the right kind of leader for the Labour party is a kind of dessicated calculating-machine’. While Clement Attlee was...

Thirty years after Neil Kinnock’s Bournemouth speech, Robert Philpot recalls the fight to save the Labour party from the hard left In September 1985, two years after Neil Kinnock was elected its leader in the wake of the devastating landslide defeat which saw Margaret...

Mandatory reselection could reduce Labour MPs to the status of delegates The idea of mandatory reselection of Labour members of parliament was born out of the frustration with the 1960s and 1970s governments which, according to the Labour left, routinely ignored...