Quotes

Ken Livingstone has only ever belonged to one party - the Ken Livingstone party.

The fundamental thing that went wrong was electing Jeremy Corbyn as leader. He is an unreconstructed Bennite. What we've seen is what would have happened to Labour if Tony Benn had taken over, even though he was a man of much greater intelligence and capability than Corbyn.

[in 1985] I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council - a Labour council - hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

[on the miners' strike] The strike was ruined the minute it was politicized and in the mind of Arthur Scargill it was always a political struggle ... He fed himself the political illusion that as long as the miners were united they had the right to destabilize and overthrow the democratically elected government.

[on Arthur Scargill] He gave himself the credit for the success of the 1974 strike but that was much exaggerated. He had the illusion that if the workers were united, they could destabilize, even overthrow a democratically elected government. That was the falsehood of Scargill's conclusion, and that is why I have always condemned him. The miners deserved something much better.

The miners didn't deserve him, they deserved much, much better. My view is Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill deserved each other. But no-one else did.

We know that power without principles is ruthless, sour, empty, vicious. We also know that principle without power is idle sterility.

One of the factors that guided me from the early days was the determination not to do anything that would be presented by Scargill as a reason for the ultimate defeat of the miners. I wanted to absolutely guarantee that ... Scargill couldn't turn round and say, 'If only the Labour leader hadn't done this or had done that we would have won'.

[on Arthur Scargill] Oh I detest him. I did then, I do now, and it's mutual. He hates me as well. And I'd much prefer to have his savage hatred than even the merest hint of friendship from that man.

On all the objective facts of the day and everything that has transpired since, there can only be one accusation about who has betrayed the miners. The reality was that the Thatcher government had organised its forces over some years previously in order to seek a confrontation. What they couldn't have anticipated was the madness with which the miners were led into the jaws of defeat.

Coming from Scargill, it doesn't matter a damn, frankly. I was then the leader of a political party with a reduced base, being further undermined by the very action which Scargill was undertaking. The idea that I could have transformed the conditions of the strike by calling on workers to come out in support of the miners is sheer fantasy. That is the kindest word that I can use.

[on holding a national ballot in 1984] There would have been unity amongst all the miners in all the coalfields ... there would have been active support from the trade unions and trade unionists which would have changed the whole environment of the strike; and the miners would have had the unalloyed respect of the great majority of the public, because it would have been understood that the strike was on a strictly democratic basis and the men were struggling to save the pits.

[on George Galloway] He is repulsive! Galloway is repulsive, he always has been ... I couldn't find a good reason to chuck him out, which used to infuriate me. But I've known him since 1983 and he is repellent ... he is such a chancer, he is so superficial.

[on Arthur Scargill] The way in which his part of the leadership of the NUM conducted the argument did ensure, in my view, first of all that the prophesy of massive mine closures came true.

[on the Falklands War] The Argentine leader, General Galtieri [Leopoldo Galtieri], was an utterly incompetent authoritarian, so filled with his own egotistical self-regard that he could not comprehend the willingness of a British government to use force in the South Atlantic. Mrs Thatcher was lucky, too, that the Argentinian force, mainly conscripts, was willing to surrender when morale collapsed. Napoleon said, 'Give me lucky generals', and she was a lucky prime minister!