Barbara Castle
Barbara Castle
Barbara Anne Castle, Baroness Castle of Blackburn, PC, GCOTwas a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament for Blackburn from 1945 to 1979, making her the longest-serving female MP in the history of the House of Commons, until that record was broken in 2007 by Gwyneth Dunwoody. She later became the Member of the European Parliament for Greater Manchester from 1979 to 1989. One of the most significant Labour Party politicians of the 20th century, she served...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth6 October 1910
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was not what men and women fought for during the war.
I remember a big meeting with the hosiery trade in Harold's ministerial room.
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.
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.
You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation.
Those were the ideals that drove us to nationalization of the health service.
Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.
Why not pool your resources? And so we broke into the concept of the sacredness of private property.