Barbara Castle Quotes:- Barbara Castle (6 October 1910 – 3 May 2002) was a British Labour Party politician who was a Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1979, making her one of the longest-serving female MPs in British history. Regarded as one of the most significant Labour Party politicians, Castle developed a close political partnership with Prime Minister Harold Wilson and held several roles in the Cabinet. She remains to date the only woman to have held the office of First Secretary of State.
Inspirational Barbara Castle Quotes
“In politics, guts is all.”
Barbara Castle
“Those were the ideals that drove us to the nationalization of the health service.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“I remember a big meeting with the hosiery trade in Harold’s ministerial room.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
Powerful Quotes on Barbara Castle
“I remember people who’d had a lot of hardship during the war. They’d thought we’d won.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“You see, another reason for nationalization was that private ownership meant fragmentation.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“And what always struck me about that war period was how even Churchill had to talk socialism to keep up people’s morale.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“And that will increasingly dawn on people. The demand for controlling the commanding heights will grow.”
Barbara Castle
“Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“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.”
Barbara Castle
“Why not pool your resources? And so we broke into the concept of the sacredness of private property.”
Barbara Castle
