Word: benn
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...January establishes a new electoral college to choose the party leader. The college will be dominated by the left-wing local parties and powerful unions. Running under the new rules, Healey might have been beaten by the divisive champion of the party's radical left, M.P. Tony Benn. As it is, the popular Foot is expected to preempt House challenge and sail through vigor the next leadership election virtually unopposed. If he becomes Prime Minister any time soon, the relationship between Washington and London would be strained. A much greater philosophical contrast than that between Foot and U.S. President...
Waiting anxiously in the wings is the radical left's idol, Tony Benn, 55, who will probably boycott the parliamentary balloting for the party leadership on the ground that it is less democratic than the proposed new electoral college. Cynics offer another reason: Benn would make a poor showing because even leftist colleagues are cool to him. If the electoral college is dominated by the far left and chooses Benn, Labor M.P.s would almost certainly move to elect their own leader. This dual system works well in West Germany. But in the acrimonious precincts of the British Labor Party...
...Blackpool guarantee us victory at the next general election [in 1984]. Electorates turn out governments, not oppositions. If we fail to get the economy right, the voters aren't likely to care all that much whether they replace us with a government led by Denis Healey or Tony Benn." Healey represents Labor's moderates, Benn its far left...
...expected sweetness and light. Ever since Labor's defeat in the 1979 elections, the party has been riven by struggles between its moderate parliamentary leadership and an increasingly radical rank and file. Last week's conference proved no exception. Headed by Tony Benn, 55, a former viscount who renounced his title in 1963 in order to remain in the House of Commons, the left arrived in Blackpool determined to wrest control of the party from its leaders. In particular, the militants aimed at three longtime objectives: 1) the right to draft the party's policy manifesto, which...
Nothing better illustrated the leftists' mood of triumph than the cheers that greeted their hero Benn as he mounted the rostrum. "Within days of the election of a new government," the silver-haired radical promised, bills would be introduced to impose a wealth tax and to nationalize a broad spectrum of additional industries, from banks to trucking firms. Benn then called for the immediate abolition of the House of Lords. This could be done, he said, simply "by creating 1,000 new peers" who could override the existing members of the House of Lords and vote the chamber...