Forgive me, but there’s no end to quoting Tony Benn. These are taken more or less at random.

He always had confidence in the people he represented. When he won the battle for the right to get rid of his inherited peerage and sit in the House of Commons again he knew that without the support of his Bristol constituents he wouldn’t have won at all. On the night he was finally re-elected, he congratulated them and thanked them:

“You have defeated the Tory cabinet, you have defeated the House of Lords, you have defeated the courts. You have changed the constitution of this country by your own power.”

When MPs take up their elected seats they have to swear an oath of allegiance to  “Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors”. In earlier times, if anyone refused, they went to jail. Today, if they refuse, they get fined £500 a day until they agree. So they don’t refuse! Benn got round it by adding an explanation and the words “under protest” to the oath: So it was:

“As a committed republican, under protest, I take the oath required of me by law under the Parliamentary Oaths Act 1866 to allow me to represent my constituency: I, Tony Benn, under protest, do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm, etc., etc.”

There’s a brilliant video somewhere of him doing that! No surprise, then, that when describing the opening of parliament for a BBC television documentary he pointed out:

“When the Queen came that day and sat on the red carpet she was sitting just above the spot where Charles I stood trial and was condemned to death by the Commons.”

And even when he was being mischievous, there was a political point to be made:

“There’s an absolute hierarchy of lavatories in the Houses of Parliament: the bishops have their own lavatory, so do the peers, and the peeresses. There are separate lavatories for members and others for lady members. There are male and female staff lavatories. They even have lavatories for gentlemen. But it all ends up in the same place.”

But he wasn’t being mischievous when, in 1981, at the height of his inspirational powers, he passionately urged the Labour Party conference to face the truth:

“We tried to make capitalism work with good and humane Labour governments and we haven’t succeeded. Because it can’t work. Because it rests on injustice.”

When Thatcher resigned he didn’t see why there should be any difficulty repealing Thatcherite laws, although Thatcherite ideas in people’s heads, he thought, would take longer to erase. So he told the House of Commons he had “a little Bill” to bring forward: “It’s called the Margaret Thatcher Global Repeal Bill.” Well, it didn’t pass, and Blair took the ideas of Thatcherism and ran with them, imposing them on his own party in the process.

It is this we’re left to deal with, to reverse. And how we’re going to do it – and how we’re going to do it without Tony Benn – I don’t know. But we will have to try.