Tony Benn is right again.

I went to see Tony Benn speak at the Festival Hall a week or so ago. Spurred on by the depth and range of his political insight and humour I’ve been reading some of his previous speeches and writing about Democracy, The EEC and Open Government. There’s an incredible amount of content that resonates as loudly today as it did when he was a Cabinet Minister in the 60’s and 70’s but there was one passage that struck a particular cord in the current climate. He himself is discussing the subject of energy (this is a speech from the early 70’s) and our need to diversify our energy reliance away from “multinationals controlled mainly from America” but it is a quote he brings forward from Winston Churchill in June 1914 which shows that this issue is longstanding and show no sign of going away;

“We have experienced … a long steady squeeze by the oil trusts all over the world, and we have found process and freights raised steadily against us until we have been pressed to pay more than double what a few years before we were accustomed to pay.”