In 2001, Tony Benn, one of the most influential socialist politicians in Europe, retired from the British House of Commons after almost 50 years in politics, to ‘devote more time to politics’. One of the ways in which he carried out his resolution was to write a series of weekly columns for the Morning Star, a British socialist daily newspaper.

These columns reflect the breadth of Benn’s political concerns, covering both domestic and international politics, and the best of them have been collected here. Benn writes with a controlled passion about the Labour party (old and new), the threats to democracy and the need for a viable protest movement, and the events and repercussions of September 11, 2001.