This selection of writings and speeches by Tony Benn, skimming the surface of his archives, reveals his eloquent yet plain-speaking style. It’s devoid of personal attacks on his opponents — Benn was only concerned with the issues.

Benn was a “run-of-the-mill Labour MP,” not a radical socialist, when he entered Parliament in 1950. Nevertheless, he resigned from his first government post because he would not support the first-use of nuclear weapons by Britain.

He became postmaster general and then minister of technology in Harold Wilson’s government but moved steadily to the left in the 1960s. He was strongly influenced by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders sit-in, which he saw as a lesson in industrial democracy as well as an assertion of the right to work.

He led the anti-Common Market campaign in the 1975 referendum but much earlier saw that the Treaty of Rome, with its laissez-faire philosophy and bureaucratic administration, would stifle national economic planning. Allied to Nato, it would harden the division of Europe and lead to the development of a nuclear superpower, while the EEC’s trading policy would restrict the exports of underdeveloped countries and, Benn argued, on balance Britain would have less influence in the world if it joined the community.

He stuck to those judgements, as valid today as when he expressed them, and saw the nation state as the only force able to combat the power of the multinationals.

At the end of the ’70s he supported the European Nuclear Disarmament movement, bitterly opposed the Malvinas war and declared in Parliament that the sacrifices of the dead and wounded were used to raise the standing of Margaret Thatcher.

His outstanding oratory marked him as a future party leader and the best-known voice for socialism in Parliament and the country.

But he recognised that the military victory in the Malvinas reduced his political support, as did the weakening of the unions, rising unemployment and the counterattack of the Labour Party right on the left. He narrowly lost the party’s deputy leadership election to Denis Healey in 1982 and his Bristol seat in the 1983 General Election. What he called the “press assassination of me” played a part.

His spirits were revived by return to the Commons after victory in Chesterfield in the following year and in later years he wrote regularly for the Morning Star.

His faith in a truly democratic, socialist society was based partly on Marx’s theory of the class struggle, which he said had enriched the Labour Party, and also on a Christian belief in an inherent moral code in humanity.

Benn, as this book reveals, stands in line with the great men and women of our nation’s radical tradition.