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Harold Wilson

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Yet people who benefit from all this now viciously defy Westminster, purporting to act as though they were an elected government; people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods. Who do these people think they are?
--
Broadcast on May 25, 1974, referring to the Ulster Workers Council strike. The use of the term "sponging" gave offence in Northern Ireland. Glenn Barr, chairman of the coordinating committee between the Loyalist paramilitaries and the UWC, said he thought of making Wilson an honorary member of the UWC for rallying Protestants behind the strike.

 
Harold Wilson

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This huge Commission building in Brussels, in the shape of a cross, is absolutely un-British. I felt as if I were going as a slave to Rome; the whole relationship was wrong. Here was I, an elected man who could be removed, doing a job, and here were these people with more power than I had and no accountability to anybody...My visit confirmed in a practical way all my suspicions that this would be the decapitation of British democracy without any countervailing advantage, and the British people, quite rightly, wouldn't accept it. There is no real benefit for Britain.

 
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