Rt Hon Barbara Castle
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 1990
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway in this week's Desert Island Discs is the Baroness Castle of Blackburn - better known to most people as Barbara Castle. For 34 years she served as the Labour member for the constituency of Blackburn, and she rose to high office in the Wilson governments of the 1960s and 1970s. As the first woman Transport Minister, she introduced, amidst great controversy, the breathalyser and the motorway speed limit. She was also at the centre of legislation over equal pay for women. Then, 10 years ago, she opted out of domestic politics and into the European cauldron.
Now retired from that too, and recently having celebrated her 80th birthday, she'll be looking back over her long and passionate political career, and forward to making her mark on the House of Lords.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a politician. For 34 years she served as the Labour member for Blackburn, |
| 0:34.8 | rising to high office in the Wilson governments of the 60s and 70s. She it was who gave us the |
| 0:39.9 | breathalyzer, the motorway speed limit, equal pay for women and the Humber Bridge. |
| 0:45.0 | Ten years ago she retired from domestic politics and went, as she put it, to raise hell in Europe. |
| 0:51.0 | She's now retired from that too, and at the age of 80 can look back on a |
| 0:54.8 | career in which she was the first to do many things, all of them with conviction, |
| 0:59.1 | many of them with great passion. She is Baroness Castle of Blackburn, better known to all of us as Barbara |
| 1:05.3 | Castle. Well now, are people allowed to call you Lady Castle now or are you still sticking to Barbara? |
| 1:10.9 | They're not. They're to call me Barbara me Barbara Castle. But technically of course you've been able to call yourself Lady Carst since the mid-70s. |
| 1:18.0 | Yes, since my husband became a life peer I had the courtesy title of Lady Carcel but I got the dispensation not to use it. |
| 1:25.0 | Now I'm a commoner by heart, by history and by pride. |
| 1:31.0 | I think although the House of Lords I must admit is full of some very |
| 1:35.3 | distinguished people and it's fascinating to meet them all again, it's a bit of an |
| 1:39.6 | anachronism you know to have an unelected second chamber. You once called it |
| 1:44.4 | called it something far worse than that in your in your diary in |
| 1:46.8 | 1967 you said that the lords were impotent and ridiculous |
| 1:50.3 | well I think what I was arguing then is that we should keep them impotent because I don't like serious political power being put in the hands of unelected people who have where they |
| 2:06.1 | are as a result of the patronage of a Prime Minister. I think that's a bad principle. I'm in |
| 2:11.1 | favour of an elected second chamber. |
| 2:14.4 | But if you believe all of that and you obviously do very deeply, very passionately, |
... |
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