Politics & Power Quote by Ellen Wilkinson

A sentence built like a barricade: blunt, public, and impossible to misread. Ellen Wilkinson’s command, “Tell the Government, our people shall not starve,” isn’t phrased as a plea or a policy suggestion. It’s an ultimatum, and that’s the point. The grammar does the political work: “Tell” deputizes the listener into a messenger, turning private suffering into a report that must reach power. “The Government” is named as a singular, accountable actor, not an abstract system you can shrug at. Then comes the moral line in the sand - “shall not” - the language of law, oath, and refusal.

The subtext is class warfare without the slogan. “Our people” draws a boundary of belonging that Westminster often treated as theoretical: industrial workers, the unemployed, the communities made expendable by austerity logic and market fatalism. Wilkinson, a Labour politician associated with working-class campaigns and famously with the Jarrow March, understood that hunger is used as discipline. Starvation isn’t just a tragedy; it’s leverage. The quote rejects the idea that deprivation is a natural consequence of “hard times,” recasting it as a political choice imposed by those insulated from its costs.

Context sharpens the edge: interwar Britain, mass unemployment, hunger marches, a state still learning what it owed its citizens. Wilkinson’s line works because it compresses policy into ethics and ethics into threat. It dares the government to govern - or be named as the author of hunger.