14 Mar 2014

Tony Benn 1925-2014

Tony Benn came closer than anyone in Labour’s modern history to getting the party to reject capitalism altogether and pursue socialism in one country.

The moment was the  1981 Labour deputy leadership contest. The party had already lurched left, electing Michael Foot as its leader. Now Tony Benn was challenging Denis Healey to be Michael Foot’s less than loyal deputy on a platform of full-blooded socialism.

Many were ready to leave the Labour party if he’d won. Many more would have quietly walked away. Denis Healey’s narrow victory didn’t stop defections to what would become the SDP, splitting the left. It could have been much worse for Labour.

After that, it would be nearly 30 years before Labour elected a leader Tony Benn voted for – Ed Miliband. Tony Benn knew both Miliband brothers as boys. He was a friend and socialist ally to their father Ralph Miliband. Their mother Marion too remained a close friend. He employed Ed Miliband as researcher for a year, when he knew him as “Edward”.

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The young Edward worked in the basement of the Benns’ Holland Park, west London home. It was a fire hazard of stored diaries, documents, audio and VHS tapes stored in endless shelves of cardboard boxes. Like his father, the First Viscount Stansgate, Tony Benn was a passionate archivist, squirreler and collector.

It was the attempt to renounce his father’s peerage, inherited on his death, that was one of Anthony Wedgwood-Benn’s early moments of fame. He campaigned for a change in the law to allow people like himself, born to privilege, to escape it and be free to pursue elected politics in parliament.

Listening to him on news footage from the time, you hear Tony Benn compare this battle to some of the great liberation battles of history like the Chartists. Tony Benn’s self-belief, the same force that drove him to pursue causes with determination, could make him seem to some contemporaries, as Tony Crosland, a fellow Labour minister and friend put it, “a bit cracked.”

Former Labour politician, Tony Benn attends a rally in Hyde Park, during a protest organised by the Trades Union Congress in central London

Technology-friendly

Anthony Wedgwood Benn was a passionate supporter of Harold Wilson and in the forefront of his attempt to brand Labour the party for the modern age. Fronting party political broadcasts with smooth command, younger and more technology-friendly than many colleagues, telegenic, a Westminster schoolboy but approachable, he was back then seen as people like Tristram Hunt or Chuka Umunna are seen now.

And then came the 1970s and the radicalisation of Tony Benn. A middle of the road social democrat or “white heat” Wilsonian socialist turned into an anti-capitalist firebrand. He felt and argued relentlessly that Labour in government had betrayed its principles.

He embraced full-blown socialism and pursued structural change in the Labour party to prevent any future generation of leaders, as he saw, it compromising with the boss class and conning the movement out of real change. True socialists had been stabbed in the back by their leaders. It must never happen again. It was charged rhetoric, deeply offensive to the fellow ministers who’d served with him and it fuelled an era of rare fratricidal bitterness and division.

Labour-SDP split

Denis Healey felt the 1981 deputy leadership contest was the ugliest episode in his political career. Revolutionaries from outside the Labour party didn’t just heckle but “howled (him) down”, he complained, and did so, he felt, with the support of Tony Benn.

Tony Benn helped to shape the 1983 general election manifesto, with its commitments to unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalisations and withdrawal from the European Economic Community. The vote on the left split between Labour and the SDP/Liberal Alliance. Labour lost 3 million votes. The Tories in government actually increased their majority, a rare trick unrepeated since.

The Labour right now felt its opponents had tested their ideas to destruction and the fightback could begin. Tony Benn felt that if you could get eight and a half million people to vote for a programme as left-wing as the 1983 manifesto, even when the media was mounted against it, there was still hope.

Blaming the media

But Tony Benn’s high point of influence had passed. He would often blame the media for that. In his diaries for 1983 he’s revolted by the “creeps” and “unspeakable” journalists at an election press conference. He endured relentless attacks from the press throughout his career.

But he was equally angered by what he saw as the slippery complicity of television news, following the right-wing press agenda, as he saw it, proclaiming their bulletins’ lack of bias when a bias towards the status quo or “centre ground” ran through everything TV put out.

He said politicians needed to circumvent the media to get their message across, and that was what in part drove him to speak at almost every rally he was every invited to. In old age, he even invented a special wheely-suitcase/seat to ease the strain of travel.

One of the reasons he taped every interview he ever gave was because he distrusted the power that sits with journalists to chop up interviews and misrepresent. “Why,” he would ask, “do you journalists get to talk to the camera direct but politicians don’t?”

On one occasion I went to see him, he did speak direct to camera. I’d asked him to record a tribute to Barbara Castle who was then unwell. I thought while I was there it might be worth getting his thoughts on other older figures in the party – Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot and Denis Healey (the last of these still happily with us).

He recorded them all, then said he’d like to do one more. “I’d like to do my own obituary,” he said, and promptly spoke straight to camera giving a brief assessment of himself and a message to be broadcast the day he died (see video above). It was 30 April 2002 when he did that. I know because, like everything else, it’s in his diaries.

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