Radical Democrats

Ross McKibbin

• Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-80 by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone
  Hutchinson, 675 pp, £20.00, September 1990, ISBN 0 09 174321 4
• Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980-1990 by Paul Foot
  Verso, 281 pp, £29.95, November 1990, ISBN 0 86091 310 4

When historians come to account for the dégringolade of modern British politics both Tony Benn and Paul Foot will find a place: Benn as actor, Foot as an observer. The two have much in common: both were born into very similar families; both see their lives as a continuing re-education, a casting aside of cultural baggage packed with the detritus of a worn-out social system; both have come to discover a superior morality within socialism and the organised working class. In both, this process has been incomplete, perhaps deliberately so. They both have a strong sense of Englishness, though they have defined it with recourse to a radical vocabulary. Both see themselves within an English radical-democratic tradition – Levellers, Paine, Cobden – onto which both have grafted Marxism.