Almost Alone

Whenever Britain​ is about to bomb another country, or is openly considering it, an old video will start doing the rounds on social media. It’s a clip a couple of minutes long from a speech by Tony Benn in the House of Commons in 1998, back in the distant days of New Labour, of which he was a frequent critic. Tony Blair’s government was seeking parliamentary approval to ‘use all necessary means’ against Iraq, which for years had been accused by Britain and its allies of developing weapons of mass destruction. Benn did not believe the situation justified a military response. ‘War is easy to talk about,’ he said.

There are not many people left of the generation which remembers it … I was in London during the Blitz in 1940, living [in Westminster] … Every night, I went to the shelter in Thames House. Every morning, I saw docklands burning. Five hundred people were killed in Westminster one night by a landmine. It was terrifying. Are not Arabs and Iraqis terrified? Do not Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does not bombing strengthen their determination? What fools we are to live as if war is a computer game for our children or just an interesting little Channel 4 News item. Every Member of Parliament who votes for the government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting responsibility for the deaths of innocent people.

These are standard enough anti-war arguments, but the speech is still remembered because of the intensity and economy with which Benn delivered them, the resonant historical reference, rhetorical gear changes and repetitions, and the personal element. His appearance and manner in the clip also have an effect. Wearing a black waistcoat under a grey suit, silver hair immaculately smoothed and parted, one hand slashing the air faster and faster as he speaks, the then 73-year-old Benn seems like a symbol of political principle transported from a bygone era.

He was born a hundred years ago – an anniversary this pithy collection of speeches, letters, articles, book extracts and pamphlets celebrates – and died in 2014. By then, he had long since been regarded by most journalists, fellow politicians and voters not as a feared and loathed disruptor but as a cosier figure, a dissident with no real power who wore a cardigan, smoked a pipe and liked a mug of tea. An MP for almost fifty years, a minister in four governments, a smooth centre-left prodigy in the 1960s, a prickly middle-aged radical in the 1970s and 1980s, and someone who abandoned Westminster, in 2001, for full-time activism and protest, Benn lived a very full political life. Yet there is a sense in which he died too soon. A year later, his protégé Jeremy Corbyn – who is sitting just behind him in the video of the Iraq speech – was elected Labour leader. The year after that came the vote for Brexit, one of Benn’s longstanding causes. With these two shocks British politics burst open, releasing such forces and ideas as populism, protectionism and nationalisation, which Benn had advocated, almost alone, for much of his career. Meanwhile, other forces that had often defeated or frustrated him, such as free-market Conservatism and Labour centrism, fell into a decline from which they have yet to emerge.

Nowadays, Benn is both remembered with reverence and increasingly forgotten. Once charged political words such as ‘Bennite’ and ‘Wedgie’ (a nickname, usually derisive, taken from Wedgwood, which was part of Benn’s surname before his move to the left) are likely to get a blank look from most people under the age of fifty. What exactly was his significance? He was certainly an unusually clear analyst and critic of the distribution of power in Britain. ‘We live in a strange country,’ he said in his final Commons speech, in 2001. By that he meant a country where power is often hidden, expressed in code or euphemism, or slyly shifted from one section of the establishment to another. ‘Although the person of the monarch has no political power,’ he writes in the opening piece in this collection, one of many letters about politics he wrote to his grandchildren, ‘the Crown has great powers and these … are exercised in practice by the prime minister.’ Another piece summarises the political influence of Britain’s oversized financial sector: ‘The judgments of financiers and City bankers on economic issues are … adopted as an established orthodoxy rather than as reflecting a particular interest.’ Another sums up the British constitution as an ‘untidy and developing collection of compromises, the consequence of sullen responses to pressure’. These compromises, he warns, are often only temporary: ‘When powerful and undemocratic groups are forced to retreat, they wait for the time when they can regain their superiority.’

As an increasingly frustrated and marginalised minister in the 1970s, the last time he held office, Benn saw the way senior civil servants, the City of London, its contacts in the press and ever more cautious Labour prime ministers could obstruct and undermine any politician who tried to push through radical left-wing reforms. While he doesn’t dwell on those experiences here – they are covered at length in his diaries – the gradual strangulation of his ministerial career gives an edge to his generalisations about the power of the British establishment. In one particularly sharp passage, he points out that demonstrations and civil disobedience by the left are routinely portrayed by right-wing journalists and politicians as illegitimate and damaging to democracy even though ‘extra-parliamentary activity has been a way of life for the ruling classes’ for centuries. He gives the examples of ‘investment strikes, attacks on the pound’ and ‘withholding business confidence’ from Labour ministers and governments. The authoritative, straightforward, even blunt explanations of these complicated and unequal power dynamics are one of the best things in this book – and one of the main reasons that, as an outspoken ministerial voice, he had to be discredited. His critique of Britain was systemic, and threatened too many interests. But now that such accounts are appearing everywhere, on the right as well as the left, his writing can feel prophetic.

Benn’s solution to Britain’s inequalities and lack of political transparency was to give more power to the people. His unusually strong faith in the voters was partly a product of the 1960s: his own radicalisation was sparked by the student uprisings of 1968, and by the social movements, such as feminism and Black Power, which were gaining ground in the tumult of that era. He came to favour bottom-up rather than top-down politics partly because he believed that improvements in computer technology would soon make possible electronic referendums and other forms of regular feedback from voters. He was an enthusiast for electronic gadgets such as tape recorders, dictating the political events of the day, as he experienced them, onto tape every evening for several decades. A speech given in 1968, when he was minister of technology, is a prescient mixture of anxiety and excitement about politics in an ever more digital society:

Just as technology is revolutionising industry, so it is outdating our political institutions … Much of the present wave of … discontent is actually directed at the present parliamentary structure. Many people do not think that it is responding quickly enough to the mounting pressure of events … It would be foolish to assume that people will be satisfied, for much longer, with … the marking of a ballot paper with a single cross once every five years. People want a much greater say … to make their influence felt on decisions that affect them.

Benn argued that Parliament should be televised, and that voters and journalists should have much greater access to government papers – what later became known as freedom of information. Both things eventually happened, but 21 years and 32 years respectively after he suggested them. Our political system often rewards forward-thinking, adventurous politicians belatedly and grudgingly, if at all. A later Benn proposal, made when he was secretary of state for energy in the late 1970s, was that Britain should use its tax revenue from North Sea oil to build up a sovereign wealth fund. Norway did this, and has become one of the richest countries in the world; Benn’s idea was not adopted.

The advocacy of greater democracy in these pieces often has a strong populist flavour, with frequent references to ‘the people’, the ‘popular will’ and the ‘elites’ who ignore or frustrate them. Yet unlike today’s populists, or those on the right at least, Benn wanted a redistribution of power far beyond the political. This is from a speech to a trade union conference in 1971:

Why should the people who own a firm control it? We abandoned that principle years ago in the political arena. For centuries the people who owned the land in Britain ran Parliament. It took a hundred years of struggle to give the people the power to choose and remove their political managers – MPs and ministers. If we can trust the country to democracy, why on earth can’t we trust individual firms to the people who work in them? … A firm managed by consent … would still need the best management … [But] they would be working, as workers, for the other workers and not for the shareholders alone.

Workers’ control never really took off in Britain as a political idea or as an operating principle; it was opposed not just by business but by some trade unionists, who believed that workers shouldn’t be managers because it would erode their class consciousness and sense of their own interests. Yet the questions Benn raised remain significant, not least as a reminder of how little of society is run on democratic principles. The frequent charge against the later, radical Benn, that his ideas were naive and impractical, loses some of its force when you consider the social, environmental and economic damage resulting from the supposedly more sensible options chosen by British governments.

A better criticism of Benn’s belief in the benign nature of democracy might be that it didn’t sufficiently consider the effects of political polarisation and misinformation. Modern British politics has become particularly distrustful and acrimonious, and large parts of the electorate cynical or credulous, and this has had consequences such as Brexit, the catastrophic premiership of Boris Johnson and the continuing rise of Nigel Farage. As a result, putting economic or social issues to a vote feels riskier than it did in Benn’s heyday, when there were fewer conspiracy theories circulating and more generally accepted political facts. How would workers’ control of a company function, for example, if half of the employees were Reform supporters and half recently arrived immigrants? Perhaps the joint enterprise would bring them together. But a lot of work would have to be done first to establish mutual trust. Similar tensions existed in the 1970s, but social media and Reform’s divisive politics have aggravated them.

Benn doesn’t consider such scenarios in these writings, though there is one intriguing speech from 1999 about immigration and globalisation. After making the strong but familiar point that modern capitalism is keener on mobility for goods and finance than for workers, he extends his argument in an unexpected direction. ‘At least in the European Union,’ he writes, ‘there is a free movement of capital and labour.’ For centrists who still see him as a bogeyman because of his opposition to the EU – which began in the early 1970s, when he was in his late forties, following a period when he had been enthusiastic about the institution, seeing it as a counter to international corporations – this remark is a reminder that his dislike of the EU was not absolute. And unlike most Eurosceptics, he also opposed the undermining of British sovereignty by the US government, and by international bodies such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund. Even late in life, his worldview was always expanding to take account of new causes and foes.

There are misjudgments here. An article from September 1984 about the miners’ strike, then six months old with hopes of a quick victory gone, declares: ‘We are going to win … because so many people in Britain have now put their hopes behind the [National Union of Mineworkers].’ In fact, after a summer of biased and distorted press coverage, almost two-thirds of voters blamed the miners, rather than the police, for picket-line violence. In a similarly over-optimistic speech from 1992, seven months after the Conservatives had been re-elected under John Major, Benn says: ‘I have a feeling that the 1990s are going to be quite different. The whole … selfish philosophy is in retreat.’ And in a book extract from 1979, he insists that ‘the Labour Party has been, is, and always will be an extremely tolerant and undogmatic party, deriving much strength and popular support from its refusal to impose a rigid test of doctrine upon its members.’ Many of those expelled or blocked from parliamentary candidacies by the Labour machine under Keir Starmer will not share Benn’s belief in the party as a broad church, a belief that sometimes wavered but never disappeared. Some of that loyalty derived from personal experience. While he was at times treated roughly by colleagues – demoted as a minister as publicly as possible by Harold Wilson in 1975; relentlessly mobilised against by the Labour right to stop him being selected for a winnable parliamentary seat in 1983 – his legitimacy as a major party figure was rarely questioned. Even Blair was deferential towards him, despite Benn’s frequent attacks on his premiership. Benn’s long experience, austere charisma and Labour movement connections protected him.

It’s hard to imagine someone like Benn surviving for long in Labour now, when a single vote against the government in the Commons can lead to suspension from the party. With national politics fragmenting to an unprecedented degree, and more options to the left of Labour than existed for most of Benn’s career, such as the increasingly popular and radical Green Party, and Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s quarrelsome but quite possibly potent new party, the idea that socialists should stick it out inside Labour may finally be losing its allure. Both these parties are likely to have leverage at Westminster if the next election produces a hung Parliament.

It’s also hard to imagine a contemporary politician of any party producing a collection as wide-ranging and stimulating as this one. Benn didn’t see himself as much of a writer or thinker, or even as a reader (especially in his ministerial years, he was often too busy for books), and his impatience and lack of intellectual self-confidence sometimes show in these pieces, with their repetitions and broad-brush passages. Short sections providing sudden insights, provocative suggestions or increases in rhetorical pressure show him at his best. Midway through a long contribution to a Commons debate in 1992 about nuclear weapons, having explained with typical eloquence the reasons he was so strongly opposed to them, he conceded that a quarter of a century earlier he had been ‘the minister responsible for Aldermaston’, where the design, manufacture and maintenance of Britain’s atomic warheads takes place. ‘Like most people,’ he went on, ‘I have had a chequered career.’

The final piece in the collection, described as his ‘last interview’, is a Q&A from three years before his death with his daughter, Melissa, who helped put the book together. She asks if he has ever ‘succumbed to [the] view that human beings are not inherently good’. ‘Well, I think there’s good and bad in everybody,’ her father begins, a little blandly. Then he adds: ‘I know there is in myself. Your job is to inhibit the bad and encourage the good.’