We exclude the Labour left from British politics at our peril

Jeremy Corbyn’s project could solve Britain’s problems. But we will never know if we focus only on its flaws, not its policies writes Andy Beckett in The Guardian
 

 

 Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA


Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is on borrowed time. That assumption has hung over it throughout his three and a half years in charge. It’s there during every Labour crisis. It’s there before every perilous election – such as the local polls this May. And after every bad or even so-so Labour result the end of Corbyn’s leadership is there in the minds of his many enemies, of many commentators, of many anxious Corbynistas.

When the party is doing better under him, such as during and immediately after the 2017 election, this sense that he is on perpetual probation recedes, but never completely and never for long. In June 2017, two days after Labour had won its largest general election vote since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, the then Labour MP Chris Leslie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We shouldn’t pretend that this is a famous victory. It is good … but it’s not going to be good enough.” Twenty months later, without waiting to see if his scepticism about Corbynism’s electoral potential was justified, he left the party to co-found the Independent Group.

Some of the temporary, besieged feel of the current Labour regime is down to Corbyn himself: his initial reluctance to fill Labour’s leadership vacuum, his relative lack of conventional political skills, his advanced age for a modern British party leader. He will turn 70 in May, shortly after the local elections, which will be handy for his political obituarists if Labour does as poorly as polls currently suggest.

The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer



Yet the unforgiving standards by which he is judged are also applied to the Labour left as a whole. Despite Corbyn’s two enormous democratic mandates, the left is endlessly said to have “taken over” the party; to be a “sect”, a “cult”, an alien “virus”. The language has become so commonplace, it is rarely pointed out how loaded it is. The Labour left has been othered.

Many people in the rest of the party, and wider British politics and the media, don’t consider the left to be a legitimate Labour tribe, let alone legitimate rulers of the party, let alone a legitimate potential government. This is rarely stated explicitly. Excluding a large and currently vibrant group from mainstream politics can be an awkward argument to make in a democracy – especially when the radical right of the Conservative party has never been othered in the same way. Instead, starting with Margaret Thatcher, it has often run the country. But once you appreciate the implacable hostility the Labour left arouses, it explains a lot of otherwise puzzling British political phenomena.
In recent weeks, MPs at a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party have reportedly applauded the Independent Group breakaway, despite the immense damage it has done to the chances of a Labour government. Tom Watson, in theory Corbyn’s loyal deputy, has said things that could end up on Tory election posters, such as “I love this [Labour] party but sometimes I no longer recognise it.” He has also set up the Future Britain group, scheduled to meet for the first time on Monday night , for “social democratic” Labour MPs to assert themselves against “doctrinaire utopianism”, which sounds like none-to-subtle code for the left.

Meanwhile, as ever, seasoned political journalists, who spent decades tolerating the dark arts of Alastair Campbell and New Labour’s other arm-twisters, have declared themselves horrified at the “bullying” of opponents by Corbynistas. Tom Bower, biographer of Gordon Brown and a dozen other bruisers, gives his current book on Corbyn the subtitle Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power. Corbyn supporters may be tempted to reply: we should be so lucky.

Despite, or, rather, partly because of, all the panics about the Labour left, it has rarely been dominant in the party. The last leftwing leader before Corbyn was George Lansbury, in the 1930s, another relatively elderly London radical, who lasted three years before being forced to resign by more centrist figures who did not like his pacifism. The fact that Labour’s leader in the early 1980s, Michael Foot, is also often regarded as a leftwinger, when he actually spent much of his tenure frustrating and arguing with the left, and its key player Tony Benn in particular, is a sign of how exaggerated the conventional picture of the Labour left’s strength can be.

“Labour leaders tremble at the relentless advance of Benn’s army,” warned the Express in May 1981, after Benn launched his famous bid for the party’s deputy leadership. And yet, in large part because the press othered him so effectively, as a kind of foreign demagogue – “Ayatollah Benn”, according to the Sun, after Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini – he did not win.

Poverty and climate more important than Brexit, says Corbyn


Labour centrists often talk about the need for the party to be “a broad church”. Rather less often, they accept that control of it ought to alternate between its different tribes, in a roughly representative way. Eight years ago David Owen, the former Labour minister and SDP co-founder, told the New Statesman that after the defeat of Jim Callaghan’s centrist government (in which Owen served) at the 1979 general election: “It was not unreasonable for those on the left to try to shift the balance of power in the party closer to their views.”

But back in the 80s Owen was rather less willing to let the left have its turn. He co-founded the SDP partly to block it. The SDP’s founding document, the 1981 Limehouse declaration, which he helped draw up, denounced “the drift towards extremism in the Labour party”, supposedly being led by Benn, as “not compatible” with the party’s “democratic traditions”. Last month, at the launch of the Independent Group, Leslie caricatured Corbynism in almost exactly the same way. Labour, he said, had been “hijacked” by “the hard left”.

Does it matter that so many people don’t want British politics to include a left of any significance? Even if you’re not at all leftwing, recent British history suggests it does. Between the fading of Benn’s influence in the mid-80s and Corbyn’s leadership win in 2015, the Labour parliamentary left – effectively the entire Commons left – dwindled to a few dozen MPs, occasionally admired, more often patronised and derided, almost always marginal to the making of government policy. Meanwhile more mainstream, supposedly more realistic politicians gave us Thatcherism, frequently disastrous wars, the financial crisis, austerity, and an increasingly dysfunctional version of free-market capitalism.

Now that we are living with the aftermath of all that – with a Conservative right promising further destructive experiments; and a Labour centre-left that has come up with almost no fresh ideas since the heyday of Blairism, two decades ago – it seems an odd time to decide that British politics can do without a leftwing alternative. Corbyn’s Labour project is rickety, incomplete and overambitious. It may be easier to concentrate on its flaws and scandals than to evaluate its policies, and then decide whether any of them are solutions to the country’s multiple crises. But if Britain could, somehow, finally, stop questioning whether the Labour left belongs in mainstream politics, it may even discover that the left has things to offer.

How British politics rediscovered Tony Benn and Enoch Powell

John McTernan in the Financial Times

All political lives . . . end in failure”. Enoch Powell’s memorable line resonates 40 years on not only because it seems so true, but because it was underscored by his own career. A brilliant academic, a decorated soldier and a reforming health minister, Powell was set for the highest office until the racist “Rivers of Blood” speech exiled him to the Commons backbenches and eventually to Northern Ireland as an Ulster Unionist MP. 

Yet despite the well-known arc of triumph to tragedy, the time has surely come to revisit his dictum — for Powell is the politician who dominates our age as no other does. The arguments that he articulated in the 1960s and 1970s resonate across the world. On the one hand, the seemingly unstoppable rise of the populist right, from France’s Marine Le Pen to Hungary’s Viktor Orban. On the other, the abiding split on Europe within the Conservative party that no leader has ever healed. The age of Brexit is the age of Powell. 

Why? First, British politics is dominated by immigration, a discussion conducted in terms that could have been drawn straight from the book of Powell. His infamous 1968 speech is still deeply disturbing to read but its tropes are all too recognisable. 

There is the obsession with numbers. Powell asks that since “it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited?” — a view that has its echo in the current Tory government’s fixation on cutting net migration to tens of thousands. There is the argument, too, of the pressure on public services. And there is the acceptance that UK residents are the victims of immigration: “The . . . sense of alarm and resentment lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.” The eugenicist strand is all that is missing from contemporary politics. 

Arguments which were so repellent and unacceptable that Powell was sacked from the Tory shadow cabinet have become mainstream. Paradoxically, it was the migration of white Christians from eastern Europe after 2004 that proved the political tipping point in the UK, legitimising a discourse about immigration that claimed to be about culture rather than race, but had clear roots in Powell’s racism. All this despite the fact that the apocalyptic visions of Powell were refuted by the reality of modern Britain. When Prince Harry marries Meghan Markle next year, the Royal Family will, like so many families, have a mixed race member. That success is a measure of just how wrong Powell got his predictions. 

Yet, arguments are one of the great political legacies — and while Powell lost in fact, he has won in rhetoric. The Brexit Leave vote was not just due to his argument but also to the cowardice of leaders of both main political parties in not challenging outright untruths about migration. Powellite arguments were marshalled against one of the institutions he most strongly opposed, the EU. It was Enoch wot won it. 

Finally, Powell would appreciate the irony that his once mighty Conservative party is being propped up in power by the Ulster Unionist’s usurpers, the Democratic Unionist party. The narrow views of a political party from Northern Ireland hold the whip hand in the most important peace time negotiations ever undertaken by the UK. 

The observation that all political careers do not end in failure is not restricted to the right of British politics. It is not merely that Jeremy Corbyn spent decades in the wilderness before increasing votes for the Labour party in this year’s snap election, depriving Theresa May of both a majority and a mandate. Take a look at his policies and his politics. They are routinely assaulted as coming from the 1970s. Nationalisation, council house building and government-planned industrial strategy. 

But they come from a very specific source in the 1970s: Tony Benn, another grand politician whose career ended in apparent failure. A successful technocratic minister in Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s, after Labour’s surprise defeat in the 1970 general election Benn turned sharply to the left. He shaped the Labour governments of the 1970s, with their increase in nationalisation and state investment in industry. He was the architect of Labour’s 1983 manifesto — the so-called “longest suicide note in history” — which led the party to a historic defeat. Benn’s state-sponsored companies collapsed, his bid for deputy leader of the Labour party failed, the Alternative Economic Strategy — the siege economy which was his great ideological project — abandoned. 

And finally, under Tony Blair the party became New Labour, accepting much of the Thatcherite settlement. It embraced the market, celebrated business and was an unprecedented success electorally. Benn and Bennism was over. 

Or so it was thought. Now Benn and Powell — whose careers ended so badly in the 1970s — dominate the ideas of British politics. The Tory party is riven by a divide over Europe deeper than it has been at any time since Powell and Benn led the campaign against common market membership in the 1975 referendum. With the migration target, and a majority sustained only by DUP MPs, Mrs May’s government cannot escape Powell’s long shadow. Meanwhile, in Mr Corbyn’s Labour party, state planning is back. With promises of tax rises targeted on corporations and the wealthy, this is the return of Old Labour with a vengeance. In British politics there has rarely been such successful second acts.

If half of Britain are ‘terrorist sympathisers’ for opposing air strikes, then Isis will win the next election

Mark Steel in The Independent

Everyone agrees the debate on whether to bomb showed our democracy at its finest. To start with, David Cameron called on all his command of history, Etonian diplomacy and wit to call his opponents “terrorist sympathisers”. Then, if anyone objected, he replied: “Look, we must move on.” This is debating at the highest level, and it would be marvellous to see Cameron try this method in pubs on the council estates of Peckham.

Opinion polls suggest that half of the population opposes the bombing, so the situation is worse than we thought, with around 30 million terrorist sympathisers – which is quite a worry as it means that Isis could win a general election, as long as its leader didn’t spoil his chances by saying something daft in the TV debates.

Then there were the Labour MPs supporting the bombing, who all assured us: “I have given this matter a great deal of thought and not taken this decision lightly.” This was highly considerate of them. Not one of them said: “I’ve given this no thought as I couldn’t give a monkey’s wank. So I made my decision by putting two slugs on a beermat and the one on the left reached the end first, so I’m with Corbyn.”

Then came the speech by Hilary Benn, which was so powerful that it persuaded MPs such as Stella Creasy to vote with Cameron. She said afterwards: “Benn persuaded me fascism should be defeated.”
Presumably then, until his speech, she thought fascism was worth a try. When she makes a full statement, it will say: “I always thought I might try fascism as a hobby when I retire, but Hilary explained the negative aspects very well so, on balance, I decided it’s best to defeat it.”

Benn has been praised for being “impassioned”. That was certainly true of the longest part of his speech, which went something like: “These people hate us. They hate our values, they hate our democracy, they hate our way of life. They hate our food, they hate our pets, they hate our weather, they have utter contempt for our garden centres, they despise Adele’s new album, they hate Cornwall, they hate Football Focus – and hated it even when it was presented by Des Lynam – and they can’t stand our flora and fauna, including our bluebells.”

Dozens of MPs were keen to remind us how much Isis hates us, which would be a reasonable point, if people opposed to bombing were saying: “Oh, I don’t think they mind us all that much. We’ve just got off on the wrong foot. Maybe if we invite them to a barbecue we’ll find out we’ve got more in common that we realise.”

It’s a shame that Benn didn’t have longer to speak, as he could have been impassioned about one more aspect of the rise of Isis, which is that most people agree this was caused – at least in part – by the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which Hilary Benn also voted for. You would think that might crop up, but instead we should just accept that the obvious solution to any disaster is to get the people who caused it to put it right by doing exactly what caused it in the first place. That’s why, if an electrician sets your house on fire, you insist on getting the same one to repair it, and on no account take any notice of the idiot who kept shouting: “Don’t do that, you’ll set the house on fire.” 

Some Labour MPs have assured us that the debate was different from the one before the invasion of Iraq because this time Cameron’s assessment and intelligence was “convincing”. But at the time Tony Blair was trying to convince people, and he sounded convincing as well. He didn’t turn up to the Iraq debate wearing a chicken costume, then swallow a balloon full of helium before screaming “Saddam can attack us in 45 minutes” in a squeaky voice and blowing bubbles at John Prescott.

Blair told us, with a solemn gaze, that to take no action in Iraq would be lethal, that we couldn’t stand aside, that there was a plan for what to do after the invasion, and he knew for a fact there were weapons of mass destruction. Now we are told that to take no action in Syria would be lethal, there is a plan for what to do after air strikes, we can’t stand aside and Cameron knows for a fact there are 70,000 moderates waiting for us to help out.

Few military experts believe this; Max Hastings says it is “bonkers”. But most MPs would believe Cameron if he said: “I have also been informed that there is a moderate, giant, two-headed bulldog, allied neither to Daesh nor to Assad, who will chew Isis to death once our brave pilots have bombed the region.”

Similarly, they believe the Defence Secretary Philip Hammond’s claim that there is a plan to introduce “free and fair elections” in Syria within 18 months, and this plan is “backed by Saudi Arabia”. That makes sense: if Saudi Arabia is known for one thing, it’s putting on elections. It’s just elections, elections, elections in Saudi. It’s a wonder they get anything else done.

We will all get excited over the next few days, when we see blurred film of something going up in smoke in a desert, and we are told this is a precision bomb blowing up an Isis factory where they manufacture evil.

The only other development we can so easily predict is that, in 10 years’ time, lots of politicians will say: “Of course, in retrospect, it’s easy to see that the bombing of Syria was a catastrophe. But this is different, so it’s essential we bomb Finland. They hate us.”

Tony Benn – the new face of the Tories

No wonder our Thatcherite prime minister can’t win over much of his party on the European Union. They’re closet Bennites

• 
• • Steve Richards
  • The Guardian, Sunday 26 October 2014 18.22 GMT

‘Tony Benn supported the right of local parties to de-select MPs – the unrelenting mission of some Tory MPs today.’ Photomontage: Photonews Scotland/Rex

‘Cameron won’t pay new EU bill!” “Cameron might threaten to pull out of the EU!” The exclamations erupt once more, but while the focus is on David Cameron’s latest position, a remarkable transformation has been taking place below him in the Conservative party, which explains his contortions and also makes them irrelevant.

A significant section of the Conservative party has become Bennite: ardent followers of the views espoused by the leftwinger Tony Benn, who died earlier this year. The rightwing Bennites do not look to their leadership for guidance. Like Benn used to do, they follow other lines of democratic accountability. Due to a matter of deeply held principle, the leader can never count on their support, even when he seeks to appease them.

I cannot quite believe I have written the previous paragraph. As a student in the early 1980s I was a Bennite and remember how much the right loathed him. Indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons I was a youthful devotee arose from my admiration of Benn’s polite dignity in the face of ferocious vilification. For a time the Conservative party projected him as the most dangerous man in Britain. Now parts of the right pay homage. The role reversal is the strangest and most significant in British politics for many decades.

Of course, there are big differences between Benn’s overall beliefs and the Tory Bennites. He was a socialist and they most emphatically are not. Benn regarded the state as a benevolent force, and sought wider state ownership, while a lot of the Tory Bennites want government to play a much smaller role. But in the importance they attach to democracy, and in their interpretation of what form democratic politics should take, they have much in common. I also sense that Benn regarded his views on democracy as of overriding importance. So do the Tory Bennites.

The former Tory MP and Ukip defector, Douglas Carswell, was typical in praising Benn in his Guardian interview last week: “Benn said the key questions were: who has power, who gave it to them, on whose behalf do they wield it, and are they accountable? I remember thinking this guy is spot on.” Separately, the founder of the ConservativeHome website, Tim Montgomerie, told me at a public event that he was a “Bennite on Europe”. He would advocate withdrawal whatever Cameron says or does, on the grounds that the EU can never be accountable to voters here or elsewhere. On another front, Benn started a campaign after the 1979 election to make Labour’s leadership and MPs more accountable to party members, supporting the right of local parties to deselect MPs. Benn’s crusade then has become, in a different form, the unrelenting mission of some Tory MPs now, or former Tory MPs. Carswell defected above all over the right of constituents to remove errant MPs – the project led by his former Conservative colleague, Zac Goldsmith. The Tory Bennites’ proposal, the right of recall, is a different measure to Benn’s, but the principle is similar. Constituents should hold MPs to account and not the national leadership.

In the last parliament David Davis pointed the way when he resigned as shadow home secretary to fight a local byelection in his constituency over his support for civil liberties – a move with Bennite rhythms, as local members and voters marched as one to put pressure on the national leadership. Benn was a strong supporter of Davis’s move. When Benn died, Davis presented a glowing tribute on Radio 4. In its counter-intuitive verve, it is the best political programme broadcast this year.

The younger generation is even more emphatic in its focus on the local over loyalty to national leadership. One of the most engaging and smartest of the 2010 intake, Dominic Raab, speaks openly of his commitment to the local party and constituents rather than following an expedient route to ministerial office. Selected by an open primary, Sarah Wollaston has similar priorities, as does Andrew Percy, a regular rebel. Benn would approve.

Listen carefully to the arguments of Tory dissenters on several matters and they care about the mechanics of decision-making as much as the substance of the decisions. This applies to their current explosive opposition to the European arrest warrant and free movement of labour. They fume above all because neither they nor their constituents can decide on the issue, even if they can see merits in the policies being imposed on them.

Benn went on to make a broader argument that the Labour government in the 1970s had failed to carry out the wishes of members. Similarly, a section of Tory MPs do not trust the leadership to deliver what their local members seek. They sought that guarantee of a referendum on Europe so that power was transferred from unreliable leaders to voters. It was Benn who originated the idea of a referendum on Europe when the Labour government held one in 1975.

There is a common characteristic between Benn and the Tory Bennites that goes beyond specifics. He was, and they are, animated by debate rather than tribal loyalties. In Benn’s diaries he was often at his most excited when reporting discussions with Tory ideologues. He describes at length a long, friendly conversation with the rightwing Keith Joseph when they met on a train. He speaks admiringly of Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, on the basis that they were “teachers” of conviction. In his Guardian interview Carswell is highly complimentary of Labour MPs who are also gripped by issues relating to accountability. Davis enjoys good relations with left-of-centre commentators and some Labour tribalists, including Alastair Campbell.

From the younger generation, Raab is similarly excited by internal debate and ideas rather than the stifling control freakery perhaps understandably favoured by leaders. At a fringe meeting during the Conservative conference Raab noted that the current parliamentary party includes libertarians, patrician Tories, Eurosceptics who want out, Eurosceptics who want to stay in, pro-Europeans, those who above all seek ministerial office, and the growing number who have other priorities in politics. In his enthusiasm for such stimulating diversity, he reminded me of Benn, who once described Labour’s mighty internal ideological battles as a healing process.

The practical consequence of Bennism is that a party becomes impossible to lead – at least on the New Labour model adopted at first by Cameron and George Osborne, of a leader and close allies deciding policy and imposing it on a docile party. Today’s Tory party is not docile enough for the model to work. Cameron can appease or challenge the Tory Bennites – it does not matter very much. In some respects he becomes marginal to them. They are driven, as Benn was, by purer lines of accountability in which members and their constituents are agents of change. I have been curious for some time about why Cameron is loathed by some of his MPs when he has delivered a programme that in some respects is more Thatcherite than Margaret Thatcher. Now I know the answer. Some of his MPs on the right are not Thatcherite. They are Bennite.

Tony Benn knew the rules but would not play the game

His lifelong belief in socialism inspired several generations of socialists and radicals, and infuriated the establishment

• 
• • Gary Younge
  • The Guardian, Friday 14 March 2014 18.05 GMT

Tony Benn: ‘What is the final corruption in politics? Earlier, it was to get into cabinet, before that, to be popular, but later on, the final corruption is this kindly, harmless old gentleman …' Photograph: Nick Rogers/Rex

The conductor was striding through the early train from Paddington to Penzance apologising as we shuddered to a halt just east of the Tamar. "I'm sorry for the delay," he told Tony Benn, sitting opposite me. "There was a lightning strike on the line ahead."

"Lightning strike!" said Benn, assuming industrial action. "What's it about?"

"It's about God, sir," said the guard, referring to the harsh weather of the previous night, and the two men smiled at each other.

That night I stayed in Cornwall. The prospect of spending nine hours on a train in one day was too draining. Benn came straight back, arriving in Paddington around 11pm so he could be up at 6am the next day to drive to Burford to address a Levellers rally. Around the time I was ordering my second round of sandwiches from the buffet car on my way back from Cornwall, he was heading back to London from Burford to speak to a pro-Palestinian demonstration, when his car exploded on the motorway. I was 33; he was 77.

When I next saw him I suggested, in jest, that he slow down, if only to stop me looking bad. He laughed and said he planned to work right up to the end. "The last entry in my diary will be: 'St Thomas's hospital: I'm not feeling very well today'," he said. He even had plans for his gravestone. "I'd like it to say: 'Tony Benn – he encouraged us.'"

The two things that stood out, watching him both from afar from an early age and up close over those few weeks, were his optimism and his persistence. He believed that people were inherently decent and that they could work together make the world a better place – and he was prepared to join them in that work wherever they were.

This alone made him remarkable in late 20th-century British politics. He believed in something. For some this was enough: they were desperate for some ideological authenticity, for someone for whom politics was rooted not merely in a series of calculations about what was possible in any given moment but in a set of principles guiding what was necessary and desirable. Criticisms that he was divisive ring hollow unless the critics address what the divisions in question were, and how the struggle to address them panned out.

Benn stood against Labour's growing moral vacuity and a political class that was losing touch with the people it purported to represent. The escalating economic inequalities, the increasing privatisation of the National Health Service, the Iraq war and the deregulation of the finance industry that led to the economic crisis – all of which proceeded with cross-party support – leave a question mark over the value of the unity on offer. What some refuse to forgive is not so much his divisiveness as his apostasy. He was a class traitor. He would not defend the privilege into which he was born or protect the establishment of which he was a part. It was precisely because he knew the rules that he would not play the game.

He hitched these principles to Labour's wagon from an early age. Its founding mission of representing the interests of the labour movement in parliament was one he held dear. He never left it even when, particularly as he got older, it seemed to leave him. His primary loyalty was not to a party but to the causes of internationalism, solidarity and equality, which together provided the ethical compass for his political engagement. When people told him that they had ripped up their party membership cards in disgust, he would say: "That's all well and good. But what are you doing now?"

With his trademark pipe, mug of tea and cardigans, that could have left him a fossilised figure of a distant ideological era. But, contrary to popular misconceptions, his politics did evolve. He did not grow up in a time when gay rights, defending Muslims against Islamophobia, or even gender equality were central to left discourse. But when they emerged as key issues he had no trouble understanding either their value or their potential. He stood for something more than office and he didn't pander. That was why he was one of the few people to emerge from an Ali G interview with his dignity intact.

Some would regard this as evidence of naivety, bordering on delusion, that went from dangerous to endearing the older and further away from power he got. Having fought so hard in the 60s to renounce his peerage, his struggle in later life was to be elevated to the to the role of "national treasure" – like Dame Judi Dench, only without the title or an Oscar. Those who pilloried him as an extremist became eager to patronise him as eccentric. "He may have talked some blather over the years," Keith Waterhouse once wrote of him in the Daily Mail. "But it was always blather he believed in."

"That's the thing you worry about," said Benn. "What is the final corruption in politics? Earlier, it was to get into cabinet, before that, to be popular, but, later on, the final corruption is this kindly, harmless old gentleman … I'm very aware of that. I take the praise as sceptically as I took the abuse. I asked myself some time ago: what do you do when you're old? You don't whinge, you don't talk all the time about the past, you don't try and manage anything, you try and encourage people."

The devotion that has poured out for him since his passing is not simply nostalgia. The parents of many of those who embraced him in recent times – the occupiers, student activists, anti-globalisation campaigners – were barely even conscious at the height of his left turn. They are not mourning a relic of the past but an advocate for a future they believe is not only possible but necessary.

The trouble for his detractors was that Benn would not go quietly into old age. He didn't just believe in "anything": he believed in something very definite – socialism. He advocated for the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich and labour against capital. He believed that we were more effective as human beings when we worked together collectively than when we worked against each other as individuals. Such principles have long been threatened with extinction in British politics. Benn did a great deal to keep them alive. In the face of media onslaught and political marginalisation, that took courage. And, in so doing, he encouraged us.

Tony Benn was defiantly, stroppily, youthfully socialist to the very end

Mark Steel in The Independent

The older you get, apparently, the more you abandon the daft socialist ideas of your youth to become sensible and conservative. There will never be a greater retort to this miserable myth than the life of Tony Benn.

Because somehow he became more defiantly, inspiringly, stroppily, youthfully socialist every year up to 88. If he’d lasted to 90 he’d have been on the news wearing a green Mohican and getting arrested for chaining himself to a banker.

Even more remarkable is that as he became younger with age, so did his audience. In a time when socialist groups despair at how to attract the under-50s, Benn regularly packed out a tent that held 3,000 people at Glastonbury. Anyone passing by outside who heard the roars and squeals as he appeared must have assumed the Arctic Monkeys were making a surprise appearance, but it was a man in his 80s, clambering on stage with a flask of tea.

Then he’d start with: “I’m pleased to say I’ve decided to give up protesting. Instead of protesting I’m going to take up DEMANDING instead.” And teenagers would shriek and raise their arms above their heads and clap, belly button studs wobbling as he recounted the first time he met Clement Attlee.

He filled theatres as well. In places like Telford, the box office manager would say: “The shows that went fastest this year were Tony Benn and a Led Zeppelin tribute act.” Maybe other politicians will try to copy him, before wondering why tickets aren’t selling well for “An evening with David Blunkett”.

He was introduced to socialism during the Second World War, when it became mainstream to suggest that if the nation could collectively pool its resources to fight, it should be able to do the same to provide health and housing. The introduction of the welfare state, along with the movements that won independence in the colonies, must have confirmed for him that mass movements, combined with parliament, can transform society in favour of the poorest people.

Parliament, he insisted, was the pinnacle of democracy, the triumph of radical thinking that went in a line from the early Christians, through the Levellers in the English Civil War and up to the Labour Party (although he’d have told Jesus, “I don’t think you should turn that water into wine as I’ve seen the damage alcohol can do.”).

These ideas can’t have seemed too controversial until the 1970s, when the response to global economic chaos was to blame the unions, taxes and state ownership of anything, and instead hand unrestrained power to big business and the free market.

But Benn stuck to his principles, so Conservatives called him the “most dangerous man in Britain”. He must have consistently disappointed opponents who portrayed him as a figure of evil, as they tried to convince people: “You can tell he’s trying to wreck the country: he’s got a gently persuasive lilting tone and he’s addicted to tea. He’s obviously worse than Stalin.”

Maybe it was the simplicity of his ideals that made him so endearing. If someone suggested immigration was causing our woes, he’d reply that it was odd how a businessman can move his business overseas, but the workforce shouldn’t be allowed to follow it to stay in work.

 

To anyone who argued that we don’t act collectively any more, he’d recount the day he was on a train that broke down for hours, and “up until then we’d all been individuals on a privatised train, but now we helped each other, lending phones and sharing sandwiches, and by the time it arrived it was a socialist train”.

But despite his reverence for Parliament, in some ways it was once he left it that he became most powerful. With an unfathomable energy he spoke at several events a day. Union meetings, anti-war benefits, campaigns against library closures – he was everywhere. If he was on Tony Blair’s asking rate for speeches he’d have been a billionaire within a month.

It wouldn’t have been surprising to find he was addressing a union conference, then speaking on the Iraq war at a children’s party, before giving a lecture about the peasants’ revolt at a sado-masochists AGM before nipping up to Leicester to appear on Question Time.

I did some filming with him once at seven in the morning, the only time he could do it. I got a taxi to his house, driven by a Pakistani man in a rage about the Iraq war. “Politicians are all crooks,” he kept saying, “The only one I trust is Tony Benn.” “Well,” I said, “strangely, we’re going to his house.” “Tony Benn? House of Tony Benn? We go to house of Tony Benn? Not Tony Benn?” he said.

Tony Benn in 1964 (PA)

So when we arrived I asked Tony Benn: “Would you mind meeting the taxi driver, he’s a huge fan of yours.” Then I went in with the driver who yelped and clasped Benn’s hand, saying “This is such a good day. Oh such a good day. My friends will not believe this.”

And Benn said: “Well I don’t know about that but I’ve got the kettle on if you’d like a cup of tea.”

This seemed to be his life. The more unassuming and down to earth he was, the more he acquired the reputation that narcissists crave.

In later years, when the establishment were unable to damage him or his reputation with their claims of his inherent evil, they labelled him a national sweetheart, and if he’d wanted to, I’m sure he could have presented Countdown and got to the final of Strictly Come Dancing.

But he ignored his new image, almost baffled by the acclaim he drew, and continued to make the case that a world in which the richest 400 have the same wealth as the poorest 2 billion is probably a bit wrong, and could do with putting right. And he did it to the end, in such a way that made anyone listening believe it was possible.

Interviewed a few weeks ago, he was asked how he’d like to be remembered. He said: “With the words ‘he inspired us’.”

Well he’s got no worries there. No worries at all.

10 of the best Tony Benn quotes

 

Tony Benn was known as an eloquent and inspirational speaker. Here are ten of his most memorable quotes, as picked by Guardian readers

• Guardian readers and James Walsh
• theguardian.com, Saturday 15 March 2014 12.39 GMT

Tony Benn attends a rally in Hyde Park, London, during a protest organised by the Trades Union Congress called The March for the Alternative on 26 March 2011. Photograph: Kevin Coombs/Reuters

1) “If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.”

Tony Benn was interviewed in Sicko, Michael Moore’s documentary film about the health industry in the US. Explaining the post-war creation of the welfare state, he said the popular mood of the 1945 election was: “If you can have full employment by killing Germans, why can’t we have full employment by building hospitals, building schools?”

2) His “Five questions” for the powerful.

Tony Benn’s final speech to the House of Commons as MP was an appropriately eloquent farewell, in which he talked widely on his view of the role of parliament and the wider question of democracy. As Hansard records, he said: 

In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

3) “Making mistakes is how you learn.”

 I made every mistake in the book, but making mistakes is how you learn. I would be ashamed if I ever said anything I didn’t believe in, to get on personally.

4) “I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so”

With a typically memorable turn of phrase, Tony Benn signalled the end of his parliamentary career in 1999, when he announced he would not be standing for re-election at the next general election. Asked whether he would be taking his place in the House of Lords, the former Viscount Stansgate - Benn renounced his peerage back in 1963 - replied: “Don’t be silly.”

5) “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”

Given the above, this quote is not especially surprising, but worth repeating. Tony Benn was a lifelong campaigner for constitutional reform, and introduced a bill that would have allowed him to renounce his peerage as early as 1955.

6) “I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.”

Another quote from Tony Benn’s interview with Michael Moore in Sicko, in which he highlighted poverty and healthcare inequality as a democratic issue. “The people in debt become hopeless, and the hopeless people don’t vote... an educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern,” he said.

7) “Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself”

Tony Benn thought any meaningful change could only come from below, and felt apathy was openly encouraged by those in positions of power. “The Prime Minister said in 1911, 14 years before I was born, that if women get the vote it will undermine parliamentary democracy. How did apartheid end? How did anything happen?”

8) “We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.”

Blamed by many for contributing to Labour’s lack of electoral success during the 1980s, Tony Benn was a totem for those who rejected the shift to the right widely seen as necessary if the party was to regain power. This shift was eventually completed under Tony Blair, who pushed through the abandonment of clause IV and redefined Labour as a party comfortable with privatisation and free market economics. The quote above indicates why Benn resisted such a move.

9) “There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. Both kill innocent people for political reasons.”

10) “A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.”

Tony Benn’s calcified view of the US as an imperialist force left him on the margins of mainstream opinion during the cold war, but a voice of reason to many after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Tony Benn puffs on his pipe as he listens to speeches during the second day of the 66th annual Labour Party Conference, in Scarborough, England. Photograph: Laurence Harris/AP

Left for dead by New Labour, liberal Britain must urgently fight back

Blair and his cult have wrecked the very beliefs millions thought they were voting for. The time for direct action is now

John Pilger
Tuesday December 18, 2007
The Guardian

The former Murdoch retainer Andrew Neil has described James Murdoch, the heir apparent, as a "social liberal". What strikes me is his casual use of "liberal" for the new ruler of an empire devoted to the promotion of war, conquest and human division. Neil's view is not unusual. In the murdochracy that Britain has largely become, once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even freedom itself, have long been emptied of their meaning. In the years leading to Tony Blair's election, liberal commentators vied in their Tonier-than-thou obeisance to such a paragon of "reborn liberalism". In these pages in 1995, Henry Porter celebrated an almost mystical politician who "presents himself as a harmoniser for all the opposing interests in British life, a conciliator of class differences and tribal antipathies, a synthesiser of opposing beliefs". Blair was, of course, the diametric opposite.

As events have demonstrated, Blair and the cult of New Labour have destroyed the very liberalism millions of Britons thought they were voting for. This truth is like a taboo and was missing almost entirely from last week's Guardian debate about civil liberties. Gone is the bourgeoisie that in good times would extend a few rungs of the ladder to those below. From Blair's pseudo-moralising assault on single parents a decade ago to Peter Hain's recent attacks on the disabled, the "project" has completed the work of Thatcher and all but abolished the premises of tolerance and decency, however amorphous, on which much of British public life was based. The trade-off has been mostly superficial "social liberalism" and the highest personal indebtedness on earth. In 2007, reported the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the United Kingdom faced the highest levels of inequality for 40 years, with the rich getting richer and the poor poorer and more and more segregated from society. The International Monetary Fund has designated Britain a tax haven, and corruption and fraud in British business are almost twice the global average, while Unicef reports that British children are the most neglected and unhappiest in the "rich" world.

Abroad, behind a facade of liberal concern for the world's "disadvantaged", such as waffle about millennium goals and anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google and Vodafone, the Brown government, together with its EU partners, is demanding vicious and punitive free-trade agreements that will devastate the economies of scores of impoverished African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. In Iraq, the blood-letting of a "liberal intervention" may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, while the British occupiers have made no real attempt to help the victims of their lawlessness. And putting out more flags will not cover the shame. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein era," says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's hospital. In January nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He refused to see them.

Even if a contortion of intellect and morality allows the interventionists to justify these actions, the same cannot be said for liberties eroded at home. These are too much part of the myth that individual freedom was handed down by eminent liberal gentlemen instead of being fought for at the bottom. Yet rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and dissent and tolerance, are slipping away, undefended. Whole British communities now live in fear of the police. The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world. A grey surveillance van with satellite tracking sits outside my local Sainsbury's. On the pop radio station Kiss 100, the security service MI5 advertises for ordinary people to spy on each other. These are normal now, along with the tracking of our intimate lives and a system of secretive justice that imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with any crime and are denied the "evidence". Hundreds of terrified Iraqi refugees are sent back to the infinite dangers of the country "we" have destroyed. Meanwhile, the cause of any real civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is "our" continuing military presence in other people's countries and collusion with a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as "pre-fascist". When famous liberal columnists wring their hands about the domestic consequences, let them look to their own early support for such epic faraway crimes.

In broadcasting, a prime source of liberalism and most of our information, the unthinkable has been normalised. The murderous chaos in Iraq is merely internecine. Indeed, Bush's "surge" is "working". The holocaust there has nothing to do with "us". There are honourable exceptions, of course, as there are in those great liberal storehouses of knowledge, Britain's universities; but they, too, are normalised and left to natter about "failed states" and "crisis management" - when the cause of the crisis is on their doorstep. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, for the first time in two centuries almost no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist is prepared to question the foundations of western actions, let alone interrupt, as DJ Taylor once put it, all those "demure ironies and mannered perceptions, their focus on the gyrations of a bunch of emotional poseurs ... to the reader infinitely reassuring ... and infinitely useless". Harold Pinter and Ronan Bennett are exceptions.

Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country. The Whitehall executive has prerogative powers as effective as politburo decrees. Unlike Venezuela, critical issues such as the EU constitution or treaty are denied a referendum, regardless of Blair's "solemn pledge". Thanks largely to a parliament in which a majority of the members cannot bring themselves to denounce the crime in Iraq or even vote for an inquiry, New Labour has added to the statutes a record 3,000 criminal offences: an apparatus of control that undermines the Human Rights Act. In 1977, at the height of the cold war, I interviewed the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia. They warned that complacency and silence could destroy liberty and democracy as effectively as tanks. "We're actually better off than you in the west," said a writer, measuring his irony. "Unlike you, we have no illusions."

For those people who still celebrate the virtues and triumphs of liberalism - anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the defence of individual conscience and the right to express it and act upon it - the time for direct action is now. It is time to support those of courage who defy rotten laws to read out in Parliament Square the names of the current, mounting, war dead, and those who identify their government's complicity in "rendition" and its torture, and those who have followed the paper and blood trail of Britain's piratical arms companies. It is time to support the NHS workers who up and down the country are trying to alert us to the destruction of a Labour government's greatest achievement. The list of people stirring is reassuring. The awakening of the rest of us is urgent.