John Humphrys looks back on the life of Tony Benn.
Tony Benn’s death takes from British politics one of its most remarkable, charismatic, controversial and unusual figures. A man who at the peak of his career provoked as much fierce opposition as passionate support for his left-wing views became, in his later years, someone almost universally respected, someone it seemed imperative at least to listen to. His death leaves us with an interesting question: what is it we want from our politicians?
By the rather conventional but limited yardstick of high office, Tony Benn’s career was not an especially successful one. To be remembered merely as a postmaster-general, minister of technology, and secretary of state for industry and then energy would normally lead to being quickly forgotten. But Tony Benn’s impact did not derive from the jobs he held nor very much from what he achieved in those jobs. His influence came from what he argued and his unique capacity to articulate those arguments. This made him, for a time, not only the leader of a political movement but the figure around which British politics seemed to pivot.
From the early 1970s to the mid 1980s he was the leader of the left in the Labour Party. He was the advocate of an uncompromising socialism that believed in nationalising the top 200 companies in the British economy, radical egalitarianism, unilateral nuclear disarmament, British withdrawal from the European Union and from NATO and much else. He had no time for those in his party who believed it could come to power and stay in power only by occupying the centre ground. Not only did he scorn the idea that capitalism could be tamed by a moderate Labour government but he believed, or claimed to believe, that socialist radicalism was the party’s best route to power.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, his biggest battles were within his own party. In the late 1970s he made no secret of his opposition to many of the policies of James Callaghan’s Labour government (in which he remained a cabinet minister) and was happy to be the idol of those in the grassroots of the party and in the trade unions who were fundamentally opposed to the course Callaghan was following. The ensuing strife was a godsend to the Conservative opposition under their new leader, Margaret Thatcher, who swept Labour from power in 1979. Benn himself lost his Bristol seat.
What amounted to civil war broke out in the Labour Party after this defeat. One section on the right broke off to form the SDP and when in 1981 Benn decided, after returning to the Commons, to challenge the deputy leader of the party, the right-winger Denis Healey, for his job, he alienated many on the soft left of the party who begged him, on grounds of party unity, not to do it. Although he narrowly failed, he permanently fell out with the left-wing leader of the party, Michael Foot.
When Neil Kinnock became leader, the ‘Bennites’ went into decline. Tony Blair’s reinvention of Labour as ‘New Labour’, with a strategy very much focused on wooing the centre ground, finally saw off Bennism as a force in the party. Blair’s three election victories also rather put paid to Benn’s claim that the only way for Labour to win was by moving sharply to the left.
But in Tony Benn’s view a rather more fundamental argument had not been disproved. He believed Labour was now winning elections only by jettisoning its central purpose: representing the interests of working people and defending them against the powerful forces that run society. As he put it, Labour ought to be changing society to make it more habitable for the powerless; instead it was demanding that people change in order to make them fit into that society.
Of course New Labour hotly disputed this charge, accusing Benn of failing to recognise how radically the world and society were changing around us anyway. To them he seemed to inhabit a nostalgically anachronistic world of class struggle. But by now Benn, at seventy-six, had retired from being an MP in order, as he characteristically put it, to give himself more time for politics.
It wasn’t a joke. The remaining years of his life, at least until illness prevented him from doing so, were spent as energetically as ever campaigning, writing, broadcasting and touring the country making speeches. And in this he was in a league of his own. His ability to articulate thoughts simply and fluently, to make the complex and problematic seem easy and obvious, made him compelling to listen to. His oratory had an extraordinary range, from passionate, barn-storming eloquence on the platform, to a quiet, mild, unfailingly courteous, almost seductive manner in the studio. Even though he never wavered from his socialist views, listeners with very different opinions often found difficulty reminding themselves why they disagreed with him, so plausible was his advocacy.
He said of his exact contemporary, Margaret Thatcher, with whom he disagreed about almost everything, that her success had been misunderstood. He believed that her power and her achievements came from the fact that, above all else, she was a teacher. And that, fundamentally, is what Tony Benn was too. He did not so much want to hold office as to change minds. One of his oldest friends in the Labour Party, the former MP Tam Dalyell, disagreed with him about a great deal but he said of him after his death that Tony Benn was really a prophet: someone who was fearless in telling the world what he saw as being wrong with it, warning us of where it might be heading and trying to offer us ways of making it a better place.
That other teacher, Margaret Thatcher, certainly changed the world more than Tony Benn did, simply by virtue of winning power and holding onto it for so long. By contrast, Benn in his later years became not so much feared by those who disagreed with him as patronised as a bit of a crank, a relic from a different era and therefore harmless at last. Without changing his views he became something of a national treasure.
Yet many of the things about which he spoke and campaigned have not become anachronistic issues. Nor have they been resolved. Ed Miliband, the current Labour leader (who was given work experience by Tony Benn when he was 16 was “treated as an equal”) characterised Benn as a “champion of the powerless”. There are still millions, indeed billions, of powerless in the world. Whether what Benn advocated to help them will ever again be given the attention it was once afforded remains to be seen. But few can doubt the need for advocacy on their behalf. It is what politics is for. Benn showed that politics needs teachers as well as do-ers.
What are your reflections on Tony Benn and what do you believe is his legacy?
