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AMONG Labour members of parliament in Britain, Tony Benn stood out not only because of his eloquence and wit as an orator but because he held on to the quaint notion that the party ought to implement the policies on the basis of which it was elected. Benn, who died last Friday at the age of 88, sat in parliament for 50 years — beginning in 1950, when he won the seat vacated by Sir Stafford Cripps. He was 25 at the time, and when he resigned from the House of Commons in 2001, Benn noted that he was doing so to “spend more time on politics”.
In between, there were two hiatuses, the first when his father died in 1960 and Benn inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate. He successfully pushed for legislation that enabled him to renounce the title. Two decades later, he lost his seat in the 1983 election, after the constituency he represented was abolished, but returned to parliament the following year on a different seat.
Longevity isn’t necessarily a virtue, of course — although the span of his experience did mean that Benn met Gandhi (in 1931, when his father was secretary of state for India) and Ramsay MacDonald as a child, and served alongside Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s welfare state.
What more significantly distinguished him from most colleagues, though, was that, having been signposted as a rising technocratic star, he steadily shifted to the left — primarily on account of his experiences in the cabinets of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, which helped him realise that power was actually wielded by people other than elected representatives, be they bankers, captains of industry or bureaucrats.
Later in life, he formulated a list of five questions that ought to be put to any powerful person: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interest do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”
He came to oppose Britain’s integration into Europe on the grounds that the commissioners who ran it were neither elected nor accountable.
Back in 1981, Benn came within a whisker of being elected deputy leader of the Labour Party amid a massive campaign against him among fellow MPs and almost the mainstream media. It was always easier to denigrate him as a raving revolutionary than to refute his persuasive arguments for democratic socialism. He is also accused of a paramount role in making Labour unelectable for a decade and a half.
When the party did return to power, it was under Tony Blair as New Labour — an organisation whose creation Margaret Thatcher (appropriately in Benn’s view) claimed to be her greatest achievement. Benn vehemently disagreed with Thatcher on every issue but admired her clarity of purpose. He had no time for Blair, because he found utterly distasteful the idea of a Labour leader betraying everything the party once stood for.
For once the word fulsome can accurately be used to describe many of the tributes that have flowed his way in recent days, with most politicians from both sides of the fake political divide echoing the refrain that listening to this committed and principled man was a pleasure even while disagreeing with his opinions. In the media it was easy to discern dregs of the venom that once characterised most commentary on him.
Although a parliamentarian par excellence, Benn never lost sight of the value of extra-parliamentary initiatives. His in-depth knowledge of Britain’s radical traditions fed into his determination to strive for a more equitable future. And a better world. Early on, Benn stood out as a campaigner against colonialism and apartheid, and through his final decade served as president of the Stop the War Coalition. He was an idealist rather than a ‘pragmatist’, a dissident who rarely hesitated to speak truth to power.
Outside parliament, he could walk with kings without losing the common touch. The aura of hope never deserted him during his twilight years. The indefatigable crusader for human dignity and liberty wanted the inscription on his grave to read: “Tony Benn — he encouraged us”. Which would be accurate, but far from adequate.
It’s too easy to memorialise him as a pipe-smoking, tea-drinking dreamer who exemplified Britain’s pluralistic tendencies in the 20th century. His legacy would be much better served, though, were he to be recognised as a standard-bearer for a future Britain that turns its back on the depredations of neoliberal capitalism — not so much as a diarist who assiduously recorded the follies and fallacies of the past 75 years, but as a signpost for what may lie ahead.
