The Benn Heresy: Foreword by Owen Jones

The Benn Heresy

The Benn Heresy

Alan Freeman

Pluto Press

First edition published 1982

This new ebook edition published 2014 by Pluto Press

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www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Alan Freeman 1982, 2014

The right of the Alan Freeman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Foreword by Owen Jones

Preface

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1. The Enemy Without

Democracy: first encounters

Democracy and economy

Investment and control

2. The New Politics

The end of a consensus

Birth of a heresy

Unions and social change

Clause Four, the Bevan tradition, and workers’ control

3. The Enemy Within

Democracy: second encounter

Whitehall’s way

The exorcists gather

The death of industrial democracy

4. Rethinking Socialism

How to fight?

Origins of the alternative strategy

Roots of decline

The AES in a world context

The empire never ended

5. From Benn to Bennism

Democracy: third encounter

A new test card

The empire strikes back

The strange death of Labour England

Birth of a movement

Epilogue

Marxism and democracy

Interview with Tony Benn

The Spirit of Benn, the Ghosts of Thatcher: A Postscript

References

Dedicated to the memory of Neil Williamson

Foreword by Owen Jones

Tony Benn was demonised at his height and patronised in his twilight. Both approaches had the same function: to neutralise any potential threat to Britain’s status quo. For those of a younger generation, it seems rather far-fetched to imagine that Benn was once ‘The Most Dangerous Man in Britain’, who was repeatedly savaged by the Rottweilers of Fleet Street, whose rubbish was emptied by hacks and whose children were abused in the street by journalists. In his old age, Benn was portrayed as a national treasure, a kindly old gentleman. His retort was one of defiance: ‘I am old, I am kind, I might be a gentleman, but I am not harmless.’

Tony Benn was a man of impeccable breeding, from a long line of Westminster politicians, privately educated: his shift to the left, then, was an unforgivable act of class treachery. He began as a technocratic, career-orientated politician, deemed a plausible future moderate Labour leader. But as he would later reflect, he was radicalised by his time in government. He experienced being in office, but not in power. He saw the powerful interests, the civil servants, the big businesses that ran the country behind the scenes, out of sight, unaccountable, as he made the intolerable mistake of trying to abide by the manifesto Labour was elected on in 1974. For those who today advocate the social transformation of Britain, it is a lesson that must be understood: not least given these powerful interests are far stronger than when Benn was a Cabinet Minister in the 1970s, and the countervailing pressures are immeasurably weaker.

Any assessment of Benn’s career must avoid – as this account rightly does – the ‘Great Man’ view of history which reduces past events to a soap opera that plays out at the top, divorced from the realities of wider society. Benn himself never accepted that it was individuals who drove history along. His speeches were constantly littered with references to the Levellers, the Chartists, the suffragettes, the trade unionists who won rights and social gains at the expense of the powerful, often at great personal cost to themselves. He believed that social change happens not because of goodwill and generosity on the part of those with power, but through the struggle and sacrifice of those from below.

This broader approach helps us to understand the rise and fall of Bennism, too. It is easy to fall back on the cliché that all political careers end in failure, and to look at Benn’s legacy as one of defeat. But as Karl Marx once wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ While individuals can make a contribution that has an impact on historical events, they are heavily constrained by the environment in which they operate.

The rise of a Bennite movement in the 1970s had everything to do with the collapse of the post-war consensus, abandoned as it was by left and right alike as they tugged in different directions. ‘For a while, it was wholly unclear which side would win,’ the Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne has reflected, ‘and indeed for long periods it appeared that the Left was in the ascendancy.’ But Thatcherism’s victory over a deeply divided opposition; the defeats of the trade union movement, both in industrial action and because of mass unemployment; the acceleration of neoliberal globalisation in the 1980s; and finally the manner in which the end of the Cold War was spun as the eternal triumph of free-market capitalism – all of this condemned the left to catastrophic defeat from which it has yet to recover. Benn was the logical leader of the left when it was resurgent in the 1970s because of his charisma and abilities; but if it had not been him, it would have been someone else. Similarly, the defeats suffered by the left were not the personal failures of Benn. As the left waned, so did Benn’s influence, consigning him to a political wilderness where he could be treated as politically eccentric, but ultimately harmless; the charming remnant of a bygone era.

As a young socialist growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, Benn was nonetheless a light in the all-embracing gloom of neoliberal triumphalism, a world of ’There Is No Alternative’, of ‘The End of History’, where Labour politicians lined up with hard right US presidents to murderously invade foreign countries. He always retained his optimism. In every speech, he would attempt to raise the spirits of his audience by saying: ‘It’s the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you’re mad, then dangerous, then there’s a pause and then you can’t find anyone who disagrees with you.’

At the core of Benn’s beliefs was an unbending commitment to democracy. He believed that it was insufficient to allow people a vote every four or five years. He wanted to democratise the economy and the workplace, and to challenge the private interests who continually subvert and undermine democracy. This simple call for democracy must surely be at the heart of any renewed attempt to build a different society.

Today’s Britain is a society where the wealth of the top 1,000 can double in 5 years while living standards fall for workers for the longest period since Benjamin Disraeli was Prime Minister; where taxes are slashed on the rich while hundreds of thousands are forced to depend on food banks to feed themselves; where banks can plunge the country into economic disaster and be bailed out by the state with minimal conditions, while benefits are stripped away from disabled and unemployed people. This country of zero-hour contracts, legal loan sharks and working poverty is not only unjust, it is unsustainable.

But as Benn himself always said, change depends on the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope for a better world. Hope must come in the shape of a coherent alternative that resonates with people’s experiences, and which is communicated in a language that is widely understood. Building a society that is based on meeting people’s needs and aspirations – rather than one organised around the interests of profit for a tiny elite – was an ambition that was not realised in Benn’s lifetime. But democratic socialism remains the best hope for the future of humanity, and, one day – however distant it may now seem – that ambition will be realised.

Preface

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne,

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Nichts is schwieriger und nichts erfordert mehr Charakter, als sich in offenen Gegensatz zu seiner Zeit zu befinden, und laut zu sagen ‘Nein!’¹

Kurt Tucholsky,

Schnipsel

Why this book? Many ready answers may spring to mind, at least some of them kind; my own rationale, when I suggested that Pluto republish it, was something close friends helped me to remember: to get our country out of the mess it is in, put an end to the needless misery this causes, and build a world worth leaving to our children, we will need Tony Benn’s ideas. These ideas are more relevant today than ever. This book offers present and future generations a better chance of finding out what Tony really had to say. It is needed because he is no longer with us to respond, as he so effectively did to the end of his days, to his critics and detractors.

Pluto Press have done a service in responding to my suggestion. All those years ago, I tried to make Tony’s ideas accessible by identifying the problems he was trying to solve; I believe the results of that effort cannot but help others do the same. What made Tony unique among his contemporaries is not just that he fought for his ideas with integrity and honesty, but that he creatively developed them every time he met an obstacle. This book does not record the thoughts of an armchair philosopher interpreting the world, but a man who insisted on learning how to change it. It presents Tony Benn’s solutions to the problems which lie at the heart of British politics.

I argue, in my postscript, that history made Tony Benn the champion of ideas that can, and have, transformed our lives for the better by solving those problems. If this was all, his work would be over and this book would be no more than an homage to his achievements. This is not so because most of his solutions have yet to be adopted, due to the opposition of a privileged and wealthy minority whose obstruction he resolutely opposed, whose methods he ruthlessly dissected, and against whose resistance he developed and exhibited the only workable alternative: an egalitarian democracy in which wealth takes second place to justice.

Of course, this idea is not his alone. It is the common emancipatory heritage of the whole world. He however showed it could be done in Britain, that it needed to be done, and that no other solution would work. For all of these, but above all the first, he was loved by the public in the same measure that he was hated by the establishment. Precisely because that establishment frustrated him, and to the extent that they succeeded, future generations will have to solve these same problems: postponing their solution has only made them worse.

Rereading the original text, I found it offers something which I did not anticipate when I first committed it to print: the quality of Benn’s thinking, which shines through, makes that text a vigorous rebuttal of his detractors, who have grown neither quieter nor less numerous with his passing. It provides a robust response to that peculiarly English dismissal of his ideas which labels as ‘impractical’ anything so popular and obviously right that it becomes a threat to vested interests.

This book is an antidote. If proper attention is paid to what Tony says in it, it is a resource which nails the distortions and misrepresentations that dominate a media-curated public perception which the establishment has assiduously cultivated. I encourage the many who still champion his views to use it; I think it will help them to have Tony Benn’s own version of his legacy in plain sight.

This claim may seem less than modest. I would defend it, however, because of Tony’s own role in the book’s production. It was written 33 years ago, on the heels of a major upheaval which has shaped English politics to this day – the bid to elect him as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1981. Lacking any formal training in history, I selected what I took to be the speeches and writings that offered the key to Tony Benn’s thinking and its evolution, those made at those decisive moments when he sensed that things were at a turning point and when he was striving to influence their outcome for the best. I quoted them at length and then tried to account for them by tracing the key events in British postwar history in which he participated and which provoked his responses, asking what real choices faced the players.

I added an interview, which took several remarkable days to complete and which the reader will find included in this book. I set out to interrogate his ideas sympathetically but critically; I was and remain a revolutionary socialist. I detest wholeheartedly, and rigorously refrained from, the destructive sectarian discourse which displays the needless worst of the British revolutionary tradition such as it is, but I did ask questions that this tradition brought to my mind. These were questions which preoccupied the generation of activists I belonged to, born of the Algerian, Cuban and Vietnamese wars of liberation, scarred by the coup in Chile and the dirty wars in Argentina and Uruguay, and scattered by the decades that followed.

Though Tony was fully aware of the relationship between Britain’s colonial past and its imperial insertion into the modern economy, and though this was a formative element of his thinking, the questions that such experiences raised were not immediate issues for a crusader whose main daily antagonist was the British political system. Those who control that system dispose of sufficient surplus wealth, and sufficient social depth, to afford the luxury of corrupting or discrediting their opponents in preference to physically eliminating them. I like to think that our discussion allowed Tony to ‘fill in the gaps’, to answer questions to which he might have devoted less thought than the many he did address.

The interviewee being Tony, this was not a passive process; his interrogation of my own ideas was if anything more challenging than mine of his, and profoundly shaped the final version of the book. He clarified my mind in the following way: if one lives in a society where corruption and lies are the principal instruments through which injustice is perpetuated, then the courage required to help move humanity move itself forward is neither the ability to carry a gun, which in America any fool can do, nor raise a mob, which has become a State Department specialism, but the intellectual tenacity to identify what is right and the moral capacity to stand up for it. This is an integral part of Tony Benn’s legacy.

What can ‘another book’ do which other writings cannot – especially one that has already been published? Tony left a huge personal record in the shape of his famous diaries, with no shortage of public speeches and writings. Countless obituaries and analyses are easily found on the web and elsewhere; does this book add anything not already there? You, the readers, will have the last word, but if publishing it achieves nothing more than encouraging you to take his ideas seriously enough to study them further, this can only be good.

Before you judge, I invite you to consider one further point. To paraphrase John Donne, no thought is an island. Ideas, more than any other human activity, are social: like language, they exist because we work and live together. That’s why you can’t put a wall round an idea.

Yet it follows that ideas can only be understood by acknowledging what they owe to other ideas. This is the price of their freedom. The twin secrets of Tony Benn’s creativity were that he never gave in, and that he was one of the world’s great listeners. In the face of opposition, he drew on the ideas of everyone who shared his determination, the better to defeat it. He worked with tens of thousands who were struggling for a better life, and incorporated, in the solutions he developed and advocated and which constitute his own unique contribution, the things he thought they were trying to tell him.

His ability to understand others was not confined to those he agreed or even identified with. When battling his many opponents, his first step was always to find out what they had to say – not out of love for it, but all the better to counter it. This is one of the reasons for his largely forgotten but somewhat fearsome debating skills. He knew more about his enemies than they knew about themselves.

That approach communicated itself to me, and forced me to let the ideas in this book march out of the pages of history. They had been imposed on both of us by decades of selfless and anonymous struggles for a better world that happened to be expressed in the intellectual contribution of a single person. In seeking to explain their origin, I was driven to put on paper not just what Tony said, but what – and who – he was fighting for. This made the text more than a history of one person; as John Donne might have said, and as I hope you feel having brought Tony’s memory back to life by reading it: never send to know for whom he spoke: he spoke for us.

Alan Freeman

11 August 2014

¹ Nothing is harder, and nothing calls for more character, than to find oneself in open conflict with one’s time, and clearly say ‘no!’.

Acknowledgements

In addition to those I acknowledged in 1982, special thanks are due to Radhika Desai for her detailed and effective editorial work. Among many who contributed to the ideas in this postscript, though they didn’t always know it, special mention goes to Mick Burke, Victoria Chick, Andrew Kliman, Kate Hudson, Fred Lee, Redmond O’Neill, John Ross, John Serieux, David Shulman, Carol Turner and Jude Woodward. The errors are, of course, my own.

The original acknowledgements made insufficient mention of R. Jenkins wonderful political biography, a masterpiece whose scholarship is today a great rarity (Tony Benn: A Political Biography. Writers and Readers, 1980). Without it, the original could never have been written. I also failed to mention the enormous influence of the people of Scotland and my special comrade Neil Williamson, who would have written a page in the current history of that country had he lived.

Prologue

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant. And other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

William Morris, News from Nowhere

On 3 October 1957, delegates to Labour’s annual conference sat in packed ranks in Brighton’s Corn Exchange to debate the British H-bomb. Norwood resolution 24 called for the unilateral renunciation of the testing, manufacture or use of nuclear weapons in any form. For the motion: the Labour left. Against: the Labour right.

The hall quietened as a giant rose to speak. Nye Bevan, hero of the left, symbol of the moral, political and physical struggle of British working people, was about to announce the end of an era.

‘When Bevan sat down’, wrote an MP later, ‘I had to get up and go away. I couldn’t stand any more ... I had been present at a murder – the murder of the enthusiasm that built the Labour movement’.

Bevan had done the unthinkable. He had spelled out to his thunderstruck supporters why they should oppose the Norwood resolution.

Bevan died in I960, but Bevanism – the movement which dominated Labour’s left-right battle throughout the fifties, and which embodied all the hopes and aspirations of the forties – died that night.

The years that followed saw the formal triumph of the Bevan team. His former colleagues rose to power one by one: Harold Wilson, who had resigned with him from Attlee’s 1950 Cabinet, became Labour’s longest-serving prime minister in history; Michael Foot, who led the unilateralists to their short-lived victory at Labour’s I960 conference in Scarborough, replaced Wilson’s disgraced successor Callaghan as party leader in 1980. But the events of the sixties and seventies tested Bevan’s inheritance to its limits – and found it wanting. The Bevanite team presided, in two successive governments and two successive decades, over the dismantling of almost everything Bevan had stood for.

A gap opened up on the left of the Labour Party. Today it is being filled by supporters of a new symbol of Labour’s socialist ideals: Anthony Neill Wedgwood Benn. The aim of this book is to explain how this came about.

Benn’s background was very different from Bevan’s. He was born on 3 April 1925, almost within earshot of Westminster. His father, William Wedgwood Benn, had been a radical Liberal MP since 1906. In 1928 William entered the Commons as a Labour MP. In 1941 he was made Viscount Stansgate. The title passed to his son on his death in I960.

Benn’s mother, Margaret Eadie Holmes, was the granddaughter of a Perthshire engineer who, after founding the firm of Eadie Brothers, became provost of Paisley. Her father, Daniel Turner Holmes, served as Liberal MP for Govan from 1910 to 1918.

Benn’s family was radical and dissenting. In the 1892 election his grandfather John Benn campaigned as ‘MP for the back streets’ with Irish Home Rule as a campaign theme. His father broke with Lloyd George over his postwar coalition policies and on the Home Rule issue. Both were nurtured in the old Liberal principles of democratic rights, government in the interests of the people, and opposition to the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy. His mother became a Congregationalist at the age of fifty-one, having studied theology at King’s College, London. Scottish Presbyterianism and fundamentalism, with their fierce insistence on moral principle and rejection of ecclesiastical authority, were strong traditions in her family.

His radical commitment was nurtured and deepened by a political partnership with his wife, Caroline Middleton de Camp, whom he met in 1948 and married the year after. An American of dissenting Huguenot stock, Caroline became a campaigner for the socialist movement for educational reform in Britain. Later on, as the distance between Benn and his colleagues in the Labour leadership began to grow, Caroline’s experience and influence were to become a major factor in shaping his emerging political philosophy.

But his was neither a working class, nor a socialist background. His uncle, Ernest Benn, was a fierce defender of free enterprise, also in the old Liberal tradition. His book Confessions of a Capitalist expounded the ideas he used to denounce Churchill for paving the way to socialism. It was almost as if the Benn family had set itself the task of reproducing within its ranks the historic split within Liberalism which led to its replacement by the Labour Party.

Benn’s family was not aristocratic and his father’s peerage owed more to wartime realpolitik than to blood lineage. But if he was not born with a silver spoon between his lips, he was certainly familiar with the corridors of power. His passage through Oxford and the RAF to parliament, where he arrived as a Labour MP in 1950, had been smoothed in advance by the benefits of connection, education and freedom from want.

In the Commons he took his distance from the left, although he thought of himself as left of centre. He was never part of the Bevanite group or its revolts. True, he was heavily involved in the anti-colonial movement, and with Brockway and others founded the Movement for Colonial Freedom in 1954. In the same year he also helped to found