SOMETHING was wrong, humphed Tony Benn, when the right-wing Daily Telegraph called him a national treasure. Ludicrous, in fact. He was no harmless old man in a cardigan, but a member of the awkward squad. “The most dangerous man in Britain”, the Tory press had called him in the 1970s. That was still true. His house was full of butane gas to light his sempiternal pipe, threatening an explosion. Shelves groaned with the speeches (two volumes) and the diaries (eight volumes) in which he made his relentless, unapologetic case for change. His rooms were loud, too, with clocks, advising him whether he was making good use of his time or not: meaning whether he was moving Britain another inch or so in what was manifestly the best direction.
That direction was socialist. Not socialism as professed by the Labour Party, in which there were too few socialists and too many kings of the Tony Blair variety; in which the people were not represented, but managed; and in which, far from changing society, the government tried to change the people to fit the status quo. Mr Benn belonged to the Labour movement, broad-based and active; not to the party, elitist and more or less ossified.
True, he’d served 51 years in the party, as an MP for Bristol South-East and Chesterfield. He had had to fight to sit in the Commons at all, campaigning for eight years to renounce the peerage he had inherited from his father. He had been a minister, for industry and later for energy, under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan in the 1970s: right-wing governments both, in his view, though Labour in name. So his industry bill, demanding more state planning and nationalisation, was dead on arrival in 1975; and he was never elected to the party leadership because his opponents inexplicably disliked his programme of disarmament, import controls, a wealth tax, and the handing of more political power to militant shop stewards.
Many said he had wrecked the Labour Party, which in 1979 lost power for a generation. Mr Benn thought that nonsense. The party leaders had wrecked it by losing touch with the people. They might even have gone into the Common Market without popular consent, had he not insisted on a referendum in 1975 (in which, dismayingly and despite his untiring “No” campaign, the people voted “Yes”). Labour leaders had sold out to Europe, NATO and the IMF—just as Mr Blair sold out later to the warmongering Americans. He would never do so; because though most leaders were unprincipled weathercocks, he was one of the few unbending signposts, pointing (as Margaret Thatcher had also, but wrongly, pointed) to the promised land.
The route he preached was “pure” socialism. Not the Marxist sort, though he fell out often with the party over clause four of its constitution, which committed the party to nationalising the means of production, distribution and exchange; though he scorned the free market New Labour so hotly embraced, and found global capitalism disgusting. No, he meant socialism in the tradition of the Peasants’ Revolt, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists, campaigners for the rights of the working man. All progress came from underneath.
The tea-powered megaphone
Mr Benn was really a Leveller, the 17th-century group who rejected all authority and preached absolute equality. He was not merely a republican who, like Cromwell, fought to get the royal head removed (from Britain’s stamps, when he was postmaster-general). He was also sceptical about parliamentary democracy itself. Power was only on loan to Parliament from the people; therefore, most MPs being useless, it was better if the people ran things themselves. Hence his indulgence of Trotskyites and rabble-rousers in the unions; his eagerness to prop up Britain’s heavy industries, mostly in vain, with workers’ co-operatives; and his hatred (he was a good hater) of those who seemed to stand in the way.
Where did this drive to be difficult come from? Not his happily middle-class family life, though Liberal-Labour politics had filtered through from his father, and non-conformist piety (altered by him to humanism) from his mother. Not from fee-paying Westminster school, where he wore top hat and tails, an attendance he excised from his entry in “Who’s Who”. But his battle to take his Commons seat, with his local constituents pitted against the Establishment, committed him to people-power. And the death of his elder brother on active service in 1944 filled him with such deep and abiding hatred of war that he even visited Saddam Hussein to divert, single-handed, the American invasion.
His campaign for a better world was generally conducted alone. After the late 1970s (when he mustered a band of Jacobins around him) he seemed to need no faction, having enough tea-fuelled energy for several men. Enemies were everywhere, of course. The Murdoch-and-Maxwell press called him bonkers for years. The Thought Police were out to get him. MI5 went through his rubbish. Nonetheless the books kept appearing and, well into old age, Mr Benn himself, plummily eloquent as ever through pipe, microphone or megaphone. No, not a treasure, but worth protecting all the same, as a curiously resilient artefact from Labour’s misspent past.