Tony Benn: A Political Life 9781474212823

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Preface t o New Edition

How much safer it is to be the tool of the oppressor than the advocate of the oppressed. William Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819) Two years have passed since the first edition of A Political Life was published, two years which, if somewhat longer than Dr Johnson once supposed, have concentrated Tony Benn's mind wonderfully. So much was inevitable, with the second Gulf War providing substance for his long-standing concerns as to the nature of the New World Order as evoked by the Bush regime: concerns over the extent of US hegemonic ambitions as revealed by Washington's hawks; over the future role of the United Nations, and the rule of international law; over the exact nature of Britain's 'special relationship' with the United States or, more exactly, with successive US administrations; over Britain's future relations with Europe and the Third World; and, as ever, the cohering factor, concerns for the well being of that political will-o'-the-wisp: democratic governance. For Benn, all these factors were encapsulated in the prelude to, and the outcome of, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq - the legitimacy of US claims to take pre-emptive action to secure 'regime change' and its right to intercede in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state; the consistent rejection by Bush and Blair of the reports of UN weapons inspectors, allied to the production of specious evidence of weapons of mass destruction; the rejection of any form of international arbitration, as scouted not only by the

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Arab League, but also, amongst others, by Russia, Germany, France and China, all culminating in the questionable legitimacy of the action itself, and the nature of the post-war settlement. Each mocked everything that Benn had ever represented. Half a century had passed since, as a young MP, he had become Treasurer of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, created to promote independence and democracy in Britain's former colonies, yet now it seemed that a new imperium, as careless as its predecessors of any principles save its own self-interest, was emerging; that his hopes, which recently had found new life in the anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle and Gothenburg and Genoa, were being imperilled. The disputed presidential election of 2000 ensured that. For George Bush Junior, a born-again Christian, the tenets of free market capitalism underwrite his fundamentalist credo, a Godgiven mission to save the world from itself, or more exactly, from social democracy. Within months of its return the new Republican administration had rejected the Kyoto agreement, revived Ronald Reagan's aborted Star Wars programme, and substituted talk of an Axis of Evil for that of an Evil Empire. Where, once, Woodrow Wilson had declared 'The world must be made safe for democracy', it was now to be on American terms. As drafted by his closest advisers, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's task was explicit: 'to shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests', which in its turn required: 'a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges, a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American interests abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States global responsibilities.' And if any doubts remained as to what that entailed, Michael Ledeen, a leading think-tanker amongst Washington's neoconservatives, was quick to lay them, calling for 'a war to remake the world itself.' Apparently Fukuyama had been wrong. This was not so much the end, rather the beginning of history, as heralded by Bush's election, and prefaced by the tragic events of September 11 2001. Whilst the Washington hawks already had their agenda in place, the attack on the World Trade Centre was to provide them with the grounds for their secular crusade, a pick'n'mix formula of which Richard Perle, then Director of the semi official US Defence

Acknowledgements

This book has taken more than two years to write, and I owe a debt of gratitude to many people, most notably Nick Bagnall, Arthur Butler, Greg Elliott, Chris Freeman, Joe McCarney, Liz Mandeville and Brian Morris. To them all, my thanks. My thanks also to Sarah and George Mallen and their team at SSL for having invested their confidence in the project, for establishing the website that 'trailed' the work's publication and for providing Tony Benn with a chat room where he can engage with what he termed his 'new constituency'. Above all, my thanks to Tony Benn. From the outset he insisted that while I was free to interpret his career in whichever way I chose ('warts and all' were the exact words that he used), he would, nonetheless, be happy to assist me in every way possible with my research. And it is precisely this that has made the work possible. Finally, my thanks once again to Rachel, who for the past couple of years has lived, uncomplainingly, 'A Political Life'. As always, this book is dedicated to her.

Introduction Britain is the traditional land ofdissent, of dissent not only in its original religious connotation, but of dissent itself;. of, i f you will, dissent for dissent's sake. John Strachey, The Strangled Cry (1962) Ten days after announcing his intention to 'retire from Westminster and go into politics' Tony Benn was approached by a Labour peer on the terrace of the Commons and invited to 'join us in the Lords'. Possibly the irony of the situation escaped his Lordship, that Benn had spent three years of his political life renouncing what was now on offer. Or possibly he failed to appreciate what the offer revealed about the mind-set of the Labour establishment. Where Benn had once been damned as a maverick, beyond political redemption, not least for his outspoken critique of the constitution, he was now being invited to join the very institution he had anathematized. Ingenuous as it may have been, there was nothing new about the practice. On the contrary, the labour movement has long made heroes of its rebels, provided, of course, that they no longer pose a threat to the party establishment. Like resurrection men, the Labour leadership has regularly called up the ghosts of dissent Winstanley and the Levellers, Tom Paine and the Revolution Society, Feargus O'Connor and the Chartists, William Morris and the Social Democratic Federation, Jimmy Maxton and the Independent Labour Party - to legitimize its own lineage. Of course, the creation of political mythology has always been a potent force. It is only in the past half-century, however, that the

CHAPTER ONE

Common Sense

M y Nation was subjected to your Lords. It was theforce of Conquest; force with force Is well ejected when the Conquer'd can. John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671) W e are light years away from being a true democracy. Tony Blair (July 1995) The coincidence went unremarked, but for all that, it was noteworthy. On Tuesday, 26 October 1999, as the Lords were voting away the rights of all but ninety-two hereditary peers to sit and vote in the upper chamber, Tony Benn was warning the Commons that unless the House asserted its authority over government 'it will virtually disappear'. The issue at stake was the independence of the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, amid rumours that New Labour apparatchiks were attempting to remove her, in the hope of placing a more emollient MP in the chair. A small coincidence, perhaps, but for Benn it revealed a disquieting symmetry; a suspicion, no more, that the government's talk of constitutional reform concealed an altogether more insidious design aimed at reinforcing the executive power of No. 10. During his half-century in the Commons, Benn had become adept at reading the minds of the nomenklatura, not that he had any quarrel with Labour's plans for reforming the Upper House. After 800 years of asserting their inherited privileges, there could be no question but that their Lordships had outlived their time, a case which he had been arguing even before the death of his father,

CHAPTER TWO

In Place of Strife

The Labour Party, that sad failure of Socialism. G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labour (1913) On the evening of 18 November 1999, following the news that Ken Livingstone had made it onto Labour's shortlist to run for the Mayor of London, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, launched an uncompromising attack on the three men he claimed 'had almost knocked the Labour Party over the edge of the cliff into extinction' - Livingstone, Scargill and Benn. And possibly he was right. Possibly, the radical policies adopted by the party in the early 1980s had made it unelectable. It was not so much this, however, as Blair's subsequent assertion that he would have to 'go out and fight for the Labour Party I believe in' which, in Benn's case, raised the question of what, precisely, did Blair believe? There was a time when he thought he knew. During the internecine disputes that racked the party following the fall of the Callaghan government, Benn had delivered a speech setting out his own position. In 1994 he received a fulsome note from Tony Blair congratulating him on his statement asserting Labour's socialist principles, and reminding him that the speech in question had been delivered during the by-election when Blair first stood for Parliament in 1982. Apparently, Benn had not so much captivated Blair's imagination as inspired him with a prospect for the future. Sixteen years on, however, it seemed all that had changed: Benn had now become one of those 'extremists' whom Blair wished to distance himself from, if not to hound out of the party. In this, of course, Benn was keeping good company. The charge

CHAPTER THREE

The Great Schism

Banking establishments are more dangerous than private armies. Thomas Jefferson (1799)

The empire ofhuman freedom will never be enlarged by a party which fails to apply its principles within its own frontiers. Michael Foot, Loyalists and Loners (1986) Britain's radical movements have always been victims of their own differences, careless of the damage this has inflicted on their cause. There can be no absolutes when it comes to building a New Jerusalem, and like medieval schoolmen, the precursors of socialism have long danced on the pinheads of their ideological differences. In mid-summer 1973, Benn was 'absorbed by reading about the English Revolution', noting in his diary on 26 June: All the parallels with the situation today are there. The argument with the king and his court: Heath and the City of London, with the big corporations. Then one can see the right wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party as the Presbyterians, rigid, doctrinaire, right wing but officially on the side of puritanism and socialism. The Socialist Labour League and the International Socialists on the left are the Agitators. The Levellers are broadly the labour movement as a whole. There is an argument about the pulpit and who has access to it, which could be seen as the whole argument about democracy today.

C H A P T E R FOUR

New Labour: ' A Little Bit of Leninism'

We have lived so long at the mercy of uncontrolled economic forces that we have become sceptical about any plan for human emancipation. Harold Macmillan, The Middle Way (1938) The most convenient world for multinational organisations is one populated by dwarf states or no states at all. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (1994) The Labour government fell in May 1979, an act of political if not of poetic justice. Ten years had passed since Callaghan had helped sabotage In Place of Strife, and, careless of their debt to him, the unions wanted no more of the government's fudge and mudge over incomes policies. The Winter of Discontent began with the unions demanding pay increases of between 20 and 30 per cent, the forerunner to a series of wildcat strikes of which Callaghan was to write later: The serious and widespread industrial dislocation caused by the strikes of January, 1979 . . . set the government's fortunes cascading downhill, our loss of authority in one field leading to misfortunes in others just as an avalanche, gathering speed, sweeps all before it. On 3 May Britain went to the polls, and the following day the Tories were returned with a 43-seat majority. Benn gleaned only

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one consolation from the defeat, that after five years in office, during which he had often felt as if he were 'tiptoeing through the corridors of power', he had now recovered 'the freedom to speak my mind, and this is probably the beginning of the most creative period of my life'. He anticipated events, but only by a matter of days. At a meeting of the shadow cabinet on 9 May, Callaghan insisted on the necessity of maintaining collective responsibility, and the following day Benn announced that he had no intention of standing for shadow office on such terms. At fifty-four years of age, and having served for eleven years in four Labour administrations, he was his own man again, and at a chance meeting with Ted Heath following the state opening of Parliament he expressed some sympathy for Margaret Thatcher 'with her dislike of the wishy-washy centre of British politics'. A conviction politician himself, it was a contempt that Benn shared, though from a radically different perspective. Apparently, the new right were bent on selling the pass, holding that democracy and capitalism were inextricably linked, a notion that Benn rejected in its entirety, maintaining that the primary task of the Labour Party was 'to restore the legitimacy . . . of democratic socialism because the press were actively engaged in outlawing any argument to the left of centre of British politics'. Although now ensconced in Brussels, Roy Jenkins had been following developments in Westrninster closely, in particular the intensifying, post-election contest for power in the Labour Party. Seemingly, the party was hell-bent on self-destruction and, unless it could be saved from itself, an alternative had to be found. In the summer of 1979, Jenkins was invited by the BBC to deliver the prestigious Dimbleby lecture, and early in November he testmarketed its contents on Ian Gilmour. Considering his position as Mrs Thatcher's Lord Privy Seal, Gilmour's reaction was significant, as Jenkins recalled in his autobiography: He thought much of the end was too right wing. In particular, he objected to the phrase 'the social market economy', saying that he thought it had gone out with Erhard [a committed monetarist, who had served as German Chancellor for three

CHAPTER FIVE

The Enemy Within

No labour movement can ever hope to succeed in this c o u n t y without the co-operation of the trade unions. Keir Hardie (1897) The unions must alzvays be an essential part of the Labour Party. That's where it was founded, and that's where it goes. Lord Callaghan (January 2000) When Benn tabled Bill 147 in the Commons in July 1999, it passed largely unremarked. Only a handful of days remained until the long summer recess, and Members were in no mood to indulge Benn's radical conceits, particularly as the New Labour whips wanted no part of a measure that smacked of a past they were still trying to expunge in pursuit of a Third Way that the party was in the throes of defining. In fact Bill 147 - 'a bill to make provision for the implementation in the laws of the United Kingdom of the rights in employment which are established by certain international instruments ratified by the United Kingdom' - prompted memories that New Labour was anxious to forget at a time when the Party was preparing to celebrate the centenary of its foundation. Not that it was altogether coincidental that Benn presented his private member's bill in the late summer of 1999. Immersed as he is in the history of the party, the proposed measure captured something of the aspirations of those trade unionists who had met almost exactly a hundred years before: This Congress having regard to the decisions of former years,

CHAPTER SIX

A Special Relationship: The Last Colony

They [the protestors] will say that the IMF is secretive and insulated from democratic accountability. They will say that the IMF's economic 'remedies' often make things worse . . . And they'll have a point. I was chief economist at the World Bank until last November [I9991during the gravest economic crisis in halfa century. I saw how the IMF in tandem with the US Treasury Department, responded. And I was appalled. Joseph Stiglitz, New Republic (April 2000) On 2 September 1998, the Commons was recalled to hear a statement by the Prime Minister on the bomb attack by a dissident faction of the IRA which had killed twenty-nine men, women and children in Omagh. Almost inevitably, the subsequent debate turned to the issue of global terrorism, the more so because, only two weeks before, the USA had launched a cruise missile attack against a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in retaliation for a terrorist attack on their Kenya embassy. For Benn the incident had dual significance, and while quick to point out that he had no truck with terrorism, he was equally quick to remind Members of the record of Britain's imperial past: 'I finish with a historical perspective. Will the PM remember that precisely one hundred years ago today, 11,000 Sudanese were killed by the army under General Kitchener.' Living, as so many MPs do, in the eternal present, it was not something that they wished to hear, and in the brief silence which

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followed, Benn resumed his seat to reflect on the happenstance that history did, indeed, repeat itself. Where, in 1898, the Prime Minister of the day, Lord Salisbury, had remarked that Kitchener's achievement was 'a humanitarian act for which the Sudanese will come to thank us', a spokesman of the Clinton administration had justified the strike on Khartoum on the grounds of 'securing the frontiers of democracy'. Plus Ga change . . . And yet, everything was, indeed, different, for where formerly it had been Britain, it was now the USA that determined the frontiers of democracy, with Britain as a subordinate partner, prompting Benn to reflect: 'Grenada, Libya, Iraq. What we've seen in the past fifty years is a role reversal in which Britain has become little more than a colony of the US.' The irony is inescapable, yet it is one for which Benn has little sympathy. The history of colonialism is too disquieting for that, for the truth as he sees it is that, contrary to myth, it was the subject races of imperialism who carried the white man's burden. Like so much else in Benn's make-up, his anti-colonialism is a part of his inheritance. The past, in fact, is never far below the surface of his consciousness, in particular the influence of his father who, as a twenty-year-old student, was thrown by jingoists through a window of University College, London, for his opposition to the Boer War: 'Thank God, it was a ground-floor room, otherwise the story would have ended there.' For over thirty years in the Commons, not least during his brief spell as Secretary of State for India, and during his fifteen years in the Lords, Viscount Stansgate was a forthright champion of colonial freedom. As Chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, he campaigned tirelessly during the 1950s to get China admitted to the UN, in the face of intense US opposition, and on the day of his death he was preparing to speak in the Upper House on the fraught issue of Rhodesia. While Viscount Stansgate's influence conditioned Benn's early development ('Everything my father did in his life was about the extension of democracy'), it was to be reinforced by his own experiences as a trainee RAF pilot. Posted to Rhodesia in 1944, he saw at first hand the consequences of colonialism: the 'bug ridden and dirty huts' which housed black workers; the contrast between the overcrowded native hospital ('there were even sick people

CHAPTER SEVEN

Interview

The socialist who is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) The future is the only kind of property that the lrlasters willingly concede to the slaves. Albert Camus, The Rebel (1953) The office in the basement of the house on the hill is large and seemingly chaotic, a warren of files, folders, books and papers: Benn's retreat, though not from reality. For almost half a century this has been that 'other place', well distanced from Westminster and Whitehall, that has been the nerve centre of Benn's political life. He smiles and gestures vaguely at the four quarters of his sanctum - 'Sorry about the mess' - then takes up the mug of tea, a ubiquitous sacrament, and wonders: 'Now, where were we?'

DAVIDPOWELL:Before taking office in 1997, New Labour made much of the need to eliminate what you call 'the democratic deficit' by reforming the constitution. How far do you think they have succeeded?

TONYBENN:The Scottish Parliament is an achievement. The Welsh Assembly is an achievement. The restoration of government to London is an achievement. The attempt to establish a constitutional settlement in Northern Ireland is wholly admirable, while the move towards a federal Europe is a constitutional change of even greater importance and one which I regard as a shift towards bureaucracy and bankers' control.

A Note on Sources Bibliographies are notoriously misleading, apparently providing equal weight to all the sources involved in a publication. Clearly, this is not so, especially as far as Tony Benn: A Political Life is concerned. Certainly, it was important to read around the subject, and in this connection the biographies and autobiographies of the other major players during Benn's fifty years in the House were required reading -John Campbell's Nye Bevan, George Brown's In M y Way, James Callaghan's Time and Chance, Barbara Castle's The Castle Diaries, Richard Crossman's The Crossman Diaries, Michael Foot's Loyalists and Loners, Denis Healey's The Time o f M y Life, Roy Jenkins's A Life at the Centre, Brian Brivati's Hugh Gaitskell, George Drower's Kinnock and Philip Ziegler's Wilson. Of comparable importance were the three existing biographies of Benn, those by Robert Jenkins, Russell Lewes and more especially J. A. D. Adams's perceptive study, first published in 1992. Ultimately, however, it is Benn's own works - not least, the five volumes of his Diaries - that have provided the core material for the present work. Since the publication of his first Fabian Society pamphlet (The Privy Council as a Second Chamber) in January 1957, Benn has either written or coauthored a range of political studies in hardback, paperback or pamphlet form, among them Arguments for Socialism, Arguments for Democracy (both of which were edited by Chris Mullin), Parliament, People and Power, Fighting Back and Common Sense. In addition, of course, there are Benn's speeches, for which Hansard provided the primary source, reinforced by the 1974 publication of his earlier speeches: Speeches by Tony Benn. One final point, while I hope that A Political Life will be of interest to students of politics, the work is equally directed at a wider audience, and thus, rather than overburdening readers with copious references, I have preferred to include the above note on the major sources that have formed the staple for my own research.