RIP Tony Benn

[Prospero]

His name will mean very little to Americans but the great Left Wing Labour politician Tony Benn has just died. He was 88. Benn was a man of compassion and wisdom. He was originally a Peer, Lord Stansgate, but sacrificed his title in order to remain in Parliamentary politics - becoming first Anthony Wedgwood Benn and later, simply Tony Benn. He was demonised by the Right in the UK but many of his ideas have since become generally accepted. He is a sad loss. His lovely American born wife Caroline had died some years ago, but his children have followed him into politics.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/14/tony-benn-dies-establishment-insider-turned-leftwing-outsider
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/03/tony-benn-1925-2014-ten-his-greatest-quotes

[martin48]

He will be sadly missed - a politician who said what he believed, and believed what he said.

By accident, I travelled two hours with him in the smoking-compartment (his pipe never went out) of a train to London late one evening. He chatted to everyone in that coach - many of us, I'm sure, will still remember his warmth, his interest in us all, and his bright eyes.

RIP

[Stavros]

It has been a sad week - I discovered a few days ago that an old Comrade from my Labour Party days was killed in a road accident not long ago, someone who like me left the Party in disgust although I did it long before Blair came along; for him the loss of Clause 4 and the Iraq war were unforgiveable. We both played a role of some sort campaigning for Tony in that fractious deputy-leadership contest with Denis Healey in 1981. I was at the Brighton Conference when Neil Kinnock gave his customary stand-up routine at the Tribune Rally (he did this as a prelude to fund-raising) and was met with a few boos and someone shouting 'Judas!'. It was perhaps at that moment that the high-tide of Benn's leadership of the left was eclipsed by reality, the 1983 election that followed was not so much a declaration of Labour's death as its burial.

Benn has been presented as a hypocrite for being a wealthy man who claimed to be a socialist, as if it were impossible for a man of any income to believe one set of ideas rather than another. Some of his arguments about justice and sharing wealth came from his Christian socialist background, inherited from his mother, although he rarely mentioned it in public, I only heard him refer to Jesus once in one his speeches. His father had discussed the peerage before agreeing to take it and it was known that his elder brother Michael didn't mind but that Tony would not accept it. Sadly Michael was killed and this set up the absurd situation in which Benn inherited a peerage he never accepted -he sent the envelope with the invitation to attend back to the Lords- and was barred from sitting in the Commons. He fought a by-election which he won with a massive landslide and had to watch as the defeated candidate took the seat in the Commons, subsequently forcing a change in law which Benn was always proud to say was the work of his constituents, not him. It also enabled two Tories to do likewise -Lord Hume of the Hirsel, and Lord Hogg of Marylebone.

Benn was not initially a left-winger, and perhaps achieved more in his first stint in the Wilson Cabinet between 1964-1970 than he did later -he was Postmaster General from 1964-66 during which the whole of the UK acquired the post-codes that had previously been limited to London; he also fought a battle with the Palace over the use of postage stamps to commemorate events and people where Benn wanted the image to dominate the stamp without any Royal sign, accepting the compromise that the stamp would always feature a silhouette of the Monarch. Whether or not the row with the Palace broke out because the stamp in question was to honour Rabbie Burns is not known.

Benn was instrumental in promoting the Anglo-French Concorde airline project, insisting the letter 'e' be put back in which Harold Wilson had taken off as a petulant snub to President de Gaulle; and in the third Wilson government (1974-76) became Secretary of State for Energy fully intending to nationalise the oil and gas industry only to discover on arriving in office that a deal had already been made with the independent companies. He did create a national company -the British National Oil Company which was wound up by Mrs Thatcher as soon as she could do it after 1979, and the merger of British car firms which had been another Benn initiative turned out to be, like the oil company, an expensive waste of tax-payer's money.

Eric Heffer always said Benn was a useless department secretary as he had no appetite for the day-to-day work which he dumped on his ministers while he wrote and delivered speeches and toured the country -he was an ideas man as evidenced in his book Arguments for Socialism. The sad truth is that in spite of his devotion to democracy, human rights and campaigns such as Nuclear Disarmament, the arguments for state ownership of industry became one of the weakest elements of Labour policy and have not had much of an outing since the death of John Smith. Ironicaly, it was his opposition to Britain's membership of the European Community that became one of Labour's policies which led to the defection of the 'gang of four' and the creation of the SDP -it was one of the policies that was said to make Labour unelectable, whereas these days it has become a policy associated with a quite different political clique. I was a shop steward in those days, and most of my members thought Benn was mad. He was however, a phenomenal public speaker, and in those dark, bleak days when Thatcher swept all before her, a speech from Tony was a much-needed boost to flagging morale.

For what it is worth, although the confrontations in the party between left and right were bitter and aggressive, the widow of one of Wilson's ministers told me it was nothing compared to the vitriolic abuse and childish behaviour that marked the war between the Bevanites and Hugh Gaitskell in the 1950s. Ultimately, Benn was a key player in a struggle for power that Labour lost, four times. He will be remembered with affection as the representative of a bygone age. I once accidentally came across old footage of Barbara Castle ranting on about something on tv, yet I had to admit that we have simply lost those old bruisers, those politicians who came out of the depression and the war, passionate, hungry for change, eloquent and inspiring, as indeed, in her own way, was Margaret Thatcher. They are gone now, and we are left with a ragged bunch of posh boys, spivs fiddling their expenses, and lawyers, none of whom could inspire a dog to go for a walk.

[Prospero]

well said Stavros.

[Ben]

Remembering British MP Tony Benn, a Lifelong Critic of War and Capitalism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE8CI012O1I

Tony Benn – educator, radical, champion of democracy:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/14/tony-benn-educator-radical-champion-democracy-labour-unions