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| Tony Benn in his own words - PAGE 1 Taken from Labour History Journal - Issue 3 Autumn 2004 |
| EARLY POLITICAL MEMORIES My dad was a Labour MP, he was a liberal when he was elected in 1906. He joined the Labour Party the year after I was born. I was born in a Labour household. Father’s tradition was a radical, liberal non-conformist tradition. It was a very, very powerful thing. He said to me when I was a young boy; ‘Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose firm, dare to make it known’. Dare to be a Daniel is the title of my next book which is about my childhood. I met a Labour MP in 1928. I went to his house. His name was Oswald Mosley. The next time I saw him was in 1935 in a blackshirt in Parliament St and it frightened me. I met Ramsey Macdonald in 1930 because my dad was in the Labour cabinet. Macdonald's daughter, who worked with him at Number 10 because his wife had died, wrote to my mother to invite her children to come to number 10 for trooping the colour. I watched the trooping of the colour and I said afterwards that I expected to see the Prime Minister but I didn't expect a chocolate biscuit. And one of my current jokes is that I have been very suspicious of Labour prime ministers with chocolate biscuits ever since and I have had a lot on offer recently. Then I met Gandhi in 1931 when he came to London. My dad had been secretary for India. In 1935 I campaigned in the general election. Dad was defeated in 1931 and 1935 and was elected for Gorton in 1937. I first went to the Comons when he took his seat in 1937 and I met Lloyd George and Attlee. And then I heard Hitler broadcasting from Nuremberg and wrote an essay on the Spanish civil war. Then I went into the war. I was in the Air Force in second class. I was in Africa, went up to Egypt and Palestine. I was rowing on the sea of Galilee when the war ended. My background had a strong moral basis, strong international basis, a strong dissenting basis and an understanding that fascism comes when there is despair. I bought Mein Kampf when I was 11 and I read it occasionally because it shows when people are utterly cynical and utterly despairing then a demigod can come along and find an enemy and build a power structure. And that helps me to understand the attacks on asylum seekers now. FATHER'S INFLUENCE He was a member of the radical group of Liberal MP's in the early twenties and stood against Lloyd George because he opposed the coalition. He did refer to socialism but there was no analytical socialism in his thinking. He didn't have roots in the Labour movement but ended up on the left of the Labour Party. He was supported by the Wapping Trades Council, and fought on the slogan "friends of Labour, working men, stick to Gladstone, vote for Benn", when he was first elected. He supported the cigar workers against the lock out before the First World War. He was a passionate supporter of the Irish cause and campaigned against the Black and Tans. THE 1945 GENERAL ELECTION I didn't think we would win. Churchill had won the war single-handedly. I went to Transport House when the results came out and there were these Tory ministers collapsing, and I went home and told my dad that we were going to win and my dad didn't believe it. I was too young to vote, you had to be 21, I'd been in the Air Force, never killed anyone but I had seen a pilot, and they wouldn't let me vote which was intolerable. That's why I am in favour of votes at 16. The arguments then were so powerful. If you can have full employment to kill people then why in God's name can you not have it to build houses, recruit nurses and teachers. And the answer was that you could do it - and that carry on of wartime planning into peacetime planning was the core of the postwar consensus which Churchill really agreed with. We defeated not Churchill but the prewar Tory party in 1945. The early Churchill was really radical: he made a really radical speech on prison reform as Home Secretary in 1910, nationalised BP, set up trade boards and set up labour exchanges. The Churchill, Macmillan, Heath tradition was well to the left of New Labour. When Thatcher came to power it was a counter-revolution against the settlement of 1945. New Labour accepted the counter-revolution. THE 1945-51 LABOUR GOVERNMENT Unlike Blair or Thatcher, Attlee believed in a balanced cabinet (as did Wilson). There's no balance now, you're either with us or against us: are you one of us? Attlee was a chairman really and a very good chairman. Clem was very progressive, if you read the Labour Party in Perspective, he was well to the left of New Labour. And he wanted Nye to suceed him as Prime Minister. He was very disappointed that Nye threw it away. He was always Major Attlee. He was a patriarchal major. He and Macmillan were very influenced by the first world war. Macmillan saw these guys slaughtered in France and then treated like dirt in the postwar period. And his 'Middle Way', in which he said you have to have a planned economy was really important in informing the radical consensus focused around the 1945 manifesto. We got rid of the empire without an Algeria or Vietnam war - an amazing thing to do. The main thing about the Labour party was that it was democratic and its idea was that people could shape their future. ENTERING PARLIAMENT AS STAFFORD CRIPPS' SUCCESSOR IN BRISTOL Cripps resigned and I was approached because Tony Crosland, who I had known extremely well and who was member for the neighbouring constituency South Gloucesteshire, recommended me to Mervyn Stockwood, who was later Bishop of Southwark and who was then a Labour Councillor. Then on polling day, 30 November 1950, Truman said he might drop the atom bomb in Korea, and I didn't notice because the candidate is too busy, but my vote dropped by 10,000. And Attlee went straight to Washington the next day and stopped Truman - and that was the beginning of the special relationship. And I voted against the Government with a matter of weeks on the Z-reservists in Korea. The next big event was Nye's resignation. I heard Nye speak at the party meeting and also in the House. He said three important things about the Cold War: one, the Russians didn't have the strength to attack the West, having lost twenty million people, second, they don't want to invade, and third, if you go for this you will launch a witchhunt against the left. And he was absolutely right. The rearamament programme cost us the 1951 election and not Nye and the split - because of inflation, the grounds on which Wilson resigned. I was asked to join the Bevanites by Fenner Brockway but I didn't because I was very new and didn't want to be part of a group with it's own whipping system but my sympathies were always with them. Then we had the bitter conflict. The hatred of Nye, leading to his expulsion from the PLP, and the hatred of Wilson was really the poison and Gaitskell was responsible for a lot of it as well as Morrison. NYE BEVAN AND THE 'NAKED INTO THE CONFERENCE CHAMBER' SPEECH Well, Nye with 'naked into the conference chamber' was persuaded to do it by Sam Watson, who said we've got a chance of a Labour government. That was a horrific statement because we had never been clothed or unclothed in the conference chamber because our weapons have been lent to us by the Americans. It utterly demoralised the left and the Bevanites died the day he made that speech. HUGH GAITSKELL He could have split the Hampstead set on the tied cottage, he was so pernickety. His principled stand on equality and Suez was something to respect. He would never have joined the SDP, he was a Labour man rooted in the party. SUEZ Gaitskell initially supported the conflict, made a wobbly speech, and then Alf Robbens, Ken Younger and myself went to see him and then he came out passionately against. I do see parallels between Anthony Eden and Tony Blair. When I see Tony Blair he seems totally possessed in the same way as Anthony Eden - and nothing gets through to him. THE 1959 ELECTION DEFEAT AND THE ATTEMPT TO ABOLISH CLAUSE IV I knew Hugh Gaitskell very well after working very closely with him on the party broadcasts during the election. I was on the NEC. And in one of my first meetings, he proposed the abolition of Clause IV. He couldn't get away with it because the unions would have to have changed their constitutions and Dick Crossman outflanked him in a brilliant way. Crossman said "Am I right in saying this is a restatement of Labour's objectives?", and Gaitskell replied "Yes"' Crossman also asked "Does this reaffirm them. And Gaitskell said yes. So it came out that the new Clause IV "reaffirmed and restated Labour's objectives!" And nobody remembered Hugh Gaitskells alternative any more than anyone who remembers the new Clause IV. It was an attempt to distant himself from the unions and socialism. Hugh believed passionately in equality and international law and looking back he comes out of it quite well. But when he said "I'll fight and fight and fight again to save the party I love"' what he was saying was that he would fight and fight and fight again to keep weapons of mass destruction! We formed the Hydrogen Bomb National Committeein 1954 in support of Attlee's call for a summit after Christmas Island. We had a petition with the likes of George Thomas and Tony Greenwood supporting. I resigned from the NEC in 1960 after Gaitskells speech on principle and earlier I had resigned in 1958 as defence spokesman because I couldn't contemplate the use of bombs. TONY CROSLAND AND FABIAN THINKING We become very close friends after he taught me economics at Oxford. There was a certain naivete about Tony Crosland. He thought the pits couldn't be privatised. He thought the 1945 achievements were absolutely safe. I was very fond of him but he was also very arrogant. He made a joke about me when I was a student. I said I wanted to get rid of the stigma of being an intellectual and he said first of all you have to get the stigma! But he did make a considerable contribution and he was a principled, serious, thoughtful guy. He became a hero to what later became New Labour. However, I think there was a certain naivete in thinking that the post-war settlement exempted you from the growing pressures of global capital. He was in the old Fabian tradition - they, the Fabians, would manage the world. And Blair has entered into a PFI with international capital that he will manage Britain in behalf of international capital. You have to make a choice: do you change society to meet human need. Or do you accept society and change what people want, and that is a very right wing idea. GAITSKELL AND THE THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY SPEECH Roy Jenkins was upset about the speech and Hugh said to me, 'the trouble with Roy is that he is an extremist - on Europe!' Crosland was very upset too. And it was the language of UKIP though it probably had more Commonwealth connotations. But that was when his reputation in the party began to grow. I did recognise that what Hugh said had a profound effect on bringing the Labour Party back together again. GAITSKELL'S LEGACY It's difficult to speculate about what would have happened had he lived. I was critical of the pernickety way in which he operated and a certain intellectual superiority, and his hostility towards Frank Cousins was passionate. I think he's got a proper place in the party. And I'll never forget his stance on Suez and his passion for equality. Personally, he was always very nice to me. |
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