Prophet of Left Is Quitting Office, Not His Calling
By Warren Hoge
London -- Tony Benn has roused a lot of passionate opinions since he joined the House of Commons in 1950, but the one he most fears now is approval.
"It is the final corruption," he said in the basement office of his Notting Hill house packed with the tapes and transcripts of half a century of provocative comment.
Papers hang from where he has stuck them to the ceiling, a cockpit habit he picked up in wartime days as a Royal Air Force pilot. "It's this 'dear old Tony' thing where they think you're harmless and don't really mean what you say and they love you."
Last month, in a "Dear Comrades" letter to Labor Party officers in his Chesterfield district, Benn announced that he would not run for re-election. But he tried to head off notions that he was giving up his role as prophet of Britain's left, giving robust expression to the socialist ideology and trade union economics he has always championed.
"I have no intention of retiring and shall continue to work closely with all those, outside and inside Parliament, who want to see the Labor Party recommit itself to the causes of social justice, democratic socialism and peace," he said.
Instantly the vexing tributes began. Alan Clark, a Conservative member of Parliament, said: "As a parliamentarian, he's tops. I wouldn't mind having him as president."
Matthew Parris, a newspaper columnist and former Tory member of Parliament whose district adjoined Benn's, credited him with "rock-solid intellectual consistency, a single lifelong fight for an unwavering set of beliefs."
John O'Farrell, author of a Labor history, said he had inspired generations of activists. "If there'd been a poster of Tony Benn, we would have had it on our walls, not Che Guevara," he said.
It wasn't always this way. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, in whose government Benn served, said he had "barmy ideas," pursued "tomfool issues" and represented "a kind of aging perennial youth -- he immatures with age."
Others called him a Communist, a loon, a parlor revolutionary, an upper-class romantic, a calculating populist and "Red Wedgie Benn," a play on his socialist views and his long-discarded full name with the unwanted aristocratic tones, Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn.
The name he hated most of all was the one he had to change British law to shed -- Viscount Stansgate, the Lord's title he inherited on the death of his father in 1960. In a campaign that first brought him to prominence in public life, he fought for three years to get the legal right to turn down the hereditary title and thereby remain in the House of Commons.
These days, Benn feels out of place in the Parliament he struggled to remain a member of and in the party he began passing out leaflets for as a 10-year-old in 1935. The boisterous Labor assemblage of union heads, leftist ideologues and people whose workplaces were mines, shipyards and factory floors has now become a disciplined party of middle managers, suburban householders and get-ahead-minded businessmen.
"If guys are having a lousy deal, they want you there to support them, and that's what I've tried to do in Parliament," Benn said. "But now in Parliament, if you make a speech that doesn't fit, then immediately all the political correspondents say it is a coded attack on the prime minister.
"There's no reporting of the argument; instead it's all this personality rubbish and celebrities, celebrities. It's a litmus test of loyalty to an individual, and I literally do think that democracy is being destroyed in the nicest and politest possible way. It has to be revitalized from the outside, and that is why I've made the decision I have."
Punctuating his talk with sips of tea and draws on his pipe, Benn warmed to the subject of whether a 74-year-old socialist was out of date in modern Britain.
"I know the nature of work has changed; the term working class is used to mean guys in overalls with dirty fingernails doing manual work," he said. "But actually the class distinction that still matters is the difference between the earners who are 90 percent of the population and the owners who make up 10 percent.
"I know a lot of quite well-paid people who were suddenly thrown out in their 50's, and all of a sudden they realized that all they had to sell was their labor, so the old idea is still very, very relevant."
Benn said he thought the great struggle of the 20th century had been over the right to vote, but that victory was now being turned back.
"All the power has gone somewhere else. It's gone to NATO, to Brussels, it's gone to the World Trade Organization, it's gone to Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch, to people who never get elected, and so we're in a situation where we're far from Parliament or Congress being there to protect people from the external powers, i.e., to control the economy in the interest of the people," he said. "Parliament is now there to control the people in the interests of the economy."
His goals are distinctly out of fashion in the party that Prime Minister Tony Blair calls New Labor. While others set out in pursuit of a "third way," he sticks to his own well-trod one. He is in favor of increasing income taxes to fund public services, expanding the welfare state, rolling back privatization and restoring full union rights. He is against nuclear weapons and waging war unless it is approved by the U.N. Security Council.
He is immensely proud of the entry of his 45-year-old son, Hilary, into Parliament in a by-election in Leeds last month even though the younger Benn proclaimed himself a committed New Labor man. He campaigned as a "Benn, not a Bennite," to which his bemused father responded, "Benns move left as they get older."
Benn's positions in the 1960s and 1970s included stints as postmaster general, minister of technology, secretary for industry, and secretary for energy. As a Labor Party officer, he fought for the "true faith" of socialism, helping move the party to the left in the 1970s in a fratricidal war that produced deep internal divisions and kept it from regaining power until Blair and his self-described "modernizers" moved it to the center and, not incidentally, to electability.
Benn was born in London in 1925, the son of William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal member of Parliament who later switched to Labor. An Oxford graduate, he last month celebrated the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Caroline Middleton, an American from Ohio. Benn bought the park bench where he proposed from the Oxford Town Council, and it sits in their overgrown front yard. The couple have four children and nine grandchildren.
His health is good though he wears hearing aids to correct a condition that he quickly dismisses with an anecdote: "It was a very hot night in Bristol, and there was a heckler. I told him a few times that he should run his own meeting rather than ruin ours, and then I heard what he said. It was 'Can we open a window?"'
He dictates diary entries daily, and he estimates the word count now tops 13 million. He has published seven volumes, and the next one, which he goes out of his way to note will not be the last, will cover the decade 1990-2000 and be titled "Free at Last."
He recently purchased diary pages that carry him past his 100th birthday, and he shows every confidence of being around to fill them in.
"The final entry will be from St. Thomas' Hospital," he said. "It will say, 'I don't feel very well today."'
[end]
Carl