Dare to be a Daniel : a note on Benn and religion

A striking aspect of Tony Benn that has escaped much attention (outside the religious press at least) in the past 24 hours is his debt to religious, specifically Christian, ideas and images. This is entirely unsurprising in the present climate, where admission of an interest in, let enough attachment to, religion is, in many left-wing circles, the social equivalent of coming out as the unique possessor of a paraphilia involving Jeremy Clarkson and yoghurt.

It is worth pausing to think about Benn's roots in Christianity. His own attachment to the creed was ambiguous, the son of a congregationalist minister and himself a confirmed Anglican, he described himself as a 'student of the teaching of Jesus'. Again and again throughout his speeches and writings, the incompatibility of this or that social injustice with (Benn's interpretation of) that teaching is asserted. Much more often, biblical images are deployed: a recurrent idea for Benn is that the Old Testament presents us with an opposition between 'the kings', who want order and hierarchy, and 'the prophets', who demand justice. We, says Tony, should be on the side of the prophets. Elsewhere, he describes the name of the right-wing Tory pressure group No Turning Back as "the motto of the Gerasene swine". Famously, he takes as a motto, and names a memoir after a Sunday school chorus:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone!
Dare to have a purpose firm!
Dare to make it known.

He once delivered the Tawney lecture to (what was in happier days known as) the Christian Socialist Movement on Christianity and socialism, but Benn was no systematic theologian or original Christian socialist thinker. In fact, he often seemed not to get theological or ecclesial distinctions. He would describe devout Anglo-Catholic Eric Heffer as standing in "the tradition of nonconformist dissent". And whilst his parliamentary and other interventions on the ordination of women in the CofE are powerful testaments to a commitment to equality, he doesn't really ever give the impression of understanding what was at issue.

But none of this really matters. What is interesting about Benn is his acknowledgement of, and use of, a religious tradition. Drawing in an eclectic fashion on Christian tropes, and displaying an openness to working with religious groups and individuals, Benn's approach to religion is different from those common on the Left. Many, in recent years, have displayed an enthusiasm for the dimwitted philistinism of the new atheists. Others, including the ancestor of the present blog, have attempted more systematic engagements with religion. In contrast to both, Benn's approach echoes that advocated by Marxist biblical critic Roland Boer. In his Rescuing the Bible, Boer champions a `worldly left', comprised of secular and religious leftists alike, that recognises the importance of the biblical text and promotes emancipatory interpretations. It seems to me that this worldly left has just lost its most significant proponent.

Tony Benn - Mourn and Organise

That the author of this blog is cut up at the departure from this life of a notorious tea drinker is a measure of what we have lost.

I still have in my possession a letter from Tony Benn written to me when I was seventeen years old. I had written him a rather pompous missive about, amongst other things, nuclear weapons, the European Union, and the monarchy. He replied by hand assuring me that he agreed with me "100%" (this was underlined) about nuclear weapons, and enclosing the text of one of his speeches on Europe. A few years later, we were organising a campaign at my university to prevent Margaret Thatcher being awarded an honorary doctorate. I wrote scores of formulaic letters to prominent figures asking them to put their name to our cause. Not only was Benn one of the few to reply, he telephoned me personally to assure us of his support. There was a humanity about the man, not just in the kind of genuine, personal, attention to individuals of which I had experience and of which numerous stories are being told today (see, for example, redcathy here), but also in the warmth with which he writes about friends and families in his diaries and above all in his deeply moving love for his wife Caroline. Tony Benn came to believe that politics was a matter of struggle, of taking sides and fighting, but unlike so many he did not allow this to dent his humanity. He was not the kind of left-wing leader to whom Gramsci's self-critical words from the Prison Notebooks could be applied,

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

Benn's starting point was that people mattered and this was lived out with a consistency not evident in today's political class.

His commitment to a politics of struggle, and to socialism (in the proper sense of that word), arose out of his experience of government in the Wilson and Callaghan years. The insights from this period caused him to give serious critical attention to the manner in which institutions - both  State and internal to the Labour Party - hinder the implementation of socialist policies. Benn is not always given sufficient credit as a political thinker but this analysis led to the development of a distinctive emphasis on democracy as integral to socialist advance; the Bennite Left focused on the democratisation of the Labour Party (the electoral college was a fruit of this, recently consigned to history by Benn's one-time intern Ed Miliband), whilst Benn himself argued for radical constitutional reform. The young, left-wing, Peter Hain correctly claimed the Bennite movement for 'libertarian socialism'.

Benn's mature politics echoed one of the best lines of Billy Bragg's dubious reworking of the Internationale 'change does not come from above'. His vision was one of a labour movement working in combination with grassroots movements of all kinds, developing alternatives to capitalism-as-usual and demanding of parliamentarians that they act in support of this vision, this demand being backed up by the teeth of democratic institutions. At its height this politics gave rise to a unique moment in Labour Party history. The Bash-Fisher book puts it like this,

The Bennite left... embraced and responded to newly emerging forces - a radicalised left in local government around the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Lambeth and other London boroughs; a feminist women's movement that left a lasting impact on most sections of the socialist movement; and the movement for Black and Asian representation in the Labour Party and beyond.

Now, there are problems with the 'don't mourn, organise' line. It lacks humanity, fails to acknowledge loss. A socialist who tells you not to stand by the grave and weep because the struggle continues is no better than a religious fundamentalist who tells you not to cry because the departed has passed on to better things. But we should at least mourn and organise. And those of us who remain in the Labour Party could do a lot worse than attempt to breathe back some of the life of the heady early 1980s to our local parties. What were once places of intense political debate, connected to local campaigns in communities far broader than the place of meeting, have become in many places little more than convenient holding pens for electoral volunteers. Debate is as absent as the democracy that depends on it, meanwhile the political enthusiasm of a generation is being poured out in numerous autonomous campaigns - around education, housing, LBGTQ liberation, the environment, and anti-imperialism - which seem a million miles away from a Labour Party dressed up in business suits and mouthing empty promises to a sky-blue backdrop.

Tony Benn, by his own admission, made mistakes. He had the humility to learn from many of them. His greatest error was undoubtedly insufficient opposition to the Eastern Bloc regimes. More recently he unfortunately lent his support to Julian Assange. But, when all is said and done, the spirit of Tony Benn is something of which the Labour Party, and the wider world, stands in desperate need.

Friday Video Corner

R.I.P. Tony Benn 1925-2014

"The key to any progress is to ask the question why? All the time. Why is that child poor? Why was there a war? Why was he killed? Why is he in power? And of course questions can get you into a lot of trouble, because society is trained by those who run it, to accept what goes on. Without questions we won't make any progress at all."

The Analysis of Blairism (i) - A Class Project

Long Post warning

A couple of days ago I had things to say about the position of the Left in the Labour Party, and this got me thinking about Blairism. It seems to me that we can't understand where we're at properly unless we begin to understand what happened to Labour under the Blair leadership, and how Blair's project continues to work itself out in the present day Labour Party, especially as we approach March's special Conference and possible modification of the Party's relationship to the trade unions.

I want to understand these things better. So I'm going to think out loud, or at least begin to think out loud, in a series of three posts on Blairism, of which this is the first. I've been helped a lot by Graham Bash and Andrew Fisher's excellent little book on the history of the Labour Party, as well as by (Ralph) Miliband and Cliff/ Gluckstein (oh for the blissful days when SWPers wrote useful things).

One response, which is pretty common on the Labour Left, to the phenomenon of Blairism is to deny that there is any such thing. To be sure, the Blair (and subsequently Brown) governments betrayed the hopes invested in them by many Labour voters and did lots of bad things. But this is hardly unparallelled; to a greater or lesser extent the same can be said of every Labour government. Nor is it even clear that Blair's governments were uniquely bad: privatising air traffic control may be deplorable, but it's not obviously worse than supporting the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And before there was Iraq, there was Vietnam.

If Blairism is to be considered interesting, and of enduring significance for labour movement politics, there has to be more to it than a succession of right-wing policy moves, however individually distasteful. I think that there is something more; I think that Blairism can be understood as a move to decisively reorientate Labour's class representative role. In outline, I believe that Blairism ought to be regarded as an attempt (by no means exhausted) to reconstitute Labour as a party of 'progressive' European-orientated capital.

Labour and Reform

It's something of an old Trot commonplace that Labour is a 'bourgeois workers party'. Being an old Trot commonplace is not incompatible with being true, and this is a case in point. British Labourism is a curious affair. On the one hand, we have a party with a solid working class base, born (in Nye Bevan's words) "from the bowels of the TUC", and over which the trade unions can exercise a degree of influence. Yet, on the other hand, we have a party wedded to the norms of the liberal state, to a divide between the economic and the political (to such an extent that, for the greater part of the Party's history - until the Bennite reforms of the early 80s - the PLP was completely independent of the wider movement), and to the class compromise that all of this entailed. The outcome of these tensions, present from the beginning, is that Labour has functioned to represent the working class politically within capitalism. Labour's existence both encourages class politics and tends to place limits on the imagined scope of those politics. The Party has both delivered historic reforms that have transformed the lives of working class people and, in the very act of doing so, bound them more closely to a system that survives by exploiting them.

All of this is workable for as long as Labour governments can deliver reforms benefiting the working class, thereby justifying their continued existence to their core electorate and the union bureaucracies. A standard narrative, widely believed on Left and Right, holds that Labour governments can no longer do this. In Cliff and Gluckstein's neat phrase Labour now has to offer "reformism without the possibility of reforms". The point of inflexion here is usually seen as the crisis of the mid 1970s, associated with the OPEC price shocks and culminating in Britain with the IMF bail-out of the Callaghan government and the resulting implementation of austerity measures. Before things got to that point, in 1976, Callaghan himself sounded the death-knell for the 'Keynesian'* macroeconomics that had been the power-house of post-war reformsim

we used to think you could just spend your way out of recession... I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked... by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment.

Shifting Phillips curves were the order of the day in the world of economic ideas. And in the hard cold world of institutional reality, new ties appeared for the hands of reformist governments. The Bretton Woods framework, which had provided a secure international context for the British post-war settlement, ended in 1971 when the US terminated the convertibility of the dollar into gold. The UK's 1973 membership of the Common Market, confirmed by the 'yes' victory in the 1975 referendum, tied UK policy-makers to a "free market economics" and posed long term problems for public ownership (particularly in terms of  reversing privatisations). The growth of transnational corporations seemed to pose problems for planning - left economist Stuart Holland's 1975 The Socialist Challenge expressed well the nature of this concern in the labour movement; he spoke of a 'mesoeonomic' sector of corporations interposed between government policymaking and the desired effects in working peoples' lives.  In the next decade, the Thatcher governments' deregulation of finance and foreign exchange foreclosed further on the options for a future Labour government.

An undoubted result of all this is that Labour governments can no longer run reformism after the exact model of the post-war consensus. I am not myself convinced that reformism as such is not longer possible. The relative continued effectiveness, and undoubted effect, of macroeconomic policy, particularly evident since the 2008 crisis, surely places a question mark over some of the more extreme claims about governmental impotence. But that isn't what matters here: what matters is a widespread collapse of belief in reformism since the mid-1970s. This was summed up quite nicely by Tony Benn in his 1981  Arguments for Democracy: the post-war consensus was spent, the options facing the British electorate were "monetarism, corporatism, and democratic socialism".

Shifting the focus from the national polity to the labour movement, it looked like the reformist project's day had passed. The contradictions of Labourism needed to resolve themselves. Labour could no longer represent the working class within capitalism by offering reforms. It had to either become a socialist party, or else - in the language of two decades later - a party of business.

Resolving the Contradictions? Benn, the SDP, and Kinnock

An increasingly militant constituency Left in the early 1980s favoured the socialist route. For the Bennites this meant not only socialist policies - Labour Conferences had been voting for these for a good few years - but structural reform of the Labour Party to favour the implementation of these policies when Labour was in government. Thus democratisation of the manifesto, mandatory reselection of MPs and similar measures became priorities. Trade union influence on Labour politics increased, for example with the introduction of an electoral college for leadership elections (a measure which also sounded the death toll for a key feature of traditional Labourism, the independence of the PLP). In other ways, boundaries prescribed by Labourism were transgressed, for instance by policy proposals advocating roles for trade unions in industrial management. None the less, the 1980s Left had no intention of weakening the link between Labour and the unions; to that extent the Party's heritage as a trade union party was unthreatened.

One might have expected a threat to come from the Party's Right. If they offered no policies which union leaderships could sell their members - and recall that this was a period of intense pessimism about the possibility of reforms - wasn't there a possibility that unions could become a thorn in the Party's side? As it happened, there was no real antagonism between unions and the rightward drifting parliamentary Party during the Kinnock years. Partly this was because the most right-wing elements of Labour had exited to the SDP, partly because the overwhelming priority was the defeat of Thatcher and Labour (however bad) provided the only electoral hope here, partly because the union movement was - as unemployment increased, the sectoral balance of the UK economy shifted, and especially after the defeat of the 1984-5 miners' strike - on the back foot, and under right-wing leadership, and partly because unions were an important source of finance for the Labour Party.

Whilst the union link remained intact, the Kinnock years did witness a clearing of the ground for a later rightward shift away from traditional Labourism. Left-wing policies adopted during the 70s and 80s were quietly abandoned, and the possibility of a leftward break was weakened by the defeat of Bennism, the anti-Militant purges, and the failure of the leadership to support the GLC and other local government struggles. Of more enduring importance, as the leadership took on board fashionable sociological claims about the changing nature of its working class support, its basis for appeal to that support changed, becoming less collective, and more directed at atomised self-interest, adopting rather than challenging key ideological tropes of the Thatcher era. As Benn's diaries describe a seminar presentation as reporting a survey of Labour voters, "it's nice to have a social conscience, but your family comes first".

In all of this the Kinnock years served as a kind of John the Baptist, a forerunner for the Blairite messiah.

A saviour from on high. Blair and Blairism


The tragically cut-short leadership of John Smith provided a temporary respite for Labourism, whilst the Tories sunk under internal divisions and the ERM fiasco. Then things changed.

The fundamentals of Labourism remained unchallenged at the start of the Blair era. The union link was unbroken and, however weakened Party demoracy might have felt, the labour movement was still capable of translating demands into policy - hence genuinely welcome policies of the Blair governments, such as the minimum wage and the restoration of trade union rights at GCHQ - as well as of applying brakes on excessive rightward drift. Yet there was a malaise in the air. Labour had lost four successive general elections, and for all its compromises was beginning to look like a party of perpetual opposition.

At the same time, by the early to mid 1990s, the role of the Tories as the unrivalled political representatives of British capital was looking shaky. Divided on Europe, but increasingly shifting in a Eurosceptic direction, the appeal of the Conservatives to capital focused on EU markets was limited. Moreover, a basic contradiction in the Tories' relationship to the capitalist class reared its head. Capitalism brings its wake relentless social change - "all that is solid melts into air". It has embarrassingly slight intrinsic respect for hierarchy, it cares little for morality and order beyond their capacity to secure profit. Family structures, national boundaries, ethnic identities - all are up for negotiation as eagle-eyed entrepreneurs seek out the next market. Since the 1960s, even as the industrial world had been opened up more completely to the ravages of capital, attitudes had grown more liberal on a range of issues: homosexuality, the family, race and racism, sex and sexism. And a good proportion of the bourgeoisie took this shift in attitudes on board, to a greater or lesser extent. Meanwhile they were represented politically in the UK by the historic party of order, the party of Section 28 and 'Hang Nelson Mandela' t-shirts, the Party which one of their own ministers termed 'the nasty party'.

Wasn't their room for a more modern, more progressive, more pro-European party of capital? Enter Tony Blair. Speaking to the FT in early 1997, Blair said (quoted in Bash/ Fisher),

I want a situation more like the Democrats and Republicans in the US. People don't even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking that question about New Labour.

New Labour courted business, and its flirtations were well received, with high profile donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. The gory details of the romance are well documented in Dave Osler's book. At the time, the long-term prospect of a New Labour lacking financial dependence on the unions seemed real. New Labour's policies remained a matter of negotiation between the representation of labour and of capital, I've already mentioned a couple of significant pre-existing labour movement policies that were implemented. Yet there was a definite shift in political economy towards acceptance of neo-liberalism. The rewriting of Clause IV had a symbolic importance here. Meanwhile the relationship between the PLP and the widered movement was negotiated. Party democracy withered (in rather the same way that plants wither after being sprayed with weedkiller), National Policy Forums were introduced, Conference decisions on policy routinely ignored, and candidate selections fixed. Blairism exerted itself as a force through organisations like Progress. Meanwhile, front bench spokespeople appealed over the heads of the movement, to individual electors, understood as consumers. This was the age of political advertising and 'spin'.

In all these ways there was a shift away from Labour even attempting to represent the working class, in however a mediated fashion, and towards it being simply another party of capital, offering itself to the electorate periodically as perhaps the least-worst alternative. Voices around Progress were quite clear that they would like to make the break with Labourism permanent and institutional, eyeing up the union link. Others, prior to the May 1997 landslide which rendered the question irrelevant, mooted working with, or forming coalitions with, the Liberal Democrats, another move which would have undermined the relationship between a Labour government and the labour movement.

Neither of these attacks on Labourism came to pass, and Blair is now redirecting his messianic energies beyond the bounds of the Labour Party, setting himself the modest task of bringing peace between the worlds' religions.  Yet the Blairite assault on Labourism is still warm. Coalition with the Lib Dems remains a live possibility after the next election. And, of course, the union link is a live topic, discussion of which is due to come to a head this March.

And that will be the subject of my next post in this series.



 *It's not really fair to Keynes to attribute to him the view that you could "just spend your way out of recession" but that's another post for a special type of geek.