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.