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eve-fensome
11th October 2012

“New Labour: it’s really a Tory Party”

Eve Fensome meets Tony Benn.
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TLDR

“The world is run now by the big multinational business corporations.” Is Tony Benn’s unwavering response when I ask him how much power politicians really hold. “We don’t elect them, we can’t defeat them, they don’t have to listen to us. And our whole democracy has been challenged and to some extent undermined by the way that multinational global finance operates.” Adding determinedly; “that’s something we’ve got to think about.”

I meet Tony Benn after an event run by the Stop the War Coalition (of which Mr Benn is President) at Methodist Central Hall in the Northern Quarter. Earlier he’d delivered an impassioned anti-war polemic with a level of vigour and energy which would be unexpected in most 87 year-olds. His speech is peppered throughout with personal anecdotes, including one recalling his memory of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and his first-hand account of the devastation it left behind.

He’s been a cabinet minister in the governments of both Wilson and Callaghan and is the only surviving Labour member who witnessed Aneurin Bevan’s famous speech of 1951 in which he resigned from the Cabinet over the introduction of means testing for free dentistry and opticians.

Tony Benn was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1950 and had served more than 50 years as an MP when he retired in 2001 for which he holds the title of the longest serving Labour MP.

With this in mind, as ask him what is the biggest change he has seen in the Labour Party during his lifetime?

“Well, I think that the Blairite counter-revolution to set up New Labour – which is not Labour at all; it’s really a Tory Party, I think that was one of the greatest changes.” He continues, musing: “Of course there have been other examples in the past, since Ramsay MacDonald even, but we recover from these things and I think we are recovering from the Blair period.”

I ask if he felt that the Labour Party was currently moving to the left?

“The Labour Party is a coalition,” I’m slightly surprised to hear him say, but he explains: “there are different forces, there’s the left and there’s other people who are not socialist at all. So our first job in the Labour Party is to persuade the party to adopt the policy we want and then if that becomes party policy then to persuade the public that that’s what we need.”

What do you think individuals can do to try to change things?

“There’s the trade union movement and there’s the Labour Party, they’re all socialist and social organisations. Put them all together and they represent a very very powerful body of opinion.

“If you have a Labour government then push that Labour government to do what you want, if you don’t have a Labour government push to get a Labour government that does do what you want. And if you elect a government that understands and takes the correct action, then I think you have to support that government.”

“Having said that, I’m Labour and I have been all my life but I don’t think that joining the Labour Party is the only thing to do. The thing to do is to stand up for the causes you believe in and campaign for them.”

As a campaigner against an unelected Lords and a republican, it’s an irony that Tony Benn’s career was launched by the accident of his aristocracy.

Upon the death of his farther in 1960; the rules of the establishment required him to take a seat in the House of Lords. He was determined to remain in the House of Commons, refusing to take up the peerage, instead asking his constituents to return him to parliament in repeated bi-elections, until the powers that be surrendered in 1963 when they passed The Peerage act, allowing the renunciation of peerages, of which Benn became the first to do so.

I ask him what if we elect governments on the promises that they’ve made in their manifestos, which they then go on to break?

“Well you have to go on and on campaigning.” He pauses then, sounding a little world weary, adds: “I mean it’s a terrible thing to say but there is no short cut. Demonstrations, letters to the papers, letters to MPs and to ministers and campaigns and broadcasts and all the things that people do when they have a cause they believe in. Because to get a really big change takes a lot of time.”

And really it’s this determination and extreme willingness to take up a fight that has made Tony Benn so well known.

Urban Dictionary says of the term Bennite ‘Implies outlandishly left-wing views, thoroughly at odds with any sensible establishment.’ I’m sure he would be amused and feel slightly validated to hear this because he in turn believes the establishment to be very rarely sensible, except when they are corruptly perusing their own interests.

He may be outlandish in one way; requiring of himself and calling others to a path of perseverance, which makes for an uncomfortable prospect in a world driven by emotional gestures and instant gratification. However, as the gestures become ever more fraudulent and feeble, and gratification endlessly postponed by austerity, it might be, that his charming but unbending principles might not seem so outlandish after all.

Eve Fensome

Eve Fensome

Eve Fensome is a second year PPE student and Politics and Comment editor.

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