Dare to Be a Daniel

by Tony Benn

  Her formidable archives (unfortunately not as well indexed as they should be) will be a source of immense interest to generations of scholars, and I hope they will find a home where they can be widely studied.

  Caroline was very tough, and the guiding commitment in her life and work was to equality, democracy and socialism; she gave me the Communist Manifesto for Christmas one year, knowing that I had not read it and that I should understand the meaning of Marxism if I was to be any good in politics.

  Two annual lectures in her memory take place every year, and a book of essays on education and democracy, dedicated to her, has been published.

  But there was a great deal more to her than that, for she was a woman of strong character and immense courage, revealed when in her last four years she suffered from a serious cancer and decided that she would not fight it, but would live with it to enjoy every remaining moment that she had.

  She taught me how to live and how to die, and you cannot ask any more of anyone than that: loving, caring, thoughtful, critical when necessary, always understanding and forgiving. I had the good fortune and the privilege of living with her, and learning from her, for so long and she was the centrepiece of my life and of the life of my family.

  We discussed my decision not to stand again for Chesterfield and it was she who suggested that I should explain it by saying that ‘I was giving up Parliament to spend more time on politics’.

  Part Three

  Now: Essays and Speeches

  Introduction

  The themes explored in Part Three reflect both the lasting influence of my parents, and their interests and concerns, and my own experiences during more than half a century of war, peace and political activity. The first four essays set out a reassessment of the role of a Member of Parliament, of the reality of ministerial office in government, and of the prospects of peace and of a new British foreign and defence policy in a challenging and dangerous world dominated by an American empire. These essays are followed by speeches, made in my last years as a Member of Parliament, which restate my enduring interest in and commitment to peace, justice, democracy and socialism.

  I have described how my father and my grandfathers had all served as MPs and how I hoped that I too would follow in their footsteps. My growing up was therefore dominated by the idea of public service. I began my parliamentary life seeing the pursuit of social justice and peace as achievable through the Labour movement in Parliament. I then believed that the situation was getting better, although more slowly than I had hoped. Now it sometimes seems that the situation is getting worse, more rapidly than I feared.

  If the skill and money now available were spent on resolving the world’s problems, instead of preparing for Armageddon against communists, terrorists or whoever else dares to challenge the hegemony of the wealthy, there is nothing we could not achieve if we turned our minds to it. The relationship between social justice, peace, democracy and internationalism now dominates my thinking.

  I have lived to see the defeat of the Nazis, the ratification of the Charter of the United Nations, the establishment of the welfare state and the development of a National Health Service (all of which are now under threat), and a welcome end to the old European empires. There has been some progress in women’s rights, with equal pay legislation and more recently the ordination of women in the Church of England – a cause for which my mother campaigned for much of her life.

  Like my father, I have found myself moving politically to the left as I have got older. The reason in both cases is similar: experience taught us that democracy does not just mean electing someone to government every five years, but achieving progress through collective effort and a clear understanding of where power truly rests.

  In medieval times power was exercised by kings, conquerors and land owners, and in more recent times by multinational corporations, the military and the media. Effective democracy has to develop beyond the idea of an elected Parliament to the exercise of greater control over all these powers that determine our destiny.

  Democracy is what we do for ourselves wherever we live and work. History is rich with examples of exactly that, whether we are talking about trade unionism, the campaign for votes for men and later for women, the end of apartheid, the colonial liberation movements or the actions of environmental campaigners. Democracy is always a struggle for justice against the powerful.

  For that reason I have come increasingly to realise that for any such advances to be made, people have to argue publicly and be ready to organise to win support and carry through change, when there is a popular majority for it: that is why I believe the Labour Party, organically linked to the trade unions and with socialists in it, here and worldwide, is so important.

  As any member of the Labour Party will attest, there are many disappointments and moments of despair (if not anger) at decisions taken by successive Labour governments. But it remains true that without such a collective instrument as the Labour Party, little progress is possible; and those who advocate progressive policies have first to win the argument within the Party, if they are ever to win a popular majority.

  But if the Labour Party is to rediscover its historical mission, it has to reconnect the working-class movement with the radical tradition and develop as a much more internationalist party, concerned with peace, justice, democracy and human rights – themes that I explore in the following pages.

  The emergence of New Labour as a neo-Thatcherite party deeply committed to capitalism, and acting as a junior partner in a new imperial mission launched in Washington, has gravely damaged the appeal of the Party to those who put their hopes in it. However, I am hopeful that this phase is ending, and my hopes are shared by many millions of others who sense that we need a new direction for this century.

  1

  The Reality of Parliament

  BEING AN MP is unique. It is the only job where there is one employee and 60,000 employers, for everyone in your constituency has the right to remove you. And that is what forces MPs to listen – a burden not carried by peers who have their seats for life.

  The correspondence of an MP is massive, and the surgeries or advice centres long and tiring. But it is the pastoral side of being an MP that is most rewarding, though it hardly ever merits any public description or discussion.

  Certainly most of what I learned derived from my constituency and the people in it, and it was no good trying to thrust ideology down constituents’ throats when they needed a pension or house or job; you had to tackle the problem as they saw it, and then think out what policy change was necessary to prevent similar problems from recurring in the future.

  The constituency work of an MP began when Lloyd George introduced National Insurance, and I remember my father telling me that a Tory MP came into the Members’ Post Office at the Commons, was handed four letters that had arrived for him and threw them down, complaining, ‘That is what your Mr Lloyd George has done for us!’, resenting the workload he had to take on.

  Father also said that before women got the vote, important social questions were discussed in a way that resembled a gentleman’s club more than a modern House of Commons.

  Ever since I was a child I always had the aspiration of serving as a Labour MP. My dad was always described as a ‘good parliamentarian’, a man who loved the place and was respected there, and that description has sometimes been applied to me too. I always regarded it as an honour to be so described. But when I look back on my life, I am beginning to see the work of a modern Parliament in a rather different light.

  Father always told me as a child that the key to parliamentary government was that the House of Commons controlled the purse and the sword, and that no Parliament can bind its successor. This was a clear and bold claim to make, but one that has been completely transformed in all respects in the last half-century or more.

  The modern House of Commons does not now control the purse, because the interaction of the world economy and the institutions that it has created, i
n banking and the development of multinational corporations, has locked England so tightly into that system that it is not in the power of any government – even the American government – to escape from the pressures and decisions imposed on it by those who are in no sense democratically elected or accountable. Of course absolute economic freedom has never been possible, even when the economy was in its early stages, in that investment had to be arranged and markets had to be found.

  But when I look back at my own opportunities to study this system in greater detail, very vivid examples come to mind of the extent of our subservience to the new world economic order, sometimes described as globalisation.

  But free trade, that old Liberal principle on which my father had been brought up, was a very good example of the regulation of commerce to prevent it from distortions created by national governments, which might create tensions that could lead to trade wars, and thence real wars.

  On the other hand, free trade, as now imposed by GATT or the WTO or the IMF, denies elected governments the right to take action to protect those they represent, and we have had very real experience of that over my years in Parliament.

  The balance of payments dominated the politics of the Wilson and Callaghan governments and led them to make cuts that damaged Labour’s prospects of re-election, although nowadays we are told that the balance of payments doesn’t matter.

  The cuts imposed on the Callaghan government in 1976 by the IMF were accompanied with a blunt warning that, if it did not comply with these demands, the British economy would be ruined. So the Cabinet capitulated after long and anxious discussions in which I put forward an alternative economic strategy, which was nevertheless rejected.

  I was told that my proposals involved a siege economy, and I argued that the IMF was imposing a siege economy (except that in their siege the bankers would be inside the castle with a Labour government, and the castle would be besieged by our supporters) – a prediction that turned out to be right because the cuts triggered the so-called Winter of Discontent in 1979 and made possible the election of Margaret Thatcher. That government mounted a massive counter-revolution against trade unions, local government, the welfare state and democracy itself. That counter-revolution was confirmed and entrenched when New Labour came to power, on the grounds that we had no alternative, as Thatcher used to say, but to live in the real world, which requires us to carry on many of the policies she initiated.

  More recently we have seen the impact of the European Community membership on our freedom of action. Under the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty and the stability pact, the Central Bank in Frankfurt (which is not elected) working with the Commission (which is not elected) has laid down that no government in the new European Union can borrow or spend more than 3 per cent of its national income, a policy that forces governments to privatise if they wish to expand their public services without infringing the new rules.

  This policy has recently been tested because the French and Germans, facing serious economic problems, have breached those rules and the Commission is now engaged in trying to enforce them (through the European Court). This could, if it succeeded, lead to the defeat of governments that stood against the iron law of Maastricht.

  In the light of this and many other examples, it can no longer be truthfully said that the House of Commons controls the purse; and ministers are little more than branch bank managers carrying out the policy of the main board, which exercises its sway over the globe.

  This is also true of our control of the sword. The phrase derives from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the power of the King to raise and maintain armed forces against the wishes of Parliament, which had been the source of royal power for centuries, was limited and was controlled by the Army Annual Act. The act required the House of Commons to re-enact every year the power to have forces, and if there was some theoretical conflict with the King, he would be denied the right to command and pay such forces, which would lose their legal authority.

  Looking back on it, that was a considerable victory at the time and, as a young Member, I attended and sometimes spoke in the debate on the Army Annual Act and was proud that we had retained that power – and in theory could use it again, if it was ever necessary.

  But of course in recent years that has changed completely. I suppose this change can be attributed to the Second World War, when American forces were based in Britain and played a leading role in mounting the assault on D-Day that gave the Allies victory over the Axis powers, and when the American forces remained in Britain permanently after the war.

  The dominant political forces were no longer British, but American under the command of an American President, whom we did not elect and could not remove. The command of NATO was in the hands of an American general, from Eisenhower through to the present day.

  The true position is that we no longer control the sword in any meaningful sense, and Britain’s nuclear weapons’ programme has always been kept a tight secret from which MPs are excluded.

  Today, when questions are asked about the location of nuclear weapons (even British ones) in any part of the world, the standard government answer is that they will neither confirm nor deny. So we are in a permanent state of ignorance imposed on us by the executive.

  This situation becomes even more complex when you realise, as I came to do when I was Minister of Technology responsible for the civil nuclear programme, that Britain does not have an independent nuclear deterrent any more, since the cancellation of the Vulcan bomber (which was capable of dropping primitive nuclear bombs) and the adoption of first Polaris and then Trident missiles. The technology for these weapons was so complex that it was beyond the industrial and scientific capacity of Britain to develop them. They are made available to us by the US, which also controls the global satellite guidance system without which, even if they were fired by a British Prime Minister, they could not be guided to their target and would rise and fall ineffectively.

  In truth, Britain does not have an independent deterrent, although we count ourselves as a nuclear power, which we are not – unlike the French, whose Force de Frappe does give the President of France some limited scope for independent action.

  In return for assisting Britain in this pretence, the American government has laid down very strict rules that allow it to control our intelligence services and (as at GCHQ) to have access to all the intelligence we have, including material gathered by bugging communications in Britain – a process that National Missile Defence (the so-called ‘Star Wars’ system) will consolidate and extend.

  So tight is this control that when the government decided to proceed with the enrichment of uranium using the centrifuge, I had to go, as a minister, and get permission from a special hearing at the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, chaired by Glenn Seaborg. And until that permission was granted, Britain would not have been able to proceed.

  The nature of this subservience in nuclear matters must have been one of the dominant factors persuading Tony Blair to go along, uncritically, with President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. For he must have known that if he had stood by our commitment to the UN Charter and opposed that war, Britain would have run the risk of losing its pretence to be a nuclear power and would be revealed as a non-nuclear island off the coast of Europe, of interest to Washington only because its bombers could fly from British bases.

  The role and importance of civil nuclear power have to be understood because when the bombs were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the human race had a warning that it dared not ignore. But ten years later, when Eisenhower announced his policy of Atoms for Peace and launched the civil nuclear-power programme, many people became really excited at the thought that ‘we were turning swords into ploughshares’, and I advocated civil nuclear power with real passion and commitment.

  It was only when I had responsibility for nuclear power that I realised that it was not cheap, safe or peaceful. That discovery turned me into a passionate opponent of civil nucle
ar power because it was dangerous, expensive and from the beginning was all about the development of plutonium for military purposes.

  After I had left office, I discovered that while I had been there supporting nuclear power for civil purposes, the plutonium we generated in our power stations was actually going into the American nuclear weapons programme and every one of our stations was in truth an atom-bomb factory.

  The principle that no Parliament can bind its successor is also no longer valid, thus defying Tom Paine’s famous statement that ‘the dead cannot control the living’. For nowadays, through NATO and our membership of the EU and in many other ways, one Parliament can and does commit its successors. And more and more people are coming to realise that whoever they vote for in future elections, they cannot alter the policies adopted by the government that has just been defeated.

  This realisation is already widening the gap between the people and the Parliament they elect; it could explain the falling turnout at elections, which in itself could undermine the democratic legitimacy of future governments and encourage people to believe that direct action – and even riot – may turn out to be the best way of securing political objectives.

  If that view were to prevail, it would entail the death of parliamentary democracy and the consequences would be very serious – not only for the people, who would lose their representation, but also for those with power, because we should not forget that democracy was demanded by those who wanted their rights, but was conceded because it was safer for those in authority to retain their power by consent than by force.

  I think that the English revolution so frightened the British establishment that, unlike the French establishment, which risked a revolution and the guillotine that followed rather than make any concessions, the powers-that-be here would see that conceding certain limited powers could defuse the opposition before they took to the streets.