Dare to Be a Daniel

by Tony Benn

  Shocking though it is to say so, I have concluded that one of the reasons why the powerful continue to boast of parliamentary democracy is because they see it as the most effective means of defusing their critics. One way is to claim that we are a perfect democracy and that the people can remove governments they do not like and elect ones they do like, and that is what democracy is about. But for the reasons I have set out above, that is not strictly true, although the capacity to get rid of a government without killing anyone is an important power that many people around the world would give their life to possess in their own country.

  So when pressure for change builds up to the point where it cannot be resisted, the British establishment has developed a way of dealing with it, by withdrawing in an apparent desire to concede some of the claims and then decapitating some of the radical movements by appearing to give them power. For example, by promoting the leaders of these movements and putting them in the House of Lords, some militant trade unionists of earlier years (some of them ex-communists) sit on the red benches and feel they have been rewarded for their work, when actually they have been politically castrated by their ennoblement.

  The limitations on the power of MPs are also very severe, arising mainly from the crude use of patronage by the leader of their own party and by the exercise of the royal prerogative by the Prime Minister of the day, which of course goes far beyond patronage.

  A young MP who wants to be promoted must not displease his party leader, and a member of the government faces dismissal if he angers the Prime Minister who appointed him. Older members hoping for retirement in the House of Lords also know that it is the Prime Minister who commands the honours lists and who can grant or withhold their wish.

  Within the party, the leader nowadays has immense powers that can lead to the expulsion of MPs, or he can exercise his influence to make reselection as a candidate more difficult, if not impossible. Then there is the crude use of loyalty by a party leader to secure policies he wishes to carry out through a blanket threat – that ‘defiance’ of the leader could lead to overall defeat for the party in an election.

  In saying this I am not opposed to the party system, because I believe that individuals cannot make much progress without the strength of the collective. But MPs could do far more to assert the authority which their own constituents have given them over the executive; they have been far too compliant in bowing to the wishes of the Whips and the orders of Downing Street, as with the recent three-line whip, first to oppose a referendum on the European Union’s proposed constitution and then to support it.

  If the House of Commons were to decide (as it could) to exercise far greater control over the executive – as, for example, in making the exercise of the royal prerogative subject to the approval of the Commons – Parliament could work much more effectively and public confidence in it could be restored in part.

  Also Members of Parliament should speak more boldly and clearly, and should not fear that a word out of place could endanger their position, so long as the speeches made are not personal or offensive in character.

  I have always divided MPs into two categories – signposts and weathercocks – and I admire signposts more than weathercocks, the latter having no opinion until the polls have been scrutinised and the focus groups interrogated to show the way forward.

  What is required is a much more radical approach to the meaning of democracy, which must be about people’s own conception of their role and their determination to force any government to listen. When the pressure is off, the system reverts, as it is now doing, to a medieval monarchy in which the King governs and Parliament merely advises.

  Looking back therefore, after many years in Parliament and with many friends in the House of Commons, I am confirmed in my belief that it is an instrument capable of making important changes for the betterment of the community. But the pressure to do so must begin at the bottom, be advanced by those who sit in the Commons and implemented by governments that see themselves as servants, and not as masters.

  2

  Whitehall Behind Closed Doors

  IT IS WIDELY believed by many members of the public that all politicians, and especially ministers, are untrustworthy and self-seeking. And it is assumed by some on the left that all Labour governments have betrayed their commitment to socialism, as if every Labour MP begins life as a dedicated socialist and gives up ideology when he or she gets to Parliament or becomes a minister.

  This is not my experience of my colleagues at all, and cynicism is utterly destructive of the democratic process – unlike argument, which sustains democracy.

  Therefore to make sense of what is going on we have at least to see ministerial office in its true light, since being a minister is one of the most interesting, difficult, challenging and exhausting jobs that an MP can have. Most MPs would like ministerial office. Without the experience, it is extremely difficult for anyone to understand how governments work, the limitations under which they have to operate, the choices they have to make and the responsibility that rests upon their shoulders.

  I was lucky to get my first appointment as head of the Post Office – the now abolished position of Postmaster-General – when I was thirty-nine years old. I found myself thrown into the headquarters of the Post Office at St Martin’s le Grand, which employed a huge number of people, including all the postmen, counter clerks, telephone operators and engineers at what was the centre of Britain’s communications system. And this job was combined with that of being the sponsoring minister for the broadcasting organisations.

  Harold Wilson had dropped a hint when we were at the Durham Miners’ Gala in the summer of 1964 that he might appoint me, so I had a bit of time to prepare my thoughts. I had written an article about the future of the Post Office, suggesting that it was a model for the way a public service might develop and expand.

  On assuming a government job for the first time after a General Election, every minister is handed a thick brief composed by his department, prepared in two drafts. The minister is given the appropriate one, depending on whether Labour or Conservatives have won the election. These briefs, written by officials who have read the party manifestos, tell you what the department would like you to do. I always kept them because they throw light on the subsequent minutes submitted to me with recommendations for future action.

  My dad had always warned me to be careful, if ever I became a minister, because the officials would be very friendly. He particularly had in mind some MPs who within five minutes of becoming ministers were calling the Permanent Secretary by his Christian name and letting him get on with his job exactly as before.

  In essence, the Civil Service offers an incoming minister a deal that sounds like this: ‘Minister, if you do what we want you to do, we will help you to pretend you are doing what you said you would do.’ And those who accept this deal have given up their basic right to take control of the department they purport to lead.

  Certainly that was exactly how the Post Office was run in 1964; it was not a department at all, but a self-governing organism over which the Postmaster-General presided, receiving and automatically approving minutes from the Director-General of the Post Office – the equivalent of the Permanent Secretary.

  I remember my private secretary, on coming to collect me from home for the first time in a giant Austin Princess limousine, asking me, ‘How would you like to play it, PMG?’ I very soon learned that my predecessor Reginald Bevins had turned up on Tuesdays and Thursdays at his office, where a long oblong table was covered in minutes from officials, which he would read and sign as he moved round the table, before going off to the House of Commons. My private office expected me to continue in that tradition and never to be there during parliamentary recesses. The Postmaster-General was seen as a sinecure position.

  I naturally read the history of the Post Office from its earliest days and discovered from the memoirs of my predecessors, including Clem Attlee (who had held the job from 1929 to 1931), that they
all felt it was absurd that the Post Office should be tied to the Treasury, paying all its receipts to it and receiving in return such money as was necessary to run the service. I suppose it would have been possible for me to continue on that care-and-maintenance basis and hope for promotion. I chose another path.

  As any minister soon discovers, his most immediate allies are in the private office, whose job it is to help him deal with this vast permanent establishment which views each minister in much the same way as the staff of a luxury hotel would view an incoming distinguished visitor booked into the royal suite for an extended holiday. I had other ideas and began a series of intensive meetings to discuss the future of the Post Office, including a decision to convene the Post Office Board – which, like the Board of Trade, had not met for years but over which, in theory, I presided.

  At these meetings I raised the issues I wanted to discuss and began issuing a series of numbered minutes of my own, making suggestions and asking questions. This was unusual, in that paperwork in the Civil Service starts at the bottom and is signed at the top; it doesn’t normally start at the top. That must have been unsettling for the officials. I also appointed as my PPS a Labour MP called Charles Morris, who had himself worked in the Post Office and was a member of the Union of Post Office Workers. I was warned by the Director-General that, because of his trade-union background, this would be an inadvisable appointment.

  I went and visited the UPW headquarters, which had never been done by a PMG before. And, guided by what Stafford Cripps had done as President of the Board of Trade after the war, I decided that wherever I went, I would hold a mass meeting for the staff to explain what I was trying to do, and would invite them to comment. This simple method, which included a huge gathering in the Royal Albert Hall concerning the future location of the Post Office Savings Bank, destabilised the mandarins, who felt they were ceding to the minister control that previously they had exercised themselves.

  It was an immensely rewarding experience and I came to love the Post Office and its traditions, which represented the finest in Britain and which of course had been developed by Rowland Hill in the nineteenth century. The invention of the penny post had the same impact then as the Internet has had today, in that it allowed people to communicate with each other cheaply and introduced a cheaper printed paper rate, which allowed newspapers to go by mail.

  I set all this out because the first experience of office, followed by appointment to the Cabinet two years later, gave me an understanding of the way that Labour ministers could shape policy, which could not have been learned any other way. Also, I learned the enormous value of having genuinely collective decision-making in the Cabinet itself, where key questions were discussed at length and decided sometimes by a vote; on one occasion a vote went against the manifest wishes of the Prime Minister. The Cabinet then comprised people of immense ability, including Wilson, Callaghan, Jenkins, Crosland, Castle, Crossman, Gardiner, and other giants of the period.

  As far as I can make out, that tradition of discussion has been abandoned now in favour of much shorter meetings, in which the Prime Minister tells the Cabinet what he has decided and there is no real collective feel about it any more. Cabinet papers are no longer submitted by ministers to focus attention on issues that might not otherwise have reached Cabinet level.

  Clearly, the question sometimes arises, ‘Should a minister resign?’ if his view in Cabinet is rejected. That question was often in my mind, and on one occasion I asked the Bristol South East Labour Party whether it would be right for me to resign, and I undertook to be guided by their decision. After a long debate they decided that they wished me to remain in Cabinet, but to argue my case as strongly as I could, which I think was right.

  The consequences of a resignation have to be thought out. If a minister who resigns finds, as a backbencher, that he is required to vote on a motion of confidence in the House of Commons, does he then vote for the government he has just left? And if that government is defeated in Parliament and there is a General Election, should he stand again as a parliamentary candidate to secure the re-election of the government whose policy he has specifically rejected by resignation? These are real questions and I concluded that it was right to stay and argue my case, winning some arguments and losing others – and then explaining in public what the decision that had been reached was, and why, even though I had taken a contrary view.

  In the end, crude though it may be, those who vote and those who serve as ministers have to decide whether they still believe that the party to which they belong remains the lesser of two evils.

  The freedom of action of a minister is not limited to the prejudices of a Prime Minister or the traditions of the department, but is imposed by a whole series of powers that lie quite outside parliamentary control: by treaty, by the imposition of international rules of finance, by the exercise of powerful influence by other countries (mainly the United States of America).

  These cannot easily be brushed aside, but unfortunately ministers are reluctant to admit it, because they do not want to be thought of as not in charge, and they fear that if the truth were told, they would be revealed as puppets in the hands of others – which in a sense they are.

  Unofficial restrictions include the ability to criticise mistakes made by the security services, so long as the power of those services is never challenged.

  It is all right to criticise mistakes made by the Common Market or EU, but to question British membership is not permitted.

  It is all right to comment on some absurd behaviour by a member of the royal family, but the legitimacy of the monarchy cannot be questioned.

  It is all right to attack the excesses of the press, so long as the right of the proprietors to control the press is never brought into question.

  I personally suffered because I was not prepared to accept these limitations.

  Of course the satisfaction of ministerial office is enormous, because ministers do have powers to deal with problems that no backbencher has; and I can think of nothing more rewarding than to take decisions that really help people, particularly if the decision involves a battle with colleagues to get that decision agreed.

  The limitations of collective Cabinet responsibility make it much harder to speak out, but I devised various techniques for bypassing it, which were just about within the rules although they were not popular with Number 10. For example, it was permissible to make a speech saying that in the years ahead – well beyond the life of the present Cabinet – the government would have to think of this and that, a method that put items on the agenda of public discussion, which would have been impossible if such proposals were made for immediate action.

  Today, if even the most modest policy changes were made that involved any conflict with the IMF, the Central Bank in Frankfurt or the European Commission, or which angered the American President, Britain would be classified almost as a rogue state, with very serious consequences for those who had elected the government. This situation is not easily understood by electors and backbenchers who have never held office. It is one of the greatest single challenges to progressive governments in the future.

  If there are criticisms to be made of Labour governments, it is not that they have betrayed the ideals of socialism, but that they have so often failed to fight for the people who elected them and to take action that would safeguard their interests.

  3

  The New Roman Empire

  FROM THE TIME when Julius Caesar landed in 55 BC and brought us into a single currency with the penny, up to the signing of the Treaty of Rome, Britain’s relations with Europe have been central to the political debate in this country and still divide both parties in a way that has threatened their unity.

  The immediate issue is the euro and whether Britain should join the European single currency; a secondary, but more important, question is whether we should accept a new European constitution drawn up under the chairmanship of the veteran French politician Giscard d’Estaing. The const
itutional implications of European enlargement – which has brought in many Eastern European countries and produces a union of twenty-five, four times the size of the original six – are huge. A third question relates to whether or not Europe should have a common defence and foreign policy, in order, it is argued, that Europe is more united and can act as a counterweight to the United States.

  At the outset of the Common Market I opposed it as a rich men’s club; subsequently, as a minister, I concluded that it was probably the only way of providing political supervision and control of multinational companies that were bigger than nation states; and I have now moved to the position where I see the EU’s present form as representing a threat to democracy in Britain and throughout all the member states of the Union.

  Harold Wilson changed his view on the matter, having first been against and then coming out in favour; and so did Mrs Thatcher, who was passionately in favour of Britain’s membership in 1975 and signed the treaty that introduced the single market, but later, when out of office, opposed the Maastricht Treaty, the euro and all forms of European integration.

  By contrast, Roy Jenkins, Michael Heseltine and Jo Grimond were united in support, as was Ted Heath, who signed the Treaty of Accession in 1972 without the authority of a referendum.

  Talking to Ted Heath about this over the years, I have always found his arguments both simple and plainly political, for I have heard him say, ‘Europe has had two major wars costing millions of lives and now we have got to get together.’ And his fierce opposition to the Afghan, Iraq and Yugoslav wars confirmed my view that his position on Europe was based partly on his resentment of America dominating our continent.

  That is an argument that has to be taken seriously, but since it raises constitutional questions, it would be intolerable if any steps taken to achieve it were slipped through Parliament without referenda to confirm them. Because these are all huge constitutional matters that involve taking away powers from the electors and transferring them into the hands of those who have been appointed.