Politics


You won’t stop me…


Mark Fisher looks at at the political life and writings of Tony Benn


T


here is a clip on YouTube from the time of the 2009 Israel-Gaza conflict. Tony Benn is being interviewed on


the BBC and is not conceding an inch. Furious with the broadcaster for choosing not to publicise the Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza Crisis Appeal, the veteran politician does the job himself. “I’m sorry, you’re not going to stop me,” he says, reading out the charity address in full. “I’m sorry, I’m a human being.”


A decade after his death, the video captures the charisma of a man who was equal parts avuncular, patrician and subversive. He was as radical in his politics as he was charming. “Grandmaster of not giving a single f***,” says a comment below the video. These are the qualities that come


across in The Most Dangerous Man in Britain?, an anthology of political writing published to coincide with the centenary of Benn’s birth. “Communication was the essence of


him,” says his daughter Melissa Benn, who contributes the foreword and helped select the material. “He was a proud member of the NUJ and would have thought it represented the best kind of journalism and journalists.” Tellingly, the first piece in the book is addressed not to readers of a prestigious newspaper but to Benn’s grandchildren. He was happy to engage with anyone. I once saw him speak in a small room in an Edinburgh bookshop. He must have spent nearly four decades as a prominent politician and could surely have attracted a bigger crowd –


20 | theJournalist


yet he spoke with no less fervour, intelligence and persuasiveness. “He was as at home in the back room of an Edinburgh bookshop as he was in front of thousands of people,” says his daughter. The opening piece about


Britain’s monarchy – eye- opening in its straightforward prose – kicks off a section on the British state. Chapters focus on democracy, industry, Britain’s role in the world, the radical tradition and Benn’s life after politics. Drawn from books, speeches, pamphlets and newspaper articles (in everything from Marxism Today to Melody Maker), they reflect his concern with the ambitions of socialism and how these might be realised. Benn was the son and grandson of parliamentarians. “He’d been raised to feel at home in those worlds and the truth was he did,” says Melissa Benn of her father, who renounced the title of Viscount Stansgate in 1963. “He had a great inner confidence about the establishment, how it worked and his relationship to it. Most representatives enter the world of power and are awed and defeated by it. My father understood power, he had exercised it, he could stand back from it and see how it could be restructured.” Benn’s concerns ranged from transparency, participation and data to political flashpoints, be they the scourge of unemployment or Margaret Thatcher’s assault on the miners. “When you go back to the period in


which Thatcherism became triumphant, it is interesting to see what the left were saying about


alternative routes,” she says. “Things like greater industrial democracy and redistribution of taxation seem to me today to be legitimate arguments that were outlawed as dangerous and ridiculous at the time.” Benn set his arguments in a historical


context, referring to everything from the Roman empire to the peasants’ revolt. He also wrote from a global perspective, calling for sanctions against apartheid in South Africa as early as 1964, and later debating the Falklands, Northern Ireland and Iraq. Underpinning his arguments was his commitment to democracy. Workers, he believed, should “ultimately control their managers”. When it came to the press, that meant “limiting the immense influence given to the small number of wealthy people who continue to own and control the British media” and handing power to the journalists. The book’s title is, of course, ironic. It


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Workers, he said, should control managers. That meant limiting the influence of the wealthy people who control the media


is hard to regard as dangerous a man so moderate in expression, so logical in reasoning. Yet his daughter, who was hounded by press photographers on the first day of her O-levels, knows that is exactly how he was regarded. “The amount of abuse, criticism and


derision piled on anyone on the left in this country is something I can’t help but feel personally,” she says. “Was he ahead of his time? Often he was. Was he right? Often he was. Does he and the left still have things to say? Yes, they do.”


The Most Dangerous Man in Britain?: The Political Writing, Tony Benn, Verso, April 8, https:// tinyurl.com/2yphm92w


KRISTIAN BUUS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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