Oh, how he would have hated this! To
be announced as Anthony Neil Wedgewood Benn,
Westminster School and New College, Oxford,
president of the Oxford Union and once the second
Viscount Stansgate. For all his antecedents, his
superb upper class English and his unwavering
politeness in speech and manners, he was nothing
other than Tony Benn, the flame thrower and
conscience keeper of the British Left. How does one
describe Tony Benn, member of the House of Commons
from 1950 to 1960 and then from 1963 till 2001, and
the Labour Party’s most persuasive votary of the
Left, who died on 14 March 2014 a tad short of 89
years?
Coming from a wealthy family that had a long
background in the Liberal Party politics and public
school education, Benn was no Aneurin (Nye) Bevan
(1897-1960), son of a Welsh coal miner and a
seamstress who grew up in great deprivation to
become a champion of working class rights — who
created UK’s National Health Service in 1948 and
nationalised over 2,600 hospitals as the Minister of
Health in the first post-World War II government of
Clement Attlee on the ground that “no society can
legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person
is denied medical aid because of lack of means”.
Though close to him in the late seventies and
eighties, nor was Benn an Arthur Scargill (1938-),
another son a miner and a cook from West Riding,
Yorkshire — who left school at 15 to be a coal miner
for 19 years, was a member of the Communist Party
before joining the Labour Party in 1962, eventually
becoming the president of the National Union
Mineworkers from 1982 to 2002, and triggering the
1984-85 nationwide miners’ strike that eventually
led to Margaret Thatcher putting an end to decades
of labour militancy.
What, then, was Tony Benn? Clearly to a manor born,
Benn went through many transformations. The first
was in the sixties, in the fight to relinquish his
hereditary peerage and thus remain in the House of
Commons. Benn succeeded in 1963 when the UK allowed
renunciation of peerage. The next was his being a
‘state-oriented’ left leaning technocrat under
different terms of prime minister Harold Wilson —
first as the Postmaster General, then as Minister
for Technology and finally as the Secretary of State
for Industry followed by Energy. With each position,
Benn moved more to the left, increasingly annoyed by
smooth-talking, Sir Humphrey Appleby-like British
civil servants who could foil policies of elected
governments.
By the seventies and early eighties, Tony Benn was
the hard-core leftie of Labour, identifying with
every grass root militancy that grew in Britain in
the times. Nationalisation, increasing the power of
trade unions and making them central to all
industrial policies, lionising shop stewards,
actively supporting the Sinn Fein, opposing the
Falkland War, fully backing Scargill in the 1984-85
miners’ strike that almost crippled Britain — all
these saw Benn taking centre stage.
In the process, he failed to realise that the
workers and the middle class of Britain were getting
prosperous, and an environment where the people of
sweat had to challenge the toffs to get their just
dues was becoming history. Soon, Benn became
marginalised in his beloved Labour Party. He lost
the battle for leadership to Neil Kinnock; saw
Labour in wilderness for over a decade under
Margaret Thatcher and John Major; and was cold
shouldered by the new Labour of Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown. Benn finally retired from the House of
Commons in 2001 and became a part of various fringes
that could be counted upon to support the
outrageous.
Why did I feel saddened at the news of Tony Benn’s
death? Certainly, I never cared for his political
positions even in my youth. Yet, I respected him for
his honesty; his manners; his common touch; his care
for the downtrodden; his conviction-driven
transformations; and his reasons to do good. So, for
all his foibles, it wasn’t surprising that his
funeral service in Westminster was attended by all.
For he was truly loved.
Published: Business World, April 2014
