RIP Tony Benn

I was very sorry to hear about Tony Benn’s passing today. I’ve always admired him, despite his views being well to the left of mine. He was an incredibly articulate and powerful orator, and remained steadfast in his principles and convictions. This will not be a biographical account as such, but more of a general overview.


Born into a privileged family, Benn never sought to keep the status quo; he renounced his peerage after a series of struggles, and was readmitted to the Commons in 1963 in a by-election, having been denied the right to by his peerage. Benn was also extraordinary in that he moved leftwards whilst a member of the cabinet under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. When you hear someone speak with viewpoints very different to your own, it’s often easy to be put off immediately (think Rick Santorum on the right or George Galloway on the left), but Tony Benn had a way of expressing his views with clarity and wit, so much so that you could end up agreeing with him more than you’d think. I disagreed with Benn over the trade unions and Arthur Scargill, and an unfortunate consequence of Benn’s split in the Labour Party meant that some very disreputable figures in the ‘militant tendency’ emerged. Losing narrowly to Denis Healey in the Deputy Leadership election of 1981, a Michael Foot-Tony Benn leadership would arguably have ended Labour’s power as an electoral force for longer. However, when it came to analysing Mrs Thatcher, Benn was capable of some devastating blows; see the Youtube clip below of his speech in the Commons on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETqOvBKnKdk *


There were many views of his to admire. When he stood down as an MP in 2001 (in nearby Chesterfield), he said he was doing so to “give more time to politics”. Furthermore, Benn had very potent views on the military. Benn said that during a war, an army general would never say that his budget had been spent up and that he could do no more; he did what was required. However, this is not the case in peacetime in other areas such as unemployment; Benn summed it up nicely by saying “if you have the money to kill people, you have the money to help people”. He was also a fierce opponent of the Iraq War, and was President of the ‘Stop the War’ coalition. He was loyal to the Labour Party, but refused to be an apologist for them; “We as a party had suffered greatly from the influence of Mr Blair...Labour won the election in 1997, but New Labour was a Conservative idea”. His loyalty to the party was truly admirable; I very much agreed with the SDP breakaway and their subsequent alliance with the Liberals, but Benn was nevertheless prepared to fight for his views as the Labour Party became more and more Thatcherite. Benn even admitted in an interview with Jeremy Paxman and Medhi Hasan in 2010 that “the Labour Party has never been a socialist party, but it’s had socialists in it”.

As a Christian, I had a lot of respect for Tony Benn’s comments on Jesus despite his agnostic stance; “when I look at the world in which we live, and the dangers, and the problems we face, the most important thing of all is the teachings of Jesus about how we should treat each other”. Benn also showed that he was a good sport, appearing in this very humorous interview with Ali G below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-YYroSudUs *

Tony Benn was a prolific diarist, his last diary poignantly titled “A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine: The Last Diaries”. I of course disagree with him in many areas, but he did raise legitimate questions when talking about power and democracy, in particular how a lot of power is concentrated in certain institutions. As polarised and radical as he was, I think it’s almost impossible to dislike a man of such integrity. If I was to choose my ideal public speaking team for a debate, I’d certainly want Tony Benn on my team. Rest in peace Mr Benn.



*I own none of the video rights; all the rights go to Youtube and the relevant accounts