Tony Benn: the history man

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/14/tony-benn-the-history-man-editorial

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Tony Benn was one of the most charismatic, most controversial, most inspirational and most divisive public figures of the second half of the 20th century. He evolved into one of the great political educators, a role to which he was ideally suited by his personal charm, his sense of humour, his passionate interest in new people and new ideas, and his profound commitment to the importance of politics. Long after he stopped being a player at the top table of politics, he fired new generations with an interest in how power works. Unlike many of his contemporaries, there is no doubt that he will always be remembered.

But how? That is a much more contentious question, one that will divide historians long after the detail of the arguments that made Labour such a snakepit of factions for much of the last century has faded. Tony Benn's politics were always within the traditions of the party's left-right divisions, a development of a trade union-socialist position, protectionist, anti-American and anti-nuclear, that stood in opposition to a more outward-looking, modernising centrism. From the early 1970s, Tony Benn gave a discontented left that had been pumped up by the failures of the Wilson years a charismatic leadership that propelled these ideas into the forefront of party debate.

Son and grandson of MPs, Tony Benn was a unique link back to Labour's early years. He was an MP himself at 25, arriving at Westminster just as Labour embarked on a decade of argument between Bevanites and Gaitskellites, a sequel to the bitter debates of the 1930s and a prequel to the later divisions in which he was such a pivotal figure. The proximate cause for both was the same: why did Labour in power fail to live up to its ambitions, and what mechanisms could ensure a better outcome in future. For Benn, after his own experiences in government, the answer was the lack of popular pressure against established power. He wanted a politics of party activism; he launched the campaign that led to the 1975 European referendum, and he campaigned for reselection of MPs and the electoral college for party leadership elections. Like the English democrat that at heart he was, his faith in the inherent radicalism of the ordinary man survived through many reverses.

In the context of the times, the Benn agenda were uniquely provocative. The second half of the 20th century was an age of binary choices: the era of the cold war and a pervasive sense of democratic crisis, inflamed by ideas of workers' control and elected judges. Positions on public ownership, nuclear weapons, trade union power and Europe were not debating points but schismatic divides. Yet different players could have disagreed less damagingly. They might have found a way to compromise and avert the defeat in 1983 that came so alarmingly close to extinguishing Labour as the official opposition. The left manifesto drawn up by Benn, branded by the rightwing Gerald Kaufman as the longest suicide note in history, might never have been written if some of the leading figures of the party's right had not broken away to form the SDP. Labour would then have been in a stronger position to interrupt the Thatcher years and the deconstruction of the post-war settlement. Tony Benn's stance, like that of opponents on the right, was central to all this. What history will debate is whether 1983 was a victory for a post-Falklands Thatcher, or part of the long tail of the public spending cuts of the Callaghan years that ended in 1979 – or a resounding defeat for the ideas of the Bennite left that rightly condemned them to the margins of extra-parliamentary politics.

Like his Puritan heroes, Tony Benn belongs in the great tradition of English revolutionaries – a passionate radical destined to be loved in popular memory for his defence of democracy and freedom, whose passing leaves the political world a smaller place.