Tagged with Bennites

On Luke Akehurst’s charge sheet against Benn

Luke Akehurst presiding over the Benn trialI was not at all surprised to see an article on Labourlist, by Luke Akehurst, rehashing many of the old arguments about “the damage” that Tony Benn allegedly did to the Labour Party.  Akehurst presented a “charge sheet” against Benn (and, by implication at least, against Bennites).

Every point on his “charge sheet” is – I would suggest – just plain wrong. To summarise they were:

  1. The policy agenda was wrong;
  2. It was undemocratic not to abandon that policy agenda after the 1983 election;
  3. The constitutional reform agenda of the late 70s/early 80s was also undemocratic;
  4. He was soft on Militant;
  5. He encouraged nasty sectarianism and bullying.

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I am still a Bennite

Mobilise for Labour Democracy 1981I am a Bennite. I think I became one in 1977 or 1978, aged 19 or 20, still a student, when we called him Wedgie. And I still describe myself as a Bennite today.

Becoming a Bennite, though it’s hard to say it without a smile, was more about policies than personality, just as Benn so often said about politics in general. I wasn’t one for heroes. I accepted the label because Benn (as chair of the home policy committee of Labour’s executive) was the architect of Labour’s radical 1976 programme, which after the IMF crisis that year was much more appealing than Chancellor Denis Healey’s version of  austerity. He also backed (though he was not, as the press would have it, the instigator of) the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) which I’d just joined. Continue reading →