If you haven’t seen them before, settle down for a fascinating weekend’s viewing of some highpoints of Tony Benn TV retrospectives — the best YouTube has to offer — including:
Dennis Skinner paid the following tribute to Tony Benn in the House of Commons this morning.
I hesitate to join in this business, because in many ways I thought of Benn in the early Labour party conferences as somebody who, unlike those of us who came from the trade union movement, was part of the English radical dissenting left. He was at that time a member of the national executive committee.
I think there were some significant changes that took place in the early 1970s that changed his life; I may be wrong. In early 1970, when I came into Parliament, we had about five or six years of constant demonstrations. I used to go on these demos, and there would be a gang of people from the TUC—they were all recognisable—and I would be telling Tony Benn all about this. Continue reading
I 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:
I had the honour, the privilege even, of getting to know Tony Benn over the course of the last year of his life. The friendship that developed between us, despite the quite large gap in age, was one I have grown to cherish more than almost any other, and one I shall deeply miss.
I was always an admirer of Tony, and despite having come across him at several public meetings, too shy to approach him. It was only down to the illness of a mutual friend that I had my first real contact with him, making sure he got home alright from a speaking engagement in Brighton, and from there on in a quite lovely friendship blossomed. What followed was a year in which I got to know ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’. Continue reading
I 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
