Bill Moyers: Remembering Tony Benn and His Five Little Questions
A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world" - Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood "Tony" Benn, formerly 2nd
Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour politician; a Member of Parliament
between 1950 and 2001 and Cabinet minister under Harold Wilson and James
Callaghan in the 1960's and 1970's.
Born: April
3, 1925 , Marylebone , United
Kingdom
Died: March
14, 2014 , London , United
Kingdom
Take a moment, please, to note the passing of a distinguished spokesman for the left, a man both firebrand and gadfly, of whom many Americans have never even heard. Yet what he did and said are of importance to us all and especially to the cause of democracy. Tony Benn died in London Friday morning, age 88. A diehard socialist once described by elements of the right wing in his country as the most dangerous man in Britain, The New York Times noted in its obituary that he was “the first peer to surrender an aristocratic title [in order] to remain in the House of Commons…
A rebellious scion of a political dynasty, Mr. Benn embraced a socialist position to the left of many of his colleagues in the Labour Party, particularly as it moved to the center under Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 1990s. While Britain’s political elite resisted and diluted union power, Mr. Benn championed labor union rights. While many Britons embraced the European Common Market in the 1970s, Mr. Benn opposed continued membership. And while Mr. Blair led the country to war in Iraq and elsewhere, Mr. Benn, a prominent advocate of nuclear disarmament, campaigned for peace.
First as a Member of Parliament — he entered the House of Commons in 1950 at the age of 25 and served for half a century — and a cabinet minister, then as a public lecturer and writer, he was a perpetual thorn in the side of more establishment politicians. Prime Minster Harold Wilson said of Benn, “He immatures with age,” but he served as an invaluable advocate for the poor and defenseless, fighting on their behalf and always struggling to keep his colleagues aware of their plight. If we can find the money to fight wars and kill people, he would remind them, we can find the money to help people.
“I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralize them,” Benn told filmmaker Michael Moore. “… The people in debt become hopeless, and the hopeless people don’t vote.” Too many in power encourage such apathy and believe, he said, that “an educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.”
Benn stood by his principles, even when they were damaging to his career and his party’s electoral ambitions. “Charming, persuasive and sometimes deeply frustrating,” is how former British Home Secretary David Blunkett described him to The Independent newspaper. “[But] what you would learn from Tony Benn was to think for yourself.”
He believed, like Dr. King, in that long arc of the moral universe that eventually bends toward justice. “How does progress occur?” he asked an interviewer from The Guardian in late October. “To begin with, if you come up with a radical idea it’s ignored. Then if you go on, you’re told it’s unrealistic. Then if you go on after that, you’re mad. Then if you go on saying it, you’re dangerous. Then there’s a pause and you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim to have been in favor of it in the first place.”
Many remembered that as firmly as he held to his ideas — “a signpost and not a weathervane,” one recalled — he remained steadfastly courteous as well. Ian Dunt at the website politics.co.uk remembered watching Benn on television and hearing him say something “which fundamentally altered the way I saw the world.
He had just delivered a fierce speech in front of an admiring crowd. At the end he sat down on the stage, his legs dangling over the side, lit up his pipe and poured out a cup of tea from his thermos. A man approached him and explained that he was a Tory. He wanted to say something else, but Benn interrupted. ‘Oh, I do hope I haven’t said anything which upset you.’ He showed that politics, no matter how principled or drastic, did not need to be mean or cruel. Once again, he revealed the humanity within.
What I will always remember about Tony Benn is a sort of pop quiz he devised to put truth to power. He explained it in 2001, during his farewell speech to the House of Commons:
“In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person — Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates — ask them five questions:
‘What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you exercise it?
To whom are you accountable?
And how can we get rid of you?’
If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.”
Anthony Wedgwood Benn, RIP.
A fitting epitaph for Tony Benn "He encouraged us" is a pretty good epitaph for Tony Benn. He certainly encouraged me, and I only met him once, back in the 1980s. At the House of Commons, after a tedious meeting where I had asked a question, I found myself walking down the stairs beside him and he asked me "What do you do?" – as if I was the most important person in the world. I told him a little about our work on improving US-Soviet relations through youth exchanges and musicals – but how hard it was with Soviet and US bureaucracy. "Keep going!" he said, fixing me with his zealous smile: "Think how many young people believe in peace now that you have touched them…" I did keep going – and, a year later, we brought the first Soviet youth and rock stars to the US. Three years after that, the Berlin Wall came down. Thank you, Tony Benn!
David Woollcombe - Founder and president, Peace Child International
• Tony Benn was an enthusiastic supporter of the co-operative movement because he believed that unregulated capitalism could never be the basis of a just society. In 1975, as chairman of the Industrial Common Ownership Movement, the national body at that time of employee-owned co-operative businesses, I invited him to be guest speaker at our AGM. He arrived with a bulky tape recorder which he placed prominently on the table. "I am often misquoted by the press," he said, and I noticed two rather furtive-looking men in belted raincoats at the back of the hall. He gave a rousing speech, but I noticed that the tape was not running. "Oh," he said, "I never turn it on. Too expensive in batteries. Putting it on the table does the trick."
I do not think his support for co-operatives would waver because of the current troubles of just one large co-operative. Neither should the rest of us waver.
Roger Sawtell - Northampton
Roger Sawtell - Northampton
• None of the tributes to Tony Benn have given attention to his daughter Melissa. She did much of the caring of him during his long illness. Tony had promised a comment on my biography of Keir Hardie but, after an operation, was too ill to read it. So she read the manuscript to him. Melissa – he sent her to comprehensive school – has become a novelist, Guardian writer and opponent of academy schools. Thanks, Tony, for your political life, but also for Melissa.
Bob Holman - Glasgow
Bob Holman - Glasgow
