Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, known between 1960 and 1963 as The Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician and political activist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001. He later served as President of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to 2014.
The son of a Liberal and later Labour Party politician, Benn was born in Westminster and privately educated at Westminster School. He was elected for Bristol South East at the 1950 general election but on his father's death he inherited his peerage, which prevented him from continuing to serve as an MP. He fought to remain in the House of Commons and campaigned for the ability to renounce the title, a campaign which eventually succeeded with the Peerage Act 1963. He was an active member of the Fabian Society and served as chairman from 1964 to 1965. He served in Harold Wilson's Labour government, first as Postmaster General, where he oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, and later as Minister of Technology.
Benn served as Chairman of the National Executive Committee from 1971 to 1972 while in Opposition. In the Labour government of 1974–1979, he returned to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Industry and subsequently served as Secretary of State for Energy. He retained that post when James Callaghan succeeded Wilson as Prime Minister. When the Labour Party was in opposition through the 1980s, he emerged as a prominent figure on the left wing of the party and unsuccessfully challenged Neil Kinnock for the Labour leadership in 1988. After leaving Parliament at the 2001 general election, Benn was President of the Stop the War Coalition until his death in 2014.
Benn was widely seen as a key proponent of democratic socialism and Christian socialism, though in regards to the latter he supported the United Kingdom becoming a secular state and ending the Church of England's status as an official church of the United Kingdom. Originally considered a moderate within the party, he was identified as belonging to its left wing after leaving ministerial office. The terms Bennism and Bennite came into usage to describe the left-wing politics he espoused from the late 1970s and its adherents. He was an influence on the political views of Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected Leader of the Labour Party a year after Benn's death, and John McDonnell, who served as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Corbyn.
Early life and family
Benn was born in Westminster, London, on 3 April 1925. He had two brothers, Michael, who was killed in the Second World War and David, a specialist in Russia and Eastern Europe. Following the Thames flood in January 1928 their house was uninhabitable so the Benn family moved to Scotland for over 12 months. Their father, William Benn, was a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 who crossed the floor to the Labour Party in 1928 and was appointed Secretary of State for India by Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, a position he held until the Labour Party's landslide electoral defeat in 1931.William Benn was elevated to the House of Lords and given the title of Viscount Stansgate in 1942, the new wartime coalition government was short of working Labour peers in the upper house. Tony Benn was subsequently titled with the honorific prefix, The Honourable. In 1945–1946, William Benn was the Secretary of State for Air in the first majority Labour Government.
Benn's mother, Margaret Benn, was a theologian, feminist and the founder President of the Congregational Federation. She was a member of the League of the Church Militant, which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women; in 1925, she was rebuked by Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women. His mother's theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were mostly about the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught righteousness.
Benn was for over 30 years a committed Christian. He said that the teachings of Jesus Christ had a "radical political importance" on his life, and made a distinction between the historical Jesus as "a carpenter of Nazareth" who advocated social justice and egalitarianism and "the way in which he's presented by some religious authorities; by popes, archbishops and bishops who present Jesus as justification for their power", believing this to be a gross misunderstanding of the role of Jesus. He believed that it was a "great mistake" to assume that the teachings of Christianity are outdated in modern Britain and Higgins wrote in The Benn Inheritance that Benn was "a socialist whose political commitment owes much more to the teaching of Jesus than the writing of Marx". "The driving force of his life was Christian socialism," according to Peter Wilby, linking Benn to the "high-minded" founding roots of Labour.
Later in his life, Benn emphasised morality and righteousness, as well as ethical principles of Nonconformism. On Desert Island Discs he said that he had been powerfully influenced by "what I would call the Dissenting tradition". "I've never thought we can understand the world we lived in unless we understood the history of the church", Benn said to the Catholic Herald. "All political freedoms were won, first of all, through religious freedom. Some of the arguments about the control of the media today, which are very big arguments, are the arguments that would have been fought in the religious wars. You have the satellites coming in now—well, it is the multinational church all over again. That's why Mrs Thatcher pulled Britain out of UNESCO: she was not prepared, any more than Ronald Reagan was, to be part of an organisation that talked about a New World Information Order, people speaking to each other without the help of Murdoch or Maxwell."
According to Wilby in the New Statesman, Benn "decided to do without the paraphernalia and doctrine of organised religion but not without the teachings of Jesus". Although Benn became more agnostic as he became older, he was intrigued by the connexions between Christianity, radicalism and socialism. Wilby also wrote in The Guardian that although former Chancellor Stafford Cripps described Benn as "as keen a Christian as I am myself", Benn wrote in 2005 that he was "a Christian agnostic" who believed "in Jesus the prophet, not Christ the king", specifically rejecting the label of "humanist".
Both of Benn's grandfathers were Liberal Party MPs; his paternal grandfather was John Benn, a politician, MP for Tower Hamlets and later Devonport, who was created a baronet in 1914 and his maternal grandfather was Daniel Holmes, MP for Glasgow Govan. Benn's contact with leading politicians of the day dates back to his earliest years. He met the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, when he was five years old and described him as "A kindly old gentleman leaned over me and offered me a chocolate biscuit. I've looked at Labour leaders in a funny way ever since". Benn also met former Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George when he was 12 and later recalled that, while still a boy, he once shook hands with Mahatma Gandhi, in 1931, while his father was Secretary of State for India.
During the Second World War, Benn joined and trained with the Home Guard from the age of 16, later recalling in a speech made in 2009, "I could use a bayonet, a rifle, a revolver, and if I'd seen a German officer having a meal I'd have tossed a grenade through the window. Would I have been a freedom fighter or a terrorist?" In July 1943, Benn enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an aircraftsman 2nd Class. His father and elder brother Michael were already serving in the RAF. He was granted an emergency commission as a pilot officer on 10 March 1945. As a pilot officer, Benn served as a pilot in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. In June 1944, he made his first solo flight, at RAF Guinea Fowl, an RAF Elementary Flying Training School, in Southern Rhodesia. The aircraft was a Canadian-built Fairchild Cornell. In a 1993 article recounting the experience, he said, "I always thought that I would feel a sense of panic when I saw the ground coming up at me on my first solo, but strangely enough I didn't feel anything but exhilaration ...". He relinquished his commission with effect from 10 August 1945, three months after the war ended in Europe on 8 May and just days before the war with Japan ended on 2 September.
After attending Eaton House day school near Sloane Square, Benn entered Westminster School, and studied at New College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, politics and economics and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947. In later life, Benn removed public references to his private education from Who's Who. In 1970 all references to Westminster School were removed, and in the 1975 edition his entry stated: "Education—still in progress". In the 1976 edition, almost all details were omitted except his name, jobs as a Member of Parliament and as a Government Minister, and address; the publishers confirmed that Benn had sent back the draft entry with everything else struck through. In the 1977 edition, Benn's entry disappeared entirely, and when he returned to Who's Who in 1983, he was listed as "Tony Benn" and all references to his education or service record were removed.
In 1972, Benn said in his diaries that "Today I had the idea that I would resign my Privy Councillorship, my MA and all my honorary doctorates in order to strip myself of what the world had to offer". While he acknowledged that he "might be ridiculed" for doing so, Benn said that Wedgie Benn' and 'the Rt Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn' and all that stuff is impossible. I have been Tony Benn in Bristol for a long time." In October 1973, he announced on BBC Radio that he wished to be known as Mr. Tony Benn rather than Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and his book Speeches from 1974 is credited to "Tony Benn". Despite this name change, social historian Alwyn W. Turner writes: "Just as those with an agenda to pursue still call Muhammed Ali by his original name... so most newspapers continued to refer to Tony Benn as Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie in the case of the tabloids, for years to come."
Benn met Caroline Middleton DeCamp over tea at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1949; just nine days after meeting her, he proposed to her on a park bench in the city. Later, he bought the bench from Oxford City Council and installed it in the garden of their home in Holland Park. Tony and Caroline had four children—Stephen, Hilary, Melissa, a feminist writer, and Joshua—and 10 grandchildren. Caroline Benn died of cancer on 22 November 2000, aged 74, after a career as an educationalist.
Two of Benn's children have been active in Labour Party politics. His eldest son Stephen was an elected Member of the Inner London Education Authority from 1986 to 1990. His second son Hilary was a councillor in London, stood for Parliament in 1983 and 1987, and became Labour MP for Leeds Central in 1999. He was Secretary of State for International Development from 2003 to 2007, and then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs until 2010, later serving as Shadow Foreign Secretary. This makes him the third generation of his family to have been a member of the Cabinet, a rare distinction for a modern political family in Britain. Benn's granddaughter Emily Benn was the Labour Party's youngest-ever candidate when she failed to win East Worthing and Shoreham in 2010. Benn was a first cousin once removed of the actress Margaret Rutherford.
Benn and his wife Caroline became vegetarian in 1970, for ethical reasons, and remained so for the rest of their lives. Benn cited the decision of his son Hilary to become vegetarian as an important factor in his own decision to adopt a vegetarian diet.