Tony Benn served as member of parliament for both Bristol South East and Chesterfield, in a parliamentary career that lasted from 1950 until 2001. Benn's transformation from technocrat in the 1960s to left-wing iconoclast in the 1980s is one of the most important in the history of the Labour Party.
Benn proved a major source of inspiration for Jeremy Corbyn, but has become a hate figure for those in Labour closer to the centre ground of British politics, who regarded him as an electoral landmine.
My guest for this conversation is Tom Clark, contributing editor at Prospect Magazine and senior fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Tony Benn served as member of parliament for both Bristol South East and Chesterfield, in a parliamentary career that lasted from 1950 until 2001. Benn's transformation from technocrat in the 1960s to left-wing iconoclast in the 1980s is one of the most important in the history of the Labour Party.
Benn proved a major source of inspiration for Jeremy Corbyn, but has become a hate figure for those in Labour closer to the centre ground of British politics, who regarded him as an electoral landmine.
My guest for this conversation is Tom Clark, contributing editor at Prospect Magazine and senior fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Hello and welcome back to the hated in the dead with Tom Leeman a very Happy Easter to all of you listening. I hope you've all been able to spend a long weekend with your family and friends. The subject of today's episode is something of a paradoxical figure. A member of parliament elevated to the House of Lords following the death of his father fightcamp Steins Gate in 1960. He ended up forcing a change to the British Constitution, allowing him to return to the House of Commons and become a proponent of radical democracy. Once dubbed the most dangerous man in Britain by the Tory press, he came to be seen in old age, no more affectionate manner, often described as a national treasure. Tony Benn served as a Labour member of parliament for over half a century, from 1950 until 2001. Although starting out as an ideologically unremarkable technocrat, by the 1970s, Ben was seen as the standard bearer for the Labour left, and he proved to be a thorn in the side of those who tried to bring labour closer to the centre ground in the 1980s, especially former guest and subject on the hated in the dead. Neil Kinnock. Because of this, Ben courted real dislike from centrist factions within the Labour Party. And this entity and tribalism, in the context of Labour's contemporary Civil War, seems to have outlived Ben, who died in 2014. Nevertheless, Ben's impact on the politics of the country more generally cannot be overlooked. In particular, his advocacy of the use of referendums, something which became so significant a part of British politics in the second half of Ben's life. My guest for this conversation is Tom Clark, contributing editor at Prospect magazine and senior fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. We discussed Ben's journey leftward in the 1970s his commitment to a very pure form of democracy and Ben's uncomfortable position within Labour's own history. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to introduce Tony Benn. Hi, Tom, how are you? Hi, fine, thank you very much. And I'm appropriately here with my cup of tea. We're talking about Tony Benn today, Tom, the Labour politician and cabinet minister. He was born in April 1925, one year before the Queen, its father was a radical Liberal MP who became a Labour MP when Tony Benn was just was three years old. And his mother had been a theologian, and then was at least for periods of his life, he described himself as a Christian, you so you have three kinds of different strands there, the radical liberalism, the socialism and the Christianity. The other point that's worth bringing up about Ben's early life is that Ben's family were quite wealthy. When do you think Ben first realised how lucky he had been to have been born into the family that he was, and given the very soul committed socialist that he became how important was his own family history in taking him to that place? Well, I mean, I think that the radical tradition, I mean, I think the kind of the non dissenting or elements of English nonconformist that mean it, which is where the radicalism came from. I just listened to him in preparation for this on desert island desk. And he was talking about William Ben, who was in a congregation is preacher who walked away from it all in 1662, because someone, maybe on behalf of Charles a second, tried to tell him what to do. And there was this, there's this thing about that goes back in English, Nonconformist, about, like, you deal directly with the Creator, you know, and you don't need the kind of Catholic hierarchy to tell you how to think or what to do you think yourself with God. And so there's that sense of kind of self assuredness and radicalism that goes right back. In and then the family had come into money a bit more recently, but I suspect, you know, like his grandfather was a progressive think he was called briefly politician in the House of Commons as well as his dad being a liberal, who then resigned to when labour when Tony Benn was two or three years old. So my sense is that there would have been a kind of refusenik Awkward squad thing that goes back centuries and a concern about poor people that went back decades, probably before he was born. So I think he probably never had to really realise that I think that was probably already there. And The household. And this is a non conformism that we're going to keep coming back to again and again today. This was not somebody who sort of went with the flow. If we look at his kind of early life, Tony Benn, was 14, when war broke out in 1939. And he joined the Home Guard when he was 16. Pretty much as soon as he was eligible to do so. He wrote extensively about his war experiences in his diaries, which are, you know, probably, I would say the most, one of the most famous sets of diaries in English history since Samuel peeps. Can you go into Ben's war a little? I don't think you can say he had a good war. Because some his older brother who's very dedicated to died, which, as we'll come on, to change his position within the family that had political implications, um, but perhaps he had a good war in the sense that lots of people of his generation did is that they, you know, went into it as boys and came back as men of the world. He said, you know, being posted somewhere in Africa, I think it was was, was it was his comprehensive school, you know, and taught him more than Westminster School and New College Oxford ever did. So, I mean, it made him sort of into a grown up when he definitely wasn't a grown up, you know, I mean, literally, it wasn't a grown up and he was a young child of 14 or whatever, when it started. And it made implausible I guess, to run for election at very young age of 25. Um, it was also useful to him in later life, and he was never slow or shy to draw on this. In the as he was criticising war after war from the Falklands onwards, he was always able to say, you know, and speaking as someone who's a pilot with fighting experience, and he could use that as a way of of neutralising the idea that he was doing what he was doing, which was effectively mostly most of the time taking a kind of pacifist position. You mentioned that he became an MP when he was 25. In 1950. He became a Labour MP, of course, having briefly worked for the BBC after the war, between 1950 and 1960, when one of the most important moments of Ben's political life happened, which we'll come on to, were within labour did Ben sit ideologically? What do you think his political views were in the context of the kind of the split for instance between Hugh Gaitskell and Knight Bevan, which dominated so much of labour politics in the 50s? Well, I gathered that he supported Hugh gates Gill, who was seen as the right wing candidate in the 1955. leadership election. I'm not something probably advertised much later on. And I mean, in general, through the 50s. And beyond into that first Wilson government in the 60s, you'd have to say he was a moderniser. He wasn't a kind of. It wasn't ideological kind of either way. I wouldn't say he was very keen on giving speeches about the importance of computers and how Britain was going to sell them. He was keen on big engineering projects, like Concorde. He was in the 50s. Like, you know, brought in as someone who understand stood this newfangled medium of television and present it is a weird idea, presented a party election broadcast, you know, here we'll hear from Hugh Gaitskell over here we'll hear from Lloyd Bevin over there because he was seen as a plausible kind of young media man, and also he's got an American wife, you know, an affinity for America, which was seen as a modern, modern thing. At that time, and again, right into the 60s at one point, he is hesitant about joining Europe, which in the 60s and later he blows all over on the question of Europe. But one reservation he has about joining Europe is that maybe Britain should be more aligned with America, which is quite hard to imagine him saying later in life. So you know, he was a he was a moderniser. He was kind of progressive in the sense he was like, in favour I think of decolonization. And interestingly, we've got the first little flick of refuse Nick, Tony blown a couple of times in the 50s. On detailed, detailed policy differences over nuclear weaponry, he wasn't someone who was at that point kind of full on CND. But he was very anxious more than once about the processes that labour was taking to walk his stance on defence and resigned from shadow from bench position. Should even as a young organiser, interestingly, never resigned from anything ever again. If we go into this event that I prefaced a minute ago, Tom, the in 1960 it was a very significant moment in Ben's political life and in his personal life. When his father died, why did the death of his father Willian aside from obviously being a tremendous personal loss to him, present Ben with a political problem. And you also alluded to this a few minutes ago. Well, and so his father had been a liberal politician and then a labour politician wanting to serve in the in the in the war, and did serve in the war in government. And he was made for this purpose, I think, a member of the House of Lords. Now, before the 1958 live peerage act, if you're a member of the House of Lords, you were made it appear of the realm and your children became peers as well. And, you know, I think, since the Glorious Revolution, probably to sound like Tony Benn for a minute, um, you couldn't simultaneously be, you know, title person in the Lord's and someone with a foot in the Commons. So, given that his brother had died in the war, he always knew and he discussed this with his father that when he did join the House of Commons, his dad already got an old dad, I think, well into his 70s, when he duly died, that was going to mean, Tony being, you know, not kicked upstairs kind of ejected, ejected upstairs. And I think they did have some conversations about what to do about it. And the truth was that, at least without changing the law, there wasn't much that could be done about it. I think he made emotionally made a speech or something. He got some support from Winston Churchill who'd toyed with taking a title and was keen, it didn't undercut his own children's parliamentary ambitions. And so what actually happened is that he received a letter right? You're not allowed him to ask for comments anymore. Dear Lord Stampscapes. That's, that's the URL you'll no longer accommodate. You can't come into the house of commons, going into the House of Lords. And he said, Well, I don't like the sound of this, but it was locked out. So he, a by election was forced, and he got himself nominated as the Labour candidate, because the local party agree with him that he should be allowed to go. But then he was returned. And I think he got something like 70% of the vote, the conservative getting about 30% of the vote in Bristol, se, but once the election was declared, he was still Lord Stampscapes. It wasn't renowned, suitable at that time. And so the common authorities welcomed in the conservative who come a distant second, instead. And I think everybody kind of knew this was a bit absurd. But, you know, as always happens with things to do with the very top of the British establishment that hard to tinker with, you know, took years years of wrangling, to get to the point more recently where it could be said that, you know, female children of Prince of Wales could inherit on the same basis as male children rather than the primogeniture. Having that kind of boys best boys first kind of leaning that took years to get sawed in this one looked like it was a dead end. But he was very persistent, which is something you certainly always was, and in the end, the was a change in the law. And then that'll be another by election, which he won, and got back in in 1963. What were his views on the House of Lords more generally, obviously, kind of splits. A lot of people within the Labour Party about whether this is a kind of an affront to democracy to have an unelected second chamber, Britain's the only country, I think, to have a second chamber, larger than its lower chamber. And it's entirely unelected. There are more members of the House of Lords than there are House members of the House of Commons. What did he think of this? 1000? January? I mean, he thought it was some ridiculous I mean, you've got this doubleness with Tony Benn, that maybe will come out and a lot of what we're talking about comes from a number of fronts, but one of them is, although he reasonably did point out you know, I'm not a kind of top from a kind of like, Norman sort of aristocracy. He was from political aristocracy. As I say, you've got these preachers go back to the 17th century. You've got granddad and dad being MPs you've got his son Hillary being not only an MP but a member of the of the cabinet in the Blair and brown years. You've got his granddaughter running for parliament. It's a it really is a kind of put litical dentistry so it is an aristocracy, if you like in that, at least in that sense, but he was very clear and very early on before he was radicalised, particularly about everything else, that this was an absurd anachronism. And in a way, everyone knew it was an absurd anachronism. That's what Harold Macmillan had to introduce the 1958 life peerages that you couldn't keep going on in the post war world, pretending that, you know, there was there was a difference. But Tony Benn, with his phenomenal talent for expressing a point simply, you know, got a vial of blood drawn, and I think it was when he got back into the House of Commons kind of waved it around his little like, NHS tub of, here's a bit of my blood. And I said, Look at this, this is blue blood, is it? Or is it red blood like everyone else, it's you need to make the point. Graphically, everyone kind of knows it's absurd, but it just, you managed to get himself back in the ability to renounce peerages is something that I think only 15 or 20 people have ever done since. So it hasn't shaken up the British Constitution quite as much as we might have done, although I think if you see it together with that night and 58 change, you know, the idea of the hereditary peerage was almost killed between those. And yet, we still have as part of a very British compromise that is elected by elections for hereditary peerages. These are the World's Strangest elections in which, depending on the party in the group, and how many people understand, sometimes the electorate is smaller than the number of people standing. I mean, there really is nothing like this in elective politics anywhere in the world. I think there were only three out of a group of 92 hereditary peers that were due to be filled by Labour people in the first place. Anyway, one of them comes up in the end of the 2010s, after Tony Benn eventually guys in 2014. And who should Philip unopposed, but his son Steven, who taken the title that his father had renounced, so you know, you can change things about the British Constitution, but you can't quite kill them off. It would seem I don't know what on earth he make of his eldest son who's very close to being there as a labour hereditary pair. You mentioned Radek, the word radicalised a couple of minutes ago to talk about Ben. Ben now is known politically for being the face of a fairly unabashed, unapologetic form of socialism. One of the newspapers in the 1970s described him as the most dangerous man in Britain. That's not the really the image that you've constructed of him. So far where we are in the story, it sounds as if in the 60s he was a fairly ideologically standard, unremarkable labour cabinet minister, not particularly to the left or right of anybody else. In that pretty esteemed cabinet. What do you think happened to Ben, that five or 10 years after Harold Wilson's first stint as prime minister came to an end in 1970? What do you think happened that by that stage, he was probably the most significant flagbearer of the hard left in Britain? I don't know. I mean, that is the big question. I mean, first of all, you're completely right. When he first came in as Postmaster General. He was a technocrat, you know, his big thing I think was introducing first and second class stamps are kind of, you know, like, you've got this over overburdened kind of creaking state bureaucracy, what do you do introduce a bit of consumer choice. It's real Think Tank stuff that isn't it. And it's still still with us today. And then these big kind of engineering projects and the white heat of technology and all of that, I in just reading up for this, I realised that he was quite affected by the events of May 1968. I'm just as someone who's very interested in politics and the sort of protests are building in America against Vietnam, Paris, everyone's out on the streets, there's a sort of feeling of revolution in the air. And he does come to this conclusion that, you know, there needs to be parliamentary democracy is too much of a clicky thing that might be related to the experience of like the ultimate clunkiness was the House of Lords that you've kind of bought into, but maybe there's this kind of other parliamentary life that's also a bit leaky. And so he's very interested in opening things up, which was very much in tune with the times of May 1968. And I don't think I don't think burn any bridges in observing that saying, you know, maybe in the future we'll we'll have more direct democracy There might be referendums on things we'll need to bring people into parliament, we might need to have primaries or whatever in in internal party elections. So I'm, say kind of interest in what I'd call radical democracy that kicks in about then. And then he would say, the Tony Benn zone account would say that, you know, a lot of people get into power, and they get a taste for Office. And that kind of leads them to become very centrist and very establishment. Whereas what happened to him is he got in and he was confident in himself in his own abilities, he thought he could get things done, particularly when it came to industrial policy, and, like, planning and that sort of thing, he ran into all kinds of brick walls. And that's what made him radical that you needed a more bottom up politics and not not a top, top down politics. And that needed to apply in the workplace, and, and all of that. So I think those things were kind of there and in the mix. And then you've got to throw in what is seen as a rising star of politics in his 40s, who's maybe eyeing the premiership one day, and there is an entry in, you know, by the mid 70s, he's kind of confessing to his diary, you know, to get anything done in politics, you really need to be Prime Minister. And although he said, Don't personalise, there definitely was a streak of ambition, points of his career. And you looked at the way the world was going, and the mood of the unions in the early 70s, strikes were everywhere, wage rises, like active unions were getting bigger wage rises, people felt the wind of history was in the left's sales at that point. And so he took the kind of awkward squad, upbringing, that we'd already seen a flick off as to say in the 50s, not for career risk reasons. I think that all like over nuclear suffering in the 50s. And then the interesting radical democracy of 1968 In that moment, and then perhaps chucked in, you know, a bit of ambition, inflamed, let's say, interest in radical economics and radical left politics. I'm not saying it wasn't sincere, but I'm saying it was kind of not an inconvenient, say set of beliefs to latch on to in the early 70s. If you're ambitious in the Labour Party. Yeah. I think another issue that became very important in British politics at that time was Britain's relationship with a common market. precursor to the European Union. Ben again, now is the kind of poster boy for left wing Euro scepticism is probably the single most significant supporter of the anti Common Market campaign, when Britain had its first referendum on that topic in 1975. The other being Enoch Powell. Why was Ben against British membership of the Common Market, apropos of what you've just been saying about radical conceptions of democracy? And do you think he was I mean, you kind of mentioned a minute ago that he'd blown hot and cold on on Europe? Was this something that he always thought about the European project? Or was it something that sort of occurred to him in the 1970s? I mean, in the 1960s, just read, I'm going on what I read in the in the Crossman diaries, you know, the other great labour diaries, it looks like Tony Benn was very inconsistent on Europe. I mean, of course, Harold Wilson, and most of the others were inconsistent, like they didn't like it when Harold Macmillan was trying to join in 1963 until general pool took all kinds of cool time with that. And then there are other ideas. So we tried it in 1967. I mean, to be honest, it isn't something that gets or didn't used to get in those days, many, many labour people out of bed in the morning, but yes, Tony Benn had this thing at one point and awesome. Doris is there saying, like, maybe we were more in tune with America and we shouldn't try and be conservative was at another point, it sort of seems to come around as someone who is very much a handled dite as Crossman calls him, you know, he's part of the inner circle, the kitchen cabinet of Harold Wilson, believe it or not in the 60s. Um, and then when Wilson comes around, he comes around. But I think as he gets more interested in this business of democracy and of institutions, he is troubled, by the way, you know, the European Union, European Communities It was then law is kind of cooked up. Like it's proposed, not by an elected government, but by an appointed commission. It's then kind of stitched together and modified by a council of ministers. And I think he started to think this way. was quite alarming. And then again, you throw in the kind of convenience factor A lot of the unions at the time, were anxious about it as well. Things like state aid, like, you know, when a lot of big unions in big sectors of the UK economy as they still were like steel, you know, basically wanted the government to be able to prop them up as much as it took. And European Union rules threatened to restrict that in different ways. And even at a more basic level, it was fundamentally first and foremost, a Customs Union, the European Union, or the European Economic Community is there more so you couldn't have tariffs on things. And as the economy started to go wrong, socialist economists began to argue that if we want to put politicians in charge again and put society in charge of what's happening to our economics, rather than just market forces, then we're going to have to put up protective tariffs and make sure that British goods can compete. So there was a whole mix of, you know, a genuine interest in democracy, of kind of politics of convenience and ambition. And also, I suspect, like, the more we got into it, the more we thought about it, this affection for like, they kicked against it at times and affection for certainly elections and parliamentary democracy. Sort of steps to that didn't quite compute with where the European Union was, that drove him to be, like you say, an extremely hard line, anti European, much more hardline than most of his comrades in the in the campaign group in later years. Euro scepticism in the UK since 1975, and especially since the 90s, has largely been a right wing phenomenon. When you look at left wing, Euro scepticism now, in an era of globalisation, hemmed in states low corporation tax, a world in which the EU is arguably quite a good protector against the theory of global market forces, rather than a kind of guarantor of them. What does it make you feel? Does that brand of left wing your scepticism have much intellectual credibility? Now, do you think do you think it ever did? I mean, you know, it, in the post war age, there was an idea that that the nation state was very, very important, you know, between now in the First World War and about 1950, the share of the economy that was traded went down and down and down. And most of what British people bought, in terms of I don't know, if you'd look at goods in isolation, but certainly goods and services were overwhelmingly British made, you know, we weren't not in 50, a very open traded place. And as the sort of world economy started opening up, which the Americans wanted, because they were better placed than Europeans to sell a lot of stuff. It looks like if you wanted a very, you know, social economy, you might need to slow the pace of, of this globalisation. Um, and so I'm going to think I think it did make sense. And it's understandable that into the 70s, people were looking back to the 40s that weren't really that long ago at that point is like, looking back to the 90s. Now, and in fact, you know, there is more scepticism that we've seen it since Trump was elected, but also in the Democrat side in the US, people are concerned that the distributional effects of opening up to China or opening up to the world economy, you know, it might be that you're bringing in cheaper goods, and things are running more efficiently. But people are much more concerned than they were 10 years ago, about what happens if the gains of that aren't fairly shared. So in that sense, the kind of anti globalisation point of view seems a lot more coherent than it did 10 or 15 years ago when you'd have Tony Blair making a speech. So you may as well ask if spring is gonna follow winter is asked whether globalisation is going to continue but people don't talk about that anymore, because it was always a choice and it is a choice. But that said, you know, the sort of 50 or 60 years of globalisation that we had before, the new scepticism kicked in, obviously achieved a lot in terms of cheaper consumer goods, obviously, achieved integrated supply chains and all the rest of it in a way that is just extremely hard to untangle now, and so unless you've got a plan for making bits of microchips that we currently get from Taiwan, somewhere in the UK, then um, you know, the idea of a sort of fortress economy a siege economy, UK It doesn't doesn't seem particularly credible to me today in like Europe might be an easier way of kind of sheltering yourself against the winds of global trade than than the UK was. But I think someone had Ben's generation that that wasn't a daft way of way of thinking because of all that history. Labour Of course, we're the party that held the European referendum in 1975. We voted to stay in by a margin of about two to one. So Ben side, lost that argument. But that government, the Wilson government, that then the Wilson Callahan, government, I should say, from 1974 to 79, was beset with really bad economic problems on many fronts completely divorced from the European issue. How do you think Ben diagnosed the economic problems of the 1970s? I mean, I think Tony Benn is always more interested if I'm honest, in kind of politics than economics. I think, um, I should just say before we move on from the, from the referendum, because in a way, you know, the most important thing that can be remembered for 100 years time, it seems to go put the idea of a referendum for better or worse, on the, on the constitutional page in Britain. He came up with it in 19 6970, or something as odd as this might be interesting. It was part of the post 1968 speech I mentioned. He then started pushing for it very hard. In the early 70s, crafty old Harold Wilson takes a view maybe this could get us out of a slight difficulty about the fact that labour is tearing itself apart on this. James Callaghan says some, you know, maybe Tony's launching a little rubber dinghy here that we'll all be grateful for when we've got to have these awful, choppy seas around Europe coming up. And then of course, it happens. And it's an immensely significant thing, that it did happen. Because if it hadn't happened, wouldn't have had the precedent that allowed, certainly the referendum to happen in the UK on Brexit, but we've had other referendums, you know, the Alternative Vote with the referendum about establishing Scottish independence. And it's also the case that the presence of the referendum in the UK Constitution has stopped some things happening, that would otherwise have happened, you know, if there wasn't this idea that a referendum was a valid part of the constitutional armoury in Britain, Tony Blair would have taken him to the euro. We know he wanted to do it. But the opinion polls never pointed that way. David Cameron might have given some form of PR to Nick Clegg in return for the coalition, rather than the promise of a referendum to something that he could then kill later. This is a point developed by Vernon bogdanor in a in a constitutional expert on a lecture on on Tony Benn, that, you know, just the fact that we had referendums after 1975, and we never had them before, is a really significant constitutional reform. And it came from Tony Ben's, like mind and arguably his ambitions. Even more important than the previous constitutional reform, we've talked about about being able to renounce peerages, which was only 12 years later. So, you know, in lots of what he was trying to do, as a minister, he didn't succeed. But he has left these two great marks on the UK constitution. And then there's another we can come on to about internal party stuff, the way that party leaders and therefore Prime Ministers are picked is something else where he's left a really, really deep mark with very mixed consequences. So I think in a way, that's the most important thing that Tony Benn did, in that 1970s Labour government. I, you know, he had this idea about a alternative economic strategy, he had a couple of left wing economists who worked with him, I think there's a woman called Francis Morel, and then there was a chap who was also called Francis something rather, and and they've got this, you know, alternative economic strategy, which is essentially that we'll put up tariffs, when I looked into the detail of it years ago, it was, you know, part of it was about, we might have to run a slightly higher risk with inflation for a bit. We're doing very well to say, you know, when inflation is low, but it's probably not very credible, when inflation is incredibly high. And then they chuck in a bit of syndicalism, you know, workers taking control of their own plants and hoping that that worked a bit better and a lot of public investment and you know, bits of that made sense, maybe the public investment, did the syndicalism there were schemes I think that as industry Secretary he got behind for workers to build their own motorbike somewhere up in Scotland and it all crashed and burned you know, because I Uh, you know, when it comes to kind of producing consumer goods, you probably need to take account of what consumers want rather than that what the workers he wants to produce them. And so I think there were lots of flaws in economics, I think there were kind of there was a suggestion that there was a sort of easy socialist way out of just some of the hard realities that Britain faced in terms of oil prices having got more expensive, but on the other hand, you know, James Callaghan, at this point was making a monetarist turn until the Cameron coalition, the deepest expenditure cuts in public services we ever saw were in 1977, to 79. And there was another body of opinion within the Labour Party associated with Anthony cross. And that also said the conservatives, sorry that the Labour government was being too conservative. And there was a different way, a Keynesian way with, you know, the right kind of public investment, the right sort of longer term planning on public borrowing and all of that, and there was a different way through and the way through someone who's politically minded like Tony Benn, rather than economics minded, what he would have seen is James Callaghan clearing the pitch for then the interest rate rises and the deep cuts that came next with that, too, and that's what happened. So I think there was probably a degree of nonsense in it if you take a purely economistic view of it. But they did have a point when it came to the politics. Yeah, that's what an important part. I mean, you mentioned the speech that Callahan gave in the 76 Labour Party conference where he basically said the days where the state can sort of intervene and spending the economy to retain full employment are gone, essentially, just just kind of better, you know, earlier, there is no magic money tree speech. And I think actually, George Osborne quoted Callaghan's words to Gordon Brown over the despatch box 10 or 15 years ago during the 2008 recession. Do you agree with the kind of Crosland element that argued essentially that Labour's economic policy in the 70s was basically the midwife to Thatcherism later on that they basically laid the the paving stones, if you like, for what went on in the 1980s. In terms of budget cuts? Yeah, I mean, I think there is this sense that you get these long cycles in politics. And, you know, it wasn't just James Callaghan in America, you had Jimmy Carter appointing Volcker to run the Federal Reserve and jacking up interest rates that started what we then came to think of as the Reagan recession in 1981. And certainly, you know, Callahan was a sort of right wing labour man, I got a kind of brother, a conservative figure, and that was his mood reading on where the British public works. You might have been right about that. But they were left, you know, without much of an argument. I think, when Thatcher went on to do what she did, I mean, I don't know, it's quite a technical question. What I would say is that when in Dennis Healy's memoirs, he seemed even more than Jared Keller was a man of the kind of hard labour right, if you like, he says that the IMF loan that became the big, you know, would Britain accept the IMF loan that employed all these spending cuts and restraints and restrictions, and Callahan halter kind of three day, cabinet wherever you are and talks about endlessly and remarkably gets through it with no one resigning and goes along with this, this IMF loan, Healy said in his memoirs, when we got the receipts a year or two later, like it turned out, the Treasury officials had spoke to us, we never needed to borrow that money in the first place. We will never borrowing as much as we thought, and maybe we should have interrogated a bit more. So I mean, on that kind of very technical ground, I think probably the sort of labour right was too cautious. But, you know, these things are never looked at, they don't play out in isolation. It's kind of the the sense in middle Britain was that the unions were, as we saw in the election that in 1979, you know, the unions were out of control, that pay rises kept running ahead, no one was gonna get a grip on inflation until that changed, and I feel like it was, you know, in the cliche, a bit of a sea change moment. And, you know, the interesting question now, of course, is whether in another sea change moment where we've got, if they're still there, when people are listening to this, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson, writing large checks for various schemes of public investment, and at least talking a good talk in terms of levelling up even though they grew up a statue Right, because it now looks like a different political economy that neoliberalism has run its course. So I mean, you know, like, if you look at it as a historian, I guess you think, Well, that was a sea change moment that was going to happen. If you look at it as a political person, you think it would have been good to have a bit more fight over that. And if you look at it as an economist, it kind of turns on the numbers, and the numbers were a bit squeaky but probably the Labour government was a bit more cautious than it needed to be. This is the point at which the battle within labour got really nasty. After they lost the 1979 general election. There's nothing like a bit of opposition for the Labour Party to just start really tearing itself apart. James Callaghan, who had been prime minister resigned as Labour leader in 1980. At that point, do you think that Ben was ever popular enough to be elected Labour leader, or indeed deputy leader, which is what he ended up running for? In 1981? Do you think the popularity within the party was actually there? I think I mean, this goes back right back to the awkward squad. nonconformist dissenting tradition. I mean, you know, in the last of his books, Tony Benn think it's got a blaze of autumn sunshine or something. And he's basically a very old man. But he keeps talking about this poem or something. He's got up on his wall about the biblical figure, Daniel, you know, the guys he refuses to Kings feast in Babylon and gets thrown to the lions and is so sure of himself that the lines are going to set upon him because God's held them back because God's found him innocent. So there's a kind of dare to be a Daniel, dare to be awkward, dare to speak up for for whatever you believe, and that can be very irritating for people. And you know, Tony Benn, was in most of his personal dealings. Very nice man. He's got a family that he clearly loved, including bits of the family that ended up with quite a different, you know, mainstream labour view. So he wasn't completely one dimensional, but he, you know, having just listened to him on Desert Island Discs, you know, you don't get a sense of many hobbies or interests apart from family and politics. He was famously teetotal, and to a lot of people, he would have looked like a kind of teetotal fanatic, someone who can't switch off Dennis Skinner, a great comrade of his says, he tried chatting to him about sport, it's completely hopeless, doesn't know who are two centuries. He doesn't know. He says to him, or Tony Benn says, Why were you late to this meeting? He said, I needed to watch cram. And he said, Is he your delegates, and he meant Steve cram, like going through the world record in some running race. But you know, none of this kind of registers. And the re the records he chose, but there's Ireland discs, they weren't chosen for musical reasons that were chosen because of either family or politics. So he said, his world was politics, he worked all day, every day. And, like, he was very convinced that it was worth being awkward. And he wasn't free to fall out with people. And so you know, not in 76, he could have possibly, like, given Michael foot, who was the left candidate, main candidate that year could really useful fill up and the challenge with Callahan, but besides nobody's gonna run against him because he's got more radical views, and he's got different views on particular issues in 1981. Michael foot is now the Labour leader, and he decides that he's going to start a big fight about who's going to be the deputy leader. Which, in terms of his popularity, well, in the weird world of labour voting after it had been affected by Tony Benn, it used to be just MPs who chose these things. But after the Wembley conference in 1980, or 81, which Tony Benn was a big mover behind there was this complicated Electoral College where, you know, MPs had so much say they voted against Tony Benn, but trade unionists and the constituency party also had a say, and they voted for Tony Benn, so it ended up very, very close. So, you know, the answer to your question would have been popular. Is it enough to do it is It depends who was voting if it was just labour activists? Yes, definitely. But then you get into the question, and how would that have played out with the country at large? Maybe not so well? In the 1980s. We really see Ben constantly trying to kind of derail the projects of more centrist social democratic people within the Labour Party, mostly the leader after 1983, Neil Kinnock and other people in the party as well like Roy Hattersley kennex deputy, and whenever I've heard people like Kinnick Hattersley identity Lee discussing Ben. They really don't like him like they hate him. I don't think that's too strong a word to describe what they think of him. Because they see him as the reason really that Labour didn't get into power in the 1980s. I don't think that's entirely fair. And I can't imagine that you do either. But I suppose that Ben would have? Well, actually, first of all, do you think that's a fair assessment? Do you think that he is the kind of single biggest reason that Labour didn't get into power in the Rotate is their rationale being that he was constantly pulling labour towards a pole in politics that they considered unelectable? That's to say, the hard left? Um, I don't I don't think that's necessarily true at all. I mean, it's certainly true that, you know, Labour people hate each other, more than any sensible kind of person would, you know, the Conservative Party does these amazing things, like you suddenly pop up and you've got a remember this happening on minorities, alliance between John redwood and Ken Clark, because it's all a big game, and they think they can just like, cook this deal up and everyone will be happy that one fell apart, but you know, that they, that they're kind of playing at it, and they and they enjoy it, and they don't care if they get called names, and they move on. But Labour is altogether more neurotic thing. They all think they're kind of doing God's work, but they're also of course, some tending their own careers. And, um, they're all then faced with the messy business of government, which is, you know, making unpleasant choices or in no Bevans words, you know, the language of priorities, and it's, it's never an easy business. And so what really, really winds people up on the labour, right, is anyone being at all sanctimonious, you know, anyone saying, Well, you know, of course, this is pathetic, and we should be pure and doing it like this, we should be daring to be a Daniel, if only we'd be morally brave, it would be easy. And with Tony Benn, there are these kind of extra almost spiritual, I mean, I don't think he was probably very religious, but there is a kind of spiritual twist on some of it, which is, you know, it talks about, you know, I don't think I'd have difficulty justifying myself to my Creator, if it came to it. He says that with elections, he said this on a desert island. So he said, you know, well, of course, elections are first and foremost a platform for making your argument. And that's what's interesting. They're invigorating it like, he likes politics, he maybe doesn't understand people who don't like politics, whereas your typical kind of average labour parliamentarian in the marginal seat is an altogether more jaded figure who maybe started out a bit wide eyed and idealise idealistic, but maybe never that wide eyed and idealistic. And then they've got quite a people moaning about immigration, they've got people moaning at them about tax, you know, and they end up kind of feeling that what's necessary to get anything done and to protect the poorest from the hard forces of the right is to make all kinds of compromises on all kinds of things. And some guy comes along who's got a silver tongue and tells them that they don't need to compromise on anything, and it just drives them absolutely. Potty. And it means that they don't, I think make a proper assessment of someone like Tony Benn, they think when they, when you talk to labour right winger about Tony Benn, they essentially think of him being, you know, an awkward so and so at the 1979 or 80 conference where he goes up reads the manifesto of not indefinitely foreign trade, trade, trade, you know, in terms of the unnecessary leadership run, which in his diaries actually does say, Well, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. A year or two later in 1981, the kind of bizarre run against Kinnock in 1988 that gets nowhere and the kind of obsession with you know, national executive committees and it's a campaign for Labour Party democracy and that's all they think of him in terms of those factional struggles because some, you know, the Labour Party is a solipsistic thing, and they people are very self absorbed in it. And, you know, in those years, I don't think he was good for Labour's electability. But nor, of course, were people on the other tail of the Labour Party who walked out and provided the split in the vote that was so faithful in 1983. And as with all these things, you know, when you look back in the fullness of time, like, you know, I don't much like referendums. I'm not sure they're a good innovation, but we're not going to disinfect them now. Nor are we going to dis invent I think the idea that party members should have some kind of sound the party Lee To ship. There was an attempt after it was introduced in the conservatives to kind of wind it back. So the individual parties, members did the whittling down and the MPs had the final say, and that was that was defeated. So Boris Johnson was, you know, picked by a very non representative group of conservative party members and his successor will be picked by a non representative group of party members. So, I mean, you could say that, you know, put out of mind all the kind of factional labour stuff and put out of mind, the fact that he was involved in that at a time where the political economic kind of model was changing. So he was, he was kind of pushing early 70s radicalism into the 80s, when the whole conversation shifted or shifted, and that sort of made him get written off as a dinosaur. But if you think of all these innovations in terms of direct democracy, you could say he still ended up as a moderniser. Possibly. I mean, I suppose, as you said, I think the most important thing to Ben was democracy, you know, democracy within the Labour Party, and more broadly within the country, he wanted parties and governments to be accountable to the people that they were representing. But the biggest criticism you can make of him really, I suppose, is that when the Labour Party did decide to move away from Ben's policies, in the 1980s, he didn't really accept it. As you said, he did run against Neil Kinnock, again in 1988. He didn't accept the internal democracy of the Labour Party, in the sense that the members did decide to take a different course and he didn't really accept their decision. It more suggests that rather than holding democracy to be completely sacrosanct, he saw it basically as democracy as being like a train or a bus, you know, you ride it into where you, you get where you want to go, and then you get off. I mean, there was a real ego in him. I think there was a real personal, his own fate, I think was really important to him, wasn't it? I think that's probably the worst thing you can say about him. I mean, I don't disagree with that, as I say, I mean, not, you know, there are these pages in the diary where you could just see him, saying, you know, like, really, I want to be Prime Minister and the, to me completely unnecessary run for the deputy leadership in 1981. And I think it's a paradox of him that he's someone who was extremely gifted at politics in the sense of turning a phrase, you know, he'd be asked about asylum seekers. And he'd say, Well, you know, for someone of my generation experience, this is a moral issue, you know, because we remember the Second World War, and you strayed into connecting with middle Britons that issue by issue subject by subject, he could, like do politics very well. But when it came to, what's the big picture? Do we look like a bunch of rats in a fat in a sack fighting? He seemed to completely lose the plot. And as I said, That was that was the defining thing of Tony Benn, really from the mid 70s to the mid mid 80s. And the only bit of the Labour side, we'll see, but in terms of whether I'm not sure about this democracy thing. I mean, if you want to say he wasn't really a Democrat, you could certainly say he aligned with elements of the left that were a bit iffy on democracy at times. So I saw an interview once where he said that the greatest the greatest human being of the 20th century was some Chairman metal, certainly no, no Democrat at all. Okay, if you've been generous, you'd say well, he was great in that it was very important that the Great War but feels to me like that, that is pushing it a bit. But I mean, letting you into a secret I don't think anyone in the Labour Party really ever accepts democracy. I think that like they will lose their arguments and plot obsessively into it until it until they come back. I mean, like you know it without getting into the specifics of you know, why Jeremy Corbyn is now kicked out. You know, as soon as the right of the Labour Party was back in charge, it moved, it began to move against Jeremy Corbyn, there's talk about prescribing this or that or the other organisation, there's restrictions on whether or not you're allowed to have a debate in a constituency Labour Party about whether Jeremy Corbyn should come back and you know, like, it is a kind of, it's a chaotic and disorderly organisation and ambitious people within it are always trying to grip it and the argumentative people they always always fight back. And I mean, at the moment, one sides on the up but the other side will come back whether it takes five years or 10 years or 20 years and and No hate each other forever, I'm afraid. There's another really interesting element to his legacy, which is this notion of him being a sort of national treasure. It's almost a cliche now to say that he's a national treasure. And I think by the time he died, he was a pretty popular figure in Britain now. He died in 2014. Do you think that by the time he he passed away, he was actually more popular outside of the Labour Party than he was in it? Yes, I think he was. I mean, you know, it's funny, who gets turned into a national treasure and other ones kind of Alan Bennett, who is a slightly kind of awkward guy who doesn't particularly enjoy the status, either. But, um, people like a kind of maverick, don't they, it's fun to have a maverick to admire in sport, or in politics, or kind of, you know, in the acting world, or whatever it is, um, and, you know, you've got this kind of guy going around, giving speeches very eloquently about, you know, the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope for a better world. And it's stirring stuff and, you know, made it to Glastonbury, and he seems like a nice old man. And he kind of insists on lighting up his pipe on kind of trains where there's a smoking ban, you know, the kind of thing that ever it'd be a poor boy, if it was a kind of 30 year old, but as Alan Bennett said, you know, in this country, by the time we get to 90, if you could still eat a hard boiled egg, they think you're a treasure, you know, and done. And so he didn't, he certainly did benefit from that, but have very mixed feelings about it, because he still wanted to turn everything upside down. I mean, and he was extremely unpopular, certainly, in the Labour Party of 2007 through to 2010, arguably, with Ed Miliband being the leader in those years during which he died. I think Ed Miliband did work experienced with him. Ed Miliband, his dad was big friend of Tony Benn, and then maybe he's standing changed a bit. But of course, it was only a year later that then suddenly Jeremy Corbyn under this kind of souped up extension of the Tony Benn rules where it really was one member, one vote the MPs had next to no say after nominating Jeremy Corbyn, who is a kind of quiet sidekick of Tony Benn throughout his first 20 years in Parliament, suddenly becomes a Labour leader. And if Ben had been around, then he would have been briefly very popular, but now he'd be becoming popular. Okay, so, um, I think that his standing in the Labour Party can tell us some very changeable low point, but I just, I've never ceased to Marvel, its ability to tear strips out of itself, and Tony Benn, could do that, as well as anyone else. And I think all sides do it. But he's standing in the country, the thing I've tried to emphasise a bit more, are those multiple changes to the Constitution to the way of doing politics, and I don't necessarily approve of all those changes. But I think they're irreversible. And that feels a bit more like something that, you know, that bit of him as opposed to the radical socialist bit, which also interesting, but that bit of him, I think it's fair enough to put in the national treasure category. Do you think just as a very quick, final question, do you think that the reason he ended up being a national treasure kind of embraced by people that would never have embraced him in the 70s? Is because they just didn't think he was a threat anymore? Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's a big element of that, you know, there was a point where one of Tony Blair's policy people, Matthew Taylor would go on news. So you know, it's over the left of one social argument centre have won the political argument and the right have won the economic argument, and this is to kind of pre 2008 Orthodoxy is that the economic questions were, were finished. And of course, we now know, to our cost, that they weren't finished and that there's a lot of lively debate to be had. So I think it was seen as, you know, quite good to have a few tripping fingers kicking around in a kind of neoliberal land that we come to live in. Even for people who really didn't want anything to change. Very fundamentally, but you know, I'm ideas live longer than people and you know, as much as I don't write Tony Benn is a economist, I do very much right his concern with inequality of not to wealth, but um, power. And, you know, in the last 1510 years, many more people have have latched on to that as a as a concern. And so the ideas now seem perhaps less safe than they did. Tom, thank you very much. That was great. All right. Where can people find your work if they want to read more about about you or about the stuff that you that you get involved in? Where can they go? Um, so I'm a contributing editor at Prospect magazine. So you go to prospect magazine.co.uk. And I guess there's an author page, Tom Clark, where you can follow me on Twitter at Prospect underscore Clark, I'm also a fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation where I tend to do more stuff from sort of public policy. Tom, cheers. All right, thanks. Thank you for listening to the hated in the dead. If you've enjoyed this podcast, follow it on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And for good measure. Leave us a review. You can also follow the hated in the dead on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, so you never miss new content.