Dare to Be a Daniel

by Tony Benn

  After the war the conventional wisdom that dominated the Cold War period was that communism was a military threat, which was thought more likely to influence the public mind than an ideological threat to capitalism, which was what governments really feared. I came to realise that the USSR never planned to overrun Western Europe.

  In retrospect, I see the Cold War hysteria as resembling the relentless pursuit of an enemy in earlier years, when those who challenged the conventional wisdom of the Church were seen as enemies of society and were regularly persecuted.

  The liberation movements in the colonies were also presented as posing a threat to civilised society, and those who led them were vilified, arrested and imprisoned. They included some of the most distinguished world statesmen, such as Nehru, Gandhi, Nkrumah, Jagan, and of course Nelson Mandela.

  Yet young men who went into the colonial service to become adminstrators (some of whom I knew) did approach their task with a sense of duty inspired by a moral responsibility that God had imposed upon them – such was the belief in imperialism as a force for good.

  Today we are being asked to accept a new conventional wisdom, which is that America has assumed the same imperial role that Britain once exercised, in a crusade against a new threat of terror closely associated with the Muslim world. The use of the word ‘crusade’ by President Bush gave this battle the same sort of religious authority that persisted in religious wars in the past.

  In parallel with this we have had the counter-revolution against the welfare state, trade unionism and democracy. This was launched during the Reagan-Thatcher period and was motivated by the realisation that politically-conscious trade unionism operating within a party with socialist roots was capable in a democracy of changing the balance of power permanently and peacefully, and that too was completely unacceptable.

  Margaret Thatcher could herself claim non-conformist roots, and in some ways traced her ideology to the Manchester School of Liberalism associated with Mr Gladstone; but her interpretation of rugged individualism was that the enemy was the state, from which individuals had to free themselves.

  My mother’s dissenting Congregationalism was interpreted quite differently. She was a very devoted and serious Christian and gave me a grounding in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible; we prayed together at night, and I went to St John’s Church in Smith Square, where Canon Woodward (later Bishop of Bristol) conducted children’s services. I was as devout as could be and took very seriously the obligations of Holy Communion after I was confirmed.

  On the wall of my bedroom I had a painting of one of King Arthur’s knights praying at an altar on the evening before he was admitted to the Round Table. That image influenced me subliminally as I grew up, in feeling that my boyhood should be used to prepare me for my work in life, which I was vaguely aware would be ‘in the public service’. My mother once gave me a tiny Crusader cross, which I wore round my neck with my RAF identity discs throughout the war, and still have at home. It was not until much later that I realised how brutal the Crusaders were in their determination to seize the Holy Land from the heathen, murdering and maiming the people who lived there.

  Another picture, ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’, showed a young man with an old sailor pointing over the distant horizon, helping him to form in his mind the idea that there was a world to be explored. Both pictures made a great impression on me.

  One of the stories my parents were fond of was that of Daniel who, having refused to give up his faith when tested by Darius, the King of Persia, was placed all night in a lions’ den and was found the next morning unharmed.

  Father used to recite a Salvation Army hymn, ‘Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to make it known’; those lines lodged in my mind so that, whenever the going has been rough, I have fallen back on it. It has taught me the importance of consistency and courage in the face of adversity – essential for anyone who is criticised for his convictions. In 1983 I saw in the YMCA in Nagasaki, of all places, a picture of Daniel standing with his hands behind his back and his head bowed, surrounded by the lions. I photographed it and it hangs in my office to remind me of those qualities that are the most important in public life:

  Standing by a purpose true,

  Heeding God’s command,

  Honour them, the faithful few!

  All hail to Daniel’s band!

  Dare to be a Daniel,

  Dare to stand alone!

  Dare to have a purpose firm!

  Dare to make it known.

  Many mighty men are lost

  Daring not to stand,

  Who for God had been a host

  By joining Daniel’s band.

  Refrain

  Many giants, great and tall,

  Stalking through the land,

  Headlong to the earth would fall,

  If met by Daniel’s band.

  Refrain

  Hold the Gospel banner high!

  On to vict’ry grand!

  Satan and his hosts defy,

  And shout for Daniel’s band.

  Refrain

  Mother was scholarly, but she did not take a fundamentalist view of the Christian message or ever say or do anything that encouraged me to rebel. My brother Michael, who wanted to be a Christian minister after the war, set up his own prayer circle at school, and I drew great comfort from the knowledge of God watching over us. When I learned to fly, my mother told me that ‘underneath were the everlasting arms’, implying that even if I crashed, I was in the hands of the Almighty.

  When my brother died in his plane, I found great comfort from praying for him and went to see the chaplain at the base in Africa where I was stationed to talk about it.

  But, over the years, imperceptibly my faith has changed. I certainly was not influenced by atheistic arguments, which were extreme and threw doubt on the value of the Bible and the historical truth of Jesus’s life, and which mocked religious leaders, whose life of service entitled them to respect.

  Inevitably a greater understanding of science, not least Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, played some part in undermining the idea that a kindly God and his Son could possibly have founded the universe, with billions of stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies beyond us, whose origins could hardly have been explicable in that way.

  But the real reason why my faith changed was the nature of the Church and the way in which it sought to use the teachings of the Bible to justify its power structures in order to build up its own authority.

  For example, the idea of original sin is deeply offensive to me, in that I cannot imagine that any God could possibly have created the human race and marked it at birth with evil that could only be expiated by confession, devotion and obedience. This use of Christianity to keep people down was, I became convinced, destructive of any hope that we might succeed together in building a better world.

  Of course what it did do was give the priests power over us, by hinting darkly that if we did not do what they told us to – and give money to the Church – we would rot in hell. Many of the hymns and prayers that I know and love contain ideas which have the same effect, and I came to repudiate them completely.

  This did not in any sense involve accepting the implicit atheism of Marx, but when he spoke of religion being ‘the opium of the people’, it seemed to be a statement of my belief, without in any way demeaning the importance of the teachings of Jesus.

  Indeed, I came to believe that Marx was the last of the Old Testament prophets, a wise old Jew sitting in the British Museum describing capitalism with clinical skill, but adding a moral dimension. Das Kapital could easily have been written in a completely factual way, describing exploitation as a part of the normal pattern of capitalism, without expressing any moral judgement on the matter. But Marx added a passion for justice that gave his work such unique political and moral power.

  Also, the older I become, the more persuaded I am that organised religion can be a threat to the surviva
l of the human race, and is fundamentally undemocratic in its structure and basically intolerant of those from other faiths, whom it sees as threatening its claim to contain the truth.

  Political leaders can harness religious prejudice to justify their own policies and help sustain them in power, by claiming to speak with authority on behalf of those simple teachers who founded the religions which they purport to espouse. This is as true of President Bush and the Christian fundamentalists as it is of Osama bin Laden.

  The ‘opium of the people’ exactly describes fundamentalist Muslims, evangelical American Christians who claim that God is on their side in a new crusade, and those Jews who believe that the Almighty granted them the right to own Palestine, as if God were an estate agent.

  None of these charges of political ambition can be levelled at the simple men – whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim – who helped to teach us how to live in peace and who were united in one thing: there is only one God and we are all his children.

  Another problem that I have tried to resolve, without repudiating what I learned as a child, is the idea of immortality, for my mother believed that when she died she would meet her parents, and my father and brother Michael, and that gave her great comfort. I never tried to dissuade her.

  But for me immortality was meaningful in quite a different sense, in that ideas and the spirit survive physical death. As my dad used to say: ‘Every life is like a pebble dropped into a pool and the ripples go backwards and forwards for ever, even if we cannot see them.’

  I see my parents in my brother David and myself, and I see my wife’s influence on my children and grandchildren; and we all feel the influence of teachers throughout history who have shaped our thinking and established the values that we attempt to uphold.

  Here, in talking of teachers, I see Jesus the Carpenter of Nazareth as one of the greatest teachers, along with Moses and Mohammed. Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all monotheistic religions, teaching that we are brothers and sisters with a responsibility to each other.

  My doubts are about the risen Christ and not about the importance of Jesus. Christians claim to have founded a Church in Jesus’s name, and my doubts are about this institution rather than about the teachings he left behind.

  In part these doubts were influenced by my visit, while I was an RAF pilot on leave from Egypt, to Jerusalem in 1945. I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and saw the Christian sects fighting over their right to a slice of the area where Christ’s body was supposed to have lain, and the stone on the top of the Mount of Olives in which a footprint on a rock was the last place on Earth that Jesus’s foot was supposed to have touched before ascending to heaven.

  I have the deepest respect for those who believe in the virgin birth, the resurrection and the saints, but they do not help me to understand the world, nor do they point to my duty as to how one should live.

  There is no wider theological gap than between those who believe that God created man and those who believe that man invented God. But the ethics of the humanist, the Christian, Jew or Muslim can be so close as to be almost indistinguishable.

  I always ask people about their religious faith, and recently a man told me that he was a ‘lapsed atheist’ who did not believe in God, but had come to believe in the spirituality in all human beings and to respect it and believe that it had a value over and above what science could teach us about the world. I found that very convincing, because we must all try to lead a good life assisted by the prophets of the Old Testament, and Jesus and Mohammed.

  Tom Paine said, ‘My country is the world and my religion is to do good,’ and added, ‘We have it in our power to start the world again.’ I have evolved from being a devout boy, through doubt and distrust in religious structures, to acceptance of the lessons the great religious teachers have taught.

  I hope that my mother would have understood what I am trying to say and that, although my ideas have developed beyond what she taught me, she would recognise the influence she had on my journey of belief.

  The role of conscience is a very interesting one: an imbued sense of right or wrong. At any one moment I know what I should do, even if I don’t do it; and I know what I shouldn’t do, even if I am doing it. It is a burden, but also a guide to the good life, helping me to see my way through the very complicated questions one has to deal with. It also embodies the idea of accountability. Whether you believe that you are accountable on the Day of Judgement for the way you have spent your life, or have to account to your fellow men and women for what you have done during your life, accountability is a strong and democratic idea.

  The next part of this book describes my childhood and growing up within this social and political culture; the third part comprises speeches and essays on some of the moral and political challenges of recent times, reflecting the influence on my life of the dissenting tradition and the need always to question the conventional wisdom of the time.

  Part Two

  Then

  1

  Family Tree

  THE FAMILY TRAIT of stubbornness and independence can be traced back at least to my great-grandfather Julius, born in 1826. His father was a master quiltmaker in Manchester, and young Julius ran away from home because of difficulties with his father’s second wife; he walked the thirty miles to Liverpool and was found, according to a family autobiography, gazing into the Mersey by a passing Quaker. Urging Julius to follow him, the Quaker acquired lodgings for him and helped him with an education; Julius got a job as a teacher, then he married and at one time ran a boys’ ‘reformatory’ school in Northamptonshire. He later became a nonconformist – Congregational – minister.

  On my mother’s side there was also a background of religious dissent and, interestingly, both families had a common entrepreneurial spirit and sense of public service.

  The two family firms – Eadie Brothers, established by my great-grandfather Peter Eadie, and Benn Brothers, set up by my grandfather John Williams Benn – have both disappeared now, having been absorbed or wound up by bigger units, which saw the value of what they did, acquired them and lost the personal touch they embodied. Both firms were typical of Victorian imaginativeness combined with a sense of obligation to society, expressed by the individuals concerned serving in elected office. Peter Eadie became the Provost of Paisley and John Benn a founder member of the London County Council, MP for Tower Hamlets and Chairman of the LCC.

  Benn Family Tree

  I am very proud of my ancestors and, as a result, I have always had a great deal of sympathy for small businesses where the founder works alongside those he employs and in that sense is a worker himself. As Secretary of State for Industry, I tried to devise policies that would help small businessmen make their way with the minimum of difficulty, for they cannot employ a battery of lawyers and tax advisers, as the huge multinational corporations do – and they have to struggle with the administration and bureaucracy themselves, which can be most oppressive.

  FATHER’S SIDE

  It is said of Julius Benn that when, as a teacher, he took his students to an Anglican church one Sunday, the vicar attacked Martin Luther in his sermon. This enraged my great-grandfather, who rose from his pew and said to his little flock, ‘Boys, we leave the church at once,’ and they marched out of the church together. For this – and because he had lost money backing an unsuccessful invention – he was asked to leave the school and, with all their possessions in a wheelbarrow or pram, the family had to find lodgings. Julius later moved his family to London to the Mile End Road, where he worked as a newsagent and became the minister of the Gravel Pit Chapel in Hackney.

  One of his children, John Benn (my grandfather), described the ‘reduced circumstances’ in which they lived. John went to work on his first day as an office boy in the City of London when he was eleven, wearing his mother’s pair of ‘Sunday boots’. Suffering some of the humiliations that many office boys experience, he wrote about this in his autobiography The Joys of Adversity.

>   John found himself employed by Lawes Randall and Co., a wholesale furniture company in City Road, as a junior invoice clerk. But he had a talent for art and practised drawing, inspired by the draughtsmen and designers, and later became a designer for the firm. By 1880 he had become a junior partner, and this enabled him to establish a little illustrated trade paper of his own, called The Cabinet Maker. This struggling business kept him going, despite regular financial difficulties, and he earned extra money later by lecturing, during which he would draw lightning-quick sketches of prominent figures; he also drew sketches of his parliamentary colleagues after he had been elected as a Liberal MP in 1892. At his peak John was earning £2,000 per year from lectures. One of his sketches showed housing in Bethnal Green:

  His real love was London and he had a desire to improve the lot of the Londoner. He was a member of the first London County Council, which met in 1889 with a massive 2:1 Progressive majority against the Moderates (Conservatives).

  Writing of that occasion, John Benn said, ‘The Progressives were already full of great schemes, mostly framed to secure a millennium for London by return of post. The Reformers, fresh from the polls, hotly resented any obstruction to their wishes. They were indeed in deadly earnest.’ John was a genuine entrepreneur, combining enterprise with a passionate belief in municipal trading, including the common management and ownership of the tramways, gas, water and electricity. The story of the introduction of electric trams, and Grandfather’s role, is most interesting.

  The Progressives’ strategy was to buy out the many privately owned horse-drawn tram companies, whose operations brought chaos to London’s transport system, and to introduce electric trams. Despite stubborn resistance, the first LCC electric trams were inaugurated in May 1903 and ran until 1952. John Benn believed that the revenue from fares could be used to reduce rates and alleviate the ‘disgraceful conditions’ of the poor; tramway employees received a minimum wage (twenty-five shillings) for a maximum sixty-hour week.