Dare to Be a Daniel

by Tony Benn

  The House will forgive me for quoting myself, but 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.

  The role of the Speaker has another importance. When the political manifestos are yellowing in the public libraries, a good ruling from the Speaker in a footnote in Erskine May [Treatise on the Laws, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament] might turn out to be one of the guarantees of our liberty.

  There are two ways of looking at Parliament. I have always thought that, from the beginning – from the model Parliament – the establishment has seen Parliament as a means of management: if there is a Parliament, people will not cause trouble, whereas, of course, the people see it as a means of representation. Those are two quite different concepts of what Parliament is about. The establishment wants to defuse opposition through Parliament; the people want to infuse Parliament with their hopes and aspirations.

  I have put up several plaques – quite illegally, without permission; I screwed them up myself. One was in the broom cupboard to commemorate Emily Wilding Davison, and another celebrated the people who fought for democracy and those who run the House. If one walks around this place, one sees statues of people, not one of whom believed in democracy, votes for women, or anything else. We have to be sure that we are a workshop and not a museum.

  My next point, if I am not out of order, is that all progress comes, in my judgement, from outside the House. I am in no way an academic, but if I look back over history, I see many advances first advocated outside the House, denounced by people in power and then emerging. Let me use a couple of non-controversial examples. Twenty years ago, Swampy would have been denounced as a bearded weirdy; he will probably be in the next honours list, because the environmental movement has won. Similarly, when that madman, Hamilton, killed the children at Dunblane, the then Conservative Home Secretary banned handguns within six months, because public opinion had shifted. So we are the last place to get the message, and it is important that we should be connected effectively to public will.

  There is a lot of talk about apathy, and it is a problem, but it is two-sided. Governments can be apathetic about the people, as well as people being apathetic about governments. For me, the test of an effective, democratic Parliament is that we respond to what people feel in a way that makes us true representatives. The real danger to democracy is not that someone will burn Buckingham Palace and run up the red flag, but that people will not vote. If people do not vote, they destroy, by neglect, the legitimacy of the government who have been elected.

  May I finish with a couple of personal points? I first sat in the Gallery sixty-four years ago, and my family have been here since 1892 and I love the place. I am grateful to my constituents who have elected me. I am grateful to the Labour Party, of which I am proud to be a member. I am grateful to the socialists, who have helped me to understand the world in which we live and who give me hope. I am also deeply grateful to the staff of the House – the clerks, the policemen, the security staff, the doorkeepers, librarians, Hansard and catering staff – who have made us welcome here.

  May I finish, in order, by saying something about yourself, Mr Speaker? In my opinion, you are the first Speaker who has remained a Back-Bencher. You have moved the Speaker’s Chair on to the Back Benches. You sit in the Tea Room with us. You are wholly impartial, but your roots are in the movement that sent you here, and you have given me one of the greatest privileges that I have ever had – the right to use the Tea Room and the Library after the election. Unless someone is a Member or a peer, he or she cannot use the Tea Room or the Library, but you have extended the rules by creating the title of ‘Freedom of the House’, so that the Father of the House and I will be able to use the Tea Room. You will not be shot of us yet. I hope in paying you a warm tribute, Mr Speaker, that you do not think that I am currying favour in the hope that I might be called to speak again because, I fear, that will not be possible.

  8

  Socialism

  The ideas at the heart of socialism go back to the beginning of time and have found their advocates in every generation. The Conservative governments of the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, unleashed a ruthless and militant capitalism that challenged socialist ideas inside and outside Parliament. I made several speeches in the Commons to combat the ideology that enabled market forces and state power to destroy the miners and the power of workers, through their unions.

  HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE ON A MOTION OF NO CONFIDENCE IN THE GOVERNMENT, 22 NOVEMBER 1990

  THIS DEBATE IS long overdue. It gives the House an opportunity to look back over a decade of Conservative government. The Conservatives have had strong messages from their supporters and from the electors suggesting that they cannot win with the leader who they have so loyally supported. We shall vote for a motion of no confidence, but the Conservative Party has already had its motion of no confidence. I do not believe that we should attach that motion to the personality of the Prime Minister because it is the policies that she has pursued, not her style, which have led to the message from the British people. I do not believe in scapegoats and it is important that we should understand that every present and former member of the Cabinet, every Conservative Member of Parliament who has trooped through the Lobby night after night after night in support of those policies, every newspaper that has supported the government and every voter who voted for them share responsibility for the current situation.

  So much has been said about the past that I want to speak about the future, but it would be wrong to let the motion of censure go by without touching on some of the damage that has been done in the past decade. I must admit that the mechanical recitation of statistics does not get near the real world.

  One important point about which we rarely hear is that Britain has spent far too much money on defence and not enough on its industrial development. There is the illusion that the only reason for change in Eastern Europe is Britain’s possession of a nuclear weapon. Is it honestly believed by any serious person that there would have been no demand for liberty in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union unless we had had a nuclear weapon from the United States? But the price we paid for that high defence expenditure has crippled our capacity to make and sell what is needed.

  Despite the fact that we have been told that this is an entrepreneurial society, Britain has an utter contempt for skill. If one talks to people who dig coal and drive trains, or to doctors, nurses, dentists or toolmakers, one discovers that no one in Britain is interested in them. The whole of the so-called entrepreneurial society is focused on the City news that we get in every bulletin, which tells us what has happened to the pound sterling to three decimal points, against the basket of European currencies. Skill is what built this country’s strength, but it has been treated with contempt …

  Assets were built up by the labour of those who work in the electricity industry and by the taxpayer who invested in the equipment. Those assets are now to be auctioned at half their value to make a profit, for a tax cut for the rich before the next General Election. If ministers were local councillors, they would be before the courts for wilful misconduct, but because they are ministers and because some of them later go on to the boards of the companies they privatised, they are treated as businessmen who know better how to handle those companies as members of the board of directors than allegedly they did as the ministers responsible.

  Local government has been crippled. Across the river is the County Hall of London County Council – the seat of government of the greatest city in the world. It is empty and is to be sold because the government wanted to cripple local government, and they have. The poll tax, the centralisation of the business rate a
nd the punishment of Liverpool and Lambeth councillors were designed to take all power from local government and to put it in the hands of the government who claimed that they did not believe in the role of the state. Many people – I am one of them – feel strongly about the undermining of the trade unions, who now have fewer rights than their counterparts in Eastern Europe, the tax cuts for the rich and the benefit cuts for the poor, the censorship of the media, the abuse practised by the security services, the restriction on civil liberties, the Falklands War and now the government’s readiness to send more troops, announced today, to the Middle East to die for the control of oil. When we look back at the 1980s we see many victims of market forces. I do not share the general view that market forces are the basis of political liberty. Every time I see a homeless person living in a cardboard box in London, I see that person as a victim of market forces. Every time I see a pensioner who cannot manage, I know that he is a victim of market forces. The sick who are waiting for medical treatment that they could receive quicker through private insurance are victims of those same market forces.

  The Prime Minister is a great ideologue. Her strength was that she understood a certain view of life, and when she goes there will be a great ideological vacuum. It is no good saying that we shall run market forces better than she did, because her whole philosophy was that one should measure the price of everything, but the value of nothing. We must replace that philosophy.

  Mr Gorbachev and Mr Walesa must be more worried than anyone to discover that the Prime Minister on whom they have modelled their economic policy has collapsed at the very moment she had persuaded them that that was the way forward to political success. To put it crudely, the Berlin Wall has fallen in London today and changes will be made which will go further than the Conservative Party yet realises.

  It is important to put on the record all those people who have been denounced in the past ten years as loonies, extremists and as the ‘enemy within’. They saw earlier than others the meaning behind the government’s policies. They include the miners and the miners’ wives, who fought against the injustice of closing pits and going for nuclear power and imported coal … They include the Greenham Common women. I was in court when those women were charged with action likely to cause a breach of the peace. They were outside the camp, while inside were enough nuclear weapons to destroy humanity. They were the pioneers of the defeat of the Prime Minister …

  What about the ambulance workers and the print workers at Wapping, the single-parent mothers, the greens and the people who came to Trafalgar Square on 31 March for the poll-tax demonstration? They reflect what the Henley candidate [Michael Heseltine] picked up and tried to use at a later stage to his advantage. The teachers and those who tried to defend the National Health Service were all grouped together as the enemy within. In fact, they were the first carriers of the message that the Tory Party has finally got …

  I have a Measure called the Margaret Thatcher (Global Repeal) Bill which, if we got a majority, could go through both Houses in twenty-four hours. It would be easy to reverse the policies and replace the personalities – the process has begun – but the rotten values that have been propagated from the platform of political power in Britain during the past ten years will be an infection – a virulent strain of right-wing capitalist thinking which it will take time to overcome.

  One cannot change human nature. There is good and bad in everybody, and for ten years the bad has been stimulated and the good denounced as lunatic, out of touch, cloud-cuckoo-land, extremist and militant. The Conservatives in power have been the cause of that. They do not quite yet know what has happened. They think that they are witnessing the retirement of a popular headmistress under circumstances that some might regret. In fact, they have killed the source of their own philosophy and opened the way for different ideas.

  We must now look to the 1990s and beyond. Most people have modest aspirations. They want useful work and a home to live in, and they would like good education for themselves and their children, with proper health care, decent pensions and peace and dignity when they are old. In a rich country – we are often told how rich we are – that should be available if the distribution of wealth were correct. With that in mind, let us look at the world today. America, which has 2 per cent of the world’s population, uses 25 per cent of the world’s resources. For how long can that last? One does not need a Saddam Hussein or a Gaddafi to point out that maldistribution of wealth is the greatest source of international conflict. So we must look to a United Nations that is not just there to launch a war under American auspices, but is there to solve the problems that lead to war. It must help to redistribute the resources of the world.

  I must speak about Europe because, after all, we are all Europeans. But I will not give up the right of the people whom I represent to decide the laws under which we are governed. I will not do that, and I have no right to do so. I only borrowed my powers from Chesterfield, and at the end of five years I must hand them back. It will be no good my saying, ‘I am handing back some of them. The rest I gave to Europe.’

  We must shift the money from weapons to development. We must protect the planet from the dangers that are associated with nationalism, fundamentalism, particularism and racism, for those, combined with nuclear and chemical weapons, could destroy the human race.

  HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE ON THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF A PROGRAMME OF SUBSTANTIAL PIT CLOSURES, 21 OCTOBER 1992

  I won the Chesterfied by-election on the day that the miners’ strike of 1984 began, and became very involved in the miners’ battles, Chesterfield being at heart a mining town. The strike was engineered by the Conservative government, which was determined to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers and the power of trade unions and to nullify Britain’s dependence on its own energy sources. Once the strike was over, successive Conservative governments closed down Britain’s coal mines and passed anti-trade-union legislation.

  Entirely lacking from the Conservative Party has been any awareness of the sense of public outrage that people could be treated as the President of the Board of Trade [Michael Heseltine] did when he announced the closure of thirty-one pits. Of course, individual Members may take a different view, but I say that it was callous and brutal. That treatment came from a party that prides itself upon a Citizens’ Charter and a classless society. That is why hundreds of thousands are marching in London today.

  All my right hon. and hon. Friends know that these events are part of a sustained attack upon the mining industry. It is taking place because the previous Prime Minister [Margaret Thatcher] regarded the National Union of Mineworkers as the ‘enemy within’. That term was coined for that reason. It gives me huge pleasure that the Tory Party threw out Thatcher and the miners re-elected Scargill. That man told the truth, and truth still has value in the politics of our society when all the lies, half-truths and half-promises about independent reviews are dismissed.

  The President of the Board of Trade said that he agonised over the decision that was before him. He is not the one who will suffer agony if pits are closed. If he agonised, why did he not have a review during that process? If there had been a review, others could have submitted other views while his discussions took place.

  I have a letter that came from the office of Cecil Parkinson when he was Energy Secretary. It is a response to someone who wrote from Derbyshire, and states that the privatisation of the electricity industry will have no effect on pit closures. Ministers have lied, lied and lied again about the mining industry. That is why people are so incensed.

  Do not tell us that this is all about market forces. If those forces applied to the farming industry, half the farms in Britain would have closed years ago. We could get cheaper food from New Zealand and Australia. Of course, the Tory Party depends on the farmers and so it supports them. I am not in favour of applying market forces to farms. It is not possible to close a farm one year and open it the following year. We all know that the miners have not received set-aside gra
nts. They have not been given money to stop producing coal. That is the reality of the debate …

  I am intensely proud that I had a role to play in the energy policy of the Labour government. That government authorised the Selby project, as we authorised the Drax B coal-fired power station. We encouraged forty-two million tonnes of extra capacity to be found. Selby was opened and there was an assisted-burn scheme. We recognised that the then Central Electricity Generating Board needed a small grant to change the merit order of the power stations so that more coal could be burned. We introduced earlier retirement for miners, something for which they had pressed for a long time. We then – [Interruption] Closures took place after negotiation and agreement. They concentrated mainly on pit exhaustion and dangerous working. As the then Secretary of State, I offered the NUM a veto on all closures. I discovered that Australian coal had been imported on the instruction of the now Lord Walker when he was Secretary of State for Energy. When it arrived it was so expensive that the Generating Board sold it to France at a loss.

  We require a re-examination of energy policy that brings fuel suppliers, fuel industries, customers and unions together. There was such a re-examination from 1976 onwards; the papers were published and the discussions were serious. When that process takes place, it will be necessary to determine the objectives of the energy policy, and one of the objectives of the Labour government was extremely simple. It was that everyone should have heat and light at home. That was not a bad energy-policy objective. It was a recognition of the fact that in the end an energy policy is judged by whether people can get hold of energy.

  It has been said, ‘If there is surplus coal, why not give it to pensioners?’ That is a sensible argument. Coal could be supplied free of charge to the generators to pump it down the wire, as it were, in the form of cheap electricity. There are those who shake their heads in dissent, but that is an energy policy. It is one in which Conservative Members do not believe, because they believe in profit and not in people. That is what the argument is about.