by Benn, Tony
Monday 25 January
Neil Kinnock told me today that he and about thirty others were organising a demonstration tonight against the guillotine on the Industrial Relations Bill and they were planning either to stand up in their places or to stand in front of the Speaker and try to get themselves or the House suspended. I argued with him for a long time, as sympathetically as I could, saying this would be a big step and it would annoy other members of the Party. I thought it worthwhile to go and see Bob Mellish, who was talking to Stan Orme and Callaghan about the same thing, and I did persuade Bob to call a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet in the evening to consider what to do. Michael Foot very sensibly said it would be stupid to make a big thing of this.
But it was agreed that some members of this group should come and meet Roy, Michael Foot, Bob Mellish, Douglas Houghton and Jim Callaghan. So we all dispersed but they failed to persuade the group not to demonstrate. So at about 9.45, they all got up, about thirty of them, including Eric Heffer and Reg Freeson, who are both Front Bench spokesmen, and stood in front of the table and shouted. The Speaker suspended the sitting, having said that this was all extremely boring, as boring as a standing ovation, which was quite a funny remark.
After the first suspension we had agreed to talk to the demonstrators in the Tea Room, but they were determined to go on and when the suspension ended, there they were standing in the middle again. The Tory Chief Whip, Francis Pym, got up and moved that the question be put, and it was put, and there was a vote and the Speaker declined to hear points of order. So that brought it to an end. It was rather surprising and there was a great deal of excitement.
Monday 1 February
I rang Clive Dunn, one of the television stars of ‘Dad’s Army’, who has just had a tremendous hit record, ‘Grandad’, and he agreed when he was in Bristol next month to come and meet some old-age pensioners at Memory Hall.
Saturday 6 March
Went up by train to Newcastle and talked to the Northumberland Mechanics’ Association and then to the dinner at which Vic Feather and Joe Gormley spoke. There were songs and bawdy speeches. As a result of the Tories’ Industrial Relations Bill, the trade union movement, and the British working class, have become proud of being the working class. Tory legislation has succeeded in shutting off the idea that somehow you can escape from your class and come up in a Davis Escape Apparatus, one by one, to join the ruling class, because the ruling class has let you down and is trying to suppress you. There is a tremendous self-confidence in being yourself and what you are. It is ‘black is beautiful’ applied to the working class, which is marvellous. It oozed out of everything Vic Feather said.
Just sitting and listening I noticed how much everybody made a reference to where they came from – ‘He’s from this part of Northumberland, or from Durham, of course, I’m from Yorkshire, you’re from Lancashire.’ I wonder whether we have given anything like enough importance politically to regionalism. I am sure we haven’t. We have only looked at it technically and in terms of blueprints.
Wednesday 21 April
To the Education Sub-Committee of the NEC and got Joan Lestor into the chair. I thought she was preferable to Eirene White or Shirley Williams. While we were sitting there, Joan Lestor was opening her mail and she had a big fat envelope and she tore it open; inside was another envelope which fitted very tightly into the outer one, and as she began pulling the inner envelope out smoke began pouring out of the envelope. So she dropped it on the ground, and I poured water on it, dropped it in a wastepaper basket and called the police, who took it away. It was a homemade bomb of some kind and the man who had sent it had fixed some matches on the inner envelope and sandpaper on the outer one. If she had pulled it out quickly it would have burst into flames and blown up, and burned her face.
Thursday 20 May
Came back on the train from Southampton with Jeremy Thorpe, who really is a very nice, agreeable and kind person but has no weight as a party leader – just thinks of the House of Commons as if it were the Oxford Union Debating Society. Absolutely out of touch with modern trends and movements.
Sunday 30 May
The Party is heading for an extremely difficult summer. There is a small group of highly dedicated Marketeers led by Royjenkins, with Bill Rodgers as campaign manager, and including the old Campaign for Democratic Socialism types. They are genuinely pro-Europe (I give them credit for that), but they also see a last opportunity to do to the Labour Party what they failed to do over disarmament and Clause 4, namely to purge it of its trade union wing and of its Left. This group, working with the conservative Europeans, really represents a new political party under the surface in Britain. They think a free vote would get them off the hook because they would be able to vote with Heath on the grounds that the question was above politics.
Of course the real crunch will come when specific legislation has to go through and any serious European would have to vote with the Government to bring British law into line with Community law. It is inconceivable that such a group, consistently voting with the Government, could do this without severing their links with the Labour Party, and to this extent it is impossible that the Party will do anything other than come out against Europe. But what the pro-Marketeers don’t realise yet, though they soon will, is that if this situation becomes impossible for them, much better that they should be coming out against entering Europe without some consultation. This is what my referendum offers them, but a referendum is a difficult concept for them to consider and is a relatively novel idea, though Philip Goodhart, the Tory MP, has written a book on referenda which he sent me and in which he argues that it is a perfectly established constitutional principle.
The anti-Marketeers are annoyed that although I am not anti-Market I do see the possibility of optimising their support by using the General Election/referendum solution. So I think my role between now and the Conference, at which I become Chairman of the Party, is to present this proposal modestly and on my own. It is of constitutional importance but it also does have the great tactical advantage of keeping the Party united, and I think people will gradually come to see this.
Monday 14 June
UCS is in difficulty. Looked through my old files and came across a confidential memorandum written by Nicholas Ridley for Heath in 1969 about how to cut up UCS. I rang up Mark Arnold-Forster at the Guardian and gave it to him. I received it from Eric Varley – I don’t know where he got it from – and I hadn’t used it before because I was a bit worried about revealing a document which had been pirated in some way, picked up from a wastepaper basket or whatever. But with the possibility of UCS being knifed today – indeed the near certainty of it – I decided to let it come out.
I drafted a statement on UCS, calling for public ownership and workers’ control in the yard itself, and went into the House of Commons. I had a filthy cold and felt terrible. I saw Harold Wilson and he approved the draft.
Davies made his statement in the House, that UCS would liquidate, and I attacked him violently, blaming him for it.
Had an urgent meeting with the Scottish Members and then decided to fly up to Clydebank with Hugh McCartney, the local MP. We went to Clydebank Town Hall where all the shop stewards were gathered and I reported what had happened in the House in the afternoon and what a betrayal it was. I was asked what attitude I would adopt to the workers taking control of the yard. I said if they felt this was right I thought their action was fully justified. This of course was encouraging or approving illegal action, but I had thought it all out some time before and I am sure it was the right thing to say. Then I asked them what they wanted me to say in the debate tomorrow. About an hour and a half later I caught the sleeper back to London and prepared for the debate.
Thursday 17 June
Our 22nd wedding anniversary.
‘Yesterday’s Men’ was shown on television. This is the programme which was supposed to be a serious look at the Opposition and the makers had brought their cameras into the Shadow Cabinet
. In fact it was a complete send-up. It was interesting because they had just taken the insignificant bits and strung them together, which made the whole thing trivial. They knifed Harold as hard as they could.
Friday 18 June
To Scotland by train, to the Clydebank yard with Frank McElhone to go over with the shop stewards what they wanted to do next. The workforce has theoretically taken over the yard today and, seen from the outside, this looks like a very revolutionary act. But when you get through the barricades and ask, as a friend, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’, they haven’t a strategy, they haven’t a plan, they haven’t got anything at all. I probed how far they wanted workers’ control to go, and they were very uncertain. But it helped me because I found a form of words for a statement that simply said that any management pattern would have to be acceptable to the workers as a whole.
Sunday 18 July
This evening I went to Geoffrey Goodman’s home in Mill Hill for a gathering of the Left with Michael Foot and Jill Craigie, Peter and Liz Shore, Dick and Bridget Clements, Alex Jarratt who used to be an official at the Department of Employment and is now Managing Director of IPC, and Leo Abse and his wife.
At dinner Jill Craigie suddenly turned to Peter and me and said, ‘I realise that the next Leader of the Party will be one or other of you and you will be getting the knives out for each other, but it’s more likely to be Peter.’ Peter was flattered but slightly embarrassed by this.
Monday 19 July
PLP meeting at 6.30 and Harold explained the procedure in the House for the Common Market debate on Wednesday. Norman Atkinson came out against Europe on ideological grounds and said that if we were taken in by the Tories, we should pledge ourselves to get out.
Barbara Castle made a speech for forty minutes saying that the party had been cornered by the Tories on the terms. She said there should be a select committee (which I agree with), devaluation would be necessary for entry, we would surrender our freedom of action, she had always been against entry even in the Cabinet, that when we had reapplied we were not committed to the Common Agricultural Policy and now the French had actually caught us out by entrenching the CAP before we were admitted. She said that the objectives must be to federalise but these were never discussed and if we supported entry we would be accepting a political coalition in this country. It was a powerful ideological case against entry.
Then Roy Jenkins said there was no great current of anti-Market feeling in the constituency Parties. He thought there should be consistency in commitment since the last Labour Cabinet, by a majority, voted to enter and the terms of entry would have been accepted by the Cabinet. If we didn’t go in now, he said, it would be worse than if we had never applied. He didn’t accept that we must reject entry because the Tories were in power. He attacked the negative insularity of the anti-Marketeers and said that socialism in one country was a slogan and not a policy and socialists in the other EEC countries wanted our help.
It was a powerful speech and the arguments carried a great deal of weight. But of course it was defiant – an arrogant and an élitist speech. A demonstration had been prearranged afterwards and people banged and hammered and shouted. Roy’s speech was of course a direct attack on Harold Wilson and also on Healey and Crosland, who had climbed off the fence against the Market, and it changed the political situation in the Party at one stroke.
Afterwards I went down to the Smoking Room and sat with the Left, where Barbara was saying, ‘We must organise, we must fight.’ Michael Foot was shaken by it and I think it would certainly confirm Michael’s determination to stand against Roy as Deputy Leader. It took you right back to 1951 or 1961 – the Party at its worst.
Tuesday 20 July
Went to the Trade and Industry Group meeting at the House, which had been summoned to consider the employment situation: while I was there a message was brought over to me to go and see Harold Wilson. So I walked over to his house, 5 Lord North Street, and found Harold in his shirtsleeves, pacing up and down the room.
He told me that he intended to make a statement at the Party meeting later today. He was extremely agitated about Roy Jenkins’s great speech at the Party meeting last night. He said he was going to lay down the law and while he remained Leader he would handle the Party as he thought right: one of his real ‘smack of government’ or ‘dog licence’-type speeches. Finally the text of his statement came over, he having written it and Marcia having made amendments. The first draft, which Marcia had cut down, was even more self-justificatory and obsessed with his leadership and referred to the number of weekends he had addressed meetings since the Election. He said to me, ‘I don’t know, I may just give up the Party leadership, they can stuff it as far as I am concerned. I pay out of my own pocket £15,000 a year to be Party Leader. I finance my own office. I have got an overdraft with my bank. All the money from my memoirs has gone. I don’t know why I go on. But I’ll smash CDS (the Campaign for Democratic Socialism) before I go,’ and I’ll do this and I’ll do that. He was full of boasts but underneath was desperately insecure and unhappy.
I walked back from his house – I didn’t particularly want to be seen with him in his car. But it was interesting that he called me in, which he only does when there is trouble.
I went over to the House and to the PLP meeting, where the statement was presented and it was received with acute embarrassment by the Party. One or two people at the end sort of pretended to applaud but it was very uncomfortable and nobody – except for a few middle-of-the-road people who thought it was necessary to straighten the Party out – could understand why he had made it.
I had a brief talk with one or two of the journalists, then had a meal in the Tea Room with Roy Mason and Frank McElhone. The position really is this: by making the leadership an issue and by using phrases like ‘whoever is Leader after October’, Harold has put himself in the most vulnerable position of all and I think it not impossible that somebody will stand against him: it might be Jim, it could hardly be Roy Jenkins or any of the others, but I think there is just a possibility.
I don’t myself see much chance for the deputy leadership because I think Roy’s honesty will win him support and the Left is almost bound to nominate Michael Foot, as the most direct attack on Roy that it can make. Michael is not an ambitious man. He is getting on himself (he is fifty-eight) and never having been in the Cabinet, he would be very much a stopgap candidate and would probably be defeated by Roy: so there may be some pressure on me.
I am almost ashamed to talk about this in my diary because it makes it seem that I am mainly concerned with that, which I hope I am not. But egoism eats up all politicians in time, which is probably the case for getting rid of them.
Thursday 29 July
The UCS statement, and the Government published a pessimistic White Paper by the so-called Four Wise Men, of which Robens was a member. There was extreme dismay in the House.
I ought to mention that Harold had called me in before the UCS statement was made and said that he would like to come to Scotland next week. He was particularly keen to do this because he wanted to expose Heath, who was sailing in the Admiral’s Cup on Wednesday, and Harold had this idea, which he himself described as a gimmick, of sailing up the Clyde in a boat, visiting the doomed shipyards while Heath was yachting in the Admiral’s Cup. He even suggested he might wear his outfit as an Elder Brother of Trinity House, which is the honorary title all Prime Ministers have. I must admit my contempt for Harold, which has been pretty high this last week, reached a peak. He said he would neither condemn nor condone the occupation. Well, that’s no good, and I told him so. I was rather worried that he would wreck it all, but clearly he was getting on my bandwagon while being a bit more cautious about it.
Monday 2 August
I opened the House of Commons UCS debate which we had demanded, and my speech was perfectly all right. I got the case on the record but against bitterly hostile Tory benches and a certain amount of anxiety on our backbenches as to whether
I had gone too far in my support for the occupation of the yards.
John Davies called me an ‘evil genius’. Heath had cancelled his Admiral’s Cup racing for the day and was sitting looking sour. It was a short debate but certainly worth while. There is no doubt that the press think the Government was right to wind up UCS and are critical of the line I have been taking.
Tuesday 3 August
I went to the House and saw the industrial correspondents on the workers’ control issue, which I am going to write about in Tribune this week. Yesterday I talked to Norman Atkinson, to Johnny Prescott and one or two other young left-wing trade union MPs who are very much afraid, as I am, that I might appear to be misleading the men.
Friday 6 August
The papers carried a great deal about the Oz trial in which Richard Neville, the Editor, and two of his colleagues have been jailed for publishing an ‘obscene’ edition. Yesterday in the House, when the sentences were announced, Bill Hamling the Labour MP for Wolverhampton West, who is a member of the Humanists Group, handed me a motion condemning the sentences as being contrary to British justice, signed by Dick Taverne, who is a QC, Tom Driberg and Frank Allaun. I signed it too.
When I rang Frank McElhone today in Aberdeen, where he is on holiday, he was worried about this and said there had been a lot of criticism in Scotland of my signing the motion and I would lose fifty votes for the leadership. I said I felt deeply that it was wrong to jail these young people. This is the difficulty, if you are going to go out simply for high office, then you have got to be cautious and I am not sure that I want to be. I would rather stand up for what I believe. Frank was worried and I tried to reassure him.
Then I sat down and thought about how one would deal with criticisms of the line that I had taken. The truth is that middle-aged parents are the last to criticise the young because we were the war generation and the young are fighting against the obscenity of racial hatred and poverty and war. I jotted this down and showed it to Hilary but he thought it was too apologetic and I had better simply stick by what I had done.
