BRITAIN Alliance for socialism - Tony Benn speaks THE FOLLOWING is the text of a speech by Tony Benn, Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) and leader of the left-wing, delivered to a meeting of socialists in London on November 16-17. The weekend meeting, entitled 'Alliance for Socialism' was organised by Socialist Action, a revolutionary socialist newspaper inside the Labour Party.
The speech is taken from the November 22, 1985 issue of Socialist Action. All footnotes and bracketed additions are by International Viewpoint.
defeat in 1983. From 1983 there has been a major swing to the right in the central organs of the Labour Party -though not at rank and file level.
The Labour [Party] conference and the labour movement are now seen in my opinion, as the first stage of the rocket that fires the front bench into office. As at Cape Canaveral, the labour movement provides the initial lift and then falls harmlessly into the Caribbean while the parliamentary capsule goes where it wants.
Since 1983, we have seen the downgrading of the national executive, the downgrading of the role of conference, and a downgrading of the role of policy itself. The NEC has decided that we'll have no Labour programme 1986 which is what we should have. There has also been an upgrading of the role of the shadow cabinet now funded by the government through state aid, an upgrading of the role of the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party], and the appearance whiCh the radicalisation
I would like to congratulate Socialist Action on organising this conference. There has been a wide range of contributions. I think everybody here appreciates how serious the situation is for the people of this country.
There is an attack on living standards, on the unions, on women, on the Irish, on the Black community, on democracy, on civil liberties - and a technique of division is being practised which is to some extent effective. The apparatus. of the state is being used quite ruthlessly and of course the media are being used on a daily basis in order to maintain that division.
I agree with what has been said, that Britain is the last colony left in the British empire, and that all the techniques of repression that were tried elswhere are now being used against our own people. Anyone who saw that recent TV programme, Brass Tacks, about the police will know that the colonial policing methods have been applied here.
At the same time we have a large American army here. We are really subject to American foreign policy and defence control. We are also, in terms of our domestic legislation, integrated with the Treaty of Rome. And the bankers have an enormous power over our economy.
It is against that background that we have to look and see what happened within the Labour Party. And I want to turn to that first.
We have had a very big change in the Labour Party over the last 15 years, beginning when Heath was elected, much of it triggered off by the earlier experience of office under the first Wilson government [elected in 1964]. That was when the radicali14 sation began. What I think people began to realise - and Diane Abbott touched on it when she talked about power rather than office (1) - was that successive Labour governments, became the intensive care units for capitalism.
When capitalism got in a real mess and the people who ran it could no longer control it, they invited a Labour government to take over which used its capacity to win the loyalty of the working class to make the sacrifices to put the system right. The government then lost us the election and handed the system back, fully recovered, to the people who ran it in the first place. That intensive care unit role for Labour governments is an absolute distortion of the original function of the Labour Party.
Thus we had the 1970-74 radicalisation, a further Labour government, and another defeat in 1979, and the campaign (which was absolutely correct) to try to deal with that problem by making the parliamentary party accountable to the Labour conference. Looking back, I think that campaign needs to be restarted, for it was certainly effective. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) left and that was an indication of the real position: they had tried to run the party from the top, failed and defected.
But, of course, in the period after 1981 there was a major swing to the right organised by some political and trade union leaders; the Labour front bench supported the Falklands [Malvinas] war, which absolutely undermined Labour's peace policy: we had the witch-hunting beginning; and we had the election
- which began when the radicalisation started - of the Trade Unions for a Labour Victory, made up of general secretaries who drip feed the national executive with money if they agree with what the NEC [National Executive Committee of the Labour Party] wants to do.
Moreover the role of the electorate has been shrunk, and is only perceived to exist now in the statistics produced by the public opinion pollsters. The electorate as such, with all its many problems and needs, disappears in weighted, balanced samples which are then studied like the omens in an ancient tribal ritual. This polling has played a part in the new strategy: distancing us from the struggle - of the miners, of Liverpool, of Bernie Grant (2), and so on — the repudiation of the left, and of course the renewed witch-hunting which goes very widely indeed.
My fear about that - quite apart from thinking it's not the right way forward - is that every time you read about another repudiation, you find that the party itself is apparently confirming the analysis of Thatcher and Owen [leader of the SP]: namely that Labour is full of nutters and loonie lefts and dangerous people. And now everything is beginning to
1. Diane Abbott, a leader of the fight for Black sections inside the Labour Party, also spoke at the weekend event. She has recently been selected as parliamentary candidate for Hackney North, London and is likely to become the first Black woman MP in Britain.
2. The reference to Liverpool is to the stand taken by Liverpool councillors against government attempts • to restrict local financing. Bernie Grant is the Labour leader of Haringey council. He is well-known for his support for Black sections in the Party and his stand taken against police brutality during last year's riots in Tottenham, London. Tottenham falls within the borough of Haringey.
International Viewpoint 27 January 1986
rotate around wnat is thought of as a loyalty test to the leaders. Much of the realignment which is supposed to be going on is apparently designed to realign us around personalities rather than around policies.
The latest charge made against anybody who asks for anything is that. of 'impossibilism'. I don't know whether "impossibilism' began with Leon Trotsky or not. But I suppose by that test the eight-hour day was an impossibilist demand, and that the Chartists and the suffragettes made impossibilist demands, and the Tolpuddle martyrs made an impossibilist demand (3).
If anyone demands more than is currently on offer from the top it means you are charged with impossibilism, and hence trying to lose the election.
The effect of all this is deliberately to lower expectations, and that is what the Mitterrand example is about. 'Don't think we'll do what he did. He came unstuck, so we won't even try it!' Full employment is therefore no longer on the agenda...
All this is moving us in the direction of a hung parliament. And Neville Hough in Ireland last week said *Labour might have to depend on Shirley Williams [SDP leader] to topple Thatcher'. That was the clearest statement from the chairman of the Labour Party as to where all this could lead us.
I remember 1959, when Macmillan won his great election, and said socialism was no longer needed because we were so prosperous. There was a film called I'm all right Jack. Peter Sellers was in it, they made fun of trade unionists. It was all old hat, you didn't need it. Gaitskell [former leader of the Labour Party] then tried to change Clause IV [of the Labour Party constitution], an early attempt to realign us to meet the demands of a prosperous welfare capitalism.
Now we're being realigned to fit in to a new right-wing consensus. Mrs Thatcher, in an interview in the Financial Times the other day said in effect, one of the reasons she was staying on was because she didn't want to leave until the Labour Party had come to terms with the fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of the rich that she was carrying through.
One of the effects of all this on the left is that there has been a crisis of perspectives, by which I mean that there is not a shared analysis of the left at the moment of what is going on. The Euro-communists are in conflict with the Morning Star (4), even with Socialist Action there is some disagreement about the meaning of permanent revolution, and in the of permanent revolution, and in the
Tony Benn, MP. (DR) WRP [the Workers Revolutionary Party] there are some arguments about what should happen. Some left trade union general secretaries are in conflict with other right wing unions of which Roy Lynk (5) is now the leader. The broad left within the unions are not always united themselves.
The psychological effect of this is to create fear, to create division within our society, and to create suspicion. When you are in difficulties it's very easy to look over your shoulder and say a Black has taken your job, or whatever is the National Front line -because a certain sense of hopelessness has been created.
Here I will say something I hope won't give offence. When Thatcher says 'there is no alternative' , and it becomes the chorus of the media, we on the left must not respond by saying there will be 'permanent betrayals? Reflect for a moment on that. If the left says we're always going to be betrayed, and Mrs Thatcher says there are no alternatives — we would be saying the same thing. That is a very dangerous line for us to take.
As far as the general public are concerned, the people we try to represent, the effect of all that I've described is to make the political process increasingly remote from their experience. I don't believe that all these little meetings, as when the 'cuddly left' was recently born, has any resonance with the public at all. If you're unemployed, if you haven't got a decent home, if your mother's waiting for a hip operation, if your dad can't live on the pension, if you're worried about nuclear weapons, and you hear there's another dinner at St Ermines where certain people are going to gather together to realign it's just as irrelevant as it could possibly be. It's irrelevant to people's needs.
All that people are being offered now is anti-Thatcherism in many varieties, but no real alternative to the policy that's been carried through.
We've got to face the fact that a hung parliament is a possibility and a non- socialist majority in the next parliament is a near certainty. And we've got to look a bit ahead too.
We may get a defeat of the present prime minister. She may be removed before the election because the Tories are not very loyal to their leaders when they fail. I don't rule out the possibility that if support for the Tories continues to decline the Earl of Stockton [former Tory prime minister, Harold Macmillan] will find himself sitting next to the Countess of Finchley [Thatcher's constituency ] and they can sort it out in a private word because the Tories will get rid of them. But the day she goes, and particularly if the Tory Party is defeated, despite everything I've said there will be a big surge of expectations. People will say 'this is the end of the crisis' • They'll have been told it's all about Thatcherism, and when Thatcher goes they'll believe that it is the end.
And that presents a danger for us as a socialist movement. For if, following the rising expectation, there was a terrible disenchantment, it could be followed by a swing to the right and socialism would go down in the subsequent debacle. Our job is to see that doesn't happen.
Now may I say something about certain cul-de-sacs which the left must avoid - the false trails. First of all the temptation to respond personally to attacks on the left that are made personally. I don't believe that has a resonance with the public. I don't think it's the right way forward. Secondly, I don't think that the right way forward is to try and personalise the argument by a challenge to the leadership - because to be quite candid, I think that if that happens, the desire to defeat Thatcher would be so great that the left's strength would not in any way be reflected in the outcome of such a challenge.
I don't believe that the answer
3. The Chartists were a broad-based movement of the mid-nineenth century campaigning for a Charter of democratic demands including the right to vote. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were a group of six trade unionists from Tolpuddle, Dorsetshire who were deported in the 1880s for setting up a trade union.
4. The Morning Star' is now the paper of the hardline Stalinist wing of what was the Communist Party of Great Britain. The party split when the 'Morning Star' editorial staff were expelled. Those supporting a more Euro-communist line have since established a new newspaper, '7 Days'.
5. Roy Lynk is a leader of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM), the scab union which was established as a splitoff from the TUC-affiliated National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) following the strike. Recently, the right-wing-led Electricians Union caused considerable controversy by holding discussions with the UDM. See IV' No 86, November 11, 1985.
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lies in sectarianism, if by that is meant the idea that somehow you can go on dividing and subdividing till you're only with people with whom you wholly agree. I don't that splitting the party is believe right. There are people who say, in effect, that there is no hope. That's absolutely wrong. Those in the past who have left, like the ILP [Independent Labour Party] have withered on the bough.
We have got to accept that the Labour Party is the vehicle by which we're going to make change. If you look at the decisions taken at the 1985 Labour Party conference you will find they are very good indeed: for example, breaking off relations with South Africa, ending nuclear power, supporting the miners, supporting the local councillors, supporting women's rights and gay rights too. The Labour conference at [the town of Bournemouth, if you forget the media hype for a moment, was an excellent indication of the strength of socialism within the party.
There is one point I want to touch on, because it often features on the left, and that is the role of parliament. I think there is some genuine confusion about this. The argument about extra-parliamentary versus parliamentary, put in its crude and simplest form, is really a false argument.
If you doubt what I say, look at the Tory Party who have never believed that their strength lay in parliament. Their strength lies outside parliament, but they need people inside parliament to control the statute book, to enrich the people outside parliament who pay for their election campaign. That view of parliament, as the control of the statute book being part of the process of transformation, seems to me to be unanswerable. We too need the statute book to control the state, to prevent it from enslaving us, to deal with certain economic questions, to liberate to enfranchise working people (I've never liked the phrase 'empower the working class, I've always thought they had power but didn't use it, but we would have to enfranchise the working people and that is what the statute book is about.
I also think there's some confusion in arguments about reform versus revolution. My complaint is not that we've had reform rather than revolution, but that we haven't had reform. All the periods of Labour governments have manipulated the system, sometimes to our advantage as in 1945 but we have never changed the power structure. And it's that failure to make the major reforms open to us to make that has led us into some of the difficulties that we're in. 16 ho sharon is often made that we The charge is often made that we want to lose. It is a wholly fraudulent argument. I've never met anybody who actually believes that if, by our conscious decision, Thatcher could be given another term in some way that would strengthen the left. It would not. We have therefore to try to build up from the bottom.
Can I turn now to the role of new social forces, which is the jargon for what we're discussing today? There is the argument, associated with Professor Hobsbawn, of a declining working class. I think there are a number of points to be said about that analysis. First of all the working class is always changing its composition and always has. Secondly, when Britain had a working class of a classic character, we never had socialism. So the theory that you could look back on a golden age when you could have got socialism because the working class was big enough to give it is not true. We've never had that.
It also seems to me a very strange — and this is why the miners' strike was so unpopular with the Eurocommunists - that such an argument was launched at the beginning of the greatest working class struggle in the history of Britain, the miners' strike. That was not supposed to be able ever to happen again. And if it happened it was supposed to be seen as irrele-
Actually, the miners' strike mobilised the very alliance that we're talking about at this conference today. The political consciousness, the central role of women in the strike as an independent reinforcing element, the link with the Black community, with the Irish struggles, and so on, came out of it.
Also, as I'm sure must be becoming apparent, the militancy of the so-called white collar workers is rising. Look at the teachers, look at the nurses, look at the GCHQ (6) people. If anyone who thinks that because you've moved to a certain level that somehow excludes you from any form of militancy they are wholly misunderstanding the nature of the struggle.
But how should we approach these new social forces? I find that I agree very strongly with Diane Abbott who talks about people who anguish about women and about the Black communities. What is now being attempted in the Labour Party is an electoral incorporation or manipulation of the new social forces: the idea that if you say the right thing somehow you solve the problem.
This theory argues that you can incorporate women, incorporate Blacks, incorporate the peace movement, incorporate the green moveand pa thout actually ment into your party without actually changing the party itself. That is itself. absolutely false and destined to failure.
If people say we want Black sections or women's rights to be recog nised then class comes out of a dusty cupboard and is used to reject the demand of the Blacks on the grounds 'it's not about colour it's about class'. So then you look at Labour's economic policy document, where you'd think that class would be in capital letters — and it's disappeared in favour of consensus. Class is used to shut off the new social forces and then is forgotten if you are going to discuss what transformation would be about. 'We've got to recreate the Socialist tradition'
I'm absolutely certain that the only way we're going to link up with those new social forces, somehow or another, is by the refounding of the labour movement - in such a way as to open it to the new social forces which must be properly statistically and politically able to make their demands within the framework of a party now dominated by white middle class males.
There is one important initiative here we should support. The Labour women's committee have now decided to have shadow elections for the national executive. They're going to have elections for all women to take part in, culminating in the women's conference. Of course it is not in the constitution, but they will produce an elected slate, which I hope the whole labour movement takes up and then elects them all onto the national executive.
We've got to open up new affiliations and we've got to recreate the socialist tradition within the labour movement. That is what I think our task is about.
When you look at that and ask how do you actually do it, the answer is that we must root it in an experience. You can't approach people with a textbook and say 'on page 88 this was said in 1883'. That would be bibliolatry, where people used to stick a pin in the Bible to read their fortune.
You can't approach socialism in that way. It's got to be rooted in people's experience, it's got to be about whose side you're on, whether it's miners or Liverpool or the people
6. GCHQ is the government communications headquarters in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. In January, 1984, the government banned trade-union membership there, provoking widespread protest in the trade-union movement.
International Viewpoint 27 January 1986
in Tottenham. Any other basis is in Tottenham An the he going to fail. It's got to build solidarity, it's got to develop internationalism.
My approach to internationalism is very, very simple. They've got the same problems in South Africa that we've got here. We were a developing country till a couple of hundred years ago. After all, the collective memory of what it was like in feudal England hasn't changed. England is still a feudal country - you just need to see the opening of parliament on television to realise that. There was the chief on her stool: there were the wise men of the tribe with long hair (they call them judges); there were the witch-doctors robed as bishops; and there were the lords dressed in animal skins, ermine, indicating their ownership of land. It's a shared analysis with the Third World that is going to make internationalism real.
We have got to campaign for basic demands and build our broad alliance on the demand for jobs, the demand for homes, the demand for schools, the demand for health care, the demand for dignity when you're old, for equality and an end to discrimination, and the demand for peace. We have got to approach socialism through all forms of experience of exploitation.
Believe it or not we had some document at the Labour National Executive's home policy committee last Monday saying that we were going to have a policy for those who were not employed, like women at home, as if those who work to raise a family were somehow non-employed people. The experience of exploitation may well come just because you are a woman or Black or gay.
Unless we open ourselves to those experiences in the way that trade union affiliation opens up the party to working experience in factories and pits, we're not going to develop good policies. We must look again at the concept of the manifesto. For many years I spent my time trying to get the manifesto under the control of the national executive, though when I look at the executive now I wonder if it was worthwhile.
We cannot have a manifesto composed of promises made to the public by politicians. The manifesto has got to be redefined as meaning those demands we make here and now. We make them when Labour's there, we make them if Owen's there. A manifesto of demands is quite different from a manifesto of promises.
I mention this only briefly, but in Chesterfield [Benn's constituency town] we're trying to do just that. There, arising out of the by-election and the miners' strike, our membership has gone up from 300 to 1500.
We got a 12 per cent increase in the
Labour vote at the county council elections. We've got a community defence campaign. We've got an international committee set up now. (I don't know if other constituencies have done it.) That international committee is also going to work with Anti Apartheid, with the Black groups in the area. It's going to be an international committee that is a centre of internationalism built into the structure of the party. We've got workplace branches. We need plans prepared for the future: new local government legislation, and aims and objectives which we're discussing at our conference in about four weeks' time. 'We don't need permission to take action'
The policies we're demanding in our manifesto must be for full employment. I know the Million Jobs A Year pamphlet which the Campaign group endorsed is not perfect, but actually at the root of most of the questions of Black people and women is mass unemployment. Unless we can tackle that problem, and do it seriously, you're not going to be able to do more than a cosmetic job.
The manifesto, in my opinion, must include the withdrawal from Ireland. All this latest media hype about Fitzgerald and Mrs Thatcher is not going to work. The manifesto must include a policy of non-alignment in British foreign policy: to take us out of NATO, because NATO's nature is being seen more clearly. It must include common ownership of the banks, of land and of major companies. But not a common ownership which ends up with a MacGregor or a Robens [present and former chairs of the National Coal Board] in charge, but one which allows people who make the wealth to make the decisions that influence the companies and enterprises in which they work.
If you look back over the history of the ninteenth century and our whole history, you will find that it is the democratic challenge they fear most. They can live with socialist rhetoric, just as they can live with the Archbishop of Canterbury on Easter Sunday talking about the brotherhood of man - so long as nothing happens till next Easter Sunday.
But what is really threatening to the establishment is to demand accountability: accountability of the unions to their members, of local government to their own community, of industry to those who work in it, accountability in foreign and defence policy and party democracy put back on the agenda. I agree with the right of recall and I've got a very radical suggestion: that we should have a socialist on every shortlist [for parliamentary candidates]. We have got to prepare it all now.
Can I just say in conclusion. It is a very hard time in a way, but it is also a time for action and for hope. I find that reading labour history is really encouraging because almost everthing that's happening has happened many, many times before.
When I saw the police in Chesterfield I remembered that the government sent the Dublin Fusiliers during the miners' strike of 1983, and again in 1910. In the 1820s I remember they were hanging Luddites all over the place, literally hanging them. They had barracks built after the French revolution, which frightened the British establishment quite as much as the Russian revolution.
It's all happened before. The difference between then and now is that when those people worked for a different society they didn't know it was possible. We know they were able to make gains. In that sense we're doing it again, and this time we intend to do it properly.
The system is in crisis and neither Thatcher, nor Macmillan, nor Heath, nor Pym [Tory leader of the so-called 'wets' faction], nor Steel [leader of the Liberal Party ], have any real answers. What gives me the feeling of confidence now - because I do have it very strongly - is that more and more people are learning what it's all really about. Political consciousness is rather a fancy phrase but that's what's happening.
I even met lawyers in Chesterfield on Friday who came to complain about what's happening to them under the new Crown Prosecution Service, that solicitors were not being treated properly. The nurses came two days earlier talking about what was happening to them. Capitalism is attacking the professions as well as the manual working class. A lot of people are learning.
And we have surely learned something else from the last year. We don't need permission before we take action. The Greenham Common women didn't need permission, Arthur Scargill didn't need permission. If he had written to Len Murray, [leader of the trade union confederation, the TUC], he would still be waiting for a letter on House of Lords notepaper telling him to go ahead.
The capacity to take action is vested in us. When you look at it that way, there are grounds for hope and confidence: so long as we're clear that we either do it ourselves or it won't be done at all.
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