Tony Benn: why words matter

With Tony Benn’s death comes an immense amount of sadness, a man of great conviction is gone. But he’s left with us an important lesson. Benn, a passionate orator who treated everyone as equal, both in importance and intellect, showed that politics isn’t about maintaining the status quo. It’s about achieving a fairer society for all.

Benn’s belief in equality is reflected in many of his decisions. But for me, one of the most significant is when, even once he was reinstated as an MP after his inherited peerage prohibited him from sitting in the Commons, in the early 1970s Anthony Wedgewood Benn made a conscious decision to become Tony Benn. I read this name change as a message that politics is more than an echo chamber for those with inherited privilege. Instead, it should be an arena in which no one feels like they don’t belong. A place where everyone feels like his or her voice is legitimate. Only then can it be a motor for positive change.

Yet, this kind of politics is absent in our contemporary Commons. Using their connections and privilege, many MPs come straight out of university and settle easily into the political world. Parliament has become an exclusive club open to very few. And many politicians are interested in keeping it that way.

To understand this, it’s worth taking a leaf out of Benn’s book and thinking about how we refer to one another. It’s not uncommon for those in the Westminster bubble to be labelled as the political ‘elite’. This one word underlines how politics has become a place of wealth and privilege. However, at the same time, it plays a part in creating an unhelpful dichotomy. In relation to the political ‘elite’, the electorate are deemed as ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’.

People use these terms across the political spectrum. There are those politicians and members of the commentariat who in their efforts to avoid uttering the politically-charged term ‘working class’, use ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’ as a substitute. While nodding to the fact that their politics take into account hard working people (to borrow David Cameron’s words), they also use these terms to neutralise the political power of class politics in British society. On the other side of the coin, there are those, who use these two words with much better intentions. They’re said with compassion and empathy, as a way to emphasise that in a harsh climate of unnecessary austerity measures many people in society, including those who aren’t a working-class, are struggling to survive.

But, whichever camp they’re coming from, these words that blend so easily into our everyday vocabulary have a negative affect on the way we see ourselves. Every time I hear someone from within the political establishment casually refer to other human beings as ordinary or normal, I shudder inside. The implication is that politicians, the rich, and rich politicians are extraordinary.  While the rest of us aren’t. At its crux, the message this sends is that you can only effect change if you qualify as part of the elite. Unless, of course, you’re able to overcome your ordinariness. This is a dangerous road we’ve gone down because it reinforces most people’s feeling that politics isn’t a place for them.

And so, this is where I take encouragement from Tony Benn, who saw every human being as important. He was right. We are all extraordinary in our own way. We shouldn’t allow those in positions of power to use language to make us feel any other way. Like Benn, I think if we overcome this, we can change the world.