We have lost someone irreplaceable in our lives

The Labour Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s to someone like me, coming out of education and into work and wanting to get involved in left politics, was anything but attractive. The Callaghan Government looked tired, uninspiring and unable to command the loyalty even of its own natural allies in the trade unions.

Joining the Party in the run up to the 1983 election was more hope than expectation.  But join I did because there was someone whose voice provided that hope; who made you think there was both an argument to win and a moral purpose to pursue.

Apologies to those who want a balanced and critical appraisal of Tony Benn, this is a tribute to the best mind and most compassionate public figure of my political life.

I didn’t agree with Tony on everything, even in 1983, but that is not the point.  He elevated politics above the sniping, personalised gamesmanship it was and is and spoke to the better part of human nature.

Ed Miliband in his reaction to Tony’s death said ‘he was an incredibly kind man. I did work experience with him at the age of 16. I may have been just a teenager but he treated me as an equal’. Even without allowing for the pressures on him and the debilitating attacks from the media and from opponents, that is a telling compliment, which I doubt could be applied to many people in public life. Though it could to Ed himself.

It shows that the public face of Tony Benn, measured, courteous and considerate, was a true reflection of his personality.  As he put it ‘say what you believe and believe what you say’.

He was not a secular saint. The battles he fought within the Labour Party took few prisoners on either side.  He was very tough, and he needed to be. The miners’ strike, in which he played a leading part, reminded an older generation lulled by Butskellism and taught a new generation assaulted by Thatcherism that the question ‘whose side are you on?’ still needed an answer.

Tony was always on the right side in those battles.  That is not to say he always called the issue right but he had an unerring instinct to support the underdog, the person discriminated against and those fighting for a better life. Whether that was in the struggle against apartheid and colonialism, supporting employment rights or the achievements of the 1945 government, which he could contrast from experience with the 1930s.

Some will say this is a rose-tinted and naive view of Bennism.  That he was a divisive figure who cost the Labour Party votes and seats in so doing harmed the very people whose cause he championed. But it was not Tony Benn who left to set up his own Party in the 80s assuring Thatcher of a decade of majority rule on a minority mandate. Some of the defectors and his detractors are back in the fold, and welcome at that, others are propping up a Government that is more focused in its promotion of privilege and attacks on the poor than Thatcher ever managed.

Tony was always a part of the Labour Movement and an asset to it.

The final time I saw him and heard him speak was last May when he unveiled a plaque in St John’s Churchyard in Wapping, commemorating Leveller leader Thomas Rainsborough, buried there in 1648 after being ambushed and killed by Royalists.

Though very frail, Tony made a typically all-encompassing speech that moved from the Civil War to the history of protest and struggle in the intervening centuries to the current challenges for the Left.  His enchanted audience ranged from Civil War reenactors to Stop the War activists, assorted politicos and the local, mainly Muslim, East End community.

I said to Jeremy Corbyn afterwards that I had intended to point out to the audience that in west London we regarded the Levellers as rather petty bourgeois, preferring the Diggers who turned Cobham Common into a Socialist collective, but thought that might be a rather pedantic postscript to Tony’s tour de force.

You should have done, Jeremy replied, Tony would have loved it.  Another perspective, an alternative view of history, an argument.  And the idea that you could be critiquing him from the left.

Tony Benn encouraged, inspired and set an example of how to do politics to more than one generation. Heartfelt commiserations to Hilary, all of Tony’s family and our movement. We have lost someone irreplaceable in our lives.