Benn, Tony (1925–)

Born in 1925, Antony Wedgewood Benn entered the House of Commons of the British Parliament in 1950. Initially, he was a protégé of right-wing Labour leader High Gaitskell and was shortly brought into the shadow cabinet by him. However, following the death of his father, Viscount Stansgate, Benn was elevated to the House of Lords, thus disbarring him from the Commons. He spent the next 3 years fighting to change the law so that he could renounce his hereditary peerage and contest an election for a seat in the Commons. This was the first act that, in hindsight, marked Benn out as a radical and rebel, albeit one that was an English, Christian socialist.

Prior to 1970, Benn was on the right wing of the Labour Party, but the disillusioning experience of the 1964–1970 Labour governments, in which he was a Minister, saw him move to the left. Benn opposed British support for the United States in Vietnam and Labour's attempt to regulate the unions. These, and the industrial struggles in the early 1970s, saw Benn establish his links with the Institute of Workers' Control and campaign against the precursor to the European Union—the European Economic Community.

The trajectory of moving further left was aided by the disastrous Labour government of 1974–1979, in which Labour attacked the unions and began implementing monetarist policies, ultimately paving the way for Thatcherism in 1979. Benn became the rallying point for a renewed left movement within Labour and the unions, whereby he just lost the election to become Labour deputy-leader to a right-winger (by 0.5%) in 1981 but succeeded in democratizing the internal processes and structures of the party.

In the early 1980s, many on the left who had previously been outside Labour joined Labour, encouraged by Bennism, and as a result, Benn became the single most important defender of the peace, anti-nuclear, pro-women, pro-gay, union, and anti-racist movements. Although he lost his Bristol seat in Labour's disastrous showing in the general election of 1983, [Page 231]Benn reentered the House of Commons the next year as a member of Parliament for Chesterfield.

Benn stood out against Labour's move to accommodate to Thatcherism and neoliberalism under successive Labour leaders, thus becoming the unassailable elder statesman of the British left. When he left Parliament in 2001, he did so, in his own words, to spend more time in politics.

Politically, Benn is an intriguing character. A lifelong and committed Christian, his political compass comes from moral indignation against injustice. He has always been on weaker ground on his alternative to capitalism, and to the extent that he is a socialist, he is best characterized as a radical social democrat. One of his particular campaigns has been to democratize the British state, in the historical tradition of the Levellers and Chartists. Despite being a dogged critic of Labour, he remains committed to Labour as the vehicle for social change, believing that pressure from outside Parliament and the unions will lead to Labour being reclaimed for his brand of socialism. In tune with this, Benn has taken a nonsectarian approach to working with the different parts of the left.

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