RIP Tony Benn

[kentonio]

Labour statesman Tony Benn has passed away aged 88. I never agreed with most of his political views, but he was a genuinely good man, and the political world is much poorer for his passing.

I once watched a politics program with Mr Benn where he was being patronized and talked over by a young presenter who loved the sound of his own voice a little too much. Despite the inevitable frustration it must have caused him, he remained polite and kind throughout. It infuriated me to the extent that I wrote Mr Benn a letter that day thanking him for his patience and dignity. I never expected to hear anything back, it just made me feel a little better, but to my surprise a few days later the man had taken the time to hand write a reply.

I wish we had more people with his grace and integrity. This is a tribute I found to him. It seems to sum the man up well.

Many years ago, where Parliament Square turns into Millbank, I spotted Tony Benn. He was sat on a low wall, alone, smoking his pipe and basking in sunlight.

I'm not usually reticent about approaching people nor nervous talking to them. But he was too big. His influence had been too great. At best, I would have garbled out a stream of gushing praise. At worst I would have been simply speechless. I chickened out.

Benn was not lacking in people telling him how much he meant to them – moments after I failed to do so a couple of middle aged women, evidently braver than I, did precisely that. But I still regret that I didn't tell him how he taught me the best side of socialism and the appropriate manner in which to conduct politics.

I first heard him in the back seat of my parent's car when I was in my early teens, on a radio documentary about Karl Marx. Benn said something about Marxism which I never forgot: That it was for those who could not understand why there should be people without homes when builders are out of work.

That is the great moral truth of socialism, the question which everyone who opposes it must answer. And there are answers to this question - some of them good - but they all involve a sacrifice, not just of logic and utility, but also of moral purpose.

As I grew up I found this idea reflected everywhere in the world around me. If I sat on a plane with an empty seat next to me, for instance, I would think about the person who was desperate to take that flight but could not afford it.

It is an idea which reveals the world as a place which is built not for humans, but for capital.

It is an idea which allows you to think in a way which political discourse rarely allows: about what people need, rather than what they can be sold. It is a fundamentally different view of politics, one in which the person comes first.

Socialism is a system which can readily turn to tyranny, but it has a human heart, a decent heart, and Benn was the person who first showed it to me.

In the teenage years that followed I became something of a die-hard socialist, of the sort you often become during that period in your life, when dogma and conformity are peculiarly seductive.

Then one day I saw Tony Benn again, this time on television, and once again he said something which fundamentally altered the way I saw the world.

He had just delivered a fierce speech in front of an admiring crowd. At the end he sat down on the stage, his legs dangling over the side, lit up his pipe and poured out a cup of tea from his thermos. A man approached him and explained that he was a Tory. He wanted to say something else, but Benn interrupted. "Oh, I do hope I haven't said anything which upset you."

He showed that politics, no matter how principled or drastic, did not need to be mean or cruel. Once again, he revealed the humanity within.

It was a lesson in the radicalism of politeness, in how manners and consideration are the lifeblood of an egalitarian society.

Far-left circles are not very kindly places, in my experience. Most people in them are harsh and often unsympathetic, driven more by dogma than by compassion.

But here was this man, this figurehead, who would always say what he pleased, who would tolerate no moral or political compromise. And yet he never lost his civility or his tenderness.

It is a testament to Britain that its great far-left figurehead was such a man, who would sit and drink tea, and worry about the feelings of Conservatives listening to him. And it is a tribute to the British left, that its spiritual leader should be a man motivated not by political programmes but by humanity.

"If we can find money to kill people, we can find money to help people," he said once.

Benn's was the best kind of socialism. It was the socialism of reaching out. Of touching people.

I regret not talking to him when he sat on that low wall, and telling him that he taught me the value of socialism and the value of civility.

But I am also happy that I have that image of him, smoking in the sunlight, looking away from parliament at the people in the street.

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2014...e-to-tony-benn

[MikeH]

The only person to come out of an interview with AliG better than he went in.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/mar/30/tvandradio.television

[MikeH]

Also :

[Sava]

never heard of this guy

Ali G

This was a weird video. I'm not used to old white man politicians being... not evil.

[Sava]

"someone in society will shoot you one day cuz you treat them like an animal"



if only that happened to conservatives more in this country

[kentonio]

He was a leading figure in the Labour party of old. He was a lifelong pacifist after his brother was killed in the second world war. He was also a Republican and the heir to a peerage, and fought to be able to give it up leading to peer reform that made that possible.

Incredibly interesting man, who did a lot of very different things during his career.

[molly bloom]

He was a conviction politician. Amazing but true.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

A politician and a gentleman. How rare it is to hear those two terms used to describe one man.

[Jimi Atkins]

Benn topped several polls as the most popular politician in the UK and was described as one of the few UK politicians to have become more left-wing after holding ministerial office. After leaving Parliament, he was president of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 until his death. Truly a remarkable man.