2025 marked the centenary of Tony Benn’s birth – the Labour statesman, activist and diarist whose words and actions continue to resonate with, and mobilise people today. In April of last year, Benn was commemorated at a major conference examining his historical legacy and his continuing relevance to tackling today’s crises from a democratic socialist perspective. The event opened with a roundtable discussion with Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis, chaired by Benn’s daughter, Melissa Benn, the editor of a newly published collection of Tony Benn’s political writings, The Most Dangerous Man in Britain?
Speaking at the conference reminded me of one of Benn’s speeches that I first encountered as a teenager, at a time when, like so many others of my generation, I became politically energised during Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and began delving into the broader history of British socialism. The address in question which remains unpublished, deserves renewed attention for the insights it offers regarding political mobilisation for the British Left today at a moment when a viable opening for a new left wing electoral project has emerged.
The speech I am referring to took place in November 2008 at an event for the People Before Profit Charter (PBPC), an initiative led by various left wing Parliamentarians like Benn alongside trade union leaders. Their goal was to coordinate socialist organisations and activists around a ten point pledge aimed at improving the lives of working people. The pledge outlined a broad socialist programme in response to New Labour’s failures, calling for higher public sector pay and an increase to minimum wage, an end to privatisation of public services, repeal of anti-trade union legislation, an emergency housing programme, and an end to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Benn’s 10 minute speech formed part of the PBPC event in London responding to then Labour Prime Minster Gordon Brown’s 2008 budget in the midst of the global financial crisis. It sought to promote PBPC’s demands. The speech is a tour de force of Benn’s intellect, demonstrating his ability to interweave clear socialist principles with a strong sense of moral clarity, situating them within a broader narrative of England’s political trajectory over the twentieth century, while drawing on earlier struggles in defence of a democratic socialist tradition. After offering an overview of the historic cycles of struggles in England up to eve of the end of the Second World War, Benn turns to some of the achievements of the post-war Labour government in containing the excess of capitalism. He then advances a sharp critique of Thatcherism before arriving at the present, where he reiterates several themes echoed in the pledge, namely the case for public ownership and an end to privatisation.
The beginning of Benn’s speech has particular resonance in the current political moment. His scepticism about forming a new left electoral vehicle at a moment when disillusionment with the then ruling Labour Party was particularly acute. It is pertinent to electoral politics today, given the current Labour government’s extraordinary unpopularity after little more than a year in office. Benn served as a Labour MP for forty-seven years but despite his criticism of New Labour, he remained a Labour Party member for the entirety of his life. Nevertheless, given Jeremy Corbyn’s own political trajectory and attachment to Labourism, and the ruthless purging of left-wing members from today’s Labour Party, it is not inconceivable that Benn may have also thrown his support behind the new left wing project, Your Party. Indeed, the demands articulated in the PBPC and advocated by Benn mirror those demands being advanced by the Left today.
Benn advances four principal themes that speak directly to the challenges and possibilities facing left wing political mobilisation today. The first is the perennial issue of disillusionment which pushes people towards political apathy. He addressed the tendency of some to lapse into what he called ‘professional pessimism’, the habitual feeling of defeat in the face of repeated historical setbacks for the Left against the seemingly invincible forces of capital. With characteristic optimism, Benn declared that he never succumbed to such defeatism:
‘I think progress is being made by two flames that have always been burning in the human heart: the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that you can build a better world’.
There is perhaps a hint of political strategy here – a Gramscian ‘war of position’, a slow march through the institutions as the Left seeks to undermine the ruling class’s hegemonic control over the state. However, while others on the Labour Left, such as John McDonnell, have emphasised their indebtedness to Gramscian strategy, Benn, more attuned to the English radical tradition, left no evidence of having read him. Instead, Benn’s central concern was that while politics may be a war of attrition, for the Left to be successful, it could not lapse into defeatism and acquiescence. Unsurprisingly, the epitaph he wished for himself was simply: ‘He encouraged us’.
The second core theme was the importance of political education. It was, Benn argued, in the speech, the Left’s ‘most powerful weapon’.
‘If people knew what was happening,’ Benn argued, ‘they wouldn’t accept what was happening’.
Whether through traditional classroom learning or mass meetings and demonstrations, political education was, in Benn’s words, ‘the main life-force of a working democracy’. He frequently spoke at educational events such as Levellers Day, an annual commemoration of three soldiers executed in 1649 on Oliver Cromwell’s orders. These soldiers were members of the Levellers, one of the most significant radical groups of the English Revolution. There Benn stressed the importance of political education in equipping ordinary men and women for political struggle. He was also strongly influenced by his wife, Caroline Benn, a leading educationalist and tireless advocate for comprehensive schooling.
Benn’s dedication to political education was tied to his fascination with England’s historical past, which he argued was a long fought out battle for democracy between the ruling class and the people. In the speech, Benn provided a more recent outline of this struggle:
‘This country… has always been run by rich and powerful men from the beginning of time… Until really quite recently, working people had no rights at all. In 1834… only two per cent of the population had the vote and it was all rich men… Then out of trade unionism came the changes. Chartists for votes for men; suffragettes for votes for women. Trade Union movement wanted representation in Parliament. The Labour Party was formed and adopted a socialist programme’.
For Benn, England’s radical dissenting tradition only served to underscore this belief in the struggle for democracy. He frequently invoked a counter history of popular resistance, rooted in the idea of the ‘Norman Yoke’ – the belief that liberty had been stolen from the English people in 1066 and replaced by tyrannous rule by foreign rulers. Against this backdrop, he traced a common thread of popular struggle: from the Peasants’ Revolt, Lollards, Levellers and Diggers, to Tom Paine, the Chartists, the suffragettes, the trade union movement and the birth of the Labour Party. For Benn, this Christian-inflected, home-grown socialist tradition offered an alternative national heritage: the story of ordinary people fighting to extend democracy and resist the status quo.
Benn’s efforts to reclaim a progressive national heritage, however, was not insular. As Hilary Wainwright has observed, there was a convergence between Benn’s homegrown radicalism and a continental Marxist tradition, encapsulated by his close friendship with Marxist intellectual, Ralph Miliband. This leads to the third important theme in Benn’s speech: a commitment to internationalism. Throughout his life, Benn consistently took an active role in progressive causes internationally whether through his support for the Movement for Colonial Freedom which campaigned for an end to British colonisation, opposition to apartheid in South Africa, or support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes in Vietnam, Chile, Northern Ireland, and Palestine. When it came to the latter, Benn was an early proponent of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, an initiative launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society ‘as a form of non-violent pressure on Israel’ to end the occupation of Palestine, apartheid regime, ethnic cleansing and now the genocide against the Palestinian people.
In the 2008 speech, Benn connected domestic Thatcherite privatisation to the wider logic of global capitalism and the devastating effects it reaped on developing countries. He cited the IMF’s pressure on Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, to sell off public schools and hospitals to multinational corporations in exchange for debt relief. The aim of the ruling class, Benn warned, was consistent worldwide:
‘The restoration of power of those who had always controlled the world… the land and the resources’.
This leads to the final theme: Benn’s unwavering commitment to democracy which he regarded as the most revolutionary of all political ideas, and as his engagement with Britain’s radical tradition suggests, the one most fiercely resisted by those in power. In the speech, Benn identified three areas where Thatcher had succeeded in curtailing democratic power: the crushing of the trade union movement after the miners’ strike of 1984-1985; the Right to Buy scheme which decimated social housing and was a deliberate ploy to increase financial precarity for working class families; and the destruction of local government’s ability to challenge the neoliberal consensus, as seen in the clampdowns on Liverpool and the Greater London Council. For Benn, New Labour’s accommodation with neoliberalism entrenched Thatcher’s legacy. Privatisation and deregulation continued apace, close ties to global capital was cultivated, while broader commitments to social equality were abandoned.
The British Left has never fully recovered from the historic defeats inflicted by Thatcher which Benn so powerfully described. Yet the present moment, marked by an insurgent far right on course to win the next general election and a Labour Party determined to mimic it, places renewed urgency on the Left to mobilise effectively. The lessons that we can draw from Benn, his unwavering political optimism, his commitment to revitalising a political culture of collective learning, and his principled outward facing internationalism will be critical in the political struggles that lie ahead for the Left.