Tony Benn

Tony Benn (2005)

Anthony "Tony" Neil Wedgwood Benn , PC , formerly 2nd Viscount Stan gate (* 3. April 1925 in London , † 14. March 2014 ibid) was a British politician of the Labor Party . He was a member of the House of Commons from 1950 to 1960 and again from 1963 to 2000, almost fifty years, and was minister several times. In the 1970s and 1980s he led the left wing of the party and was active in the socialist and pacifist spectrum until his death.

origin

Tony Benn's father, William Wedgwood Benn, was a Member of Parliament for the Liberals . He joined the Labor Party and was promoted to Lord in 1942. Both grandfathers, John Williams Benn and Daniel Holmes, were also Liberal Members of Parliament (one first for the constituency of Tower Hamlets, St George, then Devonport, the other for Govan). Tony Benn is a cousin of actress Margaret Rutherford .

His mother Margaret, b. Holmes, was a theologian and feminist. She used to tell him the biblical stories in which the prophets stood up against the abuse of power by kings and for justice. According to Tony Benn, this shaped his political values ​​throughout his life.

Life

Youth, military service and studies

Benn was born in Marylebone , London in 1925 . He attended Westminster School , a respected (and expensive) public school . During the Second World War he served from July 1943 to August 1945 in the Royal Air Force , most recently as a pilot. Also a Royal Air Force pilot was his close older brother Michael Julius Wedgwood Benn, who studied theology and wanted to become a priest in the Church of England . Michael Benn was killed in 1944 when his plane crashed.

After the war, Benn studied philosophy, politics and economics at the New College of the University of Oxford . In 1947 he was elected chairman of the prestigious Oxford Union student debating club . The fact that he had attended an elite school and an elite university should, according to his will, be made no fuss. Later, as MP and Minister, he had Westminster School and the University of Oxford removed from the official résumés. For the point “Education” he had instead entered: “in progress” (“Education: continuing”). After graduating, he worked briefly as a radio producer for the BBC in 1949/1950 .

Beginnings of the political career

In 1950, Benn got the opportunity to get into politics when Stafford Cripps resigned his parliamentary seat. The Labor Party nominated him for the due by-election. At the age of 25, Benn was elected to the House of Commons for the Bristol Southeast constituency. In the Labor Party he was considered a centrist because he did not join the left around Aneurin Bevan .

Benn knew that as an MP, he would only have a future if the Peerage Act was changed. Winston Churchill had given his father hereditary peerage with the title of Viscount Stansgate . As a result of Michael Benn's death, his younger brother Tony became a contender for the title. Due to the Act of Settlement , he would have to resign from his mandate in the House of Commons and take the inherited seat in the House of Lords upon the death of his father and the transfer of the title to the son . Membership in both houses is excluded. As a result, Benn advocated an amendment to the law in the early 1950s to allow nobles to resign from their titles and retain their parliamentary seats in the House of Commons.

The fight for the right to run as a nobleman for the lower house

When his father died in November 1960, Benn insisted on giving up his unwanted peerage. He ran for his own parliamentary seat in the by-election - and won the Bristol-Southeast constituency again. An electoral court ruled that Benn was not eligible for election under current law and awarded the seat to the conservative competitor Malcolm St Clair . Benn continued his campaign; the Conservative government eventually paved the way for a change in the law. The Peerage Act of 1963 allows the resignation of the nobility. The law received royal approval and took effect on July 31, 1963 at 6 p.m. Benn was the first lord to resign his title at 6:22 p.m. that same day. St Clair took the Chiltern Hundreds (a phrase that circumscribes a withdrawal from Parliament), and Benn returned to the House of Commons after winning the new August 20, 1963 by-election.

Ministers in Labor Governments

From 1964 to 1966 Benn was Postmaster General (Minister of the Post), from 1966 to 1970 Minister of Technology , an office in which he was responsible for the development of the Franco-British supersonic aircraft Concorde . (In October 2003 he was therefore a guest on British Airways' last regular Concorde flight .) Between 1974 and 1975 he was British Minister of Industry and from 1975 to 1979 Minister of Energy .

Struggles for leadership and direction in the Labor Party

From September 1971 to September 1972 Benn was chairman of the Labor Party. He advocated positions of the left wing more and more. He advocated a labor market policy that did not leave employment to the play of the market and the nationalization of companies of certain sizes in certain industries.

Although he had initially campaigned for Great Britain to join the European Economic Community (EEC), he followed the line of the vast majority of British trade unions and campaigned for Great Britain to leave the EEC. But the opponents of British membership failed in the referendum on June 5, 1975 on remaining in the EEC.

The defeat of the Labor Party in the parliamentary elections of 1979 intensified the struggle for direction within the party. They led to a split insofar as the party rights Shirley Williams , Roy Jenkins , William Rodgers and David Owen resigned and founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981 .

The Labor Party elected Michael Foot as chairman. As a result of an amendment to the statutes that restricted the voting weight of the union bloc when voting at party congresses, and as a result of a lack of support from some Labor leftists, including Neil Kinnock , Benn narrowly lost the election as vice chairman to Denis Healey in 1981 . From then on he had many admirers in his party, but hardly any influence in decisive areas.

In October 1982 Benn demanded that parliament should deprive the monarch of the (few) last opportunities to exert political influence. Thereupon he lost his position as chairman of the domestic affairs committee and with it his last base of power in the party executive committee. In October 1984 he lost the nomination for the shadow cabinet . In 1988 he ran for the last time (and again unsuccessfully) as party chairman.

Chesterfield Constituency MP

Benn's Bristol Southeast constituency was abolished in 1983 due to constituency changes. He lost the nomination for the safe seat of Bristol South to Michael Cocks . Benn turned down offers to take over the new constituency of Livingston in Scotland. So he went to the constituency of Bristol-East and was defeated by his conservative competitor Jonathan Sayeed . Nonetheless, he stayed away from the House of Commons only for a short time. When, in 1984, after the parliamentary elections of 1983, a safe Labor constituency became vacant for the first time, namely in Chesterfield , its still strong following ensured that Benn was nominated and elected to the lower house. His support for the miners' strike of 1984/1985 earned him furious attacks from Margaret Thatcher and the conservative press.

Benn represented the Chesterfield constituency for 17 years. But over the years it became harder and harder for him to submit to factional discipline. After all, he did not run again in the 2001 parliamentary elections, although he could be sure of his constituency. Because he wants "more time for politics". “More time for politics” is also the title of the last volume of his diaries so far. He had missed the passion of wanting to shape politics in the Labor leadership, which he accused of capitulating to supposed “practical constraints”.

Commitment to the war

As early as 1982 in the Falklands War , Benn opposed the deployment of the Navy. During the Second Gulf War in 1990/1991, he flew - after Edward Heath - to Baghdad to persuade Saddam Hussein to release the hostages he had taken from among the foreigners in Iraq . Before and during the Third Gulf War in 2003, Benn was chairman of the “Stop the War Coalition” against his country's participation in the war. In February 2003, he spoke to nearly 1 million people at a rally in London. In the same month he traveled to Baghdad again to see Saddam Hussein. The interview was broadcast on British television.

family

In 1949 Benn met Caroline Middleton DeCamp, an American educationalist of Cincinnati, Ohio, over tea at Worcester College, Oxford, and nine days later proposed marriage to her on a park bench in town. He later bought the park bench from the City of Oxford and installed it in the garden of his home in Holland Park . Tony and Caroline had four children. Caroline died in 2000 at the age of 74. His son Hilary Benn is a Labor politician and was a member of the Cabinet for several years.

Obituaries

The obituaries on the occasion of Benn's death were mixed. On the one hand, political opponents also praised Benn's idealism, sincerity and commitment: Prime Minister David Cameron praised him as an “outstanding writer, speaker and activist”, while former Conservative Prime Minister Sir John Major called him a “true political fighter”. The former leader of the Labor Party, Ed Miliband , described Tony Benn as a “champion for the powerless, great parliamentarians and politicians out of conviction”. Others, however, pointed out that Benn's extreme left positions had mainly harmed his party during the 1970s and 1980s: his former internal party opponent Denis Healey called Benn a "hero of the left", but a left Labor party could not win majorities.

The newspaper The Independent wrote, Benn's political philosophy would have, had it been implemented, caused "unspeakable damage to the country", instead, "the damage in the Labor Party has been done."

Diaries and writings

• The first six diaries. ISBN 0-09-963411-2 .
• The seventh diary. ISBN 0-09-941502-X .
• Arguments for Socialism. 1979.
• Arguments for Democracy. 1981.
• with Andrew Hood: Common Sense. 1993.

In August 2003 the London DJ Charles Bailey published an album of Benn's speeches, ISBN 1-904734-03-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Tam Dalyell: Tony Benn: Politician who embodied the soul of the Labor Party and came to be admired even by his rivals . The Independent, March 15, 2014.
2. ↑ Benn, Michael Julius Wedgwood - Biography , accessed March 15, 2014.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Jörg Bremer: Tony Benn died . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 15, 2014, p. 5.
4. ^ Tony Benn: Arguments for Socialism . Cape, London 1979. ISBN 0-224-01770-5 .
5. ↑ Tony Benn in the Hansard (English)
6. ↑ Tony Benn: More time for politics. Diaries 2001-2007 . Hutchinson, London 2007.
7. ↑ Tony Benn: Free Radical. New Century Essays . Continuum International Publishing, London 2004. ISBN 978-0-8264-7400-1 . Here is the chapter on New Labor , pp. 20–49
8. ↑ 'Champion of the powerless': Tributes to left wing legend Tony Benn Daily Mirror , March 15, 2014
9. ↑ Tony Benn was a political giant and an extraordinary man. But his actions damaged the very causes he championed , The Independent, March 15, 2014.

Web links

Commons : Tony Benn  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Tony Benn, veteran Labor politician, dies aged 88 , The Guardian , March 14th, 2013
• Obituary Tony Benn. Big Benn is dead , the daily , March 14, 2013
• Tony Benn at the Hansard (English)