POLITICS
Mr Benn's nice young friends are not as nice as they look
NOEL MALCOLM
How pleasant to know Mr Benn, who has written such volumes of stuff! His recently published journal of the early Wilson years is the first instalment in a whole series of diaries which will eventual- ly come down to the present day. Already, through its serialisation in the Sunday Telegraph, it has brought pleasure to mil- lions, with the exception of a Mr Norie who wrote in to say, 'I most strongly object to contributing, by way of subscription, to the well-being of such a moron.' Mr Node is, I fear, a poor judge of literary skill. Few writers since Gogol have so mastered the art of presenting a first-person narrative in such a way that the reader is forced, gently but irresistibly, to take a rather different view of the narrator's role in the proceed- ings from the view expressed by the narra- tor himself. Only George and Weedon Grossmith have managed anything compa- rable in English literature; and even their imaginations could not have stretched to `Mr Pooter Goes to Buckingham Palace', with its unforgettable image of Mr Pooter crawling across the carpet and his proud surmise that the Queen had never seen any of her ministers do this before.
One attraction of this book is the way it captures all the youthful optimisms of the 1960s, when, in an image drawn from old-fashioned heavy industry, everything was turning white-hot in the technological furnace. Mr Benn was the perfect choice for a Minister of Technology, with his well-known enthusiasm for repairing old bicycles and computerising the Post Office (or was it repairing the Post Office and computerising old bicycles? I forget which). He was a man of the future. Somehow, the future now feels like a long time ago.
The transition from young tearaway to favourite uncle seems, in retrospect, to have been both sudden and irreversible. Yet it was only six years ago that Mr Benn came within a one-per-cent whisker of beating Mr Healey in the deputy lead- ership election; and had he not briefly been turfed out of Parliament in 1983 — for the first time, barring the dispute over this peerage, since 1950 — he might even have narrowly defeated Mr Healey in a two-way fight for the leadership of the party. Neil Kinnock decided to stand only because of Mr Benn's temporary absence from the scene; for those on the further reaches of the Left, a Kinnock vote was faute de mieux (which meant `no better than Foot'). Now that Mr Kinnock too has led his subjects into another four years of occupa- tion by an alien power, it is only under- standable if eyes start turning to the king over the water, in Chesterfield. Mr Benn will complain that this is to talk in terms of personalities rather than ishoos. But if only Mr Benn's personality had been available for the leadership election four years ago, who can guess where Labour might be now?
Most people's guess is that it would be in even fewer seats. The Labour Left sincere- ly disbelieves this, and points out that in June it was the so-called hard Left candi- dates, or genuine socialists, who achieved the biggest swings to Labour: in Sheffield, for example, the smallest swing belonged to the one candidate who was not regarded as a left-winger. Unfortunately, this argu- ment only works in places such as Sheffield and Liverpool where voters were fhe be- neficiaries of high-spending, high-profile municipal socialism. It is an argument which harmonises nicely with the Left's constant theme of betrayal by the Labour leadership. But it risks confining the appeal of socialism to the attractions of higher spending on the rates — and that would be an understatement, to put it mildly, of what the hard Left has in mind.
The 'socialist conference' which Mr Benn hosted in Chesterfield last weekend was a chance for the Left to set out its vision of the future in all its glory. It was like a party conference, only better, be- cause everyone seemed to belong to a different party. To the old question, 'Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in?', the answer was that Chesterfield was open to everyone.
Individuals (not delegates) had come from all over the country. Each brought his own newspaper and proselytised for a party whose name was some permutation or other of the words 'Revolutionary, Workers, Socialist, or Communist': SWP, WRP, RCP and so on. (Though I could have sworn that one speaker said he belonged to the RCMP -- isn't that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police?) In the excitement of the hour, it felt as if Mr Benn were presiding over a great national move- ment, a rainbow alliance which extended far beyond Labour's band of pale rose-red on the spectrum. Viewed from Walworth Road, however, this dabbling in the higher frequencies of infra-red and ultra-scarlet must have rather the opposite effect: far from magnifying Mr Benn as a national figure, it shifts him further towards the margins of the Labour Party. In today's political vocabulary, being 'marginalised' is the worst thing that can happen to you. As one speaker wryly put it last weekend, `Some people move so far along the spectrum that they fall off.'
In one sense the difference between the Left in the Labour Party and the revolu- tionaries outside it is a secondary matter, a question not of aims but of methods. All are agreed on the goals of 'public own- ership' (in some form or other), 'democra- tic control' of the media, the police and the judges, a unilateralist defence policy and a `non-aligned' foreign policy (i.e. not aligned with America).
The real disagreement, it seems, arises only over how you bring these changes about. When Mr Benn talks about the importance of extra-parliamentary activity, he means going round the country giving speeches. The Trotskyists have more than that in mind. At Chesterfield, Mr Benn spoke of fighting Thatcherism; the man from 'Workers' Power' spoke of fighting in the streets.
The aims/methods distinction fails, however, to capture the difference in underlying assumptions which ultimatly separates Mr Benn from his new-found friends. The secret both of his naivety and of his essential decency (if the two can be distinguished) lies in the fact that he really does not believe that anyone can sincerely disagree with his vision of what is right and true.
If they vote Tory, therefore, it is because they have been corrupted or misled: educa- tion will remove the misunderstandings, and progress will always be clinched by consent. Hence his attachment to Parlia- ment and the ballot box, both as a means to overthrow the capitalist system and as a central feature of the socialist system which will replace it. For the Trotskyists and communists, on the other hand, Parlia- ment is just part of the sham, an instru- ment of capitalist class power which must be swept aside. They are fighting a class war; Mr Benn, bless him, is fighting 'the establishment'. In other words, when he closes his eyes he is back in the 1960s. For his own safety, as his true friends will no doubt tell him, he should stay there.
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