Arguments for Me
Ferdinand Mount
Arguments for Socialism Tony Benn (Cape £5.95) 'They were still at work in the shed there, using a temporary lighting system because the firm's owners, Norton Villiers Triumph, had switched off the lights. There they were. They didn't know I was coming. I went past the brazier at 2 a.m. and in the shed they were busy designing the left-hand gear shift. The spirit at Meriden sustained them and carried them forward.'
This description by Tony Benn of a surprise nocturnal visit to the Meriden motorbike workers co-op has something familiar about it. The glow of sweat under the rigged-up lights, the enthusiasm burning on through the small hours, the bright-eyed visitor. It unavoidably recalls those accounts quoted in David Caute's The Fellow Travellers by visitors to Soviet factories, like Sir Julian Huxley: 'Late one evening, as we passed this corner, we saw a gang of people working at the lines by the light of flares . . . They were a volunteer gang, a Subomik who, having been told of the urgent job that needed doing, had come down after their own day's work was over to get it done — and, of course, without extra pay. . . one is told that Stalin himself sometimes comes down to the Moscow goods sidings to help.'
Mr Benn really does come down to the sidings. He is not a Georgian gangster but a good democratic socialist. He believes in open government, parliamentary government and genuine participation in government by 'working people and their families.' And yet there hangs over this collection of articles and speeches, spatchcocked into a book by Mr Chris Mullin, that old musty aroma compounded in equal parts of naivete and bad faith, with bad faith gradually gaining the upper hand. It would be too much to expect Mr Benn's book to live up to its title. As in almost all books written by practising politicians, the ego looms large. 'When I became Secretary of State for . . . 'Those who, like me, argued at the time that . . . ' All too often these are not Arguments for Socialism, they are Arguments for Me.
Interspersed with Arguments for Me are passages of Dialectical Polyfilla, glutinous blobs of verbiage which set hard on the page to give an impression of intellectual solidity. 'Fifth, and most importantly in the context of energy and transport, ways have to be found of providing for an integration of the planning mechanisms of nationalised industries that interrelate with one another.' This sentence contains a number of Left-wing Hurray-words such as 'integration' and 'planning'. Its drift, if it has any drift to speak of, is that Mr Benn is about to propose some new form of giant socialist bureaucracy; on the contrary, his own ministerial experience leads him to deduce that nothing much can be done to integrate energy and transport without making matters worse. Often you will find that as a Minister Mr Benn was not quite such a mug as he makes himself sound.
There is an occasional tendency, on the Right no less than on the Left, to view Mr Benn with a certain mild charity. 'He may be a bit touched but at least he's sincere'; or 'he may go too far sometimes, but at least he thinks for himself.' I don't know which I admire less: the quality of his thought or the quality of his sincerity. He seems to me to be somewhat more devious than Mr Callaghan and somewhat less thoughtful than Mr Hattersley. Mr Benn's prime argument for socialism rests on the simple proposition that 'leaving aside the question of abuse, the sheer 'concentration of industrial and economic power is now a major political factor'. After the spate of mergers and take-overs, the percentage of our national output produced by the top 100 companies In Britain has risen from 20 per cent in 1950 to 46 per cent in 1973— and at this rate will reach two-thirds by 1980. On referring to the footnote, we discover that these statistics are drawn from The Socialist Challenge, by Stuart Holland, the new Left-wing MP for Vauxhall and a Benn protégé, who has, like almost all believers in the concentration theory, got his figures from S.J. Prais. But recent research by John Jewkes clearly demonstrates the serious shortcomings and contradictions in Prais. In the USA, the home of capitalism, the 20th century has shown little permanent tendency to concentration; if British experience is different, over the last 20 years at least, that is because British governments have been busily promoting mergers. Who created British Leyland? Mr Benn, for one.
Capitalism, Mr Bern says, has failed Britain; Adam Smith was wrong, See how far the UK lags behind France, Germany and Japan in the growth of manufacturing output. But why hasn't Adam Smith failed these other free-enterprise economies? Could it be because they have not suffered from Mr Benn's attentions?
Planning, we are told, is the good socialist answer to our chronic industrial problems. But when the EEC attempts to plan our steel and shipbuilding industries, that is apparently bad capitalist planning.
Even this politician's mummery is pardoned by those who like to see in Mr Benn at least a genuine heir of Robert Owen and the co-operative tradition. However, Mr Henn makes it very clear that what he understands by co-operatives is something rather different from you and me. On the contrary, he warns of the 'dangers in a naive or emotion al commitment to co-operation.' There are Conservatives and industrialists who look 'at co-operatives in a way that creates new dangers for the trade unions' and who 'would like workers to confront directly the disciplines of the market economy through co-operatives . . . only funding co-operatives that are successful in fighting market forces. This is also what lies behind "market Socialism".'
What matters for Mr Benn then is above all to preserve the power of the trade unions. Co-ops must not be allowed to fail, nor jobs to disappear if unpopular goods and services-are produced. The government is still to have the power of banker and hence of ultimate employer. The most that can be conceded in the way of liberty and independence is 'self-management' on Yugoslav lines, It is tempting to be diverted by the occasional delirious flights of silliness. NobodY but Mr Benn could thus describe his campaign to shed his peerage: 'Unusually, it gave me, who had never experienced any hardships in life, just enough of a taste of what happens when authority decides to crush a dissident,' Unusually indeed. Leaving a trail of human and economic devasta tion behind him — at British Leyland, at Fisher-Bendix, at the Scottish Daily News, at Meriden, inside the Labour Party — he continues to soar without a scratch on him. As far as he himself is concerned, selfmanagement works. And so does the lefthand gear shift.
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