The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (113 page)

Wednesday 5 October

I had been asked to reply for the NEC to the debate on safety in the North
Sea oil industry. I had worked extremely carefully on my speech and decided to make it an occasion for criticising market forces, the market economy and the multinationals, and to use the industry and its safety record as an argument for socialism and trade unionism. I got a tremendous response from the delegates. Dennis Skinner, who is slow to comment on these things, thought it was the best Conference speech I had made for many years. He was in the chair for the afternoon.

Got back to the flat utterly exhausted.

Thursday 6 October

Ron Todd in the news as the man who is challenging Kinnock’s modernisation. He’s the bogeyman this year. There is a lot of resentment within the T&G, and the Party doesn’t work unless the T&G supports the leadership, so in that sense it’s a bit like 1960, when Frank Cousins opposed Gaitskell.

Saturday 8 October

The wedding of Stephen to Nita Clarke. The family arrived and we all went to the Chelsea Register Office. Stephen was dressed up in a frock-coat, and Nita was in a cream wedding dress with a train.

Then we went to the House of Commons, where a few more people had gathered. Richard Moberly, the industrial chaplain at the
Daily Mirror
, conducted the service in the Crypt. It was a beautiful occasion. Pratima Bowes, Nita’s mother, read something in Hindi from Rabindranath Tagore. Mother, who had come in on crutches and was slumped behind the reading desk causing great concern to Richard Moberly, stood up at the appropriate moment and delivered a marvellous sermon about the Corinthians. She was splendid.

At the reception held in the Strangers’ Dining Room over 600 people turned up. Caroline and I stood in the receiving line as these people piled in. I had been nervous and thought it might be over the top, to be candid, but it was very successful, Caroline pointed out that the Labour Right had also come, and they obviously had a whale of a time.

Thursday 13 October

The injunctions against the
Guardian
and the
Sunday Times
on
Spycatcher
were lifted. The Government must have spent millions pursuing Peter Wright around the world. It is incredible that a man can confess to crimes against an elected government, yet all the British Government want to do is prevent him publishing it rather than investigate the charges.

The Law Lords compared Wright to Philby and stated that he owed ‘a lifelong obligation of confidentiality to the Crown’, a most extraordinary judgment I think this ought to be the subject of some parliamentary action.

The Thatcher years are coming to an end, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this time next year she was on her way out and some Baldwin-like figure was brought in (John Biffen or Sir Geoffrey Howe) to lower the temperature of debate.

Thursday 8 December

Following the horrific news of the earthquake in Armenia, the response of sympathy and understanding is amazing, with the Soviet Embassy open for gifts and messages.

Gorbachev’s unilateral announcement of cuts of half a million troops has put Russian diplomacy right at the top, has ended the Cold War at a stroke and may bring hope to millions. What is so absurd is that the British defence policy is based on building bombs which would create a tragedy ten times as great as the earthquake and we are pouring money in to help Armenia. It is totally contradictory. The Labour Party has absolutely failed to think anything out.

Caroline said disarmament will lead capitalism to collapse and could lead socialism to prosper, and I think she’s right.

Friday 22 December

There has been an awful air crash. A Pan-Am jumbo aircraft crashed at Lockerbie, near Dumfries in Scotland, killing everybody on board and about twenty-seven people on the ground. The plane came down on a petrol station and burst into flames. A most terrible tragedy, and of course people are worried about whether it was caused by a bomb.

Friday 6 January 1989

Today the UN Security Council discussed the US bombing of Libya over the Lockerbie disaster. The Americans were on the defensive because the Third World has joined almost unanimously in supporting President Qadhafi of Libya. The Americans now behave like cowboys fighting Indians: if you’re a Third World country, the Americans can just do what they like – they can invade you, shoot you, bomb you.

Sunday 29 January

In the evening Caroline and I went to a Socialist Conference fund-raising party in Highgate. About 150 people turned up, including Salman Rushdie, who made a little speech about the burning by Muslims of his new book,
Satanic Verses,
which he autographed and auctioned at the party.

Wednesday 15 February

At the Campaign Group we discussed Salman Rushdie and his
Satantic Verses
, Earlier this week Ayatollah Khomeini called for his execution and
another mullah put a million pounds on his head. This has sent shockwaves through the British Muslim community.

Bernie Grant put forward a motion with Max Madden which proposed extending the blasphemy laws and called for a meeting with the Islamic Council. Bernie said that Rushdie knew what he was doing and that they’d cut off people’s hands for years in the Muslim world. He appeared to be criticising Rushdie.

Diane Abbott said this was a matter of principle. The Muslims were being misled, and she was opposed to censorship because minorities would suffer.

Alice Mahon said the zealots of Islam had persecuted women, and they went as far as stoning women who’d been raped. She had no sympathy for their case.

Audrey Wise said she hadn’t read the book but Rushdie was simply looking at the world with questioning eyes. Khomeini’s death threat encouraged racism. She had 6,000 Muslims in the constituency in Preston, and many had written to her asking for the book to be banned, but she had refused, and she had had no criticism of her response.

Mildred Gordon said all fundamentalists and all established Churches were enemies of the workers and the people. All religions were reactionary forces keeping the people down and denying the aspirations of working people. She opposed all blasphemy laws.

Bernie Grant kept interrupting, saying that the whites wanted to impose their values on the world. The House of Commons should not attack other cultures. He didn’t agree with the Muslims in Iran, but he supported their right to live their own lives. Burning books was not a big issue for blacks, he maintained.

Pat Wall said his constituency, Bradford North, had the second largest Muslim population but he couldn’t sign Max Madden’s motion. He read us a letter he was sending out, refusing to support the banning of the book. The real question was the power of the imams and the mullahs and the fundamentalists, and no socialist could support Khomeini. Class was the issue.

Bernie Grant asked why the Muslims should be insulted. They had nothing to live for but their faith, he said.

Eric Heffer thought the history of our own country and the banning of books should be warning enough. Tom Paine’s
Rights of Man
had been banned. Many Muslims hadn’t even read the book. He couldn’t agree to the burning of books, because that led to the burning of people.

We left it there, and it raised all sorts of questions.

Sunday 25 February

To an anti-poll tax public meeting in Sheffield, the first meeting at which I had spoken specifically on the poll tax, and it was clear that mobilisation against it had begun. There was a great deal of anger there, and the
ultra-Left attacked people who said they would pay the poll tax and asked me if I intended to pay. I said it was easier for me because my poll tax was much less than my rates, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone else to pay the poll tax, since I thought that would just divide us.

Friday 7 April

Gorbachev had lunch today with the Queen at Windsor Castle, where she gave him some jewellery and an oil painting of a tsar. Gorbachev is going flat out to endear himself to the establishment in the West, and I suppose he’s gaining a worldwide reputation which he can use for domestic purposes in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile Boris Yeltsin is quoted as saying he is a tremendous fan of Mrs Thatcher; the praise heaped on Yeltsin is obviously being given because he is thought to be the man who might dismantle socialism.

Monday 8 May

I worked this morning on an alternative paper to ‘The Productive and Competitive Economy’, which we are discussing today at the special NEC on the policy reviews, together with ‘Economic Equality’ and ‘Consumers and the Community’.

The TV cameras were at Transport House, and I complained to Larry Whitty about Mandelson, who was telling them who and who not to film.

Ken Livingstone, Hannah Sell, the Young Socialist on the NEC, Dennis Skinner and I voted pretty well together.

Gould introduced ‘The Productive and Competitive Economy’. When he finished, I said it reminded me of 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald had said that what he recommended went against everything the Party stood for but it was necessary. The trouble with the document was that it contained no analysis, no history, nothing about the power of capital or the impact of the EEC, nothing about the fact that technology gave you a choice, nothing about post-Fordism, nothing about public assets, nothing about the problems that would face an incoming Labour government I submitted my alternative draft.

Ken Livingstone agreed about the weakness of analysis. He talked about the balance of payments and moved two amendments, one to cut the defence burden and the second to control the export of capital.

Kinnock said there was no need for a historical analysis; it would daunt us. We lived in a capitalist world and we must accept the limitations of capitalism and control technology; unless we could win we couldn’t tackle these problems. He said that my proposals were a detachment from reality because there was no easy way. The British public did believe in the market and we had to face that fact.

On cost, he said Ken had helped our enemies by drawing attention to the fact that we couldn’t afford our policies. We must build the basis for
sustainable growth and we must not promise to spend what we hadn’t got. We must create growth and distribute it more fairly – shopping-list socialism was dreaming, and we should leave dreams to others.

Then ‘Economic Equality’ was introduced by John Smith and Diana Jeuda. I moved that we remove the 50 per cent upper-limit tax pledge. That was defeated.

We adjourned and had a quick meal, then came back to the NEC at 7 for ‘Consumers and the Community’. I suggested we change it to ‘
Citizens
and the Community’ – that wasn’t accepted.

The atmosphere at the meeting was quite friendly. Four of us, Ken, Dennis, Hannah Sell and I, stuck firm. It is a major change, and by far the most right-wing policy during my time in the Party. Kinnock is openly arguing for capitalism, and the rest are accepting that Thatcher has won the argument but her government might be replaced. I was as cheerful as I could be, and there was no hostility because the majority against was so enormous. As Peter Jenkins said on the news, Kinnock needs a fight to show there has been a change.

Looking back on it, I must recognise that the Labour Party has never been a socialist party, it has never wanted social transformation, it has always had a right-wing leader, it has always wanted to pursue these policies, and it is only when circumstances require a change that the pressure comes from underneath for a transformation. When we win the Election, there will be high expectations and enormous pressure on us, and it is an inadequate economic policy for that situation.

Tuesday 9 May

To Transport House early in order to be able to give a long press interview before I went into the Executive for the second day on policy reviews.

At 10.07 we began work on ‘Democracy, the Individual and the Community’. I had put in an alternative paper, and I moved the two amendments at the beginning of my paper – that we remove US bases and take back control from the EEC. They were both defeated by 19 to 3.

We came to the paper called ‘Britain in the World’ – a defence policy for Britain, presented by Gerald Kaufman. I argued that this really was reiterating Gaitskell’s speech in 1960 – fight, fight and fight again. After Chernobyl it was clear that nuclear weapons were unusable. But the PLP had never put forward Conference policy on unilateralism, and, if you looked at the history, Labour governments had in fact been associated with unilateral nuclear
re
armament. Attlee built the bomb, Chevaline was endorsed by Callaghan, and now we were coming along .with Trident, which would multiply our nuclear capacity ninefold.

Kinnock said we were not interested in the history of Attlee, Bevin or Gaitskell. This document was put forward in the interests of the British people. He declared, ‘I have been to the White House, I have been to the
Kremlin and to the Elysée arguing for unilateral disarmament. They couldn’t comprehend the idea of giving up weapons with nothing in return – they couldn’t understand “something for nothing”. We cannot sustain the argument for unilateralism. Tony says the debate is unrealistic, but patriotism and common sense tell us that there is nothing incompatible between unilateralism and multilateralism. Realism is the greatest weapon in my argument. I have ambitions for a non-nuclear world, and we can get public support for Labour and win the Election; the choice is disarming under Labour or having a Tory government that rearms. We want partners in negotiation and we must get to power.’

The Right clapped him, and that was the first and only applause of the whole two days.

I suppose I ought to put my reflections down. It was a remarkable two days. The NEC
has
abandoned socialist aspirations and any idea of transforming society; it has accepted the main principles not only of capitalism but of Thatcherism, and it thinks that now the Party has a chance of winning office.

On peace, we have abandoned unilateralism and, however we dress it up, we are going to keep the bomb. That is catastrophic, because lots of people are just not going to support Labour – they’ll vote Green or something. I think the Labour Party may be in a state of terminal decline.