The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (36 page)

Thursday 9 May

To the ITV studios at 11 for the discussion on the local government elections today. As I arrived at the studios one of Harold’s staff was waiting for me and found a telephone and put me through to Number 10. Harold told me that Cecil King was coming out tomorrow with a tremendous attack on him in the
Daily Mirror
and he wanted to see me to build up the second stage of the campaign against King. But when I went into the studio the interviewer actually had the text of the article, entitled ‘Enough is Enough’, saying that Harold was no good and he should go. It said that Britain faced the worst financial crisis in its history and that lies about the reserves would be no answer. Quintin Hogg and Eric Lubbock and I were on and this was really all we discussed. I said that Cecil King was entitled to whatever view he liked about the leader of a political party, but it was a grave dereliction of duty to throw doubt upon our financial position in that way. Then Eric Lubbock commented that the attack was just because Cecil King hadn’t got a job under Wilson, which was a bit cynical. I said that it wasn’t surprising, that it was known he had been saying this privately for some time and all that was interesting was that it had come out. Then Quintin got terribly excited in the middle of the discussion and said, ‘Get out, get out, get out. Everybody despises your government: get out, we don’t want you any more.’

I just turned to him and said, ‘Down, Quintin, down,’ as if he were a great dog, which was the best I could do.

Saturday 11 May

I went to see Harold this morning. He was in his sitting room looking, I thought, awfully defeated and quiet. He said, ‘I’m not quitting, you know,’ as if I might have any doubts about it. I daresay he just suspects everybody, including me, and in the end he may just be left with Gerald Kaufman and Peter. I told him what I thought but he was absolutely opposed to saying anything to the Party. He was going to appear on television and talk to James Margach and release his speech to the PLP Trade Union Group of MP’s next Monday. But he was not going to speak to the Party because he said he didn’t comment on local government election results. I tried to persuade
him that, as Party Leader, people wanted to hear from him. But it was no good; he wouldn’t do it and so I decided to do it myself.

Thursday 16 May

Cabinet, and one of the first items that came up was votes at eighteen. Dick Crossman recommended that we should more or less have to accept votes at eighteen in view of our decision to give normal civil rights at eighteen. He made a play of regretting it but he was actually pleased.

Dick Marsh attacked it violently and said he thought we must have gone absolutely mad if we thought the working class wanted students to be enfranchised. When I was called, I said all that did was to make me wish they had raised the minimum age for entry into the Cabinet to forty-three, which would leave Dick out and put me in. But this was important and we had to accept it.

Peter Shore made a very good speech in favour and Gerald Gardiner was in favour. But there was great anxiety on the part of Willie Ross, the Scottish Secretary, and also George Thomas, the Welsh Secretary, for reasons of nationalism, and it may well be that this will bust us up.

Monday 3 June – Trip to Rumania

Flew to Bucharest, where we were met by dignitaries led by Alexandru Birladeanu, Chairman of the Science Research Committee, and by the Ambassador, Sir John Chadwick, and Embassy staff.

Dinner with the Ambassador and my staff (Ieuan Maddock, Harry Slater and Barry Smith). The Embassy staff were typical of a British embassy beleaguered in a Communist country, still fighting the Cold War hard. They made the point that Rumanians had never enjoyed any political freedom at any time in their history, that they had been under the Turks, under the Kings and under Antonescu, and they had not lost a great deal by having a Communist regime, although it was a rigid domestic regime which had not even been told about the position in Czechoslovakia. It was generally thought they were not wildly interested in Britain but did think that they had something to gain by establishing a partnership with us.

Tuesday 4 June

At 9 I was driven to the Council of Ministers for the first meeting with Verdet, the First Deputy Prime Minister. Around him at the table were a range of government people.

After the exchange of courtesies and inevitable television coverage of the opening session, we sat down and discussed practical issues. Our talks on computers developed into a general discussion about the COCOM embargo and we said that it was in the British national interest to develop as much independence as we could from the United States in the technical field. This point I had to hammer home again and again.

We finished at about 11.30 and at lunch I heard the news of Senator Robert Kennedy’s shooting and it is depressing to think of the violence which makes democratic politics increasingly difficult Not that the Americans are any different from the Europeans or indeed any other country, but it is more of a shock to discover that this can happen there in such a repetitive way.

At 4.30 I went back to the Council of Ministers for the first proper talk with Birladeanu who was accompanied by a number of others on the science side. When I commented that science was defined in Russia as ‘satisfying your curiosity at the expense of the state’, Birladeanu said that in Rumania it was said that if you want to spend money you could gamble, if you want to spend it enjoyably, you could spend it on women, but if you want to waste money, you have to go for science.

The Rumanians are pretty tough negotiators and this, I think, is one of their strengths. They are using their customer power in a way that we don’t always do in Britain.

At 8 we went and had dinner at the Pascaras Restaurant overlooking a lake. It was a beautiful wooden structure with an orchestra playing on the ground floor and a tremendous gathering of people. Dragos, my interpreter, was there; he had guided me through all these discussions. We had a most enjoyable time.

Birladeanu had been in Russia in 1940. He knew Stalin, who he said was a highly intelligent man but had ruled Russia with oriental tyranny. He said Stalinism had paralysed economic science for thirty years and had prevented new thinking from developing. Birladeanu himself had been criticised in 1940 for saying that the factors of production were themselves a commodity.

He said he expected to see a two-party state developing in Rumania later and that no one had yet solved the problem of democratic political freedom in a socialist state. These were the things that interested him.

We sat down with everyone telling jokes and the dinner was just one long laugh. The first joke was about Khrushchev, who won the Nobel Prize for Science because he planted seed in Russia and got the wheat from Canada.

There was another story about Khrushchev coming to Rumania. Sitting down in the Council of Ministers’ Room, the first thing he raised with the Rumanian Communist Party was, ‘Why do you kill your pigs at only twenty kilograms’ weight?’ The Rumanians said, ‘But we don’t, except the little ones which we eat as suckling pigs.’ Khrushchev said, ‘But you kill them at fifty kilograms instead of 150 kilograms. What do you Rumanians think you are doing?’ It was just this degree of authoritarianism that annoyed them.

Khrushchev asked them, ‘Why do you Rumanians plant your maize in lines, instead of squares, which give you much better production?’ Indeed, he referred to this at a major mass public meeting and the Rumanians very modestly did experiments in planting and found that you got better
productivity from the rows. This just indicated Khrushchev’s belief that he should be running Rumanian agriculture in the same way as he was trying to run it in the Ukraine and everywhere else.

This led them to ask me, ‘Can an elephant get a hernia? Yes, if he’s trying to lift the productivity of Soviet agriculture.’

They were also very funny about Mao. In China, they said, every television programme begins: ‘Good evening, Comrade Mao. This is our television and we welcome you,’ and ends: ‘Goodnight, Comrade Mao.’ Somebody asked, ‘Why is that?’ And the Chinese said, ‘Ah well, you see, Chairman Mao is the only one who has a television set.’

They couldn’t explain the Cultural Revolution and I was surprised they didn’t have an analysis of it, because it is such an important development. I should think that, as Marxists, they would have, but if they did, they didn’t want to tell us.

When de Gaulle came to Rumania, he went to visit a factory and asked one of the workers, ‘How much do you earn?’ The worker replied, ‘I earn eighty lei a day.’ De Gaulle said, ‘How much does that buy?’ So the worker replied, ‘It buys you a cow.’ So de Gaulle pulled out eighty lei, gave it to the man and said, ‘Go and buy me a cow.’ The man was absolutely paralysed and didn’t know what to do, so he consulted the officials who said, ‘You got yourself into this, you had better get out of it.’ So he came back and said, ‘Mr President, a cow would not be easy for you to take back on your aeroplane. Give me another twenty lei and I’ll bring you a hen.’

I told a few jokes. They had a great sense of humour and it was altogether a superb evening. Afterwards, Birladeanu and I walked along the lakeside, over a little bridge and into a rose garden. It was a beautiful evening and everything was quiet except for the sound of orchestras from the different restaurants around the lake. I hadn’t realised what a beautiful city Bucharest is.

Friday 7 June

Went to the Archaeological Museum, which was fascinating. We looked at the Roman port, where we saw old anchors and equipment just exactly as the Romans had left them. Visited the Mayor in his room, and had a short swim in the Black Sea.

Flew back to Bucharest and in the plane Dragos said he thought there would be two political parties in Rumania. He greatly admired the English. He was the son of a peasant and thought that collectivisation had gone too fast.

I went to the party offices for my meeting with Nicolae Ceausescu, President and General Secretary of the Party, and Maurer, the Prime Minister, and Birladeanu. The Ambassador accompanied me. I thought it would be a twenty-minute courtesy call but I was there for two and a quarter hours. Ceausescu is about forty-eight, grey-haired, modest mannered, very
penetrating in his ability, and I liked him. Maurer is a big old-fashioned Labour stalwart, rather like a well-scrubbed railway guard who had become a Minister in Attlee’s government, or even Ramsay MacDonald’s in 1929–31, and Birladeanu, chain-smoking. The Ambassador was on my side of the table.

Ceausescu greeted me, and told me he had had a talk with Jennie Lee, which he had enjoyed. Then he said he wanted concrete results, and raised the whole question of computers and the need for a third generation. I explained the whole problem all over again, that this was of fundamental interest in the United Kingdom, that Rumanian independence and ours were not so very different, that we did not intend to be let down or scooped by others. I said we were frank, we told him the truth, that the French hadn’t anything to offer that touched us. I hoped he hadn’t been persuaded by the French that COCOM was some Anglo-Saxon arrangement that didn’t apply to deals with France.

He said, ‘Well, frankly the French do promise integrated circuits and the dates and deliveries are laid down.’

So I answered, ‘Well, anything they can offer we can offer too, and I can offer it now subject to the same conditions.’

We got a bit further into this and Ceausescu told me that de Gaulle had said that embargoes were made to be broken. Ceausescu indicated that the French believed that the embargo was simply to preserve American economic interests until the Americans themselves could trade with Eastern Europe. I think the French are just about right.

We had a philosophical discussion which took up most of the time, about two roads to socialism. I cross-examined him about central planning. I said that when you do move towards a market-oriented economy, even under socialism, you are in effect leaving the decision about production to be made by those who are producing for the market and, therefore, it wasn’t possible to have as much central planning as you thought. He wasn’t able to answer this but he thought that central planning would still have a key role – and of course in some sectors it would, for example in the decision to buy and introduce computers.

We got on to the possibility of a dialogue between the Labour and Communist Parties. I said that during the Cold War, we hadn’t had the opportunities for talks like this and I suggested that he might apply for the general secretaryship of the Labour Party, at which he laughed. They were saying that we had more or less sold out to private ownership, but the Ambassador chipped in and said that the Industrial Expansion Bill was an opportunity by which the Government could take shares in private ownership as a condition of making money available. I was a little surprised that he had realised the political and economic significance of what we were doing.

I raised the possibility that decision-making would break down in
advanced societies, and talked about the way in which the institutions needed to be rebuilt to reflect modern power. I asked about the possible redundancy of the state, and when the ‘withering-away of the state’ might come.

Ceausescu contributed vigorously. He was strongly in favour of the acceptance of free will, he thought the withering-away of the state would be very welcome though he didn’t quite see the withering-away of the Party. I discussed with him the possibility of us all becoming redundant. Finally, at 4.20 I left.

To the Ambassador’s party, the British guests arriving early, at 6 o’clock, so that we could have a little ceremony of holding our glasses while the Ambassador toasted the Queen. The chap on the balcony played the National Anthem from an old gramophone record, and we all stood there. It was a most ludicrous, public-school, boy-scout event.

I talked to an enormous number of people. The staff of the Embassy said it had been very exciting for them having us there and we’d inspired them, and so on. But the real point about the evening was that Verdet, Radulescu, Birladeanu, and the Minister of Machine Building, the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Mines – six Ministers – actually came to the party. It was the first time they had ever been to the Embassy and we sat at a special table and just told jokes about the Russians, the Americans and ourselves.