Tony Benn is a
left wing member of the
English Labour Party, and was a leading member of the party between about
1960 and
1983.
Benn was born into a
rich family background in
1925 with the full name Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn. His father was a member of
Parliament - first for the
Liberals then
Labour - as a
hereditary peer. Benn (Tony) was set to inherit this position and
title (
Viscount Stansgate of
Stansgate) on his dad's death. Having been
elected to the
House of Commons for the first time in
1950 (aged 25), and as a committed
democrat and ambitious
politician, this obviously caused a problem for Benn: By law, when he inherited the seat in the
undemocratic and politically inferior
Lords, he would not be allowed to sit in the
elected House of Commons.
A Personal
Bill introduced by Benn that would have allowed him to renounce his
peerage was defeated and in
1960 he had to leave the
Commons for a period of three years. In
1963 the
Peerage Act was changed, allowing a
Hereditary Peer to give up his or her title until their death, and Tony returned to his position as
elected MP for
Bristol South East.
By the time of
Labour's
election win in
1963 under
Harold Wilson, Benn had emerged as a leader of the
traditionally
Socialist party's
left wing. From
1966 to
1970 he was
Minister of
Technology and in
Labour's next
Government (
1964-
1979),
Prime Ministers
Wilson then
Callaghan kept him in their
Cabinets. From
1974 to
1975 Benn was
Secretary of State for
Industry and from
'75 until the
General Election defeat in
1979 was
Secretary of State for
Energy.
In response to the
1979 defeat, and the
Conservative party's (under
Thatcher) apparent distinct change in direction (to the
right),
Michael Foot was elected leader of
Labour and the party took a
Democratic Socialist stance, it's most
left wing for many years. In
1979 Benn published a
book,
Arguments for Socialism, and several of the
ideas it presented were taken up by
Labour as
policy. In
1981 he challenged
Denis Healey for the
deputy leadership of the party on behalf of the '
hard left' and lost by a fraction of a
percentage point.
Somewhat
ironically, the only time that Benn lost his seat in a
General Election was in
1983, when the party's
manifesto was probably as close to his
Socialist beliefs as it ever had been in his
career. In addition to the loss of his own seat, the
Labour Party's bad defeat in
1983 was a blow for Benn, though with characteristic
optimism he made it clear that he was happy that "eight
million people had voted for a
socialist programme."
Benn regained a seat in the
Commons in
1984 in a
by-election for the
Chesterfield constituency, but he has not been at all involved in the
Labour Party's '
modernisation' which has stretched from
1984 through
Neil Kinnock and
John Smith to today's
new Labour under
Tony Blair. He resigned from the
Commons at the
2001 General Election, according to him to "
devote more time to
politics," and, being fought for by someone else, Benn's
Chesterfield constituency fell to the
Liberal Democrats. His former
constituents wanted
Labour, not
new Labour, Benn stated.
Despite
failure in the political mainstream, Tony Benn has always remained independent and has been one of the
House of Commons' (and the
country's) great
orators and has used this
skill throughout his
career to fight passionately and, to an extent, convincingly for
Democracy and
Socialism: Unlike many on the
left, when arguing for
Socialism Benn does not sound like - well - a complete
idiot.