Tony Benn: "What a world we would have created if we had listened to him"

LEAP Chair John McDonnell MP pays tribute to Tony Benn

LEAP chair John McDonnell MP spoke in Parliament yesterday (20/03/14) paying tribute to Tony Benn (click to watch via Youtube).

John, who also chairs the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs (founded by Tony Benn), said:

"I want to go back not to the manifesto of 1983, but to Labour’s programme of 1982, which was the Bennite programme, and virtually all of it was written by Tony Benn. It is worth looking back at what it said. It was absolutely prophetic. It basically said, “We will create a society that is more democratic, more fair, more just and more equal.” How would we do it? Tony’s ideas in that programme were straightforward: we would undertake a fundamental, irreversible shift in the redistribution of wealth and power. How would we do that? Through a fair and just tax system, tackling tax evasion and tax avoidance, taking control of the Bank of England, preventing speculation in the City and the banks because it could be dangerous to our long-term economic health, and creating full employment. That is what he was about. That is what he inspired us to do.

"It is interesting that he said we should invest in housing, health and education; give all young people the opportunity to stay on at school with an education maintenance allowance; and make sure that they had a guarantee of an apprenticeship or training and the opportunity to go to university, not by paying a fee but on a grant. That was his programme in 1982. It was prophetic and years in advance of its time. He said that what we needed to create the wealth was an industrial strategy—a manufacturing base based on new technology and skills. Actually, I remember him talking in one of his speeches about alternative energy sources, well in advance of the debate about climate change.

"He inspired my generation and he inspired generations to come. What a world we would have created if we had listened to him. But more important, what a world we can create now if we listen to him.

"Solidarity and go well, comrade. You made a significant contribution to all of our lives. I hope we will be able to implement the lessons you taught us, when Labour next gets back into power."

The above are extracts from John's speech. Read it in full

Tony Benn - a tribute

Tony Benn: "Democracy transferred power from the wallet to the ballot"



For all British socialists - and many around the world - Tony Benn was an iconic and inspirational figure. He perhaps developed the political philosophy of 'democratic socialism' more than any other Labour politician. In the video clip above, from the 2008 LEAP conference, Tony explained how democracy challenged capitalism - and how capitalism fought back against democracy.

LEAP Chair John McDonnell MP tweeted: "Tony Benn was the articulate advocate for socialism who inspired my generation and gave people hope of a fair and equal society."

LEAP Co-ordinator Andrew Fisher posted: "Tony Benn - inspired generations of socialists (including me) with his warmth, integrity and ideas"

John Hilary of War on Want tweeted, "RIP Tony Benn: a true internationalist, comrade in the fight for global justice and long-term friend of @WarOnWant"

Tax justice campaigner Richard Murphy, said: "Tony Benn: simply a hero. RIP"

Katy Clark MP posted on Twitter: "Very sad news about Tony Benn. A great socialist thinker who made a massive impact. A huge loss. My thoughts are with all who loved him."

Paul Mason, former Newsnight economicscorrespondent, tweeted, "At Labour conf in 1980 & heard #Benn riveting call for 1) abolish the Lords 2) industrial democracy act 3) repeal EU powers - like detonator"

Preparing for an age of scarcity

The New Consumers: preparing for an age of scarcity by John Fisher begins with a warning from George Santayana, "those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it".

Its central thesis is that our 'dominant social paradigm' in which "growth of any kind, in any section of our culture, is a social norm and probably a good thing" is fragile, on the verge of collapse. This is due mainly, but not exclusively it is argued, to the impending end of fossil fuels on which our societies have been so dependent. This may "bring about a rather sudden social paradigm shift which may be too compressed for our society to cope with without serious social consequences".

The fault for this is 'inherent in the system' which "encourages only individual solutions to collective problems". This is nowhere better illustrated than in Chapter 1 of the book called 'The Way We Live' an account of the lives of fictitious suburban middle class couple Philip and Amy Thornton as they go about their daily business with their children: working, eating, shopping, resting at home, pursuing leisure activties, etc. Although the Thorntons live in North America, their situation is not too distant from much of the UK.

This daily routine paves the way for the chapters that follow on Food, Shelter, Transportation and Energy. The rising cost of food has its root in global oil prices, but what cannot also be ignored is the extent to which prime farmland in North America has been concreted over for more lucrative commercial and residential use. Imports are often cheaper, and of course prime parts of African and Asian farmland are used to feed not themselves or even the West but to grow cut flowers, coffee, tea and tobacco. It quotes then environment minister Ben Bradshaw MP in a highly underpublicised speech, when he said that our "food production does just as much environmental damage as private transport and housing".

Community supported agriculture is positively promoted, alongside an exposure of the tactics of the marketing executives for their deceptive labeling and the politicians who permit such lax regulation - and the author should know as a former high-flyer in Canada's equivalent of Madison Avenue, exposed in his prior book The Plot to Make you Buy.

The housing chapter, 'Shelter' is begins with a fascinating history of the origins of North American suburbia, neatly summed up in the song Little Boxes. Like our food production and the prices we pay, this suburbia (far more widespread in, but not exclusive to, North America) is dependent on cheap fossil fuels - which provides a useful segue to the next chapter: Transportation.

Again, the reader is eased in with the absorbing battle for city transport - and how the automobile industry fought a dirty war against the public mass transit systems that existed in many North American cities: the streetcars and trolley systems. The behaviour of National City Lines in 1930s, 40s and 50s is not to dissimilar to that of Stagecoach in the UK (which has recently purchased Coach Canada) since the 1980s when bus services were deregulated under the Thatcher government. The public investment in interstate highways contrasted with the disinterest shown to rail systems - and they have largely withered in North America, leaving whole communities vulnerable should the private automobile become out of reach.

The quest for a solution to the car, takes the author and reader through a intrepid search for an alternative: the electric car, hybrids, hydrogen power, and railways, before contemplating the future for air transport.

The final chapter on energy looks at the oil industry: its relationship in particular with US governments, its dubious claims on new oil field finds, and the increasing lengths and ever more complex methodologies needed to exhume the dwindling supplies. The author quite rightly wonders "how we could all be so self-deluded as we pour billions of dollars, pounds and euros, into trying to recreate the very economic circumstances which got us into this mess". The answer of course is that alluded to in the introduction - the dominant social paradigm that mitigates against collective solutions.

For all the dynamic creativity of capitalism is the contradiction - it leads to monopoly power, the removal of democracy over key questions of our lives and the resources they depend upon.

How we get to this post-capitalist, post-oil dependent world is by no means clear, "the future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination".

There are no out-of-the-box solutions to this crisis. Those of us who fear the prospects for our societies if the "compressed changes" referred to are forced upon us need to start building and promoting alternative solutions now. If socialists and environmentalists fail, then the space will be vacated for the sort of neo-fascist movements like the Tea Party in the US: nationalistic, violent and angry.

*Declaration: the author of The New Consumers, John Fisher, is also my uncle.

US turns to socialism?

OK, apologies for the sensationalist title, but a recent US poll shows a marked increase in US citizens questioning the capitalist system. Only 53% favour capitalism over socialism.

Young Americans (under 30) are the most socialistic. The pollsters say they are "essentially evenly divided", 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

It is perhaps unsurprising that people are questioning the capitalist system at a time when its caused the biggest crisis for a generation (and possibly much longer). However, the point is to offer a coherent alternative.

Like in the US, the mainstream political parties are all embedded with neoliberal capitalism - and because of that the mainstream media rarely reports anything that counters that world viewpoint.

It is therefore necessary for those of us who don't want capitalism to articulate a coherent vision for a socialist society. That cannot be wrenched from ancient Marxist tomes, but has to be developed in the contemporary context. That is what LEAP has been seeking to do the last few years - and what our conference on Saturday 25th April will continue.

What would a similar poll in the UK reveal?

Sat 18 Apr update: And now there's even pictorial evidence of the shift to the left in the US - Obama and Chavez warmly embrace. Roll on to the United Socialist States of the Americas!

There Is An Alternative

To its credit, the conference provided a rare opportunity for a good number of concerned people – mostly politically active already - to raise a broad range of different ideas and proposals in response to the rapidly escalating crisis. Many, but far from all, saw the urgent need to end corporate power and establish 21st century models of social ownership. Some were for a return to Keynesian economics looking for ways to get the economy back in control through improved systems of regulation.

But it seems that ordinary people understand the immediacy of the global economic crisis of capitalism better than many political activists because working people are struggling every day with rising prices for food, shocked every time they fill up with a tank of petrol or heating oil, with mounting debts, lower wages and redundancies. Evidence is mounting of a new imminent implosion in the financial system, beginning with the biggest US mortgage lender Countrywide, that will reverberate throughout the world, whilst in the UK, Bradford & Bingley heads the sick list. Its effects could be many times greater then the 2007 credit crunch which broke the property market leaving millions here and abroad facing repossession. The coincidence of all these facts of daily existence with a mounting political crisis in Britain adds up to an even greater test for political campaigners.

It can seem difficult to identify immediate “practical” solutions to recession plus inflation, especially when the market state and client governments like New Labour have neither the capacity nor the political will to intervene. Any action they take in one area makes things worse elsewhere. Providing tax breaks for North Sea oil producers, for example, can only deepen the ecological crisis. The environmentalist Jonathon Porritt summed it up pretty well in his blog earlier this month. “So, food security is back on the political agenda. Climate change is omni-present. Peak Oil is rising. The credit crunch is the new player on the block. Resource wars are looming. Rainforest destruction just won’t go away. Species loss is as bad as ever, but no one cares – for now. Water shortages are chronic. But much, much more worrying are the linkages between all these notionally ‘separate’ phenomena. The synergies, feedback loops, interdependencies. At long last, people are starting to make the connections – and are even beginning to link all those separate symptoms back to their root cause: today’s literally insane notion of getting richer by trashing the planet and screwing the poor.”

We’re in a period of history in which no amount of tinkering can solve the big questions. So we’re obliged to work on the development of ideas that link to immediate problems but raise the spectre of radical socialist transformation.

For example, on the energy crisis, the case for social ownership of power generating and oil corporations increases daily. This essential resource should not be left in private hands or market forces. In the interim, the state could slash prices and subsidise energy through the scrapping of Trident and foreign wars. To save energy, public transport fares could be reduced drastically and services reorganised so that people could get to and from work without using their cars. Rail and bus networks would then be taken back into public ownership.

Food prices could be frozen and steps taken towards bringing the supermarket chains into co-operative ownership, ending their profiteering at consumers’ expense. People threatened with repossession should be allowed to stay in their homes pending plans to convert everyone’s mortgage debt into something more affordable and less of a long-term burden. Speculating in commodities and currencies should be blocked and a programme of turning private sector finance into mutual, co-operatively owned enterprises launched.

The big question of questions looms: Who on earth is going to implement such a programme? New Labour? You can’t be serious. The Tories or Lib Dems? To ask the question is to answer it. The apparent political impasse only poses in a sharper way the spectre already mentioned, that of a break with the capitalist present and a leap into a socialist future. It’s difficult to conceive of but it’s an eminently practical solution given the prevailing view that There is No Alternative. The real challenge out of the Leap conference is to create the leadership and organization needed to bring such policies to fruition. The urgency of achieving this cannot be overstated.