Review of
British Wealthy Faux-Left Politician's Autobiography
Tony Benn: Dare to be a Daniel (2004) (This review was removed from Amazon)
Obsolete Ideas; Stalwart Shadow Fighting With Nineteenth Century IdeasBenn died, aged 88, in March, 2014. I've slightly expanded this review to serve as an obituary.
Benn's biography has two parts: more than half the book deals with his early life (born 1925; in London, into a political family); then the text of some of his speeches, plus some socialist commentary. He was a cabinet minister for a total of about ten years, mostly under Harold Wilson. Later, he was Labour MP for Chesterfield for years, a Derbyshire mining area, a constituency no doubt chosen because it would always return someone selected as 'Labour'; it doesn't seem to have played much part in his life.
His other books include The Regeneration of Britain (1965) and Speeches of Tony Benn (1974), both collections of speeches on limited topics: Ships for the UN, South Africa, Televising the Commons, the Crown, the Honours System. His speeches (I think it's fair to say) are all reactive, made in reaction to what's being currently pushed by the media. Behind-the-scenes material is absent. Why is this? One clue is in another of his books: Writings on the Wall—Radical & Socialist Anthology 1215-1984 (1984). His introduction says his selection of extracts (in modernised English where necessary) includes '.. values based on the ideas of freedom, equality and democracy.. [but] the very fact that an alternative tradition has been in existence for many centuries is simply not known to many people'. Writers quoted include (my notes; sample from O through S) Lord Boyd-Orr, Richard Overton, Robert Owen, Tom Paine, William Paley, Christabel Pankhurst, Emmeline Pankhurst, Henry Parker, Emma Paterson, Harry Pollitt, Priestley, Jimmy Reid, Sheila Rowbotham, Bertrand Russell, Dora Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, Shakespeare, Shaw, Shelley, Algernon Sidney, George Sims, Tobias Smollett, Donald Soper, Robert Southey, John Strachey. Organisations include: 'Chartists', 'Communist Manifesto', 'Daily Herald', 'Fabian Society', 'Greenham Women', 'Independent Labour Party', 'International Brigade', 'Levellers', 'London Working Men's Association'. Benn did 'Politics, Philosophy, and Economics' at Oxford (PPE) a splendid collection of gentlemanly light topics. Probably these people were condescendingly footnoted.
The most important event of the twentieth century, the First World War, finished not much more than five years before Benn's birth. The Fed (1913) and the Balfour Declaration (secretly arranged in 1916?) and then the formation of the USSR opened the theatre curtains on new perspectives. But nothing of this seems to have entered Benn's consciousness. Most of his socialist writings precede the 20th century world, and when they don't, they ignore the new forces of paper money and international legal enforcements and 'reds', the fake socialism which corrupted genuine socialism, and was and is run by Jews via the paper money nexus. His 1984 volume is astonishingly outdated, largely concerned with Kings and Queens, landowners vs smallholdings, cotton mill owners, coal mines, women's rights, uneducated common people, highland clearances, Biblically-derived arguments such as the Creator making the earth to be a Common Treasury.
That's not to say that Benn is light on ideas. Unfortunately, they were and are outdated ideas. His snowfall of ideas and beliefs has an effect similar to a preacher in a foreign or somewhat lost language. 'Capitalism' is one of the most used and potent. As far as I know Benn never commented on Jewish domination of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve; if he had done, he might have found an answer to the puzzle of shortage of money for people, but the sudden 'finding' of money for wars that Jews want. I don't think Benn ever analysed the fuzzy idea of 'capitalism'; making speeches is generally the medium for somebody making a transient impression, and speeches were Benn's forte. I haven't found any account of the way companies, if Benn considered they were needed, could be restructured to be less 'capitalist'. Similarly with 'socialism', 'democracy', and of course 'fascism', which like most people Benn conflated with German National Socialism. Benn said fascism is a 'very powerful philosophy', but of course the taboo on Jews kept him from serious analysis.
“I think it's time we did a bit of reexamination, you know, of the 1930s and got away from the idea that the British government believed in appeasement. They didn't .. appease Hitler. They supported Hitler. They backed Hitler. .. captured German foreign office you'll find that when Halifax went to talk to Hitler on behalf of the British government the first thing he did was to congratulate the German chancellor on having destroyed communism in Germany, and acted as a bulwark against it in Europe. And the whole of that 1930s period was a period when western governments were happy to use fascism in order to destroy socialism in all its forms, not just in Russia but in the west as well.Mass murder in Russia isn't everyone's idea of 'a form' of brotherhood and freedom; nor is the supply of technology by huge capitalist organisations to Jews running the USSR; nor is it obvious that governments, with their officials and propaganda and civil servants, 'believe in capitalist ideas'. Benn doesn't distinguish Italy from Germany: Italy, probably disillusioned that, even after supporting the Allies in the First World War, they weren't to be awarded anything, decided they need to hang together—there was no Jewish implication. Benn's views on the Second World War were the dominant Jewish-driven ones; to which he seems to have never applied any critical thinking whatsoever, at the time, or subsequently. Nor of course to the 'Cold War'. As the years stretched on after 1945, his misunderstandings widened. For example, the idea that wars could be simple money-making schemes was probably barred to him: he quotes an 1823 classification of wars ('.. some are ...wars of aggression; some .. balance of power; some [assert] ... technical rights; some ... repel invasion')—the war-profiteers/warbucks idea was missing. He 'served' with Harold Wilson at the time of genocide in Vietnam, and in Nigeria, as far as I know doing nothing about either.
Fascism was the response of capitalism to the arrival in Moscow in 1917 of socialism. However distorted it later became under Joe Stalin it was seen as a threat - in every form - communism, socialism, social democracy - everything that challenged the capitalist system - the repression of it was supported by western leaders. And in my opinion from 1917 until the Berlin wall came down and still today it is the prime objective of any of the governments representing capitalist societies or believing in capitalist ideas to destroy all forms of socialism, and a readiness to use fascism for that purpose.” [From my tape recording]
Speech 1994 on media workers opposing war with Iraq is fifteen minutes on the start of WW2, defining 'fascism' which he attributes to Hitler, and seriously suggesting that media workers might be anti-war even when the Jewish media owners wanted war.
Part of Benn's belief system was Christian: he believed Jesus was born, at about the generally-accepted time, and was impressed, as many are, by a few Biblical phrases: Bertrand Russell's attention was drawn to the phrase 'follow not the multitude into wrong-doing'; Benn's to Daniel surviving a night in a lions' den. Britain has largely been spared the agonising absurdities of American style fundamentalist Christianity, with block capitals and insistence on the truth of various absurd stories and biological impossibilities. If Benn had taken this line he would certainly have been taken less seriously. As it is, he appealed to large numbers of ordinary voters: they were assured they had been heroic and right to follow Churchill, and that they were entitled to socialist benefits because of their hard work, and so on. Benn worked a bit at the BBC; he married and lived in a rich part of London; his assets were held in trust with his American wife, in America, insulating him from the possibility of revolution in Britain (according to Louis Heren, one-time editor of the Times). He did his best with some republican concerns—trying to remove the Queen's head from postage stamps, trying to remove evidence of his 'elite' education, giving up his House of Lords seat.
I doubt if any part of his life was taken up with money-making, except perhaps his books. And I don't think he ever understood technology. Incredibly, he was made Minister for Technology in the 1960s; his work supposedly included nuclear issues, much of which must have been fraudulent—perhaps that's why he was selected. And perhaps why the 'Labour' Party retained him because he never seems to have had an inkling of the strange relations around paper money and the Jewish connection. Even his diaries (interesting as a peripheral view of events; naturally the real powers are absent from them) were edited by a Jew, so that anything emerging by chance on those topics would have been removed.
The early part of the book includes a fairly powerful evocation of London life, rather puritanical and driven, including his father's timekeeping and deliberate planning of events, and concern with excessive drinking, and writings and sketches in the style of H G Wells; and his mother's religiosity. As with pretty much everybody writing about Oxbridge, the ideas that he was taught or absorbed, and the tutors and the rest, are barely mentioned. There's material on his family, many of whom follow his religion. But the most important parts of this book—how truths can be extracted from secrecy, and how people can be mobilised—are missing.