Tony Benn...

So that’s it, British socialism is dead.  Of course as a force for change it’s been dead some time; Thatcher, Scargill, and Blair all saw to that in their own ways. Look, I’m no politician and I’m no historian either, all I can do is look at my lifetime from my own perspective and comment on what I have felt and seen. I wouldn’t usually comment on the death of a politician. But I was a child in the sixties, a teenager in the seventies, a young man in the eighties and Tony Benn was always there, spouting his own very sensible and intelligent brand of political debate, so on this occasion I feel that I can.

In 1950, seven years before I was born, Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn won the by-election as Labour candidate for Bristol South at the tender age of 25. In 1960 he became a peer on the death of his father which would have prevented him sitting in the House of Commons. He didn’t want that, so he resigned his peerage and became plain old Tony Benn. In 1988 he lost the Labour Party leadership election against Neil Kinnock, depriving us of a truly great Prime Minister who would have driven at least a little social justice and equality. In 2001 he refused to stand in the general election, disappointed by what was happening in the Labour Party and politics generally, and instead became president of the Stop the War coalition.

Tony Benn was born of a time when each political party not only had different agendas and manifestos, but were different in ideology, heart, and thinking, a time when politicians were allowed to look like Doctor Who and didn’t employ image consultants, hair stylists, and acting coaches. He was a man that supported causes because he believed in them, not because they were fashionable, a man who spoke his mind and believed every word he said, a man that simply didn’t do the new politics of blandness where everyone sits saying almost nothing in a pretty narrow middle of a collective-think road.

Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, he spoke his mind and spoke up for his values. People knew where he stood and what he stood for and you can’t say that about most politicians these days.

Tony Benn, the last true British socialist. We’ll not see his like again, more’s the pity.