Upbringing and Early Career

While sympathizers as well as detractors routinely describe Benn’s background as aristocratic, his family was in fact political, not landed. His father, William Wedgwood Benn, started out as a radical Liberal MP before joining the Labour Party, moving left with age as his son later did. In 1942, he was handed a hereditary peerage and elevated to the Lords by Winston Churchill, whose wartime coalition government needed more Labour peers.

Both of Benn junior’s grandfathers were also Liberal MPs, while his Scottish mother, Margaret Eadie Holmes, was an active nonconformist Christian, feminist, and campaigner for the ordination of women. Her leveling readings of the Bible resonated profoundly with the young Tony Benn, who retained a lifelong interest in the emancipatory potential of radical Christianity despite distancing himself from organized religion in later life.

Growing up in an intensely political household, Benn was introduced to a wide range of ideas from an early age. William Wedgwood Benn had served as Ramsay MacDonald’s secretary of state for India but was sympathetic to the national liberation struggle there; visitors to the Benn family home in these years included Gandhi. The rise of fascism and the huge growth in arms expenditure in the run-up to World War II likewise led the inquisitive young Benn to question why governments had been unwilling to devote the same resources to fighting poverty and social injustice in previous years.

Coming as he did from a prominent Labour family, Benn was earmarked as a future MP before he could even exercise the vote. He entered the House of Commons in 1950, aged only twenty-five, and in his early career was broadly aligned with Labour’s then leader Hugh Gaitskell, an ardent Cold Warrior and scourge of the Labour left.

Though the party in these years was almost torn asunder by factional warfare over nuclear disarmament and public ownership, Benn maintained a certain distance; he was asked to join the left-wing Bevanite parliamentary caucus but declined. Regardless, his rhetorical talents and youthful dynamism soon marked him out as probably the outstanding young talent in the Commons, one destined for future greatness.

Benn took a keen interest in foreign policy questions and resisted being boxed in by Cold War binaries. Although he supported the United States in the Korean War, Benn’s anti-colonialism led him to align himself with the left-wing Movement for Colonial Freedom — then a largely Bevanite grouping — and he was outspoken in his opposition to the British government over the Suez Crisis in 1956. Although Gaitskell’s initial instinct had been to rally to the side of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, even offering ritual denunciations of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser as the new Adolf Hitler, Benn successfully pressured Gaitskell into changing his position.

In 1960, William Wedgwood Benn died and, as his eldest surviving son, Tony Benn inherited his peerage, becoming the unwilling Viscount Stansgate — thus barring him from the House of Commons. This issue had been raised even before Benn was selected as a parliamentary candidate in Bristol South East, but his attempts to change the law prior to his father’s death had failed.

He embarked on a three-year struggle to throw off the unwanted peerage, fighting tirelessly to remain in the Commons and for the right of his constituents to send him there. This ultimately successful campaign was a key milestone in Benn’s political evolution; many years later, he still kept a vial of “blue” blood extracted during his brief time as Viscount Stansgate as a memento.

Office Without Power

After thirteen years in opposition, Labour returned to government under the leadership of Harold Wilson, Gaitskell having died the previous year. Benn spent two years as Wilson’s postmaster general (essentially, minister of communications) before becoming minister of technology in 1966. In this role, Benn was tasked with applying Wilson’s “white heat of technology” to Britain’s flagging industries, encouraging a series of mergers in the hope that this would boost investment and productivity, both of which compared unfavorably to Britain’s industrial peer countries.

However, despite generous state subsidies, this policy was a failure. The Labour government began casting around for a scapegoat and found one in the trade unions, whose prerogatives it sought to constrain: the In Place of Strife white paper thus proposed new curbs on the right to strike. It was met with predictable fury from the unions, who forced the government to retreat; Benn vacillated, initially supporting In Place of Strife before backing down upon realizing the depth of trade union anger. Relations between the Labour Party and its trade union affiliates were strained for some time thereafter.

Having alienated both its voters and its trade union allies, Labour was ousted from government in 1970 and Ted Heath’s Conservatives came in. Wilson’s government had proved impotent in the face of worsening economic conditions, while its support for the US war on Vietnam had dismayed many party activists. Benn reflected on this and began to fundamentally rethink his politics. The events in France during May 1968 and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971 provided Benn with inspiration and brought home to him just how little serious political thinking he had done while in government.

While Benn was not devoid of personal ambition, if this was his main motivation, he could have taken a much simpler career path than the one on which he was now embarked. His move to the left was genuinely bold and risky, and it infuriated many of his Labour colleagues, Harold Wilson among them — Wilson would later remark caustically that Benn “immatures with age.” But Benn’s inquisitiveness and willingness to listen to alternative perspectives — that is, those beyond business lobbyists and the entreaties of the bourgeois press — were almost unheard of among senior Labour politicians, then as now.

Benn’s leftward shift was met with some skepticism on the Left, however; he had of course been a minister under Wilson and memories of In Place of Strife were still raw. His championing of workers’ control, meanwhile, also threw down the gauntlet to the trade union movement. As Benn saw it, the trade union militancy of this period was too narrowly focused, bargaining hard over the terms of exploitation instead of challenging the system that depended on it.

He therefore sought to break out of trade union economism and channel this energy into a broader democratizing political project, arguing that without industrial democracy, political democracy would always be incomplete. But even left-wing trade union leaders were disconcerted by the potential implications such a project could have for their own roles.

A Fork in the Road

In 1974, Britain was rocked by its second national coal miners’ strike in three years, as frustration at wage restraint and pit closures boiled over into a show of real anger. Heath responded by calling a general election that February on a single question: “Who governs Britain?” The answer from the electorate was inconclusive — Wilson’s Labour was elected to head a minority government — but it was clear enough that Heath was no longer running the country. A second election in October gave Labour an overall Commons majority of just three that was to be whittled away over the ensuing years.

In opposition, Benn had forged close connections with the shop stewards’ movement and collaborated with them to develop an ambitious program of industrial renewal and reform. Appointed by Wilson as industry secretary, he set about translating this into government policy. Benn’s Industry Bill reflected his commitment to industrial democracy, proposing increased government powers over failing or strategically important industries, giving workers greater responsibility over industrial decision-making and investment, and the formation of a holding company — the National Enterprise Board (NEB) — to take public stakes in key firms with a view toward modernizing British industry and extending democratic public ownership.

The bill, however, was gutted of any transformative potential before it could become law. Benn’s fraught relationship with his top civil servant, Sir Anthony Part, was a harbinger of the opposition he would face. When Benn first took up the position of industry secretary, Part greeted him by saying: “I presume, Secretary of State, that you don’t intend to implement the industry proposals in Labour’s manifesto.” To Part’s chagrin, Benn was indeed deadly serious. Part would be a persistent thorn in Benn’s side during his time at the Department of Industry, continually working to obstruct or slow-walk Benn’s plans for reform.

Fortunately for Part, he had allies in high places: at the top of British business and the government itself. The business lobby reacted furiously to Benn’s Industry Bill and made it clear that it would not cooperate with the new framework even if parliament approved the legislation undiluted.

Wilson deputized Michael Foot, an erstwhile left-winger who now served as the key link between the government and the trade union leaderships, to rewrite the bill without Benn’s input. The NEB’s powers were curtailed and plans for compulsory planning agreements with firms watered down to be merely voluntary, while provisions for worker input were also scaled back. But even this capitulation failed to restore fabled “business confidence” — only Benn’s removal, it was said, could do that.

The 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) would provide the pretext. Benn, an opponent of EEC membership, had proposed the referendum, but it became a plebiscite on the direction of the government and of Benn’s role in it. The landslide vote to remain in the EEC was, as a result, interpreted as a decisive rejection of Benn and the Labour left; he was dismissed as industry secretary just three days afterward.

Demoted to energy secretary, Benn would preside over the first extraction of North Sea oil, but it would be Margaret Thatcher who reaped the political rewards when the revenue started flowing in a few years later. Instead of being used for industrial renewal, as Benn had envisaged, the proceeds were squandered on tax cuts for the affluent and unemployment benefits for the millions of people who Thatcher threw out of work.

In 1976, the Labour government — now led by Wilson’s successor James Callaghan and his chancellor, Denis Healey — went to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) seeking a bailout after a succession of sterling crises. Healey’s civil servants presented him with deliberately inflated and misleading public borrowing estimates. He received instructions from the IMF to make spending cuts of £2.5 billion as a condition of the loan.

Benn recognized this as a turning point. He circulated cabinet minutes from 1931, when MacDonald’s Labour government collapsed over cuts to unemployment benefits. The comparison to MacDonald, Labour’s most notorious traitor, infuriated Benn’s colleagues but had more than a grain of truth to it.

There was, Benn insisted, another way. He put forward his Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), which proposed a raft of interventionist measures including exchange controls, state intervention in key industries, and tightened capital controls. However, only a small minority in the cabinet supported Benn, with a majority voting — very reluctantly in some cases — for the IMF deal.

Benn saw that Labour had reached a fork in the road. Unless it went beyond the postwar settlement and made a decisive advance toward democratic socialism, he believed, most of the gains it had made since 1945 would be reversed.

The Fight for the Labour Party

To make that advance toward socialism would first require a radical transformation of the structures of the Labour Party. It was to this that Benn and the Labour new left turned their attention. The Callaghan government finally ran out of road in 1978, when its policy of pay restraint collapsed amid a strike wave immortalized as the “winter of discontent.”

Later to serve as the key founding myth of Thatcherism, this episode brought much of the country to a standstill. For decades thereafter, images of rubbish piling up in the streets and lurid tales of bodies going unburied would be wheeled out by the Right as a warning against unchecked trade union power. From then on, Callaghan’s government could only mark time until its inevitable downfall, which came in March 1979 when a parliamentary vote of no confidence finally put it out of its misery.

Not only was there great anger at the record of the Wilson-Callaghan governments — there was also great irritation at their high-handed treatment of the Labour Party grassroots, which had urged a different course upon them and had been ignored. After 1979, the Bennites mounted a serious campaign for strengthened internal party democracy so that a future Labour government could be held to account.

They sought to give constituency parties and trade unions a vote in Labour leadership elections — Labour MPs, up to this point, had a monopoly on electing party leaders. The Left also wanted to compel sitting MPs to stand for reselection by local parties in each parliamentary term, so they could be more easily removed if their performance fell short of expectations.

While these measures were quite modest and already standard practice in some other European social democratic parties, they enraged the Labour leadership and most MPs. The faction fight required even to secure these changes to the Labour Party constitution was draining in the extreme, sapping the Bennites of much of their energy and depriving them of the time and energy they would have needed to communicate effectively with the wider working class.

Insofar as their ideas reached the public at all, it was mostly through the channel of an unremittingly hostile and even hateful bourgeois media. As Hilary Wainwright put it, this was “like sending prison letters through a revengeful censor.” The vicious attacks of the press on the Bennites served to alienate them from their potential constituency. The “loony left” tag and constant smears proved particularly damaging and difficult to overcome.

Moreover, the prospect of being held accountable by the grassroots of their own movement was simply too much for some Labour MPs to bear. Some twenty-eight right-wing Labour MPs broke away to join the new Social Democratic Party (SDP), founded in 1981 after a special Labour Party conference voted to introduce a new electoral college for leadership elections, consisting of constituency parties, affiliated trade unions, and MPs.

At the time of the breakaway, the Thatcher government had precipitated a deep recession with its monetarist policies, allowing unemployment to soar to three million (by official figures, and likely an undercount). Thatcher herself was deeply unpopular at this time and opinion polls put Labour ahead of the Conservatives despite its own internal divisions. The launch of the SDP, however, knowingly split the anti-Conservative vote. When coupled with the outpouring of jingoism that followed the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982, this laid the foundations for Thatcher’s landslide reelection at the 1983 general election.

At the same time, divisions opened up between the Bennite new left and the so-called “soft left,” with the latter consisting largely of fading ex-Bevanites such as Foot, who succeeded Callaghan as party leader in 1980, and their political protégés like Neil Kinnock. Where the Bennites sought to harness the power of social movements — the women’s movement, the LGBTQ rights movement, the peace movement, and the anti-racist movement — and unite them with Labour’s existing trade union base, the soft left remained wedded to purely parliamentary reform.

While the Bennites had strong support among rank-and-file trade unionists, it should be noted, many union leaders were at best ambivalent toward their agenda, fearing both the impact of factional infighting on Labour’s electoral performance and the prospect of the struggle for internal democracy spilling over to their own unions. The old Labour left, organized around the Tribune group of MPs, began to realign with the party’s right wing, backed up by the block votes and organizational heft of major trade unions.

In 1981, Benn challenged Healey for the party’s deputy leadership. Though the position itself held little power, this became a symbolic contest over Labour’s political direction; a “battle” for its “soul,” as a common cliche of Labour Party faction fights had it. Kinnock and a number of other Tribune MPs abstained from the final round of voting, effectively handing victory to Healey and concretizing the break between the Bennites and the soft left. Healey won by just 0.85 percent — “half a hair of an eyebrow,” as he later admitted — a result which marked both the high-water mark of Bennism and the beginning of its decline.

Most damaging of all, the 1983 general election defeat would be pinned almost solely on the Bennite left. The party’s manifesto of that year would be caricatured and ridiculed for decades. John Golding was the Labour right wing’s leading factional “fixer” at the time, with excellent connections in the trade unions. In his memoir, Golding crowed that with the election already as good as lost, the Labour right had deliberately given the Bennites almost a free hand over the 1983 manifesto precisely so that it could be hung around their neck as an albatross for years afterward.

Benn suffered the further indignity of losing his seat in the House of Commons at that election; boundary changes had abolished his old Bristol South East constituency, and Labour right-wingers had successfully maneuvered Benn into a successor constituency he was unlikely to win. As only sitting MPs are eligible to serve as Labour Party leader, this meant that he could not put himself forward as a candidate in the subsequent Labour leadership contest to replace the outgoing Michael Foot.

From the Miners’ Strike to New Labour

Despite losing in Bristol, Benn soon returned to the Commons as MP for Chesterfield, a mining seat in Derbyshire. His return to Parliament coincided with the onset of the 1984–85 miners’ strike, the decisive British industrial dispute of the Thatcher years. Benn’s vocal support for Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) deepened the tensions between him and Kinnock, now installed as Labour leader.

As part of his intended “modernization” of the Labour Party, Kinnock sought to distance it from anything that smacked of trade union militancy. This meant keeping Scargill and the NUM firmly at arms’ length, despite the strong and active support for the miners among the Labour grassroots.

Benn, like Scargill, was far more clear-sighted than Kinnock about the stakes involved in the miners’ strike, recognizing it as a battle with far-reaching implications for the working-class movement well beyond the miners themselves. Reluctant to draw further fire from a belligerent Thatcher, the Trades Union Congress and the Labour leadership merely fiddled as the miners went down to a defeat that the British trade union movement has never since recovered from. But the crushing of the miners strengthened the hand of right-wing elements in the Labour Party and the trade unions — representing the so-called “new realism” — as they attempted to sue for peace with the Thatcher government.

The NUM leadership was subjected to persistent harassment and surveillance by state security agencies during the strike. As the most prominent and feared left-wing politician in Britain over the preceding decade, Benn already had extensive experience of this. The Benn family’s home phone line was tapped — he joked in a Commons debate that it was “the only remaining link I have with the British establishment.”

The fact that a transmitter had been implanted in the telephone itself came to light when Benn’s youngest son, Joshua, accidentally picked up his father’s phone conversation on a shortwave radio. Benn became a vocal critic of the undemocratic, repressive arms of the state, which underpinned his subsequent push for constitutional reform.

When Thatcher was finally deposed in 1990, it was not Kinnock’s Labour Party — for all its bowing and scraping — that had unseated her. Rather, it was Thatcher’s own Conservative Party, tired of her growing Euroskepticism and spooked by the mass uprising against the poll tax, that finished her off. The Tories replaced her with the more sober John Major, who led the party to its fourth successive general election win — and Kinnock’s second consecutive defeat — in 1992, marking the end of the latter’s Labour leadership.

In pursuit of media plaudits and electoral success, Kinnock had sold policy after policy down the river, from nuclear disarmament to nationalization. But since he had originally supported all of those policies in vocal terms, the end result was that, as Benn later commented, “nobody believed a word [Kinnock] said.” As if to deliberately prove the point, Kinnock — previously an opponent of EEC membership — later accepted a sinecure in Brussels as European commissioner and then a peerage (he had also supported abolition of the House of Lords).

After the brief interregnum of John Smith’s tenure as Labour leader, ended by his sudden death in 1994, came Tony Blair and New Labour. Unquestioningly committed to the Thatcherite neoliberal settlement in a way that not even Kinnock had been, New Labour’s architects saw their task as being to reconcile their party to the new dispensation and rid it of any remaining vestiges of socialism. Some former Bennites tried, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success, to make their peace with the new regime, but Benn never reconciled himself to Blairism.

This uncompromising stance was soon vindicated as New Labour’s shine began to wear off in government after the initial euphoria of its landslide election win in 1997. Benn’s Socialist Campaign Group, though steadily dwindling in number throughout the 1990s and 2000s, at least tried to put forward a left-wing alternative even if it remained a voice in the wilderness. Benn’s warnings that Blair, moving ever further to the right in government, was in the process of melting away the party’s own base, “like a bonfire on a frozen lake,” were to prove prescient later on.

Benn reinvented himself as a popular orator and chronicler of the labor movement, and the publication of his diaries — strongly resented by some of his former colleagues — provided a unique insider account into the workings of the Wilson and Callaghan governments as well as the struggle for party democracy during the early 1980s. Benn continued to deploy his formidable talents as a public speaker to good effect after leaving parliament in 2001, using his platform to advocate for socialism, democracy, and peace. Borrowing a line from his late wife (and closest comrade) Caroline Benn, he half-joked when standing down as an MP that it would leave him with “more time for politics.”

He took a strong stance against successive imperialist wars including, most notably, the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Having originally been a Labour Zionist — he had even spent VE Day on a kibbutz — Benn was a steadfast supporter of the Palestinian national liberation struggle in later years, further cementing his status as an icon of the British anti-imperialist left.

Benn’s Legacy and Relevance Today

Many of Benn’s warnings — about the erosion of democracy, the growth of untrammelled capitalist power, and the rightward direction of the Labour Party — have been borne out. It is safe to assume that he would have been disgusted and horrified by the party’s latest lurch to the right under Keir Starmer, who has gone out of his way to eradicate any hopes of social transformation rather than nurturing and channeling them. In particular, Benn would have been enraged by Starmer’s anathematizing of Jeremy Corbyn, one of his most loyal friends and comrades.

Benn was Corbyn’s political and personal lodestar, and Corbyn’s unlikely rise to the Labour leadership would have amazed, enthralled, and delighted Benn had he lived to see it. The sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of people into the Labour Party, inspired by Corbyn’s two leadership campaigns in 2015 and 2016, would have given Benn great encouragement. The general election of 2017, when Labour came remarkably close to unseating the Conservatives from government, would have also served as vindication, providing as it did concrete proof that millions of voters could be won to an ambitious left-wing program, even if the British establishment soon regained its footing.

The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? serves as a timely reminder that Benn was one of the most original and creative thinkers the Labour Party has ever produced (and this is not to damn him with faint praise). His willingness to engage with movements and schools of thought outside the narrow purview of Labourism was extremely rare among Labour politicians, as was his genuine belief in the creative and intellectual capacities of working people. As his daughter, Melissa Benn, notes in her foreword to the book, the breadth of his thought and the pertinence of his concerns make him a figure of enduring interest — as well as contrasting sharply with the gray and inept managerialism of the floundering Starmer government.

Yet for all his unorthodoxy, Benn remained fundamentally committed to the Labour Party as the vehicle for social change in Britain. The Corbyn experience has surely settled this question once and for all in the negative. With minimal resistance, the Starmerite counterrevolution has banished what remains of the Labour left once more to the outer margins. The Socialist Campaign Group, which Benn founded, has proven ineffective and incoherent, its remaining MPs scared to speak up for fear of being kicked out of the party, while the most abject opportunists among them simply slink off and leave the group to save their worthless careers.

Throughout his life, Benn rejected democratic centralism and remained true to the belief that social change can only be brought about — where the option exists — via the ballot box and not by force. He saw parliamentary democracy as one milestone in a centuries-long, still unfinished democratic struggle from below, running like a red thread from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, through the Diggers, Chartists, and suffragettes to the modern labor movement.

But the institutions of parliament fended off Benn’s attempts to open them up to real popular participation and scrutiny, and the British constitution at its core remains unreformed and incorrigible. Political parties have gone from having an organic base in civil society to being mere cartel parties, as Peter Mair dubbed them. The post-Corbyn Labour Party has reverted to this type, actively driving out hundreds of thousands of party members to consolidate control in the hands of an increasingly reactionary parliamentary leadership.

This hollowing out of liberal democracy, which Benn always recognized as a very limited form of popular sovereignty, makes even mild social reform appear unattainable now, even in countries less hidebound and mired in mysticism than Britain. While Benn’s libertarian socialism is undeniably attractive and proved inspirational for more than one generation of activists, it would have been ill equipped in government to deal with the constant attempts at subversion and destabilization it would have faced, including from within his own party. Even Benn admitted privately that had he become prime minister, it would have probably ended up like the pessimistic scenario envisaged by his friend Chris Mullin in his novel A Very British Coup, with the media and the security forces combining to depose him.

Benn’s faith in Labour and in parliamentary democracy might be difficult to sustain today, but his participatory vision of socialism as a movement of the people and for the people still raises the spirits in a Britain gripped by sullen disillusionment and economic decline. Interviewed by the editors of New Left Review in 1982, Benn outlined his conception of a socialist Labour government as “the liberator unlocking the cells in which people live.” He may not have brought about the change he aspired to, but he did so much to keep the socialist flame alight in a period of harsh reaction that the mantle would serve just as well as a sobriquet for Benn himself.