Ed Miliband: damn right he’s not a Bennite
Posted on Tuesday 24 August, 2010
Filed Under New Labour
HILARY Benn famously fought the Leeds Central by-election campaign that gave him a seat in parliament on the slogan ‘a Benn but not a Bennite’.
Given that even Tony Benn’s offspring feels the need to emphasise repudiation of his old man’s politics, it’s safe to pronounce that particular 30 year old brand of leftism completely dead, with the stake driven through its heart and the reburial ceremony at the crossroads duly completed.
But in a fit of maliciously motivated playground name calling, there are some who seem determined to stick the label Labour leadership contender Ed Miliband, who is like his brother David the son of the prominent Marxist academic Ralph Miliband.
Indeed, if their late dad’s recondite brand of non-Stalinist left eurocommunism had ever achieved more than the limited currency it did, they would both be styling themselves Milibands but not Milibandites.
Yes, it is a fact that Ed’s leadership bid has been endorsed by Tony Benn. I’m told that the main reason was Benn’s high regard for Ed’s father, combined with a slight preference for the younger Miliband over his sibling.
But when Guardian writer Decca Aitkenhead suggests some sort of political affinity, the contention is denied as strongly as a wrongly-attributed charge of breaking wind:
When I mention the whisper that he’s really a Bennite, he goes off like a shotgun.
“That is such nonsense! It’s pathetic, genuinely, I think it’s pathetic. If we think that the way we should conduct political debate is by caricaturing people we disagree with as Bennites, I think it is an absolutely hopeless way to conduct a political debate. Are we really getting to a stage where if an aspirant leader of the Labour party has policies of the centre left, we then say they’re a Bennite?”
As an ardent young Bennite of the early 1980s, I can vouch for Ed Miliband’s indignant denial. To quote Lloyd Bentsen’s immortal smack down of Dan Quayle: ‘I knew Jack Kennedy. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy’
The reason for the strong reaction is that in the lexicon of New Labourism, the charge of Bennism is second as a insult only to the dreaded word ‘Trot’. This is, in itself, a yardstick of how far the Labour Party has moved to the right.
Bennism as an ideology was entirely within what would until that point have been accepted as mainstream democratic socialist Labourism. For much of the hard left of the period, such ideas as workers’ control, economic planning and Labour Party democracy were seen as all very well, if a bit wussy and reformist.
But the way that Labour Party history has been told since circa 1994, Bennism was solely responsible for four successive election defeats. Such a conception is entirely revisionist, airbrushing out of the equation as it does the SDP split, the Falklands conflict, the miners’ strike and the sheer ideological traction that Thatcherism was consequently able to obtain. There was, in short, nothing intrinsic to Bennism that guaranteed Labour defeat.
Of course the clock cannot now be turned back, and a neo-Bennite programme would find few takers. But really, Ed could have been a little more polite in his disavowal of a man who was in his day an inspiration to many, myself included.
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24 Responses to “Ed Miliband: damn right he’s not a Bennite”
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The Viscount put his name to one of those letters page screeds beloved of entitled “progressives” the other week, theoretically aimed at opposing the cuts…the gymnastic lengths the old fart went to to avoid using the term “class” was particularly telling.
No, he’s not the politician he once was, Scratch.
Fair play. Truth to tell his heyday was marginally before my time.
I find Ed’s rebuttal of “Bennism” merely reflective of how the political consciousness of this country is dictated by several right-wing newspapers.
Depressingly I can’t see any real change coming until 20/30 years down the line when the shit starts to hit the fan with climate change.
‘Salright. At least I’ll be dead by then.
“This is, in itself, a yardstick of how far the Labour Party has moved to the right.”
Which means you must have moved a fair old bit to the right yourself, eh, Dave?
Remind me again, who did you vote for?
I think with regard David’s “moving to the right” you may find a certain amount of Hobson’s choice at play.
I think with regard David’s “moving to the right” you may find a certain amount of Hobson’s choice at play.
Funnily enough, all this talk of alternative voting arrangements by the unsettling, straw-chewing yokel cranks in the Liberal party ought, should it amount to anything, to give a phenomenal boost to the possibility of a new, serious, effective, non-recreational left alternative.
I think this article does show Dave’s move to the right. If not he should tell us what, for him, has now replaced the ‘defunct’ Bennism?
I think what is both funny and sad, is that the LP (or likely leadership) doesn’t have a clue why they lost the last election?
A: New Labourism
Because if they did, then they wouldn’t try to outflank Cameron as Ed Balls did recently over the meaning of ‘progressive’.
The LP is falling down the financial drain, membership is strained and pitiful (anyone remember the latest membership and those of the past?), politically it doesn’t have a clue, and all of this whilst the Tories slash and burn…
This left and right is really outdated. Progressive policies that help the elderly and weaker in society can come from any party. The so called hard left just want to line people up and kill them. The Fascists did this. Not much difference.
Stupid comment of the week, well done Jimmy.
I think Ed Miliband did a bit of office/research work for Tony Benn as well, which may also be a factor in the endorsement. I think I recall an interview in which Benn said that he had voted for John Smith as Labour leader rather than Bryan Gould (remember him?), although one would have expected him to be closer to Gould in political terms, saying something to the effect that he’d come to the view that you have to go with people you trust – and to do that you have to know them a bit I suppose. Not sure how that sits with his famous insistence on the importance of issues rather than personalities, but there we are.
boilermaker. Maybe you are the stupid one. We do not have any so called lefties,left. Lefties have never been in power so how do you explain our NHS and welfare system.
I have even less idea what you’re on about than you do, I’m afraid Jimmy.
boilermaker. You should not be afraid or even bother commenting then bilermaker.
Well for me the clincher is Seamus Milne’s attack on David M in today’s Grauniad – if every extra vote DM piles up makes Comrade Milne’s life even a tiny iota more miserable then I know which way I’ll be voting.
Less facetiously they are brothers, Ed will be David’s 2iC whatever his actual job is and the only political question of substance is who will look better on TV – and there sadly there is no contest at all – the British public have repeatedly made it all too clear what they think about the relative merits of style and substance.
On the wider point about Bennism I too was a Bennite in the late 70s and early 80s.
Sure we were dealt a bad hand by General Galtieri, the recession coming to an end at exactly the worse possible point in the electoral cycle, the treachery of the Gang of Four and all the rest.
(the Miners strike by the way is post-1983 when Bennery was a broken force – the man could not even hold on to his own seat in that election – and the only thing that could defeat Thatcher after that was her own hubris).
But Benn and co. still played the few strong cards we did have catastrophically badly and did their bit to consign us all to thirty years of Thatcherism and crypto-Thatcherism and so to the catastrophe that is about to engulf us now.
And as for his career since with those nice cups of tea with Saddam Hussein, his wandering provincial theatres regaling the comfortable middle classes with his reminiscences of George Bernard Shaw and Ramsay MacDonald, his apparent inability to remember whether or not he has disowned the Labour Party or not – it may well be true that all political lives end in failure but in his case the failure never seems to end.
Roger. Benn lost his seat after one of the worst campaigns by the media against a politician. A regular TV interviewer used the programme to attack Benn with his own personnal views. It was worse than FOX. Benn did get back in. The interviewer is still kicking about.
Benn’s seat in Bristol was effectively abolished by the Boundaries Commission, but rather than accept a safe seat elsewhere, he chose to stay and fight in Bristol in a seat he knew he had little chance of winning. And as for the cheap jibe about him ‘wandering provincial theatres’- he uses those events to argue against the war and to make the case for his version of democratic socialism, albeit wrapped up in cosy reminiscences. I hope that “Roger”, whoever he is, will be even half as active a campaigner in his eighties as Benn is now.
Benn is not to blame for Thatcherism and cryto-Thatcherism. Surely the real culprits are Thatcher herself and crypto-Thatcherites. Also the role of the FPTP electoral system and the mores of the British Public need not be ignored.
As Hobbes is supposed to have said ‘Hell is Truth seen too Late’.
Looking back on the high tide of Bennism all I can see now is the destruction of the Labour party and ultimately of the old working class it once defended in the name of New Left identity politics.
Benn was the perfect leader for this inchoate uprising of the polytechnocracy as he actually had no true roots in the Labour movement – he came from the more liberal wing of the Victorian-Edwardian ruling class, owed his rapid advancement in the Labour movement to the likes of Gaitskell and Crosland and even at his most radical was never more than a Fabian enthusiast for enlightened bureaucratic collectivism (and also took from the Fabians a wide-eyed enthusiasm for progressive tyrants like Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran).
Even c.1980 the more intelligent Trot entrists never regarded him as anything more than a useful idiot.
As for his losing Bristol East this included most of his old Bristol SE constituency which he had held for 33 years(!) and showered pork-barrel largesse on in his years as a minister (the Concorde plant was magically sited there) and his Tory opponent was quite possibly the most mediocre of that whole years intake.
Sure compared to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown he seems a paragon of virtue – but we should actually be comparing him to Nye Bevan and George Lansbury – and in that company you realise just how absurd and lightweight a figure he is.
Roger. So who are the haevyweights?
Andy Burnham’s revival of Land value tax,once a fixture of Labour party manifestos and enacted in 1931 (Labour’s coalition partners immediately conspired to abolish it )is the first solid policy led iniative in the leadership election (apart from Diane Abbott’s pleadge to re-nationalise the railways).As the Labour Party once realised ,it is no use increasing wages and jobs if rents and mortgage repayments go up quicker and ,since these are pushed up by rising residential land prices,a land tax to restrain them is one answer.Benn supported LVT in the 70′s and
the issue has not gone away but got worse with the housing market destabilising major western economies.
Burnham says of land value tax;not old ,not New,but true Labour – and he is right.