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The liberal agenda: a warning
In this Guardian article (see link below) Lord Adonis (sorry, he writes as Andrew Adonis; he clearly doesn’t approve of the title he’s accepted – how democratic, indeed how liberal, that is!) describes the late Roy Jenkins as “the most transformational liberal home secretary ever” because, apparently, “he legalised both homosexuality and abortion in one of the most skilful ministerial manoeuvres of parliamentary history.” It’s true that Jenkins was Home Secretary at the time. But it was, of course, the determined campaigns by gays and women that were the crucial elements leading to those changes in the law, not really Jenkins. His image at the time, and his image as handed down through the decades, is that he was the great white hope of the liberal intelligentsia. But I’ll tell you what else he did. He voted to cancel the British passports of the Kenyan Asians who fled to the UK from Kenya in 1967-68, thus pandering to the hostile campaigns against them by Enoch Powell, Duncan Sandys and the fascists of the National Front.
The Kenyan Asians were never called refugees but, effectively, that’s what they were. Their presence in Kenya was part of colonial history and their departure a result of the decolonisation process in East Africa. After independence in 1963 Kenya adopted a policy of Africanisation: in the civil service, Africans had to be rapidly promoted; in private firms, Africans had to be employed at worker and management levels. At the time of independence Asians had been offered Kenyan or British citizenship, and many of them chose British. But the 1967 Trade Licensing Act in Kenya made it illegal for non-citizens to trade in rural or outlying urban areas and in a wide range of goods, and many Asians were forced out of business. Many turned to the UK for help. In 1963 the Conservative government, though fresh from passing the first restrictive Commonwealth Immigrants Act, reassured the Kenyan Asians that their UK citizenship was secure. In March 1968 the Labour government, though fresh from declaring Jenkins’ liberal agenda, cancelled this agreement and passed a new Commonwealth Immigrants Act which removed their UK citizenship. In the space of 72 hours. And what happened to the bright, shiny new liberals in the Labour cabinet when the vote was taken? They voted for it. Roy Hattersley expressed remorse 31 years later in an interview (the following quotation and the later quotation from the Jenkins interview come from the Channel 4 documentary Playing the Race Card, which was first broadcast in October-November1999; they are reproduced from memory and are correct in their substance, but may not be word-for-word):
Shirley [Williams] and I stayed up into the small hours discussing what we should do. When you go into politics you want to achieve certain things, but you can’t achieve everything and you often have to make compromises. But there are some things you shouldn’t compromise on, and this was one of them. We should have resigned rather than vote for it.
And Jenkins? He had become Chancellor by the time the Act was passed. He also explained himself 31 years later: he was Chancellor, he explained, travelling abroad and signing deals and agreements with a host of countries. So, he explained,
I think people would have thought it really rather trivial if I had resigned on this issue.
So beware of liberals bearing gifts. And beware of Lord Adonis, who says in the article that Jenkins “was my hero and later my mentor”. He also says that he “fell politically in love with Tony Blair” (what a careful statement that is!). I’m glad he’s against the idea of breaking away from Labour to form a new party (at least at the moment – remember he’s a liberal). But I suspect he will do his best to undermine Corbyn every chance he gets.
To end on a lighter note: he points out that the SDP failed in their aim in the 1980s to “break the mould of British politics”. Tony Benn once captured this failure perfectly to a Question Time audience:
The SDP was formed to break the mould of British politics and last week they held their annual conference in a telephone kiosk in Plymouth.[1]
His Lordship’s article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/24/labour-party-split-sdp-tories-england
[1] David Owen, a former Labour Foreign Secretary and one of the “Gang of Four” who founded the SDP, was the MP for Plymouth.
On oaths
The government may make new British citizens swear an oath of allegiance to “British values”. In my Christian youth we used to argue about whether it was right to swear an oath, even in court. Jesus had said that we shouldn’t and that anything more than just Yes or No “comes from evil”. I think it was because he rejected the assumption that everyone was a lying bastard unless they swore otherwise under some kind of threat from on high.
In later years, when I went to refugees’ citizenship ceremonies, I discovered that they were required to swear allegiance to “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and all her successors”. I realised then that I could never have become a naturalised citizen if I’d had to even just declare such allegiance, never mind swear it. Tony Benn famously found a way round it. Faced with the necessity of swearing allegiance to said Queen and said descendants at the opening of each Parliament, he read out the form of words – but prefaced them with his own: “I, Tony Benn, under protest, and in order to serve my constituents, do swear … ”
But I don’t suppose the new oath makers will put up with any ploys of that kind when they’re registering oaths from today’s new citizens as they swear blind that they are totally committed not only to Her Majesty (even if her governments did try to bomb their home countries to buggery), but to cricket, or knitting, or Manchester United or anything else that they already subscribe to. I saw one list of British values that included “family values”. Unfortunately, our government’s own allegiance to the “right to family life” found in Article 8 of the Human Rights Act is more than doubtful. If you don’t believe that, you’ve never tried to assist already-naturalised citizens to negotiate the obstacles deliberately put in their way to thwart their attempts to reunite their families on good old British soil.
Oaths? I’ll give you oaths.
“It rests on injustice”
Forgive me, but there’s no end to quoting Tony Benn. These are taken more or less at random.
He always had confidence in the people he represented. When he won the battle for the right to get rid of his inherited peerage and sit in the House of Commons again he knew that without the support of his Bristol constituents he wouldn’t have won at all. On the night he was finally re-elected, he congratulated them and thanked them:
“You have defeated the Tory cabinet, you have defeated the House of Lords, you have defeated the courts. You have changed the constitution of this country by your own power.”
When MPs take up their elected seats they have to swear an oath of allegiance to “Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors”. In earlier times, if anyone refused, they went to jail. Today, if they refuse, they get fined £500 a day until they agree. So they don’t refuse! Benn got round it by adding an explanation and the words “under protest” to the oath: So it was:
“As a committed republican, under protest, I take the oath required of me by law under the Parliamentary Oaths Act 1866 to allow me to represent my constituency: I, Tony Benn, under protest, do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm, etc., etc.”
There’s a brilliant video somewhere of him doing that! No surprise, then, that when describing the opening of parliament for a BBC television documentary he pointed out:
“When the Queen came that day and sat on the red carpet she was sitting just above the spot where Charles I stood trial and was condemned to death by the Commons.”
And even when he was being mischievous, there was a political point to be made:
“There’s an absolute hierarchy of lavatories in the Houses of Parliament: the bishops have their own lavatory, so do the peers, and the peeresses. There are separate lavatories for members and others for lady members. There are male and female staff lavatories. They even have lavatories for gentlemen. But it all ends up in the same place.”
But he wasn’t being mischievous when, in 1981, at the height of his inspirational powers, he passionately urged the Labour Party conference to face the truth:
“We tried to make capitalism work with good and humane Labour governments and we haven’t succeeded. Because it can’t work. Because it rests on injustice.”
When Thatcher resigned he didn’t see why there should be any difficulty repealing Thatcherite laws, although Thatcherite ideas in people’s heads, he thought, would take longer to erase. So he told the House of Commons he had “a little Bill” to bring forward: “It’s called the Margaret Thatcher Global Repeal Bill.” Well, it didn’t pass, and Blair took the ideas of Thatcherism and ran with them, imposing them on his own party in the process.
It is this we’re left to deal with, to reverse. And how we’re going to do it – and how we’re going to do it without Tony Benn – I don’t know. But we will have to try.
Tony Benn
At Paul Foot’s memorial meeting at Hackney town hall in 2004, Tony Benn read the obituary of William Morris written by the editor of The Clarion the week that Morris died in 1896. Tony Benn applied it to Paul Foot. Sadly, it is now time to pay the same tribute to Tony Benn. He inspired us, supported us and gave us reason to hope that we could bring about socialist change. We haven’t done it yet but, if and when we do, it will be due, in no small way, to him. We owe him an enormous debt. Read The Clarion on Morris and remember Tony Benn:
“I cannot help thinking that it does not matter what goes into the Clarion this week, because William Morris is dead. And what socialist will care for any other news this week, beyond that one sad fact? He was our best man, and he is dead …
“It is true that much of his work still lives, and will live. But we have lost him, and, great as was his work, he himself was greater … he was better than the best. Though his words fell like sword strokes, one always felt that the warrior was stronger than the sword. For Morris was not only a genius, he was a man. Strike at him where you would, he rang true … he was our best man. We cannot spare him; we cannot replace him. In all England there lives no braver, kinder, honester, cleverer, heartier man than William Morris. He is dead, and we cannot help feeling for a while that nothing else matters.”
And here’s a couple of quotes from the man himself:
On the poll tax: “The last time they tried to impose the poll tax was 1381 – and protesters cut the chancellor’s head off and stuck it on a pole on Westminster Bridge. So Mr Major [John Major was Chancellor of the Exchequer] had better watch out, because you never know what’s going to happen!”
On a demonstration against Thatcher’s policies (and here he produces one of his famous lists – he always had a list!): “It was a great demonstration. People came from all over the region – women and men, young and old, employed and unemployed, skilled and unskilled, black and white, straight and gay – all protesting against Mrs Thatcher’s plans for the region – and that’s our hope. Frankly.”
On how the media are not all-powerful (I can’t remember which election he’s talking about here): Just before the election, the Sun newspaper got all the information they could find on me and sent it to a psychiatrist in America. When the result came back, they put it on the front page on the morning of the election: ‘BENN IS STARK STARING BONKERS, SAYS PSYCHIATRIST’. When the result of the election was announced, I found I’d increased my majority! So you see, they aren’t all-powerful, and they can’t tell us what to think.”
But they do try, and governments do try, to control us and keep us passive. This is from an interview in the last couple of years: “The way they control us is to frighten us all the time, and divide us and demoralise us. If you want to win you mustn’t be frightened, you mustn’t be divided, you mustn’t be demoralised and you mustn’t be cynical. And once people discover that, then it’s astonishing what can be achieved.”
RIP Tony Benn
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