- 15 Mar 2014 09:02
#14376674
Tony Benn, Who Preferred Politics to a Title, Dies at 88
by Alan Cowell
New York Times
March 14, 2014
by Alan Cowell
New York Times
March 14, 2014
LONDON — Tony Benn, a passionate orator, prolific diarist and provocative leader of the British left who became the first peer to surrender an aristocratic title to remain in the House of Commons, died on Friday at his home in West London. He was 88.
His family announced the death.
A rebellious scion of a political dynasty, Mr. Benn embraced a socialist position to the left of many of his colleagues in the Labour Party, particularly as it moved to the center under Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 1990s. While Britain’s political elite resisted and diluted union power, Mr. Benn championed labor union rights. While many Britons embraced the European Common Market in the 1970s, Mr. Benn opposed continued membership. And while Mr. Blair led the country to war in Iraq and elsewhere, Mr. Benn, a prominent advocate of nuclear disarmament, campaigned for peace.
After abandoning mainstream parliamentary politics he continued to goad Mr. Blair about his ties with President George W. Bush. In the dispute over Iran’s nuclear technology, Mr. Benn said in 2005, “We might be told that Britain must support Bush, yet again, because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction, thus allowing him to kill even more innocent civilians.”
Mr. Benn went to Baghdad in February 2003 to interview Saddam Hussein on behalf of Britain’s Channel 4 television news — more in the manner of a self-appointed pacifist emissary than as a conventional interviewer.
“I come for one reason only: to see whether in a talk we can explore, or you can help me to see, what the paths to peace may be,” he told the Iraqi leader, who replied in part by telling him that “Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever.”
The Baghdad visit was Mr. Benn’s second; he had gone there in 1991 to plead for the release of British “human shield” hostages.
His readiness to break the mold of his party’s orthodoxy was typical of a political career rooted in a family tradition of radicalism and public service.
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn was born in London on April 3, 1925, and had a conventional upper-class education at Westminster School and New College, Oxford. Both his grandfathers and his father, William Wedgwood Benn, had been members of Parliament. His mother, Margaret Holmes, a theologian and feminist, was an early advocate of the ordination of women.
In 1949, Mr. Benn met American-born Caroline Middleton DeCamp at Oxford. He proposed marriage nine days later on a park bench. (They later installed the bench in the garden of their home in Holland Park.)
She remained a partner in his political life as well, until her death in 2000. He once called her “my socialist soul mate.”
The Benn political dynasty continued with Hilary Benn, one of Mr. Benn’s four children, who was the secretary of state for international development and later the environment secretary in Mr. Blair’s government.
Survivors include three sons, Stephen, Hilary and Joshua, and a daughter, Melissa.
Mr. Benn himself became a member of the House of Commons, the seat of legislative power, in 1950 as a Labour representative from Bristol.
The moment that propelled him to real prominence came in 1960, when he inherited the title Viscount Stansgate on the death of his father. The elevation to hereditary nobility automatically barred him from sitting among the elected commoners in the House of Commons. His effort to reject his newly minted title became a cause célèbre.
Despite being disqualified from the ballot, he fought and won the 1961 by-election in Bristol, which had been caused by his own disqualification from the Commons.
Under the laws of the time, Parliament refused to allow him to take his seat, as he was still a peer. But in 1963 a Conservative government approved a law permitting the renunciation of such titles, and within minutes Mr. Benn shed his. From then on he was known simply as Tony Benn, or by the nickname Wedgie.
For much of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Benn served as a cabinet minister in the Labour government, his position cemented by radical credentials that gave him the support of unions and the party’s left wing. His jobs included postmaster general, secretary for industry, secretary for energy and minister of technology. His manner and policies did not endear him to his political masters, notably Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who said he pursued “tomfool issues” and represented “a kind of aging perennial youth: He immatures with age.” As postmaster general, Mr. Benn tried unsuccessfully to have the image of Queen Elizabeth II removed from postage stamps.
In the 1970s, he helped push the Labour Party to the left in an internal feud that left it deeply divided, heralding 18 years in opposition in Parliament, until Mr. Blair shifted it to the market-friendly center to win back power in 1997. In 1975, Mr. Benn was among the party rebels who, in a national referendum, unsuccessfully opposed Britain’s continued membership in the European Common Market.
He once said he had moved further to the left as he aged. “He made enemies and kept enemies,” Margaret Beckett, a former cabinet minister from the Labour Party, said on Friday. Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, said on Twitter, “There was never a dull moment listening to him, even if you disagreed with him.”
During Labour’s long period in opposition, Mr. Benn, increasingly seen as a maverick, failed in his efforts to be elected to the party leadership. His critics accused him of dividing the party. Denis Healey, a Labour rival, said he had risked “destroying the Labour Party as a force in 20th-century British politics.”
After an interview with Mr. Benn in July 1999, Warren Hoge of The New York Times reported: “These days Mr. Benn feels out of place in the Parliament he struggled to remain a member of and in the party he began passing out leaflets for as a 10-year-old in 1935. The boisterous Labour assemblage of union leaders, leftist ideologues and people whose workplaces were mines, shipyards and factory floors has now become a disciplined party of middle managers, suburban householders and get-ahead-minded businessmen.”
Mistrustful of journalists, Mr. Benn was known for making his own recording of every interview he gave, adding the tapes to a voluminous archive of diaries.
He left government in 2001, four years after Labour regained power. At the time, the BBC said the pipe-puffing Mr. Benn was “brimming with ideas for books, broadcasts and campaigns,” including appearances onstage at provincial theaters to discuss the issues of the day with the public.
Asked why he had decided to quit Parliament, he said he wanted to “devote more time to politics.”
Correction: March 14, 2014
An earlier version of this obituary omitted the name of Mr. Benn’s daughter. She is Melissa Benn.
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