What a friend we have in Tony

Please read the following interview with Tony Benn. Although it was done before the Gulf war started it is loaded with wisdom.

Also I believe it shows how the secular and religious traditions helped to inspire and guide a man who is a hero to both Sam and myself.

More especially it tells me that I should widen the areas of life which I think a bit less about pie in the sky and a bit more about making the earth as it is in heaven.JOHN CLEARY: Well let’s talk for a moment about Saddam Hussein. Notwithstanding the denials he offered in your interview with him, do you believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction?

TONY BENN: Well I didn’t know what to believe. I’d seen him before in 1990 when he released all the British hostages just before the Gulf War, and I wrote again last September when it was obvious that President Bush wanted to invade Iraq, asked for a televised interview, and I decided to ask him five straight questions: Do you have weapons of mass destruction? Have you got any links with al Qaeda? What problem with the inspectors? What about Iraqi oil? And What about the UN?Now on the question of weapons of mass destruction, I didn’t try and do a Blix on him. I asked him and he said, ‘No’. And the purpose of my game was to allow people to hear what he was actually saying. On al Qaeda, he has no links. Indeed bin Laden the other day called upon the Iraqi people to overthrow him, so there’s no links there. But on the weapons, I don’t necessarily believe him, but then I don’t believe Colin Power or Mr Blair or Mr Bush. I think the only person I really believe is Blix himself and he has said ‘We’re making progress, give me time.’ And that was really what I think we should be doing now.

JOHN CLEARY: So you were in an exercise essentially of time-buying? What else was the point in your going?

TONY BENN: Well it was really to give people a chance to hear the argument, because it’s not so very shameful to go and see him. I mean Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence of America, went there in 1983 when Saddam was a huge ally of America, and they were arming him when the Americans were supplying him with chemical weapons. And that’s the hypocrisy of it really, that Saddam was a hero in Washington until he got too strong and then he’s now somebody who’s got to be invaded. So I think some balance in the understanding of the argument. After all we hear Bush and Blair every day and Howard too, but we don’t hear Saddam, and I thought it was important for the peace process, in which I believe, that we should hear his arguments.

JOHN CLEARY: What do you believe was achieved for the peace process in your going to see him?

TONY BENN: Well I’m told there’s a possibility that Nelson Mandela may go, and when I went before you see, just before the Gulf War, Willi Brandt, the former Chancellor of Germany went, Ted Heath, the former Prime Minister of Britain went, and I went with the goodwill of a large number of people you know, as was demonstrated last Saturday in London and Melbourne and Sydney and all over the world, of the peace demonstrations. I mean the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Jimmy Carter, former American President, huge peace movement, and to hear the argument from a different perspective was helpful. I’ve no doubt about that, I don’t mind being hammered because I’ve lived through that all my life, you have to do what you think is right and take the consequences.

JOHN CLEARY: Yes, your trip to Iraq has been portrayed by those who wanted to caricature you as as foolish as Chamberlain’s to see Hitler.

TONY BENN: Yes but that’s a load of rubbish, because in the case of Chamberlain and Hitler, Chamberlain supported Hitler. I’ve got hold and have got at home the captured German Foreign Office documents reporting what Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, said on behalf of Chamberlain to Hitler. He said, ‘I’ve come, Herr Chancellor, to congratulate you on destroying Communism in Germany and acting as a bulwark against Communism in Russia.’ I mean Saddam knows my views because in the House of Commons I’ve attacked him time and time and time again, but I’m not going to be party to killing up to half a million innocent Iraqis, many of whom dislike Saddam, just to see that America gets the oil, I’m not prepared to do that, I’m sorry.

JOHN CLEARY: Given the track record of Saddam, why are you particularly opposed to this war?

TONY BENN: Well, do we live in a world where any country can attack any other country because of its civil rights record? I mean could the United States attack China, because there’s never been elections, and China’s got weapons of mass destruction and has been interfering in Tibet? I mean this is the law of the jungle. Because of my age, I remember the Charter of the UN. I came back as a pilot in a troopship in the Summer of 1945 and I heard the words of the preamble: ‘We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has caused untold suffering to mankind...’ those words are imprinted in my heart. I’m not going to live in a world where the United States, which has bombed 19 countries since the war, and has weapons of mass destruction in the empire, the biggest the world has ever known, be allowed to impose its will wherever it likes in the name of humanitarianism. There’s no democracy in Saudi Arabia. Women have their heads cut off with a sword in Riyadh in the capital of Saudi Arabia, for adultery. And there’s no democracy there. Why don’t they go in and do it there? No, it’s nothing to do with human rights. It is America wishing to assert its power in the Middle East and in particular get control of the oil and Sharon wants it because he wants to evict all the Palestinians and set up a Greater Israel, driving all the Palestinians into Jordan. I mean that’s my interpretation. Anyway I may be wrong, but that’s what I think.

JOHN CLEARY: You say your life has been lived and shaped by the great causes of internationalism, such as the birth of the United Nations; the Americans are mounting, as one of their major arguments, that this action against Saddam is needed to preserve the integrity of the United Nations, and if this action isn’t taken, the United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, will lose its integrity.

TONY BENN: Well I heard President Bush at the General Assembly and he gave an ultimatum not to Saddam, he gave an ultimatum to the United Nations. He said to the General Assembly, ‘I am going to attack Iraq. Come with me if you want, but if you don’t, I’m going alone.’ I mean actually Saddam is guilty of disregarding UN Resolutions, like Israel, but Bush and Blair are contemplating tearing up the Charter of the United Nations, the whole basis of it. But Blair in London said he would not accept what he called ‘an unreasonable veto’, i.e. he would not accept a vote in the Security Council against a war. So we’re faced with, in my opinion, an attempt by Bush not to save the United Nations, but to destroy it. I feel that very, very strongly.

JOHN CLEARY: What of those who say of Blair’s stand that he’s actually doing what he’s doing in order to keep close to the Americans for two reasons: 1. So that the UN framework won’t fall apart; and 2. To maintain the pressure of the bluff. Because if your enemy doesn’t believe you, there’s no point in making the threat.

TONY BENN: Well on the question of preserving the UN, I don’t wear that. I think Blair and Bush are prepared to tear up the Charter and go back to naked Victorian imperialism. That’s my interpretation of their speeches. They both indicated they have no intention of abiding by a Security Council Resolution if it doesn’t go their way. On the question of bluff, well if wherever a denial of human rights you’re prepared to shed a quarter of a million troops and threaten nuclear weapons, because they have threatened nuclear weapons, then I mean we could abandon any hope of our children and grandchildren living in peace. And the whole purpose of this UN was to bring about the peaceful settlement of international disputes. And what about the arms trade? Selling their weapons all over the world, to both sides in many conflicts.I think we’ve forgotten that the world has been taken over by people, the World Trade Organisation, the IMF, multinationals, who have no democratic accountability whatever, and in the case of Bush, who was supported by the oil industry in which he’s had a part, and I’m not really sure that this presentation of this as a great democratic advance against barbarism has got any relation to the truth at all. It is an imperial power seeking to extend its influence. I mean after all I know about this, because I was born in an Empire, and at the end of the war when I was in Egypt as a young RAF pilot; I’ve still got my identity card about a foot from where I’m sitting, and it says ‘This man is exempt from Egyptian law’. Why? Because Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 and we were still there in 1945. You know, you have to know a little bit of history to understand what’s happening.

JOHN CLEARY: Tony Benn, let’s talk about that ethos which shaped you, for just a few moments. Let’s look though at the circumstances in which you grew up. You were born on the site which is now occupied by Labour Party headquarters, in fact next door to the house of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

TONY BENN: That’s right.

JOHN CLEARY: As great Fabian Socialists and there was a whole milieu in that environment, in which your father mixed in those days, we’re talking about the days of Lloyd George, of your father moving from the Liberals to the Labour Party, we’re talking about Churchill moving from the Liberals to the Conservatives, we’re talking about the ferment of people like the Webbs, and Bernard Shaw, of H.G. Wells; how much did these stories and these people colour your childhood?

TONY BENN: Well not quite so much, because you see the dissenting tradition from which I came was deeper and older than that. I mean my Dad left the Liberal Party because Lloyd George became leader, because he regarded Lloyd George as totally corrupt. I met Lloyd George myself in 1937 and he was very friendly to my Dad on that occasion. But my Father regarded Lloyd George as the man who destroyed the Liberal Party. Churchill I knew of course, and my Dad served with him in Parliament when they were both Liberals before the First World War. No, my roots come from the dissenting tradition in religion, that’s to say what my Mother used to call ‘the priesthood of all believers’; you do not need a Bishop to help you. Everybody has a hotline to the Almighty and that of course was a tremendously revolutionary idea because out of that sort of Methodist, Congregationalist tradition, came the idea that we had the right to build our own world, to meet our own needs and not just wait to be patted on the head by a Bishop and told by the Bishop, ‘If you do what I tell you to do, you’ll go to heaven; if you don’t you’ll go to hell’. You know, it’s a very, very different and very important and very radical idea. My Great-grandfather was a Congregational Minister and my Mother was a Bible scholar, and I was brought up on the Bible, that the story of the Bible was conflict between the kings who had power, and the prophets who preached righteousness. And I was taught to believe in the prophets, got me into a lot of trouble. And my Dad said to me when I was young, ‘Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to let it (be) known.’ Now these are very, very powerful influences. It wasn’t mixing with the Webbs and Wells, and Lloyd George and all that, they were very much of a different sort of intellectual tradition which is not really me at all.

JOHN CLEARY: I’m reminded when we look at your life, of another great quixotic figure that comes out of the Congregationalist tradition in the 19th century, and that’s the great editor, W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, the Review of Reviews, and his great crusades against child prostitution, for early internationalism, he was one of the people who moved for the first moves towards international order. There is a great dissenting tradition which involves a great era of reform in the late 19th century.

TONY BENN: Oh yes, well you see if you go right back, and I’m not a proper historian, but if you go back to the old texts in 1381, there was a man called the Reverend John Ball, and he was preaching in support of the peasants and their revolt. And he said ‘This will not go well in England till all property is held in common.’ And he was hanged, drawn and quartered, which was the punishment they had in the old days for dissenters. And there’s been a tremendously strong radical tradition linked to belief in God, but not exclusively linked. I mean there were humanists who said that in the English Revolution in the 17th century there were people who said that we were created by reason, and we therefore had a capacity to think things out for ourselves. But these ideas go back a very, very long way, and intellectual socialists who did play some role in the early part of the last century, they were not necessarily a part of that tradition. They sort of thought it all out in a rather academic way and the passion of the dissenting tradition is something which escaped them and which fortunately keeps a fire alive in my belly.

JOHN CLEARY: I had the opportunity to have a chat with Roy Hattersley, a former deputy leader of the British Labour Party a year or so ago when his biography of William and Catherine Booth, the founders of the Salvation Army came out. He’s recently written

TONY BENN: That’s right. Well you see Mrs Thatcher’s most dangerous statement was when she said, ‘There is no alternative’. She said to people, ‘Whatever you do, whatever you think, however hard you work, you’ll get nowhere, don’t even try.’ And it paralysed a lot of people, and they said, ‘Oh well, what’s the point?’...They said ‘The Left has become obsessed with private power struggles’, that is, it’s the feminists against the environmentalists, against the educationalists, against all these private power wars going on, and there’s been a loss in the belief in universals, a sort of post-modern relativism has crept into the Left. Where are the seeds of the Left’s failure?Well I think post-modernism is a throwback to the Victorian period you see. What’s called modernisation which is what Blair was talking about, is to push health and education back to the market, cut away the right to a pension as of right, and so on, and I think people are beginning to see that. The word ‘modernisation’ means the destruction of what we came to understand was right in the reversion. And thank God, literally, he hasn’t started modernising the Ten Commandments, because I could imagine what would emerge from New Labour, ‘Thou shalt not kill unless President Bush asks you to’. You know, I’m making fun of it, but I think New Labour is Thatcherism entrenched and combined with sort of European Federalism under a bank, and the Transatlantic control under the White House. And people are beginning to see that. You see this is the funny thing about my own position; having said what I’ve said for a long, long time, I now find that most people in Britain seem to agree, and I think for the first time in my life, public opinion is to the left of what is laughingly known as the Labour government, it’s actually a New Labour government, but people do want decent pensions, they don’t want students loaded up with debt, they don’t want the Public Services privatised, they don’t want war, they care about the environment. I mean there has been a sea-change in public opinion, and to that extent, insofar as I’ve tried to argue that case for a long time, and I’m an optimist, but I know it’s going to be a struggle, it always is a struggle, it never has come easily.

JOHN CLEARY: It’s one of the problems that the parties of the Left and the Right have ultimately sold out to a narrow, materialist definition of human progress. And once the field is vacated to materialism, then all you have left is arguments about economic efficiency and the amount of dollars in your pocket; that you can’t really make arguments about the wider issues of justice and ethics in the world.

TONY BENN: Well I think there’s something in that. If the Archbishop of Canterbury in his Dimbleby Lecture which he gave, I listened to very intently on the BBC the other day, really argued that point. He said a market-related society ignores the deepest moral values that we need to live in peace. I mean it was said very delicately. I know my Dad used to say to me ‘The trouble with the Prophets began when they stopped spelling P-r-o-p-h-e-t-s, and put an ‘f’ in instead.’ And I thought that summed it up very well. The worship of money you see, is the most powerful religion in the world. The worship of money is more powerful than Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and the Business News we hear on the hour on the television, I’m sure you hear it in Australia, is the worship of money. We’re told what’s happened to the FTSI and the Dow Jones and the dollar and the pound, as if it was a sort of guide to the success of our society, and the management consultants come in, and lay people off. And I find this new religion is the one that’s gripped us.

John Cleary: This is the religion of Mammon, which Jesus spoke about.

Tony Benn: Yes well again Keir Hardie said at the beginning of the 20th century, We should either choose to worship God or Mammon. We quite obviously worship Mammon. And this for example on the News every hour, instead of telling you what’s happened to the FTSI and the Dow Jones, they told you the up-to-date figures for unemployment, how many people have died of asbestosis, how many people unemployed, how many people homeless and so on, people would say, Oh Gosh, well now we know what we ought to be doing. But I do think we worship money, and if I had any musical talent I would compose a hymn in which the words of the Business News would be incorporated. ‘And the Dow Jones has fallen 3 points tonight’, you know what I mean, because this is a total Capitalist control of our mind, and yet it doesn’t conform to what it is we want. After all, people don’t want much, they want a decent home, education, good health care, dignity when they’re old, and peace. I mean it’s not an awful lot to ask in a world where the technology available is in such a scale, you could solve, not all, but many of the problems of poverty if you diverted it from Stealth bombers and Star Wars and bunker-busting nuclear weapons, and moved it into the issues raised by the Johannesburg Summit.

John Cleary: We’re getting to the end of your most generous offering of your time to us. Let me ask you a couple of other questions. You’re now at a point where you say you’ve been a voluminous diarist through your life, where you can reflect on a life, but you’ve also got to assess your life and also think about ultimate meanings. What has your life meant, and what has been the motivation for it? Do you think there is any sense in which your life, (to use the phrase I’ve used before) is about transcendent values, and how are they passed on? Do you see this being connected to any spiritual ultimate reward?

Tony Benn: Well what I’ve heard in my life is the most marvellous family. My Mother and Father, remarkable couple, my Dad died 40 years ago, he was 20 years older than my Mother, but he shared all the things, I mentioned to you ‘Dare to be a Daniel’. And he said to me once, ‘Never wrestle with a chimneysweep’, and I didn’t know what he meant when he said that. But what he was saying is if somebody plays dirty with you, don’t play dirty with him, or you’ll get dirty too. I mean all his phrases come back to me. My Mother brought me up on the Bible, as I mentioned. She said once, ‘Death is God’s last and greatest gift to the living’, and I thought of that when my own wife died of cancer just over two years ago. It was such a release to see her after years of suffering, released. My Grandmother said ‘The great thing about your last journey is you don’t have to pack.’ And that gave me comfort, because I’ve got a house of boxes full of archives to leave to someone else to sort out. My wife, who was brought up in the same tradition, she came from the Huguenot family who escaped to America in the 17th century, and the same religious background that I had, and a good Socialist, and she wrote about Keir Hardie, she concentrated on education, she was my main friend and advisor right up until she died. We’ve got four children and ten grandchildren, and they all live in London, I see lots of them. One of them’s a Minister in the Blair government. Both my Grandfathers were Member of Parliament too, so that’s five members of the family in four generations, five members of the family in three centuries all in Parliament, so we’ve got a sort of connecting thread. And I’m just a very, very happy man. I keep a Diary I think for these reasons. My father, who was born in 1877, was a Victorian, and he said, ‘You have to give an account of yourself.’ So on the Day of Judgement when the Almighty says ‘What did you do with your life?’ I shall give him a CD-ROM with 17-million words, and say ‘Well here’s what I did’, and I think I am motivated by this very powerful requirement to account for how I spent my time. It may sound funny to you, but it’s kept me going night after night when I’d rather go to bed. As I did last night, I was terribly tired and before I went to bed, I did my Diary, and that’s why it isn’t history, it isn’t memoirs, it isn’t an autobiography, it’s what happened that day, put down before you forget. And I find it very useful.

John Cleary: Tony Benn, it’s been great to speak with you. Thanks so much for being so generous with your time.

Tony Benn: Thank you very much, I’ve really enjoyed it, it’s the best cross-examination, and the most sensitive and understanding and scholarly one I think I’ve ever had from the mediaThis interview was first broadcast on ABC local radio's Sunday Nights With John Cleary, 23 February, 2003.