Benn: values of a misrepresented man

Press, 12 September 1980, Page 16

Benn: values of a misrepresented man

By

SIMON HOGGART

in the ‘‘Guardian,” London

Mr Tony Benn’s relationship with the press has always been fraught. In August in the “Daily Mail,” Lynda Lee-Potter quoted Mr Benn’s biographer on the subject of why Mr Benn had excised his public school education from ' “Who’s Who.” “ it is part of his attempt’ says Robert Jenkins reverently, ‘to become one soldier in? a great army, so that there is no place for the individual,’ ”. “Rubbish,” Miss Lee-Potter commented briskly. “Wedgwood Benn wants to be Field-Marshal, not a poor bloody infantryman. It’s the rest of us he wants marching behind him in unison, in one faceless,, mindless, silently subservient army.” Now this point of view is so totally opposite to the truth, to everything Tony Benn has ever said or done, that one is baffled to know where it came from. If Field-Marshal Benn had been running, say, the Africa campaign, the problem would, not have been a mindless and silently subservient army. It would instead have been Mr Benn’s insistence that the other ranks should decide through their democratic choice, everything from the campaign strategy to whether compo biscuits should be eaten at breakfast or tea.

Mr Benn is the opposite of a corporatist communist.' He is instead the last of the great libertarians. Every-

tiling he has ever said or written indicates that far from wanting to grab hold of power to. exercise for his own benefit, he wants to distribute it as widely as possible, to as many people as possible. You might feel to pursue the military allegory, that Mr Benn’s army would not be terribly’ successful,' that it might come to he dominated by the noisiest NCOs, and the bar-rack-room lawyers, and that the Field-Marshal was, by and large, the chap who knew best. But you couldn’t possibly call it authoritarian. If Mr Benn is obsessed by power, as so many newspapers seem to think, then he has a funny way of going about getting it. Had he decided to pursue a quiet, centrist line within the Labour Party there is little doubt that, his intelligence, diligence, oratorical skills and charm would have made him by. now the leading candidate for' Jim Callaghan’s job.

Yet he has driven himself further and further to the Left, towards his own par-, ticular and idiosyncratic brand of socialism, so that he is now little more than a fringe candidate. It is conceivable that in years to conie, Labour activists might manage to elect him as their leader. The point is, though, that he could have guaranteed the post much earlier if he had wanted it so badly. Since the press tends to

get Mr Benn so completely, so perversely wrong, it is hardly surprising that he loses few opportunities to criticise the press. If. he reasons, they are so mistaken about me and about the Labour movement in general, why should I believe anything they sav about anyone else? In late August, he expanded on this theme at a press conference to launch a new biography of himself. It is called “Tony Benn” and is published by the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. The book is by Mr Robert Jenkins who is, oddly enough a Conservative voter. Yet the book is respectful to Mr Benn, meticulously reports his speeches and decisions over the years, and while disagreeing in a mild sort of way with some of his actions, takes him very much at his own valuation. Mr Benn himself said that he liked the book because it had not concerned itself with personality, but had burrowed through lesser issues such as policies and institutions to reach what he called “the bedrock — values.” It’s actually hard to see how a man’s values can be separated from his personality, but there it is, and certainly Mr Benn has suffered more from attacks on his personal character and integrity than most. No doubt the misrepresentation he has suffer-

ed was behind his notorious remarks at the 1972 Labour Party conference when he said: “I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and the lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to - see. that what is said about us is true c.The implication, that workers in the newspaper industry should use their industrial muscle to prevent articles they did not like from appearing, had to be disowned by Mr Harold Wilson. Yet it does leave a problem. Mr Benn said vaguely

yesterday that “people should have a right of reply if a group of them is attacked in the press,” without saying what form this should take and how it could be enforced. He added that we in Britain did not have a free press “We have a press that, reflects the interests of its proprietors,” If. like Mr Benn, you are totally opposed to a gov-ernment-run press, that begs the question of who does run newspapers when workers’ co-operaties don’t succeed. Mr Benn went further, and said that even public opinion polls were false; they were “another part of media manipulation. You have a press campaign, then you run a poll which appears to

confirm your campaign. I do not accept that the way public opinion polling is done at present is a true reflection of what people think.” He contrasted the press treatment of British strikers with Polish shipyard workers. pointing out that the “Sunday People” had attacked’ one group while praising the other in adjacent columns. “If Jim Prior’s laws applied in Gdansk, any more than six pickets would find themselves in jail. “Of all the threats to free trade unions here, media attacks in many ways are the most effective, because the amount that people are allowed to understand about trade'unions is minimal.” All this, however, begs the biggest question of all: How is it that British working people are so docile that they believe whatever they are told in the newspapers, whereas Polish people, with a strictly controlled press, somehow manage to work out what is going on? Are British people conceivably so sheeplike, so easily swaved as Mr Benn seems to think? And if they are as stupid and malleable as he implies, can they be trusted with all the myriad democratic decisions he wishes to entrust to them? My guess is that Mr Benn’s ideas about the relationship between the press and the people are for the most part mistaken and too simple. But the press, through its persistent and crass attacks on him, often seems determined to prove him right.