Dare to Be a Daniel (2 page)

One of the most significant aspects of my childhood was my mother’s deep Christian convictions, which she hoped her children would share, and I often forget that few people now have a biblical background or knowledge of the different Christian
traditions
. Biblical and religious references that slip into my speeches and articles are not necessarily always understood.

Leaving the moral teaching and theology aside, the one characteristic of most religions when they become established – and certainly of Christianity – is the entrenchment of authority at their heart, with the Pope at the centre of the Roman Catholic Church and the Archbishop of Canterbury at the heart of the Anglican community, each in their time having great power over their respective churches and enforcing the Christian doctrine, sometimes ruthlessly, as at the time of the Inquisition and on other occasions when heretics were burned at the stake.

This authoritarianism, and the hierarchy that supports it, seems to be inherent in any faith when it develops in an organised form. The Stalinist dictatorship in Russia showed that this characteristic is not confined to religion, but can apply to other belief systems as well – in the case of the Soviet Union, supposedly the teachings of Marx.

The Labour Party itself, which was inspired by men and women of principle, became corrupted by the same power structures, leading to the expulsion of difficult people on the grounds that they were not prepared to accept orders from the Party hierarchy; sectarian socialists can also develop in a way that discourages and represses dissent, just like religious sects forever fighting each other.

This attempt to control what people think and say has been – and still may be – so oppressive and brutal that inevitably there have always been individuals who rebelled against it and argued that they had the right to think for themselves. Such people were generally excommunicated, expelled or even hanged, and therefore few of them ever had any political power; but they had huge
influence
. The teachers who explained the world without wanting to control it themselves have always played an important part in the development of ideas.

Indeed, my mother, when she read me Bible stories, always distinguished between the kings of Israel who exercised power and the prophets of Israel who preached righteousness, and I was brought up to believe in the prophets rather than the kings.

This dissenting tradition lies at the root of Congregationalism, in which my father had been brought up as a child and which my mother adopted after rejecting the Church of England, with its discrimination against women.

Dissenters think for themselves and claim the right to do so, even in matters of faith. The ‘priesthood of all believers’ is based on the belief that every person has a direct line to the Almighty and does not require a bishop to mediate concerning what to believe and what to do.

This of course was, and remains, a completely revolutionary doctrine because it undermined authority, disturbed the hierarchy and was seen as intolerable by the powers that be, in exactly the same way that, today, political dissenters are projected as troublemakers and members of the ‘awkward squad’, whose advice would lead to chaos. The fact that dissenters may be right is ignored, although history often shows that their views may turn out to be the conventional wisdom of the generation that follows them.

Since the control of people’s minds is even more important than the physical control of society by the use of police and military repression, those who challenge the ideas that are being imposed are seen as a threat in political as in religious matters. During the Stalinist period, Soviet dissidents were treated very harshly by the Kremlin, but were of course welcomed by the
anti-communist
world, which hailed them – not necessarily because of agreement with what they said, but because their ideas were seen to be destabilising the enemy during the Cold War.

As I get older, I realise that the right to think for yourself and say what you think is an integral part of the renewal of all systems. It gives those who are victims of those systems some hope that there is a better way of running the world.

Though my father was in no sense a ‘pious’ man, he was a dissenter and the one characteristic that illuminated his life was his support for the underdog and a passionate commitment to freedom, justice, independence and democracy, a commitment that he must have inherited from his family, notably his grandfather Julius Benn, who was a Congregationalist minister.

Julius set up a refuge for destitute boys, in a disused rope factory in the East End of London, in the course of trying to reflect that passion for justice in a practical way. When Charles Dickens visited the hostel, he said of Julius, ‘One could see by the expression of this man’s eye and by his kindly face that Love ruled rather than Fear, and that Love was triumphant.’

Julius’s son John (my grandfather) interpreted that commitment by political work and, as a founder member of the London County Council, contributed towards the development of municipal socialism, which enormously improved the prospects of people in London at a time when education and health were run by a series of unaccountable, corrupt boards.

As a Member of Parliament representing an East End constituency, my own father, William, was deeply involved with the Trades Council in its struggles for justice, and he always saw his role there as being pastoral in character.

My mother, Margaret, joined the Labour Party at the same time
as
my father, but confined her work to the elimination of injustice within the Church, especially in arguing for the rights of women, in seeking to eliminate anti-Semitism and in maintaining the principle that chapels should elect their own ministers and not have them imposed from above. But she was not so directly concerned with other forms of social injustice.

Indeed, there are two ways of looking at the moral responsibility that the dissenting tradition imposes. One is the charitable approach, whereby those who are better off assist the poor and devote themselves to that work wholeheartedly and sincerely. The other is one that attempts to tackle these same problems politically, by identifying the causes of poverty and trying to correct them through institutional and political changes that bring about a better state of affairs.

Historically those who complained of the injustice of the world would be assured by their Church that they would get their reward ‘in heaven’. This, though very welcome, led some people to respond by asking why they could not have their reward while they were still alive!

The idea of Heaven on Earth – or justice in practice – was an integral part of the dissenting tradition and of the trade-union movement, which recognised that you could only improve conditions by your own collective efforts; and the Christian tradition in socialist thinking was combined with the strength of the trade unions.

Having been protected throughout my life from any direct experience of poverty, and having been to schools where this did not touch on any of the families, I came to understand trade unionism and socialism by experience during the war and, afterwards, as an active constituency Member of Parliament. It was only through
those
experiences that I came to see the importance of what I had been taught as a child in a rather theoretical way – independence of mind.

The first example in my own life of swimming against the political current of the time occurred in respect to appeasement. The boys at school, with one or two exceptions, supported Neville Chamberlain, and earlier were very sympathetic to Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Because of what I had heard at home, I was resolutely opposed to appeasement and argued the evils of fascism, of which I had very little knowledge although, as a boy of ten, I did see Oswald Mosley, a one-time colleague of my father in the Parliamentary Labour Party, marching through Parliament Square with his men in black shirts. And I was with my dad, in my early teens, when he addressed a meeting in the East End that was attacked by the Blackshirts and we had to leave the stage in a hurry.

The second example of conventional wisdom that I came to question was during the war itself, when it was quite obvious that there were two wars going on at the same time, which – although they coalesced in the desire for victory – were differently motivated.

The motivation of the British establishment in the 1930s was to thwart the spectre of communism in Britain and Europe. However, during the war, the Left thought it was fighting fascism and did not see the conflict in national terms; after all, there were many Germans fighting fascism in their own country who were our natural allies.

We now know that there was a debate going on in the government right up until the spring of 1940, considering the possibility of a deal with Hitler. The arrival of Rudolf Hess in May 1941 was
obviously
a last-minute attempt by Hitler to win over British support for his attack on the Soviet Union. At that time Senator Harry Truman (later President) made a statement that if the Russians seemed to be winning, we should support the Germans; and if the Germans seemed to be winning, we should support the Russians – in the hope that as many as possible would kill each other.

Right up to the end of the war Hitler was telling his own people that the Nazis were fighting communism.

After the war the conventional wisdom that dominated the Cold War period was that communism was a
military
threat, which was thought more likely to influence the public mind than an ideological threat to capitalism, which was what governments really feared. I came to realise that the USSR never planned to overrun Western Europe.

In retrospect, I see the Cold War hysteria as resembling the relentless pursuit of an enemy in earlier years, when those who challenged the conventional wisdom of the Church were seen as enemies of society and were regularly persecuted.

The liberation movements in the colonies were also presented as posing a threat to civilised society, and those who led them were vilified, arrested and imprisoned. They included some of the most distinguished world statesmen, such as Nehru, Gandhi, Nkrumah, Jagan, and of course Nelson Mandela.

Yet young men who went into the colonial service to become adminstrators (some of whom I knew) did approach their task with a sense of duty inspired by a moral responsibility that God had imposed upon them – such was the belief in imperialism as a force for good.

Today we are being asked to accept a new conventional wisdom,
which
is that America has assumed the same imperial role that Britain once exercised, in a crusade against a new threat of terror closely associated with the Muslim world. The use of the word ‘crusade’ by President Bush gave this battle the same sort of religious authority that persisted in religious wars in the past.

In parallel with this we have had the counter-revolution against the welfare state, trade unionism and democracy. This was launched during the Reagan-Thatcher period and was motivated by the realisation that politically-conscious trade unionism operating within a party with socialist roots was capable in a democracy of changing the balance of power permanently and peacefully, and that too was completely unacceptable.

Margaret Thatcher could herself claim non-conformist roots, and in some ways traced her ideology to the Manchester School of Liberalism associated with Mr Gladstone; but her interpretation of rugged individualism was that the enemy was the state, from which individuals had to free themselves.

My mother’s dissenting Congregationalism was interpreted quite differently. She was a very devoted and serious Christian and gave me a grounding in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible; we prayed together at night, and I went to St John’s Church in Smith Square, where Canon Woodward (later Bishop of Bristol) conducted children’s services. I was as devout as could be and took very seriously the obligations of Holy Communion after I was confirmed.

On the wall of my bedroom I had a painting of one of King Arthur’s knights praying at an altar on the evening before he was admitted to the Round Table. That image influenced me subliminally as I grew up, in feeling that my boyhood should be used to prepare me for my work in life, which I was vaguely aware would
be
‘in the public service’. My mother once gave me a tiny Crusader cross, which I wore round my neck with my RAF identity discs throughout the war, and still have at home. It was not until much later that I realised how brutal the Crusaders were in their determination to seize the Holy Land from the heathen, murdering and maiming the people who lived there.

Another picture, ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’, showed a young man with an old sailor pointing over the distant horizon, helping him to form in his mind the idea that there was a world to be explored. Both pictures made a great impression on me.

One of the stories my parents were fond of was that of Daniel who, having refused to give up his faith when tested by Darius, the King of Persia, was placed all night in a lions’ den and was found the next morning unharmed.

Father used to recite a Salvation Army hymn, ‘Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone, Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to make it known’; those lines lodged in my mind so that, whenever the going has been rough, I have fallen back on it. It has taught me the importance of consistency and courage in the face of adversity – essential for anyone who is criticised for his convictions. In 1983 I saw in the YMCA in Nagasaki, of all places, a picture of Daniel standing with his hands behind his back and his head bowed, surrounded by the lions. I photographed it and it hangs in my office to remind me of those qualities that are the most important in public life: