The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (110 page)

David Steel has produced a list of ‘101 hard-left’ MPs, and of course I was on it. So was Tam Dalyell! It was astonishing. Even Harry Barnes in Derbyshire North East is listed as a dangerous red!

Thursday 4 June

I went to the market and made two little speeches, and people did listen carefully. There was a round of applause at the second meeting – like a village cricket match when somebody scores a run.

Returned to the NUM offices in the afternoon, and Jack Dash, the old dockers’ leader, had arrived for an Election meeting. He is nearly eighty-one, led many of the dock strikes, is a long-term member of the CP, and a man whom I deeply respect. He had written such a nice letter saying he would like to help, so Johnny Burrows paid his fare up from London and Bas Barker, a Chesterfield trade unionist and CP member, had organised a meeting of about thirty or forty pensioners. He made a marvellous, reflective speech.

Saturday 6 June

Went to the Market Square for the hustings with the other two candidates. There were 4–500 people listening, and it was enormously worth while. There was some friendly heckling. Several old characters turned up – Tommy Tatters with his cap and his placard saying ‘Mrs Thatcher’s worse than Attila the Hun’, and Gloria Havenhand, who used to be leader of the Tory Group on the council, all dolled up. She kept shouting, ‘That! From a man who went to a public school!’ – at which Johnny Burrows replied, ‘That! From a woman with no education!’ Then there was a weird local doctor who asked whether the Americans would press the nuclear button if Labour was elected.

Thursday 11 June

In the car to all the committee rooms and to some polling stations. It appeared from the first results that it was going to be a Tory landslide. Caroline and I walked over to the Winding Wheel centre where the count was, and I did actually worry about my own position.

The media were already beginning their usual chorus about why we had done badly – the hard Left, the loony Left, and so on, although the results
weren’t suggesting that at all. Eric Heffer, for example, had a huge increase in his majority from 15,000 to 23,000. Terry Fields and Dave Nellist doubled their majorities in Liverpool Broadgreen and Coventry South East. Chris Mullin won in Sunderland South, increasing the Labour vote, and my majority over the Liberal Alliance candidate was 8,500. It was in the south of England that things went badly for Labour.

Wednesday 17 June

OUR THIRTY-EIGHTH WEDDING
anniversary.

Went to the Commons for the first PLP meeting, and my instinct was to sit and listen and get the feel of it.

At 12.10 Neil Kinnock spoke. He said, ‘This is the most successful campaign in the history of the Party. It has been recognised as such by our opponents and the pundits. It was well organised, the performances were good, and, comparing speech for speech, interview for interview and press conference for press conference, we beat them all along the line. We fought as a team together and we have achieved a great deal. We made gains – for the first time the number of Labour women MPs is up to twenty-one, and for the first time we are a multiracial party, which I hope will affect the self-
image of black voters.’ He congratulated the four black and Asian Members, Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz, (the new MPs for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Brent South, Tottenham, and Leicester East).

Kinnock went on, ‘I must mention some failures. One is that we failed to win the Election, and there is no consolation for defeat in any form. Millions will suffer, the young will be isolated, the old will be frightened, the sick and the unemployed will have no prizes; but the result provides a better basis for building up.’

Then, with a lot of rhetorical flourishes, he said, ‘We must show we are in charge of events. We must emphasise freedom. We must seek a refreshment of the values which we inspire. There must be a strategy for dealing with change or we will lose again. There is a great deal to play for.’ He continued in this vein, and became hectoring. ‘With every word, every action and every deed we must support the idea of victory. We must convince people. There is a demand for unity from the Movement to disappoint the commentators, to deny them the splits. The SDP and the Liberals are divided but they are treated with kid gloves. There must be energy and commitment, the characteristic of the future. We must ensure that none of us has to dismiss this group or that group in any interview or be distracted or diverted. We must accept the light burden of self-discipline.’

Dave Nellist observed, ‘We couldn’t win the Election in three and a half weeks. Sixty per cent decided how to vote before the campaign, and there was a lot of time wasted on expulsions. The best swings to Labour were in Liverpool.’ He said he hoped the PLP would fight outside Parliament.

There was a lot of shouting at this.

Clive Soley said, ‘We want to avoid internecine war. The London situation is not the responsibility of the Party or of individuals but of the inherent situation in London.’ That was quite a sensible point.

At 9 Lev Parshin from the Soviet Embassy came to see me at home. I’m sure the security services think it is some deep plot, but all he wanted was a briefing on the Election, what I thought of Kinnock’s and Thatcher’s positions, and so on.

Parshin said he would like the television programme ‘Spitting Image’ to be available in the Soviet Union, because it makes fun of Soviet leaders. Altogether, the whole thing was so relaxed. When I look at my diary for the mid-Sixties, I realise the Soviet people I met then were not all that different but they wouldn’t accept criticism.

Sunday 12 July

Chunks of Peter Wright’s book were published in the
Sunday Times
. I must say, reading his words did make my blood run cold. Here was the American CIA trying to destroy an elected Prime Minister, and Peter Wright himself said that half the MI5 officers were trying to get rid of the Labour
Government and that they ‘bugged and burgled’ their way across London. He also referred to the assassination attempt on President Nasser.

Sunday 2 August

Turned up in Hyde Park at Speakers’ Corner early and met someone from the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom; they had asked me to read from
Spycatcher
in defiance of the ban.

I had prepared my speech with enormous care. I read it out and included long passages from
Spycatcher
. There was a bit of heckling from a man wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘Colonel North for President’ and ‘Help the Russians Join CND’, and shouting silly slogans.

Thursday 13 August

Stansgate. Lovely day with a little rain. Caroline is working on the Keir Hardie correspondence left to me in the will of Hedley Dennis. Hardie was obviously a difficult man, a loner who quarrelled with everybody. Various biographies have been written to suggest that he wasn’t a socialist but just an old Christian radical. Every generation of historians rewrites history to bring it into line with the current philosophy.

Joshua phoned from the United States to say the Hyde Park reading of
Spycatcher
was front-page news there.

The House of Lords announced their judgment on
Spycatcher
, and by 3 to 2 they voted to uphold the injunction. The lessons of
Spycatcher
are getting broader and broader – not only that there is secret material that Mrs Thatcher doesn’t want publicised but that the judges are tools of the Government. The BBC World Service can’t broadcast material that is broadcast by every other world broadcasting organisation.

Friday 14 August

Worked on letters. Listened to Danish radio, which had a programme, in Danish, on
Spycatcher
in which the extracts from it were in English, mostly the ones I had read in Hyde Park. I felt rather like someone in the French Resistance sitting in an attic with a radio.

Saturday 29 August

Chris Mullin’s wife Ngoc, whom he met two years ago in Vietnam, arrived from Saigon a few days ago, so I drove to his flat in Brixton Road to meet her. There had been television cameras at the airport when she arrived.

Thursday 17 September

The Liberal Assembly in Harrogate voted overwhelmingly to merge with that part of the SDP that wants to, and set up a new party. It is a historic moment, because the Liberal Party has been in existence for about 150 years, had a fine tradition of its own and is now throwing in its lot with
people who don’t share its principles, approach or anything else. It is bound to fail. David Owen’s achievement is amazing. First of all, he tries to split the Labour Party and fails, then he splits the SDP, and now he has split the Liberal Party and persuaded them to go out of existence.

Friday 2 October – Labour Party Conference, Brighton

Heard Dennis Skinner deliver a brilliant speech on legal reform which brought everybody to their feet as always. He is an inspired man, extremely funny, very serious and absolutely to the point.

Michael Meacher and I were asked to do a recorded interview for ‘Newsnight’, presented by Peter Snow who is the media leader of the SDP. For years ‘Newsnight’ has done nothing but show the Labour Party as unelectable, boost the Alliance and give David Owen lots of time. They had set up in one of the lobbies of the conference centre, and it turned out they had got together a film in which Martin Jacques, the Editor of
Marxism Today
, appeared. The last sentence in the little film was Martin saying that I personally was a spent force.

So Peter Snow turned to me and asked, ‘Are you a spent force, as Martin Jacques says?’

I said, ‘Martin Jacques is a Eurocommunist who believes in an alliance with the SDP.’

‘Will you answer the question?’ he demanded.

I turned on him. I used some of the arguments I’ve just listed, and added, ‘If democracy ever dies in Britain, it will be because of you.’

Around the studio set, with Michael Meacher sitting behind me, was a crowd of about fifty people – delegates, officials, security people and so on – and my attack on the BBC led to a great round of applause.

So then Peter Snow turned to Michael Meacher, who said the Left was actually in charge of the Party (which was a load of old rubbish) and the policy reviews would be undertaken with balanced views, and so on.

Then Snow came back to me. ‘Now, Mr Kinnock says that he is not going to let the tail wag the dog.’

I said, ‘I’m not going to discuss Mr Kinnock. His own position is clear.’

Then he asked, ‘What new ideas have come from the Left?’

I replied, ‘All the ideas about non-alignment; that the Russian military threat is not true, that the Americans don’t speak for freedom and democracy, that Chernobyl shows that nuclear weapons don’t make you safe.’

This threw him completely, and he went back to Michael Meacher. At one point I said to him, ‘Don’t act the part of God’, and everybody round burst into cheers. He had never had to do his interview in a public meeting before. It has always been in the safety of his own constituency, which is Lime Grove North!

It was a marvellous little incident. Needless to say, they didn’t use the interview at all.

Went back to the Conference and stood between Joan Maynard and Audrey Wise, both of whom had lost their seats on the NEC and were in tears. Audrey is an MP, so she is all right, but Joan has retired from Parliament and she is such a strong woman that it was very sad to see her upset.

My thoughts on leaving the Conference are that the whole thing was a media show. Socialism was mentioned in every sentence, and then by nudges and winks from the platform the media were told, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t mean what we appear to mean.’ They were using that to imply that the Left were a ridiculous tiny minority against a socialist majority led by Kinnock.

I don’t think we should contest the leadership, but John Prescott may put up against Hattersley and Michael Meacher may then throw his hat into the ring. I’m not getting mixed up in that.

Friday 9 October

The Tory Party Conference ended with an eleven-minute standing ovation for Mrs Thatcher, the singing of ‘Rule Britannia’, waving of flags and so on; yet, although they sound on the up and up, I think the base is not very secure, what with the poll tax, the attacks on the NHS and local government, and nuclear rearmament.

Friday 16 October

In the middle of the night we had the worst storm since 1703, with the wind speed in London reaching 94 mph. Trees were torn up all over the place. In Kew Gardens it will take 200 years for the trees that were lost to be replaced to maturity. The weather men never predicted it, though it was actually a hurricane. There are trees lying all over the streets. Caroline has been staying at Stansgate, where there was a power cut. Enormous damage has been done. The whole thing was unreal; it was like a day that didn’t exist, one of those days that has a special character of its own.

Saturday 21 November

Began packing for Russia. When you go to America you just take a toothbrush and know you can get anything you need there, but when you go to the Soviet Union you have to be self-contained. So I packed a kettle, batteries, cassettes, medicines and so on. The bag was so heavy that I couldn’t carry it, so I’ll have to unpack some of it.