Tributes to Tony Benn

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Thursday 20th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I am very glad to be called to pay personal tribute to Tony Benn and to pass on the thanks of many of my constituents who were inspired by meeting him during the miners’ strike and before that.

I have to say that I did have a cat and he was called Tony Benn, and he was just as feisty as the person he was named after, whom I did admire greatly. If we went on holiday and put him in a cattery for two weeks, he would then disappear for about two weeks just to get his own back, causing my wife a great deal of distress. Tony could also trouble people. Some people never recovered from being challenged by him, because they did not have the logic to stand against him.

I will tell one story. It has been said that Tony was great with technology. I am an honorary member of the Free Colliers, an organisation in my constituency set up after the 1799 Act that freed colliers from bondage in Scotland. The Act provided that if they were found meeting other colliers to discuss terms and conditions of employment they would be returned to the colliery from which they were freed. The Free Colliers march every year to commemorate setting up this secret society, which was a precursor of the National Federation of Coal, Iron and Lime Miners, which became the National Union of Mineworkers. Tony always said that he wanted to come and I gave him some material on it for him to read. One day we met at the ATM in this building and he started to discuss it with me. Having got some money out of the machine, he did not take it and for some reason it swallowed his money. He was totally perplexed—he could not understand where his money had gone. Although he knew about technology, even he was befuddled by that. I hope he got his money back. He was always willing to enter into a debate on important topics, sometimes in the strangest places.

The Free Colliers were very sad that Tony Benn never went to speak to them. They said that they had always wanted him to go and address them, because they held him in high regard. He was held in high regard outside the House: that is the point about Tony Benn. He was held in high regard here, by us who view things through the prism of Parliament, but people outside took a much wider view, and his heritage will last a great deal longer outside, affecting and influencing politics in the outside world. I thank him for his clarity of analysis and his support for democratic solutions. He always looked for the benefit of all in everything, even if that meant that he had to challenge the compromises of the establishment.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) mentioned Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. In 1971, I was the president of Stirling university students association. There is a BBC video—I have a copy; I hope that it is the master copy—showing me in my office with long hair and a Karl Marx poster behind me, calling for the students to organise buses so that people could go and stand by those who were “working in” to save their jobs. That was the first occasion on which I met Tony Benn. I did not get to know him, but I met him, and found him a great inspiration.

When I was the leader of Stirling council, we changed the standing orders—which had to be approved by the national executive committee—to bind councillors to the manifestos on which they stood. There is a unique idea! Imagine making people carry out the manifestos on which they stand! Tony persuaded the national executive committee to approve our standing orders, and they became the standing orders of our council, which meant that we had to deliver on the manifestos on which we had been elected. Unfortunately, being Tony Benn, he decided that this was the solution for all councils, and tried to introduce the same standing orders for every council in Britain. Of course, that frightened the horses and it never happened, but at least those in my council, during the 10 years for which I was leader, were bound by the manifestos on which we were elected, and that was approved by the national executive committee of the Labour party. Would it not be wonderful for every aspect of politics if everyone stood for election on that basis?

I became the Scottish secretary of the Labour co-ordinating committee, which had been set up by my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton at a meeting in Glasgow—on his son’s birthday, if I remember rightly. He had to rush back home after launching it. It was a bulwark against Militant, the ultra-left of the party. It was not an attack on the establishment, although some people saw it as such; it was an antidote to the anti-democratic, out-of-touch elite that ran the Labour party. For instance, I was nominated by my constituency’s branch of the GMB, which sent the form down to the national office. When it came back, my name had been not taken out but scored out, and someone else’s name had been inserted and signed by the national secretary of the union. That was a total denial of the democracy of the people in Scotland who had chosen me as a candidate. I won anyway, and I am here as a consequence, but Tony Benn was against what had happened in that instance as well.

Some people later tried to distance themselves from the distorted “bogey man” image of Tony Benn by saying that they were not Bennites, but belonged to some other kind of “left”. If I had been asked, I would have said that I was of the Bennite left, because that Bennite left was not militant, it was not Trotskyist, and it was not a compromising position in the Labour party. I hope I still stand by those principles today in the things I do, including wanting Trident to be banned. Tony wanted that, although his intelligence and logic had led him to support nuclear power. The anti-Trotskyite movement in Scotland saved the Labour party in Scotland in the 1980s, and was the driver for the devolved Parliament that we have today. All that was a part of the philosophies that Tony Benn understood. He understood Scotland in a way many politicians down here did not.

I was speaking to Tony Benn’s son Stephen last night in Portcullis House, and I now want to say a few words about the other part of the Bennite heritage. My wife Margaret Doran and I—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I must ask the hon. Gentleman to be very brief. We should be grateful for a very few words on that point, because others wish to make contributions, and we need to move on.

[Michael Connarty]

I am conscious of that, Mr Speaker, but I am talking about a long life and a long friendship.

My wife Margaret Doran and I also knew and dearly admired Tony Benn’s wife Caroline. She was a great inspiration and support, and was a vibrant, lucid and deeply compassionate educationist. She was president of the Socialist Educational Association, and my wife and I have both been, at different times, presidents of the Scottish SEA. We often talked to her at length when we came to London for SEA meetings. I was with Tony and Caroline on the Terrace shortly before her passing. I agree with what was said earlier: a light went out of his life when Caroline died. But what was amazing was that he went on. Many of us would have been destroyed by losing such a life partner but he was inexorable, and that was a tribute to what they both stood for together and what their family stand for and what will be carried on.

When he left Parliament he spoke from outside this House. People have said he left politics. He did not leave politics. His thoughts reflect where the people are. Most of the people in this country are not with us in this House: they do not regard us highly; they think we are often irrelevant to their lives. They go day to day trying to make ends meet and they look to the words of Tony Benn and people like him to give them hope. If we could learn something from him and reconnect with those people we might actually carry forward something that would be beneficial to this House. That is what Tony Benn has given people: hope, and we are not giving people hope at this moment. Maybe in the future it is his words that will give them hope, and not ours.