The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (46 page)

The anti-Marketeers are annoyed that although I am not anti-Market I do see the possibility of optimising their support by using the General Election/referendum solution. So I think my role between now and the Conference, at which I become Chairman of the Party, is to present this proposal modestly and on my own. It is of constitutional importance but it also does have the great tactical advantage of keeping the Party united, and I think people will gradually come to see this.

Monday 14 June

UCS is in difficulty. Looked through my old files and came across a confidential memorandum written by Nicholas Ridley for Heath in 1969 about how to cut up UCS. I rang up Mark Arnold-Forster at the
Guardian
and gave it to him. I received it from Eric Varley – I don’t know where he got it from – and I hadn’t used it before because I was a bit worried about revealing a document which had been pirated in some way, picked up from a wastepaper basket or whatever. But with the possibility of UCS being knifed today – indeed the near certainty of it – I decided to let it come out.

I drafted a statement on UCS, calling for public ownership and workers’ control in the yard itself, and went into the House of Commons. I had a filthy cold and felt terrible. I saw Harold Wilson and he approved the draft.

Davies made his statement in the House, that UCS would liquidate, and I attacked him violently, blaming him for it.

Had an urgent meeting with the Scottish Members and then decided to fly up to Clydebank with Hugh McCartney, the local MP. We went to Clydebank Town Hall where all the shop stewards were gathered and I reported what had happened in the House in the afternoon and what a betrayal it was. I was asked what attitude I would adopt to the workers taking control of the yard. I said if they felt this was right I thought their action was
fully justified. This of course was encouraging or approving illegal action, but I had thought it all out some time before and I am sure it was the right thing to say. Then I asked them what they wanted me to say in the debate tomorrow. About an hour and a half later I caught the sleeper back to London and prepared for the debate.

Thursday 17 June

Our 22nd wedding anniversary.

‘Yesterday’s Men’ was shown on television. This is the programme which was supposed to be a serious look at the Opposition and the makers had brought their cameras into the Shadow Cabinet. In fact it was a complete send-up. It was interesting because they had just taken the insignificant bits and strung them together, which made the whole thing trivial. They knifed Harold as hard as they could.

Friday 18 June

To Scotland by train, to the Clydebank yard with Frank McElhone to go over with the shop stewards what they wanted to do next. The workforce has theoretically taken over the yard today and, seen from the outside, this looks like a very revolutionary act. But when you get through the barricades and ask, as a friend, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’, they haven’t a strategy, they haven’t a plan, they haven’t got anything at all. I probed how far they wanted workers’ control to go, and they were very uncertain. But it helped me because I found a form of words for a statement that simply said that any management pattern would have to be acceptable to the workers as a whole.

Sunday 18 July

This evening I went to Geoffrey Goodman’s home in Mill Hill for a gathering of the Left with Michael Foot and Jill Craigie, Peter and Liz Shore, Dick and Bridget Clements, Alex Jarratt who used to be an official at the Department of Employment and is now Managing Director of IPC, and Leo Abse and his wife.

At dinner Jill Craigie suddenly turned to Peter and me and said, ‘I realise that the next Leader of the Party will be one or other of you and you will be getting the knives out for each other, but it’s more likely to be Peter.’ Peter was flattered but slightly embarrassed by this.

Monday 19 July

PLP meeting at 6.30 and Harold explained the procedure in the House for the Common Market debate on Wednesday. Norman Atkinson came out against Europe on ideological grounds and said that if we were taken in by the Tories, we should pledge ourselves to get out.

Barbara Castle made a speech for forty minutes saying that the party had been cornered by the Tories on the terms. She said there should be a select
committee (which I agree with), devaluation would be necessary for entry, we would surrender our freedom of action, she had always been against entry even in the Cabinet, that when we had reapplied we were not committed to the Common Agricultural Policy and now the French had actually caught us out by entrenching the CAP before we were admitted. She said that the objectives must be to federalise but these were never discussed and if we supported entry we would be accepting a political coalition in this country. It was a powerful ideological case against entry.

Then Roy Jenkins said there was no great current of anti-Market feeling in the constituency Parties. He thought there should be consistency in commitment since the last Labour Cabinet, by a majority, voted to enter and the terms of entry would have been accepted by the Cabinet. If we didn’t go in now, he said, it would be worse than if we had never applied. He didn’t accept that we must reject entry because the Tories were in power. He attacked the negative insularity of the anti-Marketeers and said that socialism in one country was a slogan and not a policy and socialists in the other EEC countries wanted our help.

It was a powerful speech and the arguments carried a great deal of weight. But of course it was defiant – an arrogant and an élitist speech. A demonstration had been prearranged afterwards and people banged and hammered and shouted. Roy’s speech was of course a direct attack on Harold Wilson and also on Healey and Crosland, who had climbed off the fence against the Market, and it changed the political situation in the Party at one stroke.

Afterwards I went down to the Smoking Room and sat with the Left, where Barbara was saying, ‘We must organise, we must fight.’ Michael Foot was shaken by it and I think it would certainly confirm Michael’s determination to stand against Roy as Deputy Leader. It took you right back to 1951 or 1961 – the Party at its worst.

Tuesday 20 July

Went to the Trade and Industry Group meeting at the House, which had been summoned to consider the employment situation: while I was there a message was brought over to me to go and see Harold Wilson. So I walked over to his house, 5 Lord North Street, and found Harold in his shirtsleeves, pacing up and down the room.

He told me that he intended to make a statement at the Party meeting later today. He was extremely agitated about Roy Jenkins’s great speech at the Party meeting last night. He said he was going to lay down the law and while he remained Leader he would handle the Party as he thought right: one of his real ‘smack of government’ or ‘dog licence’-type speeches. Finally the text of his statement came over, he having written it and Marcia having made amendments. The first draft, which Marcia had cut down, was even more self-justificatory and obsessed with his leadership and referred to the
number of weekends he had addressed meetings since the Election. He said to me, ‘I don’t know, I may just give up the Party leadership, they can stuff it as far as I am concerned. I pay out of my own pocket £15,000 a year to be Party Leader. I finance my own office. I have got an overdraft with my bank. All the money from my memoirs has gone. I don’t know why I go on. But I’ll smash CDS (the Campaign for Democratic Socialism) before I go,’ and I’ll do this and I’ll do that. He was full of boasts but underneath was desperately insecure and unhappy.

I walked back from his house – I didn’t particularly want to be seen with him in his car. But it was interesting that he called me in, which he only does when there is trouble.

I went over to the House and to the PLP meeting, where the statement was presented and it was received with acute embarrassment by the Party. One or two people at the end sort of pretended to applaud but it was very uncomfortable and nobody – except for a few middle-of-the-road people who thought it was necessary to straighten the Party out – could understand why he had made it.

I had a brief talk with one or two of the journalists, then had a meal in the Tea Room with Roy Mason and Frank McElhone. The position really is this: by making the leadership an issue and by using phrases like ‘whoever is Leader after October’, Harold has put himself in the most vulnerable position of all and I think it not impossible that somebody will stand against him: it might be Jim, it could hardly be Roy Jenkins or any of the others, but I think there is just a possibility.

I don’t myself see much chance for the deputy leadership because I think Roy’s honesty will win him support and the Left is almost bound to nominate Michael Foot, as the most direct attack on Roy that it can make. Michael is not an ambitious man. He is getting on himself (he is fifty-eight) and never having been in the Cabinet, he would be very much a stopgap candidate and would probably be defeated by Roy: so there may be some pressure on me.

I am almost ashamed to talk about this in my diary because it makes it seem that I am mainly concerned with that, which I hope I am not. But egoism eats up all politicians in time, which is probably the case for getting rid of them.

Thursday 29 July

The UCS statement, and the Government published a pessimistic White Paper by the so-called Four Wise Men, of which Robens was a member. There was extreme dismay in the House.

I ought to mention that Harold had called me in before the UCS statement was made and said that he would like to come to Scotland next week. He was particularly keen to do this because he wanted to expose Heath, who was sailing in the Admiral’s Cup on Wednesday, and Harold
had this idea, which he himself described as a gimmick, of sailing up the Clyde in a boat, visiting the doomed shipyards while Heath was yachting in the Admiral’s Cup. He even suggested he might wear his outfit as an Elder Brother of Trinity House, which is the honorary title all Prime Ministers have. I must admit my contempt for Harold, which has been pretty high this last week, reached a peak. He said he would neither condemn nor condone the occupation. Well, that’s no good, and I told him so. I was rather worried that he would wreck it all, but clearly he was getting on my bandwagon while being a bit more cautious about it.

Monday 2 August

I opened the House of Commons UCS debate which we had demanded, and my speech was perfectly all right. I got the case on the record but against bitterly hostile Tory benches and a certain amount of anxiety on our backbenches as to whether I had gone too far in my support for the occupation of the yards.

John Davies called me an ‘evil genius’. Heath had cancelled his Admiral’s Cup racing for the day and was sitting looking sour. It was a short debate but certainly worth while. There is no doubt that the press think the Government was right to wind up UCS and are critical of the line I have been taking.

Tuesday 3 August

I went to the House and saw the industrial correspondents on the workers’ control issue, which I am going to write about in
Tribune
this week. Yesterday I talked to Norman Atkinson, to Johnny Prescott and one or two other young left-wing trade union MPs who are very much afraid, as I am, that I might appear to be misleading the men.

Friday 6 August

The papers carried a great deal about the
Oz
trial in which Richard Neville, the Editor, and two of his colleagues have been jailed for publishing an ‘obscene’ edition. Yesterday in the House, when the sentences were announced, Bill Hamling the Labour MP for Wolverhampton West, who is a member of the Humanists Group, handed me a motion condemning the sentences as being contrary to British justice, signed by Dick Taverne, who is a QC, Tom Driberg and Frank Allaun. I signed it too.

When I rang Frank McElhone today in Aberdeen, where he is on holiday, he was worried about this and said there had been a lot of criticism in Scotland of my signing the motion and I would lose fifty votes for the leadership. I said I felt deeply that it was wrong to jail these young people. This is the difficulty, if you are going to go out simply for high office, then you have got to be cautious and I am not sure that I want to be. I would
rather stand up for what I believe. Frank was worried and I tried to reassure him.

Then I sat down and thought about how one would deal with criticisms of the line that I had taken. The truth is that middle-aged parents are the last to criticise the young because we were the war generation and the young are fighting against the obscenity of racial hatred and poverty and war. I jotted this down and showed it to Hilary but he thought it was too apologetic and I had better simply stick by what I had done.

In 1971, the Benns were invited to China by the Chinese Ambassador. The visit took place at the tail end of the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ which began in 1966 and raged on in different stages until 1969. The Revolution was actively supported by Chairman Mao Tse Tung and it brought with it fundamental changes and involved a period of turbulence and violence between the old regime and the forces of radicalism, which rocked the country.

Mao’sfamous ‘big character’ poster
BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS
constituted official approval for the action of the young Red Guards who took over the universities, colleges, schools and factories and began a purge of the bureaucracy. The main objective of Mao and the Red Guards was to prevent the old functionaries from dominating the country, and to re-educate them by sending them into the countryside, in line with Mao’s teaching that theory and practice must go together.

This diary reflects the positive impressions of China and goes into considerable depth about life after the revolution, of which a glimpse is given here; it is a remarkable record of the aftermath of that extraordinary event.

Friday 10 September

We went by train from Kowloon to Lowu where we arrived at 10.26. There we got off the train, walked along the platform through the Hong Kong border post which didn’t look, to me, to be under any sort of strain or stress and we crossed the border into mainland China. It was a very remarkable feeling crossing from one world into the other towards the Red Flag, with the Chinese soldiers standing there in their drab khaki cotton uniforms.