No Country for Old Benn

Tony Benn is taking no chances these days. The “untrained classroom assistant to the nation” now carries his soapbox around with him, in the form of a rucksack with a collapsible camping stool cleverly attached. Halfway through his talk, it’s revealed that the recording device on the table in front of him doesn’t belong to an enterprising journalist, but Benn himself.

Instead of talking about his new book – the latest, and presumably final edition of his diaries-cum-autobiograpy, chronicling his life after parliament from 2001 to 2007 – Benn says he wants to tell his audience about his next project, provisionally entitled Letters to my Grandchildren. The former Labour MP and persistent agent provocateur is showing no signs of mental slow-down, though, and is beginning to come to grips with his own mortality.

“I have ten grandchildren, and I am worried for them. This generation is the first that, with the combined power of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, has the ability to destroy humanity,” Benn says. “But it is also the first with the wealth and power to solve its problems.”

It's vintage stuff from Benn and considering today's sell-out crowd, it's clear there's still plenty in Britain that haven’t tired of hearing the 83-year old's impassioned political pleas. It’s worth noting that his listeners, while still at Benn’s end of the demographic scale, include the most generous scattering of age groups thus far seen at the EIBF.

While his ability to draw both youth and old to this event supports the case for Benn’s continued relevance, many of his views would make him unelectable today were it not for his personal popularity. That post-Thatcher taboo “redistribution” trips off his tongue a little too easily for the Barbour-clad audience, though his common sense is irresistible to most.

“The greatest problem the world faces is one of scarcity...” he begins; “if three men are on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, and all they have is a loaf of bread, either the richest man buys it, the strongest man fights for it, or you divide it in three.”

“We had rationing during the war, and it made perfect sense. The average height of the working class rose two inches because they’d never had such a good diet before. A man in Liverpool came up to me once and said, ‘I’d never heard of butter until rationing’... bread was never rationed during the war, but afterwards, when Germany didn’t have anything, we rationed bread so that the country we’d beaten didn’t starve.”

One of Benn’s most enduring qualities is exactly this sort of compassion, much in evidence during his hour on stage. Discussing the immorality of war, he is so moved when recounting the words of Bobby Sands – “Our vengeance will be the laughter of our grandchildren” – he breaks down. “Never trust a man who can’t weep,” offers chair Ruth Wishart, as usual in total command, deploying timely and perfectly weighted interjections.

There’s simply no way to sufficiently condense an hour in the company of Benn, and he himself has faced a similar challenge in dealing with his own archives. “I’ve kept everything, literally,” he says, admitting the use of a paper he wrote when he was 11 and election literature from 1935 as evidence in a recent debate. “The figures were quite useful.” Hinting that such a matter won't trouble him for much longer Benn adds, “I remember joining my grandmother at her bedside when she was quite ill, thinking she was going to die; she turned to me and said, ‘the greatest thing about your final journey is that you don’t have to pack.’”