The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (72 page)

Then I spoke. ‘Yesterday, Prime Minister, one crisis plan was put to the Cabinet and was rejected. Today another crisis plan – the true nature of which is now advancing on us – is before us; and it is based on the fact that
we throw more people on the dole, and we then cut the dole but give tax remissions for people who are better off.

‘This plan is based on two things: on Treasury forecasts that have been systematically wrong and on a monetarist theory that we don’t, for one moment, accept ourselves and are only having foisted on us by others. Denis tells us now that if it is worse than we think it is going to be, we’ll ease it up later. But it is already much worse than we thought it was going to be in July and the Treasury remedy is to increase the cuts. I therefore don’t believe that we will ease up.

‘Second, we are told that the trade union movement will welcome the cuts in benefit in order to help to reduce the pay differential for their workers. But they won’t do anything of the kind. They will say, “If you bust your side of the Social Contract, we’ll bust our side.” And what they will say is let’s go for big wage claims because that way we can keep the benefits up and we can reflate the economy to correct the deflation that the Government has imposed upon us.

‘Then there will be only two weapons left in our armoury. One is monetary policy, where you don’t have to bother with what the trade unions say, Mrs Thatcher’s view, because you turn off the taps of money and leave them without any power; or a statutory pay policy. Those are the only two things left. There is an eerie parallel with 1931.’

Jim interrupted and said, ‘There is no such parallel. I don’t accept it. I have been reading the minutes you have been circulating, every one of them, and I don’t accept it.’

‘I am very sorry but if I am in the Cabinet I must say what I think and I think there is a parallel with 1931 because then, too, the loan hinged upon cutting the benefits.’

Jim interrupted again and said, ‘Well, I lived through it. You didn’t.’

‘Well, my dad was in that Cabinet. They voted for the cuts in benefits, and I won’t accept them and I make that absolutely clear.’

Michael Foot made one final point. ‘We have had a discussion. Only a majority is for this view, it is not unanimous, and the Cabinet minutes always say, “The Cabinet noted with approval the summing-up of the Prime Minister.” Well, we don’t all approve of the summing-up of the Prime Minister.’

Jim said, ‘My summing-up will say that a majority of the Cabinet agrees and therefore surely you could “note with approval that a majority of the Cabinet agrees”.’

Michael came back to the point I had made at the very beginning and said, ‘Is it clear that the Cabinet can suspend its final judgement until the very end of this whole business when we know the quantum, we know the response, we know the allocation, we know whether we can get import deposits; we know the whole acceptability?’

‘Yes,’ said Jim, ‘I agree with that.’

With that the Cabinet adjourned at 1.15.

The foregoing diary was actually dictated in my room at the Department of Energy directly afterwards. Frances came in and wanted to know what happened so she sat while I dictated it. It is the moment of defeat and we have to recognise it. She said the
Titanic
was going down.

At 4.15 I went over to the House and thought it would be nice to have a word with Joe Ashton. Now he is a Whip I’m able to be a bit more candid with him. I told him, not in great detail, that the forecasts on unemployment and inflation were very high, that in fact the Government was going to go for cuts and deflation and was attacking benefits.

He said the truth was that the Party was absolutely punch-drunk now on anxiety and had been conditioned to what was likely to happen. In effect he was telling me to relax and not to get steamed up. It had all happened before. Eric Heffer had written an article today also saying that whatever happens, the Goverment had to be sustained.

At 5.30 I saw Michael Foot, who was distressed about this morning’s Cabinet, and hoped he would have an opportunity of a word with Jack Jones, whom he hadn’t actually seen for two or three weeks.

I’m thinking hard about how to handle the situation. It is most important not to get it wrong and go out on a limb but at the same time to try to bring the Movement in.

Wednesday 8 December

I got the report on the Windscale incident. On 10 October, nearly two months ago, there was a leak of high-activity waste material at Windscale which I was not told about. I wrote on Peter Shore’s report that it was inexcusable and I would make a parliamentary statement tomorrow.

Monday 13 December

At 2.30 the two Nuclear Inspectors came about the Windscale episode. It was horrifying that neither of them had actually been up to Windscale to have a look, even though 100 gallons a day is seeping out. I was totally shaken and they were acutely embarrassed.

Went into the House, which was pretty full because of the Devolution debate, and I played it very low key. Just as I was leaving, Nicholas Ridley, Conservative MP for Cirencester and Tewkesbury, raised a question about the surveillance of trade unionists by the secret services, which must have severely embarrassed the Front Bench.

Wednesday 15 December

Today I had a report to the effect that some tritium had been found on the beach at Windscale a year ago which had not been explained. There didn’t appear to be any link with the recent silo seepage but now they have
discovered that there could be a connection and so this raises the question of how long the leak has been going on. Was it reaching the beach?

I asked for all the details and tonight I had a note in my box that a man had inhaled some plutonium a year ago at the radio-chemical centre at Windscale and was now being watched. Now that I have demanded that all nuclear incidents be reported to me, I realise I shall be absolutely swamped by them. I have to find a way of revealing them without causing a scare but in view of the fact that tomorrow morning Peter is going to try to get a Cabinet view on Windscale, I’m hoping I can use some of the information to good effect.

Friday 17 December

There was an article by Peter Jenkins in the
Guardian
saying Jim Callaghan should sack me and get Joan Maynard, Lena Jeger, and Judith Hart removed from the Executive at next year’s Conference.

Saturday 18 December

John Cunningham came to see me. He is desperately worried about Windscale because the plant is in his constituency.

Sunday 26 December

Caroline gave each of us a copy of the
Communist Manifesto
in our stockings, published in English in Russia, and she gave Josh a book called
Marx for Beginners
and gave Hilary Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky. I read the
Communist Manifesto
yesterday, never having read it before, and I found that, without having read any Communist text, I had come to Marx’s view. It is some confession to make in a diary but the analysis of feudal society, the role of the Church and religion, the class struggle, the impact of technology in destroying the professions, the cash society, the identification of monopoly and the internationalisation of trade and commerce, all these things had been set out absolutely clearly by 1848 by Marx and Engels. It is a most astonishing thing and I feel so ignorant that at the age of fifty-one as a socialist politician in Britain I should never have read that basic text before and I am shy to admit it.

There is no doubt that in the years up to 19681 was just a career politician and in 1968 I began thinking about technology and participation and all that; it wasn’t particularly socialist and my Fabian tract of 1970 was almost anti-socialist, corporatist in character with a democratic theme – management and labour working together. Up to 1973,1 shifted to the left and analysed the Left. Then in 1974 at the Department of Industry I learned it all again by struggle and by seeing it and thinking about it, and I have been driven further and further towards a real socialist position, not a Marxist position particularly; in reading about the Levellers and our own heritage I realise that so much of British socialism goes back quite independently into
our history. But, except for the fact that the
Communist Manifesto
wasn’t written with an understanding of British history and British society, it is a most amazing summary of the impact of the Industrial Revolution – Marx was writing within seventy years of Adam Smith. So the Industrial Revolution gave rise to capitalism, socialism and trade unionism at about one and the same time.

I record this now while I am reading all the basic texts in order to try to understand what is going on.

Tuesday 28 December

It has been a very remarkable year really in the aftermath of the Referendum when the Party was in a terrible state of depression and the Government appeared to be going forward with its own right-wing policy unchallenged.

I must think about Europe. My concerns at the moment are how the Party should react to the Common Market and I think we should call for major reforms in the Treaty of Rome committing us to a democratic socialist association of states which will bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of the working people of Europe and their families. And it should be open to all countries and aim at dismantling all the federal parts so that it becomes an open association with none of the present centralisation and bureaucracy.

Next year I also want to try to restate the case for parliamentary democracy and democracy against capitalism in the very strongest way possible, to show why it is that the Labour Party is committed to democracy and free speech.

I say little of the family in this diary. Caroline is terribly busy. She has got two or three major projects on all the time and is highly respected and regarded by all the people in the educational world. Stephen has just had three months in America working with Senator Eagleton and has to finish his thesis, which is a big strain for him, particularly coming back to England after the glamour of Washington. Hilary is well established with Rosalind and his job with ASTMS will last as long as he wants it. Melissa has three years at LSE and Josh is kicking around until he goes to his polytechnic next year.

I’m very richly blessed with an extremely happy family life and could not be more content. I’ve had as much happiness and comfort and sustenance in my fifty-one years as any man could expect to have in two or three lifetimes, so even if things go wrong and I lose my seat – as I might well do in the next General Election – I have plenty to remember and a role to perform even if it isn’t necessarily in the House of Commons.

Sunday 16 January 1977

Amazement of amazement, the
Sunday Times
had two leading articles today,
one saying that the motorcycle co-operative at Meriden must be saved, and the other singling me out for favourable mention for my open-government policy at the Department of Energy.

The background to this is that I had called in the Nuclear Inspectorate to ask them questions about the fast breeder, like ‘What would happen if a fast breeder blew up?’ They had answered, Well 10,000 (or whatever) would be killed, and I had stopped the discussion and said, ‘I really cannot be told this in private, and know it privately; do you mind if I put the questions in writing to you and publish the answers?’ So the answers were published this week.

It must be the first time in history, I think, that the Nuclear Inspectorate have been cross-examined by their responsible Minister, or indeed that the Minister has ever revealed in public the interrogation of his officials about nuclear policy, or about anything.

Monday 17 January

With Caroline to
Tribune
’s fortieth birthday party at Number 10 – it was immense fun. Jim was charming and had baked a cake which said, ‘Happy Birthday
Tribune
– Life Begins at Forty’, with a red ribbon round it. He made a little speech saying he read
Tribune
and had done for years, and yearned for the day when he would agree with it.

Then Jim took us down to the Cabinet Room, which I wanted Caroline to see. We all stood there – all the wives and Dick Clements, the Editor of
Tribune
, and his staff. Jim told me to stand behind my usual seat. ‘Now, where do we all sit?’ he asked. So I began going round and we could remember our side of the table, but when it came to the other side Jim couldn’t remember. I went through them. ‘There’s Harold Lever, and next to him Fred Peart. Next to him David Ennals, then John Silkin . . .’ When we got to the end we couldn’t think of anybody else. So Jim pulled out his diary and said, ‘Well, let’s look it up and see who else is in the Cabinet.’ ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘we forgot Edmund Dell.’ In the far corner was Bill Rodgers’s seat. We’d all forgotten about him. There was a great deal of laugher, and it was very agreeable.

We had a word with Denis and Edna Healey. Denis gave a good imitation of Mike Yarwood. He was full of
bonhomie
and goodwill.

Tuesday 18 January

I worked until 2, then up at 6.30 to go off to begin my tour of European capitals as President of the Council of Energy Ministers.

I took my own mug and lots of tea bags. When we arrived in Paris we were met by the Ambassador, Nico Henderson, a tall, grey-haired, scruffy man, almost a caricature of an English public schoolboy who got to the top of the Foreign Office. I don’t think I had ever met him before; he was rather superior and swooped me up in his Rolls Royce.

The end of a day of negotiations, and I enjoyed it very much. In a way it’s very relaxing not to be a British Minister, just a European one.

But I must admit that the standard of living of, for example, the Ambassador – a Rolls Royce, luxurious house, marvellous furniture, silver plate at dinner – is indefensible. Ours is a sort of corporate society with a democratic safety valve. What a long time it will take to put it right. And how do you get measured steps of advance? Undoubtedly openness is one, and negotiations and discussions with the trade unions is another. Nobody should have power unless they are elected.