Read The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 Online
Authors: Tony Benn
Sunday 27 February
London, and Caroline and I went to the Foots’ for dinner. The Baloghs were there, and Judith and Tony Hart, welcome back after Judith left the Government nearly two years ago. The Shores came in later.
We talked over dinner about Ministers dying early, about abortion – it was a morbid discussion, really.
Monday 28 February
Did my box, and found a letter from Sir Peter Ramsbotham, our Ambassador in Washington, to Sir Jack Rampton, saying he had seen Schlesinger, who stated that the fast-breeder programme would be sharply cut back. That is really very important, marvellous news. So I might win.
Tuesday 1 March
To the Cabinet Economic Committee, and we came to a paper on unemployment. The paper described a 300,000 increase in unemployment this year.
I should add that Rampton, my Permanent Secretary, had written on my brief in his own hand, ‘Why don’t we have national service? We are the only country in the whole Community who don’t have a year’s national service.’
Wednesday 2 March
Frances Morrell had been to Number 10 yesterday or the day before and she told me that the only thing worth my doing was to become Leader of the Party. I said there was another choice, to influence the Party, and she said there was no real influence except as Leader. But I’ve seen so many lives wrecked by ambition and I don’t intend to do that.
Thursday 3 March
The Editor of the
Daily Telegraph,
Bill Deedes, came to lunch. I’ve always liked Deedes. He told me that F. A. Hayek, the author of
The Road to Serfdom
, had come to see him the other day, and Hayek had said, ‘You know, my view is that Britain ought to pursue an effective monetarist policy – but I’m very worried about unemployment; it’s on such a scale now.’
Well, if Hayek is worried about unemployment, and the Editor of the
Daily Express is worried
, and Bill Deedes is worried, why isn’t the Government worried?
At the very end Bill said, ‘You know, you are a very thoughtful guy, you’ve a lot of experience, you can obviously manage your department, and you have got a lot more supporters in the
Daily Telegraph
than you might think.’ He was frightfully nice.
Monday 7 March
Tony Crosland’s memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey. It was a
tremendous event, as you would expect for a Foreign Secretary dying in office. The Abbey was packed, the Cabinet in the choir stalls on the left, where as a Westminster schoolboy I used to sit every day for Latin prayers. Opposite were all the other Ministers and Ambassadors. There were three former Prime Ministers over on the right – Heath, Wilson and Home – and Princess Alexandra was there representing somebody.
It was the Establishment recognising and at the same time burying the idea of social democracy. First of all we had the Dean saying a few words about Tony’s incisive and lively mind, about his passion for a just and equal society, his unfaltering desire to raise up the underprivileged and to care for the less fortunate. Then we had the national anthem, then Derek Gladwin, southern regional secretary of the GMWU, described in the programme as Grimsby-born, who read Ecclesiasticus, ‘Let us now praise famous men.’ Of course we had the hymn ‘Jerusalem’. Then a reading by Dick Leonard, a past PPS of Tony’s, from
The Future of Socialism,
in which the first passage read was as follows:
It is not only dark satanic things and people that now bar the road to the new Jerusalem but also, if not mainly, hygienic, respectable, virtuous things and people, lacking only in grace and gaiety.
The most astonishing thing to read, that the only bar to socialism was now hygienic respectability and virtue. Later came a passage attacking the Webbs and continuing:
Today we are all incipient bureaucrats and practical administrators. We have all so to speak been trained at the LSE, are familiar with blue books and white papers and know our way around Whitehall.
An absolutely élitist view of politics; then finally the famous phrase:
Total abstinence and a good filing system are not now the right signposts to the socialist utopia, or at least, if they are, some of us will fall by the wayside.
After an address by Lord Donaldson, his old friend Jack Donaldson, we had the prayer for Parliament, which contains these words –
That thou wouldst be pleased to direct and prosper all their consultations to the advancement of thy glory, the good of thy church, the safety, honour and welfare of our sovereign and her dominions.
and so on – the parliamentary prayer which of course is absolutely pre-parliamentary, let alone pre-democratic.
That memorial service really could be published as a Gaitskellite pamphlet. It was the Gaitskellites mourning their dead.
Saturday 12 March
I had a bath and Caroline and I went and bought a couple of vases and drove to Woolwich Town Hall at 10.30 for my driver Ron Vaughan’s marriage to Peggy. It was a lovely day and we went to the reception in the Star Hotel.
Sunday 13 March
Caroline and I picked up her cousins, Jean and Dudley Bahlman, and drove to Number 10.
We looked at portraits of all the Prime Ministers, which Hamilton, Gladstone’s secretary, had arranged would be put on the stairs. I had my polaroid camera and took pictures of Dudley beside Gladstone’s portrait and sitting at Gladstone’s desk.
I should think Heath had spent millions redecorating the place – a fantastic amount of redecoration. We looked into the ‘Garden Room’ and there was one of the famous Garden Girls, high-society typists and secretaries who work for Number 10. There are thirteen of them and one is always on duty. She was working at a Singer sewing machine. It was just like drifting into a country house, the last remnants of Edwardian England. These girls are from ‘good’ families, having been to Roedean and other girls’ public schools, because class is seen as the ultimate safeguard of national security.
Then we went into Number 11 and Number 12 Downing Street and in Number 12 we saw pictures of the government Whips in 1910, including Father, who was then in the Liberal Party.
Monday 14 March
John Hill came in to talk about Windscale. I asked ‘What are the real hazards there?’ and he told me something extraordinary. ‘Well, there’s activity everywhere you dig on that site. Don’t forget that after the war Windscale started as a weapons site. We would be pushed to produce 20 kilograms of plutonium before the Russians marched on Berlin; Windscale was given top priority. Whenever we had a spill we just covered it up. For example, in 1957 one of the reactors caught fire and we simply poured in 300,000 tons of water which went right through the plant and into the ground. You can’t dig anywhere without the soil producing a radioactive response.’
He said the plant itself was built to two standards of containment: there were the double-clad, no-leak tanks; and there was the low-activity waste. There was always some seepage from all of it but there were inspection checks.
Tuesday 15 March
Cabinet discussed the proposed sale of BP shares which had been agreed as part of the IMF deal in December and I was called on to speak first. I said that, as the Cabinet would remember, I was strongly opposed to the sale of shares and the public reaction had also been adverse; 100 Labour MPs of the Left, Right and Centre, including John Cartwright, Phillip Whitehead and Jeremy Bray, had signed a motion against it, and Len Murray had reminded us that it would be a breach of the Social Contract.
Then I read the paragraph from the Public Accounts General Purposes Sub-Committee criticising the sale of the shares.
Going round the table, Harold Lever and Edmund Dell were of course in favour of selling the shares. Denis Healey said it would cost us 2p on income tax if we didn’t. Peter Shore wanted to leave it a bit and Bruce Millan said something helpful. I said at the end that the argument that it would damage BP if we had a big shareholding was nonsense; they had always complained about it, but no one had ever mentioned it to me. If we did reduce our holding and a foreign government bought the shares, it would be awful. People said that the North Sea was in hock and mortgaged up to the hilt and this would reinforce that view. Why not defer it?
But I was defeated. Denis said we had to know today in time for his Budget.
Thursday 17 March
Cabinet at 10. The first thing was that Jim said, ‘I told the Cabinet I would buy a gift for the Queen and I asked her what she would like and she said she would like something she would use personally, something she really could use herself.’ So Peter asked, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘A silver coffee-pot.’ Everyone laughed, because the one thing she must have a million of is silver coffee-pots. So anyway, Audrey Callaghan had gone out and found one and it was brought in and put on the table. It is Victorian and, since it will cost each member of the Cabinet £15, it is worth at least about £370.
I said, ‘I assume that as it is a Cabinet coffee-pot it won’t leak?’ Jim said, ‘You can say that to the Queen yourself.’
We went on to Carter, and Jim reported on his trip with David Owen to the United States. He said Jimmy Carter is a very fast reader, has an amazing capacity to absorb his briefs; he reads at something like 3,000 words a minute. ‘About the same speed that Harold Wilson writes his books,’ I said. Jim went on to say Carter was a great supporter of the Labour Party, and when Jim had told him, ‘Well, we may save the country but lose the Election’, Carter had replied, ‘Well, I hope you succeed with both.’
Friday 18 March
To Bristol, and was met at Temple Meads by someone from the Independent Businesses Association. I had geared myself up to sympathise
with small businesses and at the same time I was rather nervous of them because I thought they would all be potential National Front people.
Well, I couldn’t have had more of a surprise because Mr Tucker, who met me, a man of about sixty-five, born in Bristol, couldn’t have been nicer or more politically sympathetic. He hated the Common Market and had been Labour all his life. We and his son, who looked like a really tough self-made Tory businessman, drove in a Rolls Royce to Transport House, Bristol, where I met the small businessmen in the company of Harry Wright of the CSEU. It was an absolutely fascinating hour.
They talked about being inadequately represented. Their voice was not heard. They can live with a lot of legislation, but, said Mr Tucker, the big firms control the paper-money empires and they want recognition of their role.
A printer who employed thirty-five people said, ‘I may look wealthy on paper with my premises and plant but I work very hard. I want to pass it on to my sons, but the business would have to be sold to pay for death duties.’ He stated that half the people in this country are employed by small businesses; but corporation tax, VAT, PAYE, CTT, CGT, masses of civil servants and a huge inflation of tax levels made things very difficult.
Then Mr Tucker’s son said, ‘Equality and fairness are not the same. We are not speculators or big businessmen, we are all professional managers, and we are oppressed by the weight of the legislation. We want to be reasonable but it is a weight, and we would rather employ more people than pay more tax.’
It was a very useful meeting; I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Monday 21 March
The papers are full of Election fever. Everybody is steamed up about it but I am rather calm because I am absolutely sure a deal will be done with the Liberals (Michael made it pretty clear last night) and because if there isn’t a deal and there is an Election we won’t do all that badly.
Also in the papers today, the
Cambridge Review
, to which Francis Cripps contributes, forecasts a rise in unemployment to about two million; and the press has given it very little coverage.
The Labour Party – Trade Union Liaison Committee met at 10.30. It was agreed we would set aside the agenda and discuss the current parliamentary situation. Jim was asked to speak, and began, ‘Well, Chairman, I think . . .’ And Barbara as usual said, ‘Would you speak up, Jim.’ Barbara’s a bit deaf, I think.
So Jim continued, ‘Well, I was trying to think of what to say!’
Listening to the discussion, I came to this conclusion. David Basnett, Len Murray, Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones all want the Government to survive and would be perfectly content to do a deal. They are critical of the Left because they think the Left would bring the Government down. So the trade
union leaders ask what is the lesser of two evils in the present situation. Well, the Labour Government is the lesser of two evils compared to the Tories, and Labour with a bit of Liberal support is still the lesser of two evils. No doubt they would carry it further and say, ‘Look, if you put up with the Common Market, which limits the freedom of action of the Government, and with the IMF, which limited the freedom of action of the Government, then clearly the Liberal limitation on freedom of action will be less.’
If you take that view – that Jim must be kept as Prime Minister (which is different now from having a Labour Party in power) – that is the only conclusion you can reach. I might add that the trade union leaders are terrified that their own position will be put at risk, if their members say: Well, you delivered us tied hand and foot into the hands of the Tory Government.
Tuesday 22 March
I had a morning at home till 11.30. More speculation about the deals that are being done, and I am quite clear in my mind that one
is
being done.
At 12.40 Francis and Frances came in and we had a blazing row because I said I thought that in my speech to the trade union group of MPs this evening I should say something that bore upon the current political situation. Frances disagreed. She was going to have lunch, so I worked in my room and wrote a few things and had some sandwiches, then she came back and we went over it again. She said, ‘Let them discredit themselves. Just sit back and do nothing, say nothing.’