Benn’s stall sells democracy short (original) (raw)

TONY BENN talks about democracy as if it were a law of nature, like gravity: measurable and indisputable. You might like it, or dislike it. It might be handy, or inconvenient, but there is no denying what it is. So the natural consequence must presumably be that if you got a dozen democrats in a room, they’d never have cause to disagree about anything, right? Hah!

The irony is that many democrats might even disagree with much of what Benn recited in Big Ideas That Changed the World (Five), his canter through the history of democracy, from Athens, through Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Civil War, Tom Paine and The Rights of Man, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the chartists and the suffragettes to the postwar birth of the welfare state. It was like a trip on a Disney theme park ride called Democracy.

Like many politicians, Benn believes that he has a monopoly of understanding, insight and compassion. But if you disagree with him, he is a big enough man to stand back, and explain to you exactly where you are wrong. Benn has that tone that accents the voice of many who mean well, whereby his attempts to explain things clearly and simply can often make him sound as though he’s seeking to educate a six-year-old as to why eating up his greens will make him healthy.

But the former Labour MP (“After 50 years in Parliament, and 11 as a Cabinet minister, I have some experience of democracy,” he announced, like a poker player showing us the contents of his wallet at the start of a game to signal he could meet his debts) wasn’t so democratic as to share this platform with someone who might have challenged some of his balder remarks.

Here’s one such remark, part of Benn’s assault against money and military power: “The defence budget of the Pentagon is greater than the ten next most powerful countries in the world put together.” That was it. No further explanation. The implication? That America is essentially a bully, using its military muscle to monster the world. Maybe so. But what of all the occasions when America has used its military muscle to champion democracy, to fight Hitler, to act as a counterbalance to the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China? (There was also no time for Benn to mention how much he himself had praised Mao, a man now held to be perhaps the biggest mass murderer of the last century, but whom Benn hailed in his Diaries as “the greatest man of the 20th century . . . I’m a great admirer of Mao”. Benn would later visit Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to show us how we had all got the Iraqi dictator wrong).

Here’s another one: “I was in the war . . . and war is 1 per cent danger and 99 per cent boredom, and the rest of the time you talk. And what we said to each other was very simple . . . We said, if you can have full employment by killing the enemy, why can’t you have full employment by building hospitals, building schools, recruiting nurses, recruiting teachers.” A teenager who knew nothing about the Second World War might assume from Benn’s analysis that Britain joined the war not to save Europe from fascism but largely to achieve full employment.

After hailing Labour’s postwar achievements, Benn tells us how it all turned sour: “In the period of the 1980s there was a major counter- revolution against democracy: President Reagan in America, Mrs Thatcher in Britain, I think they realised that if there wasn’t something done to change it, democracy would succeed, and they were simply not having that!” Whatever your view of Reagan and Thatcher, is that a genuinely fair judgment? Democracy-haters?

Benn utters the word “globalisation” the way others might hiss the word “paedophile”. He tells us that “the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the European Commission, none of these are elected . . . So it’s true to say that power is moving back from the polling station to the marketplace, from the ballot to the wallet, and the gap between rich and poor has widened as a result.” Is it really true to say that on this evidence?

Benn comes across as a champion for democracy, but not a good salesman for it. He reminds you of the sort of democrats that Mencken might have had in mind when he said that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.