Big Benn
Words by Dan Jude
TONY BENN ON...
LEARNING LESSONS:
The same issues have come up in every generation. I mean here we are against the BNP, but when I was a kid there were fascists. Here we are dealing with a war in Iraq and Afghanistan. When I was young, there were different wars that we were fighting, and I think young people gain from knowing that they are not the first to campaign.
Just think of the Suffragettes; they were put in prison, they went on hunger strike, they got out, they won the vote. In1964 I was in Trafalgar Square with a well-known terrorist who had been sentenced to life imprisonment. I supported him as he was denounced in the tabloids, then last year I sat in Parliament Square as Nelson Mandela saw his statue being unveiled.
When my great grandfather was born in 1821, only 2 out of every 100 people had the vote. We had the battle for democracy, the battle for speech, the battle for justice. And I think that in a way, far from saying that everything is different, every generation has to fight the same battle. There is no victory and no defeat, and the difference really is very simple. There have always been famines in the world but when I was a kid you didn’t hear about it, because it was miles away, and it would take 6 weeks by ship to get there. Now you see them on the TV that night. So what’s happened is that the problems of the old generation have been intensified by technology. But by God young people today understand the world far better than I did when I was a kid
HOW PEOPLE GAIN POWER, AND HOW TO FIGHT IT:
If you want power, there is a very simple way. First of all you frighten people, because frightened people are easier to control. In the old days it was the Kaiser, then it was Hitler, then it was Stalin, and now it’s the Muslims. And you wait and see - in a couple of years’ time there’ll be an MI5 man in every Chinese takeaway. Keep people frightened. Keep people divided: black, white, women, men, Muslim, Christian, and Jew.
Demoralise people. That’s what the 11-plus is all about. You’re told at the age of 11 that you’re a failure. Make people cynical. Say they’re all a lot of crooks. Say all that and it’s easy to find a way to power. What the fascists did before the war was to identify Jews, Communists and Trade Unionists. Now the BNP have actually joined up with some of the Zionists to frighten people about the Muslims.
But, if you understand what they’re doing and realise that if you’re not frightened, you’re not divided, you’re not demoralised and you’re not cynical, then my God you’re strong enough to resist any of that.
TALKIN’ ‘BOUT MY GENERATION:
I have a lot of time for the younger generation. If I look at my generation, they made a complete hash of the world. We had two world wars that cost 105 million lives, and at the end of the Second World War we pledged that we would build peace in the United Nations. Then my generation - the Bush’s, the Blair’s – they threw it all away and went back to imperialism and war. I think the younger generation – your generation – they understand the world better. It’s a funny thing to say, but young people understand the world better than their parents. I’ve got a lot of time for young people, I enjoy talking to them, and I think they’ve got a lot to teach us.
IMMIGRATION:
First of all, immigration does mean you meet people from other cultures. My granddaughter is at a primary school in London with 77 nationalities in the school and a refugee centre! When I went to their primary school in Kilburn, it was like talking to the general assembly of the UN! It’s no good talking to my granddaughter about multi-culturalism, because that’s just normal. It’s like trying to say to a farmer: ‘have you ever thought of milking a cow?’ He’s done it all his life. So that is in our favour, but not being frightened is the important thing, not to allow people to create and exploit your fear so they get power from you, because that is the route to fascism and war and the destruction of the human race.
RELIGION:
All schools should teach all religions. I mean Muslims, Christians, Jews: they’re all the same, they all teach the same thing. Treat other people as you want to be treated yourself. Ultimately, they all preach peace and love and understanding.
But people take religion and use it as a weapon for their own purposes. Then you see within religion you get the Sunnis fighting the Shiites, the Catholics fighting the Protestants. Any Sectarianism allows a religious leader to build up a fear of another religion.
Take the Crusades; we sent 7 crusades to capture Jerusalem for the Christians. They all failed and I met an Egyptian friend of mine who said they’d just had a seminar on the Crusades in Cairo and I asked what he’d learnt? ‘Well’ he said, ‘we learned a lot of things, one of which was that during the Crusades the European arms manufacturers sold bows and arrows to both sides.’ The arms manufactures want war and do very well out of it.
THE CREDIT CRUNCH:
People are frightened now. A lot of people in the city will lose their jobs, people’s homes will be repossessed, and I think that when people look at the situation at the moment, the credit crunch will be seen as the 9/11 of the world economy. After 9/11 people said the world had changed and I think the credit crunch has changed the world. The idea that you can go on borrowing and spending based on rising house prices – it’s over. What people want now is to be protected from the effects of this. That means a more egalitarian tax system, it means looking after pensioners who are now living on the state pension, which is 17 percent of average earnings, whereas under labour when we introduced the liquid earnings it was 50 percent. There are students in great debt when they leave college, and so on. I don’t think people want privatisation, I think they’re frightened by that, because jobs are lost and the services are not as good. You elect a government to defend you, to protect you and I think that that argument will reappear in Labour politics very very strongly.
THE FUTURE FOR THE ECONOMY:
I always say to journalists: ‘Your job is to forecast the future, my job is to influence the future.’ It depends what we do. All this money we’re wasting on the war, on trident, on ID cards - all this money should be devoted to helping people. As far as housing is concerned, you’ll remember Thatcher talked about the right to buy so council house tenants could buy their houses. What you want now is a policy that you could describe as the right to stay - if you are repossessed, the government should acquire the house you live in, and then you should be able to stay in the house without being repossessed and you would then be involved in what was the recreation of a public housing programme.
MUSIC:
My favourite music is folk music. I do a show with a guy called Roy Bailey – he’s a retired professor and a brilliant singer, and he and I do a show called Writings on the Wall. We’ve done it for 10 or more years, and I read radical statements over the past 1000 years and he sings songs about the peasants’ revolt and the English Revolution. We actually won the BBC live folk act award a few years ago. I’ve never sung a note in my life but he sings and I do this.
There’s good music and bad music. I must say this about music: my parents went to Germany in 1932, the year Hitler came to power, and they brought back a gramophone record of the Fahnenlied, and I can’t play that now. Because when I hear that music it frightens me, and military bands build up the power of the Monarchy whereas miner’s bands are to build up the morale of the miners. But music speaks to people without linguistic differences; it speaks to everybody. Language and words and buildings are related to the culture where you are born and live, but music is international, and so is art. I mean anyone can appreciate works of art and anyone can appreciate music, and I think therefore that music unites people. If you hear American music, Chinese music, Tibetan music, you can understand it so in that sense music is international. But like words, it depends what you do with music. I mean you could say words are better than guns and that’s true but you could say words that make people want to kill someone. So it’s good words, good music, good ideas in a world that has to live together or we’re all finished.
THE BNP:
[Their appeal] is built on fear. What happens is that you get a situation where people are unemployed, homeless, poor, frightened, and somebody comes along and finds a scapegoat. They say: ‘It’s all due to the Jews, or the Muslims, or the Communists or the Trade Unionists.’ Hitler said: ‘Give me power and I’ll give you jobs.’ And there were 6 million unemployed in Germany when Hitler came to power, and people were utterly depressed and dejected and cynical and defeatist. And so they said, ‘well this guy Hitler, he sounds good, so we’ll give him power’. And he did give every German a job, and you know how he did it: half the unemployed he put in the arms factories and the other half he put in the German army and he made another bloody war. So you’ve got be very careful about that because the people who vote for the BNP may do it out of despair, but the people who organise the BNP know exactly what they’re doing – they’re finding a scapegoat to give them power, and blaming everything on the Jews and the Muslims and so on. And that’s what you’ve got to be careful of. You’ve got to give people confidence because if they’re confident, nobody would dream of voting for the BNP.
WHO WOULD YOU MEET?
I’ve been very lucky because in my life I’ve met four of the most influential and important people I can think of. I met Mr Ghandi when I was 6, and he believed in non-violence and he won. I’ve met Mandella, and he came through long periods in prison and he came out and tried to reconcile South Africa to what had happened. I’ve met Desmond Tutu, who talks about truth and reconciliation. And I’ve met Paul Robeson, a great black socialist and singer, who has inspired a whole generation of people. So I’m content with the people I have met. They’ve inspired me and I try to encourage other people.
THAT ALI G INTERVIEW:
First of all I was completely taken in. I treated him seriously, and I was the only one. He said incredible things like ‘Bitches only get married to get benefits to get married’ and I said ‘You can’t say that!’ And then he said ‘People only go on strike to chill out’ and I said ‘you must be mad!’ and I was the only one, or one of very few people that he met, who argued with him. Other people were so frightened of him in case they sounded racist. Afterwards he wrote to me and asked me if I would appear in his film Ali G Goes to Parliament, and so I rang him up and I said - ‘you’re my main man, but I can’t do that’. And I wrote an article defending him. But that did me a lot of good with [the younger] generation, because I think they just enjoyed the argument.
Posted Wed, January 14, 2009