For decades the opportunist left in this country has touted Tony Benn around as the epitome of socialist resistance. Now it is doing so again. He has become the figurehead of one of several campaigns against the public sector cuts – the Coalition of Resistance. Never once has the opportunist left challenged Benn for his continued membership and support for the imperialist, racist, anti-working class Labour Party. They didn’t challenge him when he called for a vote for Labour in the last general election despite the fact that Labour was committed to implementing cuts in state spending which the then Chancellor Alistair Darling agreed were more draconian than Thatcher’s. Nor did they challenge him when he endorsed Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party, despite Miliband’s past membership of a war-mongering cabinet and his continued support for war in Afghanistanand attacks on state welfare.
The truth is that behind the socialist phrases Tony Benn has always been a reactionary figure. Throughout his political life British capitalism has remained the second most powerful imperialist power in the world. Yet in the late 1970s, whilst Britain was acting as the principal supporter of apartheid South Africa and ruthlessly suppressing the Irish people (much of it whilst Benn was a member of the 1974-79 Labour government), he said that
‘Britain has moved from Empire to Colony status. It is a colony in which the IMF decides our monetary policy, the international and multi-national companies decided our industrial policy and the EEC decided our legislative and taxation policies.’
Later he thought that ‘Britain is now in effect, an American colony, seen in Washington as an unsinkable aircraft carrier’ before finally deciding that Britain was actually ‘a colony between Washington and Brussels’ (BBC interview, 2001). This is reactionary nonsense. For the last thirty years, British capitalism has been characterised by a dynamic, aggressive imperialist expansion of commerce and finance overseas as successive governments have supported the unbridled operation of the City of London as the world’s leading financial centre. This development has now reached unprecedented levels: Britain’s overseas assets stand over £9 trillion, more than six times GNP. It is a ‘gigantic usury capital’ which plunders the rest of the world. Now the City of London, the dominant section of the British ruling class, is demanding huge cuts in state spending to sustain its position against its rivals, and its hired politicians, whether they are Labour or ConDem, are dancing to its tune.
Yet what does Tony Benn’s Coalition of Resistance have to say about this? Nothing – other than to propose that an ‘alternative budget would place the banks under democratic control’ As if! It would need a socialist revolution to establish any form of control over the most aggressive arm of British imperialism, and short of that we would be ‘democratising’ plunder and mass impoverishment. When David Cameron recently declared ‘Show me a city in the world with stronger credentials than the City of London’, Lindsey German, a leading member of Counterfire which is behind the Coalition of Resistance, complained that he was ‘pretending that the British empire still exists.’ But what is this massive usury capital other than a vast empire based on finance? It is the real enemy we face and to ignore its existence is just self-delusion.
The developing resistance to the ruling class assault on the state sector and state welfare needs a clear socialist, anti-imperialist ideology. It needs to speak openly about taking on the ruling class rather than limit the struggle to one directed against the villainy of a Thatcherite ConDem coalition. It needs to take an unambiguous stand on the Labour Party, describing it as what it is, a ruling class party committed to the defence of the City of London. That means we cannot hand Labour Party politicians the leadership of the resistance. Instead we have to constantly challenge them and demand that they break with their rotten party – and we can start with Tony Benn.
