[Education For Tomorrow: No 72, 2000]

Celebrating our own struggles

 Tony Benn's speech at Burston 2nd September 2001

It's a great honour to come back to Burston. I've been before on a number of occasions and we are celebrating a lot of people. We're celebrating Annie and Tom Higdon, we're celebrating Wilf Page, we're celebrating Jimmy Knapp, we're celebrating Jack Jones and I must tell you a thing about Jack; I saw him up at the Blackpool Conference the other day, for the pensioners and he said "I'm retiring from the National Pensioners Convention because I want to devote more time to the Transport and General Workers' Union retired members". So that is Jack, he never retires.

But the point about this is that we are really celebrating ourselves. Whether we're alive or dead — and that's something that happens to everybody — we're celebrating millions and millions of people, just like ourselves who over many, many centuries, in many, many countries have campaigned for the same things that we want today and what we're saying today, what Jack has said, what Ian has said, what Andrew said this morning, applies just as much in Nicaragua, just as much in South Africa, just as much in Latin America, just as much in the old Soviet Union where as a result of "modernising", production has fallen by fifty per cent and the expectation of life, since the wall came down, has fallen by ten years. That's what we are about. We are about a better life and we are traditionalists. Now people speak as if the only tradition was bowing and scraping to some bigwig and hoping to get into the House of Lords. Well I can tell you that's not worth it.

What we are about is what Annie and Tom Higdon were about and you can go back much further than that. Go back to the Peasants Revolt in 1381 when the Reverend John Bull, who no doubt had been expelled from the Labour Party, said "When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?"

Where in the book of Genesis do you find anything about the class system. Or you go on to the English Revolution when the Levellers and the Diggers campaigned for socialism and they said the earth is a common treasury. It is a crime to buy and sell the Earth for private gain. And in rural areas — you know as well as I do — the earliest example of privatisation was the privatisation of the land. The common land was privatised with thousands and thousands of Enclosure Acts which allowed the farmers to take over the land and turn farm workers into serfs.

And then you come on to the Tolpuddle Martyrs sent to Australia. By God, they found it easier to get to Australia than the asylum seekers from Afghanistan! And the Tolpuddle Martyrs were campaigning for trade unionism and later the foundation of the Agricultural Workers Union and they were campaigning for democracy. An American friend of mine went to Australia the other day and I said "how did you get on?" "Well", he said "when I applied for an immigration visa or visitor's visa, they said to me, "'Have you got a criminal conviction?' and I said, 'Why is that still required?'" And of course Australia was built by people who were immigrants.

And then you go right on to the Miners' struggle, the Durham Miners Gala, which is one of the great events every year and if you know of Burford, which celebrates the English Revolution, the great Suffragettes' campaign and the Burston Rally itself. And they were all about the same thing. They were about people having the right to control their own lives. That's what it was about. It was about the right to organise, to do it yourself, not to wait for some kind king or prime minister to pat you on the head and say, there, there I've given you 75 pence for your pension this year, accept it. It's about self-organisation and when the trades unions were organised they wanted the vote, because they said, its all very well having trades unions but the laws are made by people we did not elect and cannot remove. And therefore you got the Chartists and the Suffragettes and the vote, and the vote allowed us to buy with the ballot paper the public services that we needed.

In the old days the rich could always educate their kids and buy houses without the help of a local authority or look after their old age without worrying about the state pension. But it was only when we got the vote that people were able to vote for the public services and see that they were publicly owned and publicly controlled. And don't make any mistake about it, that was at the time, and in my view remains, the most revolutionary demand of all. And if you look at Clause Four of the Labour Party that was a democratic demand,
". . .to secure for the workers by hand and by brain, the full fruits of their industry on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable means of public administration and control".
It was a democratic demand and that is what it is all about. And when you look at what is being done now you realise how hard we have to work to see they do not set it back in the cause of "modernisation". When they talk about "modernisation", you know — for example the minimum income guarantee — well that is the means test. And anyone of my age will remember that the end of the means test was one of the great inspirations of the 1945 Labour Government, which said we will have benefits as of right. We'll pay for them through proper taxation and the National Insurance and when we need it we will have it as of right. And that is what thev are twine to take awav.

I mentioned the privatisation of the land now its being brought forward in other ways. Even Lloyd George, who was not exactly a socialist, but he had a song that I was taught as a kid — the Land Song,

The land, the land,
The land on which we stand
Why should we be paupers
With the ballot in our hand,
God gave the land to the people.

That was a Lloyd George song. And I tell you if the land was publicly owned there would be no community charge, it would all be paid for by the rents of the land that the community owned as it should. Now when you look ahead you realise that this agenda is still before us.

In a couple of weeks time, the TUC is meeting at Brighton. I very much hope and believe that the trade union leaders and the members and delegates who go to Brighton will simply, quietly but clearly say they will not accept the privatisation of public services. Say that they will not allow the pensioners to be subject to a means test. They will not go along with a new Arms Race of the kind President Bush is determined to force upon the world. They want trade union rights fully restored in line with the International Labour Organisation which is what we are committed to but have not applied. And when we come to the Labour conference a fortnight later in Brighton, I hope and believe it will be the trade union movement that saves the Labour Party again, as it has done in the past.

When I was a kid of five I met Ramsey McDonald. He gave me a chocolate biscuit and I've looked on Labour leaders with chocolate biscuits very suspiciously ever since. And you know, Ramsey McDonald told the cabinet, of which he was leader, that there was no alternative but to introduce the means test, cut public expenditure and it was Ernie Bevin, of the Transport and General Workers Union, and the union of which I am a member who said "No you don't". And it was the TUC that opposed McDonald and although in that 1931 election, which I remember very well because my dad was a Labour MP and was defeated, although we only had fifty MPs left, within 14 years we had a landslide and the great reforms that brought in terms of health and welfare and full employment and trade union rights.

Comrades I know it is easy to get depressed. There are moments when I confess to my diary one or two doubts about the future. But the other part of my nature tells me it is so exciting I'm wondering if it is good for someone of my age to be as excited as I am. I genuinely believe that the tide is turning. That what we want — is what most people want. I never thought that I would live at a time when the public was to the left of the Labour Party. It is — you know that quite well.

Most people want the railways publicly owned, most people want the health service publicly owned, most people want education properly organised, and remember here we are celebrating as well, we're celebrating a great educational revolution in the Burston school and the demand for comprehensive education — that every child shall go to a school where there is a full range of subjects — is a basic Labour demand. And when I see selection coming back now, creeping in, in Government policy, when I hear that some schools are to be sold to private companies that are supposed to be more efficient my blood runs cold. We must not let that happen because education is what it is all about. And then I see, I've got ten grandchildren and of course they'll all be paying tuition fees. And I think my God at the end of the war when I came out of the Air Force I got a free education at college and if you could afford it when we were bankrupt you can afford it now. Once you start loans to go to college what do you do, first of all every kid who leaves college now has got to get £12,000. Marry another student — 25,000 quid, take out a mortgage to raise a family — £40,000! You start life with a debt of £60,000. And of course anyone in debt is absolutely at the mercy of their employer and that is why they do it. And if you have loans for students what about loans for schools? What about loans for operations? If I go to hospital and say "I've hurt my leg", they'll say well we will cut it off Mr Benn but we'll lend you the cost of course. You can pay it back if you can afford it. It is a complete attack on the welfare state which we built up and which we must not accept.

Now I am an optimist; I genuinely believe that what we stand for is something that the overwhelming majority of the world want. And we know from the Burston story you don't get it unless you organise. You've got to do it yourself. Nobody else is going to do it for us and it is a terrible responsibility; the day you wake up and realise if you want a better world you have got to do it yourself with other people. You can't wait at home and think that if you just vote it'll be magically done and you can watch football for five years and then vote again and the good things will go on happening. It doesn't happen like that.! (prolonged applause)

(Transcribed from tape recording)

Back to index