The publication of Tony Benn's Arguments for Democracy and Alan Freeman's The Benn Heresy* has attracted widespread interest on the left. We reprint below a substantial section of the discussion between the two authors at a recent seminar at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
[illegible] Cabinets for eleven years on the National Executive [illegible] experience I've had the opportunity of studying power at a fairly high level. I've become increasingly aware as the years have gone by that the public explanation for what was wrong, which is publicised by every newspaper from the Times to the Guardian and the Daily Mirror, with others in between, that we are a nation of unproductive people, lazy workers, and inefficient managers, doesn't correspond to my own experience. What I've found, by contrast, is that power in Britain is exercised at a very high level, very discreetly, that it's become very internationalised, and that the claim that we make for ourselves, that we are the most democratic country in the world, simply isn't true.
Therefore, in the course of a number of speeches, I've tried to analyse what exactly is wrong, where power really lies, and what we might do about it. The more I've thought about this, and argued the case, the more I've become persuaded that the British establishment and the international establishment — which has great influence over British politics — is much more frightened of democracy than it is of socialist rhetoric. Top people can live with socialist rhetoric, with preachers on Sunday talking about a fair and decent society, so long as it doesn't get into Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday — that's no threat to anybody. But when you start asking people how they got their power, where they got it from, by what legitimacy they have it, how they use it, and insist that they be accountable for the use of their power, you frighten the living daylights out of the people who have a very considerable amount of power in Britain. Arguments For Democracy therefore aims to try and put the democratic items back on the agenda.
I think that's important for a number of reasons. First, I don't think we're going to solve the problems that now afflict people — unemployment, the destruction of the welfare state, the threat to peace — unless we put democracy back on the agenda. And if you do, then I must warn you, you will land yourself in a great deal of trouble.
I think that is about all I want to say by way of introduction, except to make some reference to the critique made by Alan. To be criticised from the Left is quite appropriate. Most of the criticism I get is from the Right, who present me as if I was a rebirth of Leon Trotsky. In fact I think sometimes Trotsky is presented as a premature Bennite. Alan has written this very sympathetic book, in the sense that he tries to understand what I have been about, and then at the end he [illegible] that I have underestimated the extent to which extraparliamentary power has historically been used to establish our rights, and that if I am serious about putting democracy back on the agenda, I've [illegible] to give more [illegible] to those facts.
I'm not sure I disagree with that analysis: I think it's a very sensible analysis, and maybe by having a critique from the left, people will see more clearly the position that I occupy. I don't believe there are any revolutionaries in Britain: I don't want to insult Alan, but I've never met a revolutionary: there may be one or two about I haven't come across. I think what most revolutionaries are talking about is the need for the mobilisation of public support, to bring pressure to bear on our system of government to achieve greater democracy. Now I would call that a reform campaign, because I believe that Reform, with a capital R, has an honourable place in our history and has been brought back by pressure from the outside onto the system. Pressure for change has always come from the bottom, and the House of Commons has always been the last place to discover what's going on, from the days of the suffragettes to the Reform Bill and so on, right the way through; parliament is the last stop on the shuttle service, and it always begins at the other end; and therefore to that extent I think the issues Alan raises are important and I look forward to discussing the book that he has written.
Alan Freeman: I would agree with the chair and with Tony that it is a critique from the left; I would disagree that there are no revolutionaries in Britain, and I would consider myself to be a revolutionary, but I'm going to give what I hope will be a provocative definition of a revolutionary: that is, somebody who actually seeks to establish a genuine democracy. One of the reasons that I wrote this book is precisely because in the Labour Party, Tony Benn has been one of the first people for a long time to actually put democracy back on the agenda. That enables us to open a much needed discussion in Britain. I say in Britain because the discussion has been continuing on the continent and America much longer, about how to achieve democracy, and what democracy is. And the definition of democracy I would like to give is in fact rule by the majority: that the majority of the population is actually taken up with the running of the country.
What interested me when I began writing the book, which is largely an attempt to explain how he arrived at his conclusions, is not so much what was going on in Tony's head, but what were the forces behind the evolution of Tony Benn's ideas? Two things struck me. There was a poll conducted just after the Deputy Leadership campaign, in which it was said that forty percent of Labour voters wanted Tony Benn to continue his campaign for democracy in the Labour Party and his challenge to the leadership. Now, this is a formidable number of people. In my view this number of people, if they had a party that was capable of representing their views and was genuinely accountable to them, would be capable of assembling a majority in the country. So you have a movement of tremendous scope, a massive movement of people: I wanted to ask, 'who are these people? What is Bennism?'
My conclusion was that it consists of people who are fighting for freedom, for rights: the right to work, the right of women to equality, the right to decent health care, the right not to be wiped out by a Cruise missile — rights which have been granted to us in a society which is not democratic but which [illegible] us many freedoms, and which are now being taken away [illegible] the minority that actually runs the country won't allow them to continue. Tony Benn has been the voice of these people in parliament and in the Labour Party.
Secondly, why is it that someone who persistently raises the idea of democracy, in a society which calls itself democratic, should be treated — and I make no apologies for the title — as a heretic; that is, as somebody whose views are so subversive as to be unacceptable to that society: beyond the pale, ruled out as if a kind of power mad, dictatorial power grab was involved, and not a reasoned statement of the demands of the kind of people for whom Tony Benn speaks.
Now, the only conclusion I can come to is the one which Tony himself has come to; that real power in this country lies with unaccountable centres such as the civil servants, the multinationals, the bankers who actually take the decisions and then impose them by means of a series of measures which I try to analyse in the book, on the allegedly accountable, elected parliamentary majority in the country.
That poses us, in my view, with a very old problem, one that is not changed by the arrival of parliament. What do you do when you are living under a power which you cannot remove, when that power begins to attack your freedom and your rights, or when you start to demand of it rights which you never had, and it's not prepared to grant them?
I think this is happening in Britain today. The means whereby our rulers were able to concede a number of very important freedoms, whose importance I don't deny, namely the strength of Britain's overseas investments, the strength of its role as a world power, are being eroded, and they are no longer able to concede these rights.
Is it possible to retrieve those rights simply by asking for a reform of the structures of that unaccountable power, or is it necessary to remove it and replace it by another power which is genuinely democratic, which is elected, which you can recall, which is not made up of a privileged public school layer, or a layer of people with money who have a special right to govern and who are concentrated in these unaccountable centres of power?
The problem is this: if you launch a movement which challenges that unaccountable power, will it use force against you to the extent that you must use force against it, and if you do so, if you overthrow that power and establish your own by an act of force, is that going to result in a new and worse dictatorship, something more repressive, less accountable, less democratic than before? My argument is that if you establish democracy, if you do away with private wealth, then you will have a more democratic power.
Finally, is this changed by the existence of parliament? I suggest that parliament is not such an ideal vehicle for achieving change as has been suggested. First, with whom does the power to recall parliament rest? If parliament is a genuinely democratic institution, then when it carries out a measure which we did not vote for it to do, we ought to be able to vote to remove it. This government has put 3.2 million people on the dole queue. We never voted for that. I never voted Tory anyway, and I don't suppose most people here did; but those people who did vote Tory didn't vote for that. Yet, who can remove it? As Tony Benn has noted, actually the Queen is the only person who, legally and constitutionally can remove it. In fact throughout history, since 1832, governments have been removed before their term runs out only by bankers. A run on the pound, and the 'loss of confidence of industry' is what actually recalls governments.
I think we should have the power to recall governments. I think the response of the TUC, for example, to the claim of the healthworkers, its response to a government which is refusing to concede these claims and is taking away our right to free health care, should be to say that by the kind of action the [illegible] took in 1974 we are going to force the government to [illegible].
So, where does the right to recall actually reside? I think the electoral process on its own doesn't allow us to rusticate governments. Secondly, who actually administers the decisions of the government? At present a minority of civil servants who, through the fact that they carry out the government's decisions, actually acquire a power of veto. In the book I tried to explore the way in which workers in places like Kirkby and Meriden encountered the power of the state pretending to act in the name of the government, but actually acting in the interests of those who want to preserve the property system. So, who acts in the name of the government?
The third problem is the present leadership of the labour movement itself. If you decide you want to fight for your rights, and that you are going to have to go to the point where you might overthrow the government, do you simply say, 'all right, we have no confidence in the present government; we're going to force it to change course'? Or do you say, 'we're going to take responsibility for our actions, and we're going to prepare to take on the administration of industry ourselves?' If the response to our actions is a boycott, a run on the pound, an attempted destabilisation, and so on, are we going to occupy factories which are closing and run them ourselves?
I think that if one looks at the plan which has recently been produced by the TUC and Labour Party Liaison Committee, the problem is that it seeks compromise and agreement with the employers, instead of saying, 'we are going to take on the running of industry and of society ourselves'. One can see that contradiction in a very obvious problem: the plan says that we will 'require the employers to reach agreement.' I don't know how you can require someone to enter an agreement. Either they agree, or they don't. And the problem is what you do if they don't agree? I don't think our rulers will agree to the reforms we are proposing. Therefore we will have to say, 'we will take responsibility. We want to win. You should go, we will replace you, and what we replace you with will be far more democratic than anything you have seen so far.'
Tony Benn: I think you've got to divide this argument, which is an important and interesting one, into its component parts. First of all one of the important problems we face is what I call the 'unfinished business' of earlier reforms. For example, we have no constitution establishing the rights of citizens. We are all 'subjects'. It's a word I find personally difficult to take. I would like to be a citizen, I am a subject, and so is everybody here. We are only allowed to elect one out of two houses of parliament. The ultimate power to dismiss a parliament before the end of its duration is the residual crown prerogative, which I raised in this week's New Socialist. I don't have to tell you that that could be a very important decision if, and I don't say you will, you had a hung parliament next time with three parties of fairly equal standing, it will bear on who is chosen.
Now the second problem is the growth of the power of Capital, both nationally and internationally, which is well beyond even our historic aspiration to control. The IMF for example, controls the purse. The Americans control the sword. I was brought up to believe that the House of Commons controlled the government by control of the purse and the sword, the annual budget and the annual army act. In fact, of course, the power of the purse and sword has moved out of this country altogether.
In association with that is the growth of the state. In the period of my lifetime from 1925 to 1975, the state in real terms has grown enormously, but the democratic component has remained the same. There are still 635 MPs trying to control a state which I think is a thousand percent bigger than it was in 1925.
All these are real problems. But having said that, if we had been meeting a hundred and fifty years ago before the Reform Act was passed, Alan might have had a case, because there are about a couple of hundred people here, and two percent had the vote. And there would have been four people in this audience, if this had been a representative gathering in 1832, who had the vote. And he could have made a very credible case. What could we do? Women didn't have the vote — they didn't get it until 1918. Think how easy it was to preach revolution to women up to 1918 — they were extraparliamentary by birth, by sex. And yet actually we have achieved the capacity to remove governments.
The point I'm clinging to, because I think it is important, is that [illegible] human power, the synthetic revolution which is the real importance of our democratic system, the power to dismiss governments is vested in people. And Alan overlooks the fact that Mrs Thatcher was elected. Now why she was elected is a political argument, which we can have. But the British people voted for her, and in fairness to her, she was fairly candid about her monetarism and anyone who thought about it might well have anticipated what would happen because it was all written up in advance.
So, I think revolutionary pessimism, which is the way I would classify Alan's position, is really, by a strange inversion of events, the thing that the establishment wants more than anything else. The establishment is very pleased when revolutionary pessimists come along, because it hopes that as a result no-one will try to do anything, because Alan has told them the whole democratic achievement is no good.
That's a danger: I'm not saying he means that, but that is a danger you have to face. If you demoralise your own supporters it's no good then talking about mobilisation. Well then, he says, we'll do it all by the health workers. We'll bring the government down, well OK. Supposing they do bring the government down. And then you have a different government. Are we going to have instant recall of the new government? I don't think the revolutionaries have thought it out, and that's why I don't think they're revolutionaries. I think they are left-talking revolutionists. Just as they say I'm a left talking reformist — that's the great left phrase. And I think that the revolutionists' critique is an interesting one. But if you are saying to people that all you've struggled for over the centuries has really brought you nothing, then of course people will be quiescent, or they will explode in a sort of revolutionary adventurism, and that will lead to disaster. The problem is really a different one: it is persuading people of a different analysis, and then persuading them to vote for a different system. And that must be done, I believe, through the classic combination of parliamentary and extraparliamentary power.
And I say this in conclusion: the Conservatives have never had any embarrassment about extraparliamentary activity. They've used it for centuries. After all, William the Conqueror was the greatest example of extraparliamentary activity; and at Runnymede the barons were engaged in extraparliamentary activity: they brought about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of the barons, King John had to accept it. Historically, it's always been done in the Tory Party by the use of their power and control over capital — and later their control of the military and the media, which was once the Church and is now Fleet Street, to establish a commanding position.
We shouldn't be sensitive about extraparliamentary activity; I've never said that the House of Commons would do it by itself. But I think the combination of an elected government and the interests we represent would be capable of achieving the changes that are necessary. And I don't think that this critique has been either thought out, nor do I think it has the effect Alan intends. I think it's too pessimistic.
Alan Freeman: Let's ask what it is we are trying to persuade the [illegible] them that if Tony Benn was the government they would be better off than if Michael Foot was the government. Or is the only thing you are trying to persuade them that they would be better off under a Labour government than under a Tory government? I think the problem is that we are trying to persuade them of something very new in British politics — and this is what I call the revolutionary method — we're trying to persuade them that the only way their problems will be solved is if they govern themselves. That's a very different method from the method which the Labour Party has used for the last sixty years, because the Labour Party's method is to go to the people and talk to them about all the wonderful things it will do on their behalf; not the things that they can do for themselves.
The question you confront, if you accept this, and if you wish to give people confidence in their ability to run their own affairs, is [illegible] in order to implement its policies, to the Civil Service mandarins, or will it turn to ordinary working people and place its confidence in them? For example, when the workers of Kirkby Manufacturing Enterprises occupied their factories, should it have sent a Civil Servant to negotiate with those workers, or should it have said: 'We are going to put a law through Parliament which says that what these workers is doing is legal, because we base our laws on the defence of the rights of ordinary people. Whereas according to your law, the law of the Civil Service and the multinationals, they are attacking private property, which the media priests defend, according to our law they are defending their rights and that is a higher law, and we're going to legitimise it.' If you take that step, then you have to say, 'the civil servants are going to be sacked'. And if another civil servant comes up, a representative of the workers, but who doesn't defend their interests then she or he will have to go too.
Those are the people that I am interested in recalling. I also don't believe that it's democratic to have, for example, a system of running a firm in which one third represents the workforce, one third represents the government, and one third management as proposed by Labour's Industry Act. I think we have to say the workers will have a majority in administering the firm, so that what we are talking about is a society actually run by the people who work in it.
Of course the government is only one aspect of that. The problem is what one does with the state. But let's return to the problem of the government. An interesting figure which I uncovered is that the percentage of people who voted Labour in 1974 was exactly the same as in 1979, to within .1 of a per cent. Yet in 1974 the result was a Labour government, despite the fact that it was a minority in parliament, and in 1979 there was a Tory government. What determined that, in my opinion, was extraparliamentary forces, and not the change in the vote. That doesn't deny the importance of the vote. That doesn't deny the importance of the fight to win elections. But it means that other forces are brought to bear, and this has something to do with the result of the next election. How will we win the next election? In my opinion the present leadership of the Labour Party is frightened of winning the next election, and that is why they are trying to make the left wing a scapegoat instead of fighting the Tories. I actually believe that the best chance of winning the next election is if the TUC does call a general strike for the health workers, brings down the government, and creates a situation where our rulers know that they cannot govern us in this way, because workers are not prepared to accept the measures that they want to impose.
So, how do we give people hope? We say, 'we place trust in you, ordinary people, to take responsibility for your lives'. And we will take that to the point, not merely of saying, 'you have the right to resist, to pressurise the powers that be', as Tony Benn says, 'but also the right not to obey an immoral law; you have the right to create your own law. And if you are going to create your own law, you have to create your own state, Because it is the state that administers the law, and the only way you are going to solve the problem of democracy is this: to finish once and for all with states that are composed of a minority of people, states that are not elected, states that are not accountable. We want an elected state.' That's the problem of democracy that we've got to solve.
As for the vote, I would just point something out. There are many countries where people have the vote. The people of El Salvador have the vote. The people of Germany had the vote in 1933, they voted for Hitler. It became increasingly hard to vote for anyone else because all the parties were banned. So there are ways of interfering with the democracy of the vote that enable a tyranny to be imposed, in spite of the fact that we have the vote. What we have to look at is what goes with the vote to make a democratic society. My argument is that one also needs an elected democratic state.
I do not believe we will be allowed to create such a state without being able to resist the violence of those who will oppose us [illegible].
Tony Benn: First, I entirely agree with the point about governing thyself and I've never argued that if people vote Labour it will solve their problems. Indeed, I think one of the cruellest hoaxes the Labour Party could perpetrate on the British electorate would be to say that if you simply replace Tory ministers with Labour ministers and try and run the same system, that it'll work. One of the charges made against the views that I have is that I make it too easy; but if you analyse the argument, you'll find I'm saying that it's much more difficult than just replacing one cabinet with another.
But if I think very carefully about what Alan is saying: why didn't we change the law to allow workers to take over their factories? Well, in a sense we did by financing Kirkby, although it was killed. And it's no good blaming the civil servants for that, you know, there was a change of policy in the Department of Industry after 1975, and the cabinet wouldn't give Kirkby the money. And after all, the Tories do that, you see, and they're much cleverer. They want British Telecoms to be privately owned. So what do they do? They pass a law. At the moment there isn't a single private industrialist controlling British Telecom, and if they succeed, British Telecom will be owned privately. That is what I would call an act of piracy, but they call it privatisation. But it is piracy legalised by law. Now frankly, when the workers of Kirkby or UCS took over their factories, the establishment called it piracy. But if we passed a law, we would have legalised the democratic development of industry. And Alan uses that to say that the whole parliamentary system is going to let us down. I think Mrs Thatcher's much clearer than you are. She says, 'I'll get there, I'll use the power of parliament to transfer power to the people I support.' That's the way she interprets parliamentary democracy. And I think she's right, I think that's what it is about. I happen not to be a supporter of the people she likes. But if we were elected and we used the power to make democratic rights more widely available, what's the objection to that?
Would we have to sack civil servants? I think that's a very narrow view. I think the problem with the Civil Service is that they do have a great deal of power, but you would be acquitting the Labour cabinet of its responsibility if you thought that my permanent secretary stopped it. My permanent secretary took a line that won a majority in the cabinet who wanted to stop it. And he played that majority off, got the policy stopped and helped no doubt to get the reshuffle to take place, but don't blame him because a determined Labour government wouldn't put up with that.
Now, then you come to the votes in 1974 and 1979. You know, it's not a very good argument, because what Alan forgot to say is that in 1979 a lot more people voted Conservative. There may have been the same number who voted Labour. But you can't say, 'I ran the race as quickly in 1979 as in 1974', and forget to say that somebody else ran it much quicker.
Now the general strike argument. I ask you to consider the question: did the miners bring down Heath? No. Heath decided to have an election, to beat the miners, and the British people wouldn't take it. But what if Heath had got an overall majority in March 1974? Do you imagine that the miners would have been able to hold out against a government that had received public endorsement?
You could even argue, using Alan's approach, that Heath could say: 'I personally had the House of Commons recalled. Because after all an early dissolution is the recall of parliament: the very thing you want. And when they were recalled, they all said, that Joe Gormley and Mick McGahey were wrong.' Can you imagine that the miners would have stood out against that? Not at all. Heath was beaten by the British electorate although the miners were engaged in a dispute that Heath tried to turn political. And, the more I listen to this, the more I feel that's dodging the question.
The real question is, how can you win a majority for real change, and not just a game of ins and outs? And if you are engaged in trying to get a majority for a real change, you've got to focus first of all on the day to day problems which concern people. I promise you the suffragettes were not engaged in a theoretical discussion about the role of the House of Commons. They wanted the vote as a route to power. And that's what the vote is. And you see this problem with — I don't know how to describe them because ultra-left sounds too extreme, but what I would call the outside left, or the non-Labour left — their problem is that they are inviting the labour movement which, by its extraparliamentary pressures did so much to establish the right to dismiss governments, to put the whole of that history on one side and to start on a new and untried route.
Tony Benn: Well, if I took your analysis seriously I would leave public life. If I shared your pessimism I wouldn't even try. You have to be careful you don't find yourself an unwilling agent of Mrs Thatcher, because what you actually said is: There is no alternative. You were putting forward a quite different motivation. Now I've just been launching this novel, a Very British Coup, which is extremely interesting and I hope will lead people to understand the nature of the challenge. But what I can't accept is that if you really meant to do it, you couldn't overcome these difficulties.
And frankly if you did come to power by these means, if you toppled a government by a general strike, the one thing you could be sure about is that you wouldn't have public support. And therefore when the government that got into power by a general strike got into difficulties, it couldn't mobilise public opinion. The public would think 'Not only have we got a government we didn't want, but it was forced on us by a particular group of people. When sacrifices are to be made, why should we rally to a government that has abandoned democratic rights? We want an election, and we're told we can't have an election because this government came to power by virtue of extraparliamentary activity.'
And that, really, is not just throwing away the baby with the bathwater, it's throwing out the whole house we've built, the whole structure we've created. You're saying to the suffragettes, 'your whole activity was a waste of time. The vote was nothing, it doesn't mean anything,' It's saying to the Chartists, 'what you did has unfortunately ended up as a cul-de-sac, and a fraud.'
Now, really what I think you're arguing, because I still don't think you're a revolutionary, is we've never used the power we've struggled for so hard to make the real changes: I'm with you on that. But if you're actually talking about the replacement of the albeit imperfect democracy that we've got by something that implies it is to be achieved by force and held by force, then I think you turn yourself from a potential majority — which is what I think we have in Britain to make change — into a tiny little minority. And if you minoritise democracy, or minoritise revolutionary democracy, then of course, you lose your audience, you lose your chance to win support. And that is what I think is the danger of Alan's position. That's why I want Reform with a capital R.
Q: if a Left Labour government does come to power, does Tony Benn really think that the establishment would allow it to implement policies which would democratise our society and shift the whole balance of power?
Now, if there was an attempt to destabilise a democratic government by force, then of course the use of force to save the democratic government is quite a different matter, and I have never said that I wouldn't be prepared to use force to maintain democratic power. Indeed, if I lived in a country where there wasn't a route to democracy like the one we had then I would be in favour of the use of force. Mugabe, after all, had to fight for fifteen years. But what ended Mugabe's civil war was the very thing Alan says is no use, and you imply is no use, adult universal suffrage. And if Mugabe was prepared to lay down his arms when he got the vote, why should we give up the vote in favour of going to arms.
Let's take the most sensitive question of all: the American bases. Would they go? Very important question. After all, we established a base in the Canal Zone in 1883, and I think we always promised to withdraw. Yet we only left in 1956. On the other hand, De Gaulle wrote a letter to President Johnson which was published in 1966, and they were out within a year. It would be a very big thing for the United States to destabilise Britain. I know they're trying by bringing sanctions to bear against Mrs Thatcher, on the pipeline.
And Mrs Thatcher has shown on this issue I might add a quite commendable resilience. She said she's been deeply wounded by an old friend. Well that's how the Tories describe their resistance to a minor attempt to destabilise Mrs Thatcher's policy, which is to create a few jobs and build a pipeline with the Soviet Union. If you really think that the establishment is as powerful as that, you're wrong. Because the one lesson I have learned is that the people at the top, although they do exercise great power, are absolutely terrified that democratic pressure will take away their power.
One of the great tragedies of the 1974-79 government was that when we came to power, the British establishment was totally demoralised. I saw them, the CBI and so on, and it was Harold Wilson's great achievement to put some stuffing back into the British establishment. And when they left office they were so confident that they carried through a monetarist policy. But don't overestimate your opponents. They really are very, very nervous. I think it must have begun with Wat Tyler, and continued with Gerard Winstanley. Every time they look at the British people, they're very, very nervous. And if democracy doesn't give you hope, I promise you it terrifies the people who have got power: because they have no legitimacy. We have to expose their lack of legitimacy. And once you do that, they really do fall all over the place. The trouble is that we haven't used the democratic power to its fullest extent. I'm sure it will be difficult. But Harry Perkins, the hero of A Very British Coup, failed because he hadn't read the novel A Very British Coup.
Alan Freeman: I must pull Tony up on one point. I'm not against universal adult suffrage, and nor is the revolutionary tradition in this country. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, it was only the revolutionaries that actually fought for universal adult suffrage, and it was people who put rather a similar position to Tony Benn today who said that maybe this was going a bit too far at this stage, and maybe we should accept something like 1832 — a little bit short of that. I think there is an alternative, to extend the power of the vote: to the civil service, to the unaccountable centres of power that really govern our lives. We should say: 'We're going to do what we say we're going to do in regard to democracy. We're not going to get "nicer" civil servants, as if the early English revolutionaries went around saying we want a "nicer" king; we're going to get rid of them. And we're going to replace them by people who are accountable to our needs.' A Labour government that sets out to do that would be an alternative. It would finish the unfinished business of the previous reforms by removing an obstacle to reform which, as we have seen, is capable of coming back viciously and wiping out those reforms.
Then there's a very important thing we have to say, which I think is really the meat of the debate. Tony Benn says that the big problem about revolution is this: what comes after? I absolutely agree with that. No-one who has any sense of responsibility for what we as socialists try to do can turn round and say that we can prove from the results of history that if you make a revolution the result is going to be a perfect democratic state. And the fact that because in order to take such dramatic steps you enter a new piece of history, you enter the unknown, that has always been the argument of the right wing against reform.
What they say is, 'if you start fighting for reform, it's going to be impossible for you to win this without destablising our power'. This was said by Burke in terms of destabilising the power of the monarch. Now it's put in terms of destabilising the new monarchy and its court, the civil service — this, they argue, will remove order. You will remove the remaining guarantees of the rights of the people. And therefore, they say, because the risk is that if you start to fight for reform, the result will be a revolution, don't even fight for reform. I think the argument that says, stop at the point where you risk overturning the unaccountable powers, because you don't know what will follow, that's the most pessimistic argument of all.
The reason the Labour cabinet, in 1974, did actually side with the civil servants and not with the Kirkby workers, is because it accepted that argument. We should not be frightened that if we fight for our rights and we come up against a power that resists us by means of force, that we may have to meet that force with an equal force, and we should not be frightened of the fact that that power will have to be replaced by a more democratic one.
But is this such an implausible idea? We don't have to speculate about the future. We already know that the trade unions possess structures that are, in general, far more democratic than those of the rest of society. What is so [illegible]. Now, Chris Harman has attacked part of my book where I mention the democracy of the unions. Of course many unions are far less democratic than they should be. But are they less democratic than our existing democracy? If Chris Harman thinks so, then he shares the views of Maggie Thatcher.
Tony Benn: Well, what would happen if a government came to power by some means other than the established electoral process and then said we're going to get rid of the American bases; President Reagan would be rubbing his hands with glee, because he wouldn't bother to argue — well, first of all, they might destabilise such a government in exactly the same way as if it came to power through the vote, but the difference is that Reagan's campaign would be "to restore democracy" in Britain, which had gone because of a coup. And the army would do exactly what they did, if you came to power this way. But the truth is that a government that came to power that way would have lost its legitimacy.
The great value of our system is that at least we've established, in a limited way, in that area that governs the state, the power to sack people. I cannot visualise from what you have said, how you would sack the people who would take over other than by a process of public support and consent. And short cuts to change by consent are also short cuts to counter-revolutions without consent.
That's really the nub of the argument, although in fact if you're talking about the kind of society we'd like to see, I think there's a generality of agreement. We want a society where nobody has any power over anybody else unless they're accountable to the people over whom they have power for the use they make of it. That is the definition of democracy, and that extended into industry would mean workers' control, and so on. But I don't think there's a short cut to persuading people.
* Tony Benn Arguments for Democracy, Penguin Books, £1.75 and Alan Freeman The Benn Heresy, Pluto Press, £3.50