Tony Benn and the Constitution of Dissent
I was there in Hyde Park in February 2003, close to the speakers’ platform where huge numbers of us gathered after the long march against the Iraq War. My young son was on my shoulders, wide-eyed, too young to understand the speeches but old enough to feel the atmosphere. It was cold, but the atmosphere had the tense charge of a real political moment, one of those rare occasions when British public opinion seemed to break its own banks. When Tony Benn took the microphone, pipe in pocket, his voice resonant with urgency, it was like listening to the conscience of a nation. He reminded us that imperial war was not just immoral but illegal, that parliamentary procedure was no substitute for democracy, and that history would not be kind to those who ignored the will of the people. A few years later I heard him speak again, this time in the Left Field tent at Glastonbury. The tent was full—no, overflowing—and the crowd, mud-streaked and sunburnt, sat in near-silence as he delivered what felt like a sermon from the margins. Benn was a great orator, but also a great writer. I have all his diaries, annotated and well-thumbed, and in them one finds not just the record of a political life but a restless intelligence searching for a better society, from within the belly of a constitutional order designed to prevent it.
This new volume, The Most Dangerous Man in Britain?, published by Verso to mark the centenary of Benn’s birth, attempts to do something unusual: to rescue the political Benn from the cartoon ‘national treasure’ into which he was quietly interred during his later years. It collects thirty-six of his speeches and essays, with a foreword by his daughter Melissa Benn. The title, drawn from Kingsley Amis’s bitter jibe, is something of a provocation: the Benn depicted here is not the sentimental grandee but the republican, the socialist, the disestablishmentarian, the tireless parliamentarian who believed the House of Commons could, in the right hands, become an instrument of working-class power. It is also, implicitly, a reply to those, inside the Labour Party and out, who have long insisted that Benn’s shift to the left was a tragic detour, a youthful promise squandered on utopian causes and factional insurgencies. Read in the present, after Corbynism, after Gaza, after the long defeat of the trade union movement, Benn’s writings feel less like relics than warnings. Or maybe, more hopefully, like blueprints.
Spanning more than four decades, the selections in The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? are grouped thematically rather than chronologically, which allows readers to trace Benn’s arguments across changing political contexts without being bound to the story arc of electoral cycles or cabinet reshuffles. The first section, ‘The British State’, includes Benn’s clearest expositions on the Crown prerogative, the undemocratic scaffolding of Parliament, and his long campaign to codify a written constitution through the proposed Commonwealth of Britain Bill. Subsequent sections tackle participatory democracy, industrial strategy, foreign policy, the radical tradition, and his post-parliamentary interventions. The texts are mostly short, occasionally polemical, and always lucid. Some are familiar, his anti-war speeches on Iraq and Kosovo, for example—but many others are less well-known, including pieces on land nationalisation, technological change, and the legacy of the Diggers. Each section is prefaced with a short editorial note, and while the volume doesn’t offer the theoretical density of a Stuart Hall or a Perry Anderson, it does present Benn as he was: a brilliant communicator, a parliamentary operator, and a man who, in the words of his own epitaph, encouraged us.
The Crown and the Constitution
Benn’s fiercest and most enduring target was the British state itself, not in the abstract, but as a living architecture of deference, hierarchy, and mystification. His essay On the Power of the Crown, written as a letter to his grandchildren, lays out with remarkable clarity how political authority in Britain continues to flow not from the people but from the monarch via the Crown prerogative, which successive prime ministers have jealously guarded. “Although the person of the monarch has no political power,” he wrote, “the Crown has great powers and these powers are exercised in practice by the prime minister.” That system, he argued, allows ministers to rule without democratic accountability: “By using these prerogatives the prime minister escapes all responsibility to the elected House of Commons.”
This section could form the backbone of a curriculum on constitutional radicalism. His companion piece Democratic Rights or Ancient Traditions? expands the argument, attacking both the aristocratic and technocratic defences of the status quo. “The British political system is so steeped in hierarchy that real progress is hindered at every point,” Benn observed, before demanding that the people be redefined not as subjects but as citizens. Where liberals reach for judicial review and tinkering reform, Benn called for a written constitution, the disestablishment of the Church, and entrenched democratic rights. That these demands remain largely unmet is less a reflection of Benn’s irrelevance than of his prescience: Starmer’s Labour, despite its vast majority, seems content to leave the Crown untouched.
Democracy at Wor
If Benn’s constitutional radicalism exposes the deep structure of British oligarchy, his writings on industry and labour are an attempt to imagine an alternative. In essays like The Case for Workers’ Control and A Ten-Year Industrial Strategy for Britain, Benn sketches a vision in which workers are not merely the object of economic planning but the subjects of it. “The person who actually has to do a job of work on the factory floor… is the best person to know how his or her work should be organised,” he insisted. His support for the Lucas Plan, Meriden Co-operative, and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders wasn’t nostalgia for artisanal labour; it was a practical, if embryonic, challenge to the logic of capital.
He foresaw what the collapse of industrial Britain would mean not just for jobs but for the very idea of economic democracy. Today, amid the debris of Brexit, AI-driven disemployment, and the gentrified rhetoric of “green growth”, Benn’s industrial vision feels curiously fresh. It speaks to a socialism that is neither nostalgic nor technocratic, but rooted in democratic agency. His belief that production and innovation should be socialised under democratic control is not just good workplace policy: it is a rebuke to every corporate think tank that has ever advised a Labour front bench.
Internationalism and the Limits of Empire
No less important was Benn’s anti-imperialism. Whether denouncing apartheid, the Falklands adventure, or the bombing of Iraq, Benn was consistent in his opposition to British militarism. Speaking in Parliament in 2003, he said: “All war represents a failure of diplomacy. It represents a failure of politics… If there is a war, then it will be a war fought by the poor on both sides and not by the leaders who make the decisions.” His speeches on Kosovo and Iraq, collected here, show a moral clarity almost entirely absent from Westminster.
In a televised exchange with Tony Blair before the Iraq invasion, Benn asked: “If one man can destroy a country, why cannot one man prevent a war?” He pressed the Prime Minister on legality, civilian casualties, and the real motives of intervention, closing with the line: “I am not a pacifist, but I believe this war is unjustifiable and will bring more terrorism, not less.”
It is no coincidence that his final great political act was to help lead the Stop the War Coalition. In the wake of Gaza, where once again Britain’s political class has largely failed to oppose a clear instance of imperial violence, Benn’s words sound like dispatches from a better tradition—one that does not confuse national interest with complicity.
Traditions of Radicalism
Benn often grounded his socialism not in Marx but in the Levellers, the Diggers, and the radical edge of Christianity. “The teachings of Jesus, about brotherhood and sisterhood and peace… have acquired a new urgency and importance in the crisis which now threatens to overwhelm the world,” he wrote in Christianity as a Revolutionary Doctrine. In Marxism and the Labour Party, he argued that socialism in Britain had always been shaped by these overlapping traditions of dissent: “The Labour movement does not derive its strength from theory alone, but from the collective memory of struggle and hope.”
Benn had a particular admiration for Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, writing that “they saw the land not as property to be owned but as a common treasury for all,” and that their radicalism foreshadowed the unfinished democratic revolutions of later centuries. In one speech, he declared, “We are the inheritors of that tradition. The Diggers, like the Chartists and the Suffragettes, were labelled extremists in their day because they demanded the impossible, and changed history.”
There is something deliberately anachronistic here, a refusal to let the Labour right claim the mantle of tradition, and a subtle plea for continuity across centuries of dissent. Unlike many radicals, Benn understood that myth could be a weapon. Unlike many Labour leaders, he knew how to wield it.
After Politics
The final section of the book, titled ‘Politics After Politics’, contains Benn’s last speech to Parliament, his Stop the War addresses, and his final interview. These are elegiac pieces, but also combative. “I am leaving Parliament in order to devote more time to politics,” he said in his farewell speech. He went on: “My job is now to try and articulate the concerns that are not heard in Parliament, the peace movement, the trade unions, the young and the old who are disillusioned with the system.” Benn never accepted the idea of retirement from politics because he never accepted that politics was reducible to office.
Benn once said that the way the press treated him during the 1980s would be studied by future historians as an example of political character assassination. He was right. But his writings endure, and in that endurance lies something subversive. In this centenary volume, we don’t find the Benn of caricature, neither the messianic loony leftie nor the pipe-smoking grandfather of protest, but something harder to categorise: a socialist who took democracy seriously, a parliamentarian who wanted to abolish the Lords, a radical who understood the slow, boring work of political change.
In one of his final interviews, reflecting on his life, he remarked: “Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself.” To the end, he remained a presence on picket lines and platforms, stubborn in the belief that ordinary people could change the world if given the tools to do so.
He encouraged us. He still does.
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