We are discussing whether the British people are to be allowed to elect those who make the laws under the which they are governed. The argument is nothing to do with whether we should get more maternity leave from Madame Papandreou than from Madame Thatcher. That is not the issue.
I recognise that, when the members of the three Front Benches agree, I am in a minority. My next job therefore is to explain to the people of Chesterfield what we have decided. I will say first, “My dear constituents, in future you will be governed by people whom you do not elect and cannot remove. I am sorry about it. They may give you better creches and shorter working hours but you cannot remove them.”
I know that it sounds negative but I have always thought it positive to say that the important thing about democracy is that we can remove without bloodshed the people who govern us. We can get rid of a Callaghan, a Wilson or even a right hon. Lady by internal processes. We can get rid of the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major). But that cannot be done in the structure that is proposed. Even if one likes the policies of the people in Europe, one cannot get rid of them.
Secondly, we say to my favourite friends, the Chartists and suffragettes, “All your struggles to get control of the ballot box were a waste of time. We shall be run in future by a few white persons, as in 1832.” The instrument, I might add, is the Royal Prerogative of treaty making. For the first time since 1649 the Crown makes the laws–advised, I admit, by the Prime Minister.
We must ask what will happen when people realise what we have done. We have had a marvellous debate about Europe, but none of us has discussed our relationship with the people who sent us here. Hon. Members have expressed views on Albania and the Baltic states. I have been dazzled by the knowledge of the continent of which we are all part. No one has spoken about how he or she got here and what we were sent here to do.
If people lose the power to sack their Government, one of several things happens. First, people may just slope off. Apathy could destroy democracy. When the turnout drops below 50 per cent., we are in danger.
Mr. Peter Hardy (Wentworth) : Like the United States.
Mr. Benn : As my hon. Friend says, in the United States turnouts are very low. That is partly caused by the scale of the country. The second thing that people can do is to riot. Riot is an old-fashioned method of drawing the attention of the Government to what is wrong. It is difficult for an elected person to admit it, but the riot at Strangeways produced some prison reforms. Riot has historically played a much larger part in British politics than we are ever allowed to know.
Thirdly, nationalism can arise. Instead of blaming the treaty of Rome, people say, “It is those Germans,” or, “It is the French.” Nationalism is built out of frustration that people feel when they cannot get their way through the ballot box. With nationalism comes repression. I hope that it is not pessimistic–in my view it is not–to say that democracy hangs by a thread in every country of the world. Unless we can offer people a peaceful route to the resolution of injustices through the ballot box, they will not listen to a House that has blocked off that route.
– The Rt. Hon. Tony Benn MP, speaking on 20th November 1991 during the Commons debate about the Maastricht Treaty.
That vile weasel certainly got that right, I must admit.
I always felt that what he was thinking was that the EU would have acted as a brake on his plans for full-blooded Bolshevism in the UK, so it was to be opposed. However, some suggest that the former Viscount Stansgate was actually the moderate compared to Healey, who concealed his views better, but put his plans to undermine NATO and the West into effect in plain sight as Defence Secretary.
Even a stopped clock tells the right time, twice a day.
Yes – Phil and Perry.
Mr Ed – we do sound like paranoid Cold War warriors. And I say “we” because I agree with.
The undermining of the British armed forces in the 1960s was the work of Denis Healey. And he fully supported the increase in taxes on investment to over 90%.
The collapse of British manufacturing that Mrs Thatcher got the blame for was actually the result of decades of lackk of investment. And in the case Mr Healey (a highly intelligent man) the results were INTENTIONAL.
He played the “moderate” very well – but sometimes the mask s
I remember watching him at a Labour party event – a social event at their Conference. He was singing “I am Hitler’s Man in Moscow”. Mr Healey was clearly fighting the urge to tell the watching Labour Party members – “it is all an act you idiots – I am actually more of a socialist than any of you”.
Turning away from slipping masks to the E.U.
What is the difference between a democratic socialist and a totalitarian?
A democratic socialist will go away when most people tell them to go away – and take their policies with them.
Leaving aside the romantic nonsense about noble riots (clearly “Tony” Benn had never been attacked by rioters or had his home or business looted by them), Mr Benn was a democratic socialist.
If most people made it clear they did NOT want socialism – then he would not try and impose it upon them.
However, a lot of socialists (of various sorts) are not democrats.
Mr Benn always said that “Denis Healey is a lot closer to Stalinism than I am” – to general laughter of those who just regarded such words as more ravings from “Tony”.
But it was accurate.
The point of the EEC-EU is that it is an ANTI democratic project – not just non democratic, ANTI democratic.
It was designed from the start to prevent people having a real say over government.
Oh elections would still take place – but they would be meaningless, with all real decisions being made by “enlightened” officials. The dream of Plato, Francis Bacon, Jeremy Bentham and so on.
Which is exactly why the establishment elite (with their dreams of unlimited and unaccountable power) support the E.U.
While I’m no fan of Healey, I suspect a lot of Labour in the late 60s and late 70s was lurching from crisis to crisis, trying not to notice how little control they had over anything. They caused much of their ongoing-crisis state but then – very rapidly – found themselves trying to deal with them. Tony Benn in the 60s, setting up cooperatives that soon went bust, is simply Labour economics in miniature. As regards when Healey was deceiving himself, when he was deceiving Labour party fanatics and when he was deceiving ordinary voters, did he even know himself?
It would be a harder task – and one little worth doing – working out when and how Benn was sincere in his own mind and/or in relation to doing any due diligence on the validity of his beliefs.
– On the one hand, I’m sure Mr Ed is right to say that Benn expected the EU to restrain him if his fantasy of being able to order his agenda ever came about. Benn’s ideology obliged him to expect the EU to be controlled by a conspiracy of capitalists (just as ours suggests to us that it will far more influenced by PC, and by political, not economic, power agendas – of course, I think we can safely do due diligence without losing all reason to think this). Benn’s experience likewise would make him think the EU an obstacle: when he gave that speech, Benn’s last experience of Labour in office was as a minority party governing in accord with a letter of intent held by the IMF.
– On the other hand, politicians are not just good at uttering high-sounding impartial sentiments. Sometimes, they can believe them while they say them. At other times, they justify what we’d see as wrong by some restriction to what we’d see as right. My opinion (FWIW) is that Tony was not consciously lying when he said, “Even if one likes the policies of the people in Europe, one cannot get rid of them.” This idea (expressed in several ways in the quoted speech), is rather unsocialist. Socialism is very much about some subgroup being told by a larger group that they must, in the name of fairness, obey. Was he just believing it while he said it? Or was a commitment to “we can get rid of our governors if most of us want to” an essential part of how he reconciled himself to the coercion of socialism? (Orwell very much insisted on democratic socialism – and unlike Benn, showed very occasional flashes of awareness that maintaining democracy in a socialist society might not be trivial.)
Meanwhile, if one meets an older lefty, the speech and its source have value. I hope it is shoved in Corbyn’s face as often as possible in the next two weeks.
Niall, in my experience the number, extent and duration of logical contradictions any person can sincerely hold in his or her mind, on any subject, is limitless.
Benn, on this, was right. All the economic issues are irrelevant. The issue of representative democracy is the only issue. Vote Leave should have stressed this from day one.
The middle-ground left and right are very VERY keen on the EU. They benefit financially and socially from it.
But their enthusiasm is that the EU is ‘on their side’. They are like Royalists who are in love with hereditary monarchy because they either have a good King, or a King who dispenses largesse in their direction.
But things change.
But Kings die. Kings go mad. Some Kings are even stupid or evil. When all the levers of power are in one regime’s hands, how do you change direction when evil or incompetence seizes them?
I’ve asked a few Remainers, and it has never occurred to them that they cannot influence the future direction of the EU. Everything is focussed on the NOW. No-one is looking ahead.
I met Benn a couple times in a church on Shaftesbury Ave that used to host debates and Benn was a regular. And goodness the leftie largely Methodist regulars tended to hold his feet to the flames over past support of assorted nasties. But he was indeed someone who had grasped the totalitarian approach was wrong and foolish. I still disliked him but I credit him with breaking my attachment to democracy, unless it was fettered with a liberal constitution. He supported tyranny, just as long as it was prepared to allow itself to be voted out of office occasionally as a way of making it a kinder gentler tyranny.
Here are the long and short term impacts of leaving the EU
Short Term
Economic collapse, run on the pound the British economy hits the buffers as the banking and financial sectors are ripped to shreds.
The Right wing take over the UK and decide the look for scapegoat, many are targeted Jews, Gays, Gypsies, muslims and all immigrants. The collapse of house prices and the financial sector is blamed on the weak and vulnerable and Britain quickly becomes a fascist state.
Long Term
Europe breaks up, in geopolitical instability, and becomes a playground for the proxy wars, imposed dictators, civil wars and a land of human rights abuses, by leaders imposed on it by China, Russia, India and the USA.
I love the USA but it will not be able to stop danger happening to a divided Europe.
This was exactly the reason that I opposed the move to the list system for “electing” MEPs. It made it largely impossible for voters to target a sitting MEP and vote the scoundrel out.
Of course, that was some time ago, before I said “You may all go to Hell and I shall go to Texas”.
I do wish the Old Country luck on getting free from the EU, though.
Nina Leg,
You omitted ‘smallpox’, is that short or long-term? 🙂
Why? The UK is not in the Euro currency – what am I missing?
The thing is that the policies of the last 45 years in particular have ripped the banking and financial sectors to shreds already, but as Zaphod Beeblebrox said when asked wasn’t he dead? ‘Maybe I am, I just haven’t stopped moving yet.’.
The damage of asset price inflation, malinvestment and general misallocation resources is ongoing and the errors from 2008 have not been, in the main, liquidated, but rather swept under the carpet in another tide of fiat money, artificial interest rates and so on, and now we have 8 more years of the same to sort out.
The sooner the underlying reality is exposed, the sooner a recovery and ‘rational’ economic activity can resume.
If the UK leaves the EU, I wonder what the Doomqsayers will do when their litany of woes fail to materialise – and they will fail to materialise – just as they did, coincidentally all the same ones, when the UK did not join the euro.
If the EU is the economic sine qua non, explain France whose economy has been circling the drain ever more quickly and dizzily this past decade.
Wut? You mean the same Jews being targeted over and over and over again by the left wing Labour Party?
Oh yes, and Gays… right. Yeah it is sooooo the Conservatives who have a bee in their bonnet about homosexuals.
And… Gypsies? Who gives a flying fuck about gypsies in the UK? Well, unless a group of them just moved into a field you own, that is. As you appear to be an American, maybe you think Slovakia and Hungary are actually part of the United Kingdom, you know, places where they actually have enough gypsies for the man-in-the-street to actively dislike them?
Oh and speaking of “all immigrants”, the biggest group thereof in the UK recently (which is easily sunburnt white people from Poland, not dusky muslim people from Pakistan, contrary to popular belief) often actually vote Conservative. But yeah, the eeeeeeeevil Right Wing is going to ‘take over’ the UK 😀
Of course, Ed – but that has nothing to do with the EU membership, and it’s the same shit everywhere anyway.
John B, the economic collapse, whenever it will eventually occur, is not going to skip the UK (see Ed’s remarks above), it will be blamed on Brexit, however wrongly, and the general public will accept it as fact.
Guardian readers hate gypsies and travellers.
I was amused by Nina Leg’s doom-and-gloom scenarios (and Mr Ed’s appropriately witty response). The only part of her post with which I agree is “Europe breaks up” (my assumption being that by “Europe” she means the EU, not the physical continent itself), which I actually think is both inevitable and a Good Thing. But time will tell.
I think a more EFTA-like arrangement would actually suit Europe just fine, ideally going all the way to Kiev.
“Nina Leg” is a troll–the same shite was posted on Tim Worstall’s blog.
The Remain creeps are getting desperate.
Benn was never a real supporter of democracy, unless it was the Chavez kind where voting was just a formality you did now and again. All his talk was just lip service to further his proto-communist aims. He was a signed up political carpetbagger who was in parliament for way too long and would change the law to keep him there if needed. Often cited as “principled”, it doesn’t matter if your beliefs are just plain wrong, or even hypocritical, a noted republican opposing hereditary rule doesn’t have the same weight coming from one of Britain’s most foremost generational political families who now seem to have an inbred gene for career politician.
I think the crack shows when he seems rather blasé, or even supportive, of resorting to violence when the vote doesn’t go your way.
Turnout in the US has been dropping as the electorate see less and less difference between a career statist democrat and a career statist republican. This has been brought up repeatedly in the last 50 years or so and little if anything done until we have the electoral equivalent of a riot and Mr Trump soundly defeats several people who are arguably much more qualified to be president than he is.
So here we are with an election between Robespierre and Marie Antoinette which is necessary but would be far more fun to watch from a safe distance, say high earth orbit.
What a load of tosh the commenters here have written about Tony Benn.
Mr. Ed, near the top of the thread – there can be no doubt at all that Tony Benn was always ready to defer to the people. Of course he tried to persuade them to his view, but his 5 Questions of Power, particularly No. 5 show clearly his views. He also said, on more than one occasion, that his view was that the people loaned their power to MPs for 5 years between elections and were entitled to have those powers returned to them intact at the next election.
Runcie Balspune, later in the thread – yes indeed Benn got the law changed to keep himself in Parliament. The law change was that the voters could vote him into the House of Commons even though he had inherited an hereditary peerage. He fought for the power of the voters over the herditary principle and established, through the courts, the right to renounce a hereditary peerage.
Really, you libertarians do get clouded in your judgement because of your need to be libertarianly pure.
It’s not dissimilar to your stupid belief in open borders when the countries either side of those borders are so obviouslu unequal.
There’s little doubt the late Viscount Stansgate, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, was a master of oratory.
James Strong
Except that he didn’t establish that through the courts, quite the reverse, he failed in that. Do you lie, or are you ignorant? It could be both, but please, get your facts right.
Where have I ever said that I was a libertarian?
On what basis do you banish doubt about Mr Benn’s intentions? Was it his friends and the company he kept?
What does that even mean?
Amazing. That speech could have been made last week, but was actually made almost twenty-five years ago.
I suspect that a lot of people, perhaps even a majority, would give up the right to self-determination, in exchange for shorter working hours and better crèches. Over the years I’ve become convinced that the uprisings in central Europe in 1989 were not, as we on the right like to believe, against communist tyranny. Rather, people were uprising against the fact there was nothing to buy in the shops. Had the communists been able to deliver on their promises of material prosperity for the masses, the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union would probably still be in business.
And before anyone accuses me of excessive cynicism, consider this. Successive British governments (and governments elsewhere, for that matter) have been chipping away at ancient liberties for years, with nary a murmur of protest from the population. Yet when so much as one penny of someone’s government (i.e. taxpayer funded) benefit is threatened, there is absolute hell to pay.
I don’t think the situation is hopeless, or I wouldn’t bother coming to this site. But we’ve not yet even started the job of selling libertarianism as an appealing prospect to the majority.
Sch Dog: re “But we’ve not yet even started the job of selling libertarianism as an appealing prospect to the majority.” Is it is even possible to win over a majority on such things when, at least in the US and the UK I think, the nearly non-tax paying majority have figured out that they can vote themselves “free stuff” on the backs of an over-taxed minority?
If you don’t think “it’s over”, “it” being the West’s experiment in self rule and liberty, please tell me why.
Schrodinger’s Dog (June 8, 2016 at 12:27 am) “Had the communists been able to deliver on their promises of material prosperity for the masses, the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union would probably still be in business.”
Had socialism’s promise (“Give me your freedom and I will make you rich”) proved true, the question of how many after how long would have decided it was a bad bargain even in that alternative reality could then have been seen independently of other considerations. In real life, it is never either possible or necessary to deal with this pure state; the left fails because only its arrogance could imagine its methods had any hope of achieving its goals.
It is basic to the left-right dichotomy that left-wing solutions sound better in theory and prove worse in practice. Free speech was enshrined in England countries on the failure of various attempts to enforce one single view after the reformation. It’s restoration will come (I hope much faster and with less bloodshed) after those who hate it experience both sides of failure: that they can’t make everyone else shut up even by getting nastier and nastier (alas, that will need some martyrs guys – don’t all rush), and that they can be victims themselves. (Experience or foresee – but such arrogant fools are not good at foreseeing.)
(BTW, the promise “Enjoy your capitalist freedom and it will make you rich” is not only rejected by those who find their riches slow in coming; often the comfortable and wealthy – or their kids – get bored and rebellious, so there are low reasons – as well as much higher ones – for thinking that a state that combines riches with lack of freedom will have its malcontents, though we may hear less of them till it all falls apart.)
The problem with that formulation is that it does not reflect reality nearly truthfully enough. Most people, even those who value freedom for its own sake, don’t really enjoy it, at least not most of the time. Being free is hard work in every sense of the word. If one takes one’s freedom seriously – which means accepting the responsibilities that come with it, then one might enjoy the riches resulting from the freedom to work hard in order to achieve one’s goals.
Meanwhile, the usual suspects are moaning that their (fictional?) voters aren’t registering to vote in time, and that they crashed the website for voter registration. It all looks as if the Left are seeking to rig the ballot and are moaning about the outcome already.
> do not elect and cannot remove
You mean, like the civil service?
George Soros (hiss!) thinks that the “Remain” camp is getting stronger, and the recent strength of the pound is a sign that a Brexit vote is unlikely. But he also thinks that “[i]f Britain leaves, it could unleash a general exodus, and the disintegration of the European Union will become practically unavoidable.” And in any event, he thinks the EU might collapse anyway under the weight of the migration crisis. All this from a Wall Street Journal article today; see here (sorry, but it’s behind a pay wall). Say what you will about Soros (and I do; he’s a despicable human being), he is indisputably a canny trader.
FWIW, he’s selling stocks and buying gold and gold mining shares. He’s been right before.
Both George Soros and “Tony” Benn were dreadful people – but both were-are right about some things.
Mr Benn was right about the EEC-EU.
And Mr Soros is right about gold.