Tony Benn on Revolutionary Christianity

Tony Benn on Revolutionary Christianity

By

Tony Benn

This Easter Sunday we republish Tony Benn's classic lecture on the revolutionary social imperative of Christian teachings.

Born into a family steeped in the tradition of Christian non-conformism, Tony Benn would later go on to become Britain’s best known socialist. 

Benn’s mother, Margaret Wedgwood Benn was a theologian and founder member of the League of the Church Militant, the predecessor organization to the Movement for the Ordination of Women.
An inspiring force in Benn’s life, Margaret would teach her young son that the story of the Bible was based on the struggle between “the Kings who had power, and the prophets who preached righteousness.”
Later in his life, Benn would assert that he was a “Christian agnostic,” unsure of the existence of God, but someone who believed in “Jesus the prophet, not Christ the King,” the historical Jesus — “the carpenter of Nazareth” — who preached social justice and egalitarianism.
This is the main text of a lecture delivered in November 1980 at Mansfield College Chapel, Oxford in which Benn looks into the revolutionary history behind Christ’s message and its relationship to socialist thought.
— Max Shanly

The Social Imperative

When Jesus was asked by one of the scribes “What commandment is the first of all?” St Mark’s Gospel (chapter twelve, verse twenty-nine) records his answer thus:

The first is Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. And the second is this. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other Commandment greater than these.

Any serving student of the teachings of the historical Jesus — and I lay claim to be such a student and no more — must take that passage as his starting point in the search for their revolutionary consequences.
Few would question the use of the word “revolutionary” to describe the effect upon an individual of his or her conversion to the Christian faith with its sense of personal re-birth and the comforting certainty of eternal life.
Historically, many churches appear to have been, and to remain, more concerned with the task of preaching personal salvation than with the social imperatives spelled out in Jesus’s reply.
Generations of churchmen have formulated creeds and liturgies, discussed the mystical aspects of theology and have worked within ecclesiastical hierarchies to interpret the word of God for the faithful, supported by various disciplines designed to secure their compliance.
It has also been true that Ecclesiastical and Temporal power have often been fused into a combined establishment to secure the submission of the people to the authoritarian demands of church and state.
In such situations the social imperatives relating to our obligations to practice neighbourly love were shrunk into a vague and generalized injunction directed to the rich and powerful to express their love by being good and kind; and to the poor to return that love by being patient and submissive.
Both rich and poor, powerful and weak, were then reassured by the church that in the world to come each would have their just reward and all suffering and injustice would be swept away for all eternity.

Neighbourly Love

Not surprisingly, this interpretation of the teachings of Jesus did not commend itself to the poor and the disinherited who saw through this argument and rejected the role allocated to them in this world — of accepting injustice. Thus, outside the established churches, and in parallel with them, the practical commandment to practice true neighbourly love based upon an acceptance of our common humanity acquired an impetus of its own.
This radical interpretation of the teachings of Jesus spread wherever the Bible was available for study — and no doubt explains why the authorities were so anxious to keep it out of the hands of the laity. In this way the message reached and influenced a far wider audience — including those for whom social action was much more relevant and meaningful than the call to personal salvation.
H. G. Wells in his history of the world — himself an atheist — wrote this about the revolutionary nature of Jesus’s teachings:

In view of what he plainly said, is it any wonder that all who were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a swimming of their world at his teaching? He was dragging out all the little private reservations they had made from social service into the light of a universal religious life. He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of this kingdom of his there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride and precedence; no motive indeed and no reward but love.

Is it any wonder that men were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him? Even his disciples cried out when he would not spare them the light. Is it any wonder that the priests realized that between this man and themselves there was no choice but that he or priest-craft should perish? Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers, confronted and amazed by something soaring over their comprehension and threatening all their disciplines, should take refuge in wild laughter and crown him with thorns and robe him in purple and make a mock Caesar out of him? For to take him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible happiness.

This radical interpretation of the message of brotherhood and its clear anti-establishment agitation has surfaced time and again throughout our history. Wycliffe and the Lollards were engaged in it. So was the Reverend John Ball whose support for the Peasants Revolt cost him his life in 1381.
The belief in the “priesthood of all believers” which lies at the root of Congregationalism; or the Quakers “inner light” were all — and remain — profoundly revolutionary in their impact upon the hierarchies of the church itself. Nor was this revolutionary agitation confined to the church.
The “divine right of kings” asserted by King Charles I as a defense of his powers was overthrown along with the king himself and in the ensuing revolution a furious debate began about the legitimacy of the organs of both church and state power.
The Levellers asserted that “the relation of master and servant has no ground in the New Testament: in Christ there is neither bond nor free.” Expressing their political philosophy in Christian terms:

The relation of Master and Servant has no ground in the New Testament; in Christ there is neither bond nor free. Ranks such as those of the peerage and gentry are “ethical and heathenish distinctions.” There is no ground in nature or Scripture why one man should have £1000 per annum, another not £1. The common people have been kept under blindness and ignorance, and have remained servants and slaves to the nobility and gentry. But God has now opened their eyes and discovered unto them their Christian liberty.

Gerrard Winstanley, the True Leveller or Digger, went further and defined the Creator not as God but as “Reason” and on that basis rejected the historical justification for the doctrine that “one branch of mankind should rule over another”:

In the beginning of Time, the great Creator, Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds and Fishes, but not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another.
And the reason is this, every single man, male and female, is a perfect creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe dwells in man to govern the Globe; so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anointing that ruled in the Son of Man, teacheth him all things.
But since humane flesh (that king of Beasts) began to delight himself in the objects of the Creation, more than in the Spirit Reason and Righteousness . . . Covetousness, did set up one man to teach and rule over another, and thereby the Spirit was killed, and man was brought into bondage and became a greater Slave to such of his own kind, than the Beasts of the field were to him.

Christianity and Democracy

In this way a bridge was constructed that carried the message of brotherhood and sisterhood from Christianity to secular humanism, a bridge that carried the ethics across but left the creeds behind. Across this bridge there is now a growing two-way traffic of people and ideas. Christians involved in political action cross it one way. Humanists can cross it to go back to the teachings of Jesus and study them.
In a theological sense there is a great divide between the Christians on one side and the humanists on the other. But it is impossible to escape the conclusion that over that bridge revolutionary ideas deriving from the Bible and the carpenter of Nazareth have spread to influence hundreds of millions of people for whom the need for neighbourly love within a common humanity is immediately apparent in a way that the mysticism, liturgies, and arid screeds may appear to be less relevant.
It has also been along this route that many Christian values have traveled until they became embedded in our society as “sacred” human rights that ought to be upheld in our political life. Thus, did the American colonists proclaim it in their Declaration of Independence in 1776:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

There are many other examples to cite. Environmentalists and ecologists who assert that we are all stewards of the earth, on behalf of our brothers and sisters and our children and grandchildren, for whose right to live free from pollution we are morally responsible and politically accountable. They are revolutionaries too in their hostility to exploitation of the planet and its people by feudalism, capitalism, or any temporal authority.
The deeply held conviction that conscience is above the law — because conscience is God-given and laws are made by men and women, is also highly revolutionary, yet the struggles to assert it, and those who died to secure it are the true founders of our civil liberties — including the right to worship in our own way and to hold dissenting political views.
Perhaps the greatest inheritance that this country has derived from the teachings of Jesus has been the heritage of democracy itself— with all the political ideas that are associated with it.
If we are our “brother’s and our sister’s keeper” then an “injury to one is an injury to all” and from that derive most of our contemporary ideas about solidarity and the moral responsibilities of trade unions.
The right of each man or woman to vote in elections also stems from their right to be treated as fully human and equal in the sight of God. So too does the pressure for social justice and greater equality which the ballot box allows the electors to exercise through their vote. So too does the internationalism which is a part and parcel of socialism that has never accepted any divine authority for nationalism at the expense of others. All this was beautifully summed up in the words of the Great Charter issued by the Chartists in 1842:

The great Political Truths which have been agitated during the last half-century, have at length aroused the degraded and insulted White Slaves of England, to a sense of their duty to themselves, their children and their country. Tens of thousands have flung down their implements of labour. Your task masters tremble at your energy, and expecting masses eagerly watch this great crisis of our cause. Labour must no longer be the common prey of masters and rulers. Intelligence has beamed upon the mind of the bondsman, and he has been convinced that all wealth, comfort and produce, everything valuable, useful, and elegant have sprung from the palm of his hand; he feels that his cottage is empty, his back thinly clad, his children breadless, himself hopeless, his mind harassed, and his body punished, that undue riches, luxury and gorgeous plenty might be heaped in the palaces of the taskmasters, and flooded into the granaries of the oppressor. Nature, God, and Reason have condemned this inequality, and in the thunder of a people’s voice it must perish for ever.

These are some of the reasons why so many democratic socialists in this country look back to the teachings of Jesus as a major and continuing source of political inspiration over centuries of thought and effort. For many Christians such openly secular interpretations of the teachings of Jesus may seem to separate those who hold them completely from the creeds of Christian faith. It is argued that without the acceptance of a personal God whose fatherhood is ever present the brotherhood and sisterhood of men and women loses its meaning and the teachings of Christ degenerate into mere ethics.
In order to consider that argument it is necessary to look back into history and consider how, in the past, Christianity came to terms with the then equally threatening challenge of the natural sciences.

Christianity, Science and Socialism

In past centuries the faith of a Christian would have been defined in such a way as to require him or her to deny the validity of all scientific inquiry into the nature of the universe or the origins of man if they conflicted with the Book of Genesis. Galileo fell foul of the church.
Darwin was denounced for his Origins of Species and so were all those who challenged the most literal interpretation of the words of the Old Testament. Indeed, Darwin was forced to admit in 1870: “My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look upon the universe as the result of blind chance. Yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind in the details.”
Darwin became an agnostic, was buried in Westminster Abbey, and today few Christians would find difficulty in reconciling his theories of evolution with their Christian faith.
Scientists who study the working of nature are now accepted as they are without being seen as heretics. Today Christian fundamentalism remains as a respected position to occupy, and since fundamentalists no longer have the political power to persecute science, science has no interest in discrediting fundamentalism. They co-exist in peace. That struggle is over. It was a struggle against the church and not against the teachings of Jesus.
But how should Christians respond to the challenge of completely secular socialism and Marxism which for over a century have consciously disconnected their view of brotherhood and sisterhood from the church and its creeds and mysteries? Such socialists believe that the continuing denial of our common humanity does not derive solely, or even primarily, from the sinful conduct of individuals but is institutionalized in the structures of economic, industrial, and political power which Christian churches may support, sustain, and even bless, while turning a blind eye to the injustices that continue unchecked.
Socialists argue that neighbourly love must be sought in this world and not postponed until the next one. They do not believe that priestly injunctions restricted to matters of personal conduct “Be good” or “Be kind” are any substitute whatsoever for the fundamental reforms that require collective political action.
The socialist interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan would cast many churches and churchmen in the role of the priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side; and would identify the socialist position with that of the Good Samaritan who was less concerned with the personal salvation of the traveler who was stripped and beaten than with his immediate need for medical treatment, accommodation, and food in this world here and now.
Unless Christians can respond institutionally and politically to that socialist challenge their faith can become an escape from reality and indeed an escape from the challenge posed by Jesus himself. In a world characterized by brutal repression and exploitation under regimes of all kinds, Christian escapism is no more acceptable than it was on the road to Jericho.

Teachings of Jesus, Writings of Marx

How should Christians answer this challenge? It is just not good enough to declare a holy war on socialism and Marxism on the grounds that they are atheistic. That is how, historically, the Catholics treated the Protestants and the Protestants treated the Catholics — burning each other at the stake. Yet that is the approach advocated by many Christian anticommunist crusaders which lies behind the harassment of Marxists in many Western capitalist countries including Britain; and in all countries living under anticommunist military dictatorships.
But before adopting such a position it is necessary to consider other interpretations of the true meaning of Marxism.
Dr Nathaniel Micklem had this to say in his book A Religion of Agnostics: “Though he disguised his moral indignation under cover of scientific terminology, it was in response to the call of a higher and more lasting justice that Karl Marx repudiated the ‘bourgeois’ inequality of his day?”
This view was echoed by Ivan Svitak in his speech at Charles University during the Prague Spring on May 3, 1968:

Marx was not, and is not, and never will be, the inventor and theoretician of totalitarian dictatorship that he appears today, when the original meaning of his work, true humanism — has been given a thoroughly Byzantine and Asian twist. Marx strove for a wider humanism than that of the bourgeois democracies that he knew and for wider civil rights, not for the setting-up of the dictatorship of one class and one political party. What is today thought to be the Marxist theory of the State and the Marxist social science imply an ideological forgery, a false contemporary conception, as wrong as the idea that the orbits of heavenly bodies are circular.

Milan Machovec in his book A Marxist Looks at Jesus carried this argument a stage further forward in assessing the Marxist view of Jesus:

You can corrupt the heritage, overlay what is best in it, or push it into the background, but those who seek it out tomorrow will find life and new hope beneath the layers of dirt and the petrified outlines — simply because they are attuned to it. Thus, in Christianity the dogmatic image of Jesus Christ has never been able thoroughly to banish the image of the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

That view of the relationship between the teachings of Jesus and the writings of Marx merits very serious consideration. If that view prevails — as I believe it may — a century from now the writings of Marx may be seen as no more threatening to the teachings of Jesus than the writings of Darwin are now thought to be today.
I am not urging a political concordat between the hierarchies of the Vatican, the Kremlin, and Lambeth Palace — which if they merged, all their historical experience of centralized organization and bureaucracy could pose — it might be argued — the greatest threat to freedom of conscience the world has ever seen.
But I am saying that as the ecumenical movement gathers momentum — and if it remains a mosaic and does not become a monolith — it should extend the range of its dialogue to embrace socialists and Marxists as well as Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. And there is one compelling reason why it must.
The technology of destruction at the disposal of mankind in modern weapons and the rocketry to deliver them must now require us all to open our hearts and minds to the inescapable need for neighbourly love on a global scale and then build the social, political, and economic institutions that can express it, bringing together those who now marshal themselves under different banners of religious and political faith.
A holy war with atom bombs could end the human family for ever. I say all this as a socialist whose political commitment owes much more to the teachings of Jesus — without the mysteries within which they are presented — than to the writings of Marx whose analysis seems to lack an understanding of the deeper needs of humanity.
But untold numbers of people all over the world — and I am one of them — are now claiming the right to study all the sources of insight which they find meaningful, and reach their own personal conclusions about their significance, free from the threat of excommunication for failing to satisfy the tenets of faith laid down by any church or any party.
In that sense too the teachings of Jesus can be seen as truly revolutionary and to have spread its influence far beyond the bounds of Christendom.

About the Author

Tony Benn was a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) for forty seven years, serving as Party Chairman, Postmaster General, Minister of Technology, Secretary of State for Industry and Energy. He ran unsuccessfully for the party deputy leadership and leadership in the 1980s and was President of the Stop the War Coalition until his death in 2014

Tony Benn on the Legacy of Slavery

Tony Benn on the Legacy of Slavery

By

Tony Benn

Albert Museum in London in May 2007.
Thank you very much indeed for inviting me. May I just begin by describing how my interest in the abolition of slavery began? I learned to fly during the war in Zimbabwe, they sent RAF pilots there because it was safer than learning to fly there, than in Britain where you might be shot down.
When Zimbabwe was an English colony, Rhodesia, not a single black was allowed to vote. Cecil Rhodes was shown a land in the 1890s and seized all the land, handed it to the white farmers and in 1937, Southern Rhodesia, and laws of assembly, made it a criminal offence for an African to have a skilled job. So that interested me in the African cause and all my life I’ve worked with all the people that were involved in it.
And I’ve been interested in all the people we locked up. I met Gandhi once, we locked him up; I met Nehru, he was locked up; Mandela was locked up. I think Nkomo was locked up, certainly Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia was locked up, we locked up Nkrumah, and all the people we locked up ended their lives having tea with the Queen as head of Commonwealth countries. And so historical perspective helps a little bit.
Then I became a Member of Parliament for Bristol and, of course, Bristol was one of the great slave cities. The interesting thing about going to Bristol was it wasn’t discussable – oh no you couldn’t talk about slavery, they had all the statues of the benefactors, huge statues, who’d given money to churches and schools, who made all their money out of the slave trade. There was a very bright, black Bristolian called Paul Stephenson who led a boycott because they wouldn’t let blacks drive the buses. Now he’s persuaded Bristol to have a museum of slavery and they’re coming to terms with what’s happened. It’s quite a difficult thing because you don’t like finding you did the awful things, that you always assumed foreigners did.
And, of course, you musn’t think it’s so very long ago because I knew the son of a slave, his name will be familiar to you – Paul Robeson. He came to London in 1958, we gave him tea at the House of Commons with my dad. He’d had his passport taken away because he was supporting the colonial freedom movement, so it’s living issue, it’s not just the past and I think that’s worth remembering. Then the other thing too, is to look at Wilberforce.
Now, Wilberforce was a very interesting man. He was a Conservative, he supported Pitt, he voted for the Combination Act which made it a criminal offence for more than three people to get together to call for a trade union or political reform, and then he became a Christian and he was stirred by the injustice of it and campaigned, and that’s what we’re celebrating this year, the abolition of the slave trade. And, might I add, not the abolition of slavery, don’t think that Wilberforce brought about the abolition of slavery but only the slave trade.
And the funny thing is somebody sent me a leading article from The Economist the other day about the slave trade. Now as you know The Economist is a very responsible newspaper that everybody should read, and what it said was this – this is an edition from 1848, two years before my grandfather was born. The Economist said you can’t abolish the slave trade because there are all these ignorant blacks in Africa with nothing whatever to do, and they’re needed on the plantations of America. So, The Economist said, you should regulate the slave trade. And I thought of an organisation called Ofslave, headed by Chris Woodhead, which would name and shame slave ships where the sanitary arrangements fell below acceptable standards.
But I mention it all because, you see, we are a bit Anglo oriented. Ten million Africans were shipped, ten million of them! Many died on the way, were thrown overboard and we now claim the credit for ending it. I think that the denial of the role of the Africans themselves in ending the slave trade is something we really do have to take much more seriously. All sorts of people supported the slave trade, of course, at one time the churches thought the slave trade could be justified because the Africans could be converted to Christianity when they were slaves. It was interesting idea: you imprison them and then you persuade them that Jesus brought a message of love, but they were still slaves.
The other thing that interests me about Wilberforce and the slave trade was when slavery was abolished, which was a bit later, the government compensated the slave owners but not the slaves. So if you’d had slaves like some bishops had, you got money from the government for giving up your slave but the guys who’d been slaves got absolutely nothing at all.
It is, of course, a very old tradition, slavery’s as old as history because rich and powerful people, land owners, owned the land and they owned the workers on the land […] There were strikes by slaves in British colonies. In the 1730s, the 1760s, 1780s and the 1800s. When we talk about the role of Wilberforce – now I’m not belittling him in anyway because he was dedicated man who fought a wonderful parliamentary campaign – but in the 1780s, 27 years before that, the northern states in the United States abolished slavery. In 1787, as you’ve heard, there was the first British campaign against slavery, the Danes banished the slave trade in 1792, in 1794, after the French revolution, the revolutionary French abolished slavery and Haiti in 1804 was liberated by slaves, they just went against their owners and took over the country and liberated it from the slave trade. And so that’s the background against which you have to look at the achievements of Wilberforce, and I don’t belittle him at all. But you mustn’t think that every good thing comes from our race because we have been responsible for some of the things we now claim to have abolished.
The other thing to remember is this, it wasn’t just the black slaves, we sold white slaves to Ireland. We took convicted people and criminals and so on, and we shipped them off to Ireland as slaves. When Michael Manley, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, whom I knew very well, came to London I was asked to introduce him, which I did, and I gave a lot of examples of the slave trade and he said to me afterwards, “I’d like you to tell me more about this because I’ve got a museum of slavery in Jamaica on black slavery.” And I said, “Oh Michael that wasn’t black slavery, that was slavery in Britain in medieval times.” And so you have to think of slavery as being broader than colour though, of course, it’s identified very largely in those terms. It was therefore an economic phenomenon, not just phenomenon of lack of political democracy. And remember this, that Africa, which is still rich in gold and copper and oil, was conquered for economic reasons. Indeed Bush is now following it out with his own version of the empire, he goes to the Middle East because he wanted oil, and that’s quite straight forward.
Sir John Boyd-Orr, a very famous Nobel prize winner, once said most empires conquer for physical resources, and that was why we went there. And there’s a very interesting aspect of this that links to the movement ‘Make Poverty History.’ I think they asked the wrong question, they always say why are the poor poor? The right question to ask is why are the rich rich? Then you come to totally different conclusions. The rich are rich because they live off the backs of the poor and if that sounds very controversial to you, Adam Smith said the rich are the pensioners of the poor, the rich live off the backs of the poor. So it’s not just a racial issue, it’s a class issue, in the economic sense, and has always been that.
In this country, I come back to the Combination Act which made trade unionism illegal. Until 1834, it was illegal for people to form a union and if you were a worker in on a farm in Britain, the land owner owned the land, and he also owned the cottage. If you went to him and said, “I can’t live on the money, you’re treating me badly.” he’d get you off the farm and pinch your cottage, so you were homeless and poor. So they thought if we get together we might be able to solve it and, of course, trade unionism was illegal. So when the unions tried to form they were sent to Australia as convicts.
I’ve got an American friend who’s just been in Australia and I said, “How did you get on?” “Oh Tony,” he said, “the Aussies were great but by God,” he said, “they’re really tough.” I said, “What do you mean?” “Well,” he said, “when I applied for a visa they asked me if I had any previous convictions and I said ‘no’, is it still required?”
So, you see, it all comes together it’s all part of a bigger picture and this is what happens whenever you take an issue, it seems very narrow, you suddenly find it explodes into a million other issues which are equally interesting and important.
Now the other thing that interests me very much is the role of religion in all this, and I know the question ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ has been raised. On the internet, from which, I get a lot of very useful information, I got the other day a summary of what all the religions of the world say. Judaism says ‘what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow men’, that is the entire law, all the rest is commentary. Then Christianity, ‘all things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do even so to them.’ For Mohammad it was ‘no one of you is a believer until he desires to his brother what he desires for himself’. And the same with Brahmans, the same with Buddhists, the same with the Confucians, and that’s also what’s on every trade union banner, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’.
So you can see it all coming together as a recognition that you cannot build a society on other than on a moral basis. And that I find very interesting because nowadays, you see, religion is being used as a way of dividing us, you only have to look at what’s said now about Islam and the use of God. Bush said God told him to go to Iraq, I didn’t know God worked in the White House, but apparently he did. Then they say Moses went up Mount Siani and got Palestine allocated to the Jews, I didn’t know God was an estate agent. But the way in which you use religion to justify your power is a tremendously important question.
If you now look at it in a cultural sense, all the religions apart from people who control them, all the religions are part of our culture. I was brought up as a Christian and when I go to church I like the churches, I like seeing bishops in funny outfits. I sing hymns like ‘onward Christian soldiers marching as to war with the cross of Jesus going on before’.
Now if anyone sang ‘onward Muslim soldiers going as to war with Mohammad’s banner going,’ they’d all be locked up at once by John Reid. So you have to recognise that there is, in every religion, a culture. There’s nothing whatsoever in the culture of religion to divide one from another. The people I’m nervous of are the people who use religion to get control of us, and that is the difference.
I mentioned that I was bought up as a Christian, my mother taught me that the story in the Bible was the story of the conflict between the kings who had power and the prophets who preached righteousness, and she taught me to support the prophets against the kings. It’s got me into a lot of trouble in my life but it explained so much. Because it’s one thing to be told love your neighbours as yourself. It’s another thing to be told by a bishop, ‘if you don’t do what I tell you, you will rot in hell’ […]
When I look back is in every period of history, two flames have always been burning in the human heart, the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that you can build a better world and those two flames are really material by which we make progress. To understand that is very important, because if you don’t have some aspiration then you find yourself in a position, which I think about most of the time now – and that is how the human race is going to cope with its problems.
We live in a very remarkable period, quite unlike any other in history, when the human race has the capacity to destroy itself, and you can kill one man with a spear, a few more with a bayonet, one or two with a machine gun or a plane, but with chemical, nuclear and biological weapons it is possible to destroy the human race, that has never, ever been true before.
But it’s also the first generation in history which has the technology and the know-how and the money to solve the problems of the human race. And that’s where you really come right into the contemporary political scene, because a fraction of the cost of the war now would see that everyone in Africa with AIDs would have free drugs. A fraction of the cost of the war would see everyone in America has a health service, would protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. That is the choice.
So the question then you have to ask yourself is, well how do you change the situation? Because there are only three interesting questions in politics, what’s going on? Which is not always easy to find out. Why is it going on? Which is harder to find out. The third question is, what are you going to do about it? And if you look at the way in which it all developed, it developed really with the greatest revolution of all, far more revolutionary than the French or Russian or American revolution, it was the revolution of democracy and reason.
I mention it is because throughout the 19th century a huge change in power occurred, in the olden days all the power was in the hands of the rich. If you were rich you didn’t need a school, you hired tutors, you didn’t have a mortgage from a local authority for your castle because you owned it, you didn’t have to bother about anything else, if you were ill you hired a doctor, when you were old you were okay, you were never unemployed because you never did any work anyway, and that was the basis of society. What happened during the 19th century explains everything, I think, including the national independence movements.
When people had the vote power was transferred from the people with money to the people who didn’t have money. In 1837, when the Birmingham Corporation became law the people of Birmingham, or some of them anyway, had the vote, how did they use the vote? They used to the vote to buy with their vote what they couldn’t afford personally: municipal hospitals, municipal schools, municipal fire brigade, municipal museums, municipal art gallery and what democracy did was to transfer power from the market place to the polling station, from the wallet to the ballot.
What then happened was the whole prospect changed, that’s how the welfare state came about, of course, in the end, the idea of a National Health Service, the idea of state education, the idea, even, of a fire brigade. In the olden days there was no fire brigade, you insured your own house with an insurance company. So if your neighbour’s house burned down they didn’t bother to put that out because he wasn’t insured and that would obviously threaten your house and this idea of welfare, which is looked down upon in mockery, is on the basis that actually the interest of all of us are in common.
If you meet a diseased person your health is threatened, if you work with an uneducated person your work is threatened and so the recognition of the common interests we have in survival and prosperity was a product of democracy, and nobody really likes democracy very much, nobody in power likes democracy very much. I mean, Hitler didn’t like it, Stalin didn’t like it, the Pope doesn’t allow the clergy to elect the Pope, it’s all done by shares of cardinals whom he appoints. I can’t say I find all that much enthusiasm for democracy even in a capitalist society of where the market is everything, because the thing about having a market society is that you don’t have citizens, you only have consumers. Now to be a consumer you have to have some money, I mean homeless people in the streets of London need homes more than anybody else but as they can’t afford them they’re not consumers, and the language used to belittle collective activity is very noticeable.
Now when I look again at the future I think of what’s called ‘cultural diversity.’ When I was born it was terribly boring – they were all white, they had fish and chips, they watched cricket, a little bit of ballroom dancing. Now we’ve got such a fantastic cultural diversity in Britain. Two of my granddaughters are at a primary school in London with 77 nationalities in the school and a refugee centre in the school, so when I go and talk at the school it’s like addressing a meeting of the General Assembly [of the United Nations]. My granddaughters have got Russian friends, American friends, Malaysian friends, West Indian, for them that’s normal, that is the world we live in. It’s complete generational change because I think younger people understand it, very often much better than older people who were brought up in a different tradition.
That’s really what we have to try and, which is why I think the internet is very valuable because you get access to things which you wouldn’t necessarily find described in The Sun or The Mail. The information you get allows you to reach a judgement of your own which is independent and probably puts you in the category of the prophets against the king. So I warn you don’t use the internet too loosely or you’ll be in trouble yourself.
I mentioned the trade unions and apartheid. I spoke in Trafalgar Square in 1964 in support of a very well known terrorist and I got denounced in the tabloids. I didn’t meet him for a bit, next time I met him he had a Nobel Peace Prize and was President of South Africa. Well, look at the suffragettes who were locked up for just wanting votes for women.
The way I think progress occurs, you see, is this: to begin with is you’ve got a sensible idea like abolishing slavery or votes for women or trade unions or ending apartheid, and they ignore you. Then if you go on you’re stark staring bonkers, I’ve had a touch of that myself, then if you go on after that you’re dangerous. Then there’s a pause and then you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim to have thought of it in the first place – and that is how progress is made.
It’s made by movements, by people who understand the world, who feel a sense of commonality with other people and say, ‘why don’t we get together and do it ourselves?’ In order for that to succeed you need to have encouragement and I think encouragement is the most important quality in political leadership, because they do try, all the time, to put you down […]
I went to the Labour conference 18 months ago and the Prime Minister made a speech which I listened to and I got up to go to the loo and I collapsed. I was taken to the Brighton hospital and given a pacemaker. I had a letter from the Prime Minister saying ‘hope my speech didn’t cause it’ and I was too polite to reply.
The interesting thing was this, when I left I discovered that was the worst hospital in Britain under the league tables. Well what if you’re the nurse or a sister or a doctor or porter, what do you make of it if you’re told you work in the worst hospital in Britain?