BEATRIX CAMPBELL author of Sweet Freedom and a journalist on the weekly City Limits. It dealt with major questions strategy for the Labour Party, the women's movement, and Socialist Action is reprin- -ting the first part of the interview as we think it deserves a circulation well outside don.
Beatrix Campbell: You've said on several occasions that you're aware of why movements emerged outside Labourism like disarmament and feminism. argued that now is the time for them to return to their natural home, Labour.
Tony Benn: No, I've never said that. Absolutely never said that. What I said was these movements ought to be able to affiliate to us, like the miners or workers. The idea of an alliance of the labour movement theme I've been on for 15 years. I've never said anybody should close down an organisation and join the Labour Party.
BC: I didn't suggest that — the reason I ask is because people in the Labour Party see it as the centre of alliances.
TB: The labour movement is. BC: But the labour movement and the Labour Party represent corporate interests...
TB: What do you mean? BC: The Labour Party is the creation of organised workers. TB: Yes.
BC: Its function was to represent them at the political level. who was in those organisations?
It's only a particular stratum of the working changed radically not least... TB: This is the Eric Hobsbawm argument. I personally think all this analysis of a fundamental change which everything is different, is designed to demoralise and defeat. This idea that a statistical examination of the change in the makeup of the working class, including the entry of women into class organisations, has somehow changed the ball game, is wrong. BC: It's interesting down to Hobsbawm. Feminism is a force on the left, it's formidable but it's had to fight for its life in the Hobsbawm may clock on about, as it happens he's not a notorious supporter...
TB: He's a bitter critic of the Labour left...
BC: Hang on a sec...
TB: The truth is he's a member of a party (the Communist Party) that candidates against the Labour Party. He's covering a shift from the left to the right.
Then he says maybe we've got to do is join with bitterly anti-socialist people, the SDP, in the guise of an anti-Thatcher alliance. And then this whole idea of Thatcherism in Marxism Toto London of LonYou've transport But That's TB: Well of course she is, that working you put it movement. Sun all over the place...
what it's but they do them voluntarily. what Times rolled into one Times they killed it...
Sun? Labour women campaign for democracy day is a complete mistake. What's wrong with Britain is capitalism BC: But isn't Thatcherism a parHeath was a member of the SDP - they've governed Britain since BC: But it's a different kind of BC: But what does that tell you? TB: That for the first time in many years we now have a party them. Instead of sending the Army all over the place, send the BC: But the workers buy the Sun. People may do the wrong things TB: Actually, the entire British BC: Does that explain why Joe TB: But take the Daily Herald, it had a circulation as big as the the Telegraph, advertisers wouldn't advertise so BC: But why do people buy the TB: They can buy what they like but the fact is the Sun is financed BC: I don't know times I've asked you now why if we don't know why then there's a terrifying distance between us and them. TB: But what you haven't turned your mind to is that the Sun is a subsidised newspaper, and if it proper cover price they after ere 1944 Educatin women. Act, have experiences qualitativelong tradition fought for by our own working class movement for TB; It didn't fight for it, that was the inherited tradition...
BC: That assumes they were only victims of their own past. Can I BC: That being the case, we have policies it produces. If you believe a women's place is to bring up babies, then you don't believe in TB: But who believes that in the …know haven't met them, maybe because you never talk to them about those issues. TB: Of course I've met them. But if you accept that the conflict between women's interests and interests of the old male trade union movement is so fundamental you are splitting the only force that could beat the major system and simultaneously other questions.
BC: We're already split. TB: Then we're finished. BC: So how do we change it? TB: By supporting the women's movement party. That's what we've BC: We have no party which has policies that, policy, our social security system and our wage system, adquately reflects There power-holding another problem the left has is that the working class is a subordinate class...
TB: But that motivated the Labour Party in the four years '79 to '83. we were not leaders of the elected by a secret ballot of the Ine male-dominated Labour Party. We were going to let everybody the constituencies very things which go to the heart of the matter things support.
BC: And how does this bear on the problem of how we create politics within the working class we Have IU clean Led...
BC: Why breached.
take on these gulf.
outside the done.
in terms of social changes in the working formidable institutions, but very question We decided prepared to have Parliamentary - the unions and - vOle. These these were the Hobsbawm says lost us that transforms it from a suborhad no control over who their BC: The trade union block vote was still rolled out like a B-52 to the question: is the problem with unions shouldn't have such in fluence, or that the balance with that the trade unions have a less sensitive democratic mechanism?
TB: Isn't the process that went on in the Labour Party something we trade unions? That's beginning to my lifetime. But you have to keep your spirits up, if you don't have hope they won't try and if they don't try we're finished and the would be if they could persuade people that the labour movement was so racist and sexist that it TB: Well you have to keep hope BC: We're having a sort-out in the moment and it's a sort-out have, we've got to up the movement. Democratisation of the Labour Party was part of that.
TB: It you're saying there's an inescapable gulf that can't be bridg.
use the word inescapable? People might be saying there is a gulf and it can be TB: Well I never said there isn't a BC: Let's change tack.
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Socialist Action 27 January 1984 During the last ten years
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