"I think it’s very simple. If you want change you do it yourself."

Tony Benn is the longest serving Labour MP in the party’s history. His career in the House of Commons spanned 50 years, beginning in 1950 and ending in his retirement in 2001. He became a Cabinet Minister in the Labour governments of the 1960s and 70s, serving as Minister of Technology, Secretary of State for Industry and Secretary of State for Energy. Since his retirement he has been a key figure in the anti war movement, in February 2003 he travelled to Iraq to interview Saddam Hussein and in 2004 he was elected President of the Stop the War Coalition.

The following interview was conducted with SoN editors, Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes, via telephone in May 2006.

State of Nature: I want to start with the letter that you wrote to the UN and the UK Attorney General in December 2005, asking them to investigate breaches of the Nuremberg Charter and the Geneva and Hague Conventions during the Iraq War. What are the most recent developments in response to this letter?

Tony Benn: Well, to begin with I got a letter from Kofi Annan, I think you probably know that.

SoN: That’s right.

TB: Saying that it raised matters of serious concern and he sent it to the Human Rights Commissioner who also said the same. So we wrote back to them and said we’d be happy to help in any way we could in whatever investigations they undertook. The Secretary-General of course is the servant of the Security Council, so he can’t operate entirely by himself, but it certainly gave us great confidence that the issues we’d raised were important ones.

Now I did not get a reply from the Attorney General, apart from an acknowledgement so I wrote back and then I did get a letter from him saying that these matters had already been covered and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court had considered 240 communications and had concluded that there was nothing that needed to be done.

So we have now prepared a further response to him because of course there were lots of questions arising about the legality of subsequent actions, for example the use of Babylon, which is an international site, as a major military base and the bombing of Fallujah, which was a hideous war crime in itself, and we are pursuing it on that basis.

My own opinion is that the legal aspects are secondary to the political aspects because in terms of the political campaign the overwhelming majority of people now support the view that we should withdraw from Iraq and the legal arguments are continuing.

One good thing that came out of the Attorney General was that he made a statement the other day saying that Guantanamo Bay should be closed because it was a breach of international law. The Prime Minister had previously said it was just an anomaly, but the Attorney General now recognises, as the UN itself has done, that Guantanamo Bay is a gross breach of international law.

SoN: The letter is also calling to bring those responsible to account. Do you think this is likely?

TB: The way I see it, and I am not a lawyer and you’ll have to understand my perspective, is that this is a political campaign against a political decision taken by Bush and supported by Blair to invade Iraq. And if you talk to people generally, particularly those who are concerned about the cost of the war and the suffering, and those who have their own family members fighting in Iraq, their view is not based upon a technical breach of international law, their view is based on the fact that it’s wrong, that the money is wasted, that people are suffering and so on.

And therefore I’ve always seen this as a political campaign and the legal arguments can be used in a political campaign, but the likelihood that President Bush will be impeached or Mr Blair will be impeached is I think beyond the realms of possibility. But if the Prime Minister is unable to support an invasion or an attack on Iran and if similarly Bush is in difficulties over Iran and both governments have got to withdraw their troops from Iraq, that of course will be the real victory.

Tony Benn (right) speaking to Hugo Chavez in London, May 2006.
Photo - Joanna Curtis

SoN: For many people now the UN as a model of “international community” appears to have lost a lot of credibility. The US administration and its allies choose to recognise UN authority only when it suits their interests and many on the Left see it as an impotent force that can present no real obstacle to US imperial ambitions. You have said that you are a strong believer in the UN. What do you base this belief on?

TB: Well, on what it can become. I mean, for example, if I look back 200 years the British Parliament was elected by 2% of the population - all rich men. And the struggle that occurred throughout the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century led to votes for all men and women, led to the welfare state, led to the development of public services, and we have to do the same with the UN.

It’s not what it is that I find good but what it must become, and I think for example the General Assembly of the United Nations should take responsibility to check the arms trade, should elect and control the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, it should lay down standards for multinational corporations and their behaviour in Third World countries and so on.

And so it’s a potentiality, but if you don’t have a United Nations what have you got? You end up with the law of the jungle where Bush and Blair are warlords, to use the language we use so regularly in Africa. The world would be dominated by warlords. And the warlords kill ruthlessly when it’s necessary to get the resources they want, to get the power they want. And that is the way I see the UN.

SoN: We have a serious crisis of political representation in the UK, with only minor differences between the leading political parties. When the majority of people who oppose the government on key issues such as the war in Iraq have no real voice in the House of Commons how can they bring about meaningful change?

TB: How do you ever bring about political change? I mean, there is what I would call a Left pessimism and a Right cynicism, which are both completely unjustified. How did women get the vote? How did Apartheid end? How did the environment become a living issue? It became a living issue because people took it up and campaigned and campaigned and campaigned, and in the end the guys at the top had to give way.

But what you said about what’s happening to parliamentary democracy is a very interesting question, because as I mentioned a moment ago, the International Monetary Fund is not elected and they have huge power, the World Trade Organisation is not elected, the World Bank is not elected and they set the framework within which elected governments have to operate. And when I look around the western world now I can’t see much difference between Kerry and Bush. In Germany, Schroeder the Social Democrat and Merkel, who’s Germany’s Mrs. Thatcher, formed a coalition. In Italy, after a bitter conflict between Berlusconi and Prodi, Berlusconi suggested a coalition. And in Britain Blair and Cameron are much the same.

So I think what’s happening is that people feel that they are being managed and not represented. And the biggest gap in the world today is not between Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservative, it’s between the whole political establishment including the media and everybody else. And that is the thing that has to be addressed.

SoN: It seems as if the British public are moving more to the left of all the parties in Britain, in terms of the health service, education, foreign policy and so on. Do you think there is still life in the Labour Left that can take advantage of this? Or even more broadly, is there any hope for a left wing revival in British politics?

TB: For the first time in my life the public are to the left of what is called a Labour government. Now I’ve never known that happen before. Most people in Britain are against the war in Iraq, they don’t want Iran attacked, don’t want privatisation, don’t want pensioners saddled with the means test and don’t want students with a huge debt. So far from being a pessimist, I feel that the Blair government, which is not really a Labour government, it’s a sort of post Thatcherite government, is getting more and more separated from the people it’s supposed to represent and people don’t feel represented.

SoN: You have called on the anti-war movement to mobilise against a possible military strike on Iran. And yet we find that there is a sense of disillusionment in the movement due to fact that the invasion of Iraq went ahead in spite of impressive historic demonstrations...

TB: I know but you see this is what I call Left pessimism, where you always say “You’ve lost, you’ve lost, you’ve had the demonstration, it didn’t work, you did this, it didn’t work”. How long did it take to end Apartheid? I spoke in Trafalgar Square in 1964 in support of a very very well-known ‘terrorist’ and I was denounced in the media. The next time I met him he had a Nobel Peace Prize and was President of South Africa. I once met Gandhi, he was imprisoned by the British, so was Nehru, so was Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, Cheddi Jagan from British Guiana and many others and they all ended up having tea with the Queen as Heads of Commonwealth countries and the French jailed Ben Bella and he became President of Algeria. How did it happen? It was hopeless, but it happened.

SoN: Do you think though that, whether right or wrong, this disillusionment that appears to be there is going to make a mobilisation similar to the one in the period before the invasion of Iraq possible?

TB: It’s not disillusionment, it’s anger. I think the language here is so important. People say “People are apathetic, they are disillusioned”, they’re not. They’re angry that nobody listens to them and they don’t believe a word they’re told. Now anger and disbelief and mistrust are highly political, but they are not linked to the way the parliamentary system works. So don’t give up, I mean if you give up then it’s going to take us a lot longer to win.

SoN: Recent polls show that Tony Blair is the least popular Labour prime minister of the modern era. His approval rating has plummeted to 26%, his authority within the party is greatly weakened and he is under intense pressure to set a date for the handover of power. How much of this is a direct result of Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq?

TB: I think it is undoubtedly a major factor because we were misled. People in the House of Commons were told Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he could use within 45 minutes. It was not true. The Prime Minister said that he was taking the tough decision, but he took the easiest decision anyone can take in the world – to take orders from somebody stronger than you are.

So I think, to come back to your earlier question, the peace movement has played a very significant part in explaining to people that all these things happened and that we were misled. But we shouldn’t think in personal terms all the time. I’m not a believer it should just be all about individuals, because after all the House of Commons voted for the war and therefore every one of them who voted has to show responsibility. People voted for a government last year after the war and they put it there. So it’s everybody’s responsibility, and once you start abandoning politics and just talk about politicians, that switches people off even more.

SoN: But Blair and Bush have become the symbols of this war in a way, so therefore sometimes it can be a little difficult not to make it about them. And Tony Blair himself has said that God and history will judge whether he was right to go to war in Iraq, not the House of Commons but him.

TB: I think his legacy, the legacy of Bush and Blair will be this war, this hideous war, which has cost the Americans nearly $300 billion and cost 6 to 7 billion in Britain. A fraction of the money spent in Iraq could have given drugs to everyone with AIDS in Africa, America could have protected New Orleans from Katrina, or could have provided a free health service to every American.

I mean the more you think about it the more you realise the lunacy of going into a war for oil, which is what it was about. It had nothing to do with Saddam, after all he was armed by Bush’s father, and Osama Bin Laden was armed by Bush’s father, to get the Russians out of Afghanistan. It’s hypocritical, it’s unbelievable and people have died as a result.

SoN: Do you have a final message that you’d like to give to State of Nature readers?

TB: Well, I think it’s very simple. If you want change you do it yourself. All progress historically has come from below. The people at the top find life very attractive, but the discontent about injustice bubbles among the population and in every generation, in every country, in every century, two flames are burning, the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope you can build a better world. And those two flames are burning very brightly now.