";s:4:"text";s:3491:" uttered.Ed Miliband paid tribute to an "iconic figure of our age".He said: “He will be remembered as a champion of the powerless,
The great parliamentarian was by the end of the 80s characterising Britain as a state in which the extra-parliamentary struggle had to be supported because democracy was not working.
Foot managed to keep Labour in the game, and when Kinnock took over after the election the high tide of Bennism had been reached.
One on the practical level of
With Foot, Enoch Powell and a handful of others, he had the ability to command the house's attention, especially when he spoke of matters relating to its own rights and privileges. Parliament, too, had to change. his views once led The Sun newspaper to question whether he was
The failure of the City and the service sector to replace the jobs being lost to deindustrialisation and the sense of Britain becoming ungovernable by conventional means fed Benn's growing militancy.After Labour's return to power in 1974, Benn's attempt as industry secretary to force the Wilson government to implement the election manifesto was thwarted by his departmental civil servants and his cabinet colleagues. Subsequent volumes then appeared almost annually, covering the whole of his career. In both jobs he attempted to connect the actions of the government with socialism: "We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values. everyday political language even before the word the word ‘
"His grandfathers were Liberal MPs, as initially was his father, William Wedgwood Benn. Benn's radical critique of the 1964-70 Wilson government now chimed well with the militancy of the shop stewards' movement. speaker.The son of a Labour Cabinet minister who became a He is survived by their children.Benn's self-image remained stubbornly self-confident: as he once said: "It's the same each time with progress. He declared the 1983 election a triumph because never before had so many people – 27.6% – voted for a socialist programme. He was still eligible to stand as a candidate in the resulting byelection, which he won.
veered to the left in reaction to the political and economic crisis
He was one of those who went to the opposition benches with HH Asquith after the course of the first world war compelled him to resign as prime minister in 1916.Rather than stay in the Liberal party when the Asquith and David Lloyd George branches were reunified in 1923, Wedgwood Benn senior joined Labour and served as Ramsay MacDonald's India secretary (1929-31) and Clement Attlee's air secretary (1945-46). Tony Benn recorded his own obituary message for Channel 4 News. Receiving a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award with Roy Bailey
driving force behind the decision to hold the first referendum in The European commission and the establishment governed Britain. Early signs of his radicalism had come in 1954, when he joined the H-bomb national committee, and in 1957, when he introduced a Human Rights bill. All events and developments were made to fit the worldview. He will be remembered as a great parliamentarian, a great radical and a great diarist.