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Bevan  re-visited

966   30 March 2004  

What is
Tony Benn for?

Indeed, what are any retired politicians for?  It takes a huge intellectual effort (as I can testify) to put the past behind you, and conceive a realistic image of the future. Yet in making today's political judgments, that future image is of decisive importance. However instructive a study of history may be, the past can very easily get in the way,  The greatest political asset is an open mind, open to the ebb-and-flow of current events.  Roy Hattersley's nostalgic musings make it more difficult, rather than less, to chart the Labour Party's future.  Tony Benn is a one-man sentimental Trip Down Memory Lane, and Ted Heath seriously confuses the issues facing the Tories. They are all re-living their glory days, of greater influence and relevance. 

My own position, as a retired failed politician, is quite different.  I simply ask myself - what can a "mature" gent do, to further his Party's cause?  And I have mapped out my own Sixfold Path.

This is how I think I can best contribute to The Cause.

Help to organise political projects - EC Member, Fabian Society, Fabian Convenor for Wales - organising Conferences, political meetings, and political study-tours to Strasbourg, Berlin, Beijing and Shanghai - I do not work within the Party itself, because the Wales Labour Party will not open its doors to me - all power-bases are parochially spoken for;

Champion unpopular radical causes - only 8 (eight) Labour MPs openly advocate the human-rights cause of drugs legalisation - all the others are sitting on the electoral fence, terrified to move - my obsession with company law reform is in the same category, although the explanation there is ignorance, rather than primal electoral fear - I also favour replacing Redundancy Payments with a universal form of Adjustment Pay, but no MP at all has adopted that...

Pursue public-service non-political charitable causes (as I do, with my own charities created to promote public libraries, public loos, and refugee reception);

Help with fund-raising, both for the Party and for charitable good causes - which I do NOT do much of, but feel I ought to - others are far more assiduous, and more skilled at the grinding process, than I am;

Formulate new political ideas, where the political establishment seem to lack the initiative (e.g. my "community interest company"-idea will soon pass into legislation, and I am organising a new "Questor" profession, to supplement barrister, solicitors, and legal executives.)

That is my prescription, for politicians of advancing years.  Forget about being Prime Minister (Ted Heath is probably right, that ideally the job needs a Forty-something) - and do not try to impose your perceptions upon the imagination or forward-thinking of the young. 

But even those qualifications, there is a lot to do...

967  ---------  2004  

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