Tony Benn: Nigel Farage's John the Baptist?

#OTD 1975. Cabinet Ministers Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn debate leaving the EEC on TV.

Jenkins argues that Britain will have no say over how trade rules are made.

Benn argues that the country would get the trade deal it wanted “because we are their very best customer”. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/lfhSYxYV5q

— Tides of History (@labour_history) June 2, 2024

This video was posted on Twitter earlier today, and it's uncanny how close Tony Benn's arguments against Britain remaining in what was then the European Economic Community are to those used by Leave in the 2016 referendum.

He comes over as Nigel Farage's John the Baptist, while the slightly amused reference to Italy wanting to sell its wine is pure Boris Johnson. 

You may say that Benn's wish to leave room for protectionism is a world away from the economic beliefs of Brexit's most powerful backers, but many Brexit voters thought they were voting for protectionism.

But then I have taken the odd potshot at the myth of St Tony over the years.

In 2009 I devoted a my Liberal Democrat News column House Points to the hobby, pointing out that the pirate radio ships of the Sixties had gone from being a threat to the British way of life to the subject of warm nostalgia:

You would not know it from Richard Curtis’s recent film, but the minister who sank the pirate ships was Tony Benn - or Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he then called himself.

Getting into high gear, I continued:

Do the sweet young things who hang upon his words about global warming know that when a minister in the 1970s he forced through the construction of the coal-burning Drax power station?

Or take his party piece. There are five questions we should ask politicians: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?”

That is not what he said when he met Saddam Hussein in 2003: 

"I have 10 grandchildren and in my family there is English, Scottish, American, French, Irish, Jewish, Indian, Muslim blood, and for me politics is about their future, their survival. And I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?"

But it has to be admitted that Benn is good at getting his points across. Roy Jenkins does not say much in this clip, so it may be unfair to judge him on it, but there are two problems with what he does say.

The first is that accent. As Nye Bevan is supposed to have said when it was suggested to him that Jenkins was lazy:

"Lazy? Lazy? How can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?"

The second is something that is endemic on the left: too much abstraction. I'm sure the average voter could quickly be brought to understand the concept of "pooled sovereignty", but I'm not convinced they will understand it without explanation. So maybe Jenkins needed to find simpler language in the first place.

I'm reminded of the time, at the height of the campaign for a second referendum, when someone decided that having Stephen Fry discoursing on "forced perspective" was the way to convert Leavers to our cause.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say in the European Union.