![]() ![]() Longevity on its own isn’t necessarily a virtue, of course - although the span of his experience did mean that Benn met Gandhi (his father was secretary of state for India at the time, and Benn loved to cite the Mahatma’s comment on western civilization: that “it would be a good idea”) and Ramsay MacDonald as a child, and as a young man served alongside Aneurin Bevan, the architect of Britain’s welfare state. Two decades later, he lost his seat in the 1983 election, after the constituency he had represented for more than 30 years was abolished, but returned to Parliament the following year in a by-election for the seat of Chesterfield, which he continued to represent as long as he remained an MP. He had no intention of sitting in the House of Lords - a chamber he subsequently described as “the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians” - and successfully pushed for legislation that enabled him to renounce the title. In between, there were two hiatuses, the first when his father died in 1960 and Benn automatically inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate. ![]() He was 25 at the time, and when he resigned from the House of Commons in 2001, Benn famously noted that he was doing so in order to “spend more time on politics.” Among Labour members of Parliament in Britain, Tony Benn stood out not only because of his eloquence and wit as an orator but because he held on to the increasingly quaint notion that the party, when in power, ought to implement the policies on the basis of which it had contested the previous election.īenn, who died last Friday at the age of 88, sat in Parliament for 50 years - beginning in 1950, when he won the seat of Bristol South-East vacated by Sir Stafford Cripps. ![]()
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