TODAY marks the centenary of the birth of Tony Benn, one of the most significant figures in the history of British socialist politics.

Benn was the spearhead of the movement to establish the Labour Party as a radical anti-capitalist force in the 1970s and early 1980s, posing the only real alternative to emerging Thatcherite neoliberalism as the socio-political post-war “consensus” disintegrated.

He came within an inch of winning the deputy leadership of the party in 1981, when Michael Foot was leader and the Thatcher government was under enormous pressure, in the first Labour elections to be held under the electoral college system, which enfranchised the membership at large and the trade union affiliates.

The campaign was the culmination of the entwined processes of democratising the Labour Party and moving its policies to the left.  His narrow defeat by Denis Healey initiated a right-wing counter-revolution which eventually culminated in Tony Blair’s New Labour.

Benn was a giant of the movement. He first attracted national attention by securing a change in the law to allow him to renounce his peerage when he inherited it on his father’s death.  He was determined to remain a member of the House of Commons instead, which he did for 47 years, in Bristol and then Chesterfield.

A conventional minister in the first Wilson government, he became steadily more radical amid the militant trade union struggles of the early 1970s, championing the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders sit-in among others.

It was the start of a growing appreciation of the importance of extra-parliamentary mobilisation. He placed his outstanding oratorical skills at the service of socialist and anti-war mass movements from then until his death in 2014. He served as the first president of the Stop the War Coalition.

In the Callaghan government he led Cabinet opposition to the cuts in public spending demanded by the International Monetary Fund, championing an alternative economic strategy instead of the 1976 turn which marked the first beginnings of neoliberalism in Britain.

Tragically, he lost that Cabinet battle and Labour marched steadily on towards attacking working-class living standards, confronting the trade unions and ultimately electoral defeat.

After Labour left office he became the focal point of socialist hopes for a break with the dismal policies of the Labour right, and also of the hatred of the mass media and the Establishment generally, which spared no effort in demonising him.

Despite this, he retained a charm and a democratic demeanour, qualities which had the unintended consequence of making him a “national treasure” in retirement, and no longer a threat to the ruling class.

Benn encouraged a flowering of socialist debate in the midst of the campaigning. Not himself a Marxist — indeed, he was rather ignorant of the subject — he nevertheless was happy to work with socialists of all persuasions and got speedily bored by sectarianism. 

His own politics combined reverence for the British radical tradition, a deepening commitment to popular democracy — including in the economic sphere — and an international approach informed by the utopianism of the immediate post-war period and strong opposition to imperialist wars.

He was a long-standing friend of, and sometime columnist for, this newspaper.

By skills, temperament and experience he was better suited to seek the leadership of the country than almost any other figure on the left. 

Had he lived a little longer he would have been overjoyed to see Jeremy Corbyn elected Labour leader and would have offered a lot of advice otherwise unavailable as the storm broke over Corbyn’s head, as it once had over his.

“He encouraged us” was his preferred epitaph. He did.

On his centenary, salute his memory.