Week in Review: The passing of an era
It will inevitably go down as a tragic week for the left. But in reality it was a shared tragedy, one for those who still believed that politics should be motivated by conviction.
On Tuesday, RMT leader Bob Crow died suddenly from a suspected heart attack. He was followed on Friday by Tony Benn, the figurehead of the far-left in Britain and a warmly-regarded patrician figure in England's political culture.
It was portrayed as the passing of an era, an era when trade unions had the membership and ideology to be a force in society, an era when socialism was not a word to be shunned but embraced.
In truth, it was nothing of the sort. If Benn and Crow had been the dinosaurs their detractors claimed, their deaths would not have prompted the coverage they did. Crow would not have made a name for himself in effective industrial action and Benn would not have filled lecture halls around the country.
But the passing of these two men did throw into sharp relief how uninteresting, robotic and fundamentally empty our current crop of politicians have become.
The video clips of both men which instantly did the rounds on Twitter following their deaths spoke volumes, with resonance far beyond the actual content of what they were saying.
The first – and most worrying – thing that hit home about Crow was his accent: this thick, unapologetic working class London accent, delivered softly but precisely. It is deeply troubling to realise that this accent was more common in the news broadcasts of the '70s than it is today.
For Benn it was the same but opposite. His upper class accent, the left-over remnant of a life the establish tried to force on him but which he rejected, contrasted sharply with the constant call for democratic socialism to which he dedicated his life. It was proof that people often fight for what is right rather than just their own interests, that they think outside of the limitations of their class or their fortune.
But it was not just their accents which caught the attention, nor even what they were saying, but rather how they said it. What stands out in those clips is their way of expressing themselves, the evocative phrases they used – not knowingly, but as the side-product of a lively and active mind.
"You're a dinosaur," Jeremy Paxman tells Crow at one point.
"Well, at the end of the day, they was around for a long while," Crow replies.
In an interview with US polemicist Michael Moore, Benn talks about the lessons learned in World War Two. "If we can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people," he says.
The expressions are the precise opposite of phrases about David Cameron being "out of touch with ordinary people" or Labour "failing to mend the roof when the sun was shining". They are not the result of focus groups or the product of a mind which needs to be told what it thinks by party HQ. They are not misleading metaphors, the type that fall to dust when you look at them too closely. They are the products of minds which are thinking.
Crow and Benn were independent thinkers. It is not as if they did not take a position. They were proudly part of a movement, a socialist trade union movement. But they came to their own conclusions about issues within that movement. They were not the playthings of party whips.
These were men of principle, but not men of dogma. And you could hear it in the way they talked. The most remarkable thing about those interviews is that they are listening. They are not appearing with a message they are intent on putting across. They are listening and then replying. The fact this is remarkable is the real tragedy.
There is a feeling that we may not see their like again, that we are doomed to a period in which politicians without character or backbone inundate our national debate, ever more robotic and disconnected from their principles with each passing generation.
Can one imagine a single current politician whose passing would be marked with the same respect and admiration we saw this week? Perhaps Nigel Farage. At a push you might mention Ken Clarke.
For all the talk of how it is electoral suicide for a party to abandon the centre ground, or show ill-discipline, the deaths of Crow and Benn showed how desperate people are for the politics of conviction.
