Benn 10 – What Would The Levellers Do Today?

Tony Benn is a regular speaker at the annual Levellers Day event in Burford, Oxfordshire. The following is taken from the speech he made on 15th May, 1976.  As ’10 Point Plans’ go we think it’s a pretty good one

For my part, I think the Levellers would have much to say about the issues which concern us here in England today – and I have selected 10 issues which I believe would concern them.

1 The Levellers would surely concentrate their attention on the huge accumulation of financial power in our society; and the continued exclusion of working people from effective democratic power over it. They would link the present maldistribution of wealth – here and worldwide – to the maldistribution of power. They would champion all those in Britain and throughout the world who experience poverty.

2 The Levellers would view with deep suspicion the power of the military establishments to be found worldwide. These sometimes incorporate political police forces which seem to believe that they have a divine right to secrecy served by a network of spies and agents, using bribery and corruption to serve their purposes without regard to moral principles.

3 The Levellers would immediately see the relevance of industrial democracy – by workers’ control or self-management – as a natural extension of the political franchise to replace the power of the new industrial feudalism which has long established itself through the growth of giant companies.

4 The Levellers might see in the immense influence of the educational establishment, under the titular leadership of the universities, a new class of rulers in a self-perpetuating hierarchy, aiming to establish a claim to the ‘private ownership of knowledge’ which, by rights, is part of ‘the common store house’ belonging to us all.

5 The Levellers might see in the mass media a modern secular church seeking to control the minds of the people by standard sermons from television pulpits, day after day and night after night, keeping out dissenters or spokesmen for the common people, imposing a technical monopoly censorship that frustrates the right to free speech because it denies the equally important right to be heard.

6 The Levellers would uphold the rights of constituents to recall and replace their parliamentary candidates – on the same basis and for the same reason as dissenting chapels claimed the right to appoint and dismiss their ministers, and because of the inalienable sovereignty of the people which no Parliament has any right to usurp.

I imagine that, for the same reason, they would deeply suspect the law-making powers of the Brussels commissioners who are not accountable to electors with power to remove them.

7 The Levellers, and still more the Diggers, would add a new and moral dimension to the movement for conserving the earth’s limited resources by reminding man of his duty to his fellow citizens and his descendants not to squander the earth’s ‘common treasury’ because it is God’s gift to each generation in turn – a powerful argument for common ownership and a classless society.

8 The Levellers would demand a far greater public accountability by all those who exercise centralised civil, political, scientific, technical, educational and mass media power through the great bureaucracies of the world, and would call for the democratic control of it all.

9 The Levellers would warn against looking for deliverance to any elite group, whatever its origins, even if it came from the Labour movement, who might claim some special ability to carry through reforms by proxy, free from the discipline of recall or re-election. They would argue that all real reform comes from below, and that the self-confidence of the common people in organising for themselves – in their unions, trades, crafts, local communities and civil and human rights groups, enlarging their own horizons by their own efforts, distilling their own wisdom from their own experience, and breeding their own collective leadership in the process – offers the only real guarantee of advance.

10 The Levellers would argue passionately for free speech and make common cause, worldwide, with those who fight for human rights against tyrants and dictators of all political colours, not sparing Stalinists who falsely seek to justify uniformity as a necessary defence for socialism.

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