Little Benn

Tony Benn was right about Europe when Margaret Thatcher was wrong. And if the 1979 Election had not intervened, then he would have given effect to his scheme to do with Britain's oil revenue what Norway has done with hers, thereby giving herself the highest per capita income in the world. That could have been Britain. Benn's Britain.

But while he was Energy Secretary, Benn closed so many pits that there were not enough left at the end for his record ever to be equalled (as Education Secretary, Thatcher did the same with the grammar schools). And he has spent 30 years consorting with Stalinists, Trotskyists, fellow-travellers and others a very long way indeed from his own background in the world of Liberal grandees who joined the nascent Labour Party and helped to build it. Michael Foot came from the same stable and managed to avoid such associations, at least anything like as closely or as habitually.

So it says a very great deal that Benn has endorsed Ed Miliband. The presence of both of his old friend Ralph Miliband's sons on the ballot encapsulates perfectly the takeover of the Labour Party, well within 20 years, by a subculture defined by its vitriolic hatred of that party, by an almost complete ignorance of it, and by an utter incomprehension of, combined with a pathological distaste for, most of its Fabian and all of its non-Fabian roots: Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and so on. Nor does Ed Balls stand in any of those traditions, never mind understand them all, value them all, and draw on them all. He has never so much as heard of at least some of them.

Such MPs as have still heard of, do still draw on, do still value, do still understand, and do still stand in those traditions have nominated John McDonnell. But he is not one of them. He is not going to win. And he is probably not going to make it onto the ballot, not least due to the vanity of Diane Abbott. They and everyone else need to get the message: taking advantage of electoral reform, but even if that were not the context, it is time to start again.