In a recent email to the rest of this blog’s editors, Jacob requested, in his usual forthright fashion, that we refrain from writing ‘pseudo-insightful piece[s] based around new years’ resolutions’, so I’m not going to do that. However, because it’s Boxing Day (at the time of writing), because I’m full of too much wine and unhealthy food, and most of all because I’m frankly a lazy fucker, I’m going to do the next worst thing: my predictions for the world of politics in 2010. If you think I’m wrong about any of the following, by all means say so. I freely admit most of this is sheer guesswork, with occasional instances of stating the bleeding obvious. (But if any of it turns out to be right I’m still going to crow about it for weeks).

In the months leading up to the election, Labour will start sounding a lot more leftwing in an effort to shore up their core vote. They’ll bring out a raft of populist policies aimed at boosting their share of the vote, but it won’t be enough, and the Tories will win the general election. And yes, I realise that isn’t exactly the boldest of forecasts, so let’s be a bit more specific: the Tories will get a majority of between 50 and 100, the Lib Dems will lose seats but not so catastrophically that they get rid of Clegg, and Labour will be badly hurt but not wiped out like the Conservatives were in 1997; Brown and the rest of the government are obviously pretty unpopular, but at the same time my hunch is that there isn’t enough love for Cameron and friends for them to get a landslide. Caroline Lucas won’t become the Greens’ first MP in Brighton Pavilion, though she’ll probably come close. Galloway will be unlucky too: Bethnal Green and Bow will revert to Labour once he leaves, and he’ll split the traditional Labour vote in Poplar and Limehouse just enough to let the Tories in.

In the election aftermath, Brown will resign (yes, I know, big surprise again), and he’ll give a resignation speech which sets an all-time record for mentions of the words ‘Britain’ and ‘British’, with ‘values’ and ‘duty’ following close behind. Now that they’re sure he’s on his way out, the mainstream media will be really nice about both the speech and the man himself. A mob of pundits will gather to wax lyrical in print and on air about all his good points that were so often overlooked and downplayed by…well, those same pundits, as it happens, but never mind. David Miliband, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman and one or both of Jon Cruddas and John McDonnell will stand for party leader. Ed Miliband will look like standing but will stand aside at the last minute and back his brother. Harriet Harman will be unable to come up with any substantial reason why anyone should vote for her other than her lack of a Y chromosome, and the rightwing press will once again paint this as evidence of her radical man-hating feminist nature, rather than simply evidence that she’s a technocratic New Labour drone whose sex is the only thing that distinguishes her from the majority of senior figures in her party, and who – unfortunately – long ago lost touch with anything remotely resembling radical feminism. David Miliband will win the leadership race, and be instantly immortalised as Harry Potter by every unimaginative editorial cartoonist in the land. Jack Straw will come in second despite having less charisma than the common cold (or Harriet Harman). Rising Labour star Chuka ‘definitely not the British Obama’ Umunna will win his seat in Streatham pretty comfortably, and probably get a shadow ministerial brief.

Once in power, the Tories will make lots of noise about eliminating waste in government and cutting public sector fatcats’ pay, then slash and burn everything they can get away with. Budgets for the NHS and schools will probably get off pretty lightly (too easy to mount photogenic anti-cuts campaigns that make the government look bad), but welfare, higher education and anything to do with rehabilitation in the penal system will get hit hard. Immigration policy won’t change much, but the Daily Mail’s hysteria about it will die down a bit. Spurious and unpleasant stories about benefit-cheating single mothers will increase in volume to make up for it, helped along the way by the Tories’ ‘pro-family’ policies (tax subsidies to convince unhappy married couples to stay together – the case for ‘family’ legitimately meaning anything other than Mum, Dad and a couple of apple-cheeked kids will be set back by decades). The recession will deepen and unemployment will rise, thanks to the Tories’ spending cuts, with all the consequences you’d expect – rising crime, increasing urban decay, and so on.

In the wider world, nothing much will continue to happen in the fight against climate change. The pool of deniers will get smaller and people – even Telegraph readers – will slowly pay them less and less attention, but no meaningful action will be taken by any government, as they’ll all be waiting for the others to do something, and the prospects for concerted multilateral action look pretty damn bleak after Copenhagen. There’ll probably be at least one big jump in oil prices for some reason, though it’s hard to guess exactly what. A storm that wrecks some big refineries? Industrial action by hauliers or oil rig workers? Terrorism? Take your pick. Whichever it is, once it happens any worries about climate change in the higher echelons of government will be sidelined as the rush to exploit new sources of fossil fuels (in the Canadian tar sands, in the Arctic and so on) will intensify. The environmental protests will be stepped up in response, but they probably won’t do enough. The old standbys of war, disease and famine will continue to kill millions before their time, and civilisation will continue to lurch towards collapse. Happy New Year.

Working class universalism is not enough. Labour does not deserve our unwavering loyalty

Power to the people!

It’s Friday evening. I should be out partying or down the pub. Instead I’m sitting in front of my computer, wondering what wondrous topic to opine upon for my column. I’ve scoured the news. David Cameron’s doing God and Boris, hopes for a climate change deal this year are looking scandelously dismal, British soldiers are getting shot in Afghanistan and American soldiers are getting shot at home. But what’s really caught my attention tonight has been the debate on Though Cowards Flinch which emerged from an article Guy Aitchison wrote for The Third Estate on Power2010. The discussion on democratic reform, whilst interesting in and of itself, is not really what’s piqued my interest in this thread, rather the disagreements on left wing organisation within and without the Labour Party.

I very rarely get involved in internal left-wing organisational disputes anymore. Partly because, despite their utility to a point (and it is a definite point), they bore the hell out of me. And this is speaking as someone who considers themselves switched on. For the wider public, sectarianism is to socialism as talking about your ex is to sex. It’s a turnoff. More crucially, however, these sorts of debates in the end only serve to distract us from our common goals, our common enemies, and the wider issues facing us in a very unjust world. While we’re bickering about the best way to rally the British workers to our cause, Iraqi civillians are getting blown up, Afghanistan’s tearing itself apart, kids are slaving away in sweat shops, Palestinians are having their homes knocked down, the ice caps and glaciers are melting and David Cameron’s doing God. And Boris.

Just this once, however, I’m going to throw in my two Euro cents. The impetus for this is a comment by Carl Packman in response to my damnation of the Labour Party and everything it stands for these days.

I see what you’re saying Salman, but take something that Mark Fischer said, when he gave a lecture on Marxism recently at Eton: ‘I assured the audience that the whole point of Marxists’ identification with the working class was its universalism.’ The very reason British Marxists should remain tied to the Labour party, and not join fringe yoke like SWP, or any of the other Trot splits, is because the party is historically linked to the Labour movement, and is henceforth the site of working class universalism. New Labour neo-liberalism is its inappropriate thorn, those careerists should not be vindicated by socialists jumping ship.

I tend to avoid discussing Marxism in 19th (or indeed 20th) century terms anymore. The last time I used the words bourgeoisie and proletariat were in an essay on The German Ideology. I believe many of Marx’s ideas remain fundamentally relevant to the modern world, but the modern world is dynamic and disjunctive and theory must remain equally adaptable in its adoption. Creationists, after all, are laughed at in modern Europe. Christians who have successfully incorporated Darwinism into their world view remain part of relevant discourse. The reason I personally feel this point warrants discussion however, is because it’s a debate I’ve had with Reuben many times. It’s a very old idea and one that has never failed to leave me feeling cold.

No political party reserves the right to go unchallenged. And no left-wing organisation deserves the right to be reified, to become a concrete fact in and of itself, to demand the unwavering loyalty of the workers regardless of its political positions. If that party is not the right vehicle for change, we should not be in it. I simply cannot accept that because the Labour party was once the locus for progressive working class political activity that it should always be and will always be, irrespective of its current leadership and its present policies. That is the political equivalent of Creationism. It relies on nothing more than blind faith. Not least the faith that New Labour – a neo-liberal, neo-conservative, repressive war machine that, by gutting the Labour movement and accepting the basic tenets of Thatcherism has done far more damage to the country and the world than the Iron Lady ever could -  is simply a transient thorn. It isn’t. It’s been here for the best part of two decades and will remain for the forseeable future. Labour may be heading for a spell in opposition, but the fight against Cameron as he does God and Boris won’t be led by the old class warriors. It will be led, most likely, by David Miliband. Or another obsequious, spineless, supine, Blairite clone with a pretty face and ugly politics.

And it is precisely this kind of faith-based thinking which will continue the New Labour project long after Brown’s government has faded to a dim, uncomfortable and embarrassing memory.  New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very bourgeois (look what you’ve made me do!) architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes.

The workers of Venezuela once owed their loyalty to the loosely social democratic Acción Democrática party. Indeed their largest trade union remains linked it it. But AD was not the right vehicle for a country that desperately needed change. That’s why Chavez rose to fill a gap in political representation, without any reliance on historical links or organisational ties, because he is the right vehicle and the right voice at the right time. That time is now. Parties cannot just be viewed in terms of their history. A week’s a long time in politics and a decade’s even longer. We have to look at their policies here and now and make informed decisions about the change they are likely to bring. Otherwise we’re betraying our own principles, all in the name of some ideological committment to a homogenous, united, organised, class-conscious working class of the last century that thanks to Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, no longer exists.

In an exclusive interview with The Third Estate, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg sets out his vision for change

Nick Clegg

It can’t be easy, being the leader of Britain’s third major political party. Caught between a disintegrating New Labour and a resurgent Conservative Party waiting for its coronation, convincing the British public that what you have to say can make a difference to their lives is an uphill struggle from the start. Nick Clegg, however, is a man of firsts. Elected to the European Parliament in 1999, he became the first ever Liberal Democrat parliamentarian in the East Midlands, and the first Liberal since 1931. Ten years later, MP for Sheffield Hallam and Lib Dem leader, Clegg has his eyes on Gordon Brown’s job. “Let me tell you why I want to be prime minister. It’s because I want to change our country for good,” he said at last month’s party conference as he attempted to position the Liberal Democrats to oust Labour as the dominant force in progressive politics for the first time in almost a century. On the back of the conference, as Parliament returns from recess and we prepare to enter a general election year, I quizzed Clegg on some of the big questions facing his party and whether or not his policies in the current economic climate can truly be considered progressive.

Grabbing headlines when you’re a bronze medallist often means you have to shout louder than the rest. And it was Nick Clegg’s call for “savage cuts” last month which became the buzzword for the conference season. I ask him how it is possible to reconcile these kinds of cuts in public spending with the assertion that the Lib Dems are poised to replace Labour as the true progressive force in British politics. Surely retrenchment has always been the antithesis of social justice? “Politics is about priorities,” he says. “Simply spending money doesn’t make you progressive; it’s about what you spend it on. This government has radically enlarged the amount of money spent by the state, but the gap between rich and poor has grown. There’s nothing very progressive about a country in which a child born in the poorest area of Sheffield will die a full fourteen years earlier than one born down the road in the wealthiest part. So it is right to look at the money government spends and work out if we can use more of it to help those who need more support.”

One area in which the Lib Dems certainly have picked up the ball dropped a long time ago by Labour is in their opposition to nuclear weapons. In his youth, Tony Blair was an active member of CND. In his middle age, he presided over the multi-billion pound decision to renew Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. “What’s progressive about renewing Trident – spending billions on a system that doesn’t protect the country from the modern threats we face?” Clegg argues. “We could put that money into helping people on the lowest incomes.”

But are the Liberal Democrats really willing to commit the money necessary to help people on the lowest incomes? One of the party’s most popular policies amongst students of all backgrounds has been its opposition to tuition fees. “I believe tuition fees are wrong, I believe they need to be abolished,” Nick Clegg told the party conference, shortly before saying that they had to be realistic about whether doing so would be affordable given the country’s current debt and fuelling speculation that the Lib Dems were planning to axe one of their core progressive policies. Given that improved access to education is vital for long-term economic growth, I ask Clegg, should we really be backing away from doing the right thing just because it’s easier now?

“None of these choices are easy, at any time,” he says. “But we’ve got to be straight with people about what can be afforded right now. I’ve set out a radical programme that would make our society fairer, and give every child – no matter their background – the best chances in life. We know that at the moment a poor, bright child will be overtaken by a better off, less intelligent child by the time they’re seven years old. So we have to get in there right at the beginning, with smaller class sizes for 5-7 year olds, and extra support for children from the poorest backgrounds. We would give schools more money for taking on children from poorer families and that big injection of cash would make sure everyone had the best start in life. Then more children from disadvantaged backgrounds would have the opportunity to go to university later on. And yes, I want to get rid of the tuition fees system too – it’s just a question of when.”

Meritocracy is not exactly Marxism, but it is an ideal to which most left-of-centre MPs believe we should aspire. Are the Lib Dems doing enough, however, to distinguish themselves from the other main parties? “I think we have distinguished ourselves very substantially by setting out the radical, progressive programme for change that I’ve been talking about,” Clegg says. I ask him why, then, the party is failing to capitalise on the deep dissatisfaction with the government. Labour suffered its worst defeat in almost a century at the recent European elections. But despite the wars, privatisations and crises, and despite the Lib Dems emerging from the expenses scandal as the cleanest party, why was it that they saw their share of the vote fall by 1.2 percent?

“Of course it would have been great to win more votes in the European Elections,” Clegg says. “But just look at the local elections which took place on the same day. We pushed Labour into a devastating third place, and we now control more big cities outside London than either of the other parties: Bristol, Sheffield, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Cambridge – they’re all Liberal Democrat cities, and I could name more. And in places like Bedford, where voters chose a new mayor just the other day, people are realising that Cameron isn’t offering real change at all. In an election where Labour came fifth, the Tories didn’t win – we beat them. In all these parts of the country we’re showing the way we treat power, dispersing it to the people, using it to cut crime, and regenerate areas that have wanted for attention for so long. People see the difference Liberal Democrats make in these places and they vote for us time and again.”

Smart, young, stylish, Oxbridge educated, leader of an opposition party, Clegg is keen to distinguish himself from Cameron as the voice of change in British politics. It was David Cameron who claimed that there was “barely a cigarette paper” between their two parties when he called for “one national movement that can bring real change” – broaching the idea of a Lib-Con coalition should his party fail to win a majority next year. Clegg was having none of it, however, describing the Conservative leader as a “con man” and attacking his hypocrisy on civil liberties. But how would a Liberal Democrat government under Nick Clegg reverse the alarming erosion of civil liberties and human rights that has taken place under New Labour?

“We’ve published a Freedom Bill, which shows how we’d repeal thirty years of Labour and Conservative authoritarian legislation,” Clegg says. “That Bill would restore the right to silence, which the Tories took away; it would bring back jury trials, which Labour have tried so hard and so often to curtail, and it would stop government storing DNA from people who’ve not been convicted of any crime. On day one, we’d scrap identity cards – along with the Government’s massive National Identity Register. It’s an enormous, expensive incursion on our civil liberties; a total inversion of the relationship between citizen and state, where we have to account for ourselves to the government, not the other way round.” Clegg clearly doesn’t think that a cigarette paper is all that separates his policies from Cameron’s. “The Conservatives’ commitment to this kind of reform is just paper thin. I don’t think anyone should take them seriously on the rights of the citizen while they retain their commitment to abolish the Human Rights Act.”

"The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict."

But are Lib Dem commitments on human rights and civil liberties sufficient to see them running against the pack of British politics? I remember marching against the war in Afghanistan in November 2001. Back then, only a handful of MPs opposed the invasion, and only 12% of the country was against it. Eight years later, with Afghanistan in a worse state than ever and British casualties on the rise, opposition to the ongoing conflict is not such a lonely position when it comes to voters, even though a consensus remains amongst Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems on the need for a continued British presence in the country. The Lib Dems were widely praised for being the only major party to oppose the war in Iraq, but with the presence of foreign troops arguably exacerbating the instability of a country that has never in its history been successfully occupied, I ask Clegg if now is the time to take a principled stance against the war in Afghanistan too.

“We have taken and are taking a principled and practical approach to Afghanistan,” Clegg says. “The weekly pictures of soldiers being returned home to grieving families should give everyone pause for thought about the merit and the purpose of this conflict. But I want our troops to return when the time is right, with their heads held high, knowing they’ve made a real, long-term difference both to Afghanistan, and to Britain’s security.” Clegg’s approach, however, is not simply a military one. “The Government has a responsibility to our troops, now, to advance a political surge alongside the military surge; the Karzai Government clearly lacks the support of the Afghan people, and it is that among other things which is exacerbating instability. I’ve been calling on the Prime Minister for some time now to press for a Government of National Unity in Afghanistan, so that we can start to divert this conflict off the road of failure. Without that kind of reconciliation between the different interest groups in Afghanistan, we cannot hope to succeed.”

As a long-time opponent of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s a position I can’t subscribe to, but Clegg’s appraisal of the situation is refreshingly honest for a politician sitting on one of Parliament’s front benches. And it is on the question of honesty in politics that I turn to finally, raising, in the spirit of the organisation itself, a question suggested to me by Guy Aitchison of the Power2010 campaign. At the height of the expenses crisis, Nick Clegg responded to David Cameron and Gordon Brown’s attempts to position themselves as democratic reformers by pointing out that the Lib Dems alone had consistently called for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system. Power2010 has received nearly 2000 submissions from members of the public beyond Westminster who also want democratic reform. But what is Clegg doing to mobilise people’s anger with the way we are governed beyond engaging in the very routines of Westminster village politics that puts them off in the first place?

“Well, it would be odd if we didn’t use the platform that Westminster gives Liberal Democrat MPs to make it clear where we stand on political reform,” Clegg says. “We’ve always favoured a much more open, transparent and responsive system of government. And whether it’s freedom of information or the way in which MPs get elected, we’ve always led the way in calling for change. The others just lag behind, and – as we’ve seen after 12 years with Labour – they see constitutional change as a sort of refuge from other political crises, running to talk about it when they’re in trouble and drifting back into their establishment ways the second they think they’re out of the woods.”

As a party that has always been held back by the first-past-the-post electoral system, it is, perhaps, natural that the Lib Dems alone should remain consistent to their message on democratic reform. “For us, changing the way politics is done is a central part of what we’re here to do,” Clegg says. “But you’re right: speaking up in Westminster isn’t enough. That’s one of the reasons I meet people every week in town and village halls around the country. People can come along and ask me, to my face, anything and everything they like; believe me, they do too! One of the great things about Power2010 is that it’s asking for your ideas, from people well beyond the bubble at Westminster. I’m really looking forward to reading what people come up with after November 30th. Politicians don’t know it all, and we have to ask people directly if we’re to know what they want.”

Wisest is he who knows he does not know, goes the old Socratic belief. But philosophers are not kings. Nick Clegg is the third most likely person to be Prime Minister next year in a country that is still a two-party state. Until we see the kind of far-reaching democratic reform that he touches upon, that will not change. And change is what it’s all about. All politicians are either gamekeepers or gardeners and Nick Clegg clearly wants to be seen as the latter. Whether he has done enough to convince a public hungry for politicians to be the change they want to see in the world, only time and an election will tell.

To many of my generation, who were born in Thatcher’s Britain and whose politics were shaped by the stark reminder one morning in September 2001 that history was far from over, Tony Benn is a hero. It was another left-wing icon, Bob Dylan, who described a hero as “someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.” And whether he’s speaking to two million people in Hyde Park on the largest demonstration in British history, to a packed out Left Field every year at Glastonbury, or to one interviewer for The Third Estate, Tony Benn – a former cabinet minister under Wilson and Callaghan who retired from Parliament to “spend more time involved in politics” – has always known what that responsibility is. To inspire. Perhaps that’s too strong a term for a man of Benn’s unassuming humility. But to encourage? “If anybody asked me what I want on my gravestone, I would like ‘Tony Benn, he encouraged us’,” he once said. And in this dark climate, amidst war and recession, occupation, terrorism and environmental destruction, Tony Benn was kind enough to talk to me about the future of the Labour Party, about Afghanistan and Iraq, and to give me a few words of encouragement.

Benn has the distinction of being the second longest serving Member of Parliament in the history of the Labour Party. When he left Parliament in 2001, Labour had never been more popular. Last month, at the European Elections, the party suffered its worst defeat in almost a century. I ask Benn why he thinks it has lost so much of its support. “Well, the economic circumstances are very difficult,” he says. “A lot of people have lost their jobs and lost their homes, and they’re very, very worried and that always affects the government of the day.” But for Benn, it cannot simply be a factor of the accident of economics. “I think the policies that New Labour followed under Blair and Brown have made the situation worse, not better. We’ve had the Iraq war going on for years, now we have the Afghan war going on. Huge commitments to nuclear weapons that nobody wants, and ID cards and privatisation and so on. I think the policies of the government are very unpopular and I think for the first time in my life, the public is to the left of what is called the ‘Labour’ government.”

It comes as no surprise that Tony Benn is amongst the staunchest critics of New Labour’s move to the right. But even as Blair abandoned Clause IV and accepted the Bush doctrine, did Benn ever feel tempted to resign from the party? “No,” he says without a second’s hesitation. “I’ve lived so long, I’ve seen it happen before. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald, one of the founders of the Labour Party, Prime Minister of a minority government, joined with the Tories and the Liberals, formed a national government and described the Labour Party as Bolshevism gone mad, there were only around 50 Labour MPs left, and 14 years later there was a landslide. So I think you have to take an historical perspective on it.” Benn describes the policies of New Labour as essentially Tory policies. “If Labour does badly in the General Election, it will be a verdict on Blair and Thatcher together because those policies have been the same.”

Does that mean Benn thinks a defeat for Labour could bring the party back to the left? “I don’t think it’s a sort of ideological test,” he says. At this point he reels off the names of myriad micro socialist parties that would be straight from satire if they did not exist. “It’s a sort of theological splintering where everybody seems to be more concerned to destroy each other than deal with the real problems. People look at politics to see if it actually helps meet their needs. They don’t want some ideological test. They want to know have we got jobs, have we got homes, good schools, health, medicines. That’s the way people see it.” Benn has always been a rebel. From campaigning to be permitted to renounce his inherited peerage in 1963 to calling for the abolition of the monarchy in 1991 and for a mass campaign of civil disobedience on the outbreak of the Iraq war, if there’s a parapet, Tony Benn’s head is above it. It’s hardly surprising then, that as most young radicals find themselves growing more conservative with age, Benn has bucked that trend. “I’ve gone more to the left as I’ve got older,” he says. “And socialism explains the world. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to convert you or anybody else to my particular view of what socialism means. I think that’s the mistake that sectarians make.”

Benn does not know whether or not Labour will find a way to reconnect with its socialist roots. “I can’t forecast the future because it’s not my business,” he says. “My job is to try and influence the future.” Benn pauses after this wonderful soundbite as his mobile rings. “I go round the country,” he continues when the phone stops ringing, “I did eight public meetings last week, one yesterday, one today, another one tomorrow, another one on Sunday, and as I go round I’m pretty persuaded that the public is to the left of the Labour government. They don’t want the war, they don’t want the bomb, they don’t want ID cards, they don’t want privatisation, they do want civil liberties and so on. I think the system will have a chance of correcting itself provided we take up these causes and fight for them.”

The first time I heard Tony Benn speak, I was a sixteen-year-old A Level student taking up a cause and fighting for it. It was 2001, the twin towers had been reduced to rubble, Britain and America were bombing Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance had just forced the Taliban from Kabul and Tony Benn was speaking to 100,000 people in Trafalgar Square who saw the way things were going and wanted to make a difference. I remain convinced that, although we could not stop either of the Bush-Blair wars, opposing them was the right thing to do. But whilst I have always advocated the immediate withdrawal of British and American troops from Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan seems to me more complex. I ask Benn if withdrawal is the right thing to do if it means leaving the Afghan people, after all they’ve been through since 1979, to the mercy of the Taliban?

“We didn’t go into Afghanistan because of the Taliban, we went in, we were told, because they wouldn’t hand over Osama bin Laden to the Americans after the Americans asserted that he was responsible for 9/11.” Once again, Benn is keen to take an historical perspective. “There’s a long history – we invaded Afghanistan in 1839, eighty years before I was born, and then we were driven out. We went in again in 1879 and had to withdraw. And we went in in 1919 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Russians went into Afghanistan and I led a delegation to see the Soviet ambassador in London and he said there were terrorists there. Who was he referring to? Osama bin Laden. And who was funding Osama bin Laden? President Bush’s father, the other President Bush.”

After one of the bloodiest weeks for British forces in Afghanistan, Gordon Brown argued that the campaign is a ‘patriotic duty’ to keep the streets of Britain safe. “I think it’s a complete fraud,” says Tony Benn and there’s no doubt from the tone of his voice that he means it. “There weren’t any terrorist attacks in Britain until we invaded Afghanistan. None of the arguments are valid. It’s an unwinnable war. Every country has to work out its own internal problems. You can’t solve them with an invasion.” It’s a position to which he has remained consistent, despite his own political sympathies. “If we’d invaded South Africa to end Apartheid, there’d be bloodshed from that day to this.” But Benn is not a pacifist in the strictest sense of the word. “Everyone has the right to defend themselves. That is why the Afghans are absolutely entitled to defend themselves as their country is being invaded.”

Tony Benn once said that “all war represents a failure of diplomacy.” His own diplomacy saw him flying to Baghdad in February 2003, one month before the invasion of Iraq, to interview Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent the war. But was the war ever Saddam’s to prevent? “No,” he says. “Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam before 9/11. That came out quite clearly. And he told Blair that was his intention. And I think Blair said to him, ‘I could not persuade the British Parliament to support an invasion on those grounds, so let’s pretend it’s about weapons of mass destruction’. And Bush said ‘well it will take me months to get my troops there, so if you want to have a few months on the weapons inspection, then good luck to you.’ Hans Blix was sent in, totally ignored and frustrated. And I went to see Saddam; I said ‘do you have weapons of mass destruction?’ He said ‘no’. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he was actually speaking the truth. He said he didn’t have links with al Qaeda, and I knew he didn’t, because Osama bin Laden called on the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam because he was a secularist.”

In that sense, the Iraq war was not a failure of diplomacy because there never was any diplomatic option. It’s an argument Tony Benn has made time and again from speaker’s podiums across the country. But with his son Hilary as a member of the Cabinet, who supported the invasion of Iraq, does he ever find himself having those arguments closer to home? “He has his position and I understand it. He knows my position.” Benn’s understandable reticence on the subject reminds me – just as the many Conservatives and Zionists I met at Cambridge whom I now count amongst my closest friends remind me, like his own friendship with Enoch Powell – that although the personal is so often the political, the political is not always the personal. And there is nothing that leads me to believe that he is anything other than deeply proud of his son’s achievements as Secretary of State for International Development under Tony Blair and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under Gordon Brown.

At 84, Tony Benn is a man who has been at the heart of many of the great political challenges of the last century. What does he consider to be the greatest challenge we face as we enter the next decade? “I think the economic crisis is a big one and it’s very linked to war because depression in the 1930s played a part in bringing the Second World War about. And there’s all the nonsense of religion being the cause of conflict, it’s not true at all, but they use it. There’s the threat of nuclear weapons, very, very dangerous. There’s the whole question of civil liberties, world population, environment. There’s a huge list of problems to tackle.”

Against such a huge list of problems, against all the odds, against all the setbacks the Left has faced, the wars, the privatisations, Thatcher and Blair, what keeps Benn fighting? “I’ve been interested in politics since I was a child. I campaigned when I ten years old in the 1935 elections and I’ve still got some of the lists I pushed through the letterbox. I’m interested in it genuinely and I engage amongst communities, which is why I left Parliament. I’ve got ten grandchildren and I worry about their future. I’ve written thirty-six letters to them and I’ve got a book being published in October called Letters to My Grandchildren.”

Tony Benn was elected President of Stop the War Coalition in 2004. Through his writing and his activism, through his speeches and his television appearances, and through the many thousands of people he has encouraged, he has undoubtedly accomplished much since leaving Parliament. A 2007 poll by BBC2’s The Daily Politics declared him the UK’s ‘political hero’, narrowly beating Thatcher into second place. I ask him why, then, in the same year, he expressed an interest in standing again for Labour in Kensington at the next General Election. “That’s not quite true,” he says. “After Brown became leader there was a rumour that we’d have an immediate election. We didn’t have a candidate here and I foolishly said to the local party, if you’re looking for somebody, I’m available. Thank God it never happened, the last thing I wanted to do was to go back into Parliament.”

The reason for this is that Benn finds it easier to encourage an audience when he’s not asking them to vote for him. That’s the responsibility he has realised in his freedom from Parliament. That’s what makes him, in Dylan’s terms, a hero. But who are Benn’s political heroes? “The three greatest moral leaders of my lifetime, all of whom I have met personally, not one of whom was white or European, were Gandhi, Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Gandhi against war, Mandela for civil resistance, Tutu, Truth and Reconciliation. Things that have been very, very relevant to our needs. Meeting them has been a special pleasure.”

And speaking to Tony Benn has been a special pleasure for me. It’s hard not to be impressed by his sincerity, by his integrity and by his passion. In a world where the star that burns brightest so often burns shortest, it is reassuring to see that Benn’s has never dimmed. Not because he is a hero. But because, with his encouragement, we can all be heroes for more than just one day.