Tony Benn is now 86. He left Par­lia­ment 10 years ago in order, as he put it, ​“to spend more time on pol­i­tics.” Benn’s pub­lic ser­vice career began in 1950 and was inter­rupt­ed in 1960, when his father died and he became Vis­count Stans­gate. After a famous strug­gle, in which his deter­mi­na­tion to relin­quish his title won pop­u­lar sup­port, British law was changed to allow mem­bers of the nobil­i­ty to renounce their titles. In Benn’s case, it meant that he was free to return to Par­lia­ment as a com­mon­er. (Lords – peers – can be in gov­ern­ment, but they can’t sit in the House of Commons.)

I've made every mistake in the book, and I'm not ashamed of making mistakes, because you learn from your mistakes. The thing I would be ashamed of is if I ever said anything I didn't believe in order to get on.

Benn served in both Harold Wilson’s and James Callaghan’s Labour gov­ern­ments, but has since moved left­ward. And while that tra­jec­to­ry may have cut short his min­is­te­r­i­al career, he has remained an enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar fig­ure with Labour activists. Indeed, the adjec­tive ​“Ben­nite” has been used for years to describe the small num­ber of left-wing Labour MPs, and the much larg­er num­ber of unhap­py Labour sup­port­ers, who have nonethe­less main­tained their loy­al­ty to the party.

The cen­tral belief for which Benn has fought and argued most effec­tive­ly has been pop­u­lar democ­ra­cy. Since retir­ing from Par­lia­ment, he has been involved in grass­roots pol­i­tics, hold­ing the post of pres­i­dent of the Stop the War Coali­tion and, most recent­ly, speak­ing out in favor of the Occu­py movement.

Eight vol­umes of his polit­i­cal diaries have been pub­lished, and he is cur­rent­ly at work on the ninth. He spoke to In These Times at his home in London.

What do you tell the Occu­py move­ment in Lon­don when you speak to them?

This move­ment has been tak­en quite seri­ous­ly, much to my sur­prise. The estab­lish­ment nor­mal­ly deals with new ideas by first ignor­ing them, and then, if you go on, say­ing you’re mad, and, after awhile, say­ing you’re dangerous.

Occu­py has hit at exact­ly the right moment. There’s a major eco­nom­ic cri­sis in Europe and in the world. And these peo­ple are ask­ing, ​“What would Jesus do?” That reg­is­ters quite well.

They’re talk­ing about the nature of cap­i­tal­ism and the fact that it’s a threat to democ­ra­cy. They’ve raised ques­tions, rather than found answers, but they have made a very pow­er­ful case.

Eric Hob­s­bawm, in his lat­est book, writes: ​“The mech­a­nism of cap­i­tal­ist growth gen­er­ates inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions, end­less bouts of ten­sions and tem­po­rary res­o­lu­tions – growth lead­ing to cri­sis and change.” Is the cur­rent eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion part of that cycle? Or are we fac­ing some­thing we haven’t expe­ri­enced before?

This is a moment when peo­ple who haven’t thought very seri­ous­ly about alter­na­tives begin to think about them. If you look at our his­to­ry we’ve had so many peri­ods when there have been changes – the Eng­lish Rev­o­lu­tion, the Tolpud­dle Mar­tyrs and the suf­fragettes – brought about by pres­sure. So it may be one of those peri­ods, but you can’t fore­cast them.

You’ve always talked about the pres­sure exert­ed by big busi­ness and banks on gov­ern­ments and polit­i­cal par­ties. Is it a dif­fer­ent kind of pres­sure now? The 1% ver­sus 99%?

All cam­paigns for change always begin at the bot­tom and inch toward the top. But this is not real­ly a civ­il war between two parts of the estab­lish­ment. It’s much more of a chal­lenge from the mass­es against the rul­ing class.

What do you think about Europe these days?

Europe, as it is set up, lacks a demo­c­ra­t­ic foun­da­tion. Europe is run by [Euro­pean Union] com­mis­sion­ers who are appoint­ed, not elect­ed. I used to sit on the Com­mis­sion with them, and I found it real­ly quite fright­en­ing that bureau­crats should be deter­min­ing how things are done.

There will have to be some instru­ment for bring­ing Europe togeth­er, but it will have to rest on pop­u­lar consent.

You’ve stuck with the Labour Par­ty through thick and thin. And a lot of it has been quite thin, hasn’t it?

Well, ever since I left Par­lia­ment I’ve devot­ed myself pri­mar­i­ly to cam­paigns, peace cam­paigns and the cam­paign against the cuts in social ser­vices. If you can con­cen­trate on an issue then you can build sup­port both with­in the Labour Par­ty and out­side it, and be effective.

What do you think about the Labour Par­ty leader Ed Milliband?

Ed worked in my office as a stu­dent when he was 15. I dis­agree with a num­ber of things he’s said – he crit­i­cized the unions that were going on strike last sum­mer, and that was a mis­take. But on the oth­er hand, he made rather friend­ly noise about Occu­py. You can’t look for a per­fect per­son. He’s prob­a­bly as good of a leader as we could have now.

When you read your own diaries, do you look back and think, ​“I rec­og­nize that young man”?

Well, I’ve made every mis­take in the book, and I’m not ashamed of mak­ing mis­takes, because you learn from your mis­takes. The thing I would be ashamed of is if I thought I ever said any­thing I didn’t believe in order to get on. And I hope I haven’t done that.

In what ways have you changed?

As I got old­er, I began to see things in a dif­fer­ent way. I real­ized that the Labour Par­ty – which I joined when I was 17 and thought was the instru­ment for change in soci­ety – turned out to be a group of peo­ple with a bet­ter idea for run­ning the sta­tus quo, when actu­al­ly the prob­lem was the sta­tus quo. Now, with Occu­py and the cri­sis, what’s clear­ly need­ed from the Labour Par­ty is some idea of how we might change the sys­tem, and that takes us back to our social­ist tra­di­tion. And that is hap­pen­ing through the cam­paigns for peace and jus­tice. Peo­ple, draw­ing from their expe­ri­ence, under­stand that we need to go fur­ther than we ever have in the past.

I’ve always seen you as hav­ing a bal­ance of opti­mism and skep­ti­cism. You are an opti­mist, aren’t you?

Well, you have to be opti­mistic, because if you don’t feel as if you can win you don’t put the effort in. And the main­stream media is always pes­simistic about every cam­paign – they say it won’t work, it’s not real­is­tic, no one will sup­port you. If the media can spread pes­simism, they can damp­en down all the cam­paigns that might bring about change.

Hope is the fuel of progress. In every human being, since the begin­ning of time, two flames have burned: the flame of anger against injus­tice, and the flame of hope that you can build a bet­ter world. My job is to go around fan­ning both flames as hard as I can.

Is it dif­fer­ent doing that out­side a polit­i­cal par­ty? Out­side Parliament?

I do peace meet­ings, and anti-cuts meet­ings, trade-union meet­ings and stu­dents meet­ings. I learn a lot. Pub­lic intel­li­gence is far greater than the estab­lish­ment media imag­ines. The qual­i­ty of the dis­cus­sion is high­er than it’s been in my rec­ol­lec­tion for a long time. In the old days it was just nig­gling between the two polit­i­cal par­ties. Today there is some seri­ous dis­cus­sion with thought­ful people.

Are you nos­tal­gic about the past?

As you get old­er you start to think of the mis­takes you’ve made, and won­der why. You think of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that did exist, that you didn’t take. And then you look at the whole of human progress and see how you can advance it. Every gen­er­a­tion has to fight the same bat­tles again and again. There’s no final vic­to­ry, no final defeat for any idea. You draw inspi­ra­tion from ear­li­er cam­paigns and you try to apply what you’ve learned to the present situation.

You and I have lived through the cre­ation of the wel­fare state, which we were real­ly proud of. And now it is being unraveled.

It is being pri­va­tized. Peo­ple may not grasp the fact, but the vote gives you an oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate things that are not depen­dent upon the mar­ket. And that’s a huge advan­tage to have – a demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly account­able pub­lic sector.

I remem­ber in Jan­u­ary 1944, on a troop ship going to South Africa, I went to see the colonel in charge and said we planned to have a meet­ing to dis­cuss what would hap­pen when the war ends. He said ​“No pol­i­tics in it, Benn!” And I said, ​“Oh, no, no.” Of course, we had the most won­der­ful polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion. One lad made a speech I’ve nev­er for­got­ten. He said: ​“In the 1930s we had mass unem­ploy­ment. We don’t have unem­ploy­ment in wartime. If you can have full employ­ment killing Ger­mans, why can’t you have full employ­ment build­ing homes, build­ing hos­pi­tals, recruit­ing nurs­es, recruit­ing doc­tors and recruit­ing teach­ers?” That spir­it lead to the wel­fare state changes in Britain in 1945.

Those ideals have not com­plete­ly dis­ap­peared. The ques­tion remains: Why is there plen­ty of mon­ey for war, but not enough for peace?