Out Of The Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67 by Tony Benn

Author:Tony Benn [Benn, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

End of Term – August 1965.

Tuesday 17 – Tuesday 31 August

The family spent this period in Bandol. We left by train and boat and hired a car in Marseilles. We stayed in a pleasant family hotel and we enjoyed the sunshine and the complete escape from politics. I was able to get an English paper of one sort or another every day but otherwise it was a complete and very welcome break from the Post Office.

NOTES

Chapter Three

1. The Radcliffe Committee was set up following the Budget of 1957 to examine the monetary and credit system, with particular reference to the maintenance of high levels of savings and investment. It was chaired by Lord Radcliffe who also headed enquiries into security in 1961–2.

2. Conservative MP Peter Griffiths had beaten Patrick Gordon Walker in Smethwick in October 1964, in a campaign tainted by explicitly racist remarks. Gordon Walker, Harold’s choice of Foreign Secretary, was thus deprived of a parliamentary seat. Harold immediately launched into an attack upon Griffiths when the House met after the Election, calling him a ‘parliamentary leper’. It was the first explicit indication of official Prime Ministerial disapproval of racism in parliamentary politics. A seat had to be found for Patrick Gordon Walker and in January 1965, Leyton in East London became vacant on the creation of a life peerage for its Labour MP, Reginald Sorensen. In a sensational result, Gordon Walker failed to win that seat too.

3. The Datel service had been introduced to provide rapid data transmission facilities under the auspices of the Post Office. Some Datel material represented computers speaking to computers but a great deal of the data transmission then and now concerns the movement of tapes and print-out physically by post.

4. Although everybody pays a licence fee for BBC television (and formerly for radio as well), that money is actually a tax paid to the Treasury which then finances the BBC. In periods when revenue from the licence fee exceeds the cost of running the BBC, the Treasury pockets the difference but where the licence fee falls below what is necessary, the government pays out a grant-in-aid. Thus the BBC is actually financed 100 per cent by government grant though the money is raised separately from normal taxation. The external service of the BBC has, however, always been financed by a grant-in-aid from the Foreign Office on the grounds that this service is the voice of the British Government abroad, and also because there are no possibilities of raising a licence fee from overseas listeners.

5. Arnold Wesker, the playwright, had expressed a desire that the Trade Union and Labour movements should take a greater interest in the arts. Through a union sympathetic to this idea, a resolution, number 42, was carried at the TUC. Encouraged by this, Arnold Wesker took over the Round House, an old railway engine shed in Camden Town, as a centre for the arts. It was known as Centre 42. In the end, it foundered under financial difficulties but the

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