Tony Benn by Jad Adams

Author:Jad Adams [Jad Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849542562
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2011-04-11T16:00:00+00:00

Not for the last time.

Richard Crossman was furious about the speech because he intended to make one himself about broadcasting the following week and had even spoken to Benn about it. He attacked Benn at a dinner in Barbara Castle’s flat for having got in first but apologised for his behaviour two days later. Perhaps he had realised that he needn’t mind the competition. Benn’s contribution made the public more aware and more receptive to Crossman’s, so increasing rather than decreasing its coverage. Crossman’s speech took the form of a Granada lecture after a dinner at the Guildhall, a big event for the upper ranks of media folk, 900 of whom were there to hear him. Before it was delivered, Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC, said that Crossman’s speech would be on ‘an entirely different level’ from Benn’s, which he described as ‘silly, trivial rather than dangerous’.29

Yet Benn and Crossman were talking in entirely different traditions of media criticism, both of which were to bear fruit in different ways. Crossman had nothing to say about access to the media; his was a critique of television simplification which Peter Jay and John Birt developed and applied in the 1970s and 1980s. Benn’s arguments for access, carried forward by others, notably Phillip Whitehead and Jeremy Isaacs, led to the setting up of Channel 4, which started broadcasting in 1982. It was a national TV channel with a charter establishing it as a medium for minority interests with maximum viewer access.

Wilson felt the ministerial speeches had gone far enough and sent round a sarcastic memo warning his colleagues to restrain themselves. Whether or not Richard Crossman or Harold Wilson approved of Benn’s speeches, the Labour Party certainly did. His increasing radicalism was reflected in popularity in the NEC election – in 1968 he came third in the constituency section election, a move up one place from the previous year, and in 1969 and 1970 he came second, with only Barbara Castle above him.

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