In the early 1970s, the politics of the New Left activists in the Labour Party were still relatively inchoate. The movement had not thrown up any nationally recognized leaders of its own, nor developed any independent organizational focus. But one political leader heard what the New Left was saying and expressed it in a way that gave it a clearer shape and purpose: Tony Benn.

Tony Benn was able to do this — to become the preeminent spokesperson and interpreter of Labour’s New Left tradition — for a number of reasons: his remarkably early perception of the political forces that would become Thatcherism; his understanding of the limits of parliamentary socialism as practiced by the Labour Party; and his articulation of an alternative conception of socialist practice. It is a mistake to put too much emphasis on the role of any one individual. But it is also a mistake to deny it when an individual’s significance is exceptional — and not least when such an individual, and the politics he articulated, have been systematically misrepresented. Even sympathizers have tended to misrepresent it in retrospect as merely “clinging to the old formulae.”

Although Benn played the leading role in articulating the Labour New Left’s politics and getting its agenda debated in the cabinet and shadow cabinet, as well as in the party executive and its committees, the main organizations that composed it were not built around him. Even in Parliament, no “Bennite” faction of MPs emerged, as the “Bevanites” had in the 1950s. (At least not until the Campaign Group of MPs in the mid 1980s, by which point the New Left’s project had been defeated.) Benn’s role was not as the organizer but as the tribune.