As national institutions go, Tony Benn is surely up there with our other glittering treasures such as David Beckham and the Queen. He is probably more synonymous with British socialism than anyone since George Orwell, and he has been at the apex of Britain’s political life for over fifty years.

Like you can’t have bangers without mash, or fish without chips, so you can’t have British socialism without Tony Benn. From a young age, his whole existence has been imbued with an over-powering, all-consuming commitment to combating poverty and war, and proselytizing his socialist alternative.

Scrambling up the street in his north London neighborhood, there’s no need to check the address on my pad – the big, shiny red door tells me there’s a socialist home. On a plaque on the front of the house is a moving tribute to his late wife, Caroline Benn, fellow ‘educationalist and socialist’.

Tony met her at university in Oxford and until her death in 2004 they had lived together for 50 years, partaking in a famously utopian relationship. Tony actually bought the bench on which he had proposed to his wife from Oxford council and it now sits gaily in his garden.

A note on the door implores all visitors to go downstairs where the door is apparently ajar. Tentatively, I paw at the basement door, mindful of the fact that Benn’s area is not regal enough to be free of thugs and thieves, and hoping they haven’t discovered this good-hearted granddad before me.

But Benn is in characteristic high-spirits, a perfect reflection of a man with such an optimistic view of human nature. “Come in, come in!” he yells in his patrician drawl. “Would you like a cup of tea?” The whole of the basement ceiling is covered with newspaper clippings and all the shelves are stuffed full of yellowing newspapers. I catch a few dates: 17th March 1968; 25th November 1999.

“I’m a bit of an archivist, you see,” he says, no doubt noticing my amazement at his self-maintained Tony Benn library. We sit down at his desk. The phone rings. It’s someone wanting his thoughts on the ‘Meaning of Life’ for a television program. “Sorry about this,” he says with his hand over the receiver.

I’ve been fobbed off for less important things before, so I take a look over my questions. It is clear from what I have scribbled that Tony Benn is an independent thinker despite his strong – perhaps over-weening – loyalty to the Labour Party. There are many issues over which he evinces substantial differences with his socialist and left-wing contemporaries.

Most of his divergent beliefs are rooted in his belief in democracy as the sine qua non of any political system. For example, when he sees the European Union, he is looking at a hulking and tyrannous bureaucracy devoid of any meaningful democratic mandate and accountable to no-one. When his left-wing friends see it, they are looking at the best means of restraining the rapacious power of the American behemoth.

“Yes, well that was Ted Heath’s view,” he says referring to the latter interpretation of the EU. “I mean Ted was absolutely passionately opposed to the war in the Iraq. Last time I spoke to him he rang me up! He’d never done it in his life. I was in York and my mobile phone rang. I said, “Who is it?” He said, “It’s Ted Heath.” So I said, “What are you ringing about?” And he said, “How do we get rid of Blair?” So I said, “Well, look we’ve both left parliament a bit late.” But his view – two views he held which I fully understand. First of all, he said, “Look, Tony, millions of people have died in Europe – we can’t do it again.” Well I agree with that a hundred percent. And secondly, he said, “And America is now the dominant force and the only countervailing force is Europe.” And I understand that as well.”

But Benn’s personal experience of this same institution, while Energy Minister under Harold Wilson in the 1960s, has given him a more negative take. “The trouble is we’ve fallen into a system which is so undemocratic as to be absolutely terrifying…. It’s a bureaucratic constitution committed to capitalism. And, of course, what it is going to do – and this is what frightens me – it’s going to lead to nationalism because when you discover you that you elect a government but it can’t do what it wants to do, you know, people start saying, “It’s all the bloody French, it’s all the bloody Germans,” and it will into a sort of Yugoslav nationalism again.

“So there are four patterns for Europe. There’s the old nationalism which I’m totally opposed to. There is a fully federal United States of Europe, where you elect a President, where you elect a Senate, like America – I think that’s too bloody big, but I mean it would be democratic. You couldn’t complain if you elected the President of Europe or Senate or Congress. The third thing, which I think is the worst solution to what we’ve got now. And the fourth one is a Commonwealth of Europe where you really set up a mini-United Nations with a Secretary General under an Assembly and you harmonize by the consent of the nation states, and if you did that I think the thing would be durable. But I think this thing is going to break down myself.”

So what about a balance or countervailing force to US hegemony? “Yeah, but the balance to America is the UN.” Really? “I mean the UN is a sort of shadow parliament of 200 years ago. 200 years ago only 10% of the population had the vote and they were all rich men and gradually we democratized that up to a point – you know, one man, one women, one vote; the welfare state; we dismantled the Empire and so on without bloodshed. We’ve got to do the same to the UN. So my alternative to American superpower is the UN and I might add when China becomes the worlds greatest superpower you will need it too.”

It is strange to hear Benn’s hope for the future being expressed in terms of the UN. It lost a lot of credibility over Iraq, obviously, and more recently it’s impotence over Lebanon was a disgrace. But Benn is a great believer in the potential for goodness of well-functionary, robustly democratic institutions. If he can see the UN breaking out from under the yoke of US domination, is there a slim chance we may see Britain doing the same, or are we destined for poddledom forever? “Well, how did anything happen?” he asks, demonstrating his Hegelian spirit and belief in our democratic destiny. “It would be like a sort of colonial liberation struggle… British National Congress like the Africans had…”

Benn’s belief in the power of social movements to coerce society onto a more fair and just tangent has some credence, but the historic mobilization against the war in Iraq proved futile. The war happened despite the lifetimes of effort exerted to stop it. “I think funnily enough the peace movement where people say, “Look we had this big demonstration but the war went on, was it worth it?” and so on, what they don’t realize is that the peace movement didn’t stop the Iraq but I think that Blair would not be able to go along and support an Iranian war.”

Despite not seeing Iran as an option, like much of this despairing world, Benn thinks this concoted war will be long and destructive. “I think this is a new long, long war myself because it is nothing to do with religion, absolutely nothing to do with religion. I mean Bush said that God wanted him to be Presiden, and God wanted him to go into Iraq – I didn’t know God had that role!” he chuckles. “But I mean presenting an imperialist war in religious terms mobilizes people. So it’s very difficult to get an alternative interpretation because I’m not saying I’m right, but what I’m saying is I think an argument that merits serious consideration and I think if people heard it, it would make sense to them. To make a war on two billion Muslims…” he trails off.

War on two million Muslims? Is this really what his own son – Hilary Benn, member of Blair’s cabinet – is supporting? “Well I think they interpret it is as that,” he says. “And Bush talks about extremist Muslims. But I think religion is really a culture. I’ve thought about it and, you know, I was bought up as a Christian and I thought it all out and I see Jesus as a very good man who taught how to live and when I go to see a Church I think I like that architecture, I see a bishop in funny outfits and I sing “Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war with the Cross of Jesus going on before them.” If I was seeing “Onward Muslims soldiers marching on to war with the al-Qaeda going on before them,” I’d be locked up. And they are presenting it as a religious war…”

Apart from Bush’s indiscretion when describing the war in Iraq as a “crusade”, I believe notion is nugatory. Both governments have gone out of their way to avoid any religious overtones. This was a straight, no-frills economic war, to maintain control over the biggest energy resources in the world. “They pretend they aren’t but they are,” says Benn, referring to their religious motives.

But does he see a an Islamic fascism taking hold? “Isn’t there a fascist sort of tendency in the West?” he says with a shake of the head. But you can surely denunciate both, I retort. “Of course I’m no supporter of Islamic fundamentalism… I mean the treatment of women – not that we’re a wonderful example because, you know, the rights of women in the Christian Church are not very great. And in 1401 parliament passed the “Heresy Act” under which any lay person who read the Bible was burned at the stake as a heretic. That is what religion does, that’s the misuse of religion.”

But when I mentioned Islamic fascism, I had in mind the mass murderers in Iraq blowing up children and women every day – killing not the occupiers but the occupied. Benn seems to support this violence or is at least equivocal. “All I would say about them is that they are what we would call ‘freedom fighters.’ I was in the home Dad’s Army in the war when I was 16 – a bit younger than you. They taught me how to fire a rifle and use a bayonet and throw grenades and if the Germans arrived I would have thrown grenades into cafes where the German officers were talking to British girls and I would have been a freedom fighter.”

His democratic credentials seem to go missing again when discussing another thorn in the side of Western capitalism, Fidel Castro. Is he a fan?

“Well I am, really. I mean not very democratic but, by God, if they have tried to murder you, invade you, poison you and bomb you, and you can still survive, you have got to see I think in that context.” Benn even goes as far to say there is incipient democracy in Cuba, anyway. “There is a sort of elemental industrial democracy in Cuba – it may not be top in the normal way of having an election. But I went to a hospital in Havana and I asked how it was run, and he said, “Well we have three meetings a month. One is chaired by the management and the minister of health and the unions. The next one is chaired by the minister of health and the management and the unions. The next one is chaired by the unions and the unions and the management are there.” And they argue it out! And I’d prefer that to having management consultants coming in and telling you how to run your hospital…”

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