Geoffrey Robertson
The former Labour MP for Hampstead, north London, Ben Whitaker, who
has died aged 79, was the embodiment of the liberal values associated
with the area. At the 1966 election he won the Hampstead seat, for 81
years a Tory fiefdom, from the reactionary former home secretary Henry
Brooke, and championed the progressive social reforms of the Harold
Wilson government, in which he held a number of posts. Subsequently, as a
human rights lawyer long before this was a fashionable career, he made
distinguished contributions to civil liberties in Britain, and
especially abroad, through his leadership of the Minority Rights Group
and then of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and as a UN rapporteur.
Ben
was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of Major General Sir John Whitaker
and his wife, Pamela (nee Snowden), who were not modern enough to avoid
sending him to Eton. He subsequently did national service in the
Coldstream Guards, before graduating from New College, Oxford, to the
bar. After what he described as this "Victorian education", he lectured
in law at London University and became outraged at the conduct of the
police, who at the time were framing Stephen Ward, planting bricks on
political protesters and, in Sheffield, had been caught beating suspects
with rhino whips. His first book, The Police (1964), was written with
the object of restricting their powers.
His concern for human
rights took him on Amnesty International missions, most daringly in 1965
to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), at the repressive height of Ian Smith's
UDI. His heavily pregnant wife, Janet, accompanied him, hiding banned
anti-UDI literature under her dress: they reckoned (correctly) that the
sexist chivalry of the Rhodesian police would preclude a body search.
They
managed to enter one of Smith's secret detention camps, and afterwards
Ben arranged to be interviewed live on the heavily censored Rhodesian
Television Service (now the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation). After 10
minutes during which he condemned "an illegal police state afraid of
the truth", the police raided the studio, claiming he had broken laws
against bringing Smith into disrepute and revealing the secret
detentions. He had to exit the studio by the back door, collect Janet,
and make a quick escape to the airport.
Back in Hampstead – an
electorate, he enthused, that was "full of argumentative idealists" like
himself – his opposition to US involvement in Vietnam and to a new
white paper on immigration, made him popular with what the Guardian
described as "a horde of militant Labour helpers". Many keen youthful
canvassers made their way to Hampstead and Ben sensibly put them to work
on things that really mattered to residents: campaigning against
parking meters and a one-way traffic scheme. His victory was assured.
As
a Labour MP, he served as parliamentary private secretary to the
minister for overseas development and then to the minister for housing,
finding time to write Crime and Society (1967), Participation and
Poverty (1968) and Parks for People (1971). He helped to organise
support within the Labour party for the progressive objectives of Roy Jenkins
and Gerald Gardiner: abolishing theatre censorship, ending the death
penalty and the "matrimonial crime" of adultery, and decriminalising
homosexuality and abortion. Although sometimes humorously sardonic about
Wilson, he respected his stand against apartheid and UDI, and refused
to join in the plots against him.
Ben remained a great champion of
life's losers – hence his continuing support for Nottingham Forest FC.
In 1971 he became executive director of the Minority Rights Group,
writing and publishing well-researched reports on communities – some
that had never been mentioned before by the media – that were being
subjected to physical and cultural destruction by their states or
through the actions of multinational corporations. "Indigenous rights"
was a little-known concept at the time.
In 1975, David Owen
appointed him as British representative on a UN sub-committee on the
rights of minorities, and in 1985 it handed him the hottest of hot
potatoes: to investigate whether the Turkish atrocities against the
Armenians amounted to genocide. He concluded emphatically that they did,
and refused to withdraw his report despite a furious response from
Turkey. In recent years he was particularly critical of "genocide
equivocation" by the UK government, which refused to mention his report
and claimed that the evidence for Turkish guilt was "not sufficiently
unequivocal". He was pleased when this misleading formula, devised by
the Foreign Office to avoid political and economic reprisals from
Turkey, was finally exposed and dropped in 2010.
Ben maintained
strong and combative interests both in defending culture from political
philistines and in encouraging new forms of art that governments were
not prepared to subsidise. The anti-censorship group the Defence of
Literature and the Arts Society, of which he was chair, out-lobbied Mary Whitehouse
in her attacks on the BBC and the National Theatre. Later, as executive
director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, he took great pleasure
in encouraging competition between museums and in backing art that was
too experimental or "political" for government funders to contemplate.
His work for the foundation, which was established in Portugal, earned
him a Portuguese Order of Merit.
In his last years, this most
sociable of socialists took pleasure in his wife's performances in the
Lords (she was raised to the peerage in 1999), his daughter Quincy's
courtroom accomplishments and in his other children and grandchildren.
He became a dab hand at painting and flower arranging, and not even the
pain from a broken ankle that refused to heal could stop him furiously
agitating and fundraising almost single-handedly for a statue of George
Orwell to be placed outside BBC Broadcasting House. He will not now be
present for the unveiling of the Martin Jennings sculpture, but he would
have wished it inscribed with his favourite aphorism, from the censored
introduction to Animal Farm, which states the principle for which his
own life stood and for which he wanted the BBC to stand: "If liberty
means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do
not want to hear".
He is survived by Janet and their children,
Quincy, Dan and Rasaq; Aaron, a son from a previous relationship; and
seven grandchildren.
"The Guardian," June 15, 2014
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