Benn - Letters to My Grandchildren

Dear Nahal, Michael, James, William, Jonathan, Caroline, Emily, Daniel, Hannah and Sarah,

I am very proud of you all. The oldest of you is now thirty-one and the youngest thirteen, and you are all fit, healthy and bright, and that is all that grandparents can wish for. I am just sorry that Grandma did not live to see you all grow up.

Long before you were born, when your parents were still small, I was a busy MP and I did not spend as much time with them as I should have. To expiate my guilt I wrote a story for them, 'The Daddy Shop', which I will add as a postscript for your amusement, at the end of this book.

It is hard to believe that four of you were born in the 1980s, children of the Thatcher era, and the youngest in the first days of New Labour.

You now live in a dangerous world, and my concern for you all and indeed the whole younger generation is very simple.

It is that the future of the human race is in your hands and you have to make some of the biggest choices ever to be faced by mankind.

Now that chemical, nuclear and biological weapons are so widespread, yours is one of the first generations in human history with the power to destroy the human race.

One man can be killed with a sword or a bow and arrow, a few more with a machine gun, a lot with a bomb; but now the scale of possible destruction is unimaginable.

Yours is also the first generation that has at its disposal the technology, the know-how and the money to solve humanity's basic needs. And that has never been true before. People have always dreamed of a world of peace and plenty but it was beyond man's capacity to secure it. With a population expected soon to be 9 billion you must decide how to share the finite resources of the planet.

My generation has failed yours. In thirty-one years, from 1914 to 1945, 105 million people were killed in two European wars, and many more injured, using conventional weapons save only for Hiroshima and Nagasaki where atomic bombs spread devastation and hundreds of thousands died.

In 1983 I visited Hiroshima. The most moving moment was when my guide pointed to a small dark mark on the kerbside where a child had been sitting when the atomic bomb landed.

The child's body had been vaporised by the intense heat. Next to the dark mark was a twisted metal lunch box that had belonged to the child.

The bomb could not vaporise the lunch box but it was contorted into a hideous shape and that was all there was to commemorate the death of an innocent being: the mark and the lunch box.

I shall never forget it.

Then came the Cold War between the capitalist and the communist countries, and the disastrous arms race.

Fears of nuclear proliferation and destruction dominated the latter half of the twentieth century. Now, in the twenty-first, new dangers and threats potentially as serious have arisen.

The inexorable tide of economic growth and consumerism has taken its toll of the planet. Environmentalists have warned us that climate change will produce catastrophic flooding; the existence of whole species is threatened through the loss of their habitat, or from man's greed; religious extremism whether Christian, Zionist or Islamic is used to justify violence and murder; and new diseases and risks AIDS and obesity have taken the place of earlier ones such as polio and TB.

What are your fears, hopes and expectations as you look into the future? What are the problems which you would want to tackle? And how?

I have made many mistakes, and I have also become aware as I have got older how little I know. I am much less sure than I was in my youth that I am right about anything and for these reasons I am reluctant to give advice to you.

Today's world so different from the world in which I was born is something you take for granted. It was there when you were born and normality is the world one enters into at birth.

As a silver surfer struggling with the internet, I have long since learned that when my laptop crashes one of you, a grandson or granddaughter, will turn up, press two buttons and get me back online.

Just to put recent advances in perspective: when your great-great-great-grandfather James Holmes was born in 1831 only 2 per cent of the population could vote, and Stephenson's Rocket had not yet launched the era of rail. When your great-great-grandfather John Benn was born in 1850 there were no telephones in use. When your great-grandmother (my mother) Margaret Holmes was born in 1897 women did not have the vote and no aircraft had ever left the surface of the earth. Even when your grandfather (that's me!) was born there was no television, and when your parents were born in the 1950s computers were not in general use and the internet had not been developed.