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Protected area

Protected areas or conservation areas are locations which receive protection because of their recognized natural, ecological or cultural values. Protected areas are those areas in which human presence or the exploitation of natural resources (e.g. firewood, non-timber forest products, water, ...) is limited.

The term "protected area" also includes marine protected areas and transboundary protected areas across multiple borders. As of 2016, there are over 161,000 protected areas representing about 17 percent of the world's land surface area (excluding Antarctica).

For waters under national jurisdiction beyond inland waters, there are 14,688 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), covering approximately 10.2% of coastal and marine areas and 4.12% of global ocean areas. In contrast, only 0.25% of the world's oceans beyond national jurisdiction are covered by MPAs.

In recent years, the 30 by 30 initiative has targeted to protect 30% of ocean territory and 30% of land territory worldwide by 2030; this has been adopted by the European Union in its Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, Campaign for Nature which promoted the goal during the Convention on Biodiversity's COP15 Summit and the G7. In December 2022, Nations have reached an agreement with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at the COP15, which includes the 30 by 30 initiative.

Protected areas are implemented for biodiversity conservation, often providing habitat and protection from hunting for threatened and endangered species. Protection helps maintain ecological processes that cannot survive in most intensely managed landscapes and seascapes. Indigenous peoples and local communities frequently criticize this method of fortress conservation for the generally violent processes by which the regulations of the areas are enforced.

Definition
The definition that has been widely accepted across regional and global frameworks has been provided by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in its categorisation guidelines for protected areas. The definition is as follows:

"A clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values."

Protected Areas and Climate Change
Protected Areas alleviate climate change effects in a variety of ways:

 * Prohibition of degradative activities including: fishing, hunting, development, agriculture, mining, logging, and sometimes entry.
 * Reduction in: shifts in species distribution, intensity of storms, and impacts of sea level rise.
 * Climate change threats to coral reefs.pngts ocean acidification by: maintaining coastal primary producers, increasing teleost biomass (osmosregulation buffers pH change), and increasing natural carbon sequestration via the biological pump
 * Increased: populations, species resilience, genetic diversity, and potential for adaptations, lowering the risk of extinction

Protection of natural resources
The objective of protected areas is to conserve biodiversity and to provide a way for measuring the progress of such conservation. Protected areas will usually encompass several other zones that have been deemed important for particular conservation uses, such as Important Bird Areas (IBA) and Endemic Bird Areas (EBA), Centres of Plant Diversity (CPD), Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCA), Alliance for Zero Extinction Sites (AZE) and Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) among others. Likewise, a protected area or an entire network of protected areas may lie within a larger geographic zone that is recognised as a terrestrial or marine ecoregions (see Global 200), or a Crisis Ecoregions for example. As a result, Protected Areas can encompass a broad range of governance types. A wide variety of rights-holders and stakeholders are involved in the governance and management of protected areas, including forest protected areas, such as government agencies and ministries at various levels, elected and traditional authorities, indigenous peoples and local communities, private individuals and non-profit trusts, among others. Most protected-area and forest management institutions acknowledge the importance of recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, sharing the costs and benefits of protected areas and actively involving them in their governance and management. This has led to the recognition of four main types of governance, defined on the basis of who holds authority, responsibility, and who can be held accountable for the key decisions for protected areas. Indeed, governance of protected areas has emerged a critical factor in their success.

Subsequently, the range of natural resources that any one protected area may guard is vast. Many will be allocated primarily for species conservation whether it be flora or fauna or the relationship between them, but protected areas are similarly important for conserving sites of (indigenous) cultural importance and considerable reserves of natural resources such as;

 * Carbon stocks: Carbon emissions from deforestation account for an estimated 20% of global carbon emissions, so in protecting the worlds carbon stocks greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and longterm land cover change is prevented, which is an effective strategy in the struggle against global warming. Of all global terrestrial carbon stock, 15.2% is contained within protected areas. Protected areas in South America hold 27% of the world's carbon stock, which is the highest percentage of any continent in both absolute terms and as a proportion of the total stock.
 * Rainforests: 18.8% of the world's forest is covered by protected areas and sixteen of the twenty forest types have 10% or more protected area coverage. Of the 670 ecoregions with forest cover, 54% have 10% or more of their forest cover protected under IUCN Categories I – VI.
 * Mountains: Nationally designated protected areas cover 14.3% of the world's mountain areas, and these mountainous protected areas made up 32.5% of the world's total terrestrial protected area coverage in 2009. Mountain protected area coverage has increased globally by 21% since 1990 and out of the 198 countries with mountain areas, 43.9% still have less than 10% of their mountain areas protected.

Annual updates on each of these analyses are made in order to make comparisons to the Millennium Development Goals and several other fields of analysis are expected to be introduced in the monitoring of protected areas management effectiveness, such as freshwater and marine or coastal studies which are currently underway, and islands and drylands which are currently in planning.

Protection of biodiversity
The effectiveness of protected areas to protect biodiversity can be estimated by comparing population changes over time. Such an analysis found that the abundance of 2,239 terrestrial vertebrate populations changed at slower rate in protected areas. On average, vertebrate populations declined five times more slowly within protected areas (−0.4% per year) than at similar sites lacking protection (−1.8% per year).

Protection of ecosystem services
Along with providing important stocks of natural resources, protected areas are often major sources of vital ecosystem services, unbeknownst to human society. Although biodiversity is usually the main reason for constructing protected areas, the protection of biodiversity also protects the ecosystem services society enjoys. Some ecosystem services include those that provide and regulate resources, support natural processes, or represent culture. Provisioning services provide resources to humanity, such as fuel and water, while regulating services include carbon sequestration, climate regulation, and protection against disease. Supporting ecosystem services include nutrient cycling, while cultural services are a source of aesthetic and cultural value for tourism and heritage. Such services are often overlooked by humanity, due to the ecosystem from which they originate being far from urbanized areas. The contamination of ecosystem services within a designated area ultimately degrades their use for society. For example, the protection of a water body inherently protects that water body's microorganisms and their ability to adequately filter pollutants and pathogens, ultimately protecting water quality itself. Therefore, the implementation of protected areas is vital to maintaining the quality and consistency of ecosystem services, ultimately allowing human society to function without the interference of human infrastructure or policies.

IUCN Protected Area Management Categories
Through its World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), the IUCN has developed six Protected Area Management Categories that define protected areas according to their management objectives, which are internationally recognised by various national governments and the United Nations. The categories provide international standards for defining protected areas and encourage conservation planning according to their management aims.

IUCN Protected Area Management Categories:
 * Category Ia – Strict nature reserve
 * Category Ib – Wilderness Area
 * Category II – National park
 * Category III – Natural monument or Feature
 * Category IV – Habitat/Species Management Area
 * Category V – Protected Landscape/Seascape
 * Category VI – Protected Area with sustainable use of natural resources

History

Protected areas are cultural artifacts, and their story is entwined with that of human civilization. Protecting places and natural resources is by no means a modern concept, whether it be indigenous communities guarding sacred sites or the convention of European hunting reserves. Over 2000 years ago, royal decrees in India protected certain areas. In Europe, rich and powerful people protected hunting grounds for a thousand years. Moreover, the idea of protection of special places is universal: for example, it occurs among the communities in the Pacific ("tapu" areas) and in parts of Africa (sacred groves).

The oldest legally protected reserve recorded in history is the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, established by an ordinance dated 13 April 1776. Other sources mention the 1778 approval of a protected area on then-Khan Uul, a mountain previous protected by local nomads for centuries in Mongolia, by then-ruling Qing China Tenger Tetgegch Khaan. However, the mass protected areas movement did not begin until late nineteenth-century in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, when other countries were quick to follow suit. While the idea of protected areas spread around the world in the twentieth century, the driving force was different in different regions. Thus, in North America, protected areas were about safeguarding dramatic and sublime scenery; in Africa, the concern was with game parks; in Europe, landscape protection was more common.

The designation of protected areas often also contained a political statement. In the 17th and 18th centuries, protected areas were mostly hunting grounds of rulers and thus, on the one hand, an expression of the absolute personal authority of a monarch, and on the other hand, they were concentrated in certain places and diminished with increasing spatial distance from the seat of power. In the late 19th century, modern territorial states emerged which, thanks to the transport and communication technologies of industrialisation and the closely meshed and well-connected administrative apparatus that came with it, could actually assert claims to power over large contiguous territories. The establishment of nature reserves in mostly peripheral regions thus became possible and at the same time underpinned the new state claim to power.

Initially, protected areas were recognised on a national scale, differing from country to country until 1933, when an effort to reach an international consensus on the standards and terminology of protected areas took place at the International Conference for the Protection of Fauna and Flora in London. At the 1962 First World Conference on National Parks in Seattle the effect the Industrial Revolution had had on the world's natural environment was acknowledged, and the need to preserve it for future generations was established.

Since then, it has been an international commitment on behalf of both governments and non-government organisations to maintain the networks that hold regular revisions for the succinct categorisations that have been developed to regulate and record protected areas. In 1972, the Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment endorsed the protection of representative examples of all major ecosystem types as a fundamental requirement of national conservation programmes. This has become a core principle of conservation biology and has remained so in recent resolutions – including the World Charter for Nature in 1982, the Rio Declaration at the Earth Summit in 1992, and the Johannesburg Declaration 2002.

Recently, the importance of protected areas has been brought to the fore at the threat of human-induced global heating and the understanding of the necessity to consume natural resources in a sustainable manner. The spectrum of benefits and values of protected areas is recognised not only ecologically, but culturally through further development in the arena of Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs). ICCAs are "natural and/or modified ecosystems containing significant bio - diversity values and ecological services, voluntarily conserved by (sedentary and mobile) indigenous and local communities, through customary laws or other effective means".

As of December 2022, 17% of land territory and 10% of ocean territory were protected. At the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference almost 200 countries, signed onto the agreement which includes protecting 30% of land and oceans by 2030 (30 by 30).

Convention on Biological Diversity
In 1992, a protected area was defined in paragraph 2 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as "a geographically defined area which is designated or regulated and managed to achieve specific conservation objectives." Under Article 8 of the CBD, parties who entered the treaty agreed to, among other things, "establish a system of protected areas." In 2004, the CBD's Conference of the Parties (COP) adopted the Program of Work on Protected Areas (PoWPA) to further develop and promote protected areas. PoWPA's objective was the "establishment and maintenance by 2010 for terrestrial and by 2012 for marine areas of comprehensive, effectively managed, and ecologically representative national and regional systems of protected areas that collectively, inter alia through a global network contribute to achieving the three objectives of the Convention and the 2010 target to significantly reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss." In 2010, protected areas were included in Target 11 of the CBD's Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Target 11 states:
 * "By 2020, at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscapes."

In 2018, to complement protected areas across landscapes and seascapes, the term 'other effective area-based conservation measures' was defined as "a geographically defined area other than a Protected Area, which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity, with associated ecosystem functions and services and where applicable, cultural, spiritual, socio-economic, and other locally relevant values." Other effective area-based conservation measures complement protected areas across landscapes, seascapes, and river basins. Protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures are referenced together in Target 3 of the draft Global Biodiversity Framework, which is due to be agreed at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which will be held 5 to 17 December in Montreal, Canada.

Challenges

How to manage areas protected for conservation brings up a range of challenges – whether it be regarding the local population, specific ecosystems or the design of the reserve itself – and because of the many unpredicatable elements in ecology issues, each protected area requires a case-specific set of guidelines.

Enforcing protected area boundaries is a costly and labour-heavy endeavour, particularly if the allocation of a new protected region places new restrictions on the use of resources by the native people which may lead to their subsequent displacement. This has troubled relationships between conservationists and rural communities in many protected regions and is often why many Wildlife Reserves and National Parks face the human threat of poaching for the illegal bushmeat or trophy trades, which are resorted to as an alternative form of substinence. Poaching has thus increased in recent years as areas with certain species are no longer easily and legally accessible. This increasing threat has often led governments to enforce laws and implement new policies to adhere to the initial goal of protected areas, though many illegal activities are often overlooked.

There is increasing pressure to take proper account of human needs when setting up protected areas and these sometimes have to be "traded off" against conservation needs. Whereas in the past governments often made decisions about protected areas and informed local people afterwards, today the emphasis is shifting towards greater discussions with stakeholders and joint decisions about how such lands should be set aside and managed. Such negotiations are never easy but usually produce stronger and longer-lasting results for both conservation and people.

In some countries, protected areas can be assigned without the infrastructure and networking needed to substitute consumable resources and substantively protect the area from development or misuse. The soliciting of protected areas may require regulation to the level of meeting demands for food, feed, livestock and fuel, and the legal enforcement of not only the protected area itself but also 'buffer zones' surrounding it, which may help to resist destabilisation.

Protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD)

Protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) events are processes that change the legal status of national parks and other protected areas in both terrestrial and marine environments. Downgrading is a decrease in legal restrictions on human activities within a protected area, downsizing is a decrease in protected area size through a legal boundary change, and degazettement is the loss of legal protection for an entire protected area. Collectively, PADDD represents legal processes that temper regulations, shrink boundaries, or eliminate legal protections originally associated with establishment of a protected area.

Scientific publications have identified 3,749 enacted PADDD events in 73 countries since 1892 which have collectively impacted an area approximately the size of Mexico. PADDD is a historical and contemporary phenomenon. 78% of PADDD events worldwide were enacted since 2000 and governments in at least 14 countries are currently considering at least 46 PADDD proposals. Proximate causes of PADDD vary widely but most PADDD events globally (62%) are related to industrial scale resource extraction and development – infrastructure, industrial agriculture, mining, oil and gas, forestry, fisheries, and industrialization.

PADDD challenges the longstanding assumption that protected areas are permanent fixtures and highlights the need for decision-makers to consider protected area characteristics and the socioeconomic context in which they are situated to better ensure their permanence.

Effectiveness
A main goal of protected areas is to prevent loss of biodiversity. However, their effectiveness is limited by their small size and isolation from each other (which influence the maintenance of species), their restricted role in preventing climate change, invasive species, and pollution, their high costs, and their increasing conflict with human demands for nature's resources. In addition, the type of habitat, species composition, legal issues and governance,  play important roles.

One major problem is that only 18% of the area covered by protected areas have been assessed, hence the effectiveness of most of them remains unclear.

Bhutan as a role model
Scientists advocate that 50% of global land and seas be converted to inter-connected protected areas to sustain these benefits. The Asian country Bhutan achieved this high-reaching target by reserving 51.4% of the country's area as protected areas interconnected through biological corridors. Although these networks are well regulated (local communities are aware of their importance and actively contribute to their maintenance), Bhutan is currently a developing country that is undergoing infrastructure development and resource collection. The country's economic progression has brought about human-wildlife conflict and increased pressure on the existence of its protected areas. In light of ongoing disputes on the topic of optimal land usage, Dorji (et al.), in a study using camera traps to detect wildlife activity, summarize the results of a nationwide survey that compares the biodiversity of Bhutan's protected areas versus that of intervening non-protected areas.

The study indicated that Bhutan's protected areas "are effectively conserving medium and large mammal species, as demonstrated through the significant difference in mammal diversity between protected areas, biological corridors, and non-protected areas with the strongest difference between protected areas and non-protected areas". Protected areas had the highest levels of mammal biodiversity. This is made possible by the restriction of commercial activity and regulation of consumptive uses (firewood, timber, etc.). The regulation of such practices has allowed Bhutan's protected areas to thrive with high carnivore diversity and other rare mammals such as Chinese pangolin, Indian pangolin, mountain weasel (Mustela altaica), small-toothed ferret badger, Asian small clawed otter, the tiger, dhole (Cuon alpinus), Binturong, clouded leopard and Tibetan fox (Vulpes ferrilata). Also found to be prevalent were the large herbivore species: Asiatic water buffalo Bubalus arnee, golden langur, musk deer, and Asian elephant. The maintenance of these charismatic megafauna and other threatened species can be attributed to the intensity of Bhutan's management of its protected areas and its local communities' commitment to preserving them.

Australia
The National Heritage List is a heritage register, a list of national heritage places deemed to be of outstanding heritage significance to Australia, established in 2003. The list includes natural and historic places, including those of cultural significance to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) are formed by agreement with Indigenous Australians, and declared by Indigenous Australians, and form a specific class of protected area.

China
China, a megadiverse country, has begun implementing various protected areas in recent years. As of the year 2017, China has nearly 10,000 to 12,000 protected areas, 80% of which are nature reserves aiming to foster biodiversity conservation. These newly implemented reserves safeguard a range of ecosystems, from tropical forests to marine habitats. These protected areas encompass nearly 20% of China's land area.

European Union
Natura 2000 is a network of protected areas established by the EU across all member states. It is made up of Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs) designated respectively under the Habitats Directive and Birds Directive. 787767 km2 are designated as terrestrial sites and 251564 km2 as marine sites. Overall, 18 percent of the EU land mass is designated.

India
Protected areas of India include National parks, Wildlife sanctuaries, biosphere reserves, reserved and protected forests, conservation and community reserves, communal forests, private protected areas and conservation areas.

Lebanon
Lebanon, home to one of the highest densities of floral diversity in the Mediterranean basin, hosts tree species with critical biogeographical locations (southernmost limit) on the western slopes of Mount Lebanon’s mountain range and has passed laws to protect environmental sites at the national level, including nature reserves, forests, and Hima (local community-based conservation), with some of these sites having acquired one or more international designations:
 * Four Ramsar sites
 * Five UNESCO World Heritage Sites
 * 15 Important Bird Areas (IBAs) (under Birdlife International)
 * One Specially Protected Area (SPA)
 * Two Specially Protected Areas of Mediterranean Importance (SPAMI) (under the Protocol of Specially Protected Areas and Biodiversity of the Barcelona Convention)

There are three biosphere reserves in Lebanon that have been designated by the UNESCO:
 * 1) Al Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve, designated in 2005
 * 2) Jabal Al Rihane Biosphere Reserve, designated in 2007
 * 3) Jabal Moussa Biosphere Reserve, designated in 2009

Nicaragua
O Parks, Wildlife, and Recreation is a private protected area, also known as a 'Private Reserve' predominantly managed for biodiversity conservation, protected without formal government recognition and is owned and stewarded by the O corporation International. O parks plays a particularly important role in conserving critical biodiversity in a section of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor known as the Paso del Istmo, located along the 12-mile-wide isthmus between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean.

Russia
On 21 May 2019, The Moscow Times cited a World Wildlife Fund report indicating that Russia now ranks first in the world for its amount of protected natural areas with 63.3 million hectares of specially protected natural areas. However, the article did not contain a link to WWF's report and it may be based on previously gathered data.

United States
, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, the United States had a total of 6770 terrestrial nationally designated (federal) protected areas. These protected areas cover 2607131 km2, or 27.08 percent of the land area of the United States. This is also one-tenth of the protected land area of the world.

According to a report from the Center for American Progress, the administration of Joe Biden reached a record in conservation. In 3 years of ruling it conserved or in the process of conserving more than 24 millions acres of public land and in 2023 alone more than 12.5 million acres of public land became protected area. It is doing it together with the indigenouse people as 200 agreements of co-stewardship with them were signed in 2023 alone. The goal of Biden is to protect 30% of the terrestrial and marine territory of the United States by the year 2030.

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Protected areas of the United Kingdom

Protected areas of the United Kingdom are areas in the United Kingdom which need and /or receive protection because of their environmental, historical or cultural value to the nation. Methods and aims of protection vary depending on the nature and importance of the resource. Protection operates at local, regional, national and international levels, and may be backed by legislation and international treaty, or less formally by planning policy.

Within the United Kingdom, different approaches are taken to some forms of protection within the constituent countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, while other forms of protection are more consistent across the UK. Protected areas can be divided according to the type of resource which each seeks to protect. Primarily, these are: scenic or landscape value; biodiversity value (species and habitats); geodiversity value (relating to geology and geomorphology); and cultural or historic value. Several types of protected areas are focused on more than one of these areas.

Besides protected areas, a number of individual features are protected through other designations, such as tree preservation orders, listed buildings, and protected shipwrecks.

Areas protected for scenic value

 * National Parks
 * Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) (England, Wales and Northern Ireland)
 * National Scenic Area (Scotland)
 * Heritage Coast (England and Wales)
 * Special Landscape Area (Wales)
 * World Heritage Site (International)

Areas protected for biodiversity value

 * Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA)
 * Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI)
 * Marine nature reserve (MNR)
 * National nature reserve (NNR)
 * Local nature reserve
 * Heritage coast (England and Wales)
 * Special Area of Conservation (SAC) (European Union)
 * Special Protection Area (SPA) (European Union)
 * Wetlands designated under the Ramsar Convention (International)
 * Biosphere reserve (International)
 * World Heritage Site (International)

Areas protected for geodiversity value

 * Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI)
 * Regionally Important Geological Site (RIGS)
 * Geopark (International)

Areas protected for cultural or historic value

 * Scheduled monument
 * Parks, gardens and designed landscapes are protected separately in England, Wales and Scotland:
 * National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens (England)
 * Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland
 * Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales
 * World Heritage Site (International)

Protected areas by constituent country

 * Protected areas of Wales
 * Protected areas of Scotland

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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Protected areas of the European Union

Protected areas of the European Union are areas which need and/or receive special protection because of their environmental, cultural or historical value to the member states of the European Union.

 * NATURA 2000
 * Special Area of Conservation (SAC)
 * Special Protection Area (SPA)

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Natura 2000

Natura 2000 is a network of nature protection areas in the territory of the European Union. It is made up of Special Areas of Conservation and Special Protection Areas designated under the Habitats Directive and the Birds Directive, respectively. The network includes both terrestrial and Marine Protected Areas.

The Natura 2000 network covered more than 18% of the European Union's land area and more than 7% of its marine area in 2022.

History
In May 1992, the governments of the European Communities adopted legislation designed to protect the most seriously threatened habitats and species across Europe. The Habitats Directive complements the Birds Directive adopted in 1979, and together they make up the Natura 2000 network of protected areas.

The Birds Directive requires the establishment of Special Protection Areas for birds. The Habitats Directive similarly requires Sites of Community Importance which upon the agreement of the European Commission become Special Areas of Conservation to be designated for species other than birds, and for habitat types (e.g. particular types of forest, grasslands, wetlands, etc.). Together, Special Protection Areas and Special Areas of Conservation form the Natura 2000 network of protected areas.

The Natura 2000 network is the EU contribution to the "Emerald network" of Areas of Special Conservation Interest set up under the Bern Convention on the conservation of European wildlife and natural habitats. Natura 2000 is also a key contribution to the Program of Work of Protected Areas of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

As a prerequisite for joining the EU, accession states have to submit proposals for Natura 2000 sites meeting the same criteria as EU member states. Some new member states have large areas which qualify to be protected under the directives, and implementation has not always been simple.

The Natura 2000 sites are selected by member states and the European Commission following strictly scientific criteria according to the two directives mentioned above. The Special Protection Areas are designated directly by each EU member state, while the Special Areas of Conservation follow a more elaborate process: each EU member state must compile a list of the best wildlife areas containing the habitats and species listed in the Habitats Directive; this list must then be submitted to the European Commission, after which an evaluation and selection process on European level will take place in order to become a Natura 2000 site.

The Habitats Directive divides the EU territory into nine biogeographic regions, each with its own ecological coherence. Natura 2000 sites are selected according to the conditions in each biogeographical region; thus selected sites represent species and habitat types under similar natural conditions across a suite of countries.

Each Natura 2000 site has a unique identification form called a standard data form. This form is used as a legal reference when assessing the management of the species and habitats through the concept of favourable conservation status. The Natura 2000 Viewer is a tool to explore the network and gives access to every standard data form.

Current status
, Natura 2000 protected 27,312 sites with a terrestrial area of 787,606 km2 (around 18 percent of land of the EU countries) and marine area of 360,350 km2, and was considered almost complete in the EU terrestrial environment. The process of designation has not always been smooth as the infringement procedures against member states show. While designation of sites may be near complete, the management and enforcement of protection on sites is less advanced and many sites lack management plans. Natura 2000 faced criticism from developers, farmers and politicians who fear that the conservation of habitats and species places a brake on development.

In 2013, there were 251,564 km2 designated as Natura 2000 in the marine environment. The network in marine areas is not considered complete and acknowledged by the Commission as a "key challenge for EU biodiversity policy in the coming years".

Natura 2000 sites can vary considerably in character. They are not strictly protected in terms of how they are allowed to be used by people. Many sites are farmed, forested and some are even in urban areas. Other areas are much wilder. The European Commission developed guidelines on the relation between Natura 2000 and wild areas which are thought to make up around 13% of the network. This was in response to a report by Members of the European Parliament in 2009 which called for further protection of Europe's wilderness.

Raising awareness
The Natura 2000 network is not well known among European Union citizens; only 11% of citizens knew what it was in 2013. As part of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, the European Commission committed to raise awareness about the network and biodiversity in general with the public.

In general, Natura 2000 Sites are seen like an interdiction for developing for most of the citizens. Since appeared in some area, the citizens saw only limitations and interdictions without any local advantages for the specific area. The confusion is even greater since in the designation process as a Natura 2000 Site, the local communities were not involved. The documentations for different areas were done by different NGO not belonging to specific areas without knowing the areas, with limited studies and ignoring the local communities interests. Due to this lack of awareness, most citizens do not know the consequence of belonging to a Natura 2000 Site.

Natura 2000 Day
In order to raise awareness about the Natura 2000 network, 21 May has been designated “Natura 2000 Day”. This precedes “International Day for Biological Diversity” on 22 May. The initiative came from SEO/BirdLife who sought and received funding from the EU LIFE+ programme in order to improve the knowledge of this network.

In 2013, the first Natura 2000 day took place with the aim to raise awareness of citizens about the importance of Natura 2000 network in their lives. Since then, every May 21 and the weeks before, awareness actions take place all over Europe. For example, in 2014, school children and politicians across the EU were encouraged to make a butterfly gesture and post photos on social media to raise awareness.

The Natura 2000 Award
The Natura 2000 Award was launched by the European Commission in 2013, with the first prizes awarded on Natura 2000 Day in 2014. The annual Award aims to raise awareness about the Natura 2000 network, showcase excellence and encourage networking between people working on Natura 2000 sites.

It awards prizes to those working on the management of or to raise awareness about Natura 2000 in five award categories: Conservation; Socio-Economic Benefits; Communication; Reconciling Interests and Perceptions; Cross-Border Cooperation and Networking. In its first year, winners were selected from Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Belgium and Spain.

Controversy
The Natura 2000 legislation, notably with its habitats-test (or: habitats assessment, Article 6 of the Habitats Directive), dates back to the days climate change was not an issue and the concept of ecosystem services had not been well developed. Hence, in international law literature Kistenkas raised the question the habitats assessment was originally not designed for striking a balance of all relevant ecosystem services or to involve climate change into the assessment. Although well protecting nature conservation objectives, a rethinking of the habitats assessment might be necessary in the light of a new climate law as part of e.g. the European Green Deal.

In European law literature Borgstrom and Kistenkas have discussed some possible future incompatibilities of the Natura 2000 habitats-test with novel EU green infrastructure policies.

In the late 2010s the habitats assessment was at the basis of the nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands as the EU Court (C-293/17 and C-294/17, ECLI:EU:C:2018:882) ruled on agriculture nearby Natura 2000 sites.

In some other member states, such as Bulgaria, there was criticism a project had not been well communicated in advance. This led to construction in the Kaliakra zone of Bulgaria, including wind turbines and a golf course. Land owners have then been told they may not use their land in certain ways, otherwise non-compliance procedures would be used against Bulgaria. This led to protests by the land-owners.

Documentation

 * Natura 2000 : Protecting Europe’s biodiversity, published on 2008/11/11, in English digital book or in paper book (ISBN 978-92-79-08308-2).

title: Natura 2000


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Talk:Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Kamon
The article needs an image of his coat of arms.--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 01:44, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

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A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 02:24, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Azuchimomoyama-japan.png

spaces in his Japanese names?
That's not standard in Japanese (reference: https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/japanese-culture/japanese-culture-naming)... so why is it being done here?--KimYunmi (talk) 16:42, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

 * Not an issue. Even the Japanese Wikipedia does that in the first paragraph of every single article about a person. 93.124.52.134 (talk) 23:21, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Toyotomi Hideyoshi


text:
Tony Benn

Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as The Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician and political activist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001. He later served as President of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to 2014.

The son of a Liberal and later Labour Party politician, Benn was born in Westminster and privately educated at Westminster School. He was elected for Bristol South East at the 1950 general election but inherited his father's peerage on his death, which prevented him from continuing to serve as an MP. He fought to remain in the House of Commons and campaigned for the ability to renounce the title, a campaign which eventually succeeded with the Peerage Act 1963. He was an active member of the Fabian Society and served as chairman from 1964 to 1965. He served in Harold Wilson's Labour government, first as Postmaster General, where he oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, and later as Minister of Technology.

Benn served as Chairman of the National Executive Committee from 1971 to 1972 while in Opposition. In the Labour government of 1974–1979, he returned to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Industry and subsequently served as Secretary of State for Energy. He retained that post when James Callaghan succeeded Wilson as Prime Minister. When the Labour Party was in opposition through the 1980s, he emerged as a prominent figure on the left wing of the party and unsuccessfully challenged Neil Kinnock for the Labour leadership in 1988. After leaving Parliament at the 2001 general election, Benn was President of the Stop the War Coalition until his death in 2014.

Benn was widely seen as a key proponent of democratic socialism and Christian socialism, though in regards to the latter he supported the United Kingdom becoming a secular state and ending the Church of England's status as an official church of the United Kingdom. Originally considered a moderate within the party, he was identified as belonging to its left wing after leaving ministerial office. The terms Bennism and Bennite came into usage to describe the left-wing politics he espoused from the late 1970s and its adherents. He was an influence on the political views of Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected Leader of the Labour Party a year after Benn's death, and John McDonnell, who served as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Corbyn.

Early life and family
Benn was born in Westminster, London, on 3 April 1925. He had two brothers, Michael (1921–1944), who was killed in the Second World War, and David (1928–2017), a specialist in Russia and Eastern Europe. Following the Thames flood in January 1928 their house was uninhabitable so the Benn family moved to Scotland for over 12 months. Their father, William Benn, was a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 who crossed the floor to the Labour Party in 1928 and was appointed Secretary of State for India by Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, a position he held until the Labour Party's landslide electoral defeat in 1931.

William Benn was elevated to the House of Lords and Tony Benn was subsequently titled with the honorific prefix, The Honourable. William Benn was given the title of Viscount Stansgate in 1942: the new wartime coalition government was short of working Labour peers in the upper house. In 1945–46, William Benn was the Secretary of State for Air in the first majority Labour Government.

Benn's mother, Margaret Benn (née Holmes, 1897–1991), was a theologian, feminist and the founder President of the Congregational Federation. She was a member of the League of the Church Militant, which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women; in 1925, she was rebuked by Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women. His mother's theology had a profound influence on Benn, as she taught him that the stories in the Bible were mostly about the struggle between the prophets and the kings and that he ought in his life to support the prophets over the kings, who had power, as the prophets taught righteousness.

Benn was for over 30 years a committed Christian. He said that the teachings of Jesus Christ had a "radical political importance" on his life, and made a distinction between the historical Jesus as "a carpenter of Nazareth" who advocated social justice and egalitarianism and "the way in which he's presented by some religious authorities; by popes, archbishops and bishops who present Jesus as justification for their power", believing this to be a gross misunderstanding of the role of Jesus. He believed that it was a "great mistake" to assume that the teachings of Christianity are outdated in modern Britain, and Higgins wrote in The Benn Inheritance that Benn was "a socialist whose political commitment owes much more to the teaching of Jesus than the writing of Marx". (Indeed, he did not read The Communist Manifesto until he was in his 50s. ) "The driving force of his life was Christian socialism," according to Peter Wilby, linking Benn to the "high-minded" founding roots of Labour.

Later in his life, Benn emphasised issues regarding morality and righteousness, as well as various ethical principles of Nonconformism. On Desert Island Discs he said that he had been powerfully influenced by "what I would call the Dissenting tradition" (that is, the English Dissenters who left or were ejected from the established church, one of whom was his ancestor William Benn). "I've never thought we can understand the world we lived in unless we understood the history of the church", Benn said to the Catholic Herald. "All political freedoms were won, first of all, through religious freedom. Some of the arguments about the control of the media today, which are very big arguments, are the arguments that would have been fought in the religious wars. You have the satellites coming in now—well, it is the multinational church all over again. That's why Mrs Thatcher pulled Britain out of UNESCO: she was not prepared, any more than Ronald Reagan was, to be part of an organisation that talked about a New World Information Order, people speaking to each other without the help of Murdoch or Maxwell."

According to Wilby in the New Statesman, Benn "decided to do without the paraphernalia and doctrine of organised religion but not without the teachings of Jesus". Although Benn became more agnostic as he became older, he was intrigued by the interconnections between Christianity, radicalism and socialism. Wilby also wrote in The Guardian that although former Chancellor Stafford Cripps described Benn as "as keen a Christian as I am myself", Benn wrote in 2005 that he was "a Christian agnostic" who believed "in Jesus the prophet, not Christ the king", specifically rejecting the label of "humanist".

Both of Benn's grandfathers were Liberal Party MPs; his paternal grandfather was John Benn, a successful politician, MP for Tower Hamlets and later Devonport, who was created a baronet in 1914 (and who founded a publishing company, Benn Brothers), and his maternal grandfather was Daniel Holmes, MP for Glasgow Govan. Benn's contact with leading politicians of the day dates back to his earliest years. He met Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald when he was five years old, and described him as: "A kindly old gentleman [who] leaned over me and offered me a chocolate biscuit. I've looked at Labour leaders in a funny way ever since." Benn also met former Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George when he was 12, and later recalled that, while still a boy, he once shook hands with Mahatma Gandhi, in 1931, while his father was Secretary of State for India.

During the Second World War, Benn joined and trained with the Home Guard from the age of 16, later recalling in a speech made in 2009: "I could use a bayonet, a rifle, a revolver, and if I'd seen a German officer having a meal I'd have tossed a grenade through the window. Would I have been a freedom fighter or a terrorist?" In July 1943, Benn enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman 2nd Class. His father and elder brother Michael (who was later killed in an accident) were already serving in the RAF. He was granted an emergency commission as a pilot officer (on probation) on 10 March 1945. As a pilot officer, Benn served as a pilot in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. In June 1944, he made his first solo flight, at RAF Guinea Fowl, an RAF Elementary Flying Training School, in Southern Rhodesia. The aircraft was a Canadian-built Fairchild Cornell. In a 1993 article recounting the experience, he said, "I always thought that I would feel a sense of panic when I saw the ground coming up at me on my first solo, but strangely enough I didn't feel anything but exhilaration ...". He relinquished his commission with effect from 10 August 1945, three months after the Second World War ended in Europe on 8 May, and just days before the war with Japan ended on 2 September.

After attending Eaton House day school near Sloane Square, Benn entered Westminster School, and studied at New College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, politics and economics and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1947. In later life, Benn removed public references to his private education from Who's Who. In 1970 all references to Westminster School were removed, and in the 1975 edition his entry stated: "Education—still in progress". In the 1976 edition, almost all details were omitted except his name, jobs as a Member of Parliament and as a Government Minister, and address; the publishers confirmed that Benn had sent back the draft entry with everything else struck through. In the 1977 edition, Benn's entry disappeared entirely, and when he returned to Who's Who in 1983, he was listed as "Tony Benn" and all references to his education or service record were removed.

In 1972, Benn said in his diaries that "Today I had the idea that I would resign my Privy Councillorship, my MA and all my honorary doctorates in order to strip myself of what the world had to offer". While he acknowledged that he "might be ridiculed" for doing so, Benn said that Wedgie Benn' and 'the Rt Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn' and all that stuff is impossible. I have been Tony Benn in Bristol for a long time." In October 1973, he announced on BBC Radio that he wished to be known as Mr. Tony Benn rather than Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and his book Speeches from 1974 is credited to "Tony Benn". Despite this name change, social historian Alwyn W. Turner writes: "Just as those with an agenda to pursue still call Muhammed Ali by his original name ... so most newspapers continued to refer to Tony Benn as Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie in the case of the tabloids, for years to come."

Benn met Caroline Middleton DeCamp (born 13 October 1926, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States) over tea at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1949; just nine days after meeting her, he proposed to her on a park bench in the city. Later, he bought the bench from Oxford City Council and installed it in the garden of their home in Holland Park. Tony and Caroline had four children—Stephen, Hilary, Melissa, a feminist writer, and Joshua—and 10 grandchildren. Caroline Benn died of cancer on 22 November 2000, aged 74, after a career as an educationalist.

Two of Benn's children have been active in Labour Party politics. His eldest son Stephen was an elected Member of the Inner London Education Authority from 1986 to 1990. His second son Hilary was a councillor in London, stood for Parliament in 1983 and 1987, and became Labour MP for Leeds Central in 1999. He was Secretary of State for International Development from 2003 to 2007, and then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs until 2010, later serving as Shadow Foreign Secretary (2015–16). This makes him the third generation of his family to have been a member of the Cabinet, a rare distinction for a modern political family in Britain. Benn's granddaughter Emily Benn was the Labour Party's youngest-ever candidate when she failed to win East Worthing and Shoreham in 2010. Benn was a first cousin once removed of the actress Margaret Rutherford.

Benn and his wife Caroline became vegetarian in 1970, for ethical reasons, and remained so for the rest of their lives. Benn cited the decision of his son Hilary to become vegetarian as an important factor in his own decision to adopt a vegetarian diet.

Member of Parliament, 1950–1960
Following the Second World War, Benn worked briefly as a BBC Radio producer. On 1 November 1950, he was selected to succeed Stafford Cripps as the Labour candidate for Bristol South East, after Cripps stood down because of ill-health. He won the seat in a by-election on 30 November 1950. Anthony Crosland helped him get the seat as he was the MP for nearby South Gloucestershire at the time. Upon taking the oath on 4 December 1950 Benn became "Baby of the House", the youngest MP, for one day, being succeeded by Thomas Teevan, who was two years younger but took his oath a day later. He became the "Baby" again in 1951, when Teevan was not re-elected. In the 1950s, Benn held middle-of-the-road or soft left views, and was not associated with the young left wing group around Aneurin Bevan.

As MP for Bristol South East, Benn helped organise the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott against the colour bar of the Bristol Omnibus Company against employing black and Asian drivers. Benn said that he would "stay off the buses, even if I have to find a bike", and Labour leader Harold Wilson also told an anti-apartheid rally in London he was "glad that so many Bristolians are supporting the [boycott] campaign", adding that he "wish[ed] them every success".

Peerage reform
Benn's father was created Viscount Stansgate in 1942 when Winston Churchill increased the number of Labour peers to aid political work in the House of Lords; at this time, Benn's elder brother Michael, then serving in the RAF, was intending to enter the priesthood and had no objections to inheriting a peerage. However, Michael was later killed in an accident while on active service in the Second World War, and this left Benn as the heir-apparent to the peerage. He made several unsuccessful attempts to renounce the succession.

In November 1960, Lord Stansgate died. Benn automatically became a peer, preventing him from sitting in the House of Commons. The Speaker of the Commons, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster, did not allow him to deliver a speech from the bar of the House of Commons in April 1961 when the by-election was being called. Continuing to maintain his right to abandon his peerage, Benn fought to retain his seat in a by-election caused by his succession on 4 May 1961. Although he was disqualified from taking his seat, he was re-elected. An election court found that the voters were fully aware that Benn was disqualified, and declared the seat won by the Conservative runner-up, Malcolm St Clair, who was at the time also the heir presumptive to a peerage.

Benn continued his campaign outside Parliament. Within two years, though, the Conservative Government of the time, which had members in the same or similar situation to Benn's (i.e., who were going to receive title, or who had already applied for writs of summons), changed the law. The Peerage Act 1963, allowing lifetime disclaimer of peerages, became law shortly after 6 pm on 31 July 1963. Benn was the first peer to renounce his title, doing so at 6.22 pm that day. St Clair, fulfilling a promise he had made at the time of his election, then accepted the office of Steward of the Manor of Northstead, disqualifying himself from the House (outright resignation not being possible). Benn returned to the Commons after winning a by-election on 20 August 1963.

Benn was a supporter of abolishing the House of Lords.

In government, 1964–1970
In the 1964 Government led by Harold Wilson, Benn was Postmaster General, where he oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, then the UK's tallest building, and the creations of the Post Bus service and Girobank. He proposed issuing stamps without the Sovereign's head, but this met with private opposition from the Queen. Instead, the portrait was reduced to a small profile in silhouette, a format that is still used on commemorative stamps.

Benn also led the government's opposition to the "pirate" radio stations broadcasting from international waters, which he was aware would be an unpopular measure. He claimed that some of these stations were causing interference to emergency radio used by shipping, although he was not responsible for introducing the Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill when it came before Parliament at the end of July 1966 for its first reading.

Earlier in the month, Benn was promoted to Minister of Technology, which included responsibility for the development of Concorde and the formation of International Computers Ltd. (ICL). The period also saw government involvement in industrial rationalisation, and the merger of several car companies to form British Leyland. Following Conservative MP Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech to a Conservative Association meeting, in opposition to Harold Wilson's insistence on not "stirring up the Powell issue", Benn said during the 1970 general election campaign:

"The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen. If we do not speak up now against the filthy and obscene racialist propaganda ... the forces of hatred will mark up their first success and mobilise their first offensive...Enoch Powell has emerged as the real leader of the Conservative Party. He is a far stronger character than Mr. Heath. He speaks his mind; Heath does not. The final proof of Powell's power is that Heath dare not attack him publicly, even when he says things that disgust decent Conservatives."

The mainstream press attacked Benn for using language deemed as intemperate as Powell's language in his "Rivers of Blood" speech (which was widely regarded as racist), and Benn noted in his diary that "letters began pouring in on the Powell speech: 2:1 against me but some very sympathetic ones saying that my speech was overdue". Harold Wilson later reprimanded Benn for this speech, accusing him of losing Labour seats in the 1970 general election.

During the 1970s Benn publicly defended Marxism, saying: "The Communist Manifesto, and many other works of Marxist philosophy, have always profoundly influenced the British labour movement and the British Labour Party, and have strengthened our understanding and enriched our thinking. It would be as unthinkable to try to construct the Labour Party without Marx as it would be to establish university faculties of astronomy, anthropology or psychology without permitting the study of Copernicus, Darwin or Freud, and still expect such faculties to be taken seriously."

Labour lost the 1970 election to Edward Heath's Conservatives and upon Heath's application to join the European Economic Community, a surge in left-wing Euroscepticism emerged. Benn "was stridently against membership", and campaigned in favour of a referendum on the UK's membership. The Shadow Cabinet voted to support a referendum on 29 March 1972, and as a result Roy Jenkins resigned as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

In government, 1974–1979
In the Labour Government of 1974, Benn was Secretary of State for Industry and as such increased nationalised industry pay, provided better terms and conditions for workers such as the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and was involved in setting up worker cooperatives in firms which were struggling, the best known being at Meriden, outside Coventry, producing Triumph Motorcycles. In 1975, he was appointed Secretary of State for Energy, immediately following his unsuccessful campaign for a "No" vote in the referendum on the UK's continued membership of the European Community (Common Market). Later in his diary, (25 October 1977) Benn wrote that he "loathed" the EEC; he claimed it was "bureaucratic and centralised" and "of course it is really dominated by Germany. All the Common Market countries except the UK have been occupied by Germany, and they have this mixed feeling of hatred and subservience towards the Germans".

Harold Wilson resigned as Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister in March 1976. Benn later attributed the collapse of the Wilson government to cuts enforced on the UK by global capital, in particular the International Monetary Fund. In the resulting leadership contest Benn finished in fourth place out of the six cabinet ministers who stood—he withdrew as 11.8 per cent of colleagues voted for him in the first ballot. Benn withdrew from the second ballot and endorsed Michael Foot; James Callaghan eventually won. Despite not receiving his support in the second and third rounds of the vote, Callaghan kept Benn on as Energy Secretary. In 1976, there was a sterling crisis, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey sought a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Underlining a wish to counter international market forces which seemed to penalise a larger welfare state, Benn publicly circulated the divided Cabinet minutes in which a narrow majority of the Labour Cabinet under Ramsay MacDonald supported a cut in unemployment benefits in order to obtain a loan from American bankers. As he highlighted, these minutes resulted in the 1931 split of the Labour Party in which MacDonald and his allies formed a National Government with Conservatives and Liberals. Callaghan allowed Benn to put forward the Alternative Economic Strategy, which consisted of a self-sufficient economy less dependent on low-rate fresh borrowing, but the AES, which according to opponents would have led to a "siege economy", was rejected by the Cabinet. In response, Benn later recalled that: "I retorted that their policy was a siege economy, only they had the bankers inside the castle with all our supporters left outside, whereas my policy would have our supporters in the castle with the bankers outside." Benn blamed the Winter of Discontent on these cuts to socialist policies.

Upon the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Benn described Mao as "one of the greatest—if not the greatest—figures of the twentieth century: a schoolteacher who transformed China, released it from civil war and foreign attack and constructed a new society there" in his diaries, adding that "he certainly towers above any twentieth-century figure I can think of in his philosophical contribution and military genius". On his trip to the Chinese embassy after Mao's death, Benn recorded in an earlier volume of his diaries that he was "a great admirer of Mao", while also admitting that "he made mistakes, because everybody does".

During Benn's time as energy minister from 1975 to 1979 he supported the United Kingdom's use of nuclear power. However, later in his life he became an opponent of nuclear power, attributing his time as running it as a minister to persuading him it was not cheap, safe or peaceful. When asked in an interview in January 2009 on what he had changed his mind on over the course of his life he expanded on this issue by saying:

"'Nuclear power, for example. In 1955 when Eisenhower said he was going for 'Atoms for Peace' I became a passionate supporter of it. Having been brought up on the Bible I liked the idea of swords into ploughshares. I advocated nuclear power as Minister of Technology. I was told, and believed, that nuclear power was cheap, safe and peaceful. Having been in charge of nuclear power I discovered it wasn't cheap, wasn't safe and when I left office I was told that during my period as Secretary of State for Energy, plutonium from our nuclear power stations went to the Pentagon to make nuclear weapons. So every nuclear power station in Britain is a bomb factory for America. I was utterly shaken by that. Nothing in the world would now induce me to support nuclear power. It was a mistake.'"

Move to the left
By the end of the 1970s, Benn's views had shifted to the left wing of the Labour Party. He attributed this political shift to his experience as a Cabinet Minister in the 1964–1970 Labour Government. Benn ascribed his move to the left to four lessons:

 * 1) How "the Civil Service can frustrate the policies and decisions of popularly elected governments"
 * 2) The centralised nature of the Labour Party which allowed the Leader to run "the Party almost as if it were his personal kingdom"
 * 3) "The power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government"
 * 4) The power of the media, which "like the power of the medieval Church, ensures that events of the day are always presented from the point of the view of those who enjoy economic privilege"

As regards the power of industrialists and bankers, Benn remarked:

"Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes by the unions is minuscule. This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the International Monetary Fund secured cuts in our public expenditure. ... These [four] lessons led me to the conclusion that the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact. If the British people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is, and some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum."

Benn's philosophy consisted of a form of syndicalism, state planning where necessary to ensure national competitiveness, greater democracy in the structures of the Labour Party and observance of Party Conference decisions. Alongside an alleged 12 Labour MPs, he spent 12 years affiliated with the Institute for Workers' Control, beginning in 1971 when he visited the Upper Clyde Shipyards, arguing in 1975 for the "labour movement to intensify its discussion about industrial democracy".

He was vilified by most of the press while his opponents implied and stated that a Benn-led Labour Government would implement a type of Eastern European state socialism, with Edward Heath referring to Benn as "Commissar Benn" and others referring to Benn as a "Bollinger Bolshevik". Despite this, Benn was overwhelmingly popular with Labour activists in the constituencies: a survey of delegates at the Labour Party Conference in 1978 found that by large margins they supported Benn for the leadership, as well as many Bennite policies.

He publicly supported Sinn Féin and the unification of Ireland, although in 2005 he suggested to Sinn Féin leaders that it abandon its long-standing policy of not taking seats at Westminster (abstentionism). Sinn Féin in turn argued that to do so would recognise Britain's claim over Northern Ireland, and the Sinn Féin constitution prevented its elected members from taking their seats in any British-created institution. A supporter of the Scottish Parliament and political devolution, Benn however opposed the Scottish National Party and Scottish independence, saying: "I think nationalism is a mistake. And I am half Scots and feel it would divide me in half with a knife. The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much."

In British politics during this period, the term "Bennism" came into use to describe the conviction politics, economic, social and political ideology of Tony Benn; and an exponent or advocate of Bennism was regarded as a "Bennite".

In opposition, 1979–1997
In a keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference of 1980, shortly before the resignation of party leader James Callaghan and election of Michael Foot as successor, Benn outlined what he envisaged the next Labour Government would do. "Within days", a Labour Government would gain powers to nationalise industries, control capital and implement industrial democracy; "within weeks", all powers from Brussels would be returned to Westminster, and the House of Lords would be abolished by creating one thousand new peers and then abolishing the peerage. Benn received tumultuous applause. On 25 January 1981, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers (known collectively as the "Gang of Four") launched the Council for Social Democracy, which became the Social Democratic Party in March. The "Gang of Four" left the Labour Party because of what they perceived to be the influence of the Militant tendency and the Bennite "hard left" within the party. Benn was highly critical of the SDP, saying that "Britain has had SDP governments for the past 25 years."

Benn stood against Denis Healey, the party's incumbent deputy leader, triggering the 1981 deputy leadership election, disregarding an appeal from Michael Foot to either stand for the leadership or abstain from inflaming the party's divisions. Benn defended his decision insisting that it was "not about personalities, but about policies". The result was announced on 27 September 1981; Healey retained his position by a margin of barely one per cent. The decision of several soft left MPs, including Neil Kinnock, to abstain triggered the split of the Socialist Campaign Group from the left of the Tribune Group. After Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, Benn argued that the dispute should be settled by the United Nations and that the British Government should not send a task force to recapture the islands. The task force was sent, and following the Falklands War, they were back in British control by mid-June. In a debate in the Commons just after the Falklands were recaptured, Benn's demand for "a full analysis of the costs in life, equipment and money in this tragic and unnecessary war" was rejected by Margaret Thatcher, who stated that "he would not enjoy the freedom of speech that he put to such excellent use unless people had been prepared to fight for it".

For the 1983 election Benn's Bristol South East constituency was abolished by boundary changes, and he lost to Michael Cocks in the selection of a candidate to stand in the new winnable seat of Bristol South. Rejecting offers from the new seat of Livingston in Scotland, Benn contested Bristol East, losing to the Conservative's Jonathan Sayeed in June 1983. Foot resigned as leader following the defeat which reduced Labour to only 209 MPs, while Healey also decided to step down as deputy leader. However Benn's absence from parliament meant that he was unable to stand in the resulting leadership contest as only MPs were eligible to be candidates. Benn's absence from the contest was reported by  The Glasgow Herald to leave Neil Kinnock as "the favourite Left-wing candidate". Ultimately Kinnock won the contest, formally replacing Foot as party leader in October of that year.

In a by-election, Benn was elected as the MP for Chesterfield, the next Labour seat to fall vacant, after Eric Varley had left the Commons to head Coalite. On the day of the by-election, 1 March 1984, The Sun newspaper ran a hostile feature article, "Benn on the Couch", which purported to be the opinions of an American psychiatrist.

Newly elected to a mining seat, Benn was a supporter of the 1984–85 UK miners' strike, which was beginning when he returned to the Commons, and of his long-standing friend, the National Union of Mineworkers leader Arthur Scargill. However, some miners considered Benn's 1977 industry reforms to have caused problems during the strike; firstly, that they led to huge wage differences and distrust between miners of different regions; and secondly that the controversy over balloting miners for these reforms made it unclear as to whether a ballot was needed for a strike or whether it could be deemed as a "regional matter" in the same way that the 1977 reforms had been. Benn also spoke at a Militant tendency rally held in 1984, saying: "The labour movement is not engaged in a personalised battle against individual cabinet ministers, nor do we seek to win public support by arguing that the crisis could be ended by the election of a new and more humane team of ministers who are better qualified to administer capitalism. We are working for a majority labour government, elected on a socialist programme, as decided by conference."

In June 1985, three months after the miners admitted defeat and ended their strike, Benn introduced the Miners' Amnesty (General Pardon) Bill into the Commons, which would have extended an amnesty to all miners imprisoned during the strike. This would have included two men convicted of murder (later reduced to manslaughter) for the killing of David Wilkie, a taxi driver driving a non-striking miner to work in South Wales during the strike.

Benn stood for election as party leader in 1988, against Neil Kinnock, following Labour's third successive defeat in the 1987 general election, losing by a substantial margin, and received only about 11 per cent of the vote. In May 1989 he made an extended appearance on Channel 4's late-night discussion programme After Dark, alongside among others Lord Dacre and Miles Copeland. During the Gulf War, Benn visited Baghdad in order to try to persuade Saddam Hussein to release the hostages who had been captured.

Benn supported various LGBT social movements, which were then known as gay liberation; Benn had voted in favour of decriminalisation in 1967. Talking about Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, a piece of anti-gay legislation preventing the "promotion of homosexuality", Benn said:

"if the sense of the word 'promote' can be read across from 'describe', every murder play promotes murder, every war play promotes war, every drama involving the eternal triangle promotes adultery; and Mr. Richard Branson's condom campaign promotes fornication. The House had better be very careful before it gives to judges, who come from a narrow section of society, the power to interpret 'promote'."

Benn later voted for the repeal of Section 28 during the first term of Tony Blair's New Labour Government, and voted in favour of equalising the age of consent.

In 1990, he proposed a "Margaret Thatcher (Global Repeal) Bill", which he said "could go through both Houses in 24 hours. It would be easy to reverse the policies and replace the personalities—the process has begun—but the rotten values that have been propagated from the platform of political power in Britain during the past 10 years will be an infection—a virulent strain of right-wing capitalist thinking which it will take time to overcome."

In 1991, with Labour still in opposition and a general election due by June 1992, he proposed the Commonwealth of Britain Bill, abolishing the monarchy in favour of the United Kingdom becoming a "democratic, federal and secular commonwealth", a republic with a written constitution. It was read in Parliament a number of times until his retirement at the 2001 election, but never achieved a second reading. He presented an account of his proposal in Common Sense: A New Constitution for Britain.

The bill included the following:

 * Abolishing the House of Lords
 * Establishing a House of the People
 * Lowering the voting age to 16
 * Establishing a national parliament for England, Scotland and Wales
 * Ending British rule in Northern Ireland
 * The Church separated from the state
 * Honours list reformed to recognise services to the community
 * Confirmation of judges and election of magistrates
 * No constitutional role for the monarchy (continue to live in Buckingham Palace)

In the same year, Benn also received a Pipe Smoker of the Year award, claiming in his acceptance speech that "pipe smoking stopped you going to war".

In 1991, Benn reiterated his opposition to the European Commission and highlighted an alleged democratic deficit in the institution, saying: "Some people genuinely believe that we shall never get social justice from the British Government, but we shall get it from Jacques Delors. They believe that a good king is better than a bad Parliament. I have never taken that view." This argument has also been used by many on the right-wing Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party, such as Daniel Hannan MEP. Jonathan Freedland writes in The Guardian: "For [Tony Benn], even benign rule by a monarch was worthless because the king's whim could change and there'd be nothing you could do about it."

Prior to retirement, 1997–2001
In 1997, the Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Blair won the general election in a landslide, after 18 years of Conservative Party rule. Despite later calling Labour under Blair "the idea of a Conservative group who had taken over Labour" and saying that "[Blair] set up a new political party, New Labour", his political diaries Free at Last show that Benn was initially somewhat sympathetic to Blair, welcoming a change of government. Benn supported the introduction of the national minimum wage, and welcomed the progress towards peace and security in Northern Ireland (particularly under Mo Mowlam). He was supportive of the extra money given to public services in the New Labour years but believed it to be under the guise of privatisation. Overall, his concluding judgement on New Labour is highly critical; he describes its evolution as a way of retaining office by abandoning socialism and distancing the party from the trade union movement, adopting a presidentialist style of politics, overriding the concept of the collective ministerial responsibility by reducing the power of the Cabinet, eliminated any effective influence from the annual conference of the Labour Party and "hinged its foreign policy on support for one of the worst presidents in US history".

Benn strongly objected to the bombing of Iraq in December 1998, calling it immoral and saying: "Aren't Arabs terrified? Aren't Iraqis terrified? Don't Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Doesn't bombing strengthen their determination? ... Every Member of Parliament tonight who votes for the government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting the responsibility for the deaths of innocent people if the war begins, as I fear it will." Benn also opposed the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Several months prior to his retirement, Benn was a signatory to a letter, alongside Niki Adams (Legal Action for Women), Ian Macdonald, Gareth Peirce, and other legal professionals, that was published in The Guardian newspaper on 22 February 2001 condemning raids of more than 50 brothels in the central London area of Soho. At the time, a police spokesman said: "As far as we know, this is the biggest simultaneous crackdown on brothels and prostitution in this country in recent times", the arrest of 28 people in an operation that involved around 110 police officers. The letter read:

"In the name of 'protecting' women from trafficking, about 40 women, including a woman from Iraq, were arrested, detained and in some cases summarily removed from Britain. If any of these women have been trafficked ... they deserve protection and resources, not punishment by expulsion. ... Having forced women into destitution, the government first criminalised those who begged. Now it is trying to use prostitution as a way to make deportation of the vulnerable more acceptable. We will not allow such injustice to go unchallenged."

Retirement and final years, 2001–2014
Benn chose not to seek re-election at the 2001 general election, saying he was "leaving parliament in order to spend more time on politics." Along with former Prime Minister Edward Heath, Benn was permitted by the Speaker to continue using the House of Commons Library and Members' refreshment facilities. Shortly after his retirement, he became the President of the Stop the War Coalition. He became a leading figure of the British opposition to the War in Afghanistan from 2001 and the Iraq War, and in February 2003 he travelled to Baghdad to meet Saddam Hussein. The interview was broadcast on British television.

He spoke against the war at the February 2003 protest in London organised by the Stop the War Coalition, with police saying it was the biggest ever demonstration in the UK with about 750,000 marchers, and the organisers estimating nearly a million people participating. In February 2004 and 2008, he was re-elected President of the Stop the War Coalition.

He toured with a one-man stage show and appeared a few times each year in a two-man show with folk singer Roy Bailey. In 2003, his show with Bailey was voted 'Best Live Act' at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. In 2002, he opened the "Left Field" stage at the Glastonbury Festival. He continued to speak at each subsequent festival; attending one of his speeches was described as a "Glastonbury rite of passage". In October 2003, he was a guest of British Airways on the last scheduled Concorde flight from New York to London. In June 2005, he was a panellist on a special edition of BBC One's Question Time edited entirely by a school-age film crew selected by a BBC competition.

On 21 June 2005, Benn presented a programme on democracy as part of the Channel 5 series Big Ideas That Changed The World. He presented a left-wing view of democracy as the means to pass power from the "wallet to the ballot". He argued that traditional social democratic values were under threat in an increasingly globalised world in which powerful institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Commission are unelected and unaccountable to those whose lives they affect daily.

On 27 September 2005, Benn became ill while attending the annual Labour Party Conference in Brighton and was taken by ambulance to the Royal Sussex County Hospital after being treated by paramedics on-the-scene at the Brighton Centre. Benn reportedly fell and struck his head. He was kept in hospital for observation and was described as being in a "comfortable condition". He was subsequently fitted with an artificial pacemaker to help regulate his heartbeat.

In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted twelfth in the list of "Heroes of our Time". In September 2006, Benn joined the "Time to Go" demonstration in Manchester the day before the final Labour Party Conference with Tony Blair as Leader of the Labour Party, with the aim of persuading the Government to withdraw troops from Iraq, to refrain from attacking Iran and to reject replacing the Trident missile and submarines with a new system. He spoke to the demonstrators in the rally afterwards. In 2007, he appeared in an extended segment in the Michael Moore film Sicko giving comments about democracy, social responsibility and healthcare, notably, "If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people." A poll by the BBC Two The Daily Politics programme in January 2007 selected Benn as the UK's "Political Hero" with 38% of the vote, narrowly defeating Margaret Thatcher, who had 35%.

For the 2007 Labour Party leadership election, Benn backed the left-wing MP John McDonnell in his unsuccessful bid. In September 2007, Benn called for the government to hold a referendum on the EU Reform Treaty. In October 2007, aged 82, and when it appeared that a general election was about to be held, Benn reportedly announced that he wanted to stand, having written to his local Constituency Labour Party offering himself as a prospective candidate for the newly drawn Kensington seat. His main opponent would have been the incumbent Conservative MP for the predecessor seat of Kensington and Chelsea, Malcolm Rifkind. However, there was no election held in 2007, and so the boundary changes did not take effect until the eventual election in 2010, when Benn was not a candidate and the new seat was won by Rifkind.

In early 2008, Benn appeared on Scottish singer-songwriter Colin MacIntyre's album The Water, reading a poem he had written himself. In September 2008, he appeared on the DVD release for the Doctor Who story The War Machines with a vignette discussing the Post Office Tower; he became the second Labour politician, after Roy Hattersley to appear on a Doctor Who DVD.

At the Stop the War Conference 2009, he described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as "Imperialist war(s)" and discussed the killing of American and allied troops by Iraqi or foreign insurgents, questioning whether they were in fact freedom fighters, and comparing the insurgents to a British Dad's Army, saying: "If you are invaded you have a right to self-defence, and this idea that people in Iraq and Afghanistan who are resisting the invasion are militant Muslim extremists is a complete bloody lie. I joined Dad's Army when I was sixteen, and if the Germans had arrived, I tell you, I could use a bayonet, a rifle, a revolver, and if I'd seen a German officer having a meal I'd have tossed a grenade through the window. Would I have been a freedom fighter or a terrorist?"

In an interview published in Dartford Living in September 2009, Benn was critical of the Government's decision to delay the findings of the Iraq War Inquiry until after the general election, stating that "people can take into account what the inquiry has reported on but they've deliberately pushed it beyond the election. Government is responsible for explaining what it has done and I don't think we were told the truth." He also stated that local government was strangled by Margaret Thatcher and had not been liberated by New Labour.

In 2009, Benn was admitted to hospital and An Evening with Tony Benn, scheduled to take place at London's Cadogan Hall, was cancelled. He performed his show, The Writing on the Wall, with Roy Bailey at St Mary's Church, Ashford, Kent, in September 2011, as part of the arts venue's first Revelation St. Mary's Season. In July 2011 Benn was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Glamorgan, Wales.

Benn headed the "coalition of resistance", a group which was opposed to the UK austerity programme. In interviews in 2010 with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and 2013 with Afshin Rattansi on RT UK, Benn claimed that the actions of New Labour in the leadup to and aftermath of the Iraq War were such that the former Prime Minister Tony Blair should be tried for war crimes. Benn also claimed in 2010 that Blair had lost the "trust of the nation" regarding the war in Iraq.

In 2012, Benn was awarded an honorary degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. He was also the honorary president of the Goldsmiths Students' Union, who successfully campaigned for him to retract comments dismissing the Julian Assange rape allegations. In February 2013, Benn was among those who gave their support to the People's Assembly in a letter published by The Guardian newspaper. He gave a speech at the People's Assembly Conference held at Westminster Central Hall on 22 June 2013.

Benn was consistently one of the most vocal critics of British membership of the European Union in Parliament, citing the EU's "democratic deficit" as a main point of contempt. In 2013, Benn reiterated his previous opposition to European integration. Speaking to the Oxford Union on the alleged overshadowing of the EU debate by "UKIP and Tory backbenchers", he said:"I took the view that having fought [Europeans in the Second World War ] that we should now work with them, and co-operate, and that was my first thought about it. Then how I saw how the European Union was developing, it was very obvious that what they had in mind was not democratic. ... And the way that Europe has developed is that the bankers and the multinational corporations have got very powerful positions, and if you come in on their terms, they will tell you what you can and cannot do. And that is unacceptable. My view about the European Union has always been not that I am hostile to foreigners, but that I am in favour of democracy ... I think they're building an empire there, they want us to be a part of their empire and I don't want that."

Illness and death
In 1990, Benn was diagnosed with chronic lymphatic leukaemia and given three or four years to live; at this time, he kept the news of his leukaemia from everyone except his immediate family. Benn said: "When you're in parliament, you can't describe your medical condition. People immediately start wondering what your majority is and when there will be a by-election. They're very brutal." This was revealed in 2002 with the release of his 1990–2001 diaries.

Benn had a stroke in 2012, and spent much of the following year in hospital. He was reported to be "seriously ill" in hospital in February 2014. Benn died at home on 14 March 2014, surrounded by his family, at the age of 88.

Benn's funeral took place on 27 March 2014 at St Margaret's Church, Westminster. His body had lain in rest at St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster the night before the funeral service. The service ended with the singing of "The Red Flag". His body was then cremated; the ashes were expected to be buried alongside those of his wife at the family home near Steeple, Essex.

Figures from across the political spectrum praised Benn following his death, and the leaders of all three major political parties (the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats) in the United Kingdom paid tribute.

Conservative leader and Prime Minister David Cameron said:"... he was an extraordinary man: a great writer, a brilliant speaker, extraordinary in Parliament, and a great life of public and political and parliamentary service. I mean, I disagreed with most of what he said. But he was always engaging and interesting, and you were never bored when reading or listening to him, and the country a great campaigner, a great writer, and someone who I'm sure whose words will be followed keenly for many, many years to come."

Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg called Benn an "astonishing, iconic figure" and a "veteran parliamentarian, he was a great writer, he had great warmth and he had great conviction ... his political life will be looked back on with affection and admiration".

Leader of the Opposition and Labour leader Ed Miliband, who knew Benn personally as a family friend, said:"I think Tony Benn will be remembered as a champion of the powerless, as a conviction politician, as somebody of deep principle and integrity. The thing about Tony Benn is that you always knew what he stood for, and who he stood up for. And I think that's why he was admired right across the political spectrum. There are people who agreed with him and disagreed with him, including in my own party, but I think people admired that sense of conviction and integrity that shone through from Tony Benn."

Personal life
Benn was a teetotaler and a vegetarian.

Diaries and biographies
Benn was a prolific diarist. Nine volumes of his diaries have been published. The final volume was published in 2013. Collections of his speeches and writings were published as Arguments for Socialism (1979), Arguments for Democracy (1981), (both edited by Chris Mullin), Fighting Back (1988) and (with Andrew Hood) Common Sense (1993), as well as Free Radical: New Century Essays (2004). In August 2003, London DJ Charles Bailey created an album of Benn's speeches (ISBN 1-904734-03-0) set to ambient groove.

He made public several episodes of audio diaries he made during his time in Parliament and after retirement, entitled The Benn Tapes, broadcast originally on BBC Radio 4. Short series have been played periodically on BBC Radio 4 Extra. A major biography was written by Jad Adams and published by Macmillan in 1992; it was updated to cover the intervening 20 years and reissued by Biteback Publishing in 2011: Tony Benn: A Biography (ISBN 0-333-52558-2). A more recent "semi-authorised" biography with a foreword by Benn was published in 2001: David Powell, Tony Benn: A Political Life, Continuum Books (ISBN 978-0826464156). An autobiography, Dare to be a Daniel: Then and Now, Hutchinson (ISBN 978-0099471530), a reference to the Old Testament prophet in the lions' den, was published in 2004.

There are substantial essays on Benn in the Dictionary of Labour Biography by Phillip Whitehead, Greg Rosen (eds), Politicos Publishing, 2001 (ISBN 978-1902301181) and in Labour Forces: From Ernie Bevin to Gordon Brown, Kevin Jefferys (ed.), I.B. Tauris Publishing, 2002 (ISBN 978-1860647437). American Michael Moore dedicates his book Mike's Election Guide 2008 (ISBN 978-0141039817) to Benn, with the words: "For Tony Benn, keep teaching us".

On 5 March 2019, it was announced that a large political archive of Benn's speeches, diaries, letters, pamphlets, recordings and ephemera had been accepted in lieu of £210,000 inheritance tax and allocated to the British Library. The audio recordings total to thousands of hours of content.

Plaques
During his final years in Parliament, Benn placed three plaques within the Houses of Parliament. Two are in a room between the Central Lobby and Strangers' Gallery that holds a permanent display about the suffragettes. The first was placed in 1995. The second was placed in 1996 and is dedicated to all who work within the Houses of Parliament.

The third is dedicated to Emily Wilding Davison, who died for the cause of "Votes for women", and was placed in the broom cupboard next to the Undercroft Chapel, where Davison is said to have hidden during the night of the 1911 census in order to establish her address as the House of Commons.

In 2011, Benn unveiled a plaque in Highbury, North London, to commemorate the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Legacy
In Bristol, where Benn first served as a member of parliament, a number of tributes exist in his honour. A bust of him was unveiled in Bristol's City Hall in 2005. In 2012 Transport House on Victoria Street, headquarters of Unite the Union's regional office, was officially renamed Tony Benn House and opened by Benn himself. As of 2015 he appears, alongside other famous people associated with the city, on the reverse of the Bristol pound's £B5 banknote.

Benn told the Socialist Review in 2007:"I'd like to have on my gravestone: 'He encouraged us.' I'm proud to have been in the parliament that introduced the health service, the welfare state and voted against means testing. I did my maiden speech on nationalising the steel industry, put down the first motion for the boycott of South African goods, and resigned from the shadow cabinet in 1958 because of their support for nuclear weapons.

I think you do plant a few acorns, and I have lived to see one or two trees growing: gay rights, freedom of information, CND. I'm not claiming them for myself but you feel you have encouraged other people and see the arguments developing.

I'm not ashamed of making mistakes. I've made a million mistakes and they're all in the diary. When we edit the diary—which is cut to around 10 per cent—every mistake has to be printed because people look to see if you do. I would be ashamed if I thought I'd ever said anything I didn't believe to get on, but making mistakes is part of life, isn't it?"

Benn was widely seen as a key proponent of democratic socialism. He was described as "one of the few UK politicians to have become more left-wing after holding ministerial office". Harold Wilson, his former boss, maintained that Benn was the only man he knew who "immatures with age".

He has been cited as being a key mentor to future leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, with his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell commenting that "they would discuss everything under the sun. Jeremy was very close to Tony right up until the end." Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour Party a little over a year after Benn's death, an act which Hilary Benn said would have made his father feel "thrilled".

Styles

 * Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Esq. (1925 – 12 January 1942)
 * The Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn (12 January 1942 – 30 November 1950)
 * The Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, MP (30 November 1950 – 17 November 1960)
 * The Rt Hon. The Viscount Stansgate (17 November 1960 – 31 July 1963)
 * Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Esq. (31 July – 20 August 1963)
 * Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Esq., MP (20 August 1963 – 1964)
 * The Rt Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, MP (1964 – October 1973)
 * The Rt Hon. Tony Benn, MP (October 1973 – 9 June 1983)
 * The Rt Hon. Tony Benn (9 June 1983 – 1 March 1984)
 * The Rt Hon. Tony Benn, MP (1 March 1984 – 14 May 2001)
 * The Rt Hon. Tony Benn (14 May 2001 – 14 March 2014)

Diaries

 * Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963–67, Hutchinson (1987); ISBN 978-0-09-170660-9
 * Office Without Power: Diaries 1968–72, Hutchinson (1988); ISBN 978-0-09-173647-7
 * Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–76, Hutchinson (1989); ISBN 978-0-09-173775-7
 * Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977–80, Hutchinson (1990); ISBN 978-0-09-174321-5
 * The End of an Era: Diaries 1980–90, Hutchinson (1992); ISBN 978-0-09-174857-9
 * Years of Hope: Diaries 1940–62, Hutchinson (1994); ISBN 978-0-09-178534-5
 * The Benn Diaries: Single Volume Edition 1940–90, Hutchinson (1995); ISBN 978-0-09-179223-7
 * Free at Last!: Diaries 1991–2001, Hutchinson (2002); ISBN 978-0-09-179352-4
 * More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001–2007, Hutchinson (2007); ISBN 978-0-09-951705-4
 * A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine: The Last Diaries, Hutchinson (2013); ISBN 978-0-09-194387-5

title: Tony Benn