A year ago today, on the last day of his life, Tony Benn still managed to raise a smile from his bed. We had just placed his well worn Doc Marten shoes by his feet and were speculating on how many meetings they had done, how much mischief they had seen?

The real (unspoken) question, though, was not about their mileage but whether anyone would ever fill them. I guess we all knew the answer was “no.”

Societies don’t often throw up visionaries, at least not ones that get listened to.

Benn was the exception that broke every rule. He managed to inspire, inform, empower and entertain all in one go. Moreover, he refused to sink into the conveniently shallow spaces that politics has often found itself dragged into.

It was his, and our, good fortune that his life coincided with a brief period in which the Labour Party was also willing to question the “elected oligarchy” that, in Britain, has passed for parliamentary democracy.

Benn’s critics, of course, described this differently. He was branded as the man who almost destroyed Labour, the Samson who would pull down the pillars of society destroying everything that had made Britain what it was.

To the extent that this meant overturning the reign of patronage and domains of servitude and exploitation, Benn’s critics were right. But their criticism was never couched in such terms. The comfort zones occupied by Britain’s political elite always carefully avoided the fundamentals of a deeply divided and stratified society.

Of course there were others who challenged these structural inequalities too — brave, courageous, unbending voices who argued for fundamental change in the society we live in. But few could make you laugh in the way he could. Few could whisk you in the same way through 1,000 years of history, weaving threads that connected the past and informed the present. Few could make people feel as good about themselves as Benn told us we were.

On Monday, in the House of Commons, there will be a memorial meeting in celebration of Tony’s life. I have found myself wondering what he would say if he was to be a speaker? He would certainly invite us to look forward and not just back.

His focus would probably be on the ultimate choices he believed society faces — a choice between socialism and barbarism, between democracy and tyranny. A glance across today’s global landscapes sets out the how close we may be.

Benn’s starting place could easily be Iraq — the cradle of civilisation, as he always reminded us. It wasn’t al Qaida that turned the country into a huge sectarian killing field. It was us. The Bush-Blair shock troops   bombed their way through the land in pursuit of weapons they knew didn’t exist. And the legacy of this “conquest” was to send ripples of division and destruction through the Middle East and Africa that show no signs of ending.

The West now lives in fear of immigrants and “the terrorist threat.” But “immigrants” (refugees) — in their millions — are largely scattered across their own regions, taken in by their own (neighbouring) poor. Across the world, it is the poor who look after the destitute.

Benn would remind us that, in such circumstances, we should be arguing for an aid budget of 2 per cent of GDP not a defence budget of 2 per cent.

Domestically, we are threatened more by austerity than Isis. Footloose capital, not Islam, drove the 2007-8 global economic meltdown. Today, it is corporate fundamentalists who drive the Transatlantic Trade and Investment (TTIP) negotiations between the US and EU seeking to cloak themselves in “trade secrets” protection and a right to sue citizens if anything threatens corporate profits.

The ayatollahs of greed threaten us far more than the ayatollahs of creed.

Osama bin Laden was never responsible for pricing Londoners out of a home of their own. Rentiers, tax exiles and the supreme council of speculators has done this. Yet where is the call for international sanctions and against those who have been hoovering up the world’s wealth and squirrelling it into tax hideouts and over-priced properties?

Global leaders demand full reparations from impoverished countries like Greece but happily “cut a deal” with banks like HSBC for a fraction of the billions they have helped people hide or loot.
It is in the face of this that Benn would (again) make the case for a better, bolder politics of redistribution.

Maybe it is no more than you’d expect from a boy who, at the age of six, met Gandhi, who aged 10 was out delivering Labour leaflets in the general election campaign and who at 13 witnessed Mosley’s blackshirts trailing their hatred round the streets of London.

These events may have shaped him, but what defined Benn as a person bigger than his time was something else. If we could only capture it, bottle it and pass it round, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now. But he would be the first to say that the answer is to be found in us, not him.

Benn’s unflagging faith was in the power of people to collectively change this world for the better. All of the major “emancipating” transformational events, he would remind us,  were driven by social movements rather than political elites. He would, forever, affirm our collective ability to draw on the past in order to transform the future.

So it would be today. Benn’s call would be for a post-austerity politics insisting that Labour’s job was to abolish impoverishment, never to manage it. And he would apply this to the planet as much as its people. “We are our brothers’ keepers,” he would tell audiences “...and our sisters’ and our parents’ and our neighbours’. And we are the stewards of a fragile planet, not its owners.”

Whether he delivered this message in a train carriage, at a conference, outside a factory gate or over a mug of tea it would always be rooted in the same unshakeable belief. This was not the belief in himself, but a belief in “us.” That is what made Benn’s messages so empowering and uplifting. He would fire up his own memorial meeting with the belief that, collectively, we really could change everything.

It isn’t too late to prove him right.

In Memory of Tony Benn, a Year on — Monday March 16 2015 at 6pm, Wilson Room, Portcullis House, House of Commons