 Their father, William Wedgwood 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.