Tony Benn is a silly old extremist ...

[luke]

Tony Benn is a silly old extremist - and totally wrong about Winston Churchill

Tony Benn has given an interview to the BBC claiming that Winston Churchill was “well to the Left of New Labour”. Before we dissect that nonsense, some thoughts on Benn.

My fondest memory of the famed socialist is of him going over to Baghdad to meet Saddam Hussein in early 2003. Benn, as Nick Cohen recalls in his book Waiting for the Etonians, used to boast that he always asked five questions of any powerful person he met. “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?”

Interesting questions there for old Saddam, one would have thought, except all Benn asked the mass-murderer was:

“I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?”

So forgive me if I’ve never joined in with the media’s universal adoration of this silly old man. Journalists treat him like he’s dear old grandpop giving them a Werther’s Original; viewers on the BBC Politics Show vote him as their political idol; young people even pay money to watch him lecture.

Well, he may be charming and great company, but he’s also an extremist, a hardline socialist who, given the chance, would have left the country even more ruined than it otherwise was in 1979.

Born into the post-Nonconformist liberal elite, he’s also the worst kind of hypocritical privileged Leftie, advocating socialism and near-pacifism from the comforts of his house in Holland Park. All you need to know about Benn is that he’s the man Michael Moore turned to for an expert analysis on Britain’s socialised health care system when the American was making his health documentary Sicko.

Aside from the Common Market, Benn was wrong on everything – and he’s still wrong. He’s talking rubbish about Churchill’s “Left-wing” views, for example.

Churchill was a passionate believer in the British Empire who didn’t even think the British working class should be allowed to vote, let alone our colonial subjects. He was also the most strident anti-Communist of his generation who also believed only force could deter Nazi Germany. After the war he expressed horror at the idea of mass immigration to Britain.

Churchill would have been disgusted and baffled by Labour’s support for the European super-state, its belief in a multi-cultural Britain, its welfare system that kept over five million people on benefits even at the height of the boom, its sexual extremism and 1968 moral values, its assault on the Church, the countryside and the middle class.

Only someone who sees the political spectrum purely as a matter of economics could possibly say New Labour are “Right-wing”, or on the other hand that the Nazis were “Left-wing”. Left and right are more than about the economy: they encompass our attitude to culture, sexual morality, biology and nurture, crime and, most of all, whether humanity is essentially flawed or perfectible. Labour may be authoritarian, prone to sucking up to the rich and responsible for ever worsening social inequality, but that hardly makes them Right-wing.

Benn also points out, with the smugness of a Leftie explaining why they love living in Brixton, “My political heroes are Ghandi, Mandela and Tutu, none of them European and none of them white.” What do you want – a round of applause?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100002292/tony-benn-is-a-silly-old-extremist-and-totally-wrong-about-winston-churchill/

so there you have it ...

[faceless]

I was surprised my first comment was allowed - then he stood on the trap door...

[luke]