Tony Benn, 1925-2014

Tony Benn was one of those names that would float in and out of my consciousness on my weekly perusals of the British media.  (Who are we kidding- it's pretty much a daily matter now.) A leading light of the British left, he entered Parliament when Clement Attlee was Prime Minister and retired when Tony Blair was Prime Minister.  He was an MP for 50 years, a Cabinet Minister under both Wilson and Callaghan and lead a campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage to go back to the House of Commons.  Beyond that Reader's Digest and lamentably short summary of the man's accomplishments, I know little.  I have little knowledge of how his critics view him, never had the chance to see him on my television screens, but from what little exposure I did get of him, I knew two things:

1.  He was very very very very left wing.  (The two extra 'verys' are for any American readers, lol.)

2. He was a fiercely principled politician that always stood by what he believed in.

Fiercely principled politicians are few in number on either side of the Atlantic these days and although Benn had retired from politics some time ago, when one of these lights goes out, it's worthy of pause and consideration.  I stumbled across this clip on YouTube-  I'm not even sure if it's the whole speech, but it's sort of sad that it was so sparsely attended.   This was a guy who could speak:

I've always been dubious about socialism-- it seems to cost an awful lot of money and in this country especially it lacks a connection to the real world.  The heartland of the progressive left in this country seem to be the province of urban areas on the coasts or isolated pockets of college towns where academia tends to skew in that direction politically anyway- it's also vastly outside the everyday experience of most if not many ordinary Americans.   For the vast majority of people, driving a Prius, shopping at Whole Foods and eating only non-GM foods are just non-starters.  Socialism in this country is less of an ideology and more of a fad for rich hipster types than anything else.  It costs money to be liberal- which is why so many people aren't.

But a funny thing happened when I watched this video-  in four minutes and forty-six seconds I saw the best critique of unrestrained corporatist oligarchy (I won't call what we have capitalism, because it's not.  If the government isn't regulating the free market it's sure as shit handing out subsidies and bailouts by the bucketload to cronies and donors of the left and right) that I've ever seen.   I saw a vision of a country where people mattered more than business and for one brief, shining, moment- I almost believed a little.

And that's something.