It was a sorry thing, seeing Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn on last night's Newsnight. He was representing the Stop the War Coalition, which has decided to oppose any international attempts to save Libyans from Gaddafi's thugocracy (even though this time it's 'legal' and even the French and the Arabs are for it and the Russians not against it (so that whole UN legality thing was in fact irrelevant in the anti-Iraq invasion protests, it turns out)).
Benn looked really, really old. Old and confused and just wrong for the sake of it; as if, feeling the burden of being the nation's favourite tireless, articulate man who is always wrong (and has been wrong about absolutely everything in his long career), he feared he was now running out of chances to be wrong and had better have this last fling at glorious, thick-skulled, obstinate, morally bankrupt wrongness.
Benn will not go down in history unfortunately, as one of the cogs in the gearbox permanently stuck in reverse, he and his ilk creating an atmosphere that has us, UKPLC, where we stand today. Probably one of his worst crimes, when holding the reins under Harold, was signing off the Butterwell opencast project, so ruining the heart of central east Northumberland, just as it recovered from deep mining, it is of note that the Vale of Belvoior remained unsullied.
ReplyDeleteThis is apart from the even greater crime. that through his meddling he destroyed the heart of British Manufacturing.
Truly an enemy of the British people.
It's a shame Libya doesn't share a huge open border to its east with a country sympathetic to the rebels' goals - having recently gone through a similar uprising itself. With a massive military, too, that would be handy.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Stockholm wants its money back.
ReplyDelete