Oliver Kamm

Abortion law

Lord Steel's remarks, in The Guardian, on the 40th anniversary of the abortion law he proposed seem to me humane and apt.

Lord Steel said: "Abortion should not be regarded as long-stop [back-up] contraception, and, as a society, we need to address these issues, as well as the questions of sexual ethics and sex education."

But he went on to say that there was "no such thing" as a correct number of abortions.

In a speech marking the 40th anniversary of his bill to legalise abortion, the Lib Dem peer said that the current inquiry by the science and technology select committee into the 24-week abortion limit should address barriers to ensure that as many terminations as possible took place within 13 weeks.

"I have always argued that, if abortion is sadly necessary, it is desirable that it should be carried out as early as possible," Lord Steel told the conference.

"Many argue that the two-doctors requirement causes undesirable delay, and, since 1967, many of our European neighbours have legislated for abortion up to the 12th and 13th week of pregnancy without such a requirement. The committee should address that."

The Abortion Act of 1967 was an important advance in what the late Lord Jenkins, then Home Secretary, rightly preferred to call the civilised society rather than the permissive society. Safe and legal abortion is a humanitarian and a libertarian cause. But what distinguishes UK legislation is that this contentious issue is sublimated in politics. There is no equivalent of the US Supreme Court judgement in Roe vs. Wade, an example of judicial fiat supplanting politics. Abortion is an issue on which a significant minority of voters holds strong religious or ethical objections. Those people will always be a minority, not because of some insidious moral relativism in public mores, but because very many parents would instinctively and rightly support a daughter's decision to terminate an unwamted pregnancy. The "pro-life" lobby is a challenge not only to individual rights but also to family life.

The "pro-choice" cause must, however, be advanced by politics. If the minority is told that its views are simply unconstitutional then the abortion issue will be taken out of politics and will inflame public debate. To some extent, this has happened in the US. In the UK, I know of no case where the abortion issue has determined even a single constituency. (Those with long memories will remember the by-election in Glasgow Garscadden in 1978, where the pacifist SNP candidate failed to make abortion an election issue. Donald Dewar, a supporter of the Abortion Act, comfortably and deservedly won the seat for Labour. In the only election I have ever taken a significant part in - Martin Bell's Independent victory in Tatton in 1997 - our campaign was lobbied, quite aggressively, by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. After consulting with the candidate, I wrote to SPUC to say that Martin supported the law as it stands. He thereby forfeited the endorsement of the anti-abortion group, which supported the Conservative Neil Hamilton instead. This did not noticeably swing the result.)

There is a substantial, if not quite overwhelming, consensus among voters and parliamentarians in this country that abortion should be more easily available at an early stage, and that medical opinion should determine the time limit for late abortions. This, on my understanding, is what Lord Steel is saying, and I applaud his sentiments.

Fantasists against the state

David Aaronovitch has an excellent column in The Times today about the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker. If you have heard of Baker at all, it will be for his taste in conspiracy theories concerning the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly. I recommend you read the whole article, which includes an informative precedent whose denouement I wasn't previously aware of. This was the murder of an elderly lady, Hilda Murrell, in 1984, and the suspicion - much promoted for years afterwards by the eccentric parliamentarian Tam Dalyell - that Mrs Murrell's anti-nuclear activities had drawn her to the malevolent attention of the security services. David writes:

The Dalyell idea of a Murrell conspiracy mirrors in almost every important detail the Baker idea of the Kelly murder, with the dismissal of the “official version” as somehow deficient, and in the build-up of anonymous information. And, like Mr Baker’s accusations, Mr Dalyell’s speculations were not victimless. As far as I know Mr Dalyell has never apologised to those police officers, Home Office staff and secret service personnel whom he effectively slandered and whose time he squandered. Mr Baker happily puts the Thames Valley Police, the pathologists and (by implication) Tony Blair in the frame, and once more causes upset to the Kelly family.

But I'm afraid this is too kind to Norman Baker, whose public pronouncements I have been following with horrified fascination. Six months ago Baker floated a new theory in an interview with my local paper, the Brighton Argus. (Baker is MP for Lewes, the neighbouring constituency to Brighton Kemptown.) He said then: "Robin Cook was on Ministry of Defence land, I believe, when he died and certainly I have doubts over what happened."

Consider what this speculation requires Baker to consider as serious propositions. They are implications rather than assertions, but they are ineluctable. First, Robin Cook's death while out hill-walking might have been murder. Secondly, Tony Blair might be complicit in that murder for political reasons. Thirdly, Robin Cook's widow, who was with her husband when he collapsed, must have either participated or colluded in the murder; at a minimum, she must possess information about the violent death of her husband that she has chosen not to disclose.

David comments on the upset to the Kelly family from Baker's fantasies. I hope those fantasies are unknown to Mrs Gaynor Cook, and will stay that way.

UPDATE: Here is a contemporary Guardian report, dated 21 December 1984, of Tam Dalyell's conspiracy theories concerning the murder of Hilda Murrell:

The Home Office is investigating allegations by the Labour MP Mr Tam Dalyell, that a 78-year-old Shrewsbury woman died after a violent encounter with British intelligence officers she discovered searching her home for sensitive documents concerning the Belgrano affair. The claims, made in the House of Commons yesterday by the MP for Linlithgow, were denied by the police, whose own investigation into the mysterious death of Miss Hilda Murrell earlier this year is now in its ninth month.

One point that's worth noting about the report is that Dalyell was, if not encouraged, then at least not discouraged, by a parliamentarian whose reputation for sense stands deservedly higher: Paddy Ashdown, then Liberal MP for Yeovil. The report refers to comments made by both men in the House the previous day. Here is an account of Ashdown's comments, taken from a worthless book entitled Unlawful Killing: The Murder of Hilda Murrell, by Judith Cook, 1994, p. 107:

He had not, he said, been into the matter as fully as had Dalyell, but he had the highest respect for Robert Green [Miss Murrell's nephew] and was deeply concerned at the serious allegations that had been made. He reminded the House how often in the past they had subjected Dalyell to ridicule only to discover that he had been in the right. "In the absence of detailed answers to the detailed questions which the Honourable Member for Linlithgow [Dalyell] has put, I believe there is only one way forward: a full inquiry under a High Court judge."

The number of times, in a long political career, that Dalyell was subjected to ridicule only to be proved right was, to the best of my recollection, zero. This total includes - it assuredly includes - his campaigns over the sinking of the Belgrano, which he imaginatively attributed to Mrs Thatcher's desire to scupper a Peruvian peace plan.

Ashdown is an honourable politician for whom I have gained a lot of respect. Serious though the issue of Miss Murrell's murder plainly is, I'm relieved nonetheless to find that there were reasons early in Ashdown's political career (he became an MP in 1983) for not regarding him as the substantial figure he is now. It wasn't merely misjudgement on my part to have failed to perceive his strengths.

Someone needed to say it

This article appears on The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site.

In his first major speech since leaving Downing Street, Tony Blair this week likened Iran to the emerging threat of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. The ideology of Islamist extremism "now has a state - Iran - that is prepared to back and finance terror in the pursuit of destabilising countries whose people wish to live in peace".

David Cox identifies in this speech an encouragement of "war fervour". Mr Blair's analysis of international relations is, in truth, acute and understated. It is entirely consistent with his message while in office. In 2001, three days after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, Mr Blair warned the House of Commons that terrorists "would, if they could, go further and use chemical or biological or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction. We know, also, that there are groups or people, occasionally states, who trade the technology and capability for such weapons."

Six years later, Iran's activities confirm Blair's diagnosis. At a minimum, Iran's Revolutionary Guards are equipping Shi'ite terrorists in Iraq with improvised explosive devices to attack Iraqi and US troops (who are, let it be recalled, discharging a UN mandate). Support for terrorism ought also to be considered alongside Iran's nuclear ambitions and serial deceptions. Last month, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, told the organisation's conference: "Contrary to the decisions of the security council, calling on Iran to take certain confidence building measures, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities, and is continuing with its construction of the heavy water reactor at Arak."

Adopting a tone that Cox will doubtless find bellicose and threatening, El Baradei concluded: "This is regrettable."

There is no reason to suppose that Iran's behaviour will be moderated by concessions from the international community. Accommodation has long been the policy. The UN security council (UNSC) accepts Iran's right to develop a civil nuclear programme. Even the Bush administration has accepted a compromise proposal to move uranium enrichment from Iran to Russia. It is ironic that France's new President and especially the foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, have been excoriated for their supposedly aggressive rhetoric. The Socialist candidate whom President Sarkozy defeated, Ségolène Royal, maintained in her election campaign that Iran had no right even to peaceful nuclear technology.

The prudent inference from the Arak reactor is that Iran has malevolent designs. As Shahram Chubin, of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, has written: "Iran's insistence on the full fuel cycle makes little sense if it is intended to avoid [energy] dependence, for Iran will, in any case, need to import the raw uranium, which it does not possess in any quantity. The fact the programme was undeclared also suggests an illegal intent."

When you consider that Iran's puppet-president has disseminated into international political discourse that distinctive strain of racist fakery known as Holocaust denial, and gleefully anticipated the extinction of the Jewish state, it ought to be obvious why an Iranian bomb is an unconscionable outcome. (It ought to be obvious, but to some it is not. Astonishingly, in February 2006, the misnamed Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament "expressed regret" at the IAEA's decision to report Iran to the UNSC for its nuclear programme.)

Nuclear deterrence in the cold war was - excepting the Cuban missile crisis, and the near-disastrous Soviet misapprehension of Nato military exercises in 1983 - a reasonably stable system. When the presidency of Iran is held by a messianic crank and virulent antisemite, we are not dealing with the minimally rational political agent that a system of stable deterrence requires.

To anticipate that emerging threat will require a more concerted effort at containment. The members of the UNSC must insist that Iran abide by Resolution 1737, which requires Iran to suspend its work on uranium enrichment. If we are to avoid confrontation with Iran in future, then UN sanctions on nuclear-related technology and materials must be policed effectively.

In these circumstances, the visit this week of President Putin to Tehran is discouraging. It may be true that, as Dilip Hiro argues, Russia and Iran have traditionally enjoyed cordial relations. But these are exceptional times, when Russia has given out conflicting signals. While formally acknowledging that Iran has violated international agreements and must now adhere to them, Russia has simultaneously ensured that the costs for Iran of such conduct are minimal.

This must change. One of the many tragedies of Iraq in the last decade was the insouciance and internal division of the UNSC in responding to Saddam Hussein's violations of its own resolutions. President Hillary Clinton (if she is to be), in alliance with much improved French and German leadership, will surely understand the security implications of Iran's nuclear adventurism. She and her counterparts will be thankful for the statesmanlike precedent of Tony Blair's leadership, and would do well to heed him now.

Congratulations

It is Stephen Pollard's wedding today. Congratulations to him, and best wishes to Samantha, who probably already knows what he'll be getting up to on honeymoon.

Speech and offence

Henry Porter in The Observer makes a neat observation (emphasis added):

We live in a time of official proscription. Every political second-rater is after votes or validation. Justice Minister Jack Straw proposes to add to the laws against incitement to religious hatred by making it a criminal offence to incite hatred against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals. This new offence will be punishable by a maximum of seven years in jail. What next? The disabled? Yes, indeed. Mr Straw hopes to protect the disabled with a similar law. After that, there is no telling what this ambitious and calculating man plans. But the attack on free speech must be clear even to the groups which lobbied for this law. When the bill is passed, we will arrive at the absurd situation in which gays who express strong opinions about religious bigotry risk prosecution under one law while religious bigots who express strong opinions about gays risk prosecution under another.

Some aspects of New Labour administration are liberal in the best sense and have my strong support: civil partnerships for same-sex couples, for example, is an important and welcome piece of legislation that expands liberty. I am also unfazed, on liberal grounds, by a smoking ban in public places. But again and again you come up against New Labour's eagerness to proscribe offensive speech. That is a thoroughly pernicious tendency. My objection is not only the pragmatic one that unexceptionable statements - say, secularist critiques of religious myth - risk getting caught up in a sensitivity about religious hatred. It is that genuine advocates of bigotry - Holocaust denial, or anti-homosexual prejudice, or pseudoscientific notions of racial inferiority - must have a protected right to free speech. There can be no such thing in a free society as a protection from being offended.

Those heroic independent nationalists

"A man who had helped to plan a new order and a square deal for the masses.... The man whom no assault could terrify and no atom bomb intimidate or deflect from his purpose of building the world's first socialist country." -- Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, describing his meeting with Stalin in 1946 (quoted in David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, 1988, p. 95)

"... Iran's main sin is that since its 1979 Islamic revolution, for all its many failures and inadequacies, it has been a far more independent nation than most in the Middle East and dares to follow a foreign policy agenda which does not exactly conform to the US vision of how the Middle East should be." -- Inayat Bunglawala, Assistant Secretary-General at the Muslim Council of Britain, "Comment is Free", 19 October 2006

I have heard Bunglawala's imaginative contributions to public debate before. They don't get any more coherent.

Dealing with libel threats II

The International Herald Tribune reported last week on the dispiritingly topical issue of libel threats against bloggers. The report refers specifically to the threats made recently against Craig Murray, the blogger and former ambassador to Uzbekistan:

The daily Web log, or blog, of the former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, vanished after Murray's British Internet provider received a flurry of ominous legal letters demanding the removal of "potentially defamatory" information about Alisher Usmanov, a mining mogul with a rising stake in the English soccer club Arsenal.

Two weeks later, Murray is not blogging, but his blistering opinions are about to surface again through a Dutch Internet provider that offers refuge to controversial bloggers in the United States and in England, where libel laws are more lax. And with that journey, Murray has stirred support and a common outrage among bloggers and Internet service providers who complain that chilling demands from companies are becoming more frequent in a number of countries.

I wrote a post on this case last month. I accept that laws against defamation are a necessary part of public discourse, and bloggers should be aware that those laws apply to blogs as they do to other media. But Mr Murray certainly has my support in this case. It is disturbing that a threat addressed to Mr Murray's internet service provider - without the claim's having been tested in court - should shut down his blog. It is outrageous that that ban should have been extended to other blogs that have nothing to do with Usmanov's complaint. The ISP is not at fault here, but is acting rationally given that it can be held liable for not responding in a timely manner to a complaint. The problem is, of course, that the ISP has no way of discriminating between a justified and a frivolous complaint: it will just take the material down to be on the safe side. The problem lies with the precedent set earlier this year in the Mumsnet libel case, which I wrote about here. I said then:

Why should the publisher of a bulletin board be liable for the content of comments that it cannot check? What is the restraint on free speech of holding a publisher liable for posters’ comments? And what is the extent of a publisher's liability even where it acts entirely in accord with a complaint whether justified or not? It’s a mess, and there is an urgent need for the reform of libel law in the digital age. I shall endeavour to argue for that reform with whatever opportunities are open to me.

The issue has inevitably arisen, and quickly, in the case not of a bulletin board such as Mumsnet's but an ISP. Reform of the law is urgent. You will find later in the Herald Tribune report a comment by the blogger Tim Ireland making the same plea but on different grounds:

"The threat is and always has been money," Ireland said. "Might makes rights. We have to take away at least one aspect in U.K. libel law that gives an unfair advantage to people who are cashed up."

I share Tim's anxiety but disagree with his reasoning. First, in my view the problem is not a general one about English libel law but a particular one about a case (the Mumsnet settlement) that has set an appalling precedent. Secondly, while English libel law is known to be more onerous for a defendant than similar laws in other jurisdictions, bloggers should not overestimate the restrictions they're under. You can say a great deal. I mentioned in a post earlier this month that, while my own experience of the Internet and defamation law is in no way comparable to the threats being made against Mr Murray, it might be useful to bloggers to have a fuller account of the case than I have so far given. Just to recap; this was my reasoning:

I stress again that the "writ" issued in my case was characterised by extreme incompetence and resulted in pure failure on the part of the complainant, the pro-Milosevic blogger Neil Clark, and it shouldn't be taken as precedent for the threats now being made to bloggers. I merely record how I have gone about defending myself - and, not to overstate the case, the principles of free speech and fair comment on matters of public interest - against admittedly unintimidating and worthless threats of legal action, in the hope that the account may prove interesting to other bloggers. Libel threats against bloggers are highly likely to be an issue that will arise in some other, less farcical, form in future.

I intend to publish the complete correspondence relating to Mr Clark's purported writ. Be prepared, however, that Mr Clark's blizzard of threatening emails to me at the beginning of 2006 - before his purported claim was peremptorily struck out by the presiding judge, on application from my lawyers, in a small-claims court that didn't even have jurisdiction to hear the case - is highly repetitive. This is because Mr Clark was wont to threaten me with terrible consequences if I didn't do what he demanded (i.e. remove material from this site, apologise to him and pay him damages) by a certain deadline; whereupon I would write to him explaining why I would do none of those things, the deadline would pass and he would write again in the same terms but setting a new deadline. As I declined to remove posts that I knew I could defend on grounds of, respectively, fair comment and justification - i.e. my remarks about Mr Clark's misrepresentation of source material were true and I could prove them - there was nothing Mr Clark could do about it.

(Mr Clark did in fact do something about it, indirectly, after I had revealed on this blog the failure of his claim, but it's not a course I would recommend. Sad to relate, he invented female sock puppets so that he could post laudatory comments about himself on third party websites and pretend they were from independent parties. My friend Stephen Pollard has the full grim story. Don't miss the comments, in which Mr Clark's accomplice cheerfully owns up to the imposture, or the link to a commendably tough-minded Wikipedia administrator exposing Mr Clark's conduct and banning him from the site. There is a notable reversal in Mr Clark's tone when he realises the game's up.)

I accept entirely that most legal threats against bloggers - in fact, almost any conceivable such threat - will be of a more serious character than this. Bloggers must be aware that the laws of libel apply to them, and of the requirements of fair comment and justification. But those criteria are quite broad. They certainly encompassed my defence against Mr Clark's complaints; indeed it was obvious that Mr Clark's objection was not to libel in any conventional sense of the term but merely to remarks that he wanted suppressed. That made it an issue of free speech, on which I am stubborn. In any event, that's my experience, and those are my observations. I hope they are of some interest.

Our man this time

Daniel again, on the Liberal Democrats who committed regicide:

Those who did it shouldn't be embarrassed. They have been brave and really helped their party.

We mustn't let all this talk of assassins and daggers and so forth make it seem as if getting rid of Ming was a dirty deed.

This is clearly right, and I'm amazed it needs to be said. My analogy yesterday was with Michael Foot's leadership of an enfeebled Labour Party. If Foot's later testimony is to be believed (and I'm sure it is), only two Labour MPs urged him to his face to stand down before the party's electoral humiliation in 1983. (Those MPs were Gerald Kaufman and Jeff Rooker.) It is extraordinary and moderately scandalous that there were not more. Lib Dem MPs are not so sentimental; witness their speedy refusal to allow Charles Kennedy to continue in a post that he was demonstrably unable to fulfil. Those parliamentarians who realised the party's mistake in electing Ming have acted in their party's interest as well as their own.

They have therefore forced the question of the succession. The smart money and opinion appears to be on Nick Clegg. Here is Matthew d'Ancona on The Spectator's blog:

I stick by what I wrote in a Daily Telegraph column in January 2006. Nick Clegg is, as he was then, the only man for the job. Ming's problem was never age - Mick Jagger and Michael Heseltine are proof enough that you can still bring down the house after 60. It was the Lib Dem leader's countenance - a bearing he has always had - that made him unfit to be at the helm of a modern party: patrician, diffident, a little aloof. As Lib Dem voters looked at David Cameron's green Tories with interest, and Labour switchers, no longer outraged by Iraq, drifted back to their party, Ming had no aggressive response to offer. That was the whole point of Ming: he didn't do aggression.

He is the first casualty of Gordon Brown's decision not to hold a snap election. The Lib Dems are in big trouble, but if they choose the formidable Mr Clegg they could recover fast. Once again, the landscape changes: these are volatile, exciting times.

I can say with certainty that I shall not be voting for the Liberal Democrats at the next election, but it's still reasonable to have a preference for a leader of a party one doesn't support. I don't share the general commentators' preference for Nick Clegg. I stick by what I wrote on this site in February 2006 concerning the criteria for Lib Dem leader. Then I endorsed Simon Hughes. Hughes has ruled himself out this time, so I have considered the possible contenders. I'm pleased to read on his weblog the interest of John Hemming, MP for Birmingham Yardley, in seeking the leadership:

We should clearly argue for quality of life and away from a numerical perspective. The Treasury has argued that policy should be determined by valuing options financially. We should argue for people to have the power to determine their own situation based on an assessment of quality of life. This is, in fact, another dimension of politics where we can stand alone against Labour and Conservatives.

A third dimension in which we can create a distinction between our approach and that of the other parties is that of Deontology vs Consequentialism. Consequentialism, where the ends justify the means, has developed a stronger hold in the UK in recent years. On issues such as BAE and the Natwest 3 we should continue to argue that things should be done the right way (Deontology). Colleagues will be aware of some of my work in Public Family Law where Consequentialism holds sway and hundreds of people are imprisoned in secret every year. We should, however, review our approach to ensure a consistency here. Strict liability offences where there is no mens rea do cause difficulties from this perspective and how that operates to affect people should be thought through.

I shall wait till nominations close before I make a final decision. But as things stand, John Hemming is the most likely contender to receive my endorsement.

Gone, with reason

Daniel Finkelstein said it:

Ming just doesn’t work. He sounds and looks feeble and past it. His Commons performances are weak, his television soundbites limp. He hasn’t given his party any sense of direction. When Gordon Brown tried to mug the Libs by putting Paddy Ashdown in the Cabinet without offering policy concessions, Ming said he needed to think about it overnight. He has got to go.

I believe in Daniel's perspicacity, but usually - as with his insistence that Tony Blair exceeded his promise as PM - it's of a more counterintuitive type. It's rarely so very obvious that even the Liberal Democrats get it.

On the face of it, it's a noble decision by Sir Menzies to acknowledge that he is not, after all, the man for the job. There is thus no repetition of Labour's travails with Michael Foot, an elderly and plainly incredible leader for a general election campaign. I prefer to see the matter less graciously, however.

The great surprise to many commentators was how little Campbell really knew and how ill founded was the respect in which he was held. Campbell himself must have known; yet he didn't have the insight to perceive the damage he would inflict thereby on his party. You could just about make an intellectual case - and it has been done, unconvincingly, by two biographers - that Michael Foot was a necessary caretaker leader in Labour's then enfeebled and fractious state. The same cannot be said of Campbell. His was a mission of vanity. The party ought to have done far better in the 2005 election. A problem with the leadership caused the party to miss a historic opportunity. Campbell's succession has reinforced that failure, and the party may not again see a chance like the one it had.

And finally... Tony Benn

Here is the passage, from Tony Benn's book Dare to be a Daniel, 2004, p. 122, that I was recalling in the post immediately below this one:

All my life I have lived in the oral tradition, learning from listening and watching rather than from reading, and communicating by speaking rather than writing. I am not - nor do I aspire to be - an intellectual. In some ways, however, I do feel the disapproval of intellectuals who look down on people who have lived in the oral tradition; but it is a fact that from a speech you get a multi-dimensional understanding of a person that is not available through the printed word, however beautifully crafted.

Now, the passage does come in a chapter that Benn calls, with conscious irony, "How I Became a Philistine!"; yet that judgement is true and not quite as modest as the author believes. "Living in the oral tradition" is a peculiarly arch euphemism for not reading books, while the dismissive term "beautifully crafted" suggests that Benn regards the written word as an artifice compared with the authentic feelings conveyed by speech. That isn't merely non-intellectual: it's anti-intellectual. Later in the chapter Benn concedes: "I have undoubtedly denied myself a lot of pleasure by not reading fiction." So he has; but it's more than pleasure alone that he's thereby missed.

Regarding Benn's political judgements, I recommend a thoughtful blog post by Harry Barnes. Now retired, Harry was Labour MP for North East Derbyshire till 2005. From his local knowledge, he makes this particularly incisive point about his fellow Derbyshire MP:

When Tony won the Chesterfield seat in 1984, he achieved a fine victory in an adverse political climate. His public meetings were packed. People who went in order to "sort him out", left with leaflets and posters to try to spread his support. But after his victory, local attitudes changed over time. He developed a hot bed for the hard left with people coming from all over the country for the May Day celebrations. He made use of a section from Keir Hardie for one of his election addresses. His constituents saw him regularly on TV pressing a socialist revivalism. The problem with all this is that Chesterfield is into small town politics and comes out of an old moderate Lib-Lab tradition.

Between Eric Varley winning the seat at the depth of Labour's terrible national performance in 1983 and Tony's last victory at the height of Labour's electoral victory in 1997, the Chesterfield Labour vote only increased by a mere 2.7%. This compares with a national improvement of 15.6% in Labour's vote. Whilst in Dennis Skinner's nearby seat of Bolsover, the comparative increase was 17.7%. In North East Derbyshire which is a huge "C" shape encircling Chesterfield, the improvement was 19.7%.

It was little wonder that the Liberal Democrats went on to capture the Chesterfield seat in 2001. Yet it should be one of the strongest Labour seats in Derbyshire.

My final observation about Tony Benn's diaries is that they are - for all my criticisms of the author's politics - a very human document. Benn does not have the "hinterland" of books and music, or a vivid life of the mind; but he does have the solace of a talented family whom he is devoted to. The loneliness he records after the death of his wife, Caroline, is poignant; his pride on the political advancement of his son Hilary is touching. I was particularly moved by his recollections of his late brother Michael, who was killed in WW2. Tony Benn is an exemplary husband, brother, father and grandfather.

And yet.... When you consider Benn's public life you keep being surprised by the character of his political interventions. The notorious "interview" with Saddam Hussein was a disgrace. It was also no aberration. Ten years ago, one of very few world figures to rival Saddam's barbarism, Kim Jong Il, was confirmed in dynastic succession to North Korea's leadership. Some dreary totalitarian activists held a meeting in London to celebrate the occasion, in the company of the regime's functionaries and diplomatic allies. According to the organisers, Benn sent greetings. So did the notorious Stalinist apologist John Platts-Mills, and the notorious apologists for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Robert Parry and Ron Brown. Three years ago, The Guardian published this report about the alleged activities (alleged, because reliable information in so secretive a tyranny is scarce) of the regime that these men thus greeted:

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings. Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'

Platts-Mills, Parry and Brown were all at one time Labour MPs. I adapt a comment of Christopher Hitchens when I express my atheistic regret that there is no hell for these men - all of them now deceased - to go to. Parry and Brown at least had the excuse of being among the thickest parliamentarians I can recall. Platts-Mills, on the other hand, was unequivocally despicable. Tony Benn is not stupid, and he is not wicked. His public life thus demeans him all the more.