Benn and the peace movement

I went on Press TV's Forum programme this evening. It's pre-recorded and will be on the programme's website after it's been broadcast (sometime next week, I expect). The format is that of the BBC's Question Time; Andrew Gilligan is the moderator. The subject of this debate was the anti-war movement and what it had achieved. Tony Benn, two other anti-war campaigners and I were the guests.

My thesis on this is similar to my view of CND's opposition to Nato strategy in the 1980s. I think the movement is wrong, but there's an important place in principle for a peace movement in British politics. Before the Iraq War, it might have played a useful role in arguing whether there were pacific means of compelling Saddam Hussein to adhere to UNSC resolutions. But in practice the organised anti-war movement - and specifically the Stop the War Coalition, of which Benn is President - is not that type of questioning campaign, nor is it part of the political mainstream. Benn's plain speaking to the tyrant Saddam Hussein is well known ("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?"). It's Tony Blair whom Benn regards as the war criminal, while the fatuously named Coalition (so broad a movement that it brings together secular and theocratic advocates of totalitarianism) is opposed not to war but to our side.

Recalling a television debate he did with Benn during the European referendum campaign in 1975, the late Roy Jenkins wrote in his memoirs (A Life at the Centre, 1991, p. 410): "His methods were to my mind illegitimate in that he never replied to any argument, but merely moved on to a still more extravagant statement when the previous one was challenged." I cited this remark during my own debate with Benn because here he was exemplifying the identical technique before my very eyes. One reviewer of the latest volume of his diaries - a trivial, vainglorious and astonishingly sentimental work - described Benn as the nearest thing British politics has to a national treasure: "Most of the hostility of 25 years ago is clearly pointless and gone." Not on my part, it isn't.

After the programme Andrew Gilligan genially suggested that I appeared to get a buzz from being the most hated person in the room. This is not strictly true, but there are audiences you try to win and audiences you try to rile. I'm moderately pleased to say that no one has ever expressed scepticism, or at least not to me, at my ability to do the second.

Comments

[David Boothroyd]

To link this and the succeeding post, Tony Benn is now apparently a religious leader. He has been chosen to speak in the 'Time for reflection' slot at the opening of next week's plenary session of the Scottish Parliament, normally a place for people from faith communities to comment on spiritual matters.

I wonder if the contents of his address will be spiritual or political.

[Random]

Ah, the usual from the British media. Balance means three on the side with whom they agree, one on the other side. Again, just like Question Time!

[Jeremy Das]

"...and audiences you try to rile."

To what end?

[Oliver Kamm]

Recreation.

[ScotsToryB]

If there is one reason only why I read you the above comment satisfies.
STB.

[JohnBSheldon]

Given the mendacity and dissembling of the anti-war crowd, riling them is an honourable sport. I've always found their logic on the serious issues of war and peace to be such that Clausewitz would howl with helpless laughter. The scandal is that these bozo's are given air time and print space, thus flattering their preposterous and delusional views.