Tony Benn and BNP singing from the same hymn sheet
Front Page Headline in all major newspapers on April 23rd, 2010, St George’s Day.
Ridiculous? Sure. But, strangely enough, they do agree on one thing.
St George’s Day, 2010: the day which revealed to the British electorate that the system of political parties by which Britain has been governed is now utterly obsolete.
Both Tony Benn and Nick Griffin advocate immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. If those two, representing as they do extreme opposites in political alignment, agree on anything, we must concede that Right and Left have become meaningless distinctions in politics.
If Tony Benn can agree with Nick Griffin about anything, the old alignments of right and left in politics are manifestly meaningless.
On the eve of St George’s Day, there was a second debate between the three political leaders: Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg. Brown and Cameron were both determined to dim the lustre Nick Clegg acquired in the first debate a week earlier.
As in that first debate all three leaders were equally incoherent about the steps they would take to restore Britain’s finances.
Perhaps the most serious division of policy with which the electorate is presented is the issue of Trident. Should Britain buy a replacement for Trident at a probable cost of £100 billion? Clegg for the Lib-Dems says no; Brown and Cameron say yes. In the debate, Gordon Brown got a laugh by saying he agreed with David (Cameron). Agreement about Trident, yes. Agreement also in their attempt to crush Clegg, and return the election contest to the good old knockabout between two unrepresentative parties.
And so to the agreement between those two representatives of the extreme opposites in the right-left political line-up: Tony Benn and Nick Griffin.
Should British troops continue to kill and be killed in Afghanistan? This, like the argument over Trident, is a serious issue. The three-cornered leaders’ debate in Bristol on April 22nd gave a fascinating illumination of why each leader believes Britain should continue to wage war there.
Fascinating because the illumination was non-existent. Cameron and Clegg simply assumed Britain should continue the war, and saw no need to explain why.
Since a British general who commanded in Afghanistan has said the war is unwinnable, one would have thought an explanation of why we are continuing to fight an unwinnable war would have been helpful. Clegg and Cameron, terrified of seeming unsupportive of the army, preferred glorifying the soldiers’ bravery to telling us why they should be there at all.
Gordon Brown, however, rose to the occasion magnificently. He justified Britain’s military presence in Afghanistan with reference to Al-Qaeda.
We need to hunt down terrorists. But in the same sentence, he informed us there were members of Al-Qaeda plotting terror from bases in the Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and other places. Why are we not hunting these Yemen and Somalia terrorists? Why have we not invaded Pakistan?
Yes, I could agree there is an argument for sending small detachments of SAS into terrorist hiding places, perhaps working in conjunction with Pakistani special forces. But how can major military operations against the Taliban help in tracking down terrorists who work in teams of less than ten?
Why exactly do Nick Griffin and the BNP want to withdraw from Afghanistan? In a sense, their reason is irrelevant to anyone like myself who is against the rest of their policies.
Tony Benn’s opposition to the war in Afghanistan is stated with bald clarity: history shows that no foreign power has ever succeeded in dominating Afghanistan. Britain failed, Russia failed, and now NATO is failing.
I return to the headline, which the newspapers neglected to print. More than ever before there are issues on which the citizens of Britain would like to vote. More than ever before there is less and less reason to trust any political party to resolve these issues.
Even Brown, even Cameron, and certainly Clegg, mixed their sycophantic references to the electorate “It’s for you to decide, it’s your choice, etc” with vague promises of referendums. Let us see how quickly these promises are forgotten after the election.
Why don’t we have a referendum about the war in Afghanistan, if only to enjoy the sight of Benn and Griffin voting on the same side?
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