I've jumped into this thread here and there and not bothered to become engaged as, like many another thread of its ilk, it goes along predictable and unchanging lines. But I thought I might add just a word on Tony Benn.

Benn - whatever you think of his actual political activity and his political stance - is, I believe, one of the few genuinely sincere political figures in this country. People who sneer at him for renouncing his peerage to stay in the Commons should check the facts before writing him off with a sneer.

1. The peerage was awarded to his father in 1941 in an attempt by the coalition government to get more Labour peers into the Lords.

2. The peerage was to have passed to Benn's elder brother Michael - but he was killed in the war (Benn himself served as a pilot in South Africa and Rhodesia).

3. Michael, intending to enter the priesthood, hadn't cared whether he became a peer or not, but Tony Benn genuinely objected to it as it would stop his career in the Commons. He tried to renounce it, unsuccessfully, on several occasions until the law was changed.

I didn't agree with all of Benn's ideas and policies, but he did support British industry as far as he was able, given the time. What I do find interesting is a quote from him which you might apply to our times:

As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour Government. Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes is minuscule. This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the IMF secured cuts in our public expenditure. These lessons led me to the conclusion that the UK is only superficially governed by MPs and the voters who elect them. Parliamentary democracy is, in truth, little more than a means of securing a periodical change in the management team, which is then allowed to preside over a system that remains in essence intact. If the British people were ever to ask themselves what power they truly enjoyed under our political system they would be amazed to discover how little it is.

Benn also loathed the EEC, calling it bureaucratic and centralised. So - not a crude, two-dimensional man, but one with a range of views.