Will ~~ I have much respect for Benn, a man of true principle ~ principles which I happen not to share, but which I can nevertheless recognise as such. The one I despise, going back a socialist generation, I repeat is Cripps; an austere ascetic who confused socialism with his own peculiar variant of puritanism, and destroyed the 1945 Labour Government as a consequence. Attlee couldn't control him, as he imposed it on a nation who, in the previous 6 years, had cheerfully and patriotically suffered privations, seeing their homes and cities flattened, lived in daily anticipation of the telegram to tell them a loved-one was dead, seen the photographs of the industrialised gas-to-death organisations like Auschwitz & Treblinka or starve-to-death ones like Buchenwald & Bergen-Belsen as a reminder of what all that strife & suffering had been endured to avoid ~~ and then, having just succeeded in this monumental effort, at the moment when we had won & thought we might relax and enjoy things just a little bit, along comes Cripps to decide that what we needed was a few [or more] years longer of "austerity" (his own word), because that is what the Hon Sir Stafford, in his self-righteous abrogation of his own heritage, thought was good for people ~~ whether, like Queen Elizabeth I's annual bath, they needed it or not.

And then people are surprised that the one way any Labour campaign became bound to fail was to go to the Country {including the working class} with anything approaching 'socialism' in its manifesto. It wasn't Churchill who destroyed socialism, it was Cripps. It might even have worked ~~ thanks to him we shall never know now: not since he perversely established in the national consciousness its synonymity with his accursed "austerity".

~M~