Misura wroteNothing to do with non conformity, gore. I've plenty of time for contrarians. It was the quality of the comment. It's at the kind of level that gets pinged around twitter by verbose, uninformed fuckwits, of which you are not one. At the moment attached to a photo of George Galloway. Benn is a Revie to Crow's warnock. Regardless of his views, if you have regard for proper politics, for debate, for principles, for skilled oratory and for political history, then you'll morn his passing. If not, then ho-hum.
I have few Heroes, but a signed copy of one of his books sits proudly on my book shelf, along side a signed copy of simon Weston's autobiography.
There was a great obit from Ian Martin in the Telegraph that decided there were three different Benn's you could talk about:
1- The Technocrat
2- The Minister, colleague career killer and political assassin
3- the great Parliamentarian
If he's remembered for #3 then, yes your right - he will be mourned, but not so much from those very few who survive him in his #2 phase and suspect them who went before will have a cold welcome for him, whichever place he ends up. In some small way, I had family who were bitter political opponents of his (and Scargills) within the labour movement in the 70s and early 80s. They lost. :D
My response previously was more to FD's baiting (he won). He was always worth listening to and he was right about a few things to do with democracy and accountability, but the whole earlier bits will be airbrushed out and his track record of being wrong about most things he did in government and after will be passed over for the fact he was a dead nice old buffer who handled Ali G
