“…….I was in London in the blitz in 1940, living in the Millbank tower, where I was born. Some different ideas have come in since. And every night, I went down to the shelter in Thames house. Every morning, I saw dockland burning. Five hundred people were killed in Westminster one night by a land mine. It was terrifying. Aren't Arabs terrified? Aren't Iraqis terrified? Don't Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does bombing strengthen their determination? What fools we are to live in a generation for which war is a computer game for our children and just an interesting little channel for news item…….” So warned Tony Benn in his impassioned and compassionate speech to Parliament in 1998 prior to the decision to bomb Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (Click on video to hear and witness Benn's passion and compassion).
I didn't always agree with Tony Benn but cannot deny he was the consummate politician committed to his cause, a man of total integrity and a thoroughly decent member of the human race. On this occasion, however, as I watched this video and listened to him I found myself nodding in agreement and becoming increasingly angry as I reflected that nothing has changed at all about man's inhumanity to man and the wilful inability of politicians to do the right thing; in 1998 the big geo-political/moral question to be confronted was “Shall we bomb Iraq” today, in 2025 it is “Should we stop Israel destroying Gaza and the Palestinian people?”. What’s the right thing to do? Benn made this speech in 1998 before the proposed bombing of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq but what it speaks of, and the moral issues it raises, are just as applicable, if not more so, today as we bear witness to Gaza's anguish and Israel's many and heinous war crimes which have been allowed to become more egregious, unacceptable and immoral through every passing hour.
We have allowed pain and suffering, immoral and unlawful action and the wholesale destruction of lives and families to become normalised, to become “alright”. We watch the images on our TV screens and are no longer horrified and distressed or even embarrassed at what we see; "It is what it is" we mumble shamelessly, trying to remove ourselves from any culpability as our own politicians sit on the fence anxious not to cause offence lest they be accused of antisemitism, and saying "Nothing to see here....move on....get over it" while Gaza lies in rubble, Palestinians die and children starve - and Netanyahu celebrates.
But there was more than anger in my thinking. As I listened to Benn's words I realised what a huge intellectual hinterland, wealth of worldly and political knowledge and experience this man had. It's only when you have that hinterland and breadth of experience and understanding that you can make powerful speeches like this. And I thought of our politicians today. I can think of none of any party remotely capable of the breadth of this man's vision and soaring oratory; think Truss, Starmer, Raynor, Badenoch, Patel, Sunak, Johnson, Farage, Raab, Anderson, ,.......and the rest of our elected representatives - bumbling, monosyllabic visionless, uninspiring, wannabes who might have clever Oxford degrees but have no wisdom or courage and too often are incapable of stringing two joined up ideas together to make a coherent whole; and unlike Benn would not know integrity or a moral action if it ran over them in the street. I don't doubt that the present incumbents of Westminster and Downing Street are well intentioned and believe in what they are doing but in the end they are at best inadequate, lacking the wisdom and understanding required to be effective, competent and respected, unwilling to take the hard decisions for fear of the latest opinion poll; in short unfit for the purpose that we have put them there. To paraphrase Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s biting commentary of the elected leaders of his time: “The hour is great; and the honourable Gentlemen, I must say, are small”.
If, as we are led to believe, modern politicians are held in very low regard by the electorate the reason is simple - because, compared to politicians of the past they are third or fourth rate nobodies with nothing moving or powerful to say. If as an elected leader (which all politicians are) you cannot move and convince people of the rightness of your cause, then you are a waste of space. Where have the Benns, the Churchills, the Bevans, the Macmillans, the Attlees, the Healeys, the Thatcher’s the Foots and the rest of the great political minds and speakers gone; the people who spoke to our hearts as well as our minds and in doing so forged our current nation. We might not have agreed with them, indeed we might have hated them for the policies they espoused, but we respected them because they did not dodge the bullets, they addressed the issues that had to be addressed head on, and in doing so, forced us to address them too; in short they were leaders: wise and unafraid to court unpopularity for what they believed in.
We live in a politically impoverished age, an age where being an illiterate numpty is qualification enough to get you elected to Parliament - or even to become President of America - an age where the ordinary and everyday is lauded as "awesome" or "fantastic"; and an age where the views and opinions of the wilfully ignorant and unthinking are given credence. We live in an age where rightness of belief and political action on behalf of government and big business is increasingly an economic question, where money talks – where the question is asked “What will we get out of doing this or that?” rather than “What is the right or just or morally acceptable or decent thing to do?” - and when money talks no one checks the grammar (think the selling of arms to Israel so that Zionists can rain more death and destruction on children and a starving people, and justified by the impoverished reasoning that “If we don’t do it someone else will!”). Too often the answer to the question “What should we do?” is “What does it cost and what benefit do we get out of it?” So preoccupied with whether or not they could, politicians all parties don't stop to think if they should. Tony Benn answered this cost/benefit problem well when he said: “If we can find the money to kill people, then we can find the money to help people.”
In a world such as this integrity and doing the right thing has lost all meaning. Tony Benn, were he alive today, would weep. In such a world as this we all increasingly suffer for when we lose our integrity anything goes and anything can be justified; wrong becomes right, words lose their meaning, and systems, institutions and the old accepted standards begin to fail (think the Trump inspired riots at America's Capital, think Hitler's Germany and its “final solution” to the problem of the Jews, think Putin’s “special operation”- a terrifying euphemism for making war on Ukraine). And we allow this at our peril, for integrity, honesty and truth matter: they bring justice and decency and ultimately compassion. Once these basic values are eroded or side-lined, as we are seeing today, then in places like Gaza pain, anguish and wilful destruction become normalised, we avert our eyes to great wrongs, we deny truth, and become wilfully ignorant. And in Gaza and other places across the planet thousands die.
Over two thousand years ago Athenian General and historian, Thucydides, the father of military history and strategy, told us in his magnum opus “The History of the Peloponnesian War” – a work still required study in military academies across the world - that the great truth of war is that "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"; the people of Gaza (and the citizens of Kiev) are witness to this today, they know it well, while our politicians and we wring our hands and weep crocodile tears but do nothing. No one in our political/leadership class is willing to act with integrity, decency, strength and compassion to end the bloodshed. No one is prepared to say to Benjamin Netanyahu “This shall not be”.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer reminded us that compassion is the basis of morality. Given this self evident truth and the unwillingness of our politicians to take the hard decisions, to sit on the fence rather than act it seems to me that the Good Samaritan would today get short shrift in the corridors of power in western governments. If Jesus was retelling his parable today he might include a fourth traveller on the road to Jericho. In addition to the Samaritan who took care of the injured victim of robbers Christ might have included, with the Priest and the Levite who passed on the other side of the road without helping, a Politician who sat on the roadside fence, watching as the robbers beat the man almost to death and then looked doleful, wringing his hands, weeping crocodile tears, doing nothing afraid that the robbers might accuse him of being antisemitic, whilst checking his mobile phone for the latest opinion polls. And all the while, the injured man, like Gaza, lay bleeding in the dirt. The passion and compassion inherent in the parable of the Good Samaritan and shown by Tony Benn in this video is not a high priority on the cost/benefit policy balance sheets of today’s Westminster.
In that 1998 speech Tony Benn said “…..Every Member of Parliament tonight who votes for the Government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting responsibility for the deaths of innocent people if the war begins,…..”. That comment is just as true today – if Parliament, the government, and we the people are not prepared to say “This shall not be” and take whatever action is necessary to bring about an end to Netanyahu and Israel’s destruction of a people then we “will be consciously and deliberately accepting responsibility for the deaths of innocent people”
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