Monday 3 September 2012

The Red Benches, Indeed

Last night’s episode of Inspector George Gently, set as it is in the Northumberland of the late 1960s, featured a left-wing Earl, played by Roger Lloyd Pack, who lived entirely as an aristocrat while attending folk nights at the local workingmen’s club and using his wealth to seek to do good in the local community.

It courageously depicted his dope-smoking and sexually promiscuous wife as the reactionary in the family, and that is the truth of how it was. That is the truth of how it is. Her equally ghastly young lover, a fellow pothead, was shown as the future Tony Blair in all but surname. Again, spot on.

But Her Ladyship at one point accounted for her husband by intimating that his natural father had been a member of the lower orders. That was a cop out, and a betrayal of the historical record. Many upper-class people were shocked to the core by their youthful experiences during the First World War, or by the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, or by the realities that confronted them during the Second World War.

Many sat as Labour MPs. Some sat as Labour hereditary peers; there were always a few, as there still are. And one, Wogan Philipps, the second Baron Milford, sat for 31 years, between inheriting and dying, as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, providing it with a parliamentary platform up to 50 years after it had lost the few Commons seats that it had ever won.

Yes, you read aright: the only Communist Member of Parliament was there, and there for decades, as an application of the hereditary principle. Born in 1902, he would have been the same age in the late 1960s as Roger Lloyd Pack is now. The characters last night discussed the ongoing student riots in Paris, which of course occurred in May 1968. In that year, Lord Milford was 66. Roger Lloyd Pack is currently 68.

The other cop out, and the other betrayal of the historical record, was the call by the dope-smoking and sexually promiscuous Countess for Daniel Cohn-Bendit to be shot. He was exactly her sort of person. And he is now a leading Green Member of the European Parliament. We are therefore subject to his legislative will.

In the August 1976 edition of das da, Cohn-Bendit described his sexual activity with children: “My constant flirt with all the children soon took on erotic characteristics. I could really feel how from the age of five the small girls had already learnt to make passes at me. It’s hardly believable. Most of the time I was fairly defenceless.” He has later claimed that this had been based on fantasy, but no such disclaimer appeared at the time.

The article was a spin-off from his bestselling 1975 book on education, The Big Madness, which drew on two years of experience working in a Frankfurt kindergarten with children aged between two and five. Of those years, he later wrote that: “It has happened to me several times that a few children opened the flies of my trousers and started to stroke me. I reacted differently each time according to the circumstances, but their desire confronted me with problems. I asked them: “Why don’t you play with each other, why have you chosen me and not other children?” But when they insisted on it, I then stroked them. For that reason I was accused of perverted behaviour.”

At its national conference in Lüdenscheid in March 1985, Cohn-Bendit’s then party (he can be French or German as it suits him) called for “nonviolent sexuality” between children and adults never to be subject to criminal prosecution. In 1987, the policy was that, “When young people have the desire for older peers outside the family, prevented either because their homosexuality is not accepted by their parents, or because they have paedophile inclinations, be it for other reasons, they must be given the opportunity to do so.”

German Greens frequently legislate for us in the EU Council of Ministers, and both they and the French Greens, whom Cohn-Bendit now leads, always do so in the European Parliament, where their Group from across the EU also includes the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru while being co-chaired by Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

What says today’s newly elected Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales? What says the recently elected Leader of Plaid Cymru, for which I have a lot of time as a vehicle for rural Radicalism and for the Welsh peace tradition, even if most emphatically not as a vehicle for Welsh separatism and for Welsh-language supremacism? What says the First Minister of Scotland?

That was, and is, the New Left, into and through which were initiated those typified and exemplified by Tony Blair. Alike on pirate radio and on European federalism, we should have listened to the second Viscount Stansgate, Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

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