It prompted me to look up Tony Benn. He has a most interesting history--inherited a peerage, and renounced it. Went further left after serving in Labour governments. Mother was a strong feminist who fought the good fight for the ordination of women in the English Church back in 1925! She taught him that the Bible is a story of the struggle between the prophets and the kings, and that he should favor the prophets (committed to righteousness) over the state (committed to mere power). He served in the RAF in WW II. Oxford grad (but didn't like to brag about it--too elitist). Many Cabinet posts over the years. Fought the banksters way back when, and later Thatcherism.
Here's an excerpt from the long wiki entry (his reasons for going further left):
By the end of the 1970s, Benn had migrated to the left wing of the Labour Party. He attributed this political shift to his experience as a Cabinet Minister in the 1964–1970 Labour Government. Benn ascribed his move to the left to four lessons:
--How "the Civil Service can frustrate the policies and decisions of popularly elected governments";
--The centralised nature of the Labour Party allowing to the Leader to run "the Party almost as if it were his personal kingdom"
--"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"; and
--The power of the media, which "like the power of the medieval Church, ensures that events of the day are always presented from the point of the view of those who enjoy economic privilege.[43]
As regards the power of industrialists and bankers, Benn remarked:
"Compared to this, the pressure brought to bear in industrial disputes by the unions is minuscule. This power was revealed even more clearly in 1976 when the International Monetary Fund secured cuts in our public expenditure. ... These [four] 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, and some new Chartist agitation might be born and might quickly gather momentum."[44]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn
Am I right in interpreting the wiki scribblers' phrase "hard left" as hostile to Benn? Dunno. But, to me, he seems merely
sensible (given all that has happened, i.e., the banksters taking over the world, rampant poverty, loss of labor rights, loss of "the commons," the 'forever war,' environmental suicide--loss of the earth itself, etc.). It ain't "hard left" to be against all this, because the right has not only been gravely destabilizing society, it has been destroying the planet. Nothing "hard left" about wanting a fair shake for everybody and a planet to live on! THAT is "the center"!
= new reply since forum marked as read
