You don’t have to look terribly far to come across the kindler, gentler politics Jeremy Corbyn promised when he became Labour leader. Just look at the friendly banter between Tony Benn’s granddaughter and Corbyn supporter and raging anti-Semite Tony Greenstein:
It’s hard to know where to begin with this. Benn makes a comment that many lifelong Labour voters can currently relate to. Like her, I find myself unable to vote for anything, only against. Greenstein, illustrates why.
In attacking Emily Benn, who he states was “born with a silver spoon in (her) gullet”, he inadvertently attacks her late grandfather who enjoyed enormous privilege at private school and then at an elite university. Tony Benn never suffered poverty or homelessness. Indeed, in my admittedly limited dealings with him – he was my MP until 1983 – I saw a man almost detached and certainly semi-detached from the lives of the working people he represented. He saw the struggle of the working class as somehow romantic, when the working class itself strove to be better.
I wasn’t a great admirer of Tony Benn for all manner of reasons but one thing is for sure: I would never have said something like “it’s good that Tony is dead” in any circumstances whatsoever, never mind in the vicious way Greenstein does.
Even by Corbynista standards, Greenstein appears to be a seriously unpleasant person, so unpleasant that Labour has expelled him, but still he supports Corbyn, something that tells you everything about the low standards to which the people’s party has sunk.
Labour had its problems before the election of Jeremy Corbyn, but things have not been as toxic as this since the Militant infiltration of the 1980s. Tony Greenstein’s attack on Emily Benn is par for the course these days.
