Five years without Tony Benn – Stop the War laments
NOVANEWS
With friends like these, the working class doesn’t need enemies.
Tony Benn with his son Hillary and daughter Melissa.
On 14 March, the Stop the War (StW) coalition sent out a fundraising email entitled ‘Remembering Tony Benn’, calling him “a tireless fighter for peace, justice and equality”. StW convenor Lindsey German described him “fondly” as “a good friend, comrade and campaigner” and “a man of great courage and integrity”.
StW is now largely defunct, fundraising emails and web articles being the main content of its work, but at the time of the second Iraq war in 2003, when Tony Benn was its president, it had a genuinely mass following.
Lindsey German still loves to wax lyrical about the glorious “two million person march”, which was the defining moment of her career...