Mr Benn

I really don't like 99% of US television and radio. How can the same country that made "Gone with the Wind" and "Casablanca", fail to make television that is watchable? What good shows that there are, and there are some good shows, have so many adverts in them that, for someone who grew up with the main television channels not having adverts, this renders them unwatchable.

So I never bought a television in America, and all my entertainment either comes from Netflix, or the internet. The BBC (www.bbc.co.uk) has really excellent internet content. I can't believe that the state TV corporation that is always struggling for money, is giving all this stuff away for free! I have BBC on all the time, either streaming live, or streaming archived stuff.

Any Questions (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/anyquestions.shtml) was good today. That old war horse Anthony Wedgewood Benn was on. He is over 80, now and often gets awards like, "politician with the most integrity" - though he retired from mainstream politics a few years ago.

I have mixed feelings about Mr. Benn. He talks a lot of sense and I love the fact that he is still around, and saying things that virtually no one else is saying. For example, he was great on "Any Questions" today on the whole Iran / UK captured sailors incident - he was the only one to give any historical perspective. i.e. if the west had not be interfering in the middle east for the past 100 years, it would not be in the mess that it is in now. The Middle East may be a mess, but for us westerners - it is mainly our mess.

However, I am old enough to remember the early '80's; when the UK Labour Party should have been using all it's strength to fight Margret Thatcher, Tony Benn was the most senior Labour politician involved in stirring up all the internal strife, that lead to the SDP split. OK - there is a good argument to be made (and I've heard Tony Benn making this argument) that he was fighting for the sole of the labour party, that it was about fighting for what you believed in. The problem I have with this, is that - whilst he was tearing the Labour party apart fighting for what he believed in, Margaret Thatcher was able to consolidate the Conservative party in power, and 18 long years of Tory rule followed.

Principles sound great when they are enunciated by a gentle old grandfather on the radio - but we could have averted some of the worst excesses of Tory rule if Mr Benn had buried some of his principles back in 1981 and worked with the mainstream of the party - not against it.

So Tony - it's great that you are still around and I always agree with most of what you say, but some of us have long memories. I'm not sure all the people voting you "politican with the most integrity" have such long memories.