No business like show business
I'm not as up-to-date as I ought to be on the activities of aging British Socialists, so I wasn't even aware that Tony Benn has a "highly rated one man show" called Free at Last (which is incidentally also the title of his published memoirs.) Well, he does indeed, though judging from this description it sounds like more of a promotional speaking tour than a "show."
Nonetheless, the Brussels performance described in this article seems to have had its moments:
In the UK his show is normally attended by the converted, but here in Brussels the audience was very different. Many of the 500 or so spectators had come along out of curiosity. Eurocrats, MEPs, lobbyists, consultants, journalists, thinktank-ers, research assistants and lawyers all crammed in to hear the 77-year old reminisce about the past and fulminate about the future...One of Benn's main criticisms was that there is not enough democracy in Brussels, a point with which it is hard to argue.
The European commission, he reminded the audience, is not elected and therefore not accountable, and the European parliament, he told crestfallen MEPs, is not a parliament in the real sense of the word...
The most important question to ask someone in power, he quipped, was how you go about getting rid of them, and in the case of the European commission the disturbing answer is you can't.
A prominent Tory MEP who insisted on shouting "Hear Hear!" after any of Benn's pronouncements he liked (and there were many of them) reminded the audience that doubts about the EU and its direction are shared by the right too.
(via Airstrip One.)
Posted by Dr. Frank at November 22, 2002 04:46 PM | TrackBack