Im with Billy Connolly on this: generally anyone who *wants* to be a politician should disqualified on that basis alone. But... I worked for The Big Issue South West in Bristol for a while. One night me and News Editor Simon Mitchell were working late and an agitated woman burst in to the office, having managed to get through the security doors, and insisted we look through this folder she had. It was full of pictures of kids born in Iraq, shockingly deformed by what she said was the effect of Depleted Uranium shells. These were babies and toddlers in a horrifying state. Some of the most disturbing images Ive ever seen. We were both stunned. Simon wrote a feature on DU - to my mind way before it became a thing in the mainstream media (this would have been 1998-9ish) - and one of the people he got to comment was Tony Benn. Very predictable, you might think. Except for this: Benn said that hed been in the cabinet when the use of DU was *first approved*. He felt that hed made a terrible mistake - that theyd been misled by their military advisors - and was now campaigning against it and for a wider awareness. He gave Simon his number and said hed make himself available for any follow ups. I dont know as much as I should about Tony Benn but I know that most politicians would have run a mile from admitting their part in such a mistake. He put his hand up and tried to fix it. Integrity, I think they call it. You dont hear about it much these days. (And now thats off my chest Ill go back to thinking about Hall & Oates and Linda Ronstadt...) bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26766936
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 19:31:38 +0000
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