Posted on 03/14/2014 8:40:30 AM PDT by iowamark
Tony Benn, a passionate orator, prolific diarist and provocative leader of the British left who became the first peer to surrender an aristocratic title to remain in the House of Commons, died Friday at his home in west London. He was 88...
In November 1960, he inherited the title Viscount Stansgate on the death of his father, William Wedgwood Benn. The elevation to hereditary nobility automatically barred him from sitting among the elected commoners in the House of Commons. His effort to reject his newly minted title became a cause célèbre...
Under the laws of the time, Parliament refused to allow him to take his seat, as he was still a peer. Mr. Benn continued to campaign for the right to reject his peerage until 1963, when a Conservative government approved a law permitting the renunciation of such titles. He shed his peerage minutes after the law was passed and was subsequently known simply as Tony Benn, and sometimes by the more familiar nickname Wedgie.
For much of the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Benn served as a cabinet minister in the Labour government, his position cemented by radical credentials that gave him the support of unions and the left wing of the party. His jobs included postmaster general, secretary for industry, secretary for energy and minister of technology — a position in which he was an early supporter of the development of the Concorde supersonic airliner...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Another candidate for the deepest level of Hell.
A wealthy radical who helped to discredit British socialism.
Until then, you couldn't quit the mob.
I had a certain amount of respect for him, even though I disagreed with most of what he believed in, he lived by his word and he helped push the Concorde project through.
I guess he understands now.
One more down, several million to go!
The only good leftist is a dead leftist...
The fact that his parliamentary constituency was in Bristol where the Concorde was built was purely coincidental. The Concorde was one of those socialist make work schemes. Looked good on paper but the economics never made sense. Never made money for BA or Air France.
Same could be said for the moon landing. It was the world’s only passenger supersonic airline, and it was according to engineers an equal technological achievement due to the difficulties of making an aircraft supercruise whilst maintaining comfort for passengers back in the 1960s, and even today, most aircraft makers consider the challenge too difficult to bother building a successor to the world’s only supersonic airliner.
And towards the end of its life, Concorde was running at an operational profit, but sometimes prestige projects, like the Apollo project and the Concorde, are necessary to promote engineering excellence and to show off to the world, even if the economic benefit is negligible or even non-existant. And if it was built in his constituency, it shows he was working for his constituents I suppose...
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