Hilary Benn’s speech was just a shallow historical re-enactment

What’s with the orgy of fawning over Hilary Benn’s Syria speech? It was eloquent, yes, but content-wise it reminded me of those historical re-enactment shebangs where sad men in their fifties try to inject meaning into their lives by pretending to be a Viking in a field for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Only instead of donning archaic armour and a horned helmet, Benn and his overnight Bennites – those currently clogging up Twitter with wild claims that his speech was the best oration since the Gettysburg Address – are wrapping themselves in the moral garb of the mid-20th century warriors against Nazi Germany. Benn’s speech, and the feverish reaction to it, confirms that British politicians, especially Labourite ones, really, really miss the Second World War. They crave the moral certainty of that conflict that pitted Us against the worst Them imaginable: a vast, murderous system of Nazism. This is why Benn madly talked about the decision to fire a few rockets at the godforsaken city of Raqqa in the same breath as Britain’s long slog of a war against Hitler and Mussolini.