here's the view from the other end of politics
btw what is it with these 'characters' of the left, and their penchant for all kinds of despotery and completely wonky sense of moral equivalence:
"Ron Brown, who died on Friday aged 67, was a highly eccentric Labour MP for Edinburgh Leith from 1979 to 1992, and his antics at Westminster were such that he was suspended three times by the Speaker and once by the parliamentary party.
Brown's political philosophy was anarchistic, republican and driven by the notion of class warfare. Typical of what used to be called "the Loony Left", he once called himself "the sort of Labour MP Kinnock doesn't want around."
Foreign affairs were not his strong suit. Soon after being elected Brown appointed himself an apologist for what were then considered some of the world's most unsavoury regimes, notably Libya, Afghanistan and North Korea, becoming a regular guest of their governments.
He seemed to be on particularly friendly terms with Col Gaddafi of Libya, and it is true that he was able to help secure the release of three British political detainees where ordinary diplomatic methods had failed.
But when, in 1984, WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead in St James's Square by a gunman inside the Libyan embassy, Brown's reaction was to remark: "No one, least of all me, condones violence… but… until we know the full facts we cannot say anything."
Brown found the atmosphere in Afghanistan at the height of Soviet oppression "relaxed and informal" (he was vice-president of the British-Soviet Friendship Society); and he urged Britain to recognise "liberal" Albania. Once, in a Commons debate about the Middle East, he ventured: "Saddam Hussein can't be all that bad if he hates Thatcherism."
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