LF: Reg, welcome to the show. Tell our audience why you decided to run for Parliament, have you always hankered to be in politics?

RK: No, eh (laughs), well not really….no, I’ve never hankered for politics whatsoever! Like most people in Britain (and probably in America as well), I believed my Prime Minister’s rhetoric, as you believed Mr. Bush’s rhetoric about Saddam posing this evil threat and being able to launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

”My son believed that, I believed that, and the nation believed the Prime Minister but we were all deceived. Sadly, we were all betrayed by our own government. Iraq couldn’t launch within 45 minutes, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction or WMD program and I feel that my son’s oath to allegiance to Queen and country was betrayed. His patriotism was betrayed and that young life was snuffed out in a filthy police station in Iraq for what?

“When we look at Iraq now, over 88 British soldiers killed; 900 wounded, 100 having psychiatric counseling. I believe over on your side over there in America you have over 1500 soldiers brutally killed thousands wounded, for what? Iraq now is just a fomenting ground breeding terrorism: borders are un-policed, a hundred thousand Iraqis killed. This isn’t a democracy; this is a sham of a democracy.

“My Prime Minister tells me that Iraq is a better place and that it was the right thing to remove Saddam. I agree that Saddam was an evil dictator, but why the rush to war? You can’t have such a catastrophic political blunder as taking your country to war and expect to walk through that blunder with impunity. My Prime Minister told me that Iraq had WMD’s; we were not going to war for regime change. We have now gone to war for regime change. And if you are going to war to remove a dictator, where do you draw the line? I mean, you have to look at North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, other countries etc have dictators - America and Britain would be going to war every other year, you cannot do this! Democracy cannot be imposed at the barrel of a gun. And I stood in the elections to try to make Tony Blair accountable for the deceit of this nation and the trust that we’ve placed within him, so that is basically the reason that I became a fledgling politician.

LF: How many votes did you get?

RK: Obviously, it was a very very strong seat, he had a majority of 17,000. It was like trying to break a religion [voting Labour] up in Sedgefield. People there said to me on their doorsteps, Listen mate, we don’t count the votes, we weigh them!’ Another chap said to me, ‘If you brought a donkey with you and pinned a red rosette on it, we would still vote Labour’!

LF: So, you were really up against it.

RK: I was really up against it, but bearing in mind within five weeks from coming from nowhere, I got just over four thousand votes…

LF: Not bad in five weeks – how did you run your campaign?

RK: Tony Blair got 24 thousand votes, the Conservatives got 5,900, the Liberal Democrats got 4,900 and I got 4,200, so bearing in mind for an amateur, who campaigned for only four weeks, I came forth out of 15 candidates and I was only just behind one of the main parties.

LF: That’s incredible…

RK: …that’s the strength of feeling that can be found against the illegal war, so I think I gave a fair account of myself and [I claimed a moral victory.] Funding it? I started off with just a few friends helping me and then more and more people came on board, left wing, right wing people taking a central political point of view. Also, one of your fellow countrymen David Soul from ‘Starsky and Hutch’ fame offered support as well…

LF: David Soul from ‘Starsky and Hutch’ came and supported your campaign?!

RK: That’s right! He’s performing in theatre at the moment over here and I believe he is living here, in London at the moment and he supported me as well. And the day before the election, he called me up and told me good luck and hope it all goes well.

LF: That is great.

RK: Yes, also, a chap called Martin Bell, a well-known war correspondent with the BBC and friend of David’s, actually walked the streets with me campaigning, wearing his white suit…

LF: And didn’t you have someone who was in Blair’s campaign come and campaign for you?

RK: That’s right! We had a chap who had been a member of the Labour Party, a full-time member on the Executive Committee for 28 years… he resigned and joined my campaign. You are allowed to spend 11,800 pounds to spend within your constituency on campaign material. [By the end of two weeks] we had the money, we had the staff, we had the three offices and on one weekend we had over 100 canvassers on the streets – all volunteers.

LF: Who knows, maybe you could be Prime Minister next?! Or maybe at least a member of Parliament?

RK: Well, I think I have another few years… I’ll certainly have a go at being MP again, who knows!

LF: Now, let me ask you one question. Here in the US, people feel pretty down in the dumps, they look at what you can accomplish over there, they feel like its pretty hopeless over here, but during the break, you said that part of what inspired you and some of the strength you have received since your son Tom died in 2003 came from somebody from the US, somebody from the US Military Families Against the War. So just go give people here a little shot in the arm and some insight into how people work across the Atlantic, can you tell us what happened?

RK: Well, I was in London with other families of the bereaved, to lay a wreath at the doorstep of Number 10 (Downing St.) because we felt that that was where the responsibility for all the deaths lay. And bearing in mind we could see another Northern Ireland developing and probably for the Americans you can see the embryonic stages of the Vietnam War starting and how the hell do you get out of these situations? So, we marched to Downing St. and I met one of your countrymen, a chap called Dante Zappala from Philadelphia and he instigated a group of people in America called ‘Military Families Against the War’… And myself, along with a woman called Rose Gentle, whose son was killed after only being in the army for six months…we formed the same group over here, ‘Military Families Against the War’, and that is a growing group of people. We’ve already, just last week, marched to Downing Street again to deliver legal papers. We are going to take legal action now against our own Prime Minister.

LF: Final question, Reg. You stood there on election night -- you hadn’t won, but you got a chance to speak -- and you shared a stage with Tony Blair, as is the custom, live on camera to the world. You were able to dedicate your campaign to your son and everyone else who had died, including the Iraqis, and to reiterate your feelings about he apology that has never come from Blair. Did he [the Prime Minister] say anything to you afterwards? How did he respond?

RK: Not one word. He stood there looking quite ashen and shocked. But I had two and a half minutes. We were told by the [election official] that each candidate could have a two and a half minute speech. And he had to stand there and listen and take it and that to me made it all worth while. I could stand in front of the Prime Minister uninterrupted and speak to the world and say to the world exactly what I thought. That for me was the defining moment of my campaign.

LF: Reg Keys, you’re great, thank you so much.

The interview with Laura Flanders and Reg Keys, which was produced by Christabel Nsiah-Buadi, was broadcast live on “The Laura Flanders Show” on Air America Radio on Saturday, May 7, 2004. If want to hear more upbeat progressive talk about issues that really matter, tune in to the Laura Flanders show every weekend evening between 7-10PM EST on Air America Radio.