Words by the Water 2008, yes a literary festival, right on our doorstep and only a stone's throw away from West Cumbria. A great mixture of TV personalities, politicians, scientists and writers in a 10 day program with something for everyone. From John Simpson to Roy Hattersley and from Martin Bell to Liz Smith and Reginald Hill all exciting and stimulating their audiences in the new Theatre by the Lake in Keswick.

And it was with great pride that we saw our own Alan Alexander, Press Officer for West Cumbria Amnesty International and a key member of the team that produces Egremont Today, in front of a full house in the main theatre to introduce Roy Hattersley discussing his latest book, Borrowed Time, which analyses the period between the wars. It is the time of the great influenza epidemic, the general strike and the depression. But what is easy to forget are the massive positive changes that took place. The start of the mass production of cars, the building of roads and the birth of radio, TV and the BBC and for many but not all increased affluence. This increase was caused by a drop in food prices and the growth in employment in engineering, the professions and clerical staff. At the same time poetry and literature were enjoying a renaissance and the first talkies arrived at the cinema.

What Roy Hattersley noticed when he started researching this period is how things repeat themselves echoing down the years to our own time. For example the financial crisis, causing a run on the pound, resulting only from a lack of confidence and political prejudice, not because the country was in a financial mess. Exactly the same thing happened to England in the 70s and 80s, where once again, international capitalism dictated that the poorest in society, should suffer through restrictions on public sector spending. Similarly, the national strike, led by the miners union in 1926, started at the wrong time of year, with a leader strong on rhetoric, but not on negotiation. A situation we experienced in our own miners strike in the 80s.

But his book also had more similarities that in my view, shows how adept we are, as a society to reinvent the wheel. There was the first officially recognition of a poverty trap, where the children of people on low wages were worse off nutritionally than those on the dole, because these children received a government food supplement. And in the same way, we discovered that the malnourished children of the less well off were more likely to die during the influenza outbreak than other children. And again just before the Second World War, army doctors noticed that the young men being called up, to be trained for war were in no fit state to be soldiers until they had been properly fed.

Roy Hattersley concluded with his view that the "Iraq war was wrong" and that he still believes that a politician’s job is "to help improve opportunity and equality within our society".

Another member of the Egremont Today team at the festival was deputy editor, Sam Pollen. He had come to see Tony Benn who also focused on the issues of poverty and war, explaining that learning to understand the struggle between rich and poor drove him to be a socialist. He became an MP way back in 1950 and has been consistently controversial and continually criticised by the media for most of that time. However his socialist values and his passion have not been dimmed by the years and he remains the Standard Bearer of the Left, now more popular than ever before, typically playing to a packed house in the Theatre by the Lake as he does up and down the country and on TV and radio, bringing moral and political issues to a wide audience.

His style of giving straight answers to difficult questions went down well at Keswick, with an audience that appeared (like Sam ) to be fully paid up members of the Tony Benn appreciation society

Though utterly uncompromising in his convictions, Anti-Europe, Anti-Privatisation, Anti-Nuclear and a passionate defender of Democracy, he is never doctrinaire and never forgets that an MP's job is to represent the interests of his constituents, and he spoke contemptuously of socialist zealots who wanted to smash the state. For him it was more important to fix the pensioner's roof.

Our photographs show Roy Hattersley with Alan Alexander at Theatre by the Lake and Tony Benn with Sam Pollen.