The BBC News website is carrying a series of micro-interviews, each lasting exactly five minutes. In this one Tony Benn, asked about his politics, says:
Well, I'm a socialist, but I think democracy's the most revolutionary idea, transferring power from the rich and powerful to people...
A minute or two on, he says of time he spent in Zimbabwe (during the Second World War), when it was Southern Rhodesia:
When I was there, there was no democracy at all: all the good land had been stolen and given to white farmers, no African had votes, it was a criminal offence for an African to have a skilled job; and now we lecture Zimbabwe on democracy - total hypocrisy.
I'm not sure who the 'we' is being accused by Benn of hypocrisy. The two most obvious candidates are the British government and Britsh people more generally. Either way, doesn't it rather cramp a commitment to democracy if no one is supposed to criticize the non-democratic practices of another country towards which their own country has had a bad record in the past? And one must extend this, surely, and say that no inhabitant of a country with a bad record on some other matter should condemn any country with a bad record on the same matter today. Germans and Rwandans should not denounce genocide; US citizens or the US government shouldn't deplore slaveholding; Iraqis and Chileans should not complain of the torturing practices of other nations; countries that used to hang felons shouldn't now condemn others for the use of capital punishment; and so on.
A better approach, I think, is embodied in the standard principle of solidarity with those fighting for democracy (justice, human rights, etc) where it is absent or severely curtailed, irrespective of the historical record of the country in which one lives.