Paul Anderson journalist: SECOND TIME AS FARCE

Friday 3 August 1990

SECOND TIME AS FARCE

Tribune, 3 August 1990

Labour's National Executive Committee has decided to purge a second group of Trotskyists from the Labour Party – Socialist Organiser. Paul Anderson thinks it has taken a sledgehammer to crack some nuts

Last week's decision by the Labour Party's National Executive Committee to proscribe Socialist Organiser is one of the strangest it has made in years. Socialist Organiser is certainly, like Militant, a Leninist sect with its own rules and internal discipline. But, unlike Militant, it is extremely small and insignificant, with nothing to match Militant's record of thuggery and corruption in Liverpool. The NEC seems to have taken a sledgehammer to crack some nuts.

Socialist Organiser has its origins in a small Trotskyist faction expelled from Tony Cliff's International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers' Party) in 1971. This group was led by John O'Mahony, now the editor of Socialist Organiser newspaper, who also used, and continues to use, the Gaelic form of his name, Sean Matgamna.

After several years outside the Labour Party under various names, mostly spent in failed attempts to secure unity with other small Trotskyist sects, the O'Mahony group, by now the International Communist League, decided to join Labour. In 1978, along with several other small Trotskyist groups inside the Labour Party, it formed the Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory. The Socialist Organiser newspaper was launched as the organ of the SCLV later the same year.

The SCLV (later the Socialist Organiser Alliance) acted as an effective hard-left front for a couple of years, playing a key role in the mobilising for reform of the Labour Party's constitution in 1980 and 1981. But it was an unstable coalition, constantly plagued by sectarian feuding, particularly over Left tactics and strategy in local government. It was soon reduced to two major constituents – O'Mahony's ICL and the Workers' Socialist League, run by Alan Thornett.

After Thornett and O'Mahony fell out in 1983, O'Mahony (who kept the Socialist Organiser name) seemed to go out of his way to isolate his group from others. Always an iconoclast, he now abandoned many of the core orthodoxies of British Trotskyism. He dropped support for Irish Republicanism and Palestinian nationalism, criticised the bureaucratisation of the feminist movement, and, worst of all for the keepers of the Trotskyist flame, started to flirt with the ideas of Max Schactman, an American who broke with Trotskyism in the forties and became much more critical than orthodox Trotskyists of Soviet-style societies.

Meanwhile, Socialist Organiser lost its influence in local government and concentrated its efforts on the National Organisation of Labour Students, a handful of local Labour Parties and a few single-issue campaigns, the most successful of which has been the Campaign for Solidarity with Workers in the Eastern Bloc.

A Socialist Organiser front, Socialist Students in NOLS (SSiN), mounted a half-serious challenge for control of the National Union of Students in 1988 but proved incapable of maintaining its momentum; today, Socialist Organiser has some 350 supporters nationwide (it claims 500), around half of whom are students, and an effective presence in only two CLPs: Wallasey (which had a Socialist Organiser supporter, Lol Duffy, as a Parliamentary candidate in 1987 and submitted a Socialist Organiser model resolution to party conference in 1989) and Nottingham East.

Socialist Organiser, in other words, is one of the smallest Trotskyist groups in the Labour Party. It is also, by comparison with Militant, well-behaved (there are no allegations of intimidation of other party members, for example) and relatively open. So why has the NEC decided to proscribe it?

The answer is simple. Wallasey, where Socialist Organiser is strong, is next door to Birkenhead, where the CLP earlier this year chose a local trade union official, Paul Davies, as its Parliamentary candidate instead of the sitting MP, Frank Field.

Field, a darling of the media, refused to accept Davies's victory, complained that Militant and Socialist Organiser had interfered in the selection process, and threatened to resign to force a by-election on the issue of far-left infiltration into the Labour Party.

Under such pressure – and spurred on by memories of how Labour's poll ratings benefited from the attack on Militant in 1985 – the NEC decided to have a go at Socialist Organiser.

After a cursory investigation that seems to have produced as evidence only an anonymous two-page briefing prepared more than two years ago by NOLS activists in their battle against SSiN, Socialist Organiser appeared as an item on the agenda of the June NEC but was not discussed.

Subsequently, the NOLS briefing, which purported to document Socialist Organiser's practice as a democratic centralist sect and to identify the key figures in its leadership, was leaked to O'Mahony. He said that it was riddled with inaccuracies, some libellous (including a claim that he was a childhood member of the IRA); the NEC was presented with a "cleaned-up" version for its July meeting last week when it issued its ban.

O'Mahony argues that Socialist Organiser is "a democratic collective, committed to rational democratic working-class politics, not a cult with gurus and disciples". He complains, with reason, that the NEC gave Socialist Organiser no chance to put its case, and has announced that his group is "refusing to go quietly". This week Socialist Organiser launched a campaign to defend its position in the Labour Party.

The irony of the NEC ban is that it has already had the effect of rallying many of Socialist Organiser's sworn enemies on the left behind the sect. The Trotskyist groups that have spurned O'Mahony for most of the past decade are now lining up with Tony Benn and most of the rest of the hard left to support him. Look out for some strange platform line-ups at this year's party conference.

I was born in Edinburgh in 1959, grew up in Ipswich and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford (1978-81) and journalism at the London College of Printing (1982-83).

I spent the 1980s and 1990s working for various radical publications, starting with Solidarity and City Limits.

I was deputy editor of European Nuclear Disarmament Journal (1984-87), reviews editor (1986-91) and then editor (1991-93) of Tribune, deputy editor of New Statesman & Society (1993-96), news editor of Red Pepper (1997-99) and deputy editor of New Times (1999-2000).

From 2000 to 2012 I was a journalism lecturer at City University London. I have worked as a sub-editor on the Guardian since 1999. I wrote a column for Tribune from 1998 to 2014. I now teach at the University of Essex and University Campus Suffolk.

I was editor (with Mary Kaldor) of Mad Dogs: The US raid on Libya (Pluto, 1986), co-author (with Nyta Mann) of Safety First: The making of New Labour (Granta, 1997) and editor of Orwell in Tribune: 'As I Please' and other writings (Politico's/Methuen, 2006). In 2013 Aaaargh! Press published Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by me and Kevin Davey as an e-book; it came out as a paperback (with index and footnotes) in autumn 2014.

This archive of my published articles is far from complete, but the gaps are being filled when I have the time to scan in material from the pre-digital age.

WHAT'S HERE

I’ve written for various left and radical publications for a long time. This website is here partly to prove that I existed before the internet, partly to provide a comprehensive CV online, partly to show I was always right all along. (If only.)

What’s here is as it was published in print for the most part, though there are a few pieces that appear as they were before subediting (some of them with suggested headlines that were summarily dismissed). The only things I have edited before posting, very inadequately, are spelling and grammar (though I’ll be sorting everything out into Economist house style as soon as I have time) and a few duff headlines and standfirsts.

So far, I’ve posted nearly everything I can find that I’ve had published since the beginning of 1990, apart from news stories and news features that have no resonance today. So it's largely opinion journalism of one kind or another. There are some pieces still to scan and some missing because I don't have them in any form, but I'll be trying to find them. The record before 1990 is much more fragmentary: there are dozens of pieces still to scan and I've not had a chance to think about what's missing from the vast pile of fading clippings.

Pre-1991 is a mix of features, interviews, leaders and book and theatre reviews, mainly from Solidarity, END Journal, Tribune and Sanity. Most of 1991-93 is Tribune leaders, interviews and features; 1993-96 is mainly New Statesman leaders, interviews and features; 1996-2003 is a mix of columns and features for New Times, Red Pepper, Tribune and Chartist. I was teaching full-time from 2003 to 2011, so nearly everything from that period is a Tribune column.

For copyright reasons, there's nothing here from books apart from one excerpt...

WHAT THEY SAID

This revelatory collection shows how the different sides of Orwell’s imagination interacted… The fascination here is reading Orwell as a working journalist on a single paper. He attended editorial conferences with Nye Bevan (someone should write a play about the encounter), commissioned reviews and made a doomed attempt to publish short stories by organising a competition… Week by week, column by column, his inspirations take shape… His swipes against propaganda, the manipulation of crowds, the squalor of wartime and postwar London life, the absurdities of bureaucracy and the growth of the Great Powers formed the raw material of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sean French, Independent

This collection is remarkable, not because it contains any of Orwell's greater or more famous essays, but because, 60 years on, his articles are still wonderfully readable… Even when Orwell is using the column to settle one of his many scores with some foe now otherwise totally forgotten, Anderson's thorough footnotes will tell you all you need to know to appreciate Orwell's invective.

Martin Rowson, Tribune

Anderson's informative introduction includes a long digression into the left-wing politics of the period, which some may find heavy going but which supplies the wider context. The footnotes constitute a veritable Who Was Who of British politics and literature in the first half of the last century. Who was Barbara Castle's husband and who her lover? Who were Vernon Bartlett, the Duchess of Atholl, Leonard Merrick? Answers sit conveniently at the foot of the page.

Gordon Bowker, Observer

Anderson's compilation usefully picks out (and edits superbly) a particular thread in Orwell's huge output. Unlike his broadcast commentaries to India, “As I Please” was not concerned with day-to-day events but with broader political thinking: half-inside, half-outside the whale. Warning against the political control of discourse, blanket praise for the Soviet Union and anti-German hysteria, Orwell worked out in plain language the great themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. If he abandoned his early hopes that the war would effect a socialist revolution, he never doubted that people would act properly if they only understood.

Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please”and Other Writings, 1943-47 ... is compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, a former Tribune editor whose special insights into Orwell's genius make this particular volume the very best on the subject.

Michael Foot, Observer

It is a tribute to the publishers and to Tribune itself that Paul Anderson has been able to edit such a superb compendium of Orwell’s writings at a crucial stage in his life.

Geoffrey Goodman, Camden New Journal

The book gathers together all the pieces Orwell wrote for Tribune... Published as a whole, and in sequence, you can see what Anthony Burgess meant when he wrote of him: "Everything Orwell said had such a stamp of honest sincerity..." As Anderson also points out in his introduction, the collection shows off "one of the greatest practitioners ... of the craft of turning out 800-2,000 words a week". He was Tribune's William Hazlitt, and Orwell in Tribune does much more than re-affirm that fact as well as his genius.

Duncan Hamilton, Yorkshire Post

Neatly edited by Paul Anderson, and good on the contemporary left-wing background, this deserves to sit on the same shelf as Peter Davison's monumental George Orwell: The Complete Works.

D J Taylor, Sunday Times

This book is a collection of all the columns [Orwell] produced between 1943 and 1947... It comes with a lucid and thoughtful account of Tribune and Orwell by former Tribune editor Paul Anderson. It … shows Orwell to have been the best sort of newspaper columnist.

Francis Beckett, Guardian

Even if I had read the pieces before, I profited by reading them again in this attractively presented and well edited collection… Paul Anderson’s notes are not only copious but informative, the work of someone who knows the subject and the period…

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Spectator

To read the Tribune articles in sequence, and see him taking up points from previous columns, arguing with correspondents and expanding on dozens of subjects is to raise him from the dead, as it were, and have him talking in your living room or – as Orwell would prefer – your local. The easy explanation for the success of Paul Anderson's intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection is that Orwell was a great writer… Yet Orwell's talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers... Tribune was a magazine of the Labour left that for a few years in the forties broke the arguments that were to dominate British political life.

Nick Cohen, Democratiya

Evidently Orwell was well equipped, in 1943, to take on the literary editorship of Tribune. He could write interestingly about pretty much anything, and had often appeared in its pages already… The relevant history of the journal is sketched with authority by Paul Anderson in his introduction to this book.

Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books

WHAT THEY SAID

‘Safety First does the government the courtesy of examining its origins and ideas seriously. That inevitably involves criticism. But grown-ups’ respect for Blair and Blairism is much more likely to be encouraged by real analysis than by facile praise. Safety First is not the last word on New Labour, but it is the best so far.’

Roy Hattersley, Guardian

‘Paul Anderson is a former editor of Tribune and a former deputy editor of the New Statesman. Nyta Mann is a former NS assistant editor. The tone and the standpoint is Tribune at its best: rude, factual, lively and down-to-earth English, always provocative, always selective, but crammed full of useful information . . . They remind the triumphalists that the Conservatives killed themselves. Labour could almost certainly have won on bolder policies.’

Bernard Crick, New Statesman

‘The best of the many books now out on Labour. The authors have the ideal background to explain the Labour government, its personalities and policies to the reader . . . Safety First is clearly written and cleverly constructed.’

Nick Cohen, Observer

‘Anybody looking for a primer on Blairism would do well to start here . . . The fact that the authors are on the left, but are sceptical of the Blairite project, gives them distinct advantages in comparing old Labour with the new sort. It means that, although they understand what Mr Blair is about, they are immune from the tendency to gush in awe.’

Economist

‘A well-written and incisive portrait of the key players in the Labour Party and British government . . . a worthwhile, witty and engrossing book.’

Fabian Review

‘Anderson and Mann know a formidable amount about the development of Labour’s policies . . . Safety First is very useful as a reference book . . . a good corrective to the notion that Labour began to modernise when Blair became leader.’

John Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement

‘Written from a critical libertarian left perspective, Safety First will not, I suspect, get Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann invited to many Downing Street cocktail parties. Theirs is a voice from outside the conventional Labour spectrum, and in this stimulating and informative account they treat the official version of the party’s recent history with healthy scepticism . . . They show that serious heterodox thinking — the legacy of independently minded radicals such as George Orwell and Raymond Williams — has survived the left's disintegration.’

Tom Phillips, Contemporary Review

‘A rather intelligent tome . . . In its narrative breadth, it is a useful guide to the politics and personalities of the British government.’

Sion Simon, Spectator

'Safety First is a must.’

Mark Seddon, Tribune

‘Anderson and Mann are well-qualified to analyse the politics of the contemporary Labour Party . . . a highly informative guide book.’

Gillian Peele, Times Educational Supplement

‘A valuable study of the making of the Labour government.’

New Times

‘An intelligent guide to the development of key Labour policies and the intellectual trends that back or oppose them.’

Fortnight

‘Highly informative . . . the most detailed and accessible guide to New Labour yet.’

Labour Left Briefing

‘Safety First does not share Socialist Worker’s political analysis, but the authors have done a great job. It is stunningly up to date. Everyone will benefit from reading it.’

Socialist Worker