Little Atoms, 7 April 2015
The Beijing Bookworm literary festival offers a chance to explore the limits to criticism in the People's Republic
I’m just back in Britain from a whistle-stop tour of China, where I was speaking at the Bookworm Literary Festival, a fortnight-long talkfest organised by the leading independent English-language bookshop in China. I went with Anna Chen, who was one of the headline stars of the show – and it was one of the most stimulating foreign trips I’ve ever made.
The itinerary was hectic. Bookworm has three bookshops-cafes, in Beijing, Chengdu and Suzhou, and one of its sponsors is the Chinese branch of Nottingham University in Ningbo: fitting all of them into 10 days of a two-week trip as we did meant travelling vast distances (Chengdu-Suzhou-Ningbo-Beijing) by plane and high-speed train and forgetting about sleep. But, boy, was it worth it. The festival itself was an almost madly diverse series of talks and readings by an extraordinary selection of authors from China, the Anglophone world, Europe, the Middle East – poets, novelists, journalists, travel-writers, writers for kids, biographers, historians – and everything about China was breathtaking.
It was my first time in the country, I don’t speak the language, and two weeks in China spent staying in hotels and largely inside the protective bubble of a speaking tour (with a few days at the end to see Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall) doesn’t make me an authority on anything. My role model is not the American muckraker Lincoln Steffens who famously declared “I have seen the future and it works” after a brief visit to Bolshevik Russia. But one of the great things about the festival was that we met a large number of people with vast experience of China – Chinese who have never left the country, Chinese living abroad, western and other expat academics, teachers, students, journalists working in China, many of them from the Chinese diaspora – who were happy to share their stories and views freely (at least in private). And although it’s all second-hand, it’s worth relaying some of what they said (although I’m not for the most part naming names).
To start as everyone, without exception, started. China has gone through a gigantic and extraordinarily rapid economic and social transformation in the past 30 years, and although the pace might be slowing a little it’s still extremely fast – GDP growth will be “only” 7 per cent this year after 30 years of 10 per cent or more on average.
This is of course a statement of the obvious that can be found in any western newspaper, but its truth is in your face from the moment you touch down in China. The first thing I noticed on arriving, in the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, was – yes – just how new and big everything appeared: the massive new airport terminal buildings, the new eight-lane motorway to the city thronged with traffic and criss-crossed by spectacular flyovers, the giant new apartment blocks stretching as far as the eye can see on the city periphery, the gargantuan new city-centre skyscrapers, the enormous building sites and cranes everywhere.
The second thing that struck me (apart from the sheer number of people in the streets – in cars, on motorbikes, on bicycles, on foot – I learned later that Chengdu has 14 million inhabitants in its urban area, 6 million more than London) was the rampant consumerism on display everywhere: the shiny new cars that jam every highway, the designer-brand and consumer-electronics shops in street after street, the mini-skirted girls chatting on their smartphones. OK, I’d not been expecting party bureaucrats in Mao suits and workers in blue denim overalls cycling to the cement factory down dirt roads, but this was stunningly full-on.
Mass migration
This is mundane stuff for anyone who lives in China or knows it well, and our interlocutors at the Bookworm festival took my amazement in their stride: many had felt it themselves once and some were still prone to moments of astonishment, but nearly all also sounded notes of caution. Yes, the economic and social transformation of China is profound; yes, the state is an enormously powerful actor, capable of feats of infrastructure development inconceivable in western liberal democracies – to take just one example, 10,000 miles of high-speed railway built in less than 10 years, the equivalent of constructing Britain’s planned HS2 line from London to the west Midlands once every couple of months.
But the purpose of all the high-speed railways, motorways and apartment blocks is a helter-skelter urbanisation and industrialisation of China to get it to a European standard of living in a decade, involving a mass migration from countryside to city of extraordinary proportions, and it is fraught with problems. The urban population has been boosted by state diktat and market forces from around a quarter of the national 1.1 billion 25 years ago to around a half of the 1.4 billion or so today, and the dislocation is immense. As a teacher in Chengdu put it: it’s the entire population of the European Union and Russia arriving in town.
David Goodman, a British academic in Suzhou, author of 2014’s must-read Class in Contemporary China, says that the migrants from the countryside have become a new urban underclass, reliant on low-paid menial and casual work: the extraordinary economic growth of the past 20 years is based on super-exploitation of poor recently-peasant proletarians in factories and service industries. Anyone who skates over this fundamental truth is at best a fool, he says – singling out Martin Jacques, the former editor of Marxism Today magazine in London, whose book When China Rules the World has been an improbable global best-seller since 2009.
Most migrant workers – and most workers are migrant workers of one kind or another – live in horribly overcrowded conditions, says Goodman. In Beijing, says a British journalist working in the city, some subsist in underground dormitories that were once air-raid shelters. (He offers to take us round but we don’t have time.) Everywhere we go, people tell us that many of the giant new apartment blocks were built or started during a vast speculative real-estate bubble that has burst, the apartments often empty (if they are finished) because they are too expensive for most workers to buy or rent. Even the relatively well-off pay vast proportions of their incomes for housing. It’s quite normal in a big city to spend two or three hours commuting each day and not to know anyone who lives near you. The consumerism is greedy and unthinking, they all say, the main means by which the party hopes to keep the lid on opposition, and the party itself is corrupt, its leaders enriching themselves through the proceeds of self-offs and real-estate deals despite its campaign against corruption…
The party line
Ah, the party – the Communist Party of China. It might have nearly 90 million members, it might run one of the biggest and most powerful states in the world with unmatched ruthlessness, but to a foreign visitor unable to read or speak Chinese it is an eerie presence. There’s the famous giant portrait of Mao overlooking Tiananmen Square – in front of which every Chinese tourist from the provinces as well as every foreign visitor takes a selfie – and at the tourist tat stalls by the Great Wall and in central Beijing you can buy People’s Liberation Army hats, Mao badges, the Little Red Book and fridge magnets depicting the Great Helmsman. Otherwise, there’s the party line on the state TV English language service in your hotel and in China Daily, the official English language newspaper, full of stories about foreign policy and great successes in the struggle against corruption. But neither is intrusive, and that’s about it.
This impression of absence is of course illusory, but it is reinforced in microcosm by the apparent freedom enjoyed by the Bookworm festival. Here we were, more than 120 authors from all over the world coming along to three of China’s major cities – some of the writers long-standing critics of the regime, including a few who have been expelled for their work – and talking freely about anything we wanted. No one intervened to stop it. What’s not to like?
Well, nothing. But it’s a bit more complicated than it first appears. The Bookworm bookshop-cafes are great places to hang out, eat, drink and buy books – we could do with a few more like them in the UK – and they are qualified free-speech places (in English and Chinese) where there are no obvious limits on what is on sale (in English at least), which are accepted as legitimate businesses by the state. That is a remarkable space to have established.
But there are constraints on what Bookworm can do. The festival is monitored by the authorities – less for what speakers say than for contributions from Chinese members of the audience. My talk,"East of England: communism in Britain", was about communism in Britain and British admirers of communist China: the Bookworm organisers said that they’d been unable to find anyone to interpret my remarks into Chinese because their translators were worried about getting the blame for something I said, and after two of my sessions I was told I’d had officials in the audience. So what: it was rather less intrusive than the norm in eastern Europe 30 years ago, and it all went ahead.
More importantly, Chinese customs routinely impound books – and although Peter Goff, the affable Irish former-Guardian journalist who set up Bookworm with others 10 years ago and is general manager of the bookshop and the festival’s kingpin, says there is no obvious policy on what is stopped and what is not, there are certain key subjects and authors that are beyond the pale for the authorities, however blurred their lines. I couldn’t find Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story or anything by the historian Frank Dikötter on Bookworm’s shelves, but historical work as critical as theirs was on display. The boundaries of what can be said in a public forum are just as difficult to discern. Talk about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 is OK in a reference from a novelist or a western academic but not from a former activist who might incite the audience to do it again; and it’s difficult but not impossible to get anyone associated with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong into the mainland to speak, for the same reason. Tibet is pretty-much taboo. Goff’s stories of running Bookworm are sometimes frightening – they include being arrested – and he knows he walks a tightrope, but his successes are extraordinary: he’s always got books and people in for the festival, including “banned” authors, but it takes time and guile.
This year, as on eight previous occasions, he and his team managed to get some of the best people writing about China to talk at the festival, as well as dozens of writers with no Chinese connection to their work. There were more than 120 in total, and we were at only a tiny fraction of their events – but nearly everything we saw was impressive. I was particularly wowed by the novelist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo (A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, I Am China), the novelist Wena Poon (who launched her latest book, Café Jause: A Story of Viennese Shanghai, at the festival) and the British non-fiction writer Horatio Clare (A Single Swallow, Down to the Sea in Ships). But there were also fascinating sessions from the veteran American Beat poet and translator Willis Barnstone, the British historical novelist Victoria Hislop (with husband Ian in tow as bag-carrier), the author-illustrators for children Frané Lessac and Bridget Stevens-Marzo, the journalist-academic-analysts Michael Meyer (In Manchuria) and Francesco Sisci (A Brave New China)…
The most important thing about Bookworm, however, is that it’s marginal. It’s a tolerated showcase that could be taken down at any time – and it’s tolerated because it casts the party-state in a favourable light in the outside world and does not threaten its existence. The availability of critical books in English and the accessibility of critical debate in English in small venues in three cities are – even more than the availability of the Financial Times and the International New York Times, BBC World and CNN in posh hotels – pin-prick challenges to the regime by comparison with those posed by the internet, and the party-state has missed few tricks in ensuring that it controls what its citizens can see on their screens.
The “great firewall of China”, blocking access to much critical material online from outside China, is not impermeable, but you have to make an effort to get through it and you are not completely safe if you do. Although the world wide web as taken for granted in most of the west is accessible if you have a virtual private network, a dedicated encrypted link between your computer in China and another elsewhere, VPN users are tracked by the authorities. More important than the “great firewall”, online postings from inside China are monitored relentlessly by the state – thousands of bureaucrats beavering away to snoop – and systematically censored. You can criticise the local party boss, but never suggest a demonstration.
I don’t have the expertise to read the evidence – some say China will inevitably loosen up and that Bookworm presages big changes, others that the party-state is interested only in keeping control, scared by the Chinese history of unpredicted social explosions and by the implosion of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago. But I’m bitten by China, and I’ve got to go back to see more and talk more. My thanks to Bookworm for giving me a first taste.
Tuesday, 7 April 2015
Tuesday, 20 January 2015
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
NOTHING HAPPENING HERE
I'm giving the Tribune column a rest after 15 years and am up to my ears with Aaaargh! Press work, writing books and academic papers and earning a living, so expect nothing here for a bit for some time.
Friday, 7 February 2014
LABOUR'S UNION PROBLEM
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 7 February 2014
Labour’s relationship with the trade unions has always been a problem.
The formalities of it date from 1918, when Labour was still, essentially, a means of getting working-class men (no girls allowed) elected to parliament – and when there was a vast number of trade unions, most of them either small or very decentralised. The party then drew up a new constitution (which also included the vague promise of socialism in Clause Four) giving the unions the defining role in the new structure at every level except electing the parliamentary leader.
The deal started to look creaky within a few years, as Ernest Bevin created a giant general union by amalgamation, the Transport and General Workers, in which power was concentrated at the top – and then other big unions, representing miners, engineers, railwaymen, local authority workers, more or less successfully emulated the T and G’s transformation into national centrally managed bureaucracies.
Union barons became fixtures in Labour politics, controlling local parties through their surrogates in much of the country and wielding decisive influence over the party conference – and between conferences they ran the National Executive Committee.
There’s no romantic narrative of class struggle. From the late 20s until the 50s, the unions were mostly bastions of the Labour right; in the 60s and 70s the left took control of many unions. But until the 80s the unions’ position in the party was taken as read by just about everyone – members, the party leadership and most MPs – as a fact of life. Yes, the block vote was ridiculous, yes the union bureaucrats acted as if they owned the show … but the unions had no role in leadership elections and they weren’t (generally) a co-ordinated bloc on policy. Anyone could get around them when necessary (well, most of the time).
Two things changed that happy world: Labour’s internal constitutional reforms introduced in 1980, which created an “electoral college” for leadership elections in which unions had a third of the vote; and the collapse of trade union membership as Tory Britain deindustrialised.
Changing the leadership election system was a left cause, the key victory of the idiotic left insurgency led by Tony Benn after Labour’s 1979 general election defeat to Margaret Thatcher. But it was a very dodgy business. Until 1993, actual members of trade unions had no right to vote unless their union boss decided otherwise. Fat blokes in pubs ruled supreme. It was a blessed relief for Labour that Neil Kinnock and John Smith were elected by massive margins under the system – and that the challenge to Kinnock from Benn in 1988 was so completely, utterly and totally inept in every respect.
Much more important, however, was the impact of the collapse of union membership during the 1980s and 1990s. There were 13 million trade union members in 1979: now the figure is half that. The main reason was simple: the closure of production in mining, steel, engineering; technological change in office work, printing, film and TV. And the way unions responded was simple too: merge.
Of the 6.5 million union members today, roughly half are members of three: Unite, with 1.4 million; Unison, with 1.3 million; and the GMB, with 600,000. Add the shop workers, the teachers, the civil servants, postal workers and construction workers and you’re over 5 million.
That makes Labour's federal structure particularly difficult to sustain. I’m all in favour of the old Wobbly slogan of one big union – but amalgamations create a problem for a national social democratic party with affiliates. Federalism works only with a plurality of engaged organisations. There’s a point where an affiliate gets too big.
Unless Labour is prepared to say that Unite and Unison should dictate policy it has to change its rules. But that’s only part of the issue.
In general, given a choice, you don’t put idiots in charge of anything – but with very few exceptions, Britain’s unions do just that. They are appallingly run. Their leaders are the worst we’ve seen for years and their research departments largely inept. When was the last time a trade union report made a headline? With very few exceptions, they’ve done bugger-all organising for years and years.
Useless unions deserve no role in Labour politics. And we’ve got spectacularly useless unions right now. Ed Miliband is going for change where it’s least necessary. His experience in the 2010 leadership election obviously matters to him, but he would have won anyway. And under his proposed changes there is nothing to stop Unite or Unison sending out voting recommendations to their members...
He should have got rid of the block vote at party conference.
Labour’s relationship with the trade unions has always been a problem.
The formalities of it date from 1918, when Labour was still, essentially, a means of getting working-class men (no girls allowed) elected to parliament – and when there was a vast number of trade unions, most of them either small or very decentralised. The party then drew up a new constitution (which also included the vague promise of socialism in Clause Four) giving the unions the defining role in the new structure at every level except electing the parliamentary leader.
The deal started to look creaky within a few years, as Ernest Bevin created a giant general union by amalgamation, the Transport and General Workers, in which power was concentrated at the top – and then other big unions, representing miners, engineers, railwaymen, local authority workers, more or less successfully emulated the T and G’s transformation into national centrally managed bureaucracies.
Union barons became fixtures in Labour politics, controlling local parties through their surrogates in much of the country and wielding decisive influence over the party conference – and between conferences they ran the National Executive Committee.
There’s no romantic narrative of class struggle. From the late 20s until the 50s, the unions were mostly bastions of the Labour right; in the 60s and 70s the left took control of many unions. But until the 80s the unions’ position in the party was taken as read by just about everyone – members, the party leadership and most MPs – as a fact of life. Yes, the block vote was ridiculous, yes the union bureaucrats acted as if they owned the show … but the unions had no role in leadership elections and they weren’t (generally) a co-ordinated bloc on policy. Anyone could get around them when necessary (well, most of the time).
Two things changed that happy world: Labour’s internal constitutional reforms introduced in 1980, which created an “electoral college” for leadership elections in which unions had a third of the vote; and the collapse of trade union membership as Tory Britain deindustrialised.
Changing the leadership election system was a left cause, the key victory of the idiotic left insurgency led by Tony Benn after Labour’s 1979 general election defeat to Margaret Thatcher. But it was a very dodgy business. Until 1993, actual members of trade unions had no right to vote unless their union boss decided otherwise. Fat blokes in pubs ruled supreme. It was a blessed relief for Labour that Neil Kinnock and John Smith were elected by massive margins under the system – and that the challenge to Kinnock from Benn in 1988 was so completely, utterly and totally inept in every respect.
Much more important, however, was the impact of the collapse of union membership during the 1980s and 1990s. There were 13 million trade union members in 1979: now the figure is half that. The main reason was simple: the closure of production in mining, steel, engineering; technological change in office work, printing, film and TV. And the way unions responded was simple too: merge.
Of the 6.5 million union members today, roughly half are members of three: Unite, with 1.4 million; Unison, with 1.3 million; and the GMB, with 600,000. Add the shop workers, the teachers, the civil servants, postal workers and construction workers and you’re over 5 million.
That makes Labour's federal structure particularly difficult to sustain. I’m all in favour of the old Wobbly slogan of one big union – but amalgamations create a problem for a national social democratic party with affiliates. Federalism works only with a plurality of engaged organisations. There’s a point where an affiliate gets too big.
Unless Labour is prepared to say that Unite and Unison should dictate policy it has to change its rules. But that’s only part of the issue.
In general, given a choice, you don’t put idiots in charge of anything – but with very few exceptions, Britain’s unions do just that. They are appallingly run. Their leaders are the worst we’ve seen for years and their research departments largely inept. When was the last time a trade union report made a headline? With very few exceptions, they’ve done bugger-all organising for years and years.
Useless unions deserve no role in Labour politics. And we’ve got spectacularly useless unions right now. Ed Miliband is going for change where it’s least necessary. His experience in the 2010 leadership election obviously matters to him, but he would have won anyway. And under his proposed changes there is nothing to stop Unite or Unison sending out voting recommendations to their members...
He should have got rid of the block vote at party conference.
Thursday, 9 January 2014
THEY CAN'T FLOG THE WIRE FROM THE RAILWAY
Tribune column, 10 January 2014
Scene in the local off-license, Ipswich, New Year’s Eve:
+++
The past few months have seen the popular press whipping up panic about the supposed threat posed by Bulgarians and Romanians coming over to Britain now they’re properly part of the European Union’s single market for labour. They’re taking our jobs and houses and signing on for lavish benefits, we’re told – and it looks as if the nasty anti-foreigner mood will lead to a triumph for the saloon-bar rightists of UKIP in the European Parliament elections in spring.
Well, they’ve done it before – UKIP came second in share of the vote in the 2009 Euro-elections. But it doesn’t necessarily mean too much for the next general election. In 2010, UKIP slumped to 3 per cent of the vote and failed to win a single seat in the House of Commons. And I don’t think xenophobia is Labour’s main problem right now. The party is undoubtedly on the defensive on immigration and welfare scroungers and it still hasn’t killed the story that it was Labour profligacy that got us into this mess in the first place. But its biggest difficulty is the prospect of a house-price boom engineered by the coalition to make mortgage-holders feel good just in time for the 2015 general election.
+++
Of course, it’s not out of Labour’s control. Britain has a housing crisis: there are too few homes to satisfy demand, and prices and rents are ludicrously inflated. But inflated house prices and rents are very advantageous to a sizable minority of voters.
Most people who have bought a home in the past 50 years – whether a straight mortgage purchase or a subsidised council sale – have done very nicely, thank you very much. Particularly in London, if you were in on the act, you’ve got an asset that has appreciated by the week (for the most part) and in any case can be rented out for more than the repayments on what you borrowed.
There’s now a giant group of home-owners whose sense of well-being is based on what the estate agent says their home is worth (and who borrow to consume in line with that) and another, smaller, group of landlords living off the money they charge to other people to live in their properties, with rents inflated by shortage. The lovely Fergus and Judith Wilson, the buy-to-let millionaires of Kent, made the headlines again last weekend, this time not for charging extortionate fees to tenants but for deciding they’d no longer rent to anyone on benefits.
OK, spiralling property prices and rents are bad for everyone who is excluded from the bonanza, and they redistribute wealth and income in a radically unequal way – with a massive state subsidy for landlords in the form of housing benefit, even if the Wilsons reckon it’s no longer as bankable as it used to be. But housing is very dangerous territory for Labour. The party can win support by attacking rack-renting landlords and demanding the construction of affordable housing – but it also needs the votes of owner-occupiers whose interest is in the maintenance of the value of their properties. I’m sorry to start 2014 on a pessimistic note, but I’ve a horrible feeling that, come 2015, those owner-occupiers will prefer to vote Tory – and give David Cameron a victory that his party’s current poll ratings suggest is very unlikely.
Scene in the local off-license, Ipswich, New Year’s Eve:
Old boy from Suffolk (white, about 75, slightly tipsy) Well, they’re coming over here...The young man behind me in the queue coughs politely and I instinctively turn my head to him. He grins. I grin back. I don’t know him, but he must be Polish – who else would buy Polish beer?
Shopkeeper (brown, mid-50s, Punjabi) Yeah, they don’t wanna work, they just wanna nick stuff.
Old boy But it’s better now the scrap’s not cash. They can’t get the wire off the railway and flog it. Now they’ll just sign on.
Shopkeeper They’ve got to stop them coming. It’s out of control.
+++
The past few months have seen the popular press whipping up panic about the supposed threat posed by Bulgarians and Romanians coming over to Britain now they’re properly part of the European Union’s single market for labour. They’re taking our jobs and houses and signing on for lavish benefits, we’re told – and it looks as if the nasty anti-foreigner mood will lead to a triumph for the saloon-bar rightists of UKIP in the European Parliament elections in spring.
Well, they’ve done it before – UKIP came second in share of the vote in the 2009 Euro-elections. But it doesn’t necessarily mean too much for the next general election. In 2010, UKIP slumped to 3 per cent of the vote and failed to win a single seat in the House of Commons. And I don’t think xenophobia is Labour’s main problem right now. The party is undoubtedly on the defensive on immigration and welfare scroungers and it still hasn’t killed the story that it was Labour profligacy that got us into this mess in the first place. But its biggest difficulty is the prospect of a house-price boom engineered by the coalition to make mortgage-holders feel good just in time for the 2015 general election.
+++
Of course, it’s not out of Labour’s control. Britain has a housing crisis: there are too few homes to satisfy demand, and prices and rents are ludicrously inflated. But inflated house prices and rents are very advantageous to a sizable minority of voters.
Most people who have bought a home in the past 50 years – whether a straight mortgage purchase or a subsidised council sale – have done very nicely, thank you very much. Particularly in London, if you were in on the act, you’ve got an asset that has appreciated by the week (for the most part) and in any case can be rented out for more than the repayments on what you borrowed.
There’s now a giant group of home-owners whose sense of well-being is based on what the estate agent says their home is worth (and who borrow to consume in line with that) and another, smaller, group of landlords living off the money they charge to other people to live in their properties, with rents inflated by shortage. The lovely Fergus and Judith Wilson, the buy-to-let millionaires of Kent, made the headlines again last weekend, this time not for charging extortionate fees to tenants but for deciding they’d no longer rent to anyone on benefits.
OK, spiralling property prices and rents are bad for everyone who is excluded from the bonanza, and they redistribute wealth and income in a radically unequal way – with a massive state subsidy for landlords in the form of housing benefit, even if the Wilsons reckon it’s no longer as bankable as it used to be. But housing is very dangerous territory for Labour. The party can win support by attacking rack-renting landlords and demanding the construction of affordable housing – but it also needs the votes of owner-occupiers whose interest is in the maintenance of the value of their properties. I’m sorry to start 2014 on a pessimistic note, but I’ve a horrible feeling that, come 2015, those owner-occupiers will prefer to vote Tory – and give David Cameron a victory that his party’s current poll ratings suggest is very unlikely.
Thursday, 28 November 2013
THE PROBLEM WITH THE CO-OP
Tribune column, 29 November 2013
Maybe I’m a naïve libertarian, but I can’t be that bothered whether the Reverend Paul Flowers, the Methodist minister who was chairman of the Co-operative Bank, took illegal drugs and had sex with rent boys.
Not that I think that the Mail on Sunday should have been prevented from exposing him: it’s not good for people who run banks to be off their heads on crystal meth, just as it’s not good for airline pilots to be drunk, and religious leaders who preach against prostitution and hire prostitutes on the side are fair game. Even if it turns out that the Rev Flowers got wasted only at weekends and never met rent boys on Sundays, there is a public interest in the intrusion into his privacy that cannot be reduced to prurience, even before his links with Labour Party high-ups come into the equation …
But that’s as may be: the Rev Flowers’ louche lifestyle isn’t what really matters in the extraordinary story of the Co-op Bank. He wasn’t at the helm when it took the fateful decision to take over the Britannia Building Society in 2009, and he was by no means solely responsible for the bank’s subsequent failed attempt to acquire 631 branches of Lloyds Bank. Although he was obviously not up to the job of chairing the bank’s board – his display of ignorance of its assets in front of the Commons Treasury select committee was breathtaking – he should not be made a scapegoat for systemic failures of which his appointment was a symptom.
And, boy, were there a few of those. The most important factor in the story is the hubris that infected the upper echelons of the Co-operative Group, which owns the Co-op Bank, in the mid-noughties. Thirty years ago, what you might call the official Co-op – the consumer organisation with shops, insurance, banking and funeral services rather than the myriad co-operatively run businesses in industry and agriculture – appeared to be in terminal decline. It was fragmented into regional societies, split between wholesale and retail operations, ludicrously bureaucratic at every level. Its shops were losing trade to the big supermarkets. Its accountability to its members was minimal, its business acumen non-existent.
But in the course of the late 1980s and 1990s, the Co-op got its act together, or so it seemed. Most of the regional societies merged into a national body, and in 2000 the retail and wholesale sides of the national Co-op became one. The Co-op Bank began a successful campaign emphasising that its principles were different from its competitors’. Managers with serious experience were given key positions in the retail and wholesale operations. By the mid-noughties, the Co-op seemed to be in good shape.
Then, however, its bosses got hungry for growth – and that’s where it all started to go horribly wrong. The Co-op expanded aggressively, encouraged by the then Labour government. As well as the Co-op Bank taking over the Britannia Building Society, the group swallowed the ailing supermarket chain Somerfield. Concerns that it was moving too fast and carelessly were given short shrift both by politicians of all parties and by the markets – and in 2010 the Co-op Bank was given the go-ahead by the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, to take over branches of Lloyds, temporarily nationalised to prevent its collapse, to enhance banking competition on the high street.
I’ll come clean: I thought that the Co-op becoming a serious contender in consumer banking and growing as a supermarket was rather a good idea. But I wasn’t in any position to know whether it had the necessary means or whether its actual or potential acquisitions were turkeys. The members of the Co-op Bank board were. They all screwed up.
So is this the end of mutualism, proof that complex stuff like banking has to be left to the experts with no input from the oiks? You’d think so from most of the press, but I demur. The supposed experts got it as wrong in 2007-08 as the amateurs. And the problem with the Co-op is not that it’s too democratic, but that it’s not democratic enough. As in every other large mutual, supposedly member-controlled, organisation, including the trade unions, hardly anyone votes. And one reason for this is that elections are depoliticised: candidates for office never declare their intentions, affiliations or beliefs beyond motherhood and apple pie. The Co-op, like most of the trade unions, is dominated by a Tammany Hall culture of stitch-up and buggin’s turn in which knowing the right people and being part of the right set matters more than competence, integrity or principles.
It’s an old story: the pioneering political sociologist Robert Michels identified the “iron law of oligarchy” more than a century ago in his seminal work, Political Parties. How to break that iron law remains the biggest quandary of radical politics.
Maybe I’m a naïve libertarian, but I can’t be that bothered whether the Reverend Paul Flowers, the Methodist minister who was chairman of the Co-operative Bank, took illegal drugs and had sex with rent boys.
Not that I think that the Mail on Sunday should have been prevented from exposing him: it’s not good for people who run banks to be off their heads on crystal meth, just as it’s not good for airline pilots to be drunk, and religious leaders who preach against prostitution and hire prostitutes on the side are fair game. Even if it turns out that the Rev Flowers got wasted only at weekends and never met rent boys on Sundays, there is a public interest in the intrusion into his privacy that cannot be reduced to prurience, even before his links with Labour Party high-ups come into the equation …
But that’s as may be: the Rev Flowers’ louche lifestyle isn’t what really matters in the extraordinary story of the Co-op Bank. He wasn’t at the helm when it took the fateful decision to take over the Britannia Building Society in 2009, and he was by no means solely responsible for the bank’s subsequent failed attempt to acquire 631 branches of Lloyds Bank. Although he was obviously not up to the job of chairing the bank’s board – his display of ignorance of its assets in front of the Commons Treasury select committee was breathtaking – he should not be made a scapegoat for systemic failures of which his appointment was a symptom.
And, boy, were there a few of those. The most important factor in the story is the hubris that infected the upper echelons of the Co-operative Group, which owns the Co-op Bank, in the mid-noughties. Thirty years ago, what you might call the official Co-op – the consumer organisation with shops, insurance, banking and funeral services rather than the myriad co-operatively run businesses in industry and agriculture – appeared to be in terminal decline. It was fragmented into regional societies, split between wholesale and retail operations, ludicrously bureaucratic at every level. Its shops were losing trade to the big supermarkets. Its accountability to its members was minimal, its business acumen non-existent.
But in the course of the late 1980s and 1990s, the Co-op got its act together, or so it seemed. Most of the regional societies merged into a national body, and in 2000 the retail and wholesale sides of the national Co-op became one. The Co-op Bank began a successful campaign emphasising that its principles were different from its competitors’. Managers with serious experience were given key positions in the retail and wholesale operations. By the mid-noughties, the Co-op seemed to be in good shape.
Then, however, its bosses got hungry for growth – and that’s where it all started to go horribly wrong. The Co-op expanded aggressively, encouraged by the then Labour government. As well as the Co-op Bank taking over the Britannia Building Society, the group swallowed the ailing supermarket chain Somerfield. Concerns that it was moving too fast and carelessly were given short shrift both by politicians of all parties and by the markets – and in 2010 the Co-op Bank was given the go-ahead by the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, to take over branches of Lloyds, temporarily nationalised to prevent its collapse, to enhance banking competition on the high street.
I’ll come clean: I thought that the Co-op becoming a serious contender in consumer banking and growing as a supermarket was rather a good idea. But I wasn’t in any position to know whether it had the necessary means or whether its actual or potential acquisitions were turkeys. The members of the Co-op Bank board were. They all screwed up.
So is this the end of mutualism, proof that complex stuff like banking has to be left to the experts with no input from the oiks? You’d think so from most of the press, but I demur. The supposed experts got it as wrong in 2007-08 as the amateurs. And the problem with the Co-op is not that it’s too democratic, but that it’s not democratic enough. As in every other large mutual, supposedly member-controlled, organisation, including the trade unions, hardly anyone votes. And one reason for this is that elections are depoliticised: candidates for office never declare their intentions, affiliations or beliefs beyond motherhood and apple pie. The Co-op, like most of the trade unions, is dominated by a Tammany Hall culture of stitch-up and buggin’s turn in which knowing the right people and being part of the right set matters more than competence, integrity or principles.
It’s an old story: the pioneering political sociologist Robert Michels identified the “iron law of oligarchy” more than a century ago in his seminal work, Political Parties. How to break that iron law remains the biggest quandary of radical politics.
Thursday, 31 October 2013
LOU REED WAS MY TEENAGE HERO
Tribune column, 1 November 2013
There’s one song every band can play. If the words don’t ring a bell:
OK, maybe not. It’s “Sweet Jane”, and it was not a hit for the New York band that ripped off the lick and recorded it in 1970, the Velvet Underground. I don’t think it charted anywhere until Mott the Hoople, a cheery bunch of British rockers fronted by the great Ian Hunter, covered it in 1972 and released it as a single in Canada and Portugal.
The Velvets weren’t exactly obscure. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker were the house band at Andy Warhol’s studio-cum-party, The Factory. Reed and Cale had by 1970 established serious reputations as artistes (though Cale had left the band and Reed was on the way out) even if no one bought their records.
But it was only after the Velvet Underground went under, after the release of Loaded, their most commercially-oriented LP, that people got Lou Reed. He was turned into an international superstar by David Bowie, then at the height of his fame, who produced Reed’s second solo album, Transformer, which became a global hit in 1972. After that Reed had a mixed career. There are plenty of his records that are very good – Berlin, Rock and Roll Animal, Coney Island Baby and Street Hassle stand out, and the Take No Prisoners live set from 1978 is stunning, one of the funniest recordings made by a rock musician. I’m a fan of New York and of Songs for Drella, the album Reed and Cale put out as a tribute to Warhol in 1990. I’ve even had Metal Machine Music moments. But nothing ever matched Transformer or the Velvets’ recordings.
Now he’s dead, and I’m sad. It might seem odd, but Lou mattered a lot to kids in Suffolk in the 1970s. He was a subversive suburban geek, and there weren’t too many of them around at the time. We bought sunglasses to try to look like him, We did his songs, badly but enthusiastically, in punk bands. I’d say he was more of an inspiration than Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones.
“Give me an issue and I’ll give you a tissue – and wipe my ass with it.” he told his liberal New York audience in 1978. They loved it. In later life he ditched some of the cynicism and came out for the Democrats in a rather curmudgeonly manner, but I’m not really sure it was an improvement.
+++
Russell Brand is a very different beast. The controversial comedian is in the spotlight after editing an issue of the New Statesman and appearing on Newsnight.
His not-so-unique selling point is that he is an anarchist. He thinks that Britain needs a revolution and needs it now – and his plea for revolution has gone viral.
I have some sympathy. Thirty-five years ago, when I wanted to be Lou Reed, well, I used to be an anarchist just like Russell Brand, though I wasn’t famous. I went on every demo against the Labour government in the late 1970s and lots against the Tories after that. I didn’t vote. I squatted.
Revolution was a lot of fun – certainly more fun than straight politics. I met some of my best friends through the anarchist scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s – and some of the ideas we were into back then have stood the test of time pretty well. Anarchism inoculated me for life against the authoritarianism of the Leninist left, and I’ve always held its do-it-yourself ethic in high regard. I also retain my disdain for the timidity of centre-left politicians whose actions are dictated by the findings of opinion polls and focus groups.
But anarchism also has severe limitations – not least that there aren’t many anarchists, which makes the dream of revolution just a little unrealistic. Even if there were lots more anarchists and revolution were a realistic goal, however, I’m not sure I’d actually want one these days. Revolutions are usually nasty, bloody things that lead to different wrong people being in charge. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I’d be quite happy settling for a robust universal welfare state and lots more spending on public transport, social housing, libraries and the arts. Which is what Labour used to offer, though now I’m not so sure.
There’s one song every band can play. If the words don’t ring a bell:
Standing on a cornerthe riff will do it for you. Da – da, da, di, da – da, da, di,da.
Suitcase in my hand
OK, maybe not. It’s “Sweet Jane”, and it was not a hit for the New York band that ripped off the lick and recorded it in 1970, the Velvet Underground. I don’t think it charted anywhere until Mott the Hoople, a cheery bunch of British rockers fronted by the great Ian Hunter, covered it in 1972 and released it as a single in Canada and Portugal.
The Velvets weren’t exactly obscure. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker were the house band at Andy Warhol’s studio-cum-party, The Factory. Reed and Cale had by 1970 established serious reputations as artistes (though Cale had left the band and Reed was on the way out) even if no one bought their records.
But it was only after the Velvet Underground went under, after the release of Loaded, their most commercially-oriented LP, that people got Lou Reed. He was turned into an international superstar by David Bowie, then at the height of his fame, who produced Reed’s second solo album, Transformer, which became a global hit in 1972. After that Reed had a mixed career. There are plenty of his records that are very good – Berlin, Rock and Roll Animal, Coney Island Baby and Street Hassle stand out, and the Take No Prisoners live set from 1978 is stunning, one of the funniest recordings made by a rock musician. I’m a fan of New York and of Songs for Drella, the album Reed and Cale put out as a tribute to Warhol in 1990. I’ve even had Metal Machine Music moments. But nothing ever matched Transformer or the Velvets’ recordings.
Now he’s dead, and I’m sad. It might seem odd, but Lou mattered a lot to kids in Suffolk in the 1970s. He was a subversive suburban geek, and there weren’t too many of them around at the time. We bought sunglasses to try to look like him, We did his songs, badly but enthusiastically, in punk bands. I’d say he was more of an inspiration than Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones.
“Give me an issue and I’ll give you a tissue – and wipe my ass with it.” he told his liberal New York audience in 1978. They loved it. In later life he ditched some of the cynicism and came out for the Democrats in a rather curmudgeonly manner, but I’m not really sure it was an improvement.
+++
Russell Brand is a very different beast. The controversial comedian is in the spotlight after editing an issue of the New Statesman and appearing on Newsnight.
His not-so-unique selling point is that he is an anarchist. He thinks that Britain needs a revolution and needs it now – and his plea for revolution has gone viral.
I have some sympathy. Thirty-five years ago, when I wanted to be Lou Reed, well, I used to be an anarchist just like Russell Brand, though I wasn’t famous. I went on every demo against the Labour government in the late 1970s and lots against the Tories after that. I didn’t vote. I squatted.
Revolution was a lot of fun – certainly more fun than straight politics. I met some of my best friends through the anarchist scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s – and some of the ideas we were into back then have stood the test of time pretty well. Anarchism inoculated me for life against the authoritarianism of the Leninist left, and I’ve always held its do-it-yourself ethic in high regard. I also retain my disdain for the timidity of centre-left politicians whose actions are dictated by the findings of opinion polls and focus groups.
But anarchism also has severe limitations – not least that there aren’t many anarchists, which makes the dream of revolution just a little unrealistic. Even if there were lots more anarchists and revolution were a realistic goal, however, I’m not sure I’d actually want one these days. Revolutions are usually nasty, bloody things that lead to different wrong people being in charge. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I’d be quite happy settling for a robust universal welfare state and lots more spending on public transport, social housing, libraries and the arts. Which is what Labour used to offer, though now I’m not so sure.
Friday, 18 October 2013
LABOUR TRAITORS?
Tribune, 18 October 2013
The Daily Mail’s assertion that Ralph Miliband, father of Labour leader Ed, was a stooge of the Soviet Union who ‘hated Britain’ has created a massive storm. But it is only the latest in a long line of right-wing smears against the Labour left – with Tribune as a particular target – claiming it kow-towed to communist Russia … or worse. In an exclusive extract from their new book, Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left, Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey tell the grisly story of the lies of the 1960s and 1970s
After the 1963 defection to the Soviet Union of Kim Philby – the “third man” among the Cambridge spies, the first two of whom, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had defected to Moscow in 1951, incontrovertible revelations of Britons spying for the Kremlin were few and far between. Indeed, apart from the fourth and fifth men of the Cambridge ring, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, exposed in the late 1970s, there were only a dozen or so until after the cold war had come to an end, most of them sordid blackmail cases, the highest-profile that of Geoffrey Prime, a paedophile working at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham imprisoned in 1982.
By contrast, unsubstantiated rumours that Britons had acted as Moscow’s agents were rife, most of them with their origins in the conspiracy theories of Peter Wright and other paranoid right-wing members of MI5 who were convinced that the Cambridge spies were just the tip of a giant subversive Soviet network at the heart of the British establishment. In the mid-1970s these stories, fuelled by anti-semitism, came to play a pernicious part in British politics, as Wright and his associates mounted a concerted smear campaign against leading figures in the Labour Party and the trade union movement they considered spies or “security risks”.
The most prominent of them was none other than Harold Wilson, Labour prime minister 1964-70 and 1974-76. Wilson had been president of the board of trade between 1947 and 1951, in which role he had taken over a controversial plan to sell jets to the Soviet Union (eventually scuppered on US insistence) and had generally been an enthusiast for developing trade with the eastern bloc. In 1951, he had resigned with Aneurin Bevan from the Attlee Labour government in protest at chancellor Hugh Gaitskell’s insistence on accepting US demands for increased military spending. From the early 1950s, he worked for Montague Meyer, a company importing Soviet timber, as an adviser. His job gave him the opportunity for frequent high-profile visits to the Soviet bloc and it introduced him to a circle of businessmen, many of them Jews, who were engaged in east-west trade.
Throughout the 1950s, Wilson kept up a campaign to relax restrictions on east-west trade, starting with a 1952 Tribune pamphlet, In Place of Dollars, and pushed a dovish position on the cold war. He was the first prominent British parliamentarian to visit senior Moscow politicians after the death of Stalin in 1953. He met Khrushchev in Moscow in 1956, refused to join the chorus of disapproval at the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution and took a conciliatory line when the Berlin Wall went up.
All this made Wilson a target for public Tory accusations that he was soft on communism and sotto voce gossip in the Security Service to the effect that, along with his Jewish friends, he was a closet communist or even a Soviet agent. In the early 1960s it remained merely gossip. But after Wilson became Labour leader on Hugh Gaitskell’s death in early 1963, the story was given legs by the KGB defector Anatoly Golytsin, who, as well as exposing Philby, told MI5 that he had heard that the KGB had poisoned an un-named leading western politician to get their man in as party leader. Wright and others took this to mean Gaitskell and Wilson – even though Gaitskell died a year after Golytsin defected.
There followed 13 years of attempts to expose and undermine Wilson, despite there being no credible evidence against him. Wright and his cronies investigated not only Wilson himself but a vast swathe of others as part of their attempt to nail the Labour leader – his friends and former business partners, his political associates in the Bevanite movement – as well as Labour MPs, Labour Party officials and senior trade unionists with pasts in or close to the Communist Party, current connections with communists or any kind of links with the Soviet bloc. Jews were particularly suspect.
Two of Wilson’s friends were of particular interest to MI5, the Labour-supporting businessmen Rudy Sternberg and Joseph Kagan, both Jews of central European origin. Sternberg arrived in Britain from Austria in 1937, and after the war built up a substantial petrochemicals and trading empire. He first came to public attention when he organised a British parliamentary delegation to the Leipzig trade fair in East Germany in 1961, just after the construction of the Berlin Wall, and was accused with some reason of buying up MPs to forward his commercial interests. He became personally friendly with Wilson, subsidised his office as leader of the opposition between 1970 and 1974 and was given a peerage in Wilson’s resignation honours list. Sternberg was monitored closely by MI5, which spread rumours to journalists about his supposed political unreliability but never proved anything. Nothing damning has emerged since, at least on that score.
Kagan, born in Lithuania, was not really an east-west trader. He survived the war in his native country, arriving in Britain in 1946, and made a fortune in Huddersfield manufacturing waterproof coats. He too became a personal friend of Wilson and was constantly in and out of Downing Street during Wilson’s first term, contributing large sums to his office in opposition and getting the reward of a seat in the Lords in 1976. He was friendly for a period with a Soviet intelligence officer based at the London embassy, which massively excited MI5 in 1971 after a defecting KGB agent, Oleg Lyalin, relayed tales of Kagan’s boasting about his access to Wilson. Nevertheless, intensive surveillance in the early 1970s revealed no proof of espionage. Although many years later in 1980 Kagan was gaoled for theft, there still isn’t any credible evidence that he was anything other than a dodgy businessman.
Of the MPs targeted as “security risks” by MI5 during the Wilson years, only one admitted taking money, from an agent of the Czechoslovak intelligence service (the StB), the obscure backbencher Will Owen, a former member of the Independent Labour Party and MP for Morpeth after a byelection in 1954, who was named by the StB defector Josef Frolik in 1969. Owen, who had been on Sternberg’s payroll and was himself an east-west trader, had been a long-time Czechoslovak embassy contact and was on a list compiled by the Gaitskellite Labour right-winger Patrick Gordon Walker in 1961 of “cryptos” that he supplied to MI5 (reproduced in Christopher Andrew’s official history of MI5, published in 2009). He admitted the StB payments when he was arrested and was tried in 1970 for espionage, though he said he had not passed on secrets and was acquitted for lack of evidence: Andrew says that the files show Owen, who died in 1981, was indeed an StB agent.
Frolik also claimed that the postmaster-general since 1967 and MP for Wednesbury, John Stonehouse, had been in the employ of Prague. He had no proof, however, and Stonehouse, who had made much of his anti-communism as a leading player in London Co-op movement politics before becoming a government minister, denied he had done anything untoward. In 1974, Stonehouse, facing ruinous debts, rather spoilt his reputation for straight-dealing. He faked his own suicide and eloped to Australia with a woman who was not his wife. Misidentified as the wanted British peer Lord Lucan by local police, he was arrested, deported and, after a high-profile trial back in the UK, gaoled for fraud. According to Andrew, in 1980 another StB defector confirmed Stonehouse’s status as an agent; and in the 1990s an extensive StB file on Stonehouse was discovered in the Czech Republic that included complaints about the poor quality of information he supplied. Stonehouse died in 1988 after collapsing on a live TV show.
The third Labour MP named by Frolik was an even more colourful character, Tom Driberg. From a Jewish family and a member of the Communist Party from adolescence, Driberg became a journalist after Oxford University, working as a gossip columnist for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express under the by-line William Hickey. Flamboyantly and promiscuously homosexual – at a time when homosexuality was illegal – he was expelled from the CP in 1941 after the party discovered that he had been meeting Maxwell Knight, the head of MI5, to exchange stories, and won Maldon in a by-election the next year standing as a left-leaning Independent in defiance of the wartime electoral truce among the coalition parties. He joined Labour in 1945, becoming one of the stars of the fellow-travelling left. After losing Maldon in 1955, he produced a biography of Beaverbrook, went to Moscow to interview Guy Burgess for a fawning but sensational biography, then returned to parliament as MP for Barking in 1959. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was a fixture on Labour’s National Executive Committee, an advocate of CND and dozens of left-wing causes. It is difficult to conceive of a more unlikely figure becoming a politician let alone a spy, yet he appears to have talked to everyone and taken money from anyone prepared to offer it, quite possibly under threat of exposure for homosexuality. As well as keeping in with MI5, he is down as an agent for the KGB rather than the StB in documents copied by the former KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin, published as The Mitrokhin Archive in 1999. He was apparently persuaded to supply information to the Soviet spooks after being caught cottaging in Moscow while on his Burgess mission.
The other Frolik name, Barnett Stross, MP for Hanley 1945-50 and Stoke-on-Trent Central 1950-66, was a Jewish doctor who was an enthusiast for British-Czechoslovak friendship, but he died in 1967 and so far nothing beyond Frolik’s claims have turned up anywhere.
Frolik’s list aside, five Labour MPs are known to have been identified by MI5 during the Wilson years as “security risks”: in alphabetical order, John Diamond, Bernard Floud, Judith Hart, Niall MacDermot and Stephen Swingler.
Diamond, chief secretary to the Treasury between 1964 and 1970, was a rightwing pro-European who later joined the SDP; MI5 told journalists that a photograph of him with two Yugoslav women in Venice in 1964 was a KGB entrapment attempt (it wasn’t).
Floud, a former communist who might have had connections with Soviet intelligence as a student in the 1930s, was driven to suicide in 1967 after he was told by Peter Wright that he would not get the security clearance required to become a minister. All the evidence is that he had broken decisively with the CP, of which he had been an open member in the 1940s, in 1952.
Hart was hauled in by Wilson in 1974 after being accused by MI5 of illicit communist connections: she had called CP headquarters to ask for information about communists imprisoned by General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile. There is no evidence that she was involved in anything approaching espionage.
MacDermot decided to walk away from British politics in 1968 after MI5 decided on the basis of sheer prejudice that his half-Italian, half-Russian wife was a security threat and Wilson caved into its demands that he be denied security clearance.
Swingler was a mercurial former-communist identified as a pro-Soviet “lost sheep” by Labour’s general secretary Morgan Phillips in a list compiled in the 1940s, and had been the moving force behind the pressure group Victory for Socialism that was the principal organisation on the Labour left in the late 1950s and early 1960s – which included as members Ralph Miliband, Michael Foot, Ian Mikardo, Jo Richardson, Judith Hart and many others who later became prominent in Labour left circles. Swingler was denied promotion to the cabinet in 1968 after MI5 cast aspersions on his east European connections, even though, like Floud, he had broken with the CP in the early 1950s and had been at most a fellow-traveller ever since. He died in 1969.
Others that got the MI5 treatment include Wilson’s secretary, Marcia Williams; the Jewish businessmen Robert Maxwell and Sidney Bernstein; and the trade union leaders Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon. All were investigated and smeared by MI5 spreading unsubstantiated allegations to favoured journalists. In none of their cases has evidence turned up that can be said to implicate them in espionage.
Jones was named, after his death in 2009, by the former Soviet-British double-agent agent Oleg Gordievsky as having accepted payment for information in the mid-1960s and then again in the 1980s (when Jones was running the National Pensioners Convention). But Gordievsky’s reliability is questionable – in particular on anything that is alleged to have happened in the UK in the 1960s, when he was a KGB gofer in Copenhagen. No end of friends of Jones have come forward to say that the TGWU leader made a point of arguing with Soviet bloc officials when he met them and debriefed MI5 on the meetings.
There is certainly no more reason to accept Gordievsky’s word on Jones than there is on Michael Foot. In 1995, the Sunday Times quoted Gordievsky naming Foot as a KGB “agent of influence”. Foot was supposed to have taken serious money for Tribune from the Soviet embassy. In fact, what Foot had done was accept Soviet journalistic contacts’ contributions to the bill after sharing lunch at the Gay Hussar, the east-European restaurant in Soho that remains a favourite venue for the political class, and had put the money – which was never much – into the Tribune "slush fund”, a venerable institution that lasted well into the 1980s and provided the float for the bar at the paper’s end-of-year party. Foot threatened to sue the Sunday Times for libel and won a hefty out-of-court settlement, an effective admission that Gordievsky’s claims would not stand up in court.
The Sunday Times also quoted Gordievsky naming Ian Mikardo as a “KGB target” (which means nothing more than that Soviet intelligence was inquisitive about the east-west trading business he ran for 20 years). Mikardo could do nothing because he had died in 1993, but contemporaries said that the idea of Mikardo compromising his politics for cash was ridiculous, and there is no evidence against him. Mikardo undoubtedly had delusions about the potential of Soviet socialism, but a more important part of his international politics was an unswerving enthusiasm for Israel that was profoundly at odds with Moscow’s anti-Zionism.
There have been plenty of other allegations published in recent years about supposed Soviet infiltration of Labour, ranging from the utterly idiotic – the Spectator’s presentation in 2009 of extracts from the diaries of a Soviet foreign policy adviser as proof that all the leading figures in the 1980s Labour Party were in cahoots with Moscow – to the more-or-less plausible. Was Dick Clements, editor of Tribune from 1960 to 1982, the journalist identified by Mitrokhin as “Dan”, the KGB’s main agent of influence in 1960s London, as the Sunday Times claimed in 1999, responsible inter alia for a series of articles attacking Wilson’s policies from the left? It’s possible that Dick was indeed Dan, to the KGB at least. But the idea that Clements needed help, let alone instruction, from the KGB to criticise Wilson from the left is utterly laughable. Clements, who died in 2006, responded to the Sunday Times piece by suggesting that one of his Soviet embassy journalistic contacts might have been fiddling his expenses by pretending to hand over cash. There is no reason to disbelieve him.
And what about Ray Fletcher, a journalist who was a regular in Tribune in the 1950s and early 1960s, a columnist in the Times in the 1970s and Labour MP for Ilkeston from 1964 to 1983? The Mitrokhin Archive refers tantalisingly to his having been recruited by the KGB in 1962 but then dropped in 1964 after it discovered he was in touch with the Czechoslovak StB; and there is an even more gnomic reference in the same book to Polish intelligence suspicions that he had been co-operating with the CIA since the late 1950s. Fletcher himself said shortly before he died in 1991 that he had eastern bloc contacts who subsequently turned out to be intelligence agents (and claimed to have been the target of an attempted blackmail attempt by MI5 after he had a holiday affair with a woman in Hungary). Was he actually an agent, and if he was did it matter at all? We just don’t know, and the fact that in the early 1960s he wrote a pamphlet against Tory defence policy and Panglossian pieces about the eastern bloc for Tribune proves no more than his consistent pro-Europeanism or his columns for the Times in which he supported the rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin.
The case of another Labour backbencher, Bob Edwards, Labour MP for Biston 1955-74 and Wolverhampton South East 1974-87, seems at first sight more clear-cut. He was co-author of a 1961 exposé of CIA chief Allen Dulles that drew on Soviet source material, and Andrew’s official history of MI5 confidently names him as having worked for the KGB and having been rewarded for his efforts with a medal. Nevertheless, there’s still something odd about the story. Edwards was a veteran of the ILP and had led the ILP contingent that fought in the Spanish civil war with the POUM, which included George Orwell – hardly the background to be expected of a KGB informant. In the 1950s, as leader of the chemical workers’ union, he had been a member of the advisory council of the anti-communist trade union propaganda group Common Cause.
So what are we to make of all this? The most important lesson is that it is a good idea to be very sceptical about allegations of Labour espionage for the Soviets. Soviet bloc intelligence agencies counted as an “agent of influence”, “target” or “confidential contact” anyone who was prepared to talk to one of their placemen working under some cover or other. They had an obvious interest in exaggerating the success of their efforts to headquarters. MI5, particularly after the Cambridge spies and the Golitsyn defection, was all too ready to suspect anyone who had contact with eastern bloc officials in exactly the same terms. So was (and is) the Tory press.
At their most egregious, the stories of penetration of the Labour Party are little more than attempts to besmirch the reputations of the party and of socialist opponents of the cold war inside it who were at worst naïve and mistaken and at best incisive critics of received establishment wisdom. There’s also a nasty whiff of anti-semitism about many of the allegations.
Of course, it would be foolish to dismiss every claim as a smear. The cases against Owen, Stonehouse and Driberg appear today to be solid, and those against Fletcher and Edwards are at least credible. Yet even if we accept that these five MPs all provided information to the Soviets or their stooges as agents, we have little idea what it comprised – and it was probably not very much. Only one of them, Stonehouse, was a minister with access to any sort of state secrets, and it’s by no means clear which if any of them he handed over. The others could only have provided information already in the public sphere and political gossip, and they weren’t serious political players. The trade union leaders and left-wing journalists accused of espionage were similarly out of any loop that mattered when it came to state secrets however stupid they might have been.
The truth is that the only British leftist credibly confirmed as a serious Soviet bloc spy since Blunt had nothing to do with the Labour Party. She was an open, card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Melita Norwood. A former secretary for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, she was unmasked in 1999 by Mitrokhin as having been a supplier of documentation on atomic research to Moscow in the 1940s and a KGB agent until the 1970s. She turned out to be living a modest life as an octogenarian Morning Star supporter in a London suburb – the least likely secret agent imaginable.
The Daily Mail’s assertion that Ralph Miliband, father of Labour leader Ed, was a stooge of the Soviet Union who ‘hated Britain’ has created a massive storm. But it is only the latest in a long line of right-wing smears against the Labour left – with Tribune as a particular target – claiming it kow-towed to communist Russia … or worse. In an exclusive extract from their new book, Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left, Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey tell the grisly story of the lies of the 1960s and 1970s
After the 1963 defection to the Soviet Union of Kim Philby – the “third man” among the Cambridge spies, the first two of whom, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had defected to Moscow in 1951, incontrovertible revelations of Britons spying for the Kremlin were few and far between. Indeed, apart from the fourth and fifth men of the Cambridge ring, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, exposed in the late 1970s, there were only a dozen or so until after the cold war had come to an end, most of them sordid blackmail cases, the highest-profile that of Geoffrey Prime, a paedophile working at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham imprisoned in 1982.
By contrast, unsubstantiated rumours that Britons had acted as Moscow’s agents were rife, most of them with their origins in the conspiracy theories of Peter Wright and other paranoid right-wing members of MI5 who were convinced that the Cambridge spies were just the tip of a giant subversive Soviet network at the heart of the British establishment. In the mid-1970s these stories, fuelled by anti-semitism, came to play a pernicious part in British politics, as Wright and his associates mounted a concerted smear campaign against leading figures in the Labour Party and the trade union movement they considered spies or “security risks”.
The most prominent of them was none other than Harold Wilson, Labour prime minister 1964-70 and 1974-76. Wilson had been president of the board of trade between 1947 and 1951, in which role he had taken over a controversial plan to sell jets to the Soviet Union (eventually scuppered on US insistence) and had generally been an enthusiast for developing trade with the eastern bloc. In 1951, he had resigned with Aneurin Bevan from the Attlee Labour government in protest at chancellor Hugh Gaitskell’s insistence on accepting US demands for increased military spending. From the early 1950s, he worked for Montague Meyer, a company importing Soviet timber, as an adviser. His job gave him the opportunity for frequent high-profile visits to the Soviet bloc and it introduced him to a circle of businessmen, many of them Jews, who were engaged in east-west trade.
Throughout the 1950s, Wilson kept up a campaign to relax restrictions on east-west trade, starting with a 1952 Tribune pamphlet, In Place of Dollars, and pushed a dovish position on the cold war. He was the first prominent British parliamentarian to visit senior Moscow politicians after the death of Stalin in 1953. He met Khrushchev in Moscow in 1956, refused to join the chorus of disapproval at the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution and took a conciliatory line when the Berlin Wall went up.
All this made Wilson a target for public Tory accusations that he was soft on communism and sotto voce gossip in the Security Service to the effect that, along with his Jewish friends, he was a closet communist or even a Soviet agent. In the early 1960s it remained merely gossip. But after Wilson became Labour leader on Hugh Gaitskell’s death in early 1963, the story was given legs by the KGB defector Anatoly Golytsin, who, as well as exposing Philby, told MI5 that he had heard that the KGB had poisoned an un-named leading western politician to get their man in as party leader. Wright and others took this to mean Gaitskell and Wilson – even though Gaitskell died a year after Golytsin defected.
There followed 13 years of attempts to expose and undermine Wilson, despite there being no credible evidence against him. Wright and his cronies investigated not only Wilson himself but a vast swathe of others as part of their attempt to nail the Labour leader – his friends and former business partners, his political associates in the Bevanite movement – as well as Labour MPs, Labour Party officials and senior trade unionists with pasts in or close to the Communist Party, current connections with communists or any kind of links with the Soviet bloc. Jews were particularly suspect.
Two of Wilson’s friends were of particular interest to MI5, the Labour-supporting businessmen Rudy Sternberg and Joseph Kagan, both Jews of central European origin. Sternberg arrived in Britain from Austria in 1937, and after the war built up a substantial petrochemicals and trading empire. He first came to public attention when he organised a British parliamentary delegation to the Leipzig trade fair in East Germany in 1961, just after the construction of the Berlin Wall, and was accused with some reason of buying up MPs to forward his commercial interests. He became personally friendly with Wilson, subsidised his office as leader of the opposition between 1970 and 1974 and was given a peerage in Wilson’s resignation honours list. Sternberg was monitored closely by MI5, which spread rumours to journalists about his supposed political unreliability but never proved anything. Nothing damning has emerged since, at least on that score.
Kagan, born in Lithuania, was not really an east-west trader. He survived the war in his native country, arriving in Britain in 1946, and made a fortune in Huddersfield manufacturing waterproof coats. He too became a personal friend of Wilson and was constantly in and out of Downing Street during Wilson’s first term, contributing large sums to his office in opposition and getting the reward of a seat in the Lords in 1976. He was friendly for a period with a Soviet intelligence officer based at the London embassy, which massively excited MI5 in 1971 after a defecting KGB agent, Oleg Lyalin, relayed tales of Kagan’s boasting about his access to Wilson. Nevertheless, intensive surveillance in the early 1970s revealed no proof of espionage. Although many years later in 1980 Kagan was gaoled for theft, there still isn’t any credible evidence that he was anything other than a dodgy businessman.
Of the MPs targeted as “security risks” by MI5 during the Wilson years, only one admitted taking money, from an agent of the Czechoslovak intelligence service (the StB), the obscure backbencher Will Owen, a former member of the Independent Labour Party and MP for Morpeth after a byelection in 1954, who was named by the StB defector Josef Frolik in 1969. Owen, who had been on Sternberg’s payroll and was himself an east-west trader, had been a long-time Czechoslovak embassy contact and was on a list compiled by the Gaitskellite Labour right-winger Patrick Gordon Walker in 1961 of “cryptos” that he supplied to MI5 (reproduced in Christopher Andrew’s official history of MI5, published in 2009). He admitted the StB payments when he was arrested and was tried in 1970 for espionage, though he said he had not passed on secrets and was acquitted for lack of evidence: Andrew says that the files show Owen, who died in 1981, was indeed an StB agent.
Frolik also claimed that the postmaster-general since 1967 and MP for Wednesbury, John Stonehouse, had been in the employ of Prague. He had no proof, however, and Stonehouse, who had made much of his anti-communism as a leading player in London Co-op movement politics before becoming a government minister, denied he had done anything untoward. In 1974, Stonehouse, facing ruinous debts, rather spoilt his reputation for straight-dealing. He faked his own suicide and eloped to Australia with a woman who was not his wife. Misidentified as the wanted British peer Lord Lucan by local police, he was arrested, deported and, after a high-profile trial back in the UK, gaoled for fraud. According to Andrew, in 1980 another StB defector confirmed Stonehouse’s status as an agent; and in the 1990s an extensive StB file on Stonehouse was discovered in the Czech Republic that included complaints about the poor quality of information he supplied. Stonehouse died in 1988 after collapsing on a live TV show.
The third Labour MP named by Frolik was an even more colourful character, Tom Driberg. From a Jewish family and a member of the Communist Party from adolescence, Driberg became a journalist after Oxford University, working as a gossip columnist for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express under the by-line William Hickey. Flamboyantly and promiscuously homosexual – at a time when homosexuality was illegal – he was expelled from the CP in 1941 after the party discovered that he had been meeting Maxwell Knight, the head of MI5, to exchange stories, and won Maldon in a by-election the next year standing as a left-leaning Independent in defiance of the wartime electoral truce among the coalition parties. He joined Labour in 1945, becoming one of the stars of the fellow-travelling left. After losing Maldon in 1955, he produced a biography of Beaverbrook, went to Moscow to interview Guy Burgess for a fawning but sensational biography, then returned to parliament as MP for Barking in 1959. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was a fixture on Labour’s National Executive Committee, an advocate of CND and dozens of left-wing causes. It is difficult to conceive of a more unlikely figure becoming a politician let alone a spy, yet he appears to have talked to everyone and taken money from anyone prepared to offer it, quite possibly under threat of exposure for homosexuality. As well as keeping in with MI5, he is down as an agent for the KGB rather than the StB in documents copied by the former KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin, published as The Mitrokhin Archive in 1999. He was apparently persuaded to supply information to the Soviet spooks after being caught cottaging in Moscow while on his Burgess mission.
The other Frolik name, Barnett Stross, MP for Hanley 1945-50 and Stoke-on-Trent Central 1950-66, was a Jewish doctor who was an enthusiast for British-Czechoslovak friendship, but he died in 1967 and so far nothing beyond Frolik’s claims have turned up anywhere.
Frolik’s list aside, five Labour MPs are known to have been identified by MI5 during the Wilson years as “security risks”: in alphabetical order, John Diamond, Bernard Floud, Judith Hart, Niall MacDermot and Stephen Swingler.
Diamond, chief secretary to the Treasury between 1964 and 1970, was a rightwing pro-European who later joined the SDP; MI5 told journalists that a photograph of him with two Yugoslav women in Venice in 1964 was a KGB entrapment attempt (it wasn’t).
Floud, a former communist who might have had connections with Soviet intelligence as a student in the 1930s, was driven to suicide in 1967 after he was told by Peter Wright that he would not get the security clearance required to become a minister. All the evidence is that he had broken decisively with the CP, of which he had been an open member in the 1940s, in 1952.
Hart was hauled in by Wilson in 1974 after being accused by MI5 of illicit communist connections: she had called CP headquarters to ask for information about communists imprisoned by General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile. There is no evidence that she was involved in anything approaching espionage.
MacDermot decided to walk away from British politics in 1968 after MI5 decided on the basis of sheer prejudice that his half-Italian, half-Russian wife was a security threat and Wilson caved into its demands that he be denied security clearance.
Swingler was a mercurial former-communist identified as a pro-Soviet “lost sheep” by Labour’s general secretary Morgan Phillips in a list compiled in the 1940s, and had been the moving force behind the pressure group Victory for Socialism that was the principal organisation on the Labour left in the late 1950s and early 1960s – which included as members Ralph Miliband, Michael Foot, Ian Mikardo, Jo Richardson, Judith Hart and many others who later became prominent in Labour left circles. Swingler was denied promotion to the cabinet in 1968 after MI5 cast aspersions on his east European connections, even though, like Floud, he had broken with the CP in the early 1950s and had been at most a fellow-traveller ever since. He died in 1969.
Others that got the MI5 treatment include Wilson’s secretary, Marcia Williams; the Jewish businessmen Robert Maxwell and Sidney Bernstein; and the trade union leaders Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon. All were investigated and smeared by MI5 spreading unsubstantiated allegations to favoured journalists. In none of their cases has evidence turned up that can be said to implicate them in espionage.
Jones was named, after his death in 2009, by the former Soviet-British double-agent agent Oleg Gordievsky as having accepted payment for information in the mid-1960s and then again in the 1980s (when Jones was running the National Pensioners Convention). But Gordievsky’s reliability is questionable – in particular on anything that is alleged to have happened in the UK in the 1960s, when he was a KGB gofer in Copenhagen. No end of friends of Jones have come forward to say that the TGWU leader made a point of arguing with Soviet bloc officials when he met them and debriefed MI5 on the meetings.
There is certainly no more reason to accept Gordievsky’s word on Jones than there is on Michael Foot. In 1995, the Sunday Times quoted Gordievsky naming Foot as a KGB “agent of influence”. Foot was supposed to have taken serious money for Tribune from the Soviet embassy. In fact, what Foot had done was accept Soviet journalistic contacts’ contributions to the bill after sharing lunch at the Gay Hussar, the east-European restaurant in Soho that remains a favourite venue for the political class, and had put the money – which was never much – into the Tribune "slush fund”, a venerable institution that lasted well into the 1980s and provided the float for the bar at the paper’s end-of-year party. Foot threatened to sue the Sunday Times for libel and won a hefty out-of-court settlement, an effective admission that Gordievsky’s claims would not stand up in court.
The Sunday Times also quoted Gordievsky naming Ian Mikardo as a “KGB target” (which means nothing more than that Soviet intelligence was inquisitive about the east-west trading business he ran for 20 years). Mikardo could do nothing because he had died in 1993, but contemporaries said that the idea of Mikardo compromising his politics for cash was ridiculous, and there is no evidence against him. Mikardo undoubtedly had delusions about the potential of Soviet socialism, but a more important part of his international politics was an unswerving enthusiasm for Israel that was profoundly at odds with Moscow’s anti-Zionism.
There have been plenty of other allegations published in recent years about supposed Soviet infiltration of Labour, ranging from the utterly idiotic – the Spectator’s presentation in 2009 of extracts from the diaries of a Soviet foreign policy adviser as proof that all the leading figures in the 1980s Labour Party were in cahoots with Moscow – to the more-or-less plausible. Was Dick Clements, editor of Tribune from 1960 to 1982, the journalist identified by Mitrokhin as “Dan”, the KGB’s main agent of influence in 1960s London, as the Sunday Times claimed in 1999, responsible inter alia for a series of articles attacking Wilson’s policies from the left? It’s possible that Dick was indeed Dan, to the KGB at least. But the idea that Clements needed help, let alone instruction, from the KGB to criticise Wilson from the left is utterly laughable. Clements, who died in 2006, responded to the Sunday Times piece by suggesting that one of his Soviet embassy journalistic contacts might have been fiddling his expenses by pretending to hand over cash. There is no reason to disbelieve him.
And what about Ray Fletcher, a journalist who was a regular in Tribune in the 1950s and early 1960s, a columnist in the Times in the 1970s and Labour MP for Ilkeston from 1964 to 1983? The Mitrokhin Archive refers tantalisingly to his having been recruited by the KGB in 1962 but then dropped in 1964 after it discovered he was in touch with the Czechoslovak StB; and there is an even more gnomic reference in the same book to Polish intelligence suspicions that he had been co-operating with the CIA since the late 1950s. Fletcher himself said shortly before he died in 1991 that he had eastern bloc contacts who subsequently turned out to be intelligence agents (and claimed to have been the target of an attempted blackmail attempt by MI5 after he had a holiday affair with a woman in Hungary). Was he actually an agent, and if he was did it matter at all? We just don’t know, and the fact that in the early 1960s he wrote a pamphlet against Tory defence policy and Panglossian pieces about the eastern bloc for Tribune proves no more than his consistent pro-Europeanism or his columns for the Times in which he supported the rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin.
The case of another Labour backbencher, Bob Edwards, Labour MP for Biston 1955-74 and Wolverhampton South East 1974-87, seems at first sight more clear-cut. He was co-author of a 1961 exposé of CIA chief Allen Dulles that drew on Soviet source material, and Andrew’s official history of MI5 confidently names him as having worked for the KGB and having been rewarded for his efforts with a medal. Nevertheless, there’s still something odd about the story. Edwards was a veteran of the ILP and had led the ILP contingent that fought in the Spanish civil war with the POUM, which included George Orwell – hardly the background to be expected of a KGB informant. In the 1950s, as leader of the chemical workers’ union, he had been a member of the advisory council of the anti-communist trade union propaganda group Common Cause.
So what are we to make of all this? The most important lesson is that it is a good idea to be very sceptical about allegations of Labour espionage for the Soviets. Soviet bloc intelligence agencies counted as an “agent of influence”, “target” or “confidential contact” anyone who was prepared to talk to one of their placemen working under some cover or other. They had an obvious interest in exaggerating the success of their efforts to headquarters. MI5, particularly after the Cambridge spies and the Golitsyn defection, was all too ready to suspect anyone who had contact with eastern bloc officials in exactly the same terms. So was (and is) the Tory press.
At their most egregious, the stories of penetration of the Labour Party are little more than attempts to besmirch the reputations of the party and of socialist opponents of the cold war inside it who were at worst naïve and mistaken and at best incisive critics of received establishment wisdom. There’s also a nasty whiff of anti-semitism about many of the allegations.
Of course, it would be foolish to dismiss every claim as a smear. The cases against Owen, Stonehouse and Driberg appear today to be solid, and those against Fletcher and Edwards are at least credible. Yet even if we accept that these five MPs all provided information to the Soviets or their stooges as agents, we have little idea what it comprised – and it was probably not very much. Only one of them, Stonehouse, was a minister with access to any sort of state secrets, and it’s by no means clear which if any of them he handed over. The others could only have provided information already in the public sphere and political gossip, and they weren’t serious political players. The trade union leaders and left-wing journalists accused of espionage were similarly out of any loop that mattered when it came to state secrets however stupid they might have been.
The truth is that the only British leftist credibly confirmed as a serious Soviet bloc spy since Blunt had nothing to do with the Labour Party. She was an open, card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Melita Norwood. A former secretary for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, she was unmasked in 1999 by Mitrokhin as having been a supplier of documentation on atomic research to Moscow in the 1940s and a KGB agent until the 1970s. She turned out to be living a modest life as an octogenarian Morning Star supporter in a London suburb – the least likely secret agent imaginable.
- This is an extract from Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey (Aaaargh! Press, 2013), currently available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon for £3.50 and soon to be published in print.
Thursday, 3 October 2013
FUTURE PROSPECTS
Tribune column, 4 October 2013
It’s taken long enough, but at last Ed Miliband seems to be finding a distinctive voice. His speech at Labour conference in Brighton was less than earth-shattering, but it was better than his previous efforts, not least because it contained some hints about what a Miliband Labour government would be like.
The most important, of course, was his promise of a two-year freeze on energy bills – a modest proposal but one sufficiently at odds with the free-market consensus to send the Tory press into a frenzy about how “Red Ed” was plotting a return to the extreme state socialism of the 1970s. That was a strange reaction, largely because no one under the age of 50 has an adult memory of the 1970s but also because anyone who, like me, was around then would be hard-pressed to remember much that was extreme or socialist about the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan – though we all have vivid memories of the lights going out during the three-day week in 1974, which happened under Ted Heath’s Tory government.
David Cameron and other senior Tories seem to have realised that the spectre of a return to the 1970s is not a runner. The line from the government is now that it feels the pain of gas and electricity bills but is powerless to act against the market – a breathtakingly hypocritical gambit given George Osborne’s enthusiasm for subsidised mortgages that will inflate further the already dangerous house price bubble in the south-east, but never mind.
The truth is that the pledge of a two-year energy bill freeze is not in itself a particularly big deal. The energy companies don’t like it, but they have been forewarned. They will almost certainly compensate by hiking their charges to consumers between now and spring 2015 and by buying gas and electricity in advance.
Nevertheless, it’s a politically astute move. The promise of an energy bill freeze chimes with the widespread feeling among voters that we’re being ripped off by private profiteers charging outrageous prices for the basics of life: not just heat and light, but rents, food, public transport, home insurance, water, telecoms, you name it.
Upmarket newspaper commentators have condescendingly tagged Miliband’s initiative as “populism” – by which they mean that it’s headline-grabbing and in tune with what people think – but it might just be more than that. For the first time in 20 years, a Labour leader dared to talk explicitly about market failure and suggested a small-scale palliative. It’s hardly a return to classic social democratic reformism, but at least it’s a start.
+++
I have spent the past month grappling with the challenges of publishing books online. A year ago, my friend Anna Chen and I set up an imprint to publish alternative books of various kinds, dead trees and electronic, Aaaargh! Press.
Since then we’ve put out a book of poems, Reaching for my Gnu by Anna (in print and as an ebook) and two Kindle ebooks, the first a collection of columns by the legendary music journo Charles Shaar Murray, The Guitar Geek Dossier and the second Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by me and Kevin Davey.
We’re learning as we go along. Lesson number one is that you can’t do without Amazon: Jeff Bezos has established a global near-monopoly on book-selling, and you have to join in: Kindle is the only ebook format that makes sense or money. Lesson number two is that it isn’t free: Amazon takes at least 30 per cent of the sale price plus fees for hosting your book (otherwise known as sitting pretty). And lesson number three is that promotion is as difficult online as it ever was. If you offer a freebie, you lose sales. Hardly anyone looks at a Facebook post more than 30 minutes after it appears on your page. You’re lucky if you get five minutes’ attention for anything you put on Twitter. Everyone junks email from unknown senders.
But publishing online is also exciting. We’re not there yet, but I’ve seen the future and it might just work. Even on Amazon’s rates for hosting, you get 70 per cent minus a bit. As long as you don’t publish rubbish, as long as you publish enough, it could be how left-wing journalists keep body and soul together in the 21st century. If not, well, something else had better turn up …
It’s taken long enough, but at last Ed Miliband seems to be finding a distinctive voice. His speech at Labour conference in Brighton was less than earth-shattering, but it was better than his previous efforts, not least because it contained some hints about what a Miliband Labour government would be like.
The most important, of course, was his promise of a two-year freeze on energy bills – a modest proposal but one sufficiently at odds with the free-market consensus to send the Tory press into a frenzy about how “Red Ed” was plotting a return to the extreme state socialism of the 1970s. That was a strange reaction, largely because no one under the age of 50 has an adult memory of the 1970s but also because anyone who, like me, was around then would be hard-pressed to remember much that was extreme or socialist about the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan – though we all have vivid memories of the lights going out during the three-day week in 1974, which happened under Ted Heath’s Tory government.
David Cameron and other senior Tories seem to have realised that the spectre of a return to the 1970s is not a runner. The line from the government is now that it feels the pain of gas and electricity bills but is powerless to act against the market – a breathtakingly hypocritical gambit given George Osborne’s enthusiasm for subsidised mortgages that will inflate further the already dangerous house price bubble in the south-east, but never mind.
The truth is that the pledge of a two-year energy bill freeze is not in itself a particularly big deal. The energy companies don’t like it, but they have been forewarned. They will almost certainly compensate by hiking their charges to consumers between now and spring 2015 and by buying gas and electricity in advance.
Nevertheless, it’s a politically astute move. The promise of an energy bill freeze chimes with the widespread feeling among voters that we’re being ripped off by private profiteers charging outrageous prices for the basics of life: not just heat and light, but rents, food, public transport, home insurance, water, telecoms, you name it.
Upmarket newspaper commentators have condescendingly tagged Miliband’s initiative as “populism” – by which they mean that it’s headline-grabbing and in tune with what people think – but it might just be more than that. For the first time in 20 years, a Labour leader dared to talk explicitly about market failure and suggested a small-scale palliative. It’s hardly a return to classic social democratic reformism, but at least it’s a start.
+++
I have spent the past month grappling with the challenges of publishing books online. A year ago, my friend Anna Chen and I set up an imprint to publish alternative books of various kinds, dead trees and electronic, Aaaargh! Press.
Since then we’ve put out a book of poems, Reaching for my Gnu by Anna (in print and as an ebook) and two Kindle ebooks, the first a collection of columns by the legendary music journo Charles Shaar Murray, The Guitar Geek Dossier and the second Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by me and Kevin Davey.
We’re learning as we go along. Lesson number one is that you can’t do without Amazon: Jeff Bezos has established a global near-monopoly on book-selling, and you have to join in: Kindle is the only ebook format that makes sense or money. Lesson number two is that it isn’t free: Amazon takes at least 30 per cent of the sale price plus fees for hosting your book (otherwise known as sitting pretty). And lesson number three is that promotion is as difficult online as it ever was. If you offer a freebie, you lose sales. Hardly anyone looks at a Facebook post more than 30 minutes after it appears on your page. You’re lucky if you get five minutes’ attention for anything you put on Twitter. Everyone junks email from unknown senders.
But publishing online is also exciting. We’re not there yet, but I’ve seen the future and it might just work. Even on Amazon’s rates for hosting, you get 70 per cent minus a bit. As long as you don’t publish rubbish, as long as you publish enough, it could be how left-wing journalists keep body and soul together in the 21st century. If not, well, something else had better turn up …
RIGHT AND WRONG
Review of Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel (Oxford University Press, £25), Tribune, 4 October 2013
I started Robert Colls’s new biography of George Orwell with some trepidation. Colls is a writer I like who has written intelligently and provocatively on working-class history and the creation of an English national identity – but I was wondering what a new biography could possibly add to the already massive literature on Orwell.
I was wrong to worry. This is a stunning piece of work, well researched, tautly written and often funny. Colls’s take on Orwell is that he should be understood as a writer grappling with his Englishness and with England.
His story is essentially one of how Orwell got to know and embrace the society into which he was born but from which he was semi-detached by his family’s class, his privileged education and his early career as a colonial policeman. The watershed is 1939-40, the start of the second world war, though it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The key episodes and events are now as familiar as the writing they spawned, from Down and Out in Paris and London to Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Colls’s accounts are fresh, sometimes exhilarating. He weaves discussion of Orwell’s novels and most important essays apparently effortlessly into his exegesis of political and cultural context: there are no sharper précis of the 1930s novels, and Colls’s sense of the world in which Orwell was writing is spot-on time and again.
He is as pointed on everyday life in the empire as on the twists and turns of the Moscow line or the grim story of appeasement. He has read a great deal and taken it in, though he doesn’t show it off too blatantly. Colls is an admirer of Orwell, but not a slavish one. He is impatient with his subject’s hard-line left revolutionary politics in the late 1930s and his hypocritical anti-intellectualism, but he acknowledges what Orwell got right about Stalinism and its supporters among the British intelligentsia. I’ve not read a more judicious weighing up of Orwell’s experience in Spain in 1936-37 or a better summary of his brutal critical lashing of W H Auden.
The passages on the context of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four are not as good … but by then the argument has largely been made. There are lacunae and what I think are errors of judgment. Colls has little to say about Orwell the left-wing journalist, most importantly as a columnist on Tribune in the 1940s – and that means he is prone to downgrade the extent to which Orwell was in tune with the Labour left in the 1940s (although he catches perfectly Orwell’s relationship with Aneurin Bevan).
Like a lot of Orwell’s anarchist, Trotskyist and right-wing friends who thought his Labourism a terrible sell-out, he gives too much attention to the old trope that Orwell was a “Tory anarchist”, a joking self-description from the early 1930s, and too little to the Trotskyist and left-libertarian influences on his thinking that offer better explanations for his deviations from the left orthodoxies of his day than any vestige of Toryism (for which see John Newsinger’s excellent Orwell’s Politics and Bernard Crick’s now venerable biography). And, most important of all, I think Colls underplays Orwell’s sense of himself not as an English intellectual but as a European democratic leftist: there’s another reading of his life and concerns, still to be written, that places him squarely as a pioneer of left-wing European republican federalism.
But these are quibbles: we all have our own Orwell. Colls’s is not mine exactly, but this is a volume to enjoy and with which to disagree. It is the best book on Orwell to appear for several years, erudite and original. It catches the extent to which Orwell lived on his wits better than any other account of his life. It’s up there with Crick, Gordon Bowker and D J Taylor.
I started Robert Colls’s new biography of George Orwell with some trepidation. Colls is a writer I like who has written intelligently and provocatively on working-class history and the creation of an English national identity – but I was wondering what a new biography could possibly add to the already massive literature on Orwell.
I was wrong to worry. This is a stunning piece of work, well researched, tautly written and often funny. Colls’s take on Orwell is that he should be understood as a writer grappling with his Englishness and with England.
His story is essentially one of how Orwell got to know and embrace the society into which he was born but from which he was semi-detached by his family’s class, his privileged education and his early career as a colonial policeman. The watershed is 1939-40, the start of the second world war, though it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The key episodes and events are now as familiar as the writing they spawned, from Down and Out in Paris and London to Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Colls’s accounts are fresh, sometimes exhilarating. He weaves discussion of Orwell’s novels and most important essays apparently effortlessly into his exegesis of political and cultural context: there are no sharper précis of the 1930s novels, and Colls’s sense of the world in which Orwell was writing is spot-on time and again.
He is as pointed on everyday life in the empire as on the twists and turns of the Moscow line or the grim story of appeasement. He has read a great deal and taken it in, though he doesn’t show it off too blatantly. Colls is an admirer of Orwell, but not a slavish one. He is impatient with his subject’s hard-line left revolutionary politics in the late 1930s and his hypocritical anti-intellectualism, but he acknowledges what Orwell got right about Stalinism and its supporters among the British intelligentsia. I’ve not read a more judicious weighing up of Orwell’s experience in Spain in 1936-37 or a better summary of his brutal critical lashing of W H Auden.
The passages on the context of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four are not as good … but by then the argument has largely been made. There are lacunae and what I think are errors of judgment. Colls has little to say about Orwell the left-wing journalist, most importantly as a columnist on Tribune in the 1940s – and that means he is prone to downgrade the extent to which Orwell was in tune with the Labour left in the 1940s (although he catches perfectly Orwell’s relationship with Aneurin Bevan).
Like a lot of Orwell’s anarchist, Trotskyist and right-wing friends who thought his Labourism a terrible sell-out, he gives too much attention to the old trope that Orwell was a “Tory anarchist”, a joking self-description from the early 1930s, and too little to the Trotskyist and left-libertarian influences on his thinking that offer better explanations for his deviations from the left orthodoxies of his day than any vestige of Toryism (for which see John Newsinger’s excellent Orwell’s Politics and Bernard Crick’s now venerable biography). And, most important of all, I think Colls underplays Orwell’s sense of himself not as an English intellectual but as a European democratic leftist: there’s another reading of his life and concerns, still to be written, that places him squarely as a pioneer of left-wing European republican federalism.
But these are quibbles: we all have our own Orwell. Colls’s is not mine exactly, but this is a volume to enjoy and with which to disagree. It is the best book on Orwell to appear for several years, erudite and original. It catches the extent to which Orwell lived on his wits better than any other account of his life. It’s up there with Crick, Gordon Bowker and D J Taylor.
Thursday, 5 September 2013
THE LEFT'S DIRTY SECRET
Aaaargh! Press has just published Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by me and Kevin Davey. Buy it!
'Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey is a fine little book you can read in a day – 168 pages for just £3.50 on Kindle. Anderson and Davey have taken advantage of the vast amount of research into communism since the end of the Cold War. They wear it lightly, and refreshingly, are open about their political position. As members of the democratic left, they believe that communism was a disaster for left wing politics. It tied the left to tyranny and the lies and disillusion that went with it. Leaving everything else aside, the far left burnt out activists. For generations, idealistic men and women joined the Communist Party, Militant and the SWP, and left disgusted, not just with Leninism, but with politics of any kind.'
NICK COHEN
NICK COHEN
PROPER IMPERIALISM IS NOT ON THE AGENDA
Tribune column, 6 September 2013
The fall-out from last Thursday’s House of Commons defeat for David Cameron over military intervention in Syria has been spectacular. The newspapers and current affairs broadcasters have had a week of field days as the various political protagonists have laid into one another and pundits have tried to grasp the significance of the vote. Is Cameron finished? Is Ed Miliband an opportunist toe-rag? Is this the end of the special relationship?
Largely sidelined by the furore, however, has been any serious concern for the substantive issue supposedly at stake – what if anything the rest of the world should do about the civil war in Syria, in which some 100,000 people have died, 2 million have fled the country as refugees and 4 million have become displaced persons within its borders.
Of course, that’s not an easy question to answer. Although the internet is awash with images of atrocities, it is by no means clear exactly what is happening in Syria except that it’s bloody and unpleasant. There are conflicting reports about the strength and nature of the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime: some say it’s still largely composed of moderate Sunnis who would be quite happy to live in harmony with everyone else, others that it is now dominated by murderous jihadists with strong al-Qa’ida connections. It’s not obvious how far Assad is now reliant on support from Iran and its Lebanese surrogate Hezbollah – rather more important regional players than his friends in Moscow, who have been grandstanding for all they are worth as well as supplying him with arms – and we don’t know how far the opposition is serving the interests of Riyadh, Doha and Ankara. As I write, it’s not even beyond question that it was the regime and not agents provocateurs that unleashed the nerve gas massacre that brought about last week’s call to action from Cameron (and I’ve not succumbed to conspiracy theory, honest).
It’s possible that the intelligence agencies of the world know a lot about the situation on the ground of which journalists are wholly unaware, but even if they do that’s not the end of the problem. The strong opposition of Russia and China to any sort of international intervention against Assad might well be more a matter of cynical self-interest than a statement of anti-imperialist principle, but it rules out the possibility of United Nations endorsement of even the most minimal “shots across the bow”. Israel is a wild card, utterly unpredictable because driven by hostility both to Assad and his enemies. Egypt is more-or-less under martial law after the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood; Iraq is out of the headlines but seething with sectarian tensions. And public opinion in the US and the UK is sceptical about the claims of the political class that intervention will work: memories are fresh of Afghanistan and Iraq, where successful regime-changing assaults were followed by years of bloody counter-insurgency operations. An invasion of Syria that learnt the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq – Germany 1945-style, with regime-change, forcible disarmament of the population, an occupation involving hundreds of thousands of troops, the securing of borders and all the rest – would probably work, but “boots on the ground” are the last thing any western politician could now sell to an electorate. Proper imperialism is not on the agenda.
Which means that the people of Syria will continue to suffer in agony as humanitarians and liberals in the west wring their hands. The most that Barack Obama will sanction, as things stand, is a no-fly zone, and that’s assuming Congress gives him its backing. It won’t work, and will lead to lots more innocent people being killed.
Last week in the House of Commons, MPs refused to back something even more minimal. I can understand why, though I have no sympathy with the Tory and Liberal isolationists who can’t be bothered with quarrels in faraway countries between people of whom they know nothing. And it matters, because it creates a crisis of authority for the British government and marks a change in Britain’s perception of its role in world affairs. It makes very little difference, however, to what happens in Syria. If I were a Syrian, I think I would probably have a lot to say about that.
The fall-out from last Thursday’s House of Commons defeat for David Cameron over military intervention in Syria has been spectacular. The newspapers and current affairs broadcasters have had a week of field days as the various political protagonists have laid into one another and pundits have tried to grasp the significance of the vote. Is Cameron finished? Is Ed Miliband an opportunist toe-rag? Is this the end of the special relationship?
Largely sidelined by the furore, however, has been any serious concern for the substantive issue supposedly at stake – what if anything the rest of the world should do about the civil war in Syria, in which some 100,000 people have died, 2 million have fled the country as refugees and 4 million have become displaced persons within its borders.
Of course, that’s not an easy question to answer. Although the internet is awash with images of atrocities, it is by no means clear exactly what is happening in Syria except that it’s bloody and unpleasant. There are conflicting reports about the strength and nature of the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime: some say it’s still largely composed of moderate Sunnis who would be quite happy to live in harmony with everyone else, others that it is now dominated by murderous jihadists with strong al-Qa’ida connections. It’s not obvious how far Assad is now reliant on support from Iran and its Lebanese surrogate Hezbollah – rather more important regional players than his friends in Moscow, who have been grandstanding for all they are worth as well as supplying him with arms – and we don’t know how far the opposition is serving the interests of Riyadh, Doha and Ankara. As I write, it’s not even beyond question that it was the regime and not agents provocateurs that unleashed the nerve gas massacre that brought about last week’s call to action from Cameron (and I’ve not succumbed to conspiracy theory, honest).
It’s possible that the intelligence agencies of the world know a lot about the situation on the ground of which journalists are wholly unaware, but even if they do that’s not the end of the problem. The strong opposition of Russia and China to any sort of international intervention against Assad might well be more a matter of cynical self-interest than a statement of anti-imperialist principle, but it rules out the possibility of United Nations endorsement of even the most minimal “shots across the bow”. Israel is a wild card, utterly unpredictable because driven by hostility both to Assad and his enemies. Egypt is more-or-less under martial law after the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood; Iraq is out of the headlines but seething with sectarian tensions. And public opinion in the US and the UK is sceptical about the claims of the political class that intervention will work: memories are fresh of Afghanistan and Iraq, where successful regime-changing assaults were followed by years of bloody counter-insurgency operations. An invasion of Syria that learnt the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq – Germany 1945-style, with regime-change, forcible disarmament of the population, an occupation involving hundreds of thousands of troops, the securing of borders and all the rest – would probably work, but “boots on the ground” are the last thing any western politician could now sell to an electorate. Proper imperialism is not on the agenda.
Which means that the people of Syria will continue to suffer in agony as humanitarians and liberals in the west wring their hands. The most that Barack Obama will sanction, as things stand, is a no-fly zone, and that’s assuming Congress gives him its backing. It won’t work, and will lead to lots more innocent people being killed.
Last week in the House of Commons, MPs refused to back something even more minimal. I can understand why, though I have no sympathy with the Tory and Liberal isolationists who can’t be bothered with quarrels in faraway countries between people of whom they know nothing. And it matters, because it creates a crisis of authority for the British government and marks a change in Britain’s perception of its role in world affairs. It makes very little difference, however, to what happens in Syria. If I were a Syrian, I think I would probably have a lot to say about that.
Saturday, 13 July 2013
TIME TO BE TOUGH?
Tribune column, 12 July 2013
The giant bust-up over Labour’s parliamentary selection in Falkirk has eclipsed everything else in British politics for the past couple of weeks – and Labour’s relationship with the trade unions has the potential to escalate into the story that dominates the summer and the conference season.
And of course it matters – just as it mattered last time it became the really hot issue, 20 years ago, when Labour went through months of hell arguing the toss about John Smith’s attempt to introduce the principle of “one member, one vote” to internal Labour elections while continuing to allow affiliated unions a key role in the party’s organisation. Smith got his messy compromise through in the end, but it was only at the very last minute after some desperate behind-the-scenes conference fixing. It made for marvellous high drama, and the settlement reached in 1993 proved much more resilient than seemed likely.
How much the whole hoo-hah really changed is another question, however – and Labour’s preoccupation with its own structures undoubtedly diverted it from more important things. I have a feeling that the same might be about to happen now, if it’s not already happening. Until Falkirk came along, the shadow cabinet was obviously attempting to get into pre-election mode.
Last month’s speeches by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls accepting that an incoming Labour government in 2015 would have to stick to the coalition’s budget for a year were followed by a lacklustre intervention by the shadow education secretary, Stephen Twigg, in which he announced that Labour would not do anything against “free schools”, though it wouldn’t actually promote them.
Last week was supposed to be when Labour made it clear that it wasn't actually against a referendum on British membership of the European Union – though it wasn’t exactly in favour of one either. The party just about got the point across because someone left a briefing paper in the gents’ that was subsequently published by a right-wing blogger (or am I mixing this up with something else?).
But thanks to Falkirk it made only the online equivalent of a paragraph on page nine. Now, a cynic might suggest that Labour’s attempts to deal with the important issues have been so utterly hopeless that the confrontation with Len McCluskey is a welcome opportunity for Miliband to prove he can make tough decisions, and that he should now pull out all the stops to push through radical changes to Labour’s constitution.
I’m not so sure – and not just because I’d like to see Labour coming up with some bold alternative policies rather than turning inwards. One problem is timing. A giant internal constitutional battle is all very well for an opposition party in the first year of a parliament – it can even be cathartic – but is very dangerous less than two years from a general election, particularly when it’s only now that proposals are being tabled.
Miliband this week made it clear that he wants to move from opting out of Labour for union payers of the political levy to opting in, primaries for the London mayor selection and other selections, an overall cap on political donations – much of which makes sense in principle but, as OMOV showed 20 years ago, the devil is in the detail with this sort of thing, and there’s not a lot of time to sort it out.
The real problem, however, is it that it’s by no means clear that Miliband will win on the terrain on which he has chosen to fight. And if he loses, his credibility will be utterly destroyed. He has got his work cut out. Not for the first time, I’m glad I’m not in the Labour leader’s shoes. Oh well. The sun is out and the sky is blue, and it’s nearly holiday time. And a Scotsman has won the men’s singles at Wimbledon for the first time since 1896. It’s not all completely depressing, is it?
The giant bust-up over Labour’s parliamentary selection in Falkirk has eclipsed everything else in British politics for the past couple of weeks – and Labour’s relationship with the trade unions has the potential to escalate into the story that dominates the summer and the conference season.
And of course it matters – just as it mattered last time it became the really hot issue, 20 years ago, when Labour went through months of hell arguing the toss about John Smith’s attempt to introduce the principle of “one member, one vote” to internal Labour elections while continuing to allow affiliated unions a key role in the party’s organisation. Smith got his messy compromise through in the end, but it was only at the very last minute after some desperate behind-the-scenes conference fixing. It made for marvellous high drama, and the settlement reached in 1993 proved much more resilient than seemed likely.
How much the whole hoo-hah really changed is another question, however – and Labour’s preoccupation with its own structures undoubtedly diverted it from more important things. I have a feeling that the same might be about to happen now, if it’s not already happening. Until Falkirk came along, the shadow cabinet was obviously attempting to get into pre-election mode.
Last month’s speeches by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls accepting that an incoming Labour government in 2015 would have to stick to the coalition’s budget for a year were followed by a lacklustre intervention by the shadow education secretary, Stephen Twigg, in which he announced that Labour would not do anything against “free schools”, though it wouldn’t actually promote them.
Last week was supposed to be when Labour made it clear that it wasn't actually against a referendum on British membership of the European Union – though it wasn’t exactly in favour of one either. The party just about got the point across because someone left a briefing paper in the gents’ that was subsequently published by a right-wing blogger (or am I mixing this up with something else?).
But thanks to Falkirk it made only the online equivalent of a paragraph on page nine. Now, a cynic might suggest that Labour’s attempts to deal with the important issues have been so utterly hopeless that the confrontation with Len McCluskey is a welcome opportunity for Miliband to prove he can make tough decisions, and that he should now pull out all the stops to push through radical changes to Labour’s constitution.
I’m not so sure – and not just because I’d like to see Labour coming up with some bold alternative policies rather than turning inwards. One problem is timing. A giant internal constitutional battle is all very well for an opposition party in the first year of a parliament – it can even be cathartic – but is very dangerous less than two years from a general election, particularly when it’s only now that proposals are being tabled.
Miliband this week made it clear that he wants to move from opting out of Labour for union payers of the political levy to opting in, primaries for the London mayor selection and other selections, an overall cap on political donations – much of which makes sense in principle but, as OMOV showed 20 years ago, the devil is in the detail with this sort of thing, and there’s not a lot of time to sort it out.
The real problem, however, is it that it’s by no means clear that Miliband will win on the terrain on which he has chosen to fight. And if he loses, his credibility will be utterly destroyed. He has got his work cut out. Not for the first time, I’m glad I’m not in the Labour leader’s shoes. Oh well. The sun is out and the sky is blue, and it’s nearly holiday time. And a Scotsman has won the men’s singles at Wimbledon for the first time since 1896. It’s not all completely depressing, is it?
Thursday, 13 June 2013
WHERE IS THE VISION?
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 15 June 2013
The two big policy speeches by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls last week have not transformed the political landscape.
No one outside the political class noticed them – and the reaction within the political class was low-key and predictable. The usual suspects said the usual things. The far left and the Tory right proclaimed that Miliband and Balls had performed a U-turn to adopt the policies of the coalition government – committing Labour to austerity and abandoning the principle of universalism in the welfare state. Hardline Blairites sniffed at the failure of the two Eds to take a truly tough position on reducing government debt and pruning the welfare bill: they had shown they were was still beholden to the trade unions and left-wing activists who got Miliband elected as leader in 2010, and there was nothing of substance in what they said.
So has Labour embraced austerity or not? Actually, it has done neither and both. What happened last week was that Labour shifted into pre-election mode. After two-and-a-half years of repeatedly making the point that Labour wouldn’t have started from here, the party leadership is now talking about what it will do if it wins in 2015. Like it or loath it, by then we will have had five years of coalition austerity – and the room for manoeuvre for an incoming Labour government will be severely constrained. Miliband and Balls were simply relaying the message that if they win they won’t go mad, the very first prerequisite of a successful general election campaign.
Some say that it’s not before time for Labour to present itself as an alternative government, others that the Eds have moved too soon – that the economy and politics are in such flux, the next two years so unpredictable, that firming up Labour’s programme now will create big hostages to fortune. For what it’s worth, I think they’ve timed it about right. Until very recently, there was at least the possibility of a government U-turn on austerity or a debilitating split in the coalition, which made the lightness of Labour’s baggage an advantage. It now seems that George Osborne intends to stick to his script, and the coalition appears robust enough to survive until 2015 – though it might not – so it makes sense for Labour to get its act together.
Whether the messages the two Eds have chosen to highlight are the right ones is another matter. “We’ll not splash out on the social security budget and we’ll keep a strict watch on overall public spending” is not the stuff to set the pulse racing – and there wasn’t much else beyond Balls’s cack-handed indication that some universal benefits enjoyed by pensioners would be means-tested.
Miliband’s hint that Labour will come up with ways to revitalise the contributory element in social security benefits is a step in the right direction, as is his identification of housing benefit as a scandalously wasteful subsidy to petty rentier capitalists (as his dad would have described them). But he didn't flesh out what Labour would actually do about either. Are we talking a return to earnings-related unemployment benefit as it existed in the 1970s – or an extra 25 quid a week for people who have worked 30 years and are made redundant? Is it strict rent controls and a three-year emergency programme of putting up council pre-fabs – or is it tax-breaks for the construction industry to build blocks of luxury flats with the odd “affordable” broom cupboard with a view of the car park?
OK, I’m not really expecting a return to earnings-related dole, and there are problems with enforcing rent controls. But if Labour is saying that it is going to have to deal with the circumstances it inherits from this disastrous government in 2015, it needs to leaven the dour – it’s going to be tough – with a compelling story of how it could be different.
So far, the vision thing is absent: Labour looks and sounds timid and unadventurous, driven by focus groups and opinion polls that tell it to play safe. Labour won in 1997 on “safety first”, but things are different now. We’re in the middle of the worst depression since the 1930s, and there is a sullen anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, anti-scrounger mood among the voters that cannot be ignored. Labour needs to offer hope, and it isn’t doing it.
The two big policy speeches by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls last week have not transformed the political landscape.
No one outside the political class noticed them – and the reaction within the political class was low-key and predictable. The usual suspects said the usual things. The far left and the Tory right proclaimed that Miliband and Balls had performed a U-turn to adopt the policies of the coalition government – committing Labour to austerity and abandoning the principle of universalism in the welfare state. Hardline Blairites sniffed at the failure of the two Eds to take a truly tough position on reducing government debt and pruning the welfare bill: they had shown they were was still beholden to the trade unions and left-wing activists who got Miliband elected as leader in 2010, and there was nothing of substance in what they said.
So has Labour embraced austerity or not? Actually, it has done neither and both. What happened last week was that Labour shifted into pre-election mode. After two-and-a-half years of repeatedly making the point that Labour wouldn’t have started from here, the party leadership is now talking about what it will do if it wins in 2015. Like it or loath it, by then we will have had five years of coalition austerity – and the room for manoeuvre for an incoming Labour government will be severely constrained. Miliband and Balls were simply relaying the message that if they win they won’t go mad, the very first prerequisite of a successful general election campaign.
Some say that it’s not before time for Labour to present itself as an alternative government, others that the Eds have moved too soon – that the economy and politics are in such flux, the next two years so unpredictable, that firming up Labour’s programme now will create big hostages to fortune. For what it’s worth, I think they’ve timed it about right. Until very recently, there was at least the possibility of a government U-turn on austerity or a debilitating split in the coalition, which made the lightness of Labour’s baggage an advantage. It now seems that George Osborne intends to stick to his script, and the coalition appears robust enough to survive until 2015 – though it might not – so it makes sense for Labour to get its act together.
Whether the messages the two Eds have chosen to highlight are the right ones is another matter. “We’ll not splash out on the social security budget and we’ll keep a strict watch on overall public spending” is not the stuff to set the pulse racing – and there wasn’t much else beyond Balls’s cack-handed indication that some universal benefits enjoyed by pensioners would be means-tested.
Miliband’s hint that Labour will come up with ways to revitalise the contributory element in social security benefits is a step in the right direction, as is his identification of housing benefit as a scandalously wasteful subsidy to petty rentier capitalists (as his dad would have described them). But he didn't flesh out what Labour would actually do about either. Are we talking a return to earnings-related unemployment benefit as it existed in the 1970s – or an extra 25 quid a week for people who have worked 30 years and are made redundant? Is it strict rent controls and a three-year emergency programme of putting up council pre-fabs – or is it tax-breaks for the construction industry to build blocks of luxury flats with the odd “affordable” broom cupboard with a view of the car park?
OK, I’m not really expecting a return to earnings-related dole, and there are problems with enforcing rent controls. But if Labour is saying that it is going to have to deal with the circumstances it inherits from this disastrous government in 2015, it needs to leaven the dour – it’s going to be tough – with a compelling story of how it could be different.
So far, the vision thing is absent: Labour looks and sounds timid and unadventurous, driven by focus groups and opinion polls that tell it to play safe. Labour won in 1997 on “safety first”, but things are different now. We’re in the middle of the worst depression since the 1930s, and there is a sullen anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, anti-scrounger mood among the voters that cannot be ignored. Labour needs to offer hope, and it isn’t doing it.
Saturday, 8 June 2013
QUOTING AGAINST THE WAR
Paul Anderson, review of The March That Shook Blair by Ian Sinclair (Peace News Books, £10), Red Pepper, June-July 2013
The argument about the significance of the 15 February 2003 march in London opposing war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has been going on ever since – and got serious again with a flurry of polemics to mark the 10th anniversary a few weeks ago.
Peace News journalist Ian Sinclair’s oral history is part of that argument. The very fact that he spent years producing this book shows that he thinks the demo was very important, a point he makes explicit in his introduction.
I’m not persuaded that The March That Shook Blair vindicates his conviction, but he has put in an impressive amount of work – more than 70 face-to-face interviews, dozens of email exchanges and a trawl through the clippings – and the book provides fascinating insights into the thinking of a lot of the key people in the anti-war camp, including several who are critical of the role of the Socialist Workers Party in the Stop the War Coalition, which organised the giant march. Future historians of the British left will mine this book shamelessly.
There are two major problems with it.
First, it is too narrow. It doesn’t give enough space to demonstrators who were neither involved in the organisation of the march nor old hands in the peace movement and the left; the left pro-war argument gets a look-in only through reproduction of old clippings; and there’s no room at all for waverers or people who fell out with Stop the War (of whom there are quite a few).
Second, it doesn’t adequately contextualise the anti-war movement of 2002-05. Yes, it was primarily a reaction to the Bush administration’s “war on terror” after 9/11 and Tony Blair’s support for it – but that’s not the whole story. Most of the key players interviewed by Sinclair had been around for ages before, but few talk about their previous formative experiences – the collapse of the Communist Party and the Labour left and marginalisation of CND in the late 1980s, the 1990-91 Kuwait war, the giant left bust-ups over Bosnia and Kosovo, the Socialist Alliance. Read this book, but it’s not the last word.
The argument about the significance of the 15 February 2003 march in London opposing war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has been going on ever since – and got serious again with a flurry of polemics to mark the 10th anniversary a few weeks ago.
Peace News journalist Ian Sinclair’s oral history is part of that argument. The very fact that he spent years producing this book shows that he thinks the demo was very important, a point he makes explicit in his introduction.
I’m not persuaded that The March That Shook Blair vindicates his conviction, but he has put in an impressive amount of work – more than 70 face-to-face interviews, dozens of email exchanges and a trawl through the clippings – and the book provides fascinating insights into the thinking of a lot of the key people in the anti-war camp, including several who are critical of the role of the Socialist Workers Party in the Stop the War Coalition, which organised the giant march. Future historians of the British left will mine this book shamelessly.
There are two major problems with it.
First, it is too narrow. It doesn’t give enough space to demonstrators who were neither involved in the organisation of the march nor old hands in the peace movement and the left; the left pro-war argument gets a look-in only through reproduction of old clippings; and there’s no room at all for waverers or people who fell out with Stop the War (of whom there are quite a few).
Second, it doesn’t adequately contextualise the anti-war movement of 2002-05. Yes, it was primarily a reaction to the Bush administration’s “war on terror” after 9/11 and Tony Blair’s support for it – but that’s not the whole story. Most of the key players interviewed by Sinclair had been around for ages before, but few talk about their previous formative experiences – the collapse of the Communist Party and the Labour left and marginalisation of CND in the late 1980s, the 1990-91 Kuwait war, the giant left bust-ups over Bosnia and Kosovo, the Socialist Alliance. Read this book, but it’s not the last word.
Thursday, 16 May 2013
CAMERON'S UKIP PICKLE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 May 2013
The extraordinary surge in support for UK Independence Party in the local elections has undoubtedly been the big British politics story of the month. UKIP came from (almost) nowhere to take a surprisingly large share of the vote in the shire counties and unitary councils voting this year and increased its number of council seats by 139.
Precisely how big its share was is still unclear. The BBC’s figure for UKIP’s “projected national share” of the vote as 23 per cent is what made the headlines – but that is just a little problematic because it is an estimate of what would have happened across the country in local elections if they had taken place everywhere and if UKIP and the three main parties had been contesting every seat.
It could be that the BBC’s psephologists built a very sophisticated model to make their projection, but their assumptions have not been published and nor, so far, have the raw data for votes actually cast. I might be wrong, but my hunch is that they have probably exaggerated the evenness of the distribution of UKIP support across the country: UKIP’s actual seats are concentrated in the east and south-east in run-down coastal towns and in agricultural areas where there are lots of east European vegetable-pickers. We shall see.
Still, UKIP undoubtedly did very well – and that has sent much of the Tory party into a state of panic. Tory MPs could live with the prospect of UKIP getting the most votes in next year’s European elections, but until this month UKIP’s successes in any other elections were minor. It had a tiny number of council seats and, although it had been runner-up in a handful of parliamentary by-elections, in all apart from Eastleigh its second places had been distant. Now the fear has swept the Tories that UKIP will split the right-wing vote in the 2015 general election and let Labour through the middle.
It might happen, it might not: the general election is a long way off. What is important, however, is that the Tories’ fear is affecting their behaviour in the here and now. UKIP does not have coherent policies for government, and Nigel Farage is difficult to take seriously as a national political leader. But on one issue above all UKIP addresses directly the concerns of a large number of working-class and lower-middle-class voters who mainly voted Tory in 2010: immigration. That much was known before the local elections – the anti-immigration measures in last week’s threadbare Queen’s Speech were not dreamed up in desperation over the previous weekend – but the Tories are in shock at having lost so much of the anti-immigrant electorate, and their ugly chauvinist rhetoric is getting uglier by the day.
The government’s problem here is that, as UKIP never tires of pointing out, there is very little it can do to deter anyone from other European Union countries coming to Britain as long as we remain in the EU, and the government does not want to leave. It is difficult to see how David Cameron can get out of this one. He has already promised as much as he can that is tolerable to his Liberal Democrat coalition partners – a renegotiation and the promise of an “in-out” referendum in the next parliament – but it is not enough for the hardline Tory Eurosceptic right. Cameron now faces trouble on Europe every bit as serious as the endless bickering that undermined John Major during the 1990s.
Labour can enjoy the Tories’ predicament – but only a little. Its local election campaign was well targeted on marginal Westminster seats, but it too took a hit from UKIP, and its overall share of the vote was unimpressive. More important, it is going to be much more difficult than in the 1990s for Labour to exploit a giant bust-up on the right about Europe. Back then, the economy was booming, immigration meant asylum-seekers, and the right’s anti-Europeanism was all about Brussels bureaucracy rather than east Europeans coming over here and taking our houses and jobs. Labour cannot ignore voters’ worries about immigration and Europe, but it needs to be very careful that it is not sucked into an anti-Europe, anti-immigrant bidding war.
The extraordinary surge in support for UK Independence Party in the local elections has undoubtedly been the big British politics story of the month. UKIP came from (almost) nowhere to take a surprisingly large share of the vote in the shire counties and unitary councils voting this year and increased its number of council seats by 139.
Precisely how big its share was is still unclear. The BBC’s figure for UKIP’s “projected national share” of the vote as 23 per cent is what made the headlines – but that is just a little problematic because it is an estimate of what would have happened across the country in local elections if they had taken place everywhere and if UKIP and the three main parties had been contesting every seat.
It could be that the BBC’s psephologists built a very sophisticated model to make their projection, but their assumptions have not been published and nor, so far, have the raw data for votes actually cast. I might be wrong, but my hunch is that they have probably exaggerated the evenness of the distribution of UKIP support across the country: UKIP’s actual seats are concentrated in the east and south-east in run-down coastal towns and in agricultural areas where there are lots of east European vegetable-pickers. We shall see.
Still, UKIP undoubtedly did very well – and that has sent much of the Tory party into a state of panic. Tory MPs could live with the prospect of UKIP getting the most votes in next year’s European elections, but until this month UKIP’s successes in any other elections were minor. It had a tiny number of council seats and, although it had been runner-up in a handful of parliamentary by-elections, in all apart from Eastleigh its second places had been distant. Now the fear has swept the Tories that UKIP will split the right-wing vote in the 2015 general election and let Labour through the middle.
It might happen, it might not: the general election is a long way off. What is important, however, is that the Tories’ fear is affecting their behaviour in the here and now. UKIP does not have coherent policies for government, and Nigel Farage is difficult to take seriously as a national political leader. But on one issue above all UKIP addresses directly the concerns of a large number of working-class and lower-middle-class voters who mainly voted Tory in 2010: immigration. That much was known before the local elections – the anti-immigration measures in last week’s threadbare Queen’s Speech were not dreamed up in desperation over the previous weekend – but the Tories are in shock at having lost so much of the anti-immigrant electorate, and their ugly chauvinist rhetoric is getting uglier by the day.
The government’s problem here is that, as UKIP never tires of pointing out, there is very little it can do to deter anyone from other European Union countries coming to Britain as long as we remain in the EU, and the government does not want to leave. It is difficult to see how David Cameron can get out of this one. He has already promised as much as he can that is tolerable to his Liberal Democrat coalition partners – a renegotiation and the promise of an “in-out” referendum in the next parliament – but it is not enough for the hardline Tory Eurosceptic right. Cameron now faces trouble on Europe every bit as serious as the endless bickering that undermined John Major during the 1990s.
Labour can enjoy the Tories’ predicament – but only a little. Its local election campaign was well targeted on marginal Westminster seats, but it too took a hit from UKIP, and its overall share of the vote was unimpressive. More important, it is going to be much more difficult than in the 1990s for Labour to exploit a giant bust-up on the right about Europe. Back then, the economy was booming, immigration meant asylum-seekers, and the right’s anti-Europeanism was all about Brussels bureaucracy rather than east Europeans coming over here and taking our houses and jobs. Labour cannot ignore voters’ worries about immigration and Europe, but it needs to be very careful that it is not sucked into an anti-Europe, anti-immigrant bidding war.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013
THATCHER WAS A FAILURE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 19 April 2013
The death of Margaret Thatcher has prompted a wave of public controversy that is quite extraordinary – if only because she had not been a player in British politics for so long. She left office in 1990 and had only a minor role after that – notably in criticising her successor as prime minister, John Major, for his failings on former-Yugoslavia (on which she was right) and the European Union (on which she was wrong). No one now under the age of 43 voted in a general election in which she was a candidate; no one under 52 was a voter when she became prime minister.
Of course, her time in office was eventful, sometimes dramatic, and a lot changed while she was in charge. On the home front, her government destroyed the power of the trade unions – aided by the inept leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers – and privatised the utilities and most of the nationalised industries. It let council tenants buy their homes, allowed manufacturing industry to collapse, started the deregulation of the City and radically curtailed the autonomy of local government.
In foreign policy, there was the Falklands, resolute pursuit of the cold war and a policy on Europe that favoured the single market but opposed anything smacking of federalism. And of course, she did what she did with a distinctive style, which you either loved or loathed if you were around at the time.
But was Thatcher really the game-changer that both her fans and her critics claim? It’s true that the unions have never recovered from their 1980s defeats – and the chances of any future government engaging in a programme of renationalisation are small, if only because it would be expensive.
Otherwise, however, the big changes of the Thatcher years, where they weren’t crudely implemented adjustments to the inevitable, look increasingly thin and very much reversible.
Coal and steel would have withered in the face of international competition under any government: Thatcher’s approach brutally hastened their demise and maximised the pain to communities reliant on heavy industry for work. Manufacturing would also have declined under any government because of competition from the far east, though it was made worse by the absence of any coherent industrial policy from the Thatcher government (or any of its successors). Deregulation of the City – continued by subsequent administrations, Tory and Labour – gave us the crisis of 2008 from which we are yet to recover despite massive state intervention to rescue the banks. The sale of council housing to tenants was a bonanza for those who bought, massively subsidised by the taxpayer, but councils were not allowed to use the receipts to build new homes, and, particularly in London and the south-east, right-to-buy owners soon sold up to buy-to-let landlords who charged obscene rents paid by housing benefit. Now we’ve got a housing crisis.
As for foreign policy – well, the Falklands really doesn’t matter except for patriotic myth-makers, and the cold war is long over, though it’s worth noting that Thatcher was completley ineffectual in its last phase. She might have identified Mikhail Gorbachev as a man with whom she could do business, but she resisted the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe in the late eighties and opposed the unification of Germany in 1989. On the European Community, her record was disastrous. Britain’s bone-headed obstructionism under her watch in the late 1980s played a key part in framing the Maastricht treaty on European Union along lines that have since 2008 been exposed as utterly idiotic – a central bank committed to quell inflation and nothing else, no European federal government.
Thatcher seemed a big figure, but she wasn’t really. She won the 1979 general election with a small majority because Labour’s corporatism had failed – and then got lucky. She won massive majorities in 1983 and 1987 after a small part of the Labour leadership defected to set up an Atlanticist pro-Europe centrist party in alliance with the Liberals. She then became a heroine of the anti-European right, which took control of the Conservative party in the 1990s and lost three general elections in a row.
And that’s it. There’s not a lot in the legacy to fear apart from the remarkable success of her appeal to affluent working-class voters in 1983 and 1987. Can David Cameron do the same in 2015? Almost certainly not – and that’s despite the fact that, with the help of the Liberal Democrats, he’s engaged on a plan to shrink the state that Thatcher could only dream about. I’m not dancing on her grave, but she was a failure whose reputation will fade as soon as Britain elects a decent democratic socialist government.
The death of Margaret Thatcher has prompted a wave of public controversy that is quite extraordinary – if only because she had not been a player in British politics for so long. She left office in 1990 and had only a minor role after that – notably in criticising her successor as prime minister, John Major, for his failings on former-Yugoslavia (on which she was right) and the European Union (on which she was wrong). No one now under the age of 43 voted in a general election in which she was a candidate; no one under 52 was a voter when she became prime minister.
Of course, her time in office was eventful, sometimes dramatic, and a lot changed while she was in charge. On the home front, her government destroyed the power of the trade unions – aided by the inept leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers – and privatised the utilities and most of the nationalised industries. It let council tenants buy their homes, allowed manufacturing industry to collapse, started the deregulation of the City and radically curtailed the autonomy of local government.
In foreign policy, there was the Falklands, resolute pursuit of the cold war and a policy on Europe that favoured the single market but opposed anything smacking of federalism. And of course, she did what she did with a distinctive style, which you either loved or loathed if you were around at the time.
But was Thatcher really the game-changer that both her fans and her critics claim? It’s true that the unions have never recovered from their 1980s defeats – and the chances of any future government engaging in a programme of renationalisation are small, if only because it would be expensive.
Otherwise, however, the big changes of the Thatcher years, where they weren’t crudely implemented adjustments to the inevitable, look increasingly thin and very much reversible.
Coal and steel would have withered in the face of international competition under any government: Thatcher’s approach brutally hastened their demise and maximised the pain to communities reliant on heavy industry for work. Manufacturing would also have declined under any government because of competition from the far east, though it was made worse by the absence of any coherent industrial policy from the Thatcher government (or any of its successors). Deregulation of the City – continued by subsequent administrations, Tory and Labour – gave us the crisis of 2008 from which we are yet to recover despite massive state intervention to rescue the banks. The sale of council housing to tenants was a bonanza for those who bought, massively subsidised by the taxpayer, but councils were not allowed to use the receipts to build new homes, and, particularly in London and the south-east, right-to-buy owners soon sold up to buy-to-let landlords who charged obscene rents paid by housing benefit. Now we’ve got a housing crisis.
As for foreign policy – well, the Falklands really doesn’t matter except for patriotic myth-makers, and the cold war is long over, though it’s worth noting that Thatcher was completley ineffectual in its last phase. She might have identified Mikhail Gorbachev as a man with whom she could do business, but she resisted the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe in the late eighties and opposed the unification of Germany in 1989. On the European Community, her record was disastrous. Britain’s bone-headed obstructionism under her watch in the late 1980s played a key part in framing the Maastricht treaty on European Union along lines that have since 2008 been exposed as utterly idiotic – a central bank committed to quell inflation and nothing else, no European federal government.
Thatcher seemed a big figure, but she wasn’t really. She won the 1979 general election with a small majority because Labour’s corporatism had failed – and then got lucky. She won massive majorities in 1983 and 1987 after a small part of the Labour leadership defected to set up an Atlanticist pro-Europe centrist party in alliance with the Liberals. She then became a heroine of the anti-European right, which took control of the Conservative party in the 1990s and lost three general elections in a row.
And that’s it. There’s not a lot in the legacy to fear apart from the remarkable success of her appeal to affluent working-class voters in 1983 and 1987. Can David Cameron do the same in 2015? Almost certainly not – and that’s despite the fact that, with the help of the Liberal Democrats, he’s engaged on a plan to shrink the state that Thatcher could only dream about. I’m not dancing on her grave, but she was a failure whose reputation will fade as soon as Britain elects a decent democratic socialist government.
Wednesday, 20 March 2013
LOOK FORWARD TO SCUMBAG ONLINE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 March 2013
Now, I'm not going to do this, you understand, but ...
What if I set up a website – let's call it Scumbag – and got it hosted on a web server in the United States. Scumbag would be explicitly committed to publishing stories about UK celebrities obtained by fair means or foul that involved the most outrageous breaches of privacy, would be explicitly racist, misogynist and homophobic, would campaign relentlessly in favour of climate-change denial and reduction of welfare payments to supposed scroungers, and would never allow anyone it traduced to reply (let alone publish apologies). Familiar profile?
Although Scumbag would concentrate entirely on UK stories, as its sole proprietor I would not be resident in the UK but in Sicily. Scumbag would have no UK employees (though it would use UK freelances) and it would not register the website with any UK regulator.
The question is this: is there anything in any of the proposals currently being made for UK press regulation – including the Leveson-lite compromise that seems to have been agreed by the party leaders last weekend – that would stop Scumbag in its tracks?
I don’t think so. Scumbag would no more be published in the UK than the New York Times is published here – but it would be available to anyone with an internet connection. I’d be in Italy, ogling the girls on the beach and smoking big cigars. Scumbag’s UK freelances would be vulnerable to libel actions in the UK, but the cunningly clever ruse of not giving them bylines and refusing to identify them when anyone contacted HQ in Sicily would make them very difficult to sue. They would also of course be subject to the criminal law in the UK, but if they got caught hacking phones or trespassing in the grounds of royal properties it would be their look-out. No (overt) legal support, though Scumbag would reward initiative generously…
OK, that’s enough grim fantasy – though to be honest, we’re almost there already with dreck like the Guido Fawkes blog and Press TV available to anyone with a smartphone. You’d need a good business head for Scumbag to wash its face as an enterprise, but it already looks an awful lot easier than publishing a highbrow leftwing dead-trees weekly or fortnightly.
But if you do want to publish a highbrow leftwing dead-trees weekly or fortnightly – let’s call it Tribune – in Britain, old-style, and you don’t have big money or even small money, and it’s difficult getting it legalled every issue because you’re broke, all of the proposals put up by self-styled reformers post-Leveson are grounds for panic. You don’t have a Scumbag escape.
Most of the reformers are media studies academics who last worked as journalists 30 or more years ago and have had little published – except think-pieces on media reform and dull stuff in academic journals – for more than two decades. They’re all in favour in theory of insurgent journalism, investigations and all the rest, but they’ve not done any real journalism themselves for ages and are pretty much clueless about how the media have changed since the arrival of the internet. For the best of academic reasons circa 1987, they’re focused on the big players of the late 20th-century, the Murdochs and the Rothermeres. But they don’t know about the internet, and they are barely aware of the minnows on the edges of commercial viability.
And actually, it’s the internet and the minnows that matter. Leave grand principles aside. How much is it going to cost to sign up for being part of the regulatory system that would allow participants in a Leveson-type scheme to avoid being subject to exemplary damages in libel actions if you don’t join – something backed by all parties right now? If it’s twenty quid a year, maybe cough up. If it’s £2,000? Well, that’s the difference between survival and death, so bollocks to that.
As for the idea that third-party complainants – people who think a piece is outrageous for one reason or another though it has nothing directly to do with them – should be given rights to reply or to moan at length that can be enforced by a regulator or a court of law? Bollocks again, to the Freedom Association, the East London Mosque, the British National Party, the various publicists for Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Socialist Workers Party, who have no right whatsoever to any kind of reply from Tribune or my blog apart from the opportunity of contributing to the letters page or comments, with publication at the editor’s – in the case of this blog, my – discretion. And if they don’t like that, they can stick it wherever they want.
The would-be regulators are sad old men with leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets. Hacked Off, the campaign to support the victims of phone-hacking, has been very successful in getting party political support for its proposals to clamp down on the press as it remembers it in the 1980s. But it should be told to get lost. It’s now dangerously past-it.
Friday, 8 March 2013
A CONSCIENCE CLAUSE IS NOT ENOUGH
Paul Anderson, Free Press, March-April 2013
It’s a measure of how far the left has retreated in recent years that the best most media reformers can imagine to defend journalists’ independence is a “conscience clause” in their contracts to allow them to refuse their bosses’ instructions to act unethically.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea. The National Union of Journalists has supported it since the 1970s, and it was backed by Lord Justice Leveson in his report on press regulation at the end of last year.
If implemented, it would provide a small but significant protection for journalists.
But it addresses only at the margins the fundamental problem of how little most journalists control what they produce. You get a lot of leeway if you’re a big name – a star broadcaster or a columnist on a quality national newspaper. But journalists are generally kept on a tight rein.
Media organisations are run by managers answering to owners or (in the case of the BBC) political appointees. The bosses set the agenda in every way: the editorial line, news values, what you cannot touch for political or commercial reasons. Journalists do what they are told.
To some extent, this is inevitable: there will always be a tension between the individual journalist’s autonomy and the collective will of his or her organisation. Any journalistic enterprise that’s more than micro, new media or old, needs editorial direction and a division of labour. But it’s quite feasible for the producers to determine both.
Why isn’t anyone today making the case for workers’ self-management in the media? One reason is that it seems unrealistic. The “right to manage” ethos is entrenched even in liberal media organisations (and it’s getting worse). Even the most diluted forms of self-management –workers on the board or a say for journalists in the choice of editor – would be resisted vigorously by those in charge. Maybe, in the circumstances, the priority is defending what little space we’ve got.
But unrealistic is not impossible. The idea that workers’ self-management in the media has been tried and failed and isn’t worth trying again is a canard.
True, there were several examples of self-managed magazines and newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s that failed:
But none of these failures shows that workers’ self-management cannot work. News on Sunday was a farcical demonstration of how not to do it – as chronicled by Chris Horrie and Peter Chippendale in their book Disaster! – and the Scottish Daily News was an attempt to revive a corpse. The Leveller and City Limits both came within an inch of success, however: it was undercapitalisation that did for them.
And times have changed. All those experiments were in print, before desktop publishing and long before the internet. The internet allows anyone to publish for free to a worldwide audience – and today you can do everything online: words, pictures, audio, video.
Yet 15 years into the internet age, it’s notable how little the potential of the web has been exploited by collaborative self-managed journalistic projects in the UK. Yes, there’s Open Democracy, there’s the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there are dozens of group blogs, and plenty of media and campaigning organisations have adapted successfully to the online world. But even at local level there are few independent journalism-led and journalist-run web initiatives that go further than providing forums for the expression of opinion.
Of course, journalism costs money, and no one has quite yet worked out how to make the internet pay. Open Democracy, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the successful group blogs rely for income on fundraising or selling stories to established media outlets. But there are signs that it won’t be long before a robust business model for online publication is established, through a mix of online advertising, subscriptions and micro-payments: it’s already beginning to happen in the US and elsewhere.
And once it is – well, the possibilities for self-managed media are endless. Radical journalists in Britain need to be putting a lot more thought into how, together, we can at last seriously exploit the potential of what was once known as the information super-highway.
It’s a measure of how far the left has retreated in recent years that the best most media reformers can imagine to defend journalists’ independence is a “conscience clause” in their contracts to allow them to refuse their bosses’ instructions to act unethically.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea. The National Union of Journalists has supported it since the 1970s, and it was backed by Lord Justice Leveson in his report on press regulation at the end of last year.
If implemented, it would provide a small but significant protection for journalists.
But it addresses only at the margins the fundamental problem of how little most journalists control what they produce. You get a lot of leeway if you’re a big name – a star broadcaster or a columnist on a quality national newspaper. But journalists are generally kept on a tight rein.
Media organisations are run by managers answering to owners or (in the case of the BBC) political appointees. The bosses set the agenda in every way: the editorial line, news values, what you cannot touch for political or commercial reasons. Journalists do what they are told.
To some extent, this is inevitable: there will always be a tension between the individual journalist’s autonomy and the collective will of his or her organisation. Any journalistic enterprise that’s more than micro, new media or old, needs editorial direction and a division of labour. But it’s quite feasible for the producers to determine both.
Why isn’t anyone today making the case for workers’ self-management in the media? One reason is that it seems unrealistic. The “right to manage” ethos is entrenched even in liberal media organisations (and it’s getting worse). Even the most diluted forms of self-management –workers on the board or a say for journalists in the choice of editor – would be resisted vigorously by those in charge. Maybe, in the circumstances, the priority is defending what little space we’ve got.
But unrealistic is not impossible. The idea that workers’ self-management in the media has been tried and failed and isn’t worth trying again is a canard.
True, there were several examples of self-managed magazines and newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s that failed:
- The Scottish Daily News, created with the help of a large government loan by former staff of the Scottish Daily Express after it closed, lasted six loss-making months in 1975.
- The Leveller, a libertarian left current affairs magazine based in London, managed six crisis-ridden years (1976-82) before folding.
- City Limits, an alternative London listings magazine, did brilliantly for several years after emerging from a strike at Time Out in 1981 (with funding from the Greater London Council) but started to lose money in the late 1980s and expired in 1992.
- News on Sunday, a national left-wing paper launched in spring 1987 with trade union backing, ran out of cash in weeks and closed by the end of the year.
But none of these failures shows that workers’ self-management cannot work. News on Sunday was a farcical demonstration of how not to do it – as chronicled by Chris Horrie and Peter Chippendale in their book Disaster! – and the Scottish Daily News was an attempt to revive a corpse. The Leveller and City Limits both came within an inch of success, however: it was undercapitalisation that did for them.
And times have changed. All those experiments were in print, before desktop publishing and long before the internet. The internet allows anyone to publish for free to a worldwide audience – and today you can do everything online: words, pictures, audio, video.
Yet 15 years into the internet age, it’s notable how little the potential of the web has been exploited by collaborative self-managed journalistic projects in the UK. Yes, there’s Open Democracy, there’s the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there are dozens of group blogs, and plenty of media and campaigning organisations have adapted successfully to the online world. But even at local level there are few independent journalism-led and journalist-run web initiatives that go further than providing forums for the expression of opinion.
Of course, journalism costs money, and no one has quite yet worked out how to make the internet pay. Open Democracy, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the successful group blogs rely for income on fundraising or selling stories to established media outlets. But there are signs that it won’t be long before a robust business model for online publication is established, through a mix of online advertising, subscriptions and micro-payments: it’s already beginning to happen in the US and elsewhere.
And once it is – well, the possibilities for self-managed media are endless. Radical journalists in Britain need to be putting a lot more thought into how, together, we can at last seriously exploit the potential of what was once known as the information super-highway.
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