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.

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:

• 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.

BLUE LABOUR DESERVES A HEARING

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 5 August 2011

It would be difficult to create a more half-arsed political initiative than Blue Labour if you set out to fail.

The small group of academics and politicians that was touted earlier this year as the coming big thing in Labour’s intellectual firmament is now officially finished, according to Jonathan Rutherford on the New Statesman's blog,having produced no more than a (very patchy) e-book of first thoughts.

Oh, no, it's not, counters the group's prime mover and guru, Maurice Glasman, in the print edition of the Statesman, apologising for a series of ill-considered – not to say intemperate – public statements calling for an end to immigration, discussions with supporters of the English Defence League and (implicitly) British withdrawal from the European Union that had drawn the fire both of the Trots and of Peter Mandelson.

Such a pronounced schism at such an early stage does not, shall we say, bode well. But if Blue Labour is indeed all over before it properly started, I'm not crowing. And before Tribune readers reach for the computer keyboard or the green ink to denounce me, I've not been converted either to an intolerance of immigration that makes Migration Watch look liberal, or to consorting with the EDL, or to UKIP-style Euroscepticism.

Blue Labour was and is a dreadful name for Glasman's ideas and his group, and the e-book they published a couple of months ago, The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, is neither coherent nor comprehensive. Indeed, it reads as what it is, a string of papers by a group of people who are interested in pursuing certain themes but haven't quite worked out what they think, with the only really thought-through contribution a schematic and in many respects eccentric essay by Glasman himself that raises more questions than it answers.

Nevertheless, I think that Glasman, for all his extraordinary ability to put his foot in his mouth while dropping a bollock, has some important things to say that need to be said. Dismissing him as a clown or as some kind of far-right infiltrator into Labour's ranks is easy but a big mistake.

His most telling point is that Labour over the past two decades has abandoned any critique of capitalism as a destroyer of social solidarity and community in favour of cheer-leading for its creativity and dynamism. New Labour's unqualified enthusiasm for the “modernising” effects of globalisation, flexible labour markets and free competition has, he argues, left large swathes of the working class utterly alienated from Labour. And the first priority for anyone interested in rescuing Labour must be to reconnect it to working people's lives as they have been and are actually lived. For many of them, a lot that has happened in the past 40 years – breakdown of communities, collapse of secure employment, ever-increasing shortages of affordable housing – has been for the worse, under Labour as well as Tory governments.

Now, the way Glasman fleshes this out is intensely problematic. There are times when he appears to be romanticising a working class that never existed, others when he seems hopelessly notalgic about a world to which we cannot return. His prescriptions, both in terms of organisation and policy, are often wrong. He sees community mobilisation as a panacea, on very flimsy evidence, and seems to think that it can thrive if only the over-mighty technocratic state is cut back. And moving in one leap from the observation that working-class worries about immigration are real and will not go away to the conclusion that immigration should be stopped at once (and that we should leave the EU if it doesn't allow us to stop allowing free movement of labour) is breathtakingly simplistic.

But at least Glasman is asking what Labour is for, and his insistence that it cannot survive if it remains disengaged from the everyday lives of the people that were once its core support makes a lot of sense. An arid, abstractly liberal Labour that fetishes the new, professing that "things can only get better" and turning its back on everything rooted or old, can never inspire a movement – and as Harold Wilson famously (though cynically) put it, the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing. And right now? Well, it ain't a crusade.

+++

On a different matter entirely, I was shocked to read in the Guardian this week that City of Westminster police's “counter-terrorism information desk” had issued a leaflet urging members of the public to inform on anarchists. “Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police,” it read. “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchism."

The leaflet was hurriedly disowned by Scotland Yard, which issued a statement saying that it was a poor choice of words by a minion at a single police station (Belgravia, I kid you not) and that all the leaflet should have said was that the Met was looking for information on people who had caused criminal damage to business premises this year. “The Metropolitan police does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views,” ran the official line.

Oh yeah? I'll wager a fiver that, when the records are opened in 30 years (or whenever), we'll find that a substantial part of Special Branch's anti-terrorism budget since the end of the Cold War has been devoted to keeping track of anarchists … who in that time have been responsible for precisely zero terrorist attacks in Britain, and not a single death.

LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM IN A COLD CLIMATE

Paul Anderson, Chartist, May-June 2011

'You call yourself a libertarian socialist,' said my girlfriend the other day. 'But what does it actually mean in practice?'

All right, I'd left some washing-up undone – quite a lot, actually – but I was stumped. 'Er,' I replied hesitantly. 'So I'll do the washing-up when I feel like it?' She laughed, but I was embarassed. Thirty years ago, I'd have had a comprehensive answer on the tip of my tongue.

Back in the early 1980s, I believed that the working class could and should seize power for itself in a revolution, that it didn't need a revolutionary party to guide it, and that a self-managed socialist society based on democratically controlled workers' councils was a realistic and desirable objective. It might not happen immediately, but it certainly could in the next 10 or 15 years. Over-optimistic? Not at all. Remember Paris 1968! The washing-up can wait! I wasn't exactly an anarchist and wasn't exactly a council communist, but no one outside Britain's tiny revolutionary libertarian left milieu – 'milieu' was a word we liked – could have told the difference.

I was a member of a small national group, Solidarity, that had been the British affiliate of the French revolutionary socialist journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in the 1960s, and I was a big fan of the founders of S ou B, Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. There was space on my book shelves for plenty of others, however: the Situationists, the Italian workerists, the Frankfurt School , Gyorgy Lukacs, Anton Pannekoek, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Korsch, Henri Lefebvre. Then as now, I liked reading.

You could say that my politics were a highbrow version of the TV sit-coms Citizen Smith and The Young Ones – and many of my closest friends made just that point. There was an embarrassingly massive gap between my theory and my practice. I read a lot about revolutions and working-class self-organisation, but my everyday life in the early 1980s, though bohemian in many respects, was far from revolutionary. I did demos and squats and no end of meetings, and was involved in a couple of minor industrial disputes. But nothing came close to Paris 1968. The sex and drugs and rock'n'roll were great, but the revolution existed only in my imagination.

Slowly and unsurely, I adjusted to reality. The landslide Tory victory in the 1983 general election made it clear that the post-war social-democratic welfare state settlement was rather more fragile than I had assumed. A year later, I got a job working for European Nuclear Disarmament, the part of the 1980s movement against nuclear weapons that was least enamoured of the Soviet Union , and found myself mixing more and more with people on the soft left of the Labour Party, with whom I had surprisingly few disagreements. The debacles of the 1984-85 miners' strike and the 1986-87 Wapping dispute finally disabused me of the notion that the class struggle at the point of production was the key to socialist advance. I succumbed to Kinnockite reformism. In 1986, I was hired as reviews editor of Tribune, and soon after that joined the Labour Party. I suppose I've been a Labour reformist libertarian socialist ever since.

But what, as the girl asked, does it actually mean in practice?

Let's start with the negatives. Libertarian socialism entails taking a stand against any strand of authoritarianism anywhere in the world. Leninist mountebanks, New Labour spin-doctors, foreign dictators, Islamist bigots, Christian fundamentalists, CIA assassins, Tory racists, BNP fascists – all are enemies that must be relentlessly tracked down, exposed and never appeased or excused. Every state needs to be monitored constantly on freedom of expression, freedom of organisation and prison conditions – and any state must be denounced loudly whenever it censors its critics, imprisons its writers and trade unionists or tortures its prisoners in dingy cells. Much the same applies to capital: the line is no-holds-barred antagonism to exploitation everywhere in the world.

That, though, is the easy bit. The positives are more difficult. Yes, libertarian socialists can support all the usual liberal good causes, from proportional representation to libel reform, and they can rail against the capitalist system. But there's more to what we stand for than that.

Or there should be. Unfortunately, there's not a lot going on right now in austerity Britain that gets the libertarian socialist juices flowing. The whole political class is enthusing about self-organisation and civil society, but – UK Uncut and student protesters notwithstanding – the popular mood is more sullen and apathetic than at any time in living memory. When you're broke and worried about your job and about keeping up the rent or the payments on your house, you retreat from engagement with politics. David Cameron's 'big society' is nothing more than fraudulent ideological cover for cutting public spending to pay for the bankers' gambling debts. Working people are facing a quite extraordinary squeeze because the big players of finance capital cocked up.

This is where libertarian socialism gets problematic. In an ideal world, I'd like to see co-ops running the local buses and democratic housing associations controlling most rented living spaces – but in the absence of a revolution, which isn't on the agenda, the only context in which it could happen would be a big, generous, redistributive social-democratic state that taxed the rich and used the proceeds to forge a more equal and democratic society. I want that state, I want it now, and I want it more than I want my windows cleaned by a profit-sharing workers' collective.

So although I'm all in favour of do-it-yourself socialist initiatives, I can do without them for now. Like it or not, the priority today is the battle to prevent the destruction of state services by the coalition government, and it's backs-against-the-wall. Maybe that makes me a very unlibertarian orthodox left social democrat – but that's the way it is. Now for that washing-up...

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE IS NOTHING NEW

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 October 2009

I meant to write about Christopher Andrew’s authorised centenary history of the security service, MI5, The Defence of the Realm, in my last column – but my copy of the book turned up late because of the postal strikes. And because I’m a busy man and it’s more than 1,000 pages (and that’s not counting the index), I’ve only now finished reading it.

Whatever, it’s still worth a column, because there’s a lot more to it than the first news stories and reviews suggested.

Which is not to knock David Leigh, who made it clear, in a cutting review in the Guardian, that Andrew’s denial of MI5’s plot against Harold Wilson as prime minister is radically at odds with the evidence Andrew himself supplies in the book that senior figures in the security service, most importantly Peter Wright, really did think Wilson was a Soviet stooge and acted to undermine him.

Nor is it to dismiss the critics of The Defence of the Realm who have said that it shamelessly traduces several people who conveniently cannot answer back – notably the late Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union from 1968 to 1976, whom Andrew claims to have been a Soviet agent, largely on the basis of the dubious testimony of the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky.

Andrew’s is an official history – he even joined MI5 in order to write it – and he never misses an opportunity to portray the security service in the most favourable light. He has an unerring eye for headline-inducing allegations, and he reproduces them even when the evidence for their truth is anecdotal.

Nevertheless, The Defence of the Realm is an important and in many ways impressive piece of work, and it would be a mistake to write it off. Andrew has had unprecedented access to the security service archives, and there is a lot he has turned up that is fascinating.

What struck me most forcefully as I read the book was the sheer scale of MI5’s surveillance of what it called “domestic subversion” – otherwise known as the Communist Party of Great Britain and the various revolutionary groups, mainly Trotskyist, to its left.

For more than 40 years after 1945, keeping tabs on the far left was what the security service spent most of its time and energy upon. Although it was originally set up in 1909 as a small secret agency to identify and root out German spies in Britain – revolutionaries were the preserve of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch – during the 1920s the security service found itself increasingly involved in monitoring the activities of members of the Communist Party. The reason was simple: the CP was from its foundation in 1920 loyal to the Soviet regime in Russia and engaged in espionage (or at least some of its members were), and from the mid-1920s the CP was the organisation that most of Britain’s small band of revolutionaries joined.

By the early 1930s, MI5 had taken over Special Branch’s lead role in revolutionary-watching. It built up a comprehensive card index of all CP members and bugged the CP’s headquarters in Covent Garden. The rise of Hitler and then the second world war diverted the service’s attention from this crucial activity – but with the onset of the cold war in the 1940s “domestic subversion” once again became its primary focus. MI5 kept files on all communists, suspected communists and, increasingly from the late 1960s, members of Trotskyist groups: the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party), the Socialist Labour League (later the Workers’ Revolutionary Party), the Militant Tendency. It infiltrated agents into the CP and the Trotskyist parties, bugged their offices, tapped their phones and intercepted their mail. Most controversially, it monitored organisations in which it believed “subversives” were active – the trade unions, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people were under MI5 surveillance at any time. It was only with the end of the cold war in 1989-91 that MI5 ceased to plough most of its energies into “domestic subversion” and concentrate instead on its other roles in counter-espionage and counter-terrorism.

Of course, we knew quite a lot of this before, thanks to whistle-blowers (Cathy Massiter, David Shayler) and, in recent years, selective releases of once-secret documents to the National Archives. No one who was active in left-wing politics during the cold war will be surprised that MI5 took a keen interest in “subversives”. All the same, the scope of the intelligence-gathering described by Andrew is really quite breathtaking. The surveillance society is nothing new.