Paul Anderson, Chartist, March-April 2004
The most important thing to remember about the impending enlargement of the European Union is just how unimaginable it would have been only a short time ago.
Anyone who had suggested just 15 years ago – in early 1989 – that the European Community would today be about to take into membership a majority of the states of east-central Europe would have been a political laughing stock. The division of the Europe into two hostile blocs and Soviet domination of the east were givens, taken by just about everyone as unpleasant facts of political life that were likely to last a very long time if not forever.
Yet here we are in 2004, and the European club is about to welcome 10 new members, among them four states that were Soviet satellites in 1989 (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and three that were actually part of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).
Of course, they will be second-class members when they join on 1 May. For some time, their citizens’ freedom to work wherever they want in the European Union will be restricted, and their farmers will be denied the level of subsidy enjoyed by their counterparts in existing EU member states under the Common Agricultural Policy. None of the new member states will be part of the eurozone, either.
But none of this should be allowed to obscure the momentous importance of this enlargement of the EU. It marks the definitive end of the cold-war division of the continent and the near-achievement of the pioneering 1930s European federalists’ dream of a united democratic Europe.
Of the countries everyone agrees to be European, only Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, the states of former Yugoslavia – apart from Slovenia – and Switzerland are now outside the EU. And that is no mean achievement (although of course there is a strong case for arguing that any definition of “European” that excludes the Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Turks is far too narrow). Even in the late 1990s, when the enlargement proposed was less far-reaching than the one that is now happening, plenty of informed people thought it impossible before 2010.
Which is not to say that the entry of the 10 new members will be unproblematic. In particular, every government in the pre-enlargement EU is worried, to a greater or lesser extent, about the possibility of a giant influx of workers from the accession countries, chasing better wages and better welfare provision. Even the British government, which expects few accession-country immigrants and would anyway welcome them because the labour market is tight, has changed benefit rules to exclude migrants from the accession countries. Nearly all the others, with Germany and Austria in the vanguard, have imposed strict quotas on immigration from the EU’s new members.
Immigration is the issue likely to have the biggest impact in the short term on the politics of the EU. To put it bluntly, if the controls over and disincentives to immigration don’t work – or, rather, are seen as not working by voters in the existing member states, there is a possibility of a swell of anti-immigrant sentiment that is successfully exploited by the right in the west.
This is, however, no more than a possibility. For a start, it is by no means certain that very many people from the accession countries will leave their homelands. Up-rooting everything to work abroad is not something people generally do unless they are either unusually adventurous or suffering from extreme poverty or persecution – and extreme poverty and persecution are not the lot of most citizens of the accession states, with the partial exception of the Roma of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The last time the European Community embraced a batch of much poorer countries – Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1980s – there was no mad rush of migration, and there is no reason to expect this time to be different.
What’s more, it is doubtful that migration from the accession countries will in itself lead to a swell of anti-immigrant feeling even if large numbers move west. There are already many people from the accession countries living in the pre-enlargement EU – and although it would be idiotic to claim that they are never victims of discrimination or prejudice, with the exception of the Roma they are pretty much invisible. They are white and indistinguishable from the majority population by way of religion, dress or social habits – and thus rather difficult to turn into scapegoats for the troubles of the majority. “Vote Labour if you want a Latvian for a neighbour” just won’t wash.
The problem with this scenario is the exception to the rule of invisibility, the Roma – in Britain at any rate. Already, the right-wing press here is running scare stories about the imminent arrival of a flood of gypsies, many of them former failed asylum-seekers. So far, only the British National Party has shown any interest in exploiting the scare for electoral gain, but if it turns out to have any basis in reality it is by no means unlikely – despite Michael Howard’s apparent rejection of anti-immigrant rhetoric -- that the Tories will jump on the bandwagon, pushing a cocktail of anti-European, anti-immigrant xenophobia as their core political message at the next general election. We shall see.
But EU enlargement is important politically not only because of the impact of migration on the domestic politics of current member countries. It will also have ramifications for the EU’s political balance, for the economies of the whole union and for the way the EU’s institutions work.
The effects of enlargement on the political balance of the EU will be less marked than they would have been had it happened in the late 1990s, when social democratic parties were in power in the four biggest EU countries, Germany, France, Britain and Italy – not that they acted in concert, to their shame – and most of east-central Europe was governed by the centre-right. The ascendancy of the centre-left in western Europe was fleeting, and today the existing EU is roughly split between centre-left and centre-right governments. In east-central Europe, there was a shift towards the centre-left in 2001-02, though hardly one of seismic proportions, and today the accession countries’ governments are roughly split between centre-right and centre-left, much as current EU governments are.
But there are significant differences between east and west in the new EU, particularly on foreign policy, with the accession countries generally far more favourable to the United States. The governments of “new Europe”, as Donald Rumsfeld called it, were much closer to Tony Blair in their response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than those of “old Europe”.
How far this will make any difference in the next couple of years is hard to tell, because no one knows what (if anything) the US will do now in its “war on terror”. As ever, what will matter most in European Union politics are general elections in the member states. With nearly many governments east and west looking vulnerable to election defeat, no one can predict with confidence what the situation will be in a couple of years’ time. This year’s European Parliament elections will be an indication of the state of play, but with turnouts everywhere expected to be low even they will need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
The economic effects of enlargement are even more difficult to judge. It should be an engine of growth throughout Europe as everyone benefits from the opening of markets – but it might simply benefit the accession countries, exacerbating the globalisation-led flight of employment from the high-wage countries of western Europe while the poorest parts of western Europe suffer from the diversion of EU cash to the accession countries. Whatever, it is likely to have rather less influence on Europe’s economic performance than exchange rates (particularly if the US maintains its weak dollar policy) and the onward march of globalisation.
As for the workings of the EU’s institutions, enlargement will certainly mean a far greater emphasis in the short term on intergovernmental wheeling and dealing – and this in a set-up that is already dominated by intergovernmental carve-ups – for the simple reason that there is no alternative. In the medium to long term, however, everything is up for grabs. The proposed EU constitution is essentially intergovernmentalist, with a few sops to federalism. But there is little sense anywhere that it is a final settlement of the union’s institutional arrangements. No one knows whether its provisions will come into being, let alone that they will prove lasting if they do.
It’s true that it does currently seem unlikely that a polity as big and diverse as the enlarged EU could successfully evolve towards federalism. On the other hand, however, there are powerful pressures in the other direction: the euro, which demands a coherent centrally controlled fiscal policy; the likelihood that the smaller countries of the new EU will tire of being dominated by the big ones; and the EU’s much-discussed lack of democratic legitimacy, which can only be addressed by giving the European Parliament a much greater role, including the power to initiate legislation.
In other words, it’s business as usual on the European scene. There is no way the left can guarantee a social democratic Europe after enlargement. But there is also no reason to give up on that goal, which is no less credible than it ever has been.
Sunday, 29 February 2004
Tuesday, 17 February 2004
'ANTI-IMPERIALISM' IS NOT ENOUGH
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, February 20 2004
By far the most entertaining read of the year — OK, I know it’s only February — is Francis Wheen’s broadside against contemporary bullshit, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. I read it in one sitting last weekend and laughed a great deal.
Wheen, once of the New Statesman and the Guardian and still of Private Eye, has spent the best part of 25 years as a journalist amassing material on mountebanks of all kinds, and he puts it to devastating use. Religious fundamentalists, free-market economists, management gurus, New Labour strategists, deconstructionist intellectuals, internet visionaries — you name them, they all get richly deserved trashings.
Wheen is of the left: his previous books include sympathetic biographies of Tom Driberg, the Labour left-winger, and Karl Marx. But some of the best bits of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World are his debunkings of left charlatanry — in particular the willful failure of such “anti-imperialist” leftists as John Pilger and Noam Chomsky to recognise that everything the United States does is not by definition evil and that everyone who hates the United States is not by definition good.
Wheen is especially telling on two cases in the recent past when the “anti-imperialist” left lost the plot completely — its shameful opposition to western military intervention to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, and its conclusion after 9/11 that America had it coming because of its policies in the Middle East. “While expressing obligatory if perfunctory regret at Osama bin Laden’s methods,” writes Wheen of the latter, “many self-styled ‘progressives’ seemed to find his motives wholly explicable, and even reasonable.”
What’s particularly worrying about this current of leftist delusion is that it is so persistent. As Wheen points out, the belief that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” led large parts of the western left to view the Soviet Union as an ally and to suppress any criticism of it long after it became obvious to anyone open to reason that it was a brutal police state that had nothing in common with democratic socialism: even in the 1980s, you could find Labour MPs, senior trade unionists and left intellectuals who were as pro-Soviet as any 1930s communist.
More importantly for us today, over the past few months the “my enemy’s enemy” crew have found new friends in what they call the “resistance” in Iraq. No matter that the people attacking US forces and police stations and terrorising ordinary Iraqi citizens are either enthusiasts for the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein or reactionary Islamists — they’re against the Yankee imperialists and so deserve our support.
As Pilger put it in an interview with an Australian magazine a few weeks back (click here for full interview): “We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the ‘Bush gang’ will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.”
I used to have great respect for Pilger, who was a columnist on the New Statesman when I was deputy editor, and I still admire his early work on Cambodia and East Timor. But this line of “thinking” is beneath contempt. Pilger is right that victory for the Iraqi “resistance” would be a blow to the Bush administration. But it would also, more importantly, inevitably mean the imposition of yet another dictatorship, whether secular or theocratic, on the long-suffering Iraqi people — who have every right to be “choosy” — and an end to any hope of a free, decent, prosperous, democratic Iraq.
Sorry, but condemning the Iraqis to barbarism in order to cock a snook at US imperialism is in no sense “progressive”. Iraq needs peace and a sustainable civil society; and to get them the “resistance” must be defeated. The real danger is that the US will pull out of Iraq too soon, abandoning it to a bloody civil war.
I am not arguing that Bush was right to invade Iraq or that the Blair government was right to join in. The war was a massive gamble, and although one part of it came off spectacularly — Saddam was easily toppled and eventually captured — the US and Britain had not thought through what happened next. That was, to say the least, extraordinarily irresponsible.
But there is no way anyone can turn the clock back and stop the war: it happened, and everyone now has to live with the consequences. Having sold the war as necessary to prevent Saddam using weapons of mass destruction that have not yet materialised, Tony Blair has his own cynical reasons for wanting everyone to “move on” from the long-running argument about whether and how the war was justified. But he also happens to be right. The urgent question now is how Iraq can best be helped to emerge from the mess created by the war. And crude “anti-imperialism” is not the answer.
By far the most entertaining read of the year — OK, I know it’s only February — is Francis Wheen’s broadside against contemporary bullshit, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. I read it in one sitting last weekend and laughed a great deal.
Wheen, once of the New Statesman and the Guardian and still of Private Eye, has spent the best part of 25 years as a journalist amassing material on mountebanks of all kinds, and he puts it to devastating use. Religious fundamentalists, free-market economists, management gurus, New Labour strategists, deconstructionist intellectuals, internet visionaries — you name them, they all get richly deserved trashings.
Wheen is of the left: his previous books include sympathetic biographies of Tom Driberg, the Labour left-winger, and Karl Marx. But some of the best bits of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World are his debunkings of left charlatanry — in particular the willful failure of such “anti-imperialist” leftists as John Pilger and Noam Chomsky to recognise that everything the United States does is not by definition evil and that everyone who hates the United States is not by definition good.
Wheen is especially telling on two cases in the recent past when the “anti-imperialist” left lost the plot completely — its shameful opposition to western military intervention to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, and its conclusion after 9/11 that America had it coming because of its policies in the Middle East. “While expressing obligatory if perfunctory regret at Osama bin Laden’s methods,” writes Wheen of the latter, “many self-styled ‘progressives’ seemed to find his motives wholly explicable, and even reasonable.”
What’s particularly worrying about this current of leftist delusion is that it is so persistent. As Wheen points out, the belief that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” led large parts of the western left to view the Soviet Union as an ally and to suppress any criticism of it long after it became obvious to anyone open to reason that it was a brutal police state that had nothing in common with democratic socialism: even in the 1980s, you could find Labour MPs, senior trade unionists and left intellectuals who were as pro-Soviet as any 1930s communist.
More importantly for us today, over the past few months the “my enemy’s enemy” crew have found new friends in what they call the “resistance” in Iraq. No matter that the people attacking US forces and police stations and terrorising ordinary Iraqi citizens are either enthusiasts for the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein or reactionary Islamists — they’re against the Yankee imperialists and so deserve our support.
As Pilger put it in an interview with an Australian magazine a few weeks back (click here for full interview): “We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the ‘Bush gang’ will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.”
I used to have great respect for Pilger, who was a columnist on the New Statesman when I was deputy editor, and I still admire his early work on Cambodia and East Timor. But this line of “thinking” is beneath contempt. Pilger is right that victory for the Iraqi “resistance” would be a blow to the Bush administration. But it would also, more importantly, inevitably mean the imposition of yet another dictatorship, whether secular or theocratic, on the long-suffering Iraqi people — who have every right to be “choosy” — and an end to any hope of a free, decent, prosperous, democratic Iraq.
Sorry, but condemning the Iraqis to barbarism in order to cock a snook at US imperialism is in no sense “progressive”. Iraq needs peace and a sustainable civil society; and to get them the “resistance” must be defeated. The real danger is that the US will pull out of Iraq too soon, abandoning it to a bloody civil war.
I am not arguing that Bush was right to invade Iraq or that the Blair government was right to join in. The war was a massive gamble, and although one part of it came off spectacularly — Saddam was easily toppled and eventually captured — the US and Britain had not thought through what happened next. That was, to say the least, extraordinarily irresponsible.
But there is no way anyone can turn the clock back and stop the war: it happened, and everyone now has to live with the consequences. Having sold the war as necessary to prevent Saddam using weapons of mass destruction that have not yet materialised, Tony Blair has his own cynical reasons for wanting everyone to “move on” from the long-running argument about whether and how the war was justified. But he also happens to be right. The urgent question now is how Iraq can best be helped to emerge from the mess created by the war. And crude “anti-imperialism” is not the answer.
Tuesday, 3 February 2004
HUTTON SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, February 6 2004
The media furore that has followed the publication of Lord Hutton’s report on the death of Dr David Kelly is of course understandable.
Hutton’s verdict was at odds with what most of the media expected and, more importantly, at odds with what most of them wanted. His damning criticism of the BBC’s handling of Andrew Gilligan’s notorious Today programme broadcast led not only to the resignation of Gilligan but to the departure of Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC’s board of governors, and Greg Dyke, the corporation’s director-general. The government, by contrast, got off scot-free.
But to say that the uproar is understandable is not to justify it. Given Hutton’s narrow brief, and given what emerged in the course of his inquiry, it was never likely that he would come to any conclusion other than the one he came to. The real question the hoo-hah raises is why on earth the media expected anything different — and the answer has precious little to do with their failure to recognise Hutton's undoubtedly pro-establishment record over the years.
Lest we forget, Hutton was not charged with investigating the reasons Britain went to war with Iraq: his task was to look into the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death. Quite reasonably, he limited himself to examining the chain of events, beginning with the production of the government dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, that ended with Dr Kelly’s suicide, focusing in particular on his interview with Gilligan, Gilligan’s subsequent broadcast, and the complex process by which Dr Kelly was identified as Gilligan’s source. He did not even attempt to consider whether the intelligence reports on which the dossier was based were accurate.
During the course of the inquiry, it became clear that Gilligan’s journalism was appallingly shoddy. He had based his story on a single source — which was almost incredibly unprofessional given the seriousness of the allegation that even though the government knew that Saddam Hussein had no WMD capable of deployment in 45 minutes, it nevertheless inserted the claim into the dossier. He had no credible contemporaneous record of his interview with Dr Kelly that showed he had at least reported an allegation in good faith. And he had behaved in an extraordinarily devious way once his story came under fire, attempting to pull the wool over his editors’ eyes about the nature of his source and trying to get Dr Kelly’s identity revealed by underhand means. Gilligan would have deserved criticism from Hutton even if had not emerged that the 45 minute claim had been inserted in the dossier late simply because it arrived late.
It also became clear during the inquiry that the BBC’s initial response to the government’s protests at Gilligan’s broadcast, defending him stoutly without bothering to check the provenance or veracity of his story, had been sloppy in the extreme. Again, the real surprise of last week is that anyone expected the corporation not to be deservedly hammered by the Hutton report.
As for the government, it should have become obvious at an early stage that it was on track to be cleared on the charge that it inserted claims it knew were false in the dossier. The mass of official documents made public by the inquiry certainly showed that the government “sexed-up” intelligence material to produce the dossier, at least in the sense of putting the strongest possible interpretation on it. That was revealing, and deeply unattractive. But there was nothing at all to show that the government had knowingly lied.
Nor should this have come as a surprise. Governments in societies with free media are often evasive, duplicitous and economical with the truth. But they don’t usually tell outright lies they know are outright lies — if only for the cynical reason that the costs of being found out are so great. Only the most desperate and reckless government would have attempted knowingly to falsify the WMD dossier.
None of this is to argue that the government’s handling of the WMD issue in the run-up to the war on Iraq was beyond criticism. There is a strong case for believing that the government seized on WMD as a means of justifying its support for an invasion the US had already decided upon for other reasons, and it has become increasingly apparent that there were major flaws in the intelligence on Iraqi WMD on which it relied.
Still less is it to argue that the BBC should somehow be reined in or prevented from doing investigative journalism. The government’s veiled threats to take the Hutton report into consideration when renewal of the coporation’s charter comes up were sinister and shameful.
My point is that too many journalists approached Hutton with the lazy assumption that it’s OK for a journalist to get a story “95 per cent right” (as former Today editor Rod Liddle put it) and with the prejudice that it can be taken as read that the government is lying to us nearly all of the time. Hutton’s report is a salutary reminder that in journalism the facts matter more than anything else.
The media furore that has followed the publication of Lord Hutton’s report on the death of Dr David Kelly is of course understandable.
Hutton’s verdict was at odds with what most of the media expected and, more importantly, at odds with what most of them wanted. His damning criticism of the BBC’s handling of Andrew Gilligan’s notorious Today programme broadcast led not only to the resignation of Gilligan but to the departure of Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC’s board of governors, and Greg Dyke, the corporation’s director-general. The government, by contrast, got off scot-free.
But to say that the uproar is understandable is not to justify it. Given Hutton’s narrow brief, and given what emerged in the course of his inquiry, it was never likely that he would come to any conclusion other than the one he came to. The real question the hoo-hah raises is why on earth the media expected anything different — and the answer has precious little to do with their failure to recognise Hutton's undoubtedly pro-establishment record over the years.
Lest we forget, Hutton was not charged with investigating the reasons Britain went to war with Iraq: his task was to look into the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death. Quite reasonably, he limited himself to examining the chain of events, beginning with the production of the government dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, that ended with Dr Kelly’s suicide, focusing in particular on his interview with Gilligan, Gilligan’s subsequent broadcast, and the complex process by which Dr Kelly was identified as Gilligan’s source. He did not even attempt to consider whether the intelligence reports on which the dossier was based were accurate.
During the course of the inquiry, it became clear that Gilligan’s journalism was appallingly shoddy. He had based his story on a single source — which was almost incredibly unprofessional given the seriousness of the allegation that even though the government knew that Saddam Hussein had no WMD capable of deployment in 45 minutes, it nevertheless inserted the claim into the dossier. He had no credible contemporaneous record of his interview with Dr Kelly that showed he had at least reported an allegation in good faith. And he had behaved in an extraordinarily devious way once his story came under fire, attempting to pull the wool over his editors’ eyes about the nature of his source and trying to get Dr Kelly’s identity revealed by underhand means. Gilligan would have deserved criticism from Hutton even if had not emerged that the 45 minute claim had been inserted in the dossier late simply because it arrived late.
It also became clear during the inquiry that the BBC’s initial response to the government’s protests at Gilligan’s broadcast, defending him stoutly without bothering to check the provenance or veracity of his story, had been sloppy in the extreme. Again, the real surprise of last week is that anyone expected the corporation not to be deservedly hammered by the Hutton report.
As for the government, it should have become obvious at an early stage that it was on track to be cleared on the charge that it inserted claims it knew were false in the dossier. The mass of official documents made public by the inquiry certainly showed that the government “sexed-up” intelligence material to produce the dossier, at least in the sense of putting the strongest possible interpretation on it. That was revealing, and deeply unattractive. But there was nothing at all to show that the government had knowingly lied.
Nor should this have come as a surprise. Governments in societies with free media are often evasive, duplicitous and economical with the truth. But they don’t usually tell outright lies they know are outright lies — if only for the cynical reason that the costs of being found out are so great. Only the most desperate and reckless government would have attempted knowingly to falsify the WMD dossier.
None of this is to argue that the government’s handling of the WMD issue in the run-up to the war on Iraq was beyond criticism. There is a strong case for believing that the government seized on WMD as a means of justifying its support for an invasion the US had already decided upon for other reasons, and it has become increasingly apparent that there were major flaws in the intelligence on Iraqi WMD on which it relied.
Still less is it to argue that the BBC should somehow be reined in or prevented from doing investigative journalism. The government’s veiled threats to take the Hutton report into consideration when renewal of the coporation’s charter comes up were sinister and shameful.
My point is that too many journalists approached Hutton with the lazy assumption that it’s OK for a journalist to get a story “95 per cent right” (as former Today editor Rod Liddle put it) and with the prejudice that it can be taken as read that the government is lying to us nearly all of the time. Hutton’s report is a salutary reminder that in journalism the facts matter more than anything else.
Friday, 23 January 2004
TACTICAL VOTING STILL MAKES SENSE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 January 2004
My thanks to Tribune reader John Morgan of Grantham, whose generous letter the week before last demanding that I be fired as a columnist in case I commit a thought crime reminded me that I need to get on with drawing up a list of constituencies in which Labour supporters should vote Liberal Democrat at the next general election.
I would have done it for this week’s column had I not been too busy to get up to speed on the implications of constituency boundary changes since the 2001 election. Rest assured that the definitive list of where Labourites should vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out will appear as soon as I’ve done the number-crunching – unless, of course, the editor takes Morgan’s advice and sacks me first. But you’re going have to wait.
For now, all I can do is restate the case for tactical voting – at least in first-past-the-post elections – to beat Conservative candidates. Morgan seems to think that this has lost much of its power since 2001: “Last time, there was an excuse. This time there will not be.” But I can’t work out what has changed.
Yes, the Tories have a marginally more competent leader than in 2001. Otherwise, they are pretty much what they were at the time of the last general election: a bunch of reactionary, authoritarian, xenophobic, anti-European zealots, out of touch with the modern world, committed to chipping away at the welfare state, hostile to public transport, eltist in education – in other words, the main enemy. And because their leader is marginally more competent they pose a greater threat. Ergo, the case for doing what we can to minimise their parliamentary representation is greater than it was three years ago.
As for the Lib Dems, I’ll concede that they’ve shifted a little to the right since 2001 on taxation: they’ve abandoned their promise of a penny on the basic rate of income tax for education and no longer attack the government for failing to tax and spend enough. But they too are essentially what they were before: a pro-European, anti-Conservative party of the centre-left, with much more in common with Labour than diehards of either party think.
Where the Lib Dems differ with the government, their position is still either more explicitly egalitarian and redistributionist (top-up fees, council tax), more libertarian (asylum policy), more coherently democratic (electoral reform, the House of Lords, the European Union constitution) or more pacifist (the Iraq war). On the issues, Charles Kennedy is closer politically to Labour’s thinking soft left (Robin Cook, Clare Short, Chris Smith et al) than he is to Tony Blair, let alone to the Tories.
I don’t agree with the Lib Dems (or indeed Labour’s soft left) on quite a lot of this. On Iraq, I now think that the centre-left opponents of war (myself included) exaggerated the risks of military action to remove Saddam Hussein – and that the dubiety of the justification for war advanced by Blair and George Bush should not be allowed to cloud the fact that the regime change in Iraq has been a good thing. On top-up fees, the Lib Dems and the soft left are playing a self-indulgent game that endangers a large slice of money coming to the universities that they desperately need.
But that’s beside the point – as indeed is the Lib Dems’ opportunism, for example in earmarking the same tax rise to pay for several spending promises. Taking everything into account, it remains as sensible as in 2001 for Labour supporters to vote Lib Dem at the next general election wherever a Lib Dem is the sitting MP and wherever the Lib Dem came second to a Tory last time. It also makes sense for Lib Dem supporters to back Labour wherever the sitting MP is Labour and weherever Labour came second to a Tory.
* * *
On a different subject entirely, I’ve just received a circular letter from Jeremy Dear, fellow Tribune columnist and general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, imploring me to vote “yes” in a forthcoming ballot to set up an NUJ political fund.
I’m going to ignore his plea and vote “no”, simply because I can’t see why the NUJ needs a political fund. The way the law stands, the only circumstances in which a union must set up such a fund is to campaign at election time for or against a political party. Yet any attempt by the NUJ to back party-political campaigns at election time, even a negative “Don’t vote British National Party” one, would not only compromise the ability of union members to do their jobs as journalists but would also lead to a significant number of resignations (particularly among BBC hacks who are contractually obliged to remain politically neutral).
Dear and other supporters of a political fund insist that they don’t want to use it to back party-political campaigns. But if that’s the case, there’s no point in the fund: any extra campaigning they envisage could be paid for with an increase in ordinary subscriptions. Why don’t they just go for that?
My thanks to Tribune reader John Morgan of Grantham, whose generous letter the week before last demanding that I be fired as a columnist in case I commit a thought crime reminded me that I need to get on with drawing up a list of constituencies in which Labour supporters should vote Liberal Democrat at the next general election.
I would have done it for this week’s column had I not been too busy to get up to speed on the implications of constituency boundary changes since the 2001 election. Rest assured that the definitive list of where Labourites should vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out will appear as soon as I’ve done the number-crunching – unless, of course, the editor takes Morgan’s advice and sacks me first. But you’re going have to wait.
For now, all I can do is restate the case for tactical voting – at least in first-past-the-post elections – to beat Conservative candidates. Morgan seems to think that this has lost much of its power since 2001: “Last time, there was an excuse. This time there will not be.” But I can’t work out what has changed.
Yes, the Tories have a marginally more competent leader than in 2001. Otherwise, they are pretty much what they were at the time of the last general election: a bunch of reactionary, authoritarian, xenophobic, anti-European zealots, out of touch with the modern world, committed to chipping away at the welfare state, hostile to public transport, eltist in education – in other words, the main enemy. And because their leader is marginally more competent they pose a greater threat. Ergo, the case for doing what we can to minimise their parliamentary representation is greater than it was three years ago.
As for the Lib Dems, I’ll concede that they’ve shifted a little to the right since 2001 on taxation: they’ve abandoned their promise of a penny on the basic rate of income tax for education and no longer attack the government for failing to tax and spend enough. But they too are essentially what they were before: a pro-European, anti-Conservative party of the centre-left, with much more in common with Labour than diehards of either party think.
Where the Lib Dems differ with the government, their position is still either more explicitly egalitarian and redistributionist (top-up fees, council tax), more libertarian (asylum policy), more coherently democratic (electoral reform, the House of Lords, the European Union constitution) or more pacifist (the Iraq war). On the issues, Charles Kennedy is closer politically to Labour’s thinking soft left (Robin Cook, Clare Short, Chris Smith et al) than he is to Tony Blair, let alone to the Tories.
I don’t agree with the Lib Dems (or indeed Labour’s soft left) on quite a lot of this. On Iraq, I now think that the centre-left opponents of war (myself included) exaggerated the risks of military action to remove Saddam Hussein – and that the dubiety of the justification for war advanced by Blair and George Bush should not be allowed to cloud the fact that the regime change in Iraq has been a good thing. On top-up fees, the Lib Dems and the soft left are playing a self-indulgent game that endangers a large slice of money coming to the universities that they desperately need.
But that’s beside the point – as indeed is the Lib Dems’ opportunism, for example in earmarking the same tax rise to pay for several spending promises. Taking everything into account, it remains as sensible as in 2001 for Labour supporters to vote Lib Dem at the next general election wherever a Lib Dem is the sitting MP and wherever the Lib Dem came second to a Tory last time. It also makes sense for Lib Dem supporters to back Labour wherever the sitting MP is Labour and weherever Labour came second to a Tory.
* * *
On a different subject entirely, I’ve just received a circular letter from Jeremy Dear, fellow Tribune columnist and general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, imploring me to vote “yes” in a forthcoming ballot to set up an NUJ political fund.
I’m going to ignore his plea and vote “no”, simply because I can’t see why the NUJ needs a political fund. The way the law stands, the only circumstances in which a union must set up such a fund is to campaign at election time for or against a political party. Yet any attempt by the NUJ to back party-political campaigns at election time, even a negative “Don’t vote British National Party” one, would not only compromise the ability of union members to do their jobs as journalists but would also lead to a significant number of resignations (particularly among BBC hacks who are contractually obliged to remain politically neutral).
Dear and other supporters of a political fund insist that they don’t want to use it to back party-political campaigns. But if that’s the case, there’s no point in the fund: any extra campaigning they envisage could be paid for with an increase in ordinary subscriptions. Why don’t they just go for that?
Wednesday, 7 January 2004
EUROFIGHTER: WHAT A WASTE OF MONEY
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, January 9 2004
Journalists at the BBC are understandably nervous that their managers will react to expected criticism in the Hutton report by putting the dampers on critical and politically sensitive journalism. But they haven’t done so yet, as an excellent current affairs documentary on Radio Four, Eurofighter: The Plane Truth, presented by David Lomax, demonstrated this week (for audio click here).
The Eurofighter is one of the greatest unsung scandals of contemporary Britain — an aircraft designed to do something that is no longer necessary, which does not work properly and has cost billions of taxpayers’ money. Lomax’s documentary, made with only the most minimal co-operation from either BAe Systems, the main British Eurofighter contractor, or the Ministry of Defence, was a stunning expose of the whole farce.
Eurofighter made a certain amount of military sense when the plans that transmuted into the project were conceived in Britain in the late 1970s. The Cold War was at its height, and the Soviet Union had developed advanced fighters capable of outperforming anything the RAF possessed. A new fighter capable of matching these aircraft in high-altitude dog-fighting seemed a high priority. And, given the costs of developing advanced military aircraft and the perceived need not to rely wholly on the US for military procurement, it made economic and political sense to opt for a European collaborative effort to design and build it.
Even before the programme was actually started, however, the military rationale had all but disappeared. Dog-fighting fighters were effectively rendered obsolete by the development of smart air-to-air missiles in the early 1980s. But the then Conservative Government, under pressure from the RAF and, more importantly, from defence manufacturers desperate for big contracts, particularly British Aerospace, decided to go ahead; and, with Michael Heseltine as Secretary of State for Defence, the project soon evolved into a flagship for West European military-industrial co-operation between Britain and Germany, with Italy and Spain as junior partners. (France had initially been Britain’s major partner but withdrew at an early stage and built its own fighter, the Dassault Rafaele.)
Since then, as Lomax made clear, the story of the Eurofighter has been one of technical hitches, international squabbles, delays and ever-spiralling costs. The original plan was for it to enter service in 1992, but it is only now that the first few aircraft have been delivered (and they can hardly be described as operational because of technical problems). The estimated likely cost of the programme to the British taxpayer, £6 billion in the late 1980s, has risen to £20 billion.
And all this money has been spent on a piece of equipment that is of extremely limited military use. It became clear early on in the project’s life that the highly manoeuvrable dog-fighting aircraft originally envisaged was not what was required, and the plane was rejigged (at great expense) as an air-to-air missile platform. But this role itself became effectively obsolete as soon as the Cold War came to an end. Suddenly, there was no potential enemy against whom an advanced air-to-air combat aircraft might be useful.
This was an obvious point to cancel the whole project. Instead, although the Germans came close to pulling the plug, Eurofighter was rejigged again as a ground-attack aircraft — a role for which it is not really suited, which is reflected in the amazing fact that the ground-attack version might not be ready for squadron service for more than another decade.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole story — though this was barely touched upon by Lomax — is the cross-party support that this white elephant has enjoyed since the late 1980s. Labour originally opposed the project, but this stance, like nuclear disarmament, was one of the casualties of Neil Kinnock’s policy review, and by the mid-1990s Labour was an out-and-out enthusiast. David Clark, then the party’s defence spokesman, kept a model Eurofighter on his desk, and Tony Blair enthisastically endorsed the plane as “the cornerstone of the RAF’s capability as we enter the next century”.
Of course, Labour didn’t want to look soft on defence — and of course there are quite a few British jobs in the Eurofighter (its supporters claim 14,000), many of them in marginal Labour constituencies in the north-west of England.
But £20 billion, the bill for the Eurofighter, would generate substantial employment however it were spent — and there’s absolutely no reason it couldn’t have been put towards something useful: railway infrastructure, hospitals, schools, military helicopters or whatever. As it is, it’s difficult to disagree with the verdict of John Nott, the Tories’ Secretary of State for Defence in the early 1980s, who gave the scheme the initial go-ahead. “It was my biggest mistake,” he told Lomax, “a complete waste of money.”
Journalists at the BBC are understandably nervous that their managers will react to expected criticism in the Hutton report by putting the dampers on critical and politically sensitive journalism. But they haven’t done so yet, as an excellent current affairs documentary on Radio Four, Eurofighter: The Plane Truth, presented by David Lomax, demonstrated this week (for audio click here).
The Eurofighter is one of the greatest unsung scandals of contemporary Britain — an aircraft designed to do something that is no longer necessary, which does not work properly and has cost billions of taxpayers’ money. Lomax’s documentary, made with only the most minimal co-operation from either BAe Systems, the main British Eurofighter contractor, or the Ministry of Defence, was a stunning expose of the whole farce.
Eurofighter made a certain amount of military sense when the plans that transmuted into the project were conceived in Britain in the late 1970s. The Cold War was at its height, and the Soviet Union had developed advanced fighters capable of outperforming anything the RAF possessed. A new fighter capable of matching these aircraft in high-altitude dog-fighting seemed a high priority. And, given the costs of developing advanced military aircraft and the perceived need not to rely wholly on the US for military procurement, it made economic and political sense to opt for a European collaborative effort to design and build it.
Even before the programme was actually started, however, the military rationale had all but disappeared. Dog-fighting fighters were effectively rendered obsolete by the development of smart air-to-air missiles in the early 1980s. But the then Conservative Government, under pressure from the RAF and, more importantly, from defence manufacturers desperate for big contracts, particularly British Aerospace, decided to go ahead; and, with Michael Heseltine as Secretary of State for Defence, the project soon evolved into a flagship for West European military-industrial co-operation between Britain and Germany, with Italy and Spain as junior partners. (France had initially been Britain’s major partner but withdrew at an early stage and built its own fighter, the Dassault Rafaele.)
Since then, as Lomax made clear, the story of the Eurofighter has been one of technical hitches, international squabbles, delays and ever-spiralling costs. The original plan was for it to enter service in 1992, but it is only now that the first few aircraft have been delivered (and they can hardly be described as operational because of technical problems). The estimated likely cost of the programme to the British taxpayer, £6 billion in the late 1980s, has risen to £20 billion.
And all this money has been spent on a piece of equipment that is of extremely limited military use. It became clear early on in the project’s life that the highly manoeuvrable dog-fighting aircraft originally envisaged was not what was required, and the plane was rejigged (at great expense) as an air-to-air missile platform. But this role itself became effectively obsolete as soon as the Cold War came to an end. Suddenly, there was no potential enemy against whom an advanced air-to-air combat aircraft might be useful.
This was an obvious point to cancel the whole project. Instead, although the Germans came close to pulling the plug, Eurofighter was rejigged again as a ground-attack aircraft — a role for which it is not really suited, which is reflected in the amazing fact that the ground-attack version might not be ready for squadron service for more than another decade.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole story — though this was barely touched upon by Lomax — is the cross-party support that this white elephant has enjoyed since the late 1980s. Labour originally opposed the project, but this stance, like nuclear disarmament, was one of the casualties of Neil Kinnock’s policy review, and by the mid-1990s Labour was an out-and-out enthusiast. David Clark, then the party’s defence spokesman, kept a model Eurofighter on his desk, and Tony Blair enthisastically endorsed the plane as “the cornerstone of the RAF’s capability as we enter the next century”.
Of course, Labour didn’t want to look soft on defence — and of course there are quite a few British jobs in the Eurofighter (its supporters claim 14,000), many of them in marginal Labour constituencies in the north-west of England.
But £20 billion, the bill for the Eurofighter, would generate substantial employment however it were spent — and there’s absolutely no reason it couldn’t have been put towards something useful: railway infrastructure, hospitals, schools, military helicopters or whatever. As it is, it’s difficult to disagree with the verdict of John Nott, the Tories’ Secretary of State for Defence in the early 1980s, who gave the scheme the initial go-ahead. “It was my biggest mistake,” he told Lomax, “a complete waste of money.”
Wednesday, 17 December 2003
TOP-UP FEES ARE NOT SUCH A BAD IDEA
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, December 12 2003
I'm not sure whether, in the current climate, this will get me fired as a Tribune columnist — but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been coming round to the idea that top-up fees are not such a bad thing.
My main job, these days, is as a lecturer in City University’s journalism department, and I know from personal experience that higher education needs more money and needs it at once.
My department deservedly has a very good reputation. Most of its graduates get decent jobs when they qualify, and the majority go on to pursue successful careers in journalism — a tribute both to the quality of our students and to the expertise, commitment and hard work of my colleagues.
But, despite its success and reputation, journalism at City is seriously short of cash. The space we occupy is cramped, overcrowded and decrepit; we don’t have enough computers and other equipment; and the salaries of lecturers have been falling behind those of journalists on newspapers and magazines and in the broadcasting media (from among whom we necessarily recruit our teaching staff) for years.
I’m sure the department can survive for some time yet making up for lack of resources with enthusiasm and hard work. But eventually it will reach breaking point — most likely, I reckon, when it becomes impossible to recruit lecturers to replace those that leave or retire or impossible to afford industry-standard technology.
The picture in other university departments is much, much bleaker. After more than a decade of relentless expansion of student numbers with little or no increase in funding, they are at breaking point already. Unless they get an influx of cash, and quick, they will not be able to continue to function.
So what should be done to relieve the university funding crisis? The Tories reckon that the answer is not to find any more money but to slash the number of students in higher education — a position echoed in last week’s Tribune by Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham who is a prominent top-up fees rebel, with his contention that on current trends, “a serious over-supply of graduates ... will be competing for a limited supply of graduate jobs”.
I’m sceptical about this line of argument for two reasons. First, I hold the old-fashioned socialist view that a university education is a good thing in itself, and that a civilised society should aspire to make one available to everyone capable of benefiting from one — which in my opinion means at very least the 50 per cent of 18- to 30-year-olds the government wants in higher education. And second, it’s plain nonsense to think that we are anwhere near the limit of the economy’s ability to provide employment for graduates. There will always, of course, be a demand for plumbers and brickies and cleaners and so forth — but Britain’s only hope for prosperity in the globalised economy is an increasingly educated and skilled workforce.
So the universities need more cash. Where should it come from? General taxation is an option, and the Liberal Democrats have a coherent plan for bailing out higher education with a new top rate of income tax. One problem here, of course, is that overtly raising general taxation is anathema to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown: it just won’t happen. Another is that a simple increase in general taxation would not guarantee a continuing income stream to the universities: it would have to be hypothecated to prevent the Treasury diverting it elsewhere at some point in the future when university funding is not the flavour of the month.
A graduate tax (which would also have to be hypothecated) would be less of a problem politically. But it wouldn’t raise any money for years unless it were imposed on everyone who has ever taken a degree — a great idea in principle, though it immediately runs into the insurmountableproblem that the Inland Revenue has no way of identifying which taxpayers are graduates and which are not.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve been driven reluctantly to the conclusion that top-up fees have three serious advantages over the other options that have been floated. First, they are politically feasible: they do not offend against New Labour’s antipathy to overt increases in taxation, and there is no obvious practical obstacle to their implementation. Second, they deliver money at onceto the universities. And third, they will continue to deliver money to the universities regardless of future Treasury whims.
This is not to say that top-up fees are perfect. The government’s current plans might evolve towards allowing universities to charge what they like, which would genuinely create a two-tier higher education system in which elite institutions effectively exclude debt-averse working-class students. As the scheme now stands, however, the debts involved will be small, interest-free and repayable only when graduates are reasonably well-off. I’m sorry, but as a way of getting money into the universities, it’s rather neat.
I'm not sure whether, in the current climate, this will get me fired as a Tribune columnist — but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been coming round to the idea that top-up fees are not such a bad thing.
My main job, these days, is as a lecturer in City University’s journalism department, and I know from personal experience that higher education needs more money and needs it at once.
My department deservedly has a very good reputation. Most of its graduates get decent jobs when they qualify, and the majority go on to pursue successful careers in journalism — a tribute both to the quality of our students and to the expertise, commitment and hard work of my colleagues.
But, despite its success and reputation, journalism at City is seriously short of cash. The space we occupy is cramped, overcrowded and decrepit; we don’t have enough computers and other equipment; and the salaries of lecturers have been falling behind those of journalists on newspapers and magazines and in the broadcasting media (from among whom we necessarily recruit our teaching staff) for years.
I’m sure the department can survive for some time yet making up for lack of resources with enthusiasm and hard work. But eventually it will reach breaking point — most likely, I reckon, when it becomes impossible to recruit lecturers to replace those that leave or retire or impossible to afford industry-standard technology.
The picture in other university departments is much, much bleaker. After more than a decade of relentless expansion of student numbers with little or no increase in funding, they are at breaking point already. Unless they get an influx of cash, and quick, they will not be able to continue to function.
So what should be done to relieve the university funding crisis? The Tories reckon that the answer is not to find any more money but to slash the number of students in higher education — a position echoed in last week’s Tribune by Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham who is a prominent top-up fees rebel, with his contention that on current trends, “a serious over-supply of graduates ... will be competing for a limited supply of graduate jobs”.
I’m sceptical about this line of argument for two reasons. First, I hold the old-fashioned socialist view that a university education is a good thing in itself, and that a civilised society should aspire to make one available to everyone capable of benefiting from one — which in my opinion means at very least the 50 per cent of 18- to 30-year-olds the government wants in higher education. And second, it’s plain nonsense to think that we are anwhere near the limit of the economy’s ability to provide employment for graduates. There will always, of course, be a demand for plumbers and brickies and cleaners and so forth — but Britain’s only hope for prosperity in the globalised economy is an increasingly educated and skilled workforce.
So the universities need more cash. Where should it come from? General taxation is an option, and the Liberal Democrats have a coherent plan for bailing out higher education with a new top rate of income tax. One problem here, of course, is that overtly raising general taxation is anathema to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown: it just won’t happen. Another is that a simple increase in general taxation would not guarantee a continuing income stream to the universities: it would have to be hypothecated to prevent the Treasury diverting it elsewhere at some point in the future when university funding is not the flavour of the month.
A graduate tax (which would also have to be hypothecated) would be less of a problem politically. But it wouldn’t raise any money for years unless it were imposed on everyone who has ever taken a degree — a great idea in principle, though it immediately runs into the insurmountableproblem that the Inland Revenue has no way of identifying which taxpayers are graduates and which are not.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve been driven reluctantly to the conclusion that top-up fees have three serious advantages over the other options that have been floated. First, they are politically feasible: they do not offend against New Labour’s antipathy to overt increases in taxation, and there is no obvious practical obstacle to their implementation. Second, they deliver money at onceto the universities. And third, they will continue to deliver money to the universities regardless of future Treasury whims.
This is not to say that top-up fees are perfect. The government’s current plans might evolve towards allowing universities to charge what they like, which would genuinely create a two-tier higher education system in which elite institutions effectively exclude debt-averse working-class students. As the scheme now stands, however, the debts involved will be small, interest-free and repayable only when graduates are reasonably well-off. I’m sorry, but as a way of getting money into the universities, it’s rather neat.
Tuesday, 11 November 2003
BROWN IS NOT A LEFT ALTERNATIVE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, November 15 2003
Last week’s public spat between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair was about more than Brown’s displeasure at Blair’s refusal to give him a seat on Labour’s National Executive Committee — and it was about more than Brown’s opposition to identity cards or indeed his bizarre flirtation with Euroscepticism in the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
On this, everyone agrees. But how much more is difficult to judge. Was Brown merely asserting his status as the second-biggest beast in the Labour jungle after his return from paternity leave, with a view to (depending on your taste) grabbing a key role in writing Labour’s next manifesto, stopping Ken Livingstone’s return to Labour or stemming Peter Mandelson’s growing influence in Number Ten? Or was his display the start of an attempt to oust Blair as prime minister and take his place?
In common with every other commentator who has addressed these crucial questions, I can’t read Brown’s mind. But I suspect that he wasn’t going for broke.
However much he covets Blair’s job, it’s difficult to imagine circumstances before the next election in which he could mount a challenge. Blair’s standing inside the Labour Party is certainly at its lowest since he became leader in 1994. Brown is certainly the obvious alternative leader. But unless Blair is knocked down by the proverbial bus, discovered in flagrante with Prince Charles or branded an inveterate liar by Lord Hutton, the next ocassion on which he could be challenged for the Labour leadership is next year’s party conference — by which point Labour will be in pre-election mode.
Whatever else can be said about Brown, he is not stupid. So hunch says that last week’s shenanigans were less the start of an outright Brown bid for the leadership than a bit of opportunist self-promotion, a reminder to the world that the Chancellor remains the heir apparent, that he has ideas of his own that differ significantly from Blair’s — and that he is insistent on having a decisive influence on the manifesto, the career prospects of Red Ken and Mandy and anything else that crops up. In other words, it’s back to business as usual.
All the same, Brown did give the appearance of having lost patience with Blair, and it’s this, rather than any evidence that Brown is moving in for the kill, that has got everyone talking again about what Brown might be like as Prime Minister.
Here I have a confession to make. Ever since Blair became Labour leader in 1994, I’ve found it difficult to understand why a substantial number of Labour leftists — including the editor of Tribune and quite a few contributors — think that Brown would be significantly more sympathetic than Blair to their various causes.
Of course, Brown was, in the dim and distant past, very much of the left (though he was always a pragmatist too). And, unlike Blair, he is steeped in the traditions of This Great Movement of Ours. He speaks the lingo fluently and is rivalled as a glad-hander of trade union bureaucrats only by John Prescott.
Most important, Brown has so far been a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer in terms both of macroeconomic management (six-and-a-half years of reasonable growth, low unemployment and no currency crisis) and, to a lesser extent, of social democratic redistribution. Although his stealth strategy has done nothing to stop the increasing ineqaulity of British society, it has at least helped some of the worst-off.
But there is not a shred of evidence that Brown has been to the left of Blair in any substantive way since at least 1992. In opposition from 1992 to 1997, Brown and Blair were together responsible for the ultra-cautious, pro-business strategy that was branded “New Labour” after Blair became leader. In government, Brown has not only been the author of many keynote policies — the 1997-99 spending squeeze and 1999-2003 spending splurge, the expansion of the Private Finance Initative, the welfare-to-work programme, the five tests on British membership of the euro — but has been intimately involved in every area of policy that entails spending money. He has been as enthusiastic as Blair for labour market deregulation and private enterprise, as admiring of the American model of capitalism and as disparaging of the European model. Where Brown has differed with Blair, on the euro and on foundation hospitals for example, it has not been because he sees Blair’s position as too right-wing.
Brown has said nothing to disassociate himself from the authoritarian populism of the government’s crime and immigration policies, nothing to suggest that he supports further constitutional reform, and nothing to hint that he’d prefer a less pro-American foreign policy than Blair has pursued. The left is deluding itself if it sees Brown as the champion of anything other than Blairism with a scowling face.
Last week’s public spat between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair was about more than Brown’s displeasure at Blair’s refusal to give him a seat on Labour’s National Executive Committee — and it was about more than Brown’s opposition to identity cards or indeed his bizarre flirtation with Euroscepticism in the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
On this, everyone agrees. But how much more is difficult to judge. Was Brown merely asserting his status as the second-biggest beast in the Labour jungle after his return from paternity leave, with a view to (depending on your taste) grabbing a key role in writing Labour’s next manifesto, stopping Ken Livingstone’s return to Labour or stemming Peter Mandelson’s growing influence in Number Ten? Or was his display the start of an attempt to oust Blair as prime minister and take his place?
In common with every other commentator who has addressed these crucial questions, I can’t read Brown’s mind. But I suspect that he wasn’t going for broke.
However much he covets Blair’s job, it’s difficult to imagine circumstances before the next election in which he could mount a challenge. Blair’s standing inside the Labour Party is certainly at its lowest since he became leader in 1994. Brown is certainly the obvious alternative leader. But unless Blair is knocked down by the proverbial bus, discovered in flagrante with Prince Charles or branded an inveterate liar by Lord Hutton, the next ocassion on which he could be challenged for the Labour leadership is next year’s party conference — by which point Labour will be in pre-election mode.
Whatever else can be said about Brown, he is not stupid. So hunch says that last week’s shenanigans were less the start of an outright Brown bid for the leadership than a bit of opportunist self-promotion, a reminder to the world that the Chancellor remains the heir apparent, that he has ideas of his own that differ significantly from Blair’s — and that he is insistent on having a decisive influence on the manifesto, the career prospects of Red Ken and Mandy and anything else that crops up. In other words, it’s back to business as usual.
All the same, Brown did give the appearance of having lost patience with Blair, and it’s this, rather than any evidence that Brown is moving in for the kill, that has got everyone talking again about what Brown might be like as Prime Minister.
Here I have a confession to make. Ever since Blair became Labour leader in 1994, I’ve found it difficult to understand why a substantial number of Labour leftists — including the editor of Tribune and quite a few contributors — think that Brown would be significantly more sympathetic than Blair to their various causes.
Of course, Brown was, in the dim and distant past, very much of the left (though he was always a pragmatist too). And, unlike Blair, he is steeped in the traditions of This Great Movement of Ours. He speaks the lingo fluently and is rivalled as a glad-hander of trade union bureaucrats only by John Prescott.
Most important, Brown has so far been a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer in terms both of macroeconomic management (six-and-a-half years of reasonable growth, low unemployment and no currency crisis) and, to a lesser extent, of social democratic redistribution. Although his stealth strategy has done nothing to stop the increasing ineqaulity of British society, it has at least helped some of the worst-off.
But there is not a shred of evidence that Brown has been to the left of Blair in any substantive way since at least 1992. In opposition from 1992 to 1997, Brown and Blair were together responsible for the ultra-cautious, pro-business strategy that was branded “New Labour” after Blair became leader. In government, Brown has not only been the author of many keynote policies — the 1997-99 spending squeeze and 1999-2003 spending splurge, the expansion of the Private Finance Initative, the welfare-to-work programme, the five tests on British membership of the euro — but has been intimately involved in every area of policy that entails spending money. He has been as enthusiastic as Blair for labour market deregulation and private enterprise, as admiring of the American model of capitalism and as disparaging of the European model. Where Brown has differed with Blair, on the euro and on foundation hospitals for example, it has not been because he sees Blair’s position as too right-wing.
Brown has said nothing to disassociate himself from the authoritarian populism of the government’s crime and immigration policies, nothing to suggest that he supports further constitutional reform, and nothing to hint that he’d prefer a less pro-American foreign policy than Blair has pursued. The left is deluding itself if it sees Brown as the champion of anything other than Blairism with a scowling face.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)