Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 19 May 2006
OK, and now for something to cheer you all up. It’s this magazine’s 70th birthday in six months and I’ve been spending some time beefing up on the history for a collection of George Orwell’s columns for Tribune that — with a bit of luck — should be appearing in time for the celebrations. In the meantime, here’s a quiz, and the first two correct answers to me get free copies of the Orwell book. Answers by snail-mail to Tribune Quiz, Tribune, 9 Arkwright Road, London NW3 6AN or (preferably) by email to tribunequiz@yahoo.co.uk.
1. Which Tribune editor had a younger brother who became the head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency?
2. When was the Tribune Group set up?
3. George Orwell was literary editor of Tribune from 1943 to 1945. What was his next job after he left the staff?
4. Which Tribune editor became news editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Times?
5. Which founder member of the Tribune board was interned as a Nazi sympathiser during the second world war?
6. Why did the headline “Lower than Kemsley” nearly put Tribune out of business?
7. Which former Tribune editors have been accused by the Sunday Times of being Soviet “agents of influence”?
8. How long was Sheila Noble the person who really ran Tribune — I mean editorial secretary and then production manager?
9. Which senior Tribune journalist of the 1940s became a regular contributor to the pornographic magazine Penthouse in the 1970s?
10. Who was the lover of Tribune’s first editor, William Mellor?
11. Which two Labour MPs put up the money to launch Tribune in 1937 and how much did they lose in their first year?
12. What did Douglas Hill do when he was not editing the Tribune reviews pages?
13. Five people who at Tribune’s launch were either journalists on the paper or members of its board became Labour cabinet ministers. Name them.
14. Three Tribune editors also edited Fleet Street newspapers at different times of their lives. Name them.
15. Which Tribune editor founded the Good Food Guide?
16. Three Tribune editors were MPs before, during or after their spells as editor. Name them.
17. Two Tribune editors also worked on the staff of the New Statesman. Name them.
18. In which year did the headline “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” appear on the front page?
19. Which Tribune editor now works for Al-Jazeera in New York?
20. Who was Thomas Rainsboro’?
Right, that’s enough fun: on to the real business, which of course is Gordon and Tony. No, I don’t mean it. I’m sick of the pair of them, bored with the endless wrangling, can’t see the difference between them. Whether GB has shafted TB or TB has shafted GB doesn’t mean very much to me. What I want to see is a coherent left-of-centre Labour Party with some sense of where it’s going, and I’m not getting a lot of it.
But TB/GB is unavoidable. Now Charles Clarke is out of the running, I’m reluctantly prepared to accept that there is no alternative to Brown as Labour leader after Blair. But Brown can’t take over now: he’s not up to it. And he has got to get his act up to speed pretty fast if he is going to be more than a Jim Callaghan, hanging on for a couple of years before losing to the Tories. He has the numbers in the party to be a shoo-in as leader when Blair goes (I always said 2007, incidentally) but the numbers aren’t what matter now: he needs to inspire the voters with a programme for what happens next.
He’s fine on the vision thing with the party — African babies are lovely — but it all looks too much like a 1980s Anti-Apartheid photo-call run by the Communist Party. So far, he’s probably done enough to retain or regain the “Bush is evil” crew for Labour. But he hasn’t so far worked out how to woo middle-class mums who aren’t averse to doing the right thing in Africa but worry about getting little Jemima into a decent school. Nor does he ring the bell for geezers in the boozer cheering for England.
I’m not bashing Gordon: I’m reconciled, really I am. The point is that he’s got to become much more of a man of the people if he’s going to make a success of it. The idiotic way of doing that would be to echo the law-and-ordure slogans that are the last resort of the Blair claque. But that would just piss off the party. I hope he finds an alternative.
QUIZ ANSWERS
1. Jon Kimche (1909-94) was Tribune assistant editor 1943-45 and joint editor 1946-48. His brother David, who emigrated to Israel and with whom he co-authored two books, joined Mossad, the Israeli secret service, rising to become its deputy director in the 1970s, and was director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry 1980-87.
2. In 1964.
3. He briefly became a war correspondent for the Observer.
4. Nigel Williamson (editor 1984-87) left Tribune to become editor of Labour Party News, Labour's magazine for members, then moved to The Times. He now writes on rock music for several publications.
5. Ben Greene, first cousin of the novelist Graham Greene, was invited on to the Tribune board because of his leading role in the campaign to reform the Labour Party constitution to give constituency parties greater representation on the party's ruling National Executive Committee, which fmally got its way in 1937. He did not last long on the Tribune board – he resigned in March 1937 – but the main reason he is not mentioned in most memoirs of the paper's early days is that he became a vociferous supporter of Hitler. In 1939, he became treasurer of the tiny anti-semitic and pro-Nazi British People's Party; and he was interned during the Second World War.
6. Lord Kemsley, proprietor of the Sunday Times, the Daily Sketch and a chain of regional newspapers, sued Tribune for libel and won. Tribune was bailed out secretly by Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express.
7. Michael Foot (editor 1948-52, 1955-60) and Dick Clements (editor 1960-82) were both named as Soviet 'agents of influence' by the Sunday Times in the 1990s. Foot sued for libel, won, and gave a substantial donation to Tribune (as well as having his kitchen done).
8. Sheila Noble was editorial secretary and then production manager from 1964 to 1994.
9. Frederic Mullally, assistant editor 1945-47.
10. Barbara Betts (later Castle)
11. Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss. They lost £20,000 in the first year - almost £1 million in today's money.
12. He was and is a science fiction author. He was voted most popular children's author in a (pre-Harry Potter) poll in the Guardian.
13. Sir Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan, Ellen Wilkinson, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle.
14. William Mellor (editor, Daily Herald, 1926-30, Tribune 1937-38), Michael Foot (editor, Evening Standard, 1942-44, Tribune 1948-52 and 1955-60), Bob Edwards (editor Tribune 1952-55, Daily Express, 1961 and 1964-65, People, 1966-72, Sunday Mirror, 1972-84).
15. Raymond Postgate (editor 1940-41).
16. Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot, Chris Mullin.
17. Michael Foot, Paul Anderson.
18. It appeared in 1988 - and within a week readers had donated £40,000 to rescue the paper.
19. Mark Seddon (editor 1993-2004).
20. Frank Owen, who in 1942 wrote a series of articles for Tribune criticising the Churchill Government's conduct of the war which caused a sensation. Owen (1905-79) was editor of the Evening Standard (1937-41) and co-author with Michael Foot and Peter Howard, using the collective pseudonym of "Cato", of Guilty Men, the 1940 pamphlet attacking the late-1930s policy of appeasement that became an instant best-seller.
Saturday, 20 May 2006
Friday, 14 April 2006
BERLUSCONI IS A DISGRACE
Tribune column, 14 April 2006
If, as seems likely, Silvio Berlusconi is on his way out as Italian prime minister, it will soon be time to crack open a bottle in celebration.
Of course, it’s not clear that we have seen the back of him: as I write, he is refusing to concede defeat and demanding that spoilt votes be recounted. But as things stand it appears that the centre-left has beaten him. And that is a Good Thing.
It’s not that Romano Prodi, the leader of the centre-left, is the answer to all of Italy’s dreams. He’s a dull cove, familiar from his none-too-successful stints as Italian PM in the late 1990s and then as president of the European Commission until 18 months ago. Nor is Prodi’s coalition too promising: it takes in everyone from bits of the old Christian Democrat centre-right to bits of the hardcore Leninist left, and it’s as unstable as unstable can be. Just about all that the disparate elements of Prodi’s supporting cast agree on is that they want Berlusconi out. The narrowness of the centre-left’s victory – if victory it is – is also something of a surprise: the opinion polls taken before the poll-free end of the campaign had suggested that the centre-left had a clear lead. This too could make life difficult for Prodi, particularly in the upper house of parliament.
But Prodi is (a) a democrat; (b) a moderate social reformer; (c) not a media magnate; and (d) not, as far as we know, a crook. Even if he runs an incompetent administration that fails miserably to address any of Italy’s problems, he starts with advantages over Berlusconi.
Berlusconi is – I hope was – a disgrace to democratic politics. He made his way to the top in business during the 1970s and 1980s by developing an unhealthily close relationship with Bettino Craxi’s Socialist Party, which was then in power as the minor partner in a coalition dominated by the Christian Democrats. Craxi in turn gave him the breaks to become effective controller of commercial television in Italy. Under investigation for corruption and with his old allies on the ropes, Berlusconi in 1994 made one of the most cynical entries into electoral politics a media baron has ever made, using his media empire to create and promote – from nothing – a populist right-wing party, Forza Italia, that won the subsequent general election in coalition with the separatist Northern League and the post-fascist National Alliance.
His first administration soon collapsed, and Berlusconi made way for the centre-left, which won the 1996 general election. But he was back in 2001 – despite having several corruption charges outstanding – and for the past five years has ruled the roost through patronage and bullying, again in league with the National Alliance.
The most disgraceful thing about Berlusconi is not however his manner, his friends or indeed his business methods. It is the fact that, as prime minister, he has controlled something like 90 per cent of Italian broadcasting, owning three channels and appointing the controllers of state broadcasting. Such a concentration of media power makes a mockery of democracy – and breaking it down should be one of Prodi’s most urgent tasks.
* * *
On the domestic front, all the hoo-hah over Adair Turner’s proposals on pensions has got me thinking about how I’m going to survive in my old age. And after looking at the statement from my pension scheme, I reckon that I’m going to be one of those pensioners who have to rely on the state pension and means-tested benefits. After 25 years of working my occupational pension is utterly pathetic. Now, that might change in the next 20 years if I stick in the same scheme and keep up the payments – but it might not even then, and I can’t really see the point of saving like crazy if all it’s going to mean is that I’m not entitled to means-tested benefits.
OK, if I give up on saving completely, I’m vulnerable to a future government changing the pensions regime to remove means-testing. But as things stand I am one of many people who feel a disincentive to save because I think it will probably be all right on the night. To read much of the commentary on the future of pensions, you’d think I was the lowest form of life. Virtuous people are thrifty people who put money aside and never become a burden on the state. I can’t be bothered to save because I reckon that hard-working taxpayers will bail me out in the end.
Could anything be more degenerate? But I look at it another way. Were it not for us non-savers, the British economy would be in a far worse state. The high levels of consumer demand we sustain keep millions in work. Surely our selfless consumption should be rewarded generously when we hit 65?
If, as seems likely, Silvio Berlusconi is on his way out as Italian prime minister, it will soon be time to crack open a bottle in celebration.
Of course, it’s not clear that we have seen the back of him: as I write, he is refusing to concede defeat and demanding that spoilt votes be recounted. But as things stand it appears that the centre-left has beaten him. And that is a Good Thing.
It’s not that Romano Prodi, the leader of the centre-left, is the answer to all of Italy’s dreams. He’s a dull cove, familiar from his none-too-successful stints as Italian PM in the late 1990s and then as president of the European Commission until 18 months ago. Nor is Prodi’s coalition too promising: it takes in everyone from bits of the old Christian Democrat centre-right to bits of the hardcore Leninist left, and it’s as unstable as unstable can be. Just about all that the disparate elements of Prodi’s supporting cast agree on is that they want Berlusconi out. The narrowness of the centre-left’s victory – if victory it is – is also something of a surprise: the opinion polls taken before the poll-free end of the campaign had suggested that the centre-left had a clear lead. This too could make life difficult for Prodi, particularly in the upper house of parliament.
But Prodi is (a) a democrat; (b) a moderate social reformer; (c) not a media magnate; and (d) not, as far as we know, a crook. Even if he runs an incompetent administration that fails miserably to address any of Italy’s problems, he starts with advantages over Berlusconi.
Berlusconi is – I hope was – a disgrace to democratic politics. He made his way to the top in business during the 1970s and 1980s by developing an unhealthily close relationship with Bettino Craxi’s Socialist Party, which was then in power as the minor partner in a coalition dominated by the Christian Democrats. Craxi in turn gave him the breaks to become effective controller of commercial television in Italy. Under investigation for corruption and with his old allies on the ropes, Berlusconi in 1994 made one of the most cynical entries into electoral politics a media baron has ever made, using his media empire to create and promote – from nothing – a populist right-wing party, Forza Italia, that won the subsequent general election in coalition with the separatist Northern League and the post-fascist National Alliance.
His first administration soon collapsed, and Berlusconi made way for the centre-left, which won the 1996 general election. But he was back in 2001 – despite having several corruption charges outstanding – and for the past five years has ruled the roost through patronage and bullying, again in league with the National Alliance.
The most disgraceful thing about Berlusconi is not however his manner, his friends or indeed his business methods. It is the fact that, as prime minister, he has controlled something like 90 per cent of Italian broadcasting, owning three channels and appointing the controllers of state broadcasting. Such a concentration of media power makes a mockery of democracy – and breaking it down should be one of Prodi’s most urgent tasks.
* * *
On the domestic front, all the hoo-hah over Adair Turner’s proposals on pensions has got me thinking about how I’m going to survive in my old age. And after looking at the statement from my pension scheme, I reckon that I’m going to be one of those pensioners who have to rely on the state pension and means-tested benefits. After 25 years of working my occupational pension is utterly pathetic. Now, that might change in the next 20 years if I stick in the same scheme and keep up the payments – but it might not even then, and I can’t really see the point of saving like crazy if all it’s going to mean is that I’m not entitled to means-tested benefits.
OK, if I give up on saving completely, I’m vulnerable to a future government changing the pensions regime to remove means-testing. But as things stand I am one of many people who feel a disincentive to save because I think it will probably be all right on the night. To read much of the commentary on the future of pensions, you’d think I was the lowest form of life. Virtuous people are thrifty people who put money aside and never become a burden on the state. I can’t be bothered to save because I reckon that hard-working taxpayers will bail me out in the end.
Could anything be more degenerate? But I look at it another way. Were it not for us non-savers, the British economy would be in a far worse state. The high levels of consumer demand we sustain keep millions in work. Surely our selfless consumption should be rewarded generously when we hit 65?
Friday, 17 March 2006
THE BEST BLOGS ARE AGAINST THE GRAIN
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 March 2006
The big media news in my world this week wasn’t the white paper on the future of the BBC but the launch by the Guardian of its group blog, Comment is Free, where writers from the paper’s comment pages and assorted others sound off about whatever takes their (or the blog editor’s) fancy.
Comment is Free is a novel idea that shows yet again how seriously the Guardian takes online. The paper has been a consistent pioneer in web publishing. It was one of the first newspapers to go online and its website, Guardian Unlimited, has for several years been one of the biggest, best and most visited newspaper websites in the world.
Unlike many of its rivals, it carries everything from the print edition of the paper for free, and it doesn’t limit access to a few days. Guardian Unlimited was a pioneer in offering email alerts and text message services to readers and one of the first newspaper websites to experiment with blogging.
But Comment is Free – it gets its name from the dictum of C. P. Scott, editor of the Guardian from 1871 to 1929, that “comment is free but facts are sacred” – is a big step into the unknown. For the first time, a newspaper has gone for the current affairs bloggers’ natural territory, the instant publication of opinion on events as they happen. Here I should declare a couple of small interests. I work on the Guardian comment pages as a sub-editor and have no desire to lose the gig – and I have a blog of my own, Gauche, at www.libsoc.blogspot.com.
The Guardian has several big advantages over most current affairs bloggers. It has dozens of professional journalists who are paid to write on every topic under the sun. It has a team of sub-editors to correct their factual errors and stylistic infelicities. And it can pay freelance contributors – which makes commissioning easy.
But will it work? It is, of course, too early to tell. As I write, Comment is Free has been up and running a little more than 24 hours. My first impression is that it’s rather good – but that it doesn’t quite do what the best current affairs blogs do.
Most current affairs blogs are run by individuals or small groups with a bee (or several bees) in their bonnets. They are the work of enthusiasts who feel – rightly or wrongly – that their views are not getting a fair hearing in the mainstream press and on the airwaves. In Britain, for example, some of the best current affairs blogs have come from left-wingers at odds with the left consensus that it was wrong to topple Saddam Hussein: Normblog (normblog.typepad.com), Harry’s Place (hurryupharry.bloghouse.net), Oliver Kamm (oliverkamm.typepad.com).
Whether you agree with them or not, what makes them worth reading is precisely their iconoclasm, the fact that they are against the grain. The problem with Comment is Free is that the Guardian regulars who are the mainstay of the site, the columnists from the comment pages, are in this context not against the grain but the grain itself – and regular readers already have a pretty good idea of what they think about most of the key issues of the day. I’m not sure that reading them rehearsing their lines on the blog will become quite as addictive a habit as Harry’s Place or indeed the main Guardian Unlimited website. But we shall see.
* * *
On a different matter entirely, for a couple of days this week it felt as if the “Who killed Princess Di?” conspiracy theorists had met their match at last in loons asking: “Who killed Slobbo?” Even the BBC joined in for several hours, its website’s lead story headlined “Milosevic poisoned, says doctor” and then “Mystery over Milosevic death”.
Yet the only evidence that the death of Slobodan Milosevic was in any way suspicious is the discovery in a blood sample of traces of an antibiotic, the effects of which would have been to counter those of the heart disease medication he had been prescribed. This is odd, but the most plausible explanation for it is not that Milosevic was done away with by the forces of imperialism (or whatever) but that he was administering the antibiotic to himself in an attempt to persuade the authorities in The Hague that the treatment he was receiving for heart disease wasn’t working and that he would have to be sent to Moscow for treatment. A younger, fitter man might just have got away with it – but Slobbo the 62-year-old lard-arse could not.
Whatever, Milosevic will be mourned by no one at Tribune. Thanks to Mark Thompson, who started filing from Yugoslavia long before anyone else took serious notice of what was happening there, this paper had a head start on the story when Milosevic sent the tanks rolling. We were the first paper to denounce the appeasement of Milosevic by the then Tory government (which was supported by the Labour front bench, to its shame) and the first to demand military intervention by the US and Britain to stop him.
The big media news in my world this week wasn’t the white paper on the future of the BBC but the launch by the Guardian of its group blog, Comment is Free, where writers from the paper’s comment pages and assorted others sound off about whatever takes their (or the blog editor’s) fancy.
Comment is Free is a novel idea that shows yet again how seriously the Guardian takes online. The paper has been a consistent pioneer in web publishing. It was one of the first newspapers to go online and its website, Guardian Unlimited, has for several years been one of the biggest, best and most visited newspaper websites in the world.
Unlike many of its rivals, it carries everything from the print edition of the paper for free, and it doesn’t limit access to a few days. Guardian Unlimited was a pioneer in offering email alerts and text message services to readers and one of the first newspaper websites to experiment with blogging.
But Comment is Free – it gets its name from the dictum of C. P. Scott, editor of the Guardian from 1871 to 1929, that “comment is free but facts are sacred” – is a big step into the unknown. For the first time, a newspaper has gone for the current affairs bloggers’ natural territory, the instant publication of opinion on events as they happen. Here I should declare a couple of small interests. I work on the Guardian comment pages as a sub-editor and have no desire to lose the gig – and I have a blog of my own, Gauche, at www.libsoc.blogspot.com.
The Guardian has several big advantages over most current affairs bloggers. It has dozens of professional journalists who are paid to write on every topic under the sun. It has a team of sub-editors to correct their factual errors and stylistic infelicities. And it can pay freelance contributors – which makes commissioning easy.
But will it work? It is, of course, too early to tell. As I write, Comment is Free has been up and running a little more than 24 hours. My first impression is that it’s rather good – but that it doesn’t quite do what the best current affairs blogs do.
Most current affairs blogs are run by individuals or small groups with a bee (or several bees) in their bonnets. They are the work of enthusiasts who feel – rightly or wrongly – that their views are not getting a fair hearing in the mainstream press and on the airwaves. In Britain, for example, some of the best current affairs blogs have come from left-wingers at odds with the left consensus that it was wrong to topple Saddam Hussein: Normblog (normblog.typepad.com), Harry’s Place (hurryupharry.bloghouse.net), Oliver Kamm (oliverkamm.typepad.com).
Whether you agree with them or not, what makes them worth reading is precisely their iconoclasm, the fact that they are against the grain. The problem with Comment is Free is that the Guardian regulars who are the mainstay of the site, the columnists from the comment pages, are in this context not against the grain but the grain itself – and regular readers already have a pretty good idea of what they think about most of the key issues of the day. I’m not sure that reading them rehearsing their lines on the blog will become quite as addictive a habit as Harry’s Place or indeed the main Guardian Unlimited website. But we shall see.
* * *
On a different matter entirely, for a couple of days this week it felt as if the “Who killed Princess Di?” conspiracy theorists had met their match at last in loons asking: “Who killed Slobbo?” Even the BBC joined in for several hours, its website’s lead story headlined “Milosevic poisoned, says doctor” and then “Mystery over Milosevic death”.
Yet the only evidence that the death of Slobodan Milosevic was in any way suspicious is the discovery in a blood sample of traces of an antibiotic, the effects of which would have been to counter those of the heart disease medication he had been prescribed. This is odd, but the most plausible explanation for it is not that Milosevic was done away with by the forces of imperialism (or whatever) but that he was administering the antibiotic to himself in an attempt to persuade the authorities in The Hague that the treatment he was receiving for heart disease wasn’t working and that he would have to be sent to Moscow for treatment. A younger, fitter man might just have got away with it – but Slobbo the 62-year-old lard-arse could not.
Whatever, Milosevic will be mourned by no one at Tribune. Thanks to Mark Thompson, who started filing from Yugoslavia long before anyone else took serious notice of what was happening there, this paper had a head start on the story when Milosevic sent the tanks rolling. We were the first paper to denounce the appeasement of Milosevic by the then Tory government (which was supported by the Labour front bench, to its shame) and the first to demand military intervention by the US and Britain to stop him.
Sunday, 12 February 2006
RESPECT BELIEVERS, NOT THEIR BELIEFS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 10 January 2006
The hoo-hah over the publication of cartoon images of Muhammad has been so disproportionate that I’m almost apologetic about bringing it up in this column. Almost, but not quite — because someone has to make the point that the real story is the disproportionality of the hoo-hah.
The most remarkable thing about the cartoons published months ago in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten is that only one of them is funny — the one of the Prophet greeting the suicide bombers in Paradise with the words “Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins”. The rest of them are at best dull and at worst asinine — the one of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. But that might be because the origin of the cartoons was a complaint by a children’s author that illustrators would only work anonymously on a book explaining Islam to Danish kids for fear of violence from Islamist extremists. Maybe the cartoons weren’t supposed to be side-splittingly hilarious.
OK, the cartoons broke a Muslim prohibition on depicting the Prophet in illustrations. But so what? That prohibition has been broken inumerable times before without anyone making any fuss, not least by Muslims who don’t think it matters very much. More important, to state the obvious, it is not a prohibition most of the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists or the editors of Jyllands-Posten accept. And why should they, any more than they accept Muslim bans on eating pork or drinking alcohol or engaging in extra-marital sex?
All right, I admit that there is a difference, in that a devout Muslim in Copenhagen would not find it hard to avoid inadvertently munching bacon sandwiches, swigging beer or having sex but might easily inadvertently see the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten. Publishing, by definition, is not a simply matter of private behaviour.
It’s clear too, that Jyllands-Posten was deliberately attempting to provoke a reaction when it decided to publish, and by some accounts it seems to have been motivated by a rather crude antipathy to Islam.
I also accept that the cartoons might offend Muslims either because they include images of the Prophet or because a few of them (though by no means all) ridicule aspects of their faith — the ban on depicting the Prophet, the vision of Paradise, the doctrine of jihad (holy war).
But again, in the end, so what? Even if Jyllands-Posten’s provocation was gratuitous and unsophisticated — and I’m not convinced it was — it is entirely legitimate to ridicule religious belief. And much of Islam richly deserves ridicule. The same goes for Christianity, Judaism and every other religion. There is a long and distinguished tradition of ridiculing religion that goes back to the Enlightenment. And no one has the right not to be offended.
Which is not to say that Jyllands-Posten was right to publish the cartoons — just that it had a right to do so, and that that right is worth defending against the far-from-spontaneous expressions of Muslim outrage that swept the world last week. I would have expected Labour politicians in Britain to make this point emphatically and unambiguosly. Instead, we’ve had the grim spectacle of Jack Straw mumbling platitudes about how evil it is to give offence to believers and how important it is for editors to be “responsible”.
The British press has also played a far from glorious role in the affair. No newspaper has republished the cartoons — which is probably sensible given the hysteria whipped up against them by radical Islamists. Publication would place foreign correspondents and other Brits in severe danger in large swathes of the world.
But where were the clear expressions of the inalienable right to publish material offensive to religious believers? OK, there were a few in columns by the usual secularist suspects. The overwhelming majority of pundits and leader-writers opted for rambling on evasively about not pouring petrol on raging fires and the need to understand the depth of religious faith in the Islamic world. Only the Sun admitted — and then obliquely — that a major reason the papers didn’t publish is that they were scared that a Muslim boycott could harm sales.
This is not to suggest that secular democrats should abandon religious tolerance. Respect for the believer’s freedom to choose what he or she believes is another of the great legacies of the Enlightenment that deserves unconditional defence (against, among others, the most radical Islamists). But respect for the believer is not the same thing as respect for the believer’s belief. And if we can’t make it clear that this is a fundamental principle of our society, we’ve got a big problem.
The hoo-hah over the publication of cartoon images of Muhammad has been so disproportionate that I’m almost apologetic about bringing it up in this column. Almost, but not quite — because someone has to make the point that the real story is the disproportionality of the hoo-hah.
The most remarkable thing about the cartoons published months ago in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten is that only one of them is funny — the one of the Prophet greeting the suicide bombers in Paradise with the words “Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins”. The rest of them are at best dull and at worst asinine — the one of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. But that might be because the origin of the cartoons was a complaint by a children’s author that illustrators would only work anonymously on a book explaining Islam to Danish kids for fear of violence from Islamist extremists. Maybe the cartoons weren’t supposed to be side-splittingly hilarious.
OK, the cartoons broke a Muslim prohibition on depicting the Prophet in illustrations. But so what? That prohibition has been broken inumerable times before without anyone making any fuss, not least by Muslims who don’t think it matters very much. More important, to state the obvious, it is not a prohibition most of the Jyllands-Posten cartoonists or the editors of Jyllands-Posten accept. And why should they, any more than they accept Muslim bans on eating pork or drinking alcohol or engaging in extra-marital sex?
All right, I admit that there is a difference, in that a devout Muslim in Copenhagen would not find it hard to avoid inadvertently munching bacon sandwiches, swigging beer or having sex but might easily inadvertently see the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten. Publishing, by definition, is not a simply matter of private behaviour.
It’s clear too, that Jyllands-Posten was deliberately attempting to provoke a reaction when it decided to publish, and by some accounts it seems to have been motivated by a rather crude antipathy to Islam.
I also accept that the cartoons might offend Muslims either because they include images of the Prophet or because a few of them (though by no means all) ridicule aspects of their faith — the ban on depicting the Prophet, the vision of Paradise, the doctrine of jihad (holy war).
But again, in the end, so what? Even if Jyllands-Posten’s provocation was gratuitous and unsophisticated — and I’m not convinced it was — it is entirely legitimate to ridicule religious belief. And much of Islam richly deserves ridicule. The same goes for Christianity, Judaism and every other religion. There is a long and distinguished tradition of ridiculing religion that goes back to the Enlightenment. And no one has the right not to be offended.
Which is not to say that Jyllands-Posten was right to publish the cartoons — just that it had a right to do so, and that that right is worth defending against the far-from-spontaneous expressions of Muslim outrage that swept the world last week. I would have expected Labour politicians in Britain to make this point emphatically and unambiguosly. Instead, we’ve had the grim spectacle of Jack Straw mumbling platitudes about how evil it is to give offence to believers and how important it is for editors to be “responsible”.
The British press has also played a far from glorious role in the affair. No newspaper has republished the cartoons — which is probably sensible given the hysteria whipped up against them by radical Islamists. Publication would place foreign correspondents and other Brits in severe danger in large swathes of the world.
But where were the clear expressions of the inalienable right to publish material offensive to religious believers? OK, there were a few in columns by the usual secularist suspects. The overwhelming majority of pundits and leader-writers opted for rambling on evasively about not pouring petrol on raging fires and the need to understand the depth of religious faith in the Islamic world. Only the Sun admitted — and then obliquely — that a major reason the papers didn’t publish is that they were scared that a Muslim boycott could harm sales.
This is not to suggest that secular democrats should abandon religious tolerance. Respect for the believer’s freedom to choose what he or she believes is another of the great legacies of the Enlightenment that deserves unconditional defence (against, among others, the most radical Islamists). But respect for the believer is not the same thing as respect for the believer’s belief. And if we can’t make it clear that this is a fundamental principle of our society, we’ve got a big problem.
Thursday, 17 November 2005
WE'RE ALL LOSING OUR RELIGION
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 November 2005
I’m not a religious believer and haven’t been for a very long time — I think I must have come to the conclusion that god doesn’t exist when I was 12 or 13, and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.
It’s not a big thing in my family. Neither of my parents was at all religious, and the only serious believers among my close relations were my grandmother (who was married to an avowed militant atheist) and one aunt. My school was more of a problem: a minor public school, it insisted on compulsory chapel and RE, and during my early teenage years I was in regular small-scale trouble for talking during chapel (for which the penalty was cleaning the first XV’s rugby boots) and for being rude to teachers in RE lessons.
What the hell: by the time I was 15, the school had relaxed about compulsory chapel and RE and much else besides — in the sixth form one liberal teacher even put on a showing of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If ..., in which Malcolm McDowell leads an armed uprising in an authoritarian C of E boarding school — and since then the only times I’ve suffered for my unbelief have been those occasions when I’ve had to sit through religious ceremonies at weddings, funerals and the like.
The worst was when a single-mother friend persuaded me to endure two hours of happy-clappy nonsense at a Muswell Hill church because she wanted to get her daughter into the local C of E primary and needed a plausible male to act the devout husband in front of the vicar. Never again.
But plenty of people have a really tough time making their way in life as unbelievers. The most famous case in recent years is that of Salman Rushdie, against whom the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a sentence of death for apostasy after the publication of The Satanic Verses, but Rushdie is not alone. Professing atheism is apostasy in Islam and is traditionally punishable by execution — and in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and several other countries the punishment is still on the statute book or whatever the equivalent is. Unbelievers (and for all we know they could number millions) live in constant fear of their lives. Many other countries in the Islamic world do not enforce the death penalty for apostasy but nevertheless have severe blasphemy laws, among them Pakistan, where the penalty for blasphemy is life imprisonment and blasphemy actions are common.
Of course, in western Europe, blasphemy laws (in defence of Christianty) have fallen into disuse, though they still exist in several countries, among them Britain. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people always have an easy time of it giving up religion. At least a dozen Brits I know have been disowned by their families for abandoning their faith — three of them were thrown out of their parental homes for it — and I know plenty of others who keep quiet about their faithlessness in front of their parents even though they have long since left home.
***
Now, I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but most of the people I know of my generation or older who have been dropped by their families for ditching their religion come from Christian backgrounds — and most of those of a younger generation are former Muslims.
This could just be coincidence. And it could be because few of my friends and colleagues of my own age or older are Muslims or ex-Muslims, whereas lots of my students and former students are. I certainly wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much from a handful of examples. But hunch tells me that it is probably the result of something bigger — that Islam in Britain is beginning to go through precisely the same process of decline in the face of disbelief that Christianity experienced in the course of the 20th century.
This view is, in the current climate, a bit heterodox. The cant of the day is that, for better or worse, Islam in Britain — as elsewhere in Europe — is on the march, and that the Muslim community is an increasingly important political actor. George Galloway and a large part of the far left see Muslims as allies in anti-imperialism. Since 7/7, the government has been desperately trying to find Muslims who can credibly persuade Muslim youth not to become jihadis. The Spectator rants about the threat to our existence posed by “Eurabia”.
But what if the rise of radical Islamism among Muslim youth in Europe is in fact a symptom of a crisis of belief? What if the young men who turn to jihadism do so for the most part because they can’t get laid — because the girls they think should be theirs are turning them down because they can’t stand the idea of life with a 20-something would-be patriarch and have given up the religion?
Sorry if it’s not PC, but I’m more and more convinced that this is the story. Muslims in Britain are losing their religion. A few loons are resisting, but in the long run we’ll all benefit.
I’m not a religious believer and haven’t been for a very long time — I think I must have come to the conclusion that god doesn’t exist when I was 12 or 13, and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.
It’s not a big thing in my family. Neither of my parents was at all religious, and the only serious believers among my close relations were my grandmother (who was married to an avowed militant atheist) and one aunt. My school was more of a problem: a minor public school, it insisted on compulsory chapel and RE, and during my early teenage years I was in regular small-scale trouble for talking during chapel (for which the penalty was cleaning the first XV’s rugby boots) and for being rude to teachers in RE lessons.
What the hell: by the time I was 15, the school had relaxed about compulsory chapel and RE and much else besides — in the sixth form one liberal teacher even put on a showing of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If ..., in which Malcolm McDowell leads an armed uprising in an authoritarian C of E boarding school — and since then the only times I’ve suffered for my unbelief have been those occasions when I’ve had to sit through religious ceremonies at weddings, funerals and the like.
The worst was when a single-mother friend persuaded me to endure two hours of happy-clappy nonsense at a Muswell Hill church because she wanted to get her daughter into the local C of E primary and needed a plausible male to act the devout husband in front of the vicar. Never again.
But plenty of people have a really tough time making their way in life as unbelievers. The most famous case in recent years is that of Salman Rushdie, against whom the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a sentence of death for apostasy after the publication of The Satanic Verses, but Rushdie is not alone. Professing atheism is apostasy in Islam and is traditionally punishable by execution — and in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and several other countries the punishment is still on the statute book or whatever the equivalent is. Unbelievers (and for all we know they could number millions) live in constant fear of their lives. Many other countries in the Islamic world do not enforce the death penalty for apostasy but nevertheless have severe blasphemy laws, among them Pakistan, where the penalty for blasphemy is life imprisonment and blasphemy actions are common.
Of course, in western Europe, blasphemy laws (in defence of Christianty) have fallen into disuse, though they still exist in several countries, among them Britain. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people always have an easy time of it giving up religion. At least a dozen Brits I know have been disowned by their families for abandoning their faith — three of them were thrown out of their parental homes for it — and I know plenty of others who keep quiet about their faithlessness in front of their parents even though they have long since left home.
***
Now, I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but most of the people I know of my generation or older who have been dropped by their families for ditching their religion come from Christian backgrounds — and most of those of a younger generation are former Muslims.
This could just be coincidence. And it could be because few of my friends and colleagues of my own age or older are Muslims or ex-Muslims, whereas lots of my students and former students are. I certainly wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much from a handful of examples. But hunch tells me that it is probably the result of something bigger — that Islam in Britain is beginning to go through precisely the same process of decline in the face of disbelief that Christianity experienced in the course of the 20th century.
This view is, in the current climate, a bit heterodox. The cant of the day is that, for better or worse, Islam in Britain — as elsewhere in Europe — is on the march, and that the Muslim community is an increasingly important political actor. George Galloway and a large part of the far left see Muslims as allies in anti-imperialism. Since 7/7, the government has been desperately trying to find Muslims who can credibly persuade Muslim youth not to become jihadis. The Spectator rants about the threat to our existence posed by “Eurabia”.
But what if the rise of radical Islamism among Muslim youth in Europe is in fact a symptom of a crisis of belief? What if the young men who turn to jihadism do so for the most part because they can’t get laid — because the girls they think should be theirs are turning them down because they can’t stand the idea of life with a 20-something would-be patriarch and have given up the religion?
Sorry if it’s not PC, but I’m more and more convinced that this is the story. Muslims in Britain are losing their religion. A few loons are resisting, but in the long run we’ll all benefit.
Wednesday, 2 November 2005
FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO BE REALLY STUPID
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 4 November 2005
I know that, in the grand scheme of things, whether or not you’re allowed a Marlboro with your pint of Adnams in the Horse and Groom or a nice Chilean cabernet with your meal in the restaurant car on the 20.30 from Liverpool Street doesn’t really matter that much. But for some reason — not just that I frequently enjoy a fag with my beer and once a week polish off a half-bottle of red with my dinner on the way home — I get hot under the collar when I read about government plans to ban smoking in pubs and drinking on public transport.
OK, I know that the pub smoking ban is now not likely to be complete, so I’ll still be able to light up in the two pubs I use most frequently, as long as I don’t do so at the bar — neither the aforementioned Horse and Groom (Woodbridge Road, Ipswich) nor the Prince Arthur in Charles Square, Hoxton, do food as long as you don’t count pork scratchings or cheese sandwiches.
And OK, I realise that the idea of banning booze on public transport is just an idea and is a long way from the statute book: it made the headlines last weekend because it was contained in a policy paper by Louise Casey, aka “Tony Blair’s anti-social behaviour tsar”, and was discussed at a meeting at Chequers.
Oh, all right, and I also know that I could live with a pub smoking ban or a public transport booze ban. I cope perfectly well with smoking bans imposed by my various workplaces, by cinemas, theatres, shops and public transport and, increasingly, by non-smoking friends in their homes. If smoking is banned in pubs and restaurants, I’ll just go outside for a snout if I want one. And I’m not such a hopeless alcoholic that I couldn’t survive a train journey without a little tipple.
My problem is that I don’t see why it’s the state’s business to interfere with these minutiae of my everyday life. I accept that tobacco smoke is unpleasant to many non-smokers and that it is bad for the health. I agree that no one should be forced to endure a smoky atmosphere against their will.
But, as things stand, coercion doesn’t come into it. People can choose whether or not to visit a pub or restaurant in which smoking is allowed — and they can choose whether or not to work in one, just as they can choose whether or not to work in an abattoir or as a motorcycle courier. It might be really stupid to opt for drinking, eating or working in a place that’s smoky; it’s certainly stupid to smoke. But if I choose to be stupid, it’s a decision that I’ve made, and it’s not up to the state to force me to change my mind.
Drinking on public transport is different in one respect: the apparent motive for the proposed ban is to prevent passengers who are the worse for wear from making life unpleasant for those that are not. I don’t have a problem with this motive, in that I’m all in favour of everyone being able to travel without being harassed by drunks.
But think about it. There are already all sorts of laws proscribing the sort of behaviour the ban is aimed at curtailing: the problem is that there is no way of enforcing them. In the interest of efficiency, conductors have been removed from buses and guards from trains, and the cops are too busy doing more important things to get involved.
The simple truth is that banning booze on public transport won’t make a blind bit of difference. It won’t stop anyone getting on a bus or a train steaming drunk and spoiling for a fight. And, unless it is accompanied by the reintroduction of conductors and guards, it will be no more enforceable than existing laws. Anyone who really wants to get pissed on the train or bus will buy a few tinnies or a bottle before embarking on their journey, then tell anyone who challenges their drinking to get lost. The sole effect of a ban will be to deny a harmless pleasure to passengers who pose no threat to anyone.
I know that complaints about the “nanny state” are a staple of the rightwing press — and that many of the complainants against drinking and smoking bans take rather a different position when it comes to sex and drugs. But I’m consistent. If you want to get totally Flintoffed or completely Cameroned, as far as I’m concerned you can do it whenever you like as long as you don’t sing tuneless Norwich City songs or bore me to tears with the story of your life while I’m trying to read the Economist on my way home on a Friday night. And if you wish to engage in whatever nefarious sexual pratice takes your fancy in private with another consenting adult — or indeed other consenting adults or none — that’s fine by me too. It’s none of my business.
And if it’s none of my business, it’s none of the state’s business either. There is a private sphere in which the state should have no role beyond advice — that smoking is bad for your health, that drinking too much and too often turns you into an alcoholic, that keed spills or that vigorous buggery without a condom spreads Aids. If people take notice, fine. If they don’t, and keep on shagging shamelessly without any protection after a night on the tiles drinking, smoking furiously and snorting coke, what the state needs is not new legislation but a new advertising agency.
I know that, in the grand scheme of things, whether or not you’re allowed a Marlboro with your pint of Adnams in the Horse and Groom or a nice Chilean cabernet with your meal in the restaurant car on the 20.30 from Liverpool Street doesn’t really matter that much. But for some reason — not just that I frequently enjoy a fag with my beer and once a week polish off a half-bottle of red with my dinner on the way home — I get hot under the collar when I read about government plans to ban smoking in pubs and drinking on public transport.
OK, I know that the pub smoking ban is now not likely to be complete, so I’ll still be able to light up in the two pubs I use most frequently, as long as I don’t do so at the bar — neither the aforementioned Horse and Groom (Woodbridge Road, Ipswich) nor the Prince Arthur in Charles Square, Hoxton, do food as long as you don’t count pork scratchings or cheese sandwiches.
And OK, I realise that the idea of banning booze on public transport is just an idea and is a long way from the statute book: it made the headlines last weekend because it was contained in a policy paper by Louise Casey, aka “Tony Blair’s anti-social behaviour tsar”, and was discussed at a meeting at Chequers.
Oh, all right, and I also know that I could live with a pub smoking ban or a public transport booze ban. I cope perfectly well with smoking bans imposed by my various workplaces, by cinemas, theatres, shops and public transport and, increasingly, by non-smoking friends in their homes. If smoking is banned in pubs and restaurants, I’ll just go outside for a snout if I want one. And I’m not such a hopeless alcoholic that I couldn’t survive a train journey without a little tipple.
My problem is that I don’t see why it’s the state’s business to interfere with these minutiae of my everyday life. I accept that tobacco smoke is unpleasant to many non-smokers and that it is bad for the health. I agree that no one should be forced to endure a smoky atmosphere against their will.
But, as things stand, coercion doesn’t come into it. People can choose whether or not to visit a pub or restaurant in which smoking is allowed — and they can choose whether or not to work in one, just as they can choose whether or not to work in an abattoir or as a motorcycle courier. It might be really stupid to opt for drinking, eating or working in a place that’s smoky; it’s certainly stupid to smoke. But if I choose to be stupid, it’s a decision that I’ve made, and it’s not up to the state to force me to change my mind.
Drinking on public transport is different in one respect: the apparent motive for the proposed ban is to prevent passengers who are the worse for wear from making life unpleasant for those that are not. I don’t have a problem with this motive, in that I’m all in favour of everyone being able to travel without being harassed by drunks.
But think about it. There are already all sorts of laws proscribing the sort of behaviour the ban is aimed at curtailing: the problem is that there is no way of enforcing them. In the interest of efficiency, conductors have been removed from buses and guards from trains, and the cops are too busy doing more important things to get involved.
The simple truth is that banning booze on public transport won’t make a blind bit of difference. It won’t stop anyone getting on a bus or a train steaming drunk and spoiling for a fight. And, unless it is accompanied by the reintroduction of conductors and guards, it will be no more enforceable than existing laws. Anyone who really wants to get pissed on the train or bus will buy a few tinnies or a bottle before embarking on their journey, then tell anyone who challenges their drinking to get lost. The sole effect of a ban will be to deny a harmless pleasure to passengers who pose no threat to anyone.
I know that complaints about the “nanny state” are a staple of the rightwing press — and that many of the complainants against drinking and smoking bans take rather a different position when it comes to sex and drugs. But I’m consistent. If you want to get totally Flintoffed or completely Cameroned, as far as I’m concerned you can do it whenever you like as long as you don’t sing tuneless Norwich City songs or bore me to tears with the story of your life while I’m trying to read the Economist on my way home on a Friday night. And if you wish to engage in whatever nefarious sexual pratice takes your fancy in private with another consenting adult — or indeed other consenting adults or none — that’s fine by me too. It’s none of my business.
And if it’s none of my business, it’s none of the state’s business either. There is a private sphere in which the state should have no role beyond advice — that smoking is bad for your health, that drinking too much and too often turns you into an alcoholic, that keed spills or that vigorous buggery without a condom spreads Aids. If people take notice, fine. If they don’t, and keep on shagging shamelessly without any protection after a night on the tiles drinking, smoking furiously and snorting coke, what the state needs is not new legislation but a new advertising agency.
Sunday, 2 October 2005
BROWN WILL MEAN BUSINESS AS USUAL
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 September 2005
I suppose it was inevitable that this week’s Labour Party conference would become the Gordon and Tony Show. Tony Blair declared earlier this year that he would be quitting as prime minister some time during the current parliament, and Gordon Brown is so strongly placed to succeed him that no one credible is likely to stand against him.
So it’s hardly surprising that many journalists have spent the week in Brighton desperately searching the texts of speeches, analysing body language and talking to “allies” of Blair and “friends” of Brown in the hope of finding out (a) when Tony will go and (b) how Gordon will be different.
Not that they’ve discovered anything very much about either. Blair didn’t announce his imminent departure, which means that he probably isn’t retiring this year but, er, we still can’t be quite sure. And Brown said nothing to indicate what he would do differently, though he did make it pretty clear that he wouldn’t be any friendlier to the trade unions or any less enthusiastic for free trade. So we’re still guessing what Brown would be like as PM, just as we were before.
For what it’s worth, my hunch is still that Blair will go this time next year or early in 2007 rather than hanging on until late 2007 or even 2008. The next general election does not need to be until 2010 but (unless the opinion polls turn against Labour, which is by no means impossible) it is more likely to be in spring 2009.
Because it makes sense for a new prime minister to have a good two years in charge before polling day — enough time to establish familiarity with the voters but not enough to start looking jaded — and because Labour’s leadership election process is rather long-winded, the feeling in my bones is that Blair will be gone by spring 2007.
As for how Brown would be different as prime minister, well, we’ll see. I’m sure he will be much growlier than Blair and much more serious. But I’m afraid I don’t buy the idea that he will change very much of substance.
It’s true that he has deeper roots in Labour politics than Blair — he was active in Scottish Labour politics years before Blair joined the party and is an assiduous networker — and that 30 years ago he was quite left-wing. But he abandoned his youthful lefttsm long ago, and during the past decade has (for better or worse) been at least as responsible as Blair for Labour policy.
The invention of “New Labour” was a joint Brown-Blair effort. It was Brown who embraced the private finance initiative, Brown who abandoned “tax and spend”, Brown who resisted calls for big increases in pensions. He is just as ardent an Atlanticist as Blair and has said and done nothing to indicate that he would take a different approach to foreign policy. There have been faint indications that he might be interested in reviving the process of constitutional reform, but otherwise everything suggests a Brown premiership will mean business as usual.
***
On a different subject entirely, I know that new releases from the National Archives rarely make the front pages. But I’m still just a bit surprised by how little coverage there has been this month of the publication of a massive collection of documents detailing the security state’s surveillance in the late Betty Reid, one-time witchfinder general of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The Guardian gave the released papers a cursory mention, the Times ran a story remarking on the banality of much of the material, and that was just about it.
Yet the documents — page after page of transcripts of tapped telephone calls, copies of intercepted correspondence and MI5 and Special Branch agents’ reports — are quite remarkable.
It’s no surprise that the spooks took an interest in Reid, who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and rose to become head of its organisation department, responsible for enforcing party discipline. The Sunday Times revealed more than 20 years ago that her live-in nanny for many years, Betty Gordon, had been an MI5 agent.
But the newly released documents show in extraordinary detail precisely what the spooks’ interest entailed in the 1940s and 1950s. They followed her everywhere she went, recorded the identity of every person she met, listened to and transcribed every phone call she made and opened and copied every letter she was sent.
Of course, a lot of the documentation produced by this intensive surveillance is banal or incomprehensible. But the picture of the cold-war security state’s methods that emerges from them is fascinating. It’s clear that the spooks had the CP pretty much completely penetrated in this period.
Reid responed to the Sunday Times story about her MI5 nanny with the immortal words: “I’m afraid it makes me look rather silly.” This new material makes her and her comrades look even sillier.
I suppose it was inevitable that this week’s Labour Party conference would become the Gordon and Tony Show. Tony Blair declared earlier this year that he would be quitting as prime minister some time during the current parliament, and Gordon Brown is so strongly placed to succeed him that no one credible is likely to stand against him.
So it’s hardly surprising that many journalists have spent the week in Brighton desperately searching the texts of speeches, analysing body language and talking to “allies” of Blair and “friends” of Brown in the hope of finding out (a) when Tony will go and (b) how Gordon will be different.
Not that they’ve discovered anything very much about either. Blair didn’t announce his imminent departure, which means that he probably isn’t retiring this year but, er, we still can’t be quite sure. And Brown said nothing to indicate what he would do differently, though he did make it pretty clear that he wouldn’t be any friendlier to the trade unions or any less enthusiastic for free trade. So we’re still guessing what Brown would be like as PM, just as we were before.
For what it’s worth, my hunch is still that Blair will go this time next year or early in 2007 rather than hanging on until late 2007 or even 2008. The next general election does not need to be until 2010 but (unless the opinion polls turn against Labour, which is by no means impossible) it is more likely to be in spring 2009.
Because it makes sense for a new prime minister to have a good two years in charge before polling day — enough time to establish familiarity with the voters but not enough to start looking jaded — and because Labour’s leadership election process is rather long-winded, the feeling in my bones is that Blair will be gone by spring 2007.
As for how Brown would be different as prime minister, well, we’ll see. I’m sure he will be much growlier than Blair and much more serious. But I’m afraid I don’t buy the idea that he will change very much of substance.
It’s true that he has deeper roots in Labour politics than Blair — he was active in Scottish Labour politics years before Blair joined the party and is an assiduous networker — and that 30 years ago he was quite left-wing. But he abandoned his youthful lefttsm long ago, and during the past decade has (for better or worse) been at least as responsible as Blair for Labour policy.
The invention of “New Labour” was a joint Brown-Blair effort. It was Brown who embraced the private finance initiative, Brown who abandoned “tax and spend”, Brown who resisted calls for big increases in pensions. He is just as ardent an Atlanticist as Blair and has said and done nothing to indicate that he would take a different approach to foreign policy. There have been faint indications that he might be interested in reviving the process of constitutional reform, but otherwise everything suggests a Brown premiership will mean business as usual.
***
On a different subject entirely, I know that new releases from the National Archives rarely make the front pages. But I’m still just a bit surprised by how little coverage there has been this month of the publication of a massive collection of documents detailing the security state’s surveillance in the late Betty Reid, one-time witchfinder general of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The Guardian gave the released papers a cursory mention, the Times ran a story remarking on the banality of much of the material, and that was just about it.
Yet the documents — page after page of transcripts of tapped telephone calls, copies of intercepted correspondence and MI5 and Special Branch agents’ reports — are quite remarkable.
It’s no surprise that the spooks took an interest in Reid, who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and rose to become head of its organisation department, responsible for enforcing party discipline. The Sunday Times revealed more than 20 years ago that her live-in nanny for many years, Betty Gordon, had been an MI5 agent.
But the newly released documents show in extraordinary detail precisely what the spooks’ interest entailed in the 1940s and 1950s. They followed her everywhere she went, recorded the identity of every person she met, listened to and transcribed every phone call she made and opened and copied every letter she was sent.
Of course, a lot of the documentation produced by this intensive surveillance is banal or incomprehensible. But the picture of the cold-war security state’s methods that emerges from them is fascinating. It’s clear that the spooks had the CP pretty much completely penetrated in this period.
Reid responed to the Sunday Times story about her MI5 nanny with the immortal words: “I’m afraid it makes me look rather silly.” This new material makes her and her comrades look even sillier.
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