CND MARCHES INTO TROUBLE

Tribune, 29 March 1991


Trade unionists and a Labour parliamentary candidate have asked the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to cancel its Easter demonstration in Barrow-in-Furness because of the jobs crisis at the local shipyard. Paul Anderson reports

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament never gets a particularly warm welcome in Barrow-in-Furness, the Cumbrian coastal town where VSEL's shipyard is building Trident nuclear missile submarines. But on Monday, when it holds its Easter national demonstration there, it can expect an especially hostile local response.

The economy of Barrow and its hinterland is dominated by VSEL, which employs half the town's workforce. Last Wednesday the company's chief executive, Noel Davies, announced that in the next `five years it would be shedding up to 5,500 of the 12,500 workers it now employs in Barrow. The 1,900 workers at Carmen Laird, VSEL's surface-warship yard in Birkenhead, already face redundancy unless a buyer is found by 1993.

VSEL Barrow specialises in submarine construction, and has orders worth £3,500 million Three Trident submarines are under construction (one, HMS Venture, to be launched this year, with two more to be completed by 1997), and the company has high hopes that a fourth Trident will be ordered soon. Barrow also stands to pick up refit work if the naval dockyard at Rosyth is shut.

But the bulk of the labour-intensive work on Trident has already been done, and Ministry of Defence orders for conventionally armed submarines, both diesel- and nuclear-powered, have been cut drastically in the past year. Barrow faces an economic collapse as severe as any suffered by a one-industry town in the eighties.

Local people were shocked both by the announcement and by the way it was made, without any warning to the workers. "Some of the youngsters looked as if they were going to the scaffold," a VSEL fitter told the Barrow North West Evening Mail the day of the announcement. The paper led its front page on Thursday with an open letter from the editor, Keith Sutton, to the Prime Minister, arguing that Barrow's dependence on MoD work gave the government a duty to intervene in Barrow's hour of need.

Frank Ward, the Barrow district secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and chairman of the local Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, said he was "devastated". "This is catastrophic for Barrow, there's no doubt about that. Everybody is going to suffer." It is hardly surprising that this weekend's demonstration (slogan: "Turn from Trident: Build a Future") has not gone down too well with many of the locals – a feeling that the Tory opposition group on the town council has done its best to exploit, attacking the ruling Labour group for waiving CND's £385 licence fee for using Barrow Park on Monday.

But opposition to the demonstration has not been limited to the Right. At the weekend, the VSEL unions wrote to CND asking for it to be cancelled, arguing that the fourth Trident was essential for Barrow's economic survival. John Hutton, Labour's prospective parliamentary candidate for the highly marginal Tory seat, Barrow and Furness, has also called for the demonstration to be called off as a mark of respect for the feelings of local people. "Frankly, it isn't the time or the place," he told Tribune, although he added that the threat to the yard had nothing to do with Trident.

But CND decided this week to press ahead. Chris Sinton, the secretary of Barrow and District CND, told Tribune that the demonstration was a specifically antinuclear one. "We regret the redundancies and share the town's grief," she said.

The chair of national CND, Marjorie Thompson, backed Ms Sinton. "We are not demonstrating against the people of Barrow. One of our main priorities is a proper conversion and diversification policy. We cannot abandon our opposition to Trident. But VSEL's own refusal to build a future' has caused these redundancies and wrecked thousands of livelihoods. These defence cuts have been expected since the end of the cold war, and VSEL should have been looking seriously at possibilities for conversion and diversification since then."


When VSEL announced the redundancies last week, it also indicated that it wanted to reduce its dependency on the defence sector by 25 per cent within five years, possibly by going into offshore engineering, environmental engineering and combined-heat-and-power generators. Management met union representatives this week to discuss possibilities for diversification, and the unions are planning to consult the workforce for further ideas.


"The people who know the workers' skills best are the workers themselves," said one official, How many jobs could be saved by diversification alone is, however, a moot point. All the areas of possible diversification mentioned by VSEL are intensely competitive and would require extensive expensive retooling. Other defence companies hit by spending cuts face similar problems. Some sort of state intervention to ease the path to civilian production seems essential if substantial job losses are to be avoided.

The main problem here is that the government is opposed to state intervention, seeing cuts in defence expenditure as a convenient tool of counter-inflationary policy. On the other hand, Labour, although enthusiastic about the need for action and insistent that the "peace dividend" should be used to rebuild Britain's industrial base, has given few indications about what it would do beyond setting up a defence diversification agency.

Detailed policy documents are apparently in the pipeline, but in the meantime trade union calls for the party to make more of the running on defence job losses are bound to grow louder. Anyone who thought that the Gulf war had killed off the controversy about defence spending after the cold war has got another thing coming.

DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Paul Anderson, review of The Revenge of History by Alex Callinicos (Polity, £9.95), Tribune 8 March 1990

Alex Calinicos's argument in The Revenge of History will be familiar to anyone who has read the publications of the Socialist Workers Party. The collapse of "actually existing socialism" in eastern Europe is not to be mourned by socialists, because it isn't (increasingly wasn't) socialism at all but rather state capitalism. Far from marking "the bankruptcy of the revolutionary socialist tradition founded by Marx," the end of the Stalinist system means that true revolutionary Marxism-Leninism will no longer be held back by the popular misconception that it was somehow responsible for the disaster. Meanwhile, capitalism remains as crisis-ridden and irrational as ever, and social democracy offers no real alternative.

The proletarian revolution, led by the Leninist party, is still on the agenda.

All this is stated clearly and concisely, and on the way Callinicos makes some telling points – about the flimsiness of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History?, about the vacuity of postmodernism, about the intellectual and political collapse of the orthodox communist parties. But in the end this must go down as one of the least convincing books yet published about 1989 and its aftermath.

One problem is Callinicos's conception of "state capitalism", which is based upon a definition of capitalism – "wage labour plus capital accumulation" – that makes it difficult to conceive of any feasible socialism This is not to suggest that the left should be leaping to the posthumous defence of "actually existing socialism", but it just won't do simply to denounce as reactionary all the ideas of social democrats and market socialists, while gesturing vaguely in the direction of democratic planning through workers' councils as if it were a panacea.

More importantly, in his attempt to rescue Lenin from the dustbin of history, Callinicos falls in himself.

His account of the fate of the Russian revolution dismisses far too casually the argument that the roots of Stalinism were well nourished in the Leninist conception of the revolutionary party and in the practice of the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power in 1917: the red terror, the militarisation of labour, the suppression of workers' control, independent trade union organisation and rival political parties. Even in the hands of an articulate polemicist, the old excuses — the isolation of the Bolshevik revolution, the backwardness of Russian society and the defeat of Leon Trotsky by the right — are as unconvincing as ever. Callinicos gives no good reasons to expect that a Leninist revolution in the developed world today would be anything other than a bloody disaster.

Of course, the chances of such a revolution are luckily almost non-existent, but that. we can be sure, won't cause Callinicos and his pals in the SWP leadership any pause for thought. As long as a few hundred students every year sign up to replace the few hundred disillusioned ex - students who leave, the SWP leadership will continue quite happily to wallow in its belief that it is the vanguard of the working class. The overwhelming feeling one gets on reading this book is a sense of sadness that such an obviously intellectually capable man has wasted so much of.his life on such a tbolish cause.

DESPICABLE DESPOTISM

Paul Anderson, review of Saddam's War by John Bulloch and Harvey Morris (Faber, £13.99) and Unholy Babylon by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander (Gollancz, £9.99), Tribune, 15 February 1991

These two instant books on the background to the war over Kuwait, both by pairs of journalists, are complementary. Saddam's War is a clearly written introduction to the pre-history of the current carnage by two experienced British Middle East correspon­dents, both now in the Independent stable. Unholy Babylon, by an Egyptian journalist (also now on the Independent) and a pseudonymous British defence specialist, provides a welter of extra background information, particularly on oil, the history of Iraq's relationship with Kuwait, the development of Iraqi Ba'athism and the world's arms sales to Saddam Hussein.

No heroes emerge from the pages of either book, and the villains are many. Saddam is the main one, and with some reason. On the evidence assembled here, no one could doubt that this street-fighting thug turned torturer turned totalitarian despot heads one of the vilest regimes in the world. Both sets of authors point to the ideological debts owned by Ba'athism to the European fascisms of the twenties and thirties – the fetish of military valour, the cult of the authorita­rian leader, the myth of the betrayed nation – and it is impossible not to note the similarities between Sad­dam's techniques of rule by terror and those of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

But Saddam would never have come close to power, his militarist pan-Arabism would never have had any political purchase, had not Britain, France and the United States made such a pig's ear of the Middle East in the past century. And he would not have stayed in power, let alone been capable of taking on the military might of the United States and its allies, had not those same powers, ably assisted by the Soviet Union, cynically sustained his regime as a bulwark against Iran and Syria. Darwish and Alexander catalogue the giant arms deals, the massive economic aid packages and the diplomatic silences with con­siderable verve.

When and why the US decided that it was time to put an end to its appeasement of Saddam is a moot point. Both books effectively discount the idea that the decision was made long before August 2 and that Saddam was lured into taking Kuwait to provide a pretext for acting against him; the detailed account in Unholy Babylon suggests that the Bush administra­tion, operating on State Department advice, was genuinely surprised by the invasion despite the CIA's warnings. In any case, the Americans responded by sending substantial armed forces to Saudi Arabia, and by November, through inertia or choice, war rather than containment was clearly what the US and its allies were promising Saddam if he did not withdraw.

Here, understandably, both books begin to tail off, their authors unwilling to predict the course of events as the January 15 deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait approached. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that Unholy Babylon, on the whole more sceptical about the wisdom of taking military action against Saddam, underplays the possibility that by the end of 1990 (possibly earlier, or even all along) Saddam actually wanted war, calculating that he could at least last long enough to go down in history as a hero of the Arab masses. Saddam's War, which occasionally lapses into trite moralising in its con­cluding chapter, tends to skate over the potentially disastrous political ramifications of attempting to remove Saddam from Kuwait by force. But this is carping: as instant books go, both of these provide plenty of insights.

GREENS IN THE SOUP

Tribune, 1 February 1991


Support for the  the former West German Greens collapsed in December's federal elections, yet they doubled their vote to 9 per cent in last month's state elections in Hesse. Paul Anderson wonders whether their sister-party in Britain can stage a similar comeback

Eighteen months ago it seemed as if British politics could be on the brink of a dramatic realignment. In the June 1989 elections for the European Parliament, the Green Party came from nowhere to take 15 per cent of the vote, out-polling the Liberal Democrats nearly everywhere.


Although they didn't win a single seat, the Greens suddenly became a credible political force. Their autumn 1989 conference in Wolverhampton was given blanket coverage by the news media, and the newspaper pundits started suggesting that they might replace the Liberal Democrats as the third party in British politics.

But the breakthrough never came. Membership of the Green Party rose dramatically in the wake of the European elections, then started to tail off again. The 1990 Green conference was barely reported.

Today, the Greens are bumping along at 2 per cent in the opinion polls, ignored or ridiculed by the media. Just about the only time they have hit the headlines recently was when they organised a conference with King Hussein of Jordan on the environmental consequences of war in the Gulf.

Although some Greens insist that nothing has gone wrong – that the party is still on course for slow steady growth – most blame factors outside their control: the unfairness of the electoral system, the superficial Greening of the major parties, the temporary eclipse of Green issues by change in Eastern Europe, the poll tax, mortgage rates and mayhem in the Conservative Party.

There is certainly something in this. The first-past-the-post electoral system does make it difficult for small parties to secure representation. The major parties have gone out of their way since June 1989 to make themselves appear environmentally friendly, largely for fear of losing votes to the Greens. And the environment has slipped down the list of voters' priorities as British economic prospects have become gloomier.

But the Greens cannot escape all responsibility for their own demise. They have faced adversity with quite extraordinary ineptitude.


This is not so much because they have refused to compromise on their aversion to "leaders": whatever their formal status in the organisation, David Icke,: Sara Parkin, Johnathon Porritt and Jean Lambert have been treated as de facto leaders by the media.

The problems have been rather deeper than that. Most importantly, the Greens have proved incapable of working out precisely to whom they are trying to appeal.

Their voters in 1989 were overwhelmingly affluent, educated and middle-class. But they came from all political backgrounds — rural Tories worried about Barrett homes in their back yards, leftists angered by . Labour's policy review (particularly the ditching of unilateralism), radical Liberals disillusioned by their party's merger with the SDP.

That left the Greens in a quandary about where they should pitch their message both for recruiting and for votes. Should they attempt to appeal to everyone, or should they target particular groups? In the event, they chose to go for everyone except the Left. In response to the Bennite Socialist Conference to woo the Greens, the party's "media leadership" made it clear that they were "neither right nor left but ahead" and that leftist defectors from Labour were not welcome. Sara Parkin in particular warned that "parasites" might turn their attentions to the party.

Unsurprisingly, few joined the Greens from the Left. The Association of Socialist Greens, the party's minority left group, was routed at the autumn 1989 Green conference, and then came increasingly under the influence of a Trotskyist entrist group, Socialists for SelfManagement, the British section of the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency led by the veteran Trotskyist intellectual, Michel Raptis (Pablo).

SSM's influence had the effect of turning off even more would-be left recruits to the Greens: the group had previously infiltrated the Socialist Society in an unsuccessful attempt to take it over and was notoriously unpopular among precisely those leftists most sympathetic to the Green cause.

Meanwhile, however, once the initial rush after the Euro-elections was over, the Greens were also failing to pick up members from the centre and right and from environmentalist pressure groups. Radical Liberals disillusioned by the merger with the SDP followed Michael Meadowcroft into his reformed Liberal Party or gave up politics; the ex-Tory protest voters returned to the fold.

Activists from the pressure groups were unconvinced that the Green Party offered any better way of doing things than Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

Worse, many who did join the Greens in 1989 soon tired of life in the party, particularly after its dismal showing in the 1990 local elections and its failure to make any impact in parliamentary by-elections. To all intents and purposes, the Greens are now back where they were before 1989.


It would be a mistake to write off the Greens. Their opposition to the Gulf war could easily result in another influx of recruits: in particular, many Labour leftists are disillusioned by the Labour leadership's craven support for the Government's stance on the war and are seeking a new, non-Leninist, political home. But it is clear that with a first-past-the-post voting system the Greens are going to have an uphill struggle if they are to escape complete electoral marginalisation.

They need proportional representation to prosper even modestly as an electoral'party – but they will only ever get it if Labour is persuaded that proportional representation is in its own interests. In the long term, the best hope for the Green Party would be for its members to leave and join Labour to argue for changing Labour's policies on electoral reform – though whether anyone of a remotely pacifist disposition is going to be tempted to take out Labour Party membership in current circumstances is a moot point.

IS THERE A WAY OUT BY NEGOTIATION?

Tribune, 25 January 1991

It was unnecessary to go to war to secure Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. Sanctions would have worked had they been given more time, and the United States and Britain should not have closed the door to a negotiated settlement.

But now that war has started, there is little point in rehearsing last week's arguments. The priority now is to bring the war to an end as soon as possible.

How, though, should this be done? The government, the Labour leadership and most of the media believe that the best way is a vigorous military campaign against Iraq until Saddam Hussein withdraws from Kuwait.

And, because of the apparent success of the initial American-led air bombardment, achieved with few casualties among allied forces, a large majority of the public agrees with them.

But Desert Storm has not been quite the success it was at first claimed to be. The allied onslaught has failed to destroy Iraq's airforce, airfields, chemical and biological warfare capability, Scud missiles and launchers, crack ground troops or command-and-control infrastructure. (The corollary is that it is now difficult to believe that the bombardment did not cause many civilian casualties.) Iraqi forces are well dug in and have started a scorched earth defence of Kuwait, setting fire to the first of the country's several hundred oil-wells.

It is likely that, far from being an easy and painless business, securing military victory against Saddam Hussein will be protracted, bloody and environmentally disastrous even if the conflict conti nues to involve only its current protagonists and does not go chemical or nuclear.

The longer the war goes on, the" more likely it is that Iraq will use chemical and biological weapons. If radicals in Iran have their way, Saddam could fmd himself with a powerful ally. If he drags in nuclear-armed Israel, the prospects for death and destruction are almost beyond rational contemplation.

Politically, the war has already had profound consequences, nearly all of them grim. Now that the Americans owe Hafez Assad a favour in return for participation in the anti-Saddam alliance, the Syrians can look forward to hegemonY in the Lebanon for the foreseeable future.

Similarly, the Israelis can expect substantial rewards from the Americans in return for refraining from immediate retalliation against Iraqi Scud attacks.

Meanwhile, Saddam has become a hero of the dispossesed (and a role-model for the politically ambitious)  in the Arab and Islamic worlds, the first leader in years to dare to stand up to the United States and Israel.

Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise. In this context the fact that some form of peace conference on Israel and Palestine after hostilities have ceased is now almost inevitable is not without its problems.

So is getting Saddam out of Kuwait by force worth the cost? He is a brutal, criminal despot.

His invasion of Kuwait was an act of aggression which the international community was absolutely right to seek to reverse.

It is irrelevant at this stage to point out that Britain and America have refused to enforce international law, against Saddam or any other aggressor, when it was not in their economic interests, or that Saddam was armed and aided for years by the world's major powers. Past failure to deal with despotism and aggression does not justify abstention today.

It is, however, an entirely different matter to argue that liberating Kuwait justifies the slaughter of thousands, environmental catastrophe or spreading war to the whole of the Middle East – particularly if there is a chance, however slim, of securing Iraqi withdrawal and averting death and destruction.

At present the chances are slim indeed. On Monday, Saddam rejected a Soviet proposal for a ceasefire followed by withdrawal from Kuwait, arguing that the Americans were the aggressors and should be made to agree to a ceasefire first. America and Britain have repeatedly rejected all calls for a ceasefire.

But diplomatic efforts have not ceased. A ceasefire plan from the Non-Aligned Movement, currently being put together frantically by Iran, Yugoslavia, Algeria and India, just might have a different fate.

Such an initiative should not be dismissed out of hand as allowing Saddam time to regroup and resupply: a ceasefire need not necessarily be permanent, and even if he has weathered Desert Storm better than the Americans hoped, he knows that the allies are serious about removing him from Kuwait and that he must lose any war.

Not to explore the possibility of a ceasefire is to risk a massive human, political and ecological disaster. It is extraordinary that the Labour leadership is prepared to take the risk.

DOOMED EMPIRE

Paul Anderson,  review of From Yalta to Glasnost by Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher (Blackwell, £30), Tribune, 18 January 1991

Since they left their native Hungary in 1977 to continue their academic careers in the west, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher have been extraordinarily prolific social theorists. As well as Dictatorship Over Needs, their innovative democratic left critique (with Gyorgy Markus) of the "actually existing socialism" of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they have co-written a vast number of fiery iconoclastic political and philosophical essays, a book on the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and, most controversially, a polemical assault on what they saw as the iditotic ideology of the west European peace movements. Heller has also published several volumes of philosophy on her own.

From Yalta to Glasnost collects the most important of the recent political essays that were missed out of Eastern Left, Western Left in 1987 and a few extracts from books. All the pieces are provocative and some brilliant. Those in defence of the Hungarian revolution's democratic credentials and relevance to the whole of eastern Europe 25 years on are superb exercises in historical re-evaluation; the essays on the contrasting "reform communism" of the Prague Spring and Janos Kadar's Hungary are almost as good.

But on some things Heller and Feher were way off the mark. On Germany, the focus of the longest essay here, they were in some ways perceptive in raising the prospect of unification at a time (1984) when no one else was taking it at all seriously. Yet their prognosis of how unification might come about, as the result of German appeasement of the Soviet Union leading to Moscow offering Bonn unification in return for neutrality and economic aid, was quite wrong.

In particular, their identification of the West German peace movement of the early eighties as a Trojan horse for German nationalism has turned out to be bunk: in 1989-90, it was the Greens and left Social Democrats who had formed the backbone of the peace movement who were the most vocal opponents of unification.

Had "Better Red than dead" actually been the dominant thrust of the early eighties peace movement, Heller and Feher's analysis might have more purchase. In reality, however, the greater part of the peace movement in West Germany, as elsewhere in western Europe, opposed new NATO nuclear arms because it believed the Soviet Union had no desire or ability to expand its influence in Western Europe.

It is certainly arguable that the peace movement didn't, on the whole, think through the question of the Soviet Union's long-term goals in Europe. The idea that the Soviet Union might like to have Germany "Finlandised" was barely discussed. This was a weakness, but hardly, as Heller and Feher would have it, willful blindness to the dangers of Soviet expansionism. Contrary to their core assumption that the Soviet nomenklatura not only wanted to expand its influence in western Europe but was actually capable of pursuing such a policy, the rulers of the Soviet Union were increasingly paralysed by the ever-deepening economic, social and cultural crisis of their empire.

WHAT'S SO SPECIAL?

Paul Anderson, review of Reagan and Thatcher by Geoffrey Smith, Tribune, 4 January 1991

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were both crusading free-marketeers, friends of big business who won office on populist promises to reduce the burden of taxation, curb union power and cut government waste. Both were moral conservatives, enthusiasts for family values and law and order. And both were instinctive hardline cold warriors. It is hardly surprising that they hit it off when they first met in 1975, or that in office (except after the American invasion of Grenada in 1983) they enjoyed a personal and political relationship closer than normally exists between heads of government.

But did their closeness really make that much difference? Geoffrey Smith, a Times journalist and committed Atlanticist, believes it did, and in some ways he is right. His book shows that the "special relationship" between the president and the prime minister was crucial in securing American support for Britain in the Falklands war and was the main reason that Thatcher endorsed the American bombing of Libya in 1986. Thatcher was instrumental in persuading Reagan that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom it was possible to do business, and she kept quiet after the British security services told her about the Irangate affair (an episode examined in some detail here).

Beyond this, however, it is arguable whether the ideological and personal affinity between Thatcher and Reagan had particularly far-reaching effects.

It certainly did little to stop the focus of American foreign and defence policy drifting away from Europe. On Star Wars, which Thatcher (like other West European leaders) saw as a dangerous threat to nuclear deterrence, the "special relationship" merely allowed her the opportunity to air her views and get a vague agreement from Reagan to limit research: the programme went ahead regardless, eventually to be cut drastically by Congress. Similarly, Thatcher's attempts to scupper a super-power deal on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces were brushed off by the Reagan administration, which was desperate for a disarmament agreement in the wake of Irangate.

Smith puts a different spin on all this, emphasising the seriousness with which Thatcher was taken in the United States even when she was at odds with the administration. "A Thatcher intervention with the president was always a powerful instrument in the ceaseless battle over policy," he writes in his conclusion. But Smith never lapses into sycophancy, and it is not necessary to agree with his analysis or assumptions to appreciate the work he has put into uncovering the history of Anglo-American relations in the eighties.