New Statesman & Society, 22 April 1994
As the BNP threatens to make more gains on Millwall council, Labour is changing tactics; fascists in power are bad for house prices. Paul Anderson reports
Nah, mate," says the young woman with cropped blond hair, opening the door to the Labour canvasser on the 15th floor of the Isle of Dogs tower block, "I'm voting BNP." And with that she slams the door.
Her neighbours in this block are less forthright. Of those who bother to answer the door, a few say unenthusiastically that they "suppose" they will vote Labour, others say that they're not voting or claim to be undecided. Which is not to say that only one inhabitant of 80-odd on the electoral roll in the 20-floor block will actually vote for the neo-Nazi candidates in the Millwall ward in the 5 May local elections. After all the negative publicity the BNP has had since the election of Derek Beackon as a councillor for Millwall in a by-election last September, plenty of people who are thinking of voting forhim and his colleagues this time are keeping their views to themselves, particularly when the Labour Party comes around.
The tower block is one of four built in the 1960s on the otherwise low-rise Barkantine Estate on the west side of the Island, with spectacular views over east and south-east London. Once the dominant features all around were the docks and warehouses that provided work for the people of (he Island and, across the river, Bermondsey. Today, the landscape is a strange mix of dereliction and spanking new office buildings and flats erected under the auspices of the London Docklands Development Corporation, the unaccountable quango set up in the early 1980s to regenerate the local economy after the docks disappeared. Unfortunately, few of the offices employ local labour. As the view has changed and unemployment has increased, so the tower block has become more and more run-down.
"The whole block is filthy," says a man on the fifth floor, a long-time resident active in the tenants' association. "The council never does repairs. Nothing is ever given a coat of paint and the windows are falling out. One of my neighbours has waited four months to have his central heating fixed." He reckons that there are four or five families here who are definite BNP, and maybe ten or 12 other people who might vote BNP because of their disillusionment with the way they have been treated as tenants.
And this, according to the local Labour Party, is by no means a hotbed of BNP support. Canvassers elsewhere on the Barkantine Estate report far more vocal support for the BNP – up to 50 per cent in some streets. "And that's just the ones who admit it," says a glum-looking Liverpudlian man who has come down from Bethnal Green to help out with Labour's Millwall mass canvass.
The Barkantine is where Beackon and his party have expended most effort and time, knocking on doors every weekend. Windswept, tatty and largely white, with unemployment estimated at getting on for 50 per cent, it is the part of the Island most receptive to the BNP message that "immigrants" are getting favoured treatment in housing and jobs. But it is by no means the only place that the BNP can expect a big vote. Even among the attractive semis in Thermopylae Gardens in the south of the Island, once council but long since bought by their former tenants and now proudly displaying the manicured lawns and carefully tended hedges of suburbia, Labour canvassers report a third of voters to be BNP or hostile to Labour, although half declare that they are Labour.
All this is very much in line with an opinion poll conducted at the end of last month by ICM for the Institute of Community Studies, chaired by Lord Young of Dartington. It suggests that 53 per cent of decided Millwall voters plan to vote for Labour, with the BNP on 20 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 12 and the Tories on 10 per cent. But it also showed that only 21 per cent of those questioned admitted to voting for the BNP last year, while 52 per cent claimed to have voted for Labour: in fact, the BNP took 34 per cent in the by-election, with Labour on 33.7 and the Liberals on 29.4.
Many who voted BNP were obviously ashamed to admit it, and the same almost certainly goes for those planning to vote BNP next month. According to the ICS, if underreporting of planned BNP voting is as high as that of under-reporting of BNP voting in 1993, the contest is too close to call. That means that the BNP has a good chance of taking all three Millwall seats. And, because Liberal-controlled Tower Hamlets decentralised its operations in the late 1980s, that would give it a majority on the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood council (composed of three Millwall councillors and two from neighbouring Blackwall) and control over its £23-million budget.
For all this, Labour is cautiously confident that it will win Millwall. "You've got to remember that the level of under-reporting of BNP support is a matter of guesswork," says one campaign organiser. "Actual voting intentions in the poll show us clearly ahead."
Some in the Labour camp think that BNP support has peaked, arguing that the neo-Nazis have spread themselves too thinly in the local elections to run the sort of campaign that they organised for the by-election. Altogether, 30 BNP candidates are standing for seats elsewhere in the country, five of them in other Tower Hamlets wards and six in the neighbouring borough of Newham, with the rest scattered in the rest of London and the north-west. That doesn't sound a lot, but, say Labour optimists, it could just be too much for a party of 600 members to handle.
Even less sanguine Labour campaigners believe that, since the poll was taken, they have clearly established that Labour is the only party that can beat the BNP. Last September, there was a three-way split in the vote among the BNP, Labour and the Liberals, and just six weeks ago it seemed that May's contest would be four-way, with these three combatants joined by the East London People's Alliance, a tenants' association-based outfit created by former Labour Party members who had left Labour in disgust after being accused of racism in the course of its internal inquiry into the conduct of the 1993 by-election campaign.
But the ELPA was persuaded not to stand after all and the Liberals, desperate to hold on to their seats elsewhere in Tower Hamlets and without a strong base on the Island, have been almost invisible since the campaign has started in earnest. Meanwhile, Labour has been able to call on more than 100 activists from outside the Isle of Dogs to turn out to canvass and deliver leaflets. For a party that was almost moribund in Millwall a year ago and that suffered a major defection of key people just two months ago – those who resigned from the party included the ward secretary and chair, the defeated candidate in last year's by-election, James Hunt, and sitting councillor Ted Johns, a veteran community activist – Labour has put on quite a credible show.
"We've shown that we've got over the problems we had at the end of last year," says Steve Molyneaux, the only one of Labour's three candidates selected before the split over the by-election inquiry (the other two Labour hopefuls next month, Julia Mainwaring and Martin Young, were selected at the very last minute). "We're finding a lot of Liberals and Tories who've decided to vote tactically for us." Molyneaux also points to Labour's success in getting its message across to groups who didn't bother to vote in 1993. Then, notoriously, the party's campaign, following the Liberals' lead, focused on the alleged bias against "local" people – in Isle of Dogs politics, a euphemism for "whites" – in council-housing allocation. Apart from causing a massive rumpus within the Labour Party, this theme managed to alienate the 20 per cent of Millwall voters who belong to ethnic minorities, and made little or no impact on the ward's middle-class white voters, most of whom are owner-occupiers living in newly built flats and houses.
This time around, although Molyneaux says that "the key is still the white working class", and Labour is promising a giant home-building programme in Tower Hamlets if it wins, the party has dropped the racist overtones that it adopted in the 1993 by-election. It has made a point of canvassing in the new owner-occupied areas – warning waverers that a BNP victory will do damage to local house prices – and has made a serious effort to ensure that ethnic minority voters – mainly Bengali, but also Afro-Caribbean, Vietnamese and Somali – turn out to vote.
So far, this effort seems to be paying off. The Timber Wharves Estate in the middle of the ward was originally built as an LDDC-spon-sored luxury development for yuppies – but few were tempted to buy before the housing market collapsed in the late 1980s, and today the apartments are mostly taken by council and housing-association tenants, many of them Bangladeshi families moved from the St Vincents Estate in Blackwall, which has been demolished to make way for a road. The Labour canvassing team gets a friendly reception from the Bangladeshis. Nearly all are registered, the overwhelming majority firm Labour supporters. But their problem is getting to the polling station, in a nearby school: many are scared to walk there, and want to be given lifts on polling day.
It is hardly surprising that this is how they feel. Timber Wharves has been at the centre of the storm over housing in Millwall. The first people to be housed here were upwardly mobile white working-class families, who, when the Bangladeshis started to arrive from St Vincents, began to complain that they were lowering the tone of the place. Next came petitions and letter-writing campaigns, and the resentment among the whites is still apparent. "I've nothing against these people," says a white woman in her fifties, gesturing towards a Bangladeshi Labour canvasser who is talking to her Bangladeshi neighbour. "But have any of them lived here as long as I have? My daughter had to move off the Island to get a place: I had to give her £9,000 to get her started. I mean, they're homeless, I'm sorry for them, but it's not right. I've never been more undecided about who to vote for at this election. It's not just Labour I think is useless. It's the lot of them."
Friday, 22 April 1994
A PUSILLANIMOUS RESPONSE
New Statesman & Society leader, 22 April 1994
The west's response to the Serb assault on the supposedly UN-guaranteed "safe area" of Gorazde has been pusillanimous even by the execrable standards of the past two years. Instead of treating the Serbs' actions as a declaration of war on the international community, which is what they are, the western "powers" have merely wrung their hands.
Nothing epitomises this better than the miserable excuses for failing to act offered by the British Defence Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, in the House of Commons on Monday. He had little option but to speak on Bosnia before the House: British servicemen had been killed, and it would have been very bad form indeed if some sort of statement offering condolences to their grieving relatives had not been read out. Not that a full debate was justified, of course – that would have meant Rifkind doing more than repeating the same old smug, dishonest answers to questions fired at him by opponents.
And were his answers smug and dishonest! Rifkind spewed out the whole gamut of distortions that have legitimised western appeasement of Serbian aggression for two years. He described the war there as a "civil war", the combatants as "warring factions". "Each of the factions is seeking to grab as much territory as possible," he droned.
To critics calling for UN or Nato intervention to stop the Serb aggression, Rifkind asserted bluntly that such intervention would require a massive and permanent deployment of ground forces. "There are about 200,000 heavily armed Serbs, Croats and Muslims who are fighting each other," he explained. As for lifting the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, well, that "would require the repeal of the Security Council resolution" banning the supply of arms to all sides, which is impossible because the Russians don't want it. It should not at this stage be necessary to demonstrate that this is a farrago of evasions, the government line in the media and across the political spectrum that even now it is essential to spell out precisely where it is wrong.
To begin: the war in Bosnia is not essentially a civil war, but a war of aggression by Serbia and its Bosnian Serb surrogates against the multi-ethnic, democratic, internationally recognised state of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Croatia joined in the war too, supporting its own Bosnian Croat clients, but gave up the fight after suffering military defeats at the hands of the Bosnian government and being put under pressure by the United States.
What this means is that today there are not "three sides" fighting one another, but two: on one hand, the Serb aggressors, and, on the other, and the once-again-allied Bosnian government and Bosnian Croat forces. Moreover, far from being "even-handed" in condemning "all sides", western policy, and that of the UN, should be strongly partisan in defence of the legitimate government – even if it means ending the humanitarian relief operation in the "safe areas", the sole effect of which at present seems to be to fatten Bosnians for the Serbian slaughter.
Then there is the canard that the Serb forces are so well armed and so numerous that only a giant and permanent deployment of ground forces by outside powers could impose a settlement. In fact, most of the Serbs fighting in Bosnia today are raw conscripts, and they are armed almost entirely with rifles, mines, ancient tanks and artillery. They have no air cover and their lines of communication are stretched. It would not take much for properly armed Bosnian government forces, aided if the Bosnians request it from outside, to inflict a decisive military defeat that would roll back the Serb armies and force them to sue for peace.
Of course, the Russians don't want such an outcome for domestic political reasons – but there are plenty of carrots that the west could dangle before Moscow to persuade it to change its mind on intervention and on the arms embargo. How can misty-eyed pan-Slavism compete with the prospect of substantial aid and trade for the crisis-ridden Russian economy? The real problem, as ever, is not an insurmountable Russian veto, but the lack of political will on the part of the west to stop the Serbs.
There were a few MPs making such points against Rifkind on Monday – but they did not include anyone from the Labour front bench, which has sold the pass on Serbian aggression against Bosnia as effectively as Labour in the 1930s backed the appeasement of Hitler by the Chamberlain government. Its two most senior figures with responsibility for speaking on Bosnia, defence spokesperson David Clark and shadow foreign secretary Jack Cunningham, have played a consistently craven role throughout the Bosnian war, par-rotting the government's rhetoric of "civil war" and "warring factions". Clark's intervention in the Commons on Monday was utterly spineless and unprincipled.
What makes all this particularly galling is that the do-nothing consensus among senior politicians – notable not just in Britain but everywhere else in western Europe – is so out of step with public opinion, which is disgusted by the Serbs' murderous expansionism and by the west's failure to stand up to it. But this disjunction between the public and the politicians is also an opportunity. If popular anger at the plight of Bosnia can be mobilised, and mobilised fast, it is just possible that the politicians can be shocked out of their complacency. What is needed is a movement in defence of Bosnia on the scale, and with the international coordination, of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe in the early 1980s. That, as anyone who has been active on Bosnia in the past two years knows, is a tall order. But the forthcoming European election provides a unique opportunity to start a continent-wide campaign to press the politicians to change their minds.
The west's response to the Serb assault on the supposedly UN-guaranteed "safe area" of Gorazde has been pusillanimous even by the execrable standards of the past two years. Instead of treating the Serbs' actions as a declaration of war on the international community, which is what they are, the western "powers" have merely wrung their hands.
Nothing epitomises this better than the miserable excuses for failing to act offered by the British Defence Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, in the House of Commons on Monday. He had little option but to speak on Bosnia before the House: British servicemen had been killed, and it would have been very bad form indeed if some sort of statement offering condolences to their grieving relatives had not been read out. Not that a full debate was justified, of course – that would have meant Rifkind doing more than repeating the same old smug, dishonest answers to questions fired at him by opponents.
And were his answers smug and dishonest! Rifkind spewed out the whole gamut of distortions that have legitimised western appeasement of Serbian aggression for two years. He described the war there as a "civil war", the combatants as "warring factions". "Each of the factions is seeking to grab as much territory as possible," he droned.
To critics calling for UN or Nato intervention to stop the Serb aggression, Rifkind asserted bluntly that such intervention would require a massive and permanent deployment of ground forces. "There are about 200,000 heavily armed Serbs, Croats and Muslims who are fighting each other," he explained. As for lifting the UN arms embargo on Bosnia, well, that "would require the repeal of the Security Council resolution" banning the supply of arms to all sides, which is impossible because the Russians don't want it. It should not at this stage be necessary to demonstrate that this is a farrago of evasions, the government line in the media and across the political spectrum that even now it is essential to spell out precisely where it is wrong.
To begin: the war in Bosnia is not essentially a civil war, but a war of aggression by Serbia and its Bosnian Serb surrogates against the multi-ethnic, democratic, internationally recognised state of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Croatia joined in the war too, supporting its own Bosnian Croat clients, but gave up the fight after suffering military defeats at the hands of the Bosnian government and being put under pressure by the United States.
What this means is that today there are not "three sides" fighting one another, but two: on one hand, the Serb aggressors, and, on the other, and the once-again-allied Bosnian government and Bosnian Croat forces. Moreover, far from being "even-handed" in condemning "all sides", western policy, and that of the UN, should be strongly partisan in defence of the legitimate government – even if it means ending the humanitarian relief operation in the "safe areas", the sole effect of which at present seems to be to fatten Bosnians for the Serbian slaughter.
Then there is the canard that the Serb forces are so well armed and so numerous that only a giant and permanent deployment of ground forces by outside powers could impose a settlement. In fact, most of the Serbs fighting in Bosnia today are raw conscripts, and they are armed almost entirely with rifles, mines, ancient tanks and artillery. They have no air cover and their lines of communication are stretched. It would not take much for properly armed Bosnian government forces, aided if the Bosnians request it from outside, to inflict a decisive military defeat that would roll back the Serb armies and force them to sue for peace.
Of course, the Russians don't want such an outcome for domestic political reasons – but there are plenty of carrots that the west could dangle before Moscow to persuade it to change its mind on intervention and on the arms embargo. How can misty-eyed pan-Slavism compete with the prospect of substantial aid and trade for the crisis-ridden Russian economy? The real problem, as ever, is not an insurmountable Russian veto, but the lack of political will on the part of the west to stop the Serbs.
There were a few MPs making such points against Rifkind on Monday – but they did not include anyone from the Labour front bench, which has sold the pass on Serbian aggression against Bosnia as effectively as Labour in the 1930s backed the appeasement of Hitler by the Chamberlain government. Its two most senior figures with responsibility for speaking on Bosnia, defence spokesperson David Clark and shadow foreign secretary Jack Cunningham, have played a consistently craven role throughout the Bosnian war, par-rotting the government's rhetoric of "civil war" and "warring factions". Clark's intervention in the Commons on Monday was utterly spineless and unprincipled.
What makes all this particularly galling is that the do-nothing consensus among senior politicians – notable not just in Britain but everywhere else in western Europe – is so out of step with public opinion, which is disgusted by the Serbs' murderous expansionism and by the west's failure to stand up to it. But this disjunction between the public and the politicians is also an opportunity. If popular anger at the plight of Bosnia can be mobilised, and mobilised fast, it is just possible that the politicians can be shocked out of their complacency. What is needed is a movement in defence of Bosnia on the scale, and with the international coordination, of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe in the early 1980s. That, as anyone who has been active on Bosnia in the past two years knows, is a tall order. But the forthcoming European election provides a unique opportunity to start a continent-wide campaign to press the politicians to change their minds.
Friday, 15 April 1994
CHANGE OF HEART ON BOSNIA
New Statesman & Society leader, 15 April 1994
This week's attacks by Nato bombers on Serb positions around the beseiged Bosnian government enclave of Gorazde are welcome. By using military force against the invading Serbian armies, the west has done what it should have been doing for two years, ever since the Serbs began their brutal campaign of territorial aggrandisement and ethnic cleansing against the recognised, democratic, multi-ethnic Bosnian state.
But this week's actions were not enough. The intention was not to defend the legitimate government of Bosnia against aggression: the reason that the bombers went in was simply that Gorazde had been declared a United Nations "safe area" and yet was about to fall to the Serbs, an outcome that would have demonstrated to the world (and might yet do so) that the UN's Bosnia policy is wholly inadequate to the task of resisting the creation of a fascist Greater Serbia by Slobodan Milosevic and his psycopathic Bosnian Serb puppets. And because the intervention was intended to save face rather than to confront the root problem, there is a real danger that the UN will cave in now that the Serbs have decided to cut up rough.
Whereas Nato's downing of four Serb war-planes at the end of February seemed to cow the aggressors, the latest action was denounced as "a joint Nato-Muslim assault" by the Bosnian Serbs, who have threatened to shoot down Nato aircraft if there are any more attacks. On Tuesday, dozens of UN personnel were held hostage or forcefully confined to their offices by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The Serbs have tightened their siege on the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, barring the UN from entering or leaving the city, and there are few signs that they are preparing to reduce their military activity elsewhere.
Already, there are signs of panic in the western establishment that it could be forced not only to take sides in what it has always described as a "civil war" among "warring factions" but also – horror of horrors – to take the side of the militarily weaker party in the conflict. David Owen, whose plans for the partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines gave such encouragement to Serb aggression, has dropped everything to go to flatter again his good friend Radovan Karadzic in the cause of peace at any price. British and French officials are reported to be "worried" by the prospects of escalation. And US President Bill Clinton – whose declaration earlier this month that ground troops would not be used to save Gorazde can only have prompted the Serbs to believe that nothing too serious would happen to them if they took the town – has warned the Bosnian government that it should not take advantage of the air raid to mount new offensives.
Given the west's history of prevarication and procrastination over Bosnia, it would be no surprise if the apparent toughening of the Serb position provokes a climbdown – particularly if Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose preservation is the number one US foreign policy priority, persuades Clinton that facing down the Serbs will inevitably lead, via an upsurge in pan-Slavic nationalism in Russia, to growing support for Vladimir Zhirinovsky. But there are sound reasons for calling the Serbs' bluff.
If the Serbs are appeased once again, the possibility of recreating a multi-ethnic, democratic, secular Bosnia with the borders recognised in 1992 – now a slim chance, it has to be admitted, but nevertheless still there – will disappear forever. What the Serbs want the west to believe is that the choice in Bosnia is between a negotiated partition, in which they give up a little of the land they have seized in return for "peace", and a continuing war in which they take more and more territory unless the west commits massive ground forces to the defence of Bosnia. Hence the bluster this week, with the suggestion that the Serbs will effectively declare war on the international community if it continues to resist Serb territorial aggrandisement and to refuse partition (at least on Serbian terms, if not in principle). If the west is bounced into suing for peace, partition, on terms favourable to the aggressors, is inevitable.
But there is an alternative. The Serbs are by no means as militarily strong as they would have us believe. Even though the Bosnian government has been denied arms by the idiotic UN embargo on "all sides", it has managed to survive the Serbian assault for two years. With the explicit support of the west – most importantly through the lifting of the arms embargo, but also, if the Bosnians request it, through intervention to defend a sovereign government against aggression – it is not inconceivable that the Bosnian government could force the Serbs on to the defensive, just as it forced the Zagreb-sponsored Bosnian Croat armies to retreat.
As everyone knows, the result of the Bosnian army's successes against the Croat insurgency was Zagreb's agreement (under US pressure) to accept a ceasefire and a multiethnic Bosnian federation. It is not hopelessly Utopian to suggest that the Serbs might knuckle under in precisely the same way. But for that to happen, western policy towards Bosnia needs to be changed, and changed fast. First, the west has to make it clear that it is indeed on the side of the Bosnian government, and that it will not accept ethnic partition of Bosnia or the creation of a greater Serbia. Then it has to back these principles with actions: removing from official positions David Owen and the rest of the gang of appeasers who have done such damage in the past two years, offering military support to the Bosnian government if it requests it, and, most important of all, dropping the embargo on arms sales to the Bosnian government.
In short, there is an opportunity today for the west to make amends for its shabby treatment of Bosnia in the first two years of its agony. It is, however, a last opportunity. If the appeasers' counsel is followed, it really will be too late.
This week's attacks by Nato bombers on Serb positions around the beseiged Bosnian government enclave of Gorazde are welcome. By using military force against the invading Serbian armies, the west has done what it should have been doing for two years, ever since the Serbs began their brutal campaign of territorial aggrandisement and ethnic cleansing against the recognised, democratic, multi-ethnic Bosnian state.
But this week's actions were not enough. The intention was not to defend the legitimate government of Bosnia against aggression: the reason that the bombers went in was simply that Gorazde had been declared a United Nations "safe area" and yet was about to fall to the Serbs, an outcome that would have demonstrated to the world (and might yet do so) that the UN's Bosnia policy is wholly inadequate to the task of resisting the creation of a fascist Greater Serbia by Slobodan Milosevic and his psycopathic Bosnian Serb puppets. And because the intervention was intended to save face rather than to confront the root problem, there is a real danger that the UN will cave in now that the Serbs have decided to cut up rough.
Whereas Nato's downing of four Serb war-planes at the end of February seemed to cow the aggressors, the latest action was denounced as "a joint Nato-Muslim assault" by the Bosnian Serbs, who have threatened to shoot down Nato aircraft if there are any more attacks. On Tuesday, dozens of UN personnel were held hostage or forcefully confined to their offices by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The Serbs have tightened their siege on the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, barring the UN from entering or leaving the city, and there are few signs that they are preparing to reduce their military activity elsewhere.
Already, there are signs of panic in the western establishment that it could be forced not only to take sides in what it has always described as a "civil war" among "warring factions" but also – horror of horrors – to take the side of the militarily weaker party in the conflict. David Owen, whose plans for the partition of Bosnia along ethnic lines gave such encouragement to Serb aggression, has dropped everything to go to flatter again his good friend Radovan Karadzic in the cause of peace at any price. British and French officials are reported to be "worried" by the prospects of escalation. And US President Bill Clinton – whose declaration earlier this month that ground troops would not be used to save Gorazde can only have prompted the Serbs to believe that nothing too serious would happen to them if they took the town – has warned the Bosnian government that it should not take advantage of the air raid to mount new offensives.
Given the west's history of prevarication and procrastination over Bosnia, it would be no surprise if the apparent toughening of the Serb position provokes a climbdown – particularly if Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose preservation is the number one US foreign policy priority, persuades Clinton that facing down the Serbs will inevitably lead, via an upsurge in pan-Slavic nationalism in Russia, to growing support for Vladimir Zhirinovsky. But there are sound reasons for calling the Serbs' bluff.
If the Serbs are appeased once again, the possibility of recreating a multi-ethnic, democratic, secular Bosnia with the borders recognised in 1992 – now a slim chance, it has to be admitted, but nevertheless still there – will disappear forever. What the Serbs want the west to believe is that the choice in Bosnia is between a negotiated partition, in which they give up a little of the land they have seized in return for "peace", and a continuing war in which they take more and more territory unless the west commits massive ground forces to the defence of Bosnia. Hence the bluster this week, with the suggestion that the Serbs will effectively declare war on the international community if it continues to resist Serb territorial aggrandisement and to refuse partition (at least on Serbian terms, if not in principle). If the west is bounced into suing for peace, partition, on terms favourable to the aggressors, is inevitable.
But there is an alternative. The Serbs are by no means as militarily strong as they would have us believe. Even though the Bosnian government has been denied arms by the idiotic UN embargo on "all sides", it has managed to survive the Serbian assault for two years. With the explicit support of the west – most importantly through the lifting of the arms embargo, but also, if the Bosnians request it, through intervention to defend a sovereign government against aggression – it is not inconceivable that the Bosnian government could force the Serbs on to the defensive, just as it forced the Zagreb-sponsored Bosnian Croat armies to retreat.
As everyone knows, the result of the Bosnian army's successes against the Croat insurgency was Zagreb's agreement (under US pressure) to accept a ceasefire and a multiethnic Bosnian federation. It is not hopelessly Utopian to suggest that the Serbs might knuckle under in precisely the same way. But for that to happen, western policy towards Bosnia needs to be changed, and changed fast. First, the west has to make it clear that it is indeed on the side of the Bosnian government, and that it will not accept ethnic partition of Bosnia or the creation of a greater Serbia. Then it has to back these principles with actions: removing from official positions David Owen and the rest of the gang of appeasers who have done such damage in the past two years, offering military support to the Bosnian government if it requests it, and, most important of all, dropping the embargo on arms sales to the Bosnian government.
In short, there is an opportunity today for the west to make amends for its shabby treatment of Bosnia in the first two years of its agony. It is, however, a last opportunity. If the appeasers' counsel is followed, it really will be too late.
Friday, 11 March 1994
GETTING RID OF THE LORDS
New Statesman & Society leader, 11 March 1994
"l'm afraid," said Lord Dacre, best known as the historian who said that the forged Hitler diaries were genuine, "it smells to me a little of political correctitude. This bill is rather like burning down the house in order to have roast pig."
And to what insurrectionary outrage was the Tory peer referring? Why, none other than the shameless attempt by Lord Diamond, formerly a Labour Cabinet minister and then an SDP defector, to change the rules on hereditary peerages, currently passed down from father to son, so that eldest children – daughters as well as sons – would inherit titles. "It's as if one were to burrow through antique architectural rubble in order to create a difficult side way into a house of which the front door is already open," Dacre fumed in the House of Lords on Monday.
Nor was he alone in his opposition to this dangerously radical measure. Indeed, the charge in the chamber was led by the 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury, whose title goes back to 1442, and the llth Baron Strabogli, whose title was created in 1318. "The present system has been with us since before the Norman Conquest," said the earl. "I can imagine much confusion, uncertainty and family friction," said the baron. And, in the end, the Lords voted by 75 votes to 39 to prevent the change in the rules. Britain's hereditary peerages will continue to be handed down from father to son, just as they have always been.
An "insult to every woman in the land", as Lord Diamond put it? Certainly. But the problems go deeper than that. Diamond's reform, if successful, would not have addressed the far more important issue of the very existence of the hereditary principle in what purports to be a democratic polity.
Of 1,203 members of Britain's upper house, 774 are hereditary peers. More than half the members of our second legislative chamber are there not because of anything that they have done, but as a reward for their ancestors' actions. Unsurprisingly, the hereditary peers are completely unrepresentative of the public as a whole: apart from their overwhelming maleness, most are rich and nearly all are Tories. And most turn up at the House of Lords only to swamp the rare revolts of working peers against the Tory party.
The legislative role of the hereditary peers is an outrage and must go – but that is not all that is wrong with the Lords. If it is insupportable for most of the members of a second chamber to be there because their fathers and fathers' fathers were adept at bribery and kow-towing to power, it is almost as bad for the rest of it to consist of people who are there because they themselves have precisely the same skills. Although many life peers work hard and perform a valuable legislative function, most are washed-up hacks given titles for their consistent time-serving. The life peerage system is essentially one of political patronage, and even if the politicians running it are themselves directly elected, life peers do not have the legitimacy of elected representatives. In short, there is an overwhelming case that, if we are to have a second chamber, it should be elected directly.
That, however, is not the end of the story. For a start, there are the thorny questions of whether we need a second chamber at all and, if we do, how it should be elected. Here, there are no better answers than those provided by Labour's Plant Commission, which – despite its inability to come up with any consensus on elections for the Commons – argued convincingly that a revising and delaying second chamber was a useful safeguard and that the upper house should be elected using a regional list system of proportional representation. Last year's Labour conference backed this recommendation, and there is no good reason that it cannot form the basis for a government programme.
But there are still details of strategy and tactics to be worked out. And here, according to Graham Allen, Labour's dynamic spokesperson on constitutional reform, there are three views that have significant support in Labour circles.
The first is that the job should be done in one fell swoop – immediate abolition and replacement of the Lords with an elected second chamber voted in on the first available Thursday in May. Second, there are those, apparently including John Smith, who reckon that, because the hereditary peers are the major affront to democracy, hereditary peerages should be abolished first, with the introduction of an elected upper house delayed, perhaps until a second term. The final viewpoint holds that the best way of dealing with the Lords is to hold elections for the upper house without actually abolishing hereditary or life peers, so that, for a time, elected peers would sit alongside unelected ones. This hybrid Lords would be left to decide in its own time what to do – the assumption being that hereditary and life peers would not dare to argue against the elective principle once it had been established.
Which of these routes Labour chooses will be decided by the party's Commission on Democracy within the next year. Each could provide a means of getting rid of the Lords in its present form – but there is a strong case for Labour not opting for the most gradualist approach of abolishing hereditary peerages first. Leaving aside the possibility that Labour would not win a second term, such a strategy would send all the wrong signals about the seriousness of Labour's commitment to democracy – not least because it would almost certainly necessitate the creation of. a large number of life peers to force the abolition of hereditary peerages through the existing Lords. Rather than raise suspicions that a Labour government would once again renege on a promise to do away with the most glaringly anti-democratic political institution in Britain, the party should make it clear that a democratic second chamber would be operating by the end of the first term of a Labour government.
"l'm afraid," said Lord Dacre, best known as the historian who said that the forged Hitler diaries were genuine, "it smells to me a little of political correctitude. This bill is rather like burning down the house in order to have roast pig."
And to what insurrectionary outrage was the Tory peer referring? Why, none other than the shameless attempt by Lord Diamond, formerly a Labour Cabinet minister and then an SDP defector, to change the rules on hereditary peerages, currently passed down from father to son, so that eldest children – daughters as well as sons – would inherit titles. "It's as if one were to burrow through antique architectural rubble in order to create a difficult side way into a house of which the front door is already open," Dacre fumed in the House of Lords on Monday.
Nor was he alone in his opposition to this dangerously radical measure. Indeed, the charge in the chamber was led by the 22nd Earl of Shrewsbury, whose title goes back to 1442, and the llth Baron Strabogli, whose title was created in 1318. "The present system has been with us since before the Norman Conquest," said the earl. "I can imagine much confusion, uncertainty and family friction," said the baron. And, in the end, the Lords voted by 75 votes to 39 to prevent the change in the rules. Britain's hereditary peerages will continue to be handed down from father to son, just as they have always been.
An "insult to every woman in the land", as Lord Diamond put it? Certainly. But the problems go deeper than that. Diamond's reform, if successful, would not have addressed the far more important issue of the very existence of the hereditary principle in what purports to be a democratic polity.
Of 1,203 members of Britain's upper house, 774 are hereditary peers. More than half the members of our second legislative chamber are there not because of anything that they have done, but as a reward for their ancestors' actions. Unsurprisingly, the hereditary peers are completely unrepresentative of the public as a whole: apart from their overwhelming maleness, most are rich and nearly all are Tories. And most turn up at the House of Lords only to swamp the rare revolts of working peers against the Tory party.
The legislative role of the hereditary peers is an outrage and must go – but that is not all that is wrong with the Lords. If it is insupportable for most of the members of a second chamber to be there because their fathers and fathers' fathers were adept at bribery and kow-towing to power, it is almost as bad for the rest of it to consist of people who are there because they themselves have precisely the same skills. Although many life peers work hard and perform a valuable legislative function, most are washed-up hacks given titles for their consistent time-serving. The life peerage system is essentially one of political patronage, and even if the politicians running it are themselves directly elected, life peers do not have the legitimacy of elected representatives. In short, there is an overwhelming case that, if we are to have a second chamber, it should be elected directly.
That, however, is not the end of the story. For a start, there are the thorny questions of whether we need a second chamber at all and, if we do, how it should be elected. Here, there are no better answers than those provided by Labour's Plant Commission, which – despite its inability to come up with any consensus on elections for the Commons – argued convincingly that a revising and delaying second chamber was a useful safeguard and that the upper house should be elected using a regional list system of proportional representation. Last year's Labour conference backed this recommendation, and there is no good reason that it cannot form the basis for a government programme.
But there are still details of strategy and tactics to be worked out. And here, according to Graham Allen, Labour's dynamic spokesperson on constitutional reform, there are three views that have significant support in Labour circles.
The first is that the job should be done in one fell swoop – immediate abolition and replacement of the Lords with an elected second chamber voted in on the first available Thursday in May. Second, there are those, apparently including John Smith, who reckon that, because the hereditary peers are the major affront to democracy, hereditary peerages should be abolished first, with the introduction of an elected upper house delayed, perhaps until a second term. The final viewpoint holds that the best way of dealing with the Lords is to hold elections for the upper house without actually abolishing hereditary or life peers, so that, for a time, elected peers would sit alongside unelected ones. This hybrid Lords would be left to decide in its own time what to do – the assumption being that hereditary and life peers would not dare to argue against the elective principle once it had been established.
Which of these routes Labour chooses will be decided by the party's Commission on Democracy within the next year. Each could provide a means of getting rid of the Lords in its present form – but there is a strong case for Labour not opting for the most gradualist approach of abolishing hereditary peerages first. Leaving aside the possibility that Labour would not win a second term, such a strategy would send all the wrong signals about the seriousness of Labour's commitment to democracy – not least because it would almost certainly necessitate the creation of. a large number of life peers to force the abolition of hereditary peerages through the existing Lords. Rather than raise suspicions that a Labour government would once again renege on a promise to do away with the most glaringly anti-democratic political institution in Britain, the party should make it clear that a democratic second chamber would be operating by the end of the first term of a Labour government.
Friday, 4 March 1994
NOT THE ONLY GUILTY MAN
New Statesman & Society leader, 4 March 1994
According to all the best placed sources in the corridors of Westminster, the government is preparing to make a sacrifice of Sir Nicholas Lyell, the attorney-general, if the report of the Scott inquiry into British arms sales to Iraq, due in the summer, criticises ministers' handling of public interest immunity certificates in the 1992 Matrix Churchill trial.
He should, of course, go – and there is no need to wait until the summer. Lyell was the person who orchestrated the government's attempts to prevent the Matrix Churchill trial seeing documents that proved beyond a shadow of doubt that the company's exports of machine tools to the Iraqi military-industrial complex were fully encouraged by the government. He drew up the public interest immunity certificates, signed by ministers, which were presented to the trial judge claiming that disclosure of the documents would damage the public interest. If Mr Justice Smedley had not overturned the PII certificates, three innocent men would have gone to prison.
As became clear this week following Trade and Industry Secretary Michael Heseltine's evidence to Scott, the issuing of the PII certificates was by no means the mere technical legal obligation that Lyell has consistently claimed it was. Heseltine told Scott that he had disagreed with the argument that the documents should not be disclosed: Lyell's response had been to argue that ministers had a legal duty to sign PII certificates in all cases involving certain sorts of information. After a lot of wrangling, Heseltine eventually signed a watered-down PII certificate on the understanding that his worries would be communicated to the trial judge. They were not.
In public, Lyell subsequently kept up the line that ministers were "required by law to claim PII" with "certain classes of documents" – a position given full support by Prime Minister John Major. "Claiming public interest immunity is an obligation, not a privilege," Major told Scott when he appeared before the inquiry earlier this year.
Yet, according to Heseltine on Monday, a few days after the collapse of the Matrix Churchill trial, Lyell informed him, apropos another case, that ministers did not after all have to sign PII certificates in every circumstance. If Heseltine is telling the truth – and in this case there is no reason to doubt that he is – Lyell has been exposed as a liar who was prepared to abuse all the power and authority that goes with his position to expedite a cover-up that would have resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of three people. If that is not cause for resignation, and resignation now, the Tories have sunk even deeper into the moral mire than even NSS thought possible.
But it would be wrong if Lyell were the only minister to lose his job over arms-to-Iraq. On the PII question, the defence of Heseltine and the other three ministers who signed Matrix Churchill certificates – the then home secretary Kenneth Clarke, Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and the then junior Foreign Office minister Tristan Garel-Jones – is essentially that offered by war criminals the world over: they were only following orders (albeit in Heseltine's case – we now discover, conveniently for his prospects of political advancement – unwillingly). The story simply will not wash.
Even if the ministers were under a legal obligation to sign the certificates – which is extremely doubtful – they all had the option of resigning instead of signing, on the grounds that non-disclosure of the documents would send the Matrix Churchill executives to jail. The fact that this does not seem to have crossed any of their minds – even the whin-geing Heseltine's – is inexcusable, and the three of the four who are still serving as ministers deserve to be hounded out of office.
But the casualty list should not stop there. The PII certificates question is only one of the issues raised by the Scott inquiry – and is by no means the most substantive. Lyell, Heseltine, Clarke, Rifkind and Garel-Jones are guilty of having engineered, or carried out, a massive cover-up: others are guilty of having constructed, implemented and acquiesced in the policy that they tried to keep from public view.
Put simply, following the Iran-Iraq war, the government secretly adopted a policy of maximising exports to Iraq – even though it knew that many of the exports were of equipment essential to Iraq's rearmament programme, and even though it knew all about the viciousness of Saddam's regime and his expansionist ideology. The policy was more than just a disastrous misreading of Saddam's intentions: it raises fundamental questions about the making of British foreign policy and about the competence and honesty of the politicians responsible for it.
Of course, many of the key players are peripheral to politics these days: Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe, Alan Clark. But others are not. The foreign secretaries who presided over the latter part of Britain's "arm Iraq" policy – for that is what it was – were John Major and Douglas Kurd: their underlings included William Waldegrave. All deserve the chop for their roles: in a decent polity, Scott would not hesitate to recommend in his report a mass resignation from the cabinet.
According to all the best placed sources in the corridors of Westminster, the government is preparing to make a sacrifice of Sir Nicholas Lyell, the attorney-general, if the report of the Scott inquiry into British arms sales to Iraq, due in the summer, criticises ministers' handling of public interest immunity certificates in the 1992 Matrix Churchill trial.
He should, of course, go – and there is no need to wait until the summer. Lyell was the person who orchestrated the government's attempts to prevent the Matrix Churchill trial seeing documents that proved beyond a shadow of doubt that the company's exports of machine tools to the Iraqi military-industrial complex were fully encouraged by the government. He drew up the public interest immunity certificates, signed by ministers, which were presented to the trial judge claiming that disclosure of the documents would damage the public interest. If Mr Justice Smedley had not overturned the PII certificates, three innocent men would have gone to prison.
As became clear this week following Trade and Industry Secretary Michael Heseltine's evidence to Scott, the issuing of the PII certificates was by no means the mere technical legal obligation that Lyell has consistently claimed it was. Heseltine told Scott that he had disagreed with the argument that the documents should not be disclosed: Lyell's response had been to argue that ministers had a legal duty to sign PII certificates in all cases involving certain sorts of information. After a lot of wrangling, Heseltine eventually signed a watered-down PII certificate on the understanding that his worries would be communicated to the trial judge. They were not.
In public, Lyell subsequently kept up the line that ministers were "required by law to claim PII" with "certain classes of documents" – a position given full support by Prime Minister John Major. "Claiming public interest immunity is an obligation, not a privilege," Major told Scott when he appeared before the inquiry earlier this year.
Yet, according to Heseltine on Monday, a few days after the collapse of the Matrix Churchill trial, Lyell informed him, apropos another case, that ministers did not after all have to sign PII certificates in every circumstance. If Heseltine is telling the truth – and in this case there is no reason to doubt that he is – Lyell has been exposed as a liar who was prepared to abuse all the power and authority that goes with his position to expedite a cover-up that would have resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of three people. If that is not cause for resignation, and resignation now, the Tories have sunk even deeper into the moral mire than even NSS thought possible.
But it would be wrong if Lyell were the only minister to lose his job over arms-to-Iraq. On the PII question, the defence of Heseltine and the other three ministers who signed Matrix Churchill certificates – the then home secretary Kenneth Clarke, Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and the then junior Foreign Office minister Tristan Garel-Jones – is essentially that offered by war criminals the world over: they were only following orders (albeit in Heseltine's case – we now discover, conveniently for his prospects of political advancement – unwillingly). The story simply will not wash.
Even if the ministers were under a legal obligation to sign the certificates – which is extremely doubtful – they all had the option of resigning instead of signing, on the grounds that non-disclosure of the documents would send the Matrix Churchill executives to jail. The fact that this does not seem to have crossed any of their minds – even the whin-geing Heseltine's – is inexcusable, and the three of the four who are still serving as ministers deserve to be hounded out of office.
But the casualty list should not stop there. The PII certificates question is only one of the issues raised by the Scott inquiry – and is by no means the most substantive. Lyell, Heseltine, Clarke, Rifkind and Garel-Jones are guilty of having engineered, or carried out, a massive cover-up: others are guilty of having constructed, implemented and acquiesced in the policy that they tried to keep from public view.
Put simply, following the Iran-Iraq war, the government secretly adopted a policy of maximising exports to Iraq – even though it knew that many of the exports were of equipment essential to Iraq's rearmament programme, and even though it knew all about the viciousness of Saddam's regime and his expansionist ideology. The policy was more than just a disastrous misreading of Saddam's intentions: it raises fundamental questions about the making of British foreign policy and about the competence and honesty of the politicians responsible for it.
Of course, many of the key players are peripheral to politics these days: Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe, Alan Clark. But others are not. The foreign secretaries who presided over the latter part of Britain's "arm Iraq" policy – for that is what it was – were John Major and Douglas Kurd: their underlings included William Waldegrave. All deserve the chop for their roles: in a decent polity, Scott would not hesitate to recommend in his report a mass resignation from the cabinet.
Friday, 18 February 1994
SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER
New Statesman & Society, 18 February 1994
With the major parties in turmoil, the neo-Nazi BNP could win a majority on the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood council in May's local elections. Paul Anderson reports
The atrium of Tower Hamlets' spanking new town hall in Blackwall, east London, just before an evening council meeting: a dozen or so locals sit waiting for the public gallery to be opened, chatting and gazing around warily at the post-modern glass and chrome that give this £10 million monument to the ruling Liberal Democrats' eight years in power the air of a tacky provincial shopping mall.
Suddenly, the talking stops and all eyes focus on the automatic revolving doors, from which emerges a small bald middle-aged man with pebble glasses, a moustache and a respectable navy blue raincoat. He is as unremarkable a figure as it is possible to meet – and yet everyone knows who he is. Last September in Millwall, Derek Beackon became the first ever member of the neo-Nazi British National Party to win a council seat. Now he is coming to take part in his second full council meeting.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is not alone: he is followed through the doors by three large young men, one of them, obviously a plain-clothes skinhead, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "Sing up for England". The minders eye the locals suspiciously; the locals resume their conversation until an usher tells them: "You can go in now."
In the council chamber, the Liberal Democrats sit opposite Labour, with Beackon at his own table. It is the first time that Labour has attended a council meeting with Beackon present. The Lib Dems' policy of decentralisation means that most council business is dealt with by councillors in "neighbourhood councils". There are only four full council meetings a year, and Labour boycotted the last as a symbolic protest against Beackon's election.
So this is the only real chance that the two main parties have had to argue face-to-face since September – and both sides take the opportunity with relish, mindful that May's local elections are looming. Four hours of party-political invective follow, culminating in each side accusing the other of responsibility for the BNP victory. Beackon says nothing and votes only once, for a motion giving the Salvation Army the freedom of the borough. His minders look on bored.
It is without a doubt the Lib Dems who have most explaining to do when it comes to last September's debacle. As their national party's inquiry into Tower Hamlets, chaired by Lord Lester, QC, made clear just before Christmas, their propaganda in the borough, particularly in the Isle of Dogs, has systematically pandered to racism, especially on housing.
What then styled itself the Liberal Focus Team took control of the council from Labour in 1986 after more than a decade of "community politics" characterised by populist anti-Labour rhetoric and assiduous wooing of tenants' associations – a major force in a borough in which three-quarters of the population lives in council housing even after years of right-to-buy. Despite having a tiny majority, the Liberals implemented their decentralisation and council house-sales policies with missionary zeal. From the start, they courted controversy over race with their tough line on the council's legal obligation to house the homeless (mostly Bangladeshi) and their "sons and daughters scheme", giving priority in housing allocation to the offspring of people born in the borough, most of whom were white.
It was, however, only in the run-up to the 1990 council elections, which Labour expected to win, that the Lib Dems pulled out all the stops. A series of election leaflets – including, notoriously, one purporting to be "anti-racist" Labour propaganda – gave the impression that Labour gave preference to Bangladeshi immigrants while the Lib Dems worked for "local" whites. The Lib Dems increased their majority. Afterwards, the High Court ruled that seven Lib-Dem councillors were guilty of "corrupt and illegal practice" in using the fake leaflet, but they got off on appeal.
In a late-1992 by-election in Millwall ward, caused by the resignation of a Labour councillor, the Lib Dems, standing as "Island Liberal Focus Team", went further, ar-guing for "Island homes for Island people" and against "Labour's positive discrimination policies" on the Isle of Dogs. They used much the same message last September – and there are few signs of remorse today. The Lester report tore apart the local Lib Dems, several of whom resigned from the party. Paddy Ashdown responded by threatening the Tower Hamlets party with suspension if it did not accept Lester's findings by midnight last Sunday. It knuckled under, but only grudgingly.
But at least the Lib Dems had a full inquiry. By contrast, Labour's post mortem on the by-election was a secretive affair, extraordinarily careful not to put anything on paper that might suggest that something was seriously wrong with Labour in Millwall.
Labour has gone out of its way to claim that what happened was not an inquiry at all but a "debrief" followed by a few interviews, with the only question at stake the allegation, first made openly in the hard-left magazine Briefing by Christine Shawcroft (a Labour councillor in Blackwall, the other ward in the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood) that faked canvass returns had been leaked to the press by Labour to give the impression that only it had a hope of beating the BNP in September.
The initial "debrief was conducted by two London regional party officials and London region chair Jim Fitzpatrick. They interviewed a wide range of people, including candidate James Hunt, agent Steve Moly-neaux and the Millwall branch officers, then produced a three-page report, which concentrated on the minutiae of Labour's organisational weaknesses in the by-election.
According to the report, the debrief team considered the question of the leaked canvass returns "at great length" but "it was not possible to reach precise conclusions" either about who did it or about whether they were faked. The regional party therefore decided to get the Bow and Poplar consituency party to appoint a panel to look into the matter further. This panel reported to a special CLP executive meeting in December that the canvass figures were inaccurate but that it could not establish the precise chain of events leading up to the leak. Back went the buck to London region, which in turn called in national general secretary Larry Whitty. He decided to interview Molyneaux, Hunt and one other member of the Bow and Poplar party. He was about to interview Hunt last month when the former candidate resigned from the Labour Party, ripping up his party card in front of the television cameras and throwing the pieces in the Thames.
And that, for Labour, was that. The London region put out a statement declaring the matter "concluded except for the selection of a full team of candidates by the local Labour Party". "Responsibility for the BNP victory in the Millwall by-election rests four-square with the Liberal Democrats," said Whitty. "There is a world of difference between 'pandering to racism', which is what the Liberal Democrats themselves say some of their members did in Tower Hamlets, and the unauthorised issuing of the canvass figures."
Others are less sanguine – particularly among the local Labour hard left. They say that the party's investigations into what went wrong in Millwall failed to address the real issue – the extent to which, after the Millwall ward Labour Party was taken over by local Labour right-wingers in the late 1980s, with the full support of Labour headquarters, it adopted the same populism-bordering-on-racism for which the national party has attacked the Lib Dems. According to the hard left, Walworth Road was prepared to tolerate the worst sort of pandering to racism, as long as it meant getting rid of the Trots.
Some of the evidence for these accusations is anecdotal. But the local ward party was undoubtedly hard-left dominated during the 1980s, with key figures belonging to both Militant and Briefing. The hard left was ousted by a combination of the national party's purge of Militant and the efforts of a group of local party members with a base in the tenants' associations, two of whom, Sandra Ireland and Kathy McTasney, became chair and secretary of the ward party.
It is also indisputable that, after the demise of the hard left, the ward party shed councillors and adopted a more populist approach. First to go was Ivan Walker, whose resignation in 1992 caused the first by-election in the ward, in which veteran community activist Ted Johns held the seat for Labour and the BNP took 20 per cent. Next, sitting councillor Dave Chapman decided not to stand again in 1994 and hard-left councillor Yve Amor was deselected at a meeting that chose James Hunt and Steve Molyneaux as Labour candidates. Chapman's resignation last year caused the by-election that Beackon won by 1,480 votes to Hunt's 1,473.
In both by-election campaigns, Labour made much of the localness of its candidates – and, although the more lurid accusations of racism against it are impossible to prove, there is no doubt that { Labour in Millwall did produce two leaflets that played to racial prejudice.
The first lambasted the Lib Dems for publishing "leaflets saying 'Island homes for Island people'" when they had instructed the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood "to give 40 per cent of its lettings to homeless families or else" – the clear implication being that Labour really would tell the homeless "outsiders" where to go. In the other, under the heading "James Hunt says: 'House the hidden homeless'", Labour declared: "The homeless in your home are your children who have to sleep on the couch, your brothers and sisters who want a place of their own, your grandchildren without space to grow up in ... James says: The Liberals tell us which homeless to house – why can't we decide our own priorities and decide for ourselves?'"
Officially, Labour denies that the leaflets and the accusations of racism were an issue in the party's investigations into Millwall: "The only people who think that are the Liberals," said a spokesman. But there is evidence that they were. When Ireland and McTasney resigned from the party last month, Ireland wrote a letter to one of the "debrief officials at the Greater London Labour Party. It suggests that the debrief was fully informed about the leaflets and that bitter argument about the Millwall party's line on housing had undermined the effectiveness of Labour's campaign last September.
"We are being victimised for our deep commitment to housing the homeless at home," she complained. "When Kathy and I seek to press for a better deal for local people, we are immediately accused, without a shred of evidence, of being 'racists and gangsters'." She hit out particularly at Yve Amor, the still-sitting but deselected Millwall councillor, and the two hard-left councillors from neighbouring Blackwall, Christine Shawcroft and Dave Lawrence. "We have told you, as we told the debrief committee, that at a meeting when Kathy and I attempted to press for a proper deal for the homeless at home, Christine Shawcroft said that neither she nor Amor nor Lawrence would house the homeless at home 'because they were predominantly white'. As a result of this Kathy and I, along with James Hunt and many others of the ward have fought them relentlessly ever since, and you know this is the reason why James Hunt wanted none of them to have anything to do with his campaign."
Last week, Ireland and Hunt announced that they would stand for election in Millwall in May's local elections as candidates of the East London People's Alliance, a mysterious outfit formed three weeks ago, which will be fighting on the "hidden homeless" theme that was such a favourite when they were with Labour. Hunt told the local East London Advertiser. "All people living in Tower Hamlets including those over 18 living with their parents are entitled to a home in the borough." The ELPA claims already to have the support of 25 Labour activists on the Isle of Dogs, and sitting Labour councillor Ted Johns has indicated that he is thinking of joining them.
Labour is sceptical about the strength of the ELPA and says that Beackon's inactivity as a councillor and the bad publicity that the BNP has had since his election will ensure that neither he nor any other BNP candidate is successful in May. "We're fighting to win in all three seats in Millwall," says John Biggs, leader of the Labour group on the council. And indeed the exit of Ireland, Hunt and their friends does seem to have had a cathartic effect on the Millwall party. Last week, it had its biggest ward meeting for ages, and last Sunday it managed to get 80 people out on the streets, despite Arctic weather, for the first of a series of monthly mass canvasses in the run-up to the elections. There is still the small matter of selecting candidates to get out of the way – but campaign organisers say. with reason, that neither the ELPA nor the Lib Dems, who came a close third last September but are now in a shambles, can hope to match Labour's organisation.
Nevertheless, many of the activists on the canvass admit that Labour has a difficult fight with the BNP on its hands. The neo-Nazis have been out on the knocker on the white council estates in groups of 30 or 40 most weekends for several months, they say, and racism among the white working class on the Island is deep-rooted. With racist former Lib Dem voters likely to vote BNP, some in the Labour camp fear that the intervention of the ELPA could siphon off just enough votes from Labour to allow the BNP to sweep all three Millwall seats.
If that happens, the BNP will have a three-two majority on the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood council. This would be bad enough if all it meant was the BNP's promised renaming of the neighbourhood building "Oswald Mosley House" (it is currently named after Jack Dash, the communist dockers leader). But it would also mean BNP control over housing allocation and the neighbourhood's £20 million budget. And that, as everyone who turned out last Sunday agrees, would be a disaster.
With the major parties in turmoil, the neo-Nazi BNP could win a majority on the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood council in May's local elections. Paul Anderson reports
The atrium of Tower Hamlets' spanking new town hall in Blackwall, east London, just before an evening council meeting: a dozen or so locals sit waiting for the public gallery to be opened, chatting and gazing around warily at the post-modern glass and chrome that give this £10 million monument to the ruling Liberal Democrats' eight years in power the air of a tacky provincial shopping mall.
Suddenly, the talking stops and all eyes focus on the automatic revolving doors, from which emerges a small bald middle-aged man with pebble glasses, a moustache and a respectable navy blue raincoat. He is as unremarkable a figure as it is possible to meet – and yet everyone knows who he is. Last September in Millwall, Derek Beackon became the first ever member of the neo-Nazi British National Party to win a council seat. Now he is coming to take part in his second full council meeting.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is not alone: he is followed through the doors by three large young men, one of them, obviously a plain-clothes skinhead, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "Sing up for England". The minders eye the locals suspiciously; the locals resume their conversation until an usher tells them: "You can go in now."
In the council chamber, the Liberal Democrats sit opposite Labour, with Beackon at his own table. It is the first time that Labour has attended a council meeting with Beackon present. The Lib Dems' policy of decentralisation means that most council business is dealt with by councillors in "neighbourhood councils". There are only four full council meetings a year, and Labour boycotted the last as a symbolic protest against Beackon's election.
So this is the only real chance that the two main parties have had to argue face-to-face since September – and both sides take the opportunity with relish, mindful that May's local elections are looming. Four hours of party-political invective follow, culminating in each side accusing the other of responsibility for the BNP victory. Beackon says nothing and votes only once, for a motion giving the Salvation Army the freedom of the borough. His minders look on bored.
It is without a doubt the Lib Dems who have most explaining to do when it comes to last September's debacle. As their national party's inquiry into Tower Hamlets, chaired by Lord Lester, QC, made clear just before Christmas, their propaganda in the borough, particularly in the Isle of Dogs, has systematically pandered to racism, especially on housing.
What then styled itself the Liberal Focus Team took control of the council from Labour in 1986 after more than a decade of "community politics" characterised by populist anti-Labour rhetoric and assiduous wooing of tenants' associations – a major force in a borough in which three-quarters of the population lives in council housing even after years of right-to-buy. Despite having a tiny majority, the Liberals implemented their decentralisation and council house-sales policies with missionary zeal. From the start, they courted controversy over race with their tough line on the council's legal obligation to house the homeless (mostly Bangladeshi) and their "sons and daughters scheme", giving priority in housing allocation to the offspring of people born in the borough, most of whom were white.
It was, however, only in the run-up to the 1990 council elections, which Labour expected to win, that the Lib Dems pulled out all the stops. A series of election leaflets – including, notoriously, one purporting to be "anti-racist" Labour propaganda – gave the impression that Labour gave preference to Bangladeshi immigrants while the Lib Dems worked for "local" whites. The Lib Dems increased their majority. Afterwards, the High Court ruled that seven Lib-Dem councillors were guilty of "corrupt and illegal practice" in using the fake leaflet, but they got off on appeal.
In a late-1992 by-election in Millwall ward, caused by the resignation of a Labour councillor, the Lib Dems, standing as "Island Liberal Focus Team", went further, ar-guing for "Island homes for Island people" and against "Labour's positive discrimination policies" on the Isle of Dogs. They used much the same message last September – and there are few signs of remorse today. The Lester report tore apart the local Lib Dems, several of whom resigned from the party. Paddy Ashdown responded by threatening the Tower Hamlets party with suspension if it did not accept Lester's findings by midnight last Sunday. It knuckled under, but only grudgingly.
But at least the Lib Dems had a full inquiry. By contrast, Labour's post mortem on the by-election was a secretive affair, extraordinarily careful not to put anything on paper that might suggest that something was seriously wrong with Labour in Millwall.
Labour has gone out of its way to claim that what happened was not an inquiry at all but a "debrief" followed by a few interviews, with the only question at stake the allegation, first made openly in the hard-left magazine Briefing by Christine Shawcroft (a Labour councillor in Blackwall, the other ward in the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood) that faked canvass returns had been leaked to the press by Labour to give the impression that only it had a hope of beating the BNP in September.
The initial "debrief was conducted by two London regional party officials and London region chair Jim Fitzpatrick. They interviewed a wide range of people, including candidate James Hunt, agent Steve Moly-neaux and the Millwall branch officers, then produced a three-page report, which concentrated on the minutiae of Labour's organisational weaknesses in the by-election.
According to the report, the debrief team considered the question of the leaked canvass returns "at great length" but "it was not possible to reach precise conclusions" either about who did it or about whether they were faked. The regional party therefore decided to get the Bow and Poplar consituency party to appoint a panel to look into the matter further. This panel reported to a special CLP executive meeting in December that the canvass figures were inaccurate but that it could not establish the precise chain of events leading up to the leak. Back went the buck to London region, which in turn called in national general secretary Larry Whitty. He decided to interview Molyneaux, Hunt and one other member of the Bow and Poplar party. He was about to interview Hunt last month when the former candidate resigned from the Labour Party, ripping up his party card in front of the television cameras and throwing the pieces in the Thames.
And that, for Labour, was that. The London region put out a statement declaring the matter "concluded except for the selection of a full team of candidates by the local Labour Party". "Responsibility for the BNP victory in the Millwall by-election rests four-square with the Liberal Democrats," said Whitty. "There is a world of difference between 'pandering to racism', which is what the Liberal Democrats themselves say some of their members did in Tower Hamlets, and the unauthorised issuing of the canvass figures."
Others are less sanguine – particularly among the local Labour hard left. They say that the party's investigations into what went wrong in Millwall failed to address the real issue – the extent to which, after the Millwall ward Labour Party was taken over by local Labour right-wingers in the late 1980s, with the full support of Labour headquarters, it adopted the same populism-bordering-on-racism for which the national party has attacked the Lib Dems. According to the hard left, Walworth Road was prepared to tolerate the worst sort of pandering to racism, as long as it meant getting rid of the Trots.
Some of the evidence for these accusations is anecdotal. But the local ward party was undoubtedly hard-left dominated during the 1980s, with key figures belonging to both Militant and Briefing. The hard left was ousted by a combination of the national party's purge of Militant and the efforts of a group of local party members with a base in the tenants' associations, two of whom, Sandra Ireland and Kathy McTasney, became chair and secretary of the ward party.
It is also indisputable that, after the demise of the hard left, the ward party shed councillors and adopted a more populist approach. First to go was Ivan Walker, whose resignation in 1992 caused the first by-election in the ward, in which veteran community activist Ted Johns held the seat for Labour and the BNP took 20 per cent. Next, sitting councillor Dave Chapman decided not to stand again in 1994 and hard-left councillor Yve Amor was deselected at a meeting that chose James Hunt and Steve Molyneaux as Labour candidates. Chapman's resignation last year caused the by-election that Beackon won by 1,480 votes to Hunt's 1,473.
In both by-election campaigns, Labour made much of the localness of its candidates – and, although the more lurid accusations of racism against it are impossible to prove, there is no doubt that { Labour in Millwall did produce two leaflets that played to racial prejudice.
The first lambasted the Lib Dems for publishing "leaflets saying 'Island homes for Island people'" when they had instructed the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood "to give 40 per cent of its lettings to homeless families or else" – the clear implication being that Labour really would tell the homeless "outsiders" where to go. In the other, under the heading "James Hunt says: 'House the hidden homeless'", Labour declared: "The homeless in your home are your children who have to sleep on the couch, your brothers and sisters who want a place of their own, your grandchildren without space to grow up in ... James says: The Liberals tell us which homeless to house – why can't we decide our own priorities and decide for ourselves?'"
Officially, Labour denies that the leaflets and the accusations of racism were an issue in the party's investigations into Millwall: "The only people who think that are the Liberals," said a spokesman. But there is evidence that they were. When Ireland and McTasney resigned from the party last month, Ireland wrote a letter to one of the "debrief officials at the Greater London Labour Party. It suggests that the debrief was fully informed about the leaflets and that bitter argument about the Millwall party's line on housing had undermined the effectiveness of Labour's campaign last September.
"We are being victimised for our deep commitment to housing the homeless at home," she complained. "When Kathy and I seek to press for a better deal for local people, we are immediately accused, without a shred of evidence, of being 'racists and gangsters'." She hit out particularly at Yve Amor, the still-sitting but deselected Millwall councillor, and the two hard-left councillors from neighbouring Blackwall, Christine Shawcroft and Dave Lawrence. "We have told you, as we told the debrief committee, that at a meeting when Kathy and I attempted to press for a proper deal for the homeless at home, Christine Shawcroft said that neither she nor Amor nor Lawrence would house the homeless at home 'because they were predominantly white'. As a result of this Kathy and I, along with James Hunt and many others of the ward have fought them relentlessly ever since, and you know this is the reason why James Hunt wanted none of them to have anything to do with his campaign."
Last week, Ireland and Hunt announced that they would stand for election in Millwall in May's local elections as candidates of the East London People's Alliance, a mysterious outfit formed three weeks ago, which will be fighting on the "hidden homeless" theme that was such a favourite when they were with Labour. Hunt told the local East London Advertiser. "All people living in Tower Hamlets including those over 18 living with their parents are entitled to a home in the borough." The ELPA claims already to have the support of 25 Labour activists on the Isle of Dogs, and sitting Labour councillor Ted Johns has indicated that he is thinking of joining them.
Labour is sceptical about the strength of the ELPA and says that Beackon's inactivity as a councillor and the bad publicity that the BNP has had since his election will ensure that neither he nor any other BNP candidate is successful in May. "We're fighting to win in all three seats in Millwall," says John Biggs, leader of the Labour group on the council. And indeed the exit of Ireland, Hunt and their friends does seem to have had a cathartic effect on the Millwall party. Last week, it had its biggest ward meeting for ages, and last Sunday it managed to get 80 people out on the streets, despite Arctic weather, for the first of a series of monthly mass canvasses in the run-up to the elections. There is still the small matter of selecting candidates to get out of the way – but campaign organisers say. with reason, that neither the ELPA nor the Lib Dems, who came a close third last September but are now in a shambles, can hope to match Labour's organisation.
Nevertheless, many of the activists on the canvass admit that Labour has a difficult fight with the BNP on its hands. The neo-Nazis have been out on the knocker on the white council estates in groups of 30 or 40 most weekends for several months, they say, and racism among the white working class on the Island is deep-rooted. With racist former Lib Dem voters likely to vote BNP, some in the Labour camp fear that the intervention of the ELPA could siphon off just enough votes from Labour to allow the BNP to sweep all three Millwall seats.
If that happens, the BNP will have a three-two majority on the Isle of Dogs neighbourhood council. This would be bad enough if all it meant was the BNP's promised renaming of the neighbourhood building "Oswald Mosley House" (it is currently named after Jack Dash, the communist dockers leader). But it would also mean BNP control over housing allocation and the neighbourhood's £20 million budget. And that, as everyone who turned out last Sunday agrees, would be a disaster.
Friday, 4 February 1994
STALIN'S BRITISH BULLDOG
New Statesman & Society, 4 February 1994
Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey report on what historians of the British Communist Party are finding in the newly opened archives in the former Soviet Union
On 23 June 1941, the day after Hitler's Germany began its invasion of the Soviet Union, George Orwell wrote in his diary:
"At present the British Communists have issued some kind of manifesto calling for a 'People's Government' etc, etc. They will change their tune as soon as the hand-out from Moscow comes. If the Russians are really resisting, it is not in their interest to have a weak government in Britain, or subversive influences at work here. The Communists will no doubt be super-patriotic within ten days . . ."
Orwell was precisely right. The very next day, the executive committee of the Communist International, which controlled all the world's communist parties, and which in turn was controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, met in Moscow. It composed a message to the Communist Party of Great Britain condemning its position and demanding a change. "You should direct your fire against capitulationist anti- Soviet elements," ran the missive. "To demand in the present situation the replacement of the Churchill government with a 'People's Government' means to bring grist to the mill of pro-Hitlerite elements in England."
And so the CPGB did a somersault – just as it had in the aftermath of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, when the Comintern instructed it to drop its policy of maximum unity against Nazi expansionism and instead condemn the war as "imperialist". By the end of June 1941, the party was calling for "the broadest united national front around the Churchill government", outdoing everyone else, left or right, in its backing for the war. Orwell described the new line as "All power to Churchill!"
An old story, of course – except for one thing. It was only last weekend that the content of the "hand-out from Moscow" was first made public, in a paper delivered by Monty Johnstone, for years one of the CP's chief ideologues, to a conference in Manchester, grandly titled "Opening the Books", attended by 80-odd historians of the Communist Party.
For most of its life, the British Communist Party simply denied that its political line was ever determined by the Kremlin: its changes of direction were, it claimed, locally determined. And, however implausible the claim, it was impossible to counter definitively. Access to the party's own records and those in Moscow was denied to all but official party historians, who, to the dismay of the party's best minds, published nothing that could be construed as remotely embarrassing.
Although, from the late 1970s, some party historians admitted Soviet influence on the CPGB and then documented it from the British party archives (a process encouraged by the party itself as it prepared to wind itself up in the late 1980s), it is only since glasnost and the subsequent collapse of Soviet communism that the incontrovertible evidence of the CPGB's subordination to the CPSU has begun to see the light of day.
In the past five years, researchers have dug out an extraordinary array of material from newly open archives in Moscow – and the 1941 Comintern directive is by no means the most exciting or revealing. In 1990, Lawrence and Wishart, the CP's publishing outfit, published About Turn, the transcript of the CP central committee's discussion in 1939 that led to its toeing the Moscow line of opposition to the war. Since then, other researchers have uncovered the Moscow pay-off to the CP after 1956, when it backed the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, and the role of Stalin in the drafting of the CP programme, The British Road to Socialism, which the CP had always claimed it composed itself.
More is to come – some of it, no doubt, extremely embarrassing, and not just for former members of the Communist Party. Researchers have only just started on the archives of the Comintern, and the archives of the CPSU international department, which dealt with relations with other communist parties after the end of the Comintern, are not yet open. The same goes for both Soviet foreign office and secret police files. The delicate questions of how far the CP was the hidden hand behind much of the Labour left and the extent of its work for Soviet intelligence (suspected even by former loyal party members to have been the price of the "Moscow gold") have yet to be addressed.
Unsurprisingly, there is a mood of expectation among historians of British communism about what the Moscow archives – now effectively on the market to the highest bidder – will yield. Kevin Morgan, one of the organisers of last weekend's conference and the author of a recent highly acclaimed biography of British Communist leader Harry Pollitt, is particularly excited by the verbatim transcripts of CPGB central committee and Politbureau meetings collected by the Comintern. "They provide an immediacy and vividness of detail unique among the formal records of the British labour movement," he says. "It is like an old sepia photograph suddenly become voluble and argumentative."
But even Morgan sounds a note of caution. The Moscow archives should not be fetish-ised, he says: now that it has been firmly established that the Comintern had a decisive influence in the most important CPGB decisions something that no one outside the party ever really doubted – it is not particularly important to publish papers on the details of old news. Far more interesting is the way the "orders from Moscow" were received and implemented by the party below the leadership level: "Even apparatchiks were often guided as much by an unacknowledged pragmatism as by their formal directives." And indeed, a major theme of recent communist history has been an emphasis on indigenous radicalism and local practice. The underlying notion is that the CP was not just Moscow's poodle but an honourable player in British politics and society.
It was this approach to communist history that informed most of the written contributions to last weekend's apprehensive postmortem. Few contributions were based on work in the Soviet archives, and Moscow gold was no more than a topic of speculation in the bar.
There were papers on everything from the Communist Party's role in local government in south Wales in the 1920s and 1930s to the influence of the ideas of Marxism Today in the 1980s. And although there was little on the CP's "heroic period" in the 1930s, when it was briefly the darling of most of the British left (including Kingsley Martin's New Statesman), most of the writers were searching for ways to present the CP as a respectable part of the British heritage.
Paper after paper, many of them scholarly overstatements, extolled rediscovered virtues: the CP's moderation during the latter part of the war, its trade unionists' pragmatism, its responsibility for cultural innovations (including, bizarrely, the Great British Soap: Coronation Street, according to Andy Croft, owed a lot to the "socialist realist" screenplays by CP writers). There were exceptions to this semi-apologetic tone. A paper on the CP, race and colonialism revealed that the party was probably more of a white bastion than Labour's colonial bureau and was constantly upbraidedby the Comintern for failing to take the colonies seriously; in the postwar years, the party, somewhat belatedly, instructed its members to sit next to black people on the London Underground. Another paper on the Daily Worker, the newspaper that became the Morning Star, argued that it was rather less of a success than CP mythology would have us believe. But for the most part, any iconoclasm was voiced, not written.
In one session, veteran Trotskyist Ray Challinor retold his anecdotes about having been beaten up by the CP's Wal Hannington for daring to question the party's 1940s "no strikes" line, and John Saville, who broke with the CP in 1956 and was a leading light in the first New Left, railed against the "opportunism" of the CP leadership after the war. In another workshop, younger ex-members berated the party's failure to democratise even in the 1980s.
But for the most part this was familiar stuff – a settling of old scores of little interest to anyone who did not buy the Leninist fairytale in the first place. To the outside world, the opening of the archives provides an opportunity to ask, and answer, questions that threaten far more than the posthumous reputation of the CP. For the first time, that hobby horse of the right, the communist influence on the Labour Party, the trade union movement and left culture more generally, can become an object of serious documentary analysis.
That the CP was influential, well beyond its size, has long been obvious. As Walter Kendall made clear 25 years ago in his pioneering study of the birth of the CP, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, its very formation transformed the far left in Britain, effectively killing off the homegrown radical libertarian socialism that had found expression in syndicalism and guild socialism. Others without access to the archives have shown how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the CP played a major role in establishing the idea on the British left that "socialism" was nothing more than a matter of nationalisation and planning.
But the really fascinating and disturbing questions surround the more recent past. Even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, the CP effectively controlled a large part of the trade union bureaucracy. It had sufficient influence on the Labour left to play a large part in the creation of the 1970s Alternative Economic Strategy and in 1980s Bennism.
Last weekend's conference touched on such themes, but there is still a feeling among left-wing historians of communism, particularly the majority who were members of the party, that some stones are best left unturned. Describing precisely how a few score CP-influenced caucuses managed to control trade unions with hundreds of thousands of members seems just a little too much like class treachery even now.
Although most of the communist historians are beginning to accept that, in the words of social historian Angus Calder, "Yesterday's solutions are today's problems," many are still in mourning for the old days. "A lot of people here are missing the party," said Mike Power, editor of New Times, the monthly newspaper of the CPGB's successor, Democratic Left. "They don't really know how to live without it."
Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey report on what historians of the British Communist Party are finding in the newly opened archives in the former Soviet Union
On 23 June 1941, the day after Hitler's Germany began its invasion of the Soviet Union, George Orwell wrote in his diary:
"At present the British Communists have issued some kind of manifesto calling for a 'People's Government' etc, etc. They will change their tune as soon as the hand-out from Moscow comes. If the Russians are really resisting, it is not in their interest to have a weak government in Britain, or subversive influences at work here. The Communists will no doubt be super-patriotic within ten days . . ."
Orwell was precisely right. The very next day, the executive committee of the Communist International, which controlled all the world's communist parties, and which in turn was controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, met in Moscow. It composed a message to the Communist Party of Great Britain condemning its position and demanding a change. "You should direct your fire against capitulationist anti- Soviet elements," ran the missive. "To demand in the present situation the replacement of the Churchill government with a 'People's Government' means to bring grist to the mill of pro-Hitlerite elements in England."
And so the CPGB did a somersault – just as it had in the aftermath of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, when the Comintern instructed it to drop its policy of maximum unity against Nazi expansionism and instead condemn the war as "imperialist". By the end of June 1941, the party was calling for "the broadest united national front around the Churchill government", outdoing everyone else, left or right, in its backing for the war. Orwell described the new line as "All power to Churchill!"
An old story, of course – except for one thing. It was only last weekend that the content of the "hand-out from Moscow" was first made public, in a paper delivered by Monty Johnstone, for years one of the CP's chief ideologues, to a conference in Manchester, grandly titled "Opening the Books", attended by 80-odd historians of the Communist Party.
For most of its life, the British Communist Party simply denied that its political line was ever determined by the Kremlin: its changes of direction were, it claimed, locally determined. And, however implausible the claim, it was impossible to counter definitively. Access to the party's own records and those in Moscow was denied to all but official party historians, who, to the dismay of the party's best minds, published nothing that could be construed as remotely embarrassing.
Although, from the late 1970s, some party historians admitted Soviet influence on the CPGB and then documented it from the British party archives (a process encouraged by the party itself as it prepared to wind itself up in the late 1980s), it is only since glasnost and the subsequent collapse of Soviet communism that the incontrovertible evidence of the CPGB's subordination to the CPSU has begun to see the light of day.
In the past five years, researchers have dug out an extraordinary array of material from newly open archives in Moscow – and the 1941 Comintern directive is by no means the most exciting or revealing. In 1990, Lawrence and Wishart, the CP's publishing outfit, published About Turn, the transcript of the CP central committee's discussion in 1939 that led to its toeing the Moscow line of opposition to the war. Since then, other researchers have uncovered the Moscow pay-off to the CP after 1956, when it backed the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, and the role of Stalin in the drafting of the CP programme, The British Road to Socialism, which the CP had always claimed it composed itself.
More is to come – some of it, no doubt, extremely embarrassing, and not just for former members of the Communist Party. Researchers have only just started on the archives of the Comintern, and the archives of the CPSU international department, which dealt with relations with other communist parties after the end of the Comintern, are not yet open. The same goes for both Soviet foreign office and secret police files. The delicate questions of how far the CP was the hidden hand behind much of the Labour left and the extent of its work for Soviet intelligence (suspected even by former loyal party members to have been the price of the "Moscow gold") have yet to be addressed.
Unsurprisingly, there is a mood of expectation among historians of British communism about what the Moscow archives – now effectively on the market to the highest bidder – will yield. Kevin Morgan, one of the organisers of last weekend's conference and the author of a recent highly acclaimed biography of British Communist leader Harry Pollitt, is particularly excited by the verbatim transcripts of CPGB central committee and Politbureau meetings collected by the Comintern. "They provide an immediacy and vividness of detail unique among the formal records of the British labour movement," he says. "It is like an old sepia photograph suddenly become voluble and argumentative."
But even Morgan sounds a note of caution. The Moscow archives should not be fetish-ised, he says: now that it has been firmly established that the Comintern had a decisive influence in the most important CPGB decisions something that no one outside the party ever really doubted – it is not particularly important to publish papers on the details of old news. Far more interesting is the way the "orders from Moscow" were received and implemented by the party below the leadership level: "Even apparatchiks were often guided as much by an unacknowledged pragmatism as by their formal directives." And indeed, a major theme of recent communist history has been an emphasis on indigenous radicalism and local practice. The underlying notion is that the CP was not just Moscow's poodle but an honourable player in British politics and society.
It was this approach to communist history that informed most of the written contributions to last weekend's apprehensive postmortem. Few contributions were based on work in the Soviet archives, and Moscow gold was no more than a topic of speculation in the bar.
There were papers on everything from the Communist Party's role in local government in south Wales in the 1920s and 1930s to the influence of the ideas of Marxism Today in the 1980s. And although there was little on the CP's "heroic period" in the 1930s, when it was briefly the darling of most of the British left (including Kingsley Martin's New Statesman), most of the writers were searching for ways to present the CP as a respectable part of the British heritage.
Paper after paper, many of them scholarly overstatements, extolled rediscovered virtues: the CP's moderation during the latter part of the war, its trade unionists' pragmatism, its responsibility for cultural innovations (including, bizarrely, the Great British Soap: Coronation Street, according to Andy Croft, owed a lot to the "socialist realist" screenplays by CP writers). There were exceptions to this semi-apologetic tone. A paper on the CP, race and colonialism revealed that the party was probably more of a white bastion than Labour's colonial bureau and was constantly upbraidedby the Comintern for failing to take the colonies seriously; in the postwar years, the party, somewhat belatedly, instructed its members to sit next to black people on the London Underground. Another paper on the Daily Worker, the newspaper that became the Morning Star, argued that it was rather less of a success than CP mythology would have us believe. But for the most part, any iconoclasm was voiced, not written.
In one session, veteran Trotskyist Ray Challinor retold his anecdotes about having been beaten up by the CP's Wal Hannington for daring to question the party's 1940s "no strikes" line, and John Saville, who broke with the CP in 1956 and was a leading light in the first New Left, railed against the "opportunism" of the CP leadership after the war. In another workshop, younger ex-members berated the party's failure to democratise even in the 1980s.
But for the most part this was familiar stuff – a settling of old scores of little interest to anyone who did not buy the Leninist fairytale in the first place. To the outside world, the opening of the archives provides an opportunity to ask, and answer, questions that threaten far more than the posthumous reputation of the CP. For the first time, that hobby horse of the right, the communist influence on the Labour Party, the trade union movement and left culture more generally, can become an object of serious documentary analysis.
That the CP was influential, well beyond its size, has long been obvious. As Walter Kendall made clear 25 years ago in his pioneering study of the birth of the CP, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, its very formation transformed the far left in Britain, effectively killing off the homegrown radical libertarian socialism that had found expression in syndicalism and guild socialism. Others without access to the archives have shown how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the CP played a major role in establishing the idea on the British left that "socialism" was nothing more than a matter of nationalisation and planning.
But the really fascinating and disturbing questions surround the more recent past. Even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, the CP effectively controlled a large part of the trade union bureaucracy. It had sufficient influence on the Labour left to play a large part in the creation of the 1970s Alternative Economic Strategy and in 1980s Bennism.
Last weekend's conference touched on such themes, but there is still a feeling among left-wing historians of communism, particularly the majority who were members of the party, that some stones are best left unturned. Describing precisely how a few score CP-influenced caucuses managed to control trade unions with hundreds of thousands of members seems just a little too much like class treachery even now.
Although most of the communist historians are beginning to accept that, in the words of social historian Angus Calder, "Yesterday's solutions are today's problems," many are still in mourning for the old days. "A lot of people here are missing the party," said Mike Power, editor of New Times, the monthly newspaper of the CPGB's successor, Democratic Left. "They don't really know how to live without it."
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