JUST LIKE OLD TIMES AT THE STATESMAN

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 14 December 1998

I first thought something was up at the New Statesman when I read Peter Wilby’s media column in last week’s issue. It was an extended argument for not taking circulation figures as the sole criterion for judging the success of a publication. I agreed with it wholeheartedly – but it made me suspect that the Statesman editor was himself presiding over a stagnant or falling circulation and was getting grief from Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General and the magazine’s proprietor. My suspicions increased when I looked at the Audit Bureau of Circulations website and discovered that the most recent audited circulation for the magazine, just under 26,000, was six months out of date.

Then, last Sunday, the Independent on Sunday carried a story on its front page announcing that the Statesman was about to be sold to a consortium led by Robert Harris, the Sunday Times columnist and best-selling author, and Nick Butler, an economist. According to the Sindy, the idea behind the bid was to make the Statesman more Blairite. Both Harris and Butler are good friends of Peter Mandelson, it noted, whereas Robinson is very much in Gordon Brown’s camp.

On Tuesday, the Independent introduced a twist to the tale, claiming that news of Harris’s interest in the Statesman was an old story that had been resuscitated by Brown’s chief spin-doctor, Charlie Whelan, in an attempt to scupper the bid. According to the Indy, the Brown camp is concerned that Robinson might sell to a Blairite in order to curry favour with Blair and save his ministerial career. Harris denied that he would get rid of Wilby, who has been noticeably more critical of the government than his predecessor as editor, Ian Hargreaves.

Politicians who take a keen interest in what goes on at the New Statesman are nothing new. Its founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, intervened constantly in editorial decision-making. Dick Crossman edited it (very badly) in 1970-72.

But in recent years, with its circulation well below 30,000 and its losses barely sustainable, the venerable weekly has been particularly vulnerable to meddling by Labour politicians. In 1986, after the resignation of Hugh Stephenson as editor, Neil Kinnock intervened forcefully to ensure that his successor would be John Lloyd and not Anthony Barnett. After Lloyd left, Kinnock tried – unsuccessfully – to prevent the appointment of Stuart Weir, whom he had fired as editor of New Socialist, the Labour Party monthly, for advocating tactical voting. In 1991, a consortium led by the Labour peer Lord McIntosh of Haringey (and including Robert Harris and Peter Mandelson) made a hostile bid to buy the magazine which got nowhere.

Three years ago, it was the opposition of Margaret Hodge and various other New Labour trustees to a (fully underwritten) plan to raise capital by selling shares to readers that forced the magazine into the near-bankruptcy from which it was rescued by Geoffrey Robinson, then an obscure backbencher. Robinson was put up to buying the magazine by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. And it was Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who first suggested the name of Ian Hargreaves as a replacement for Steve Platt at the Statesman’s helm.

Here I should declare an interest: I was Platt’s deputy; I applied to succeed him; the first thing Hargreaves did when he became editor was fire me; and I don’t like what he did to the magazine editorially or politically. I didn’t exactly hit it off with Robinson either. In the interregnum between Platt and Hargreaves, when I was acting editor (though Robinson told me not to describe myself as such), he grumbled constantly about the content of the magazine. When he interviewed me for the editorship, he seemed more interested in finding out about my sex life than in my ability to do the job. (He’d got it into his head that I was gay – not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say.) I particularly remember him asking whether I had “a mistress”. I don’t think he meant as well as the regular squeeze, but I still wish I’d told him to mind his own business. As for his taste in aftershave, well, the less said the better.

But I’m not grinding an axe – honest. I’m more than happy to accept that Robinson has been the ideal hands-off proprietor to both his editors. He has certainly been as generous with the cash as anyone could wish, losing £2 million in his first year as owner. I’ve no reason to disbelieve Wilby when he says that Robinson leaves him to his own devices.

The point, however, is that it doesn’t look that way to most outsiders. The Statesman’s big problem these days – the reason even millions of pounds cannot buy a respectable circulation – is its reputation as a tame New Labour house journal. And it won’t shed it, whatever it publishes, as long as it is owned by friends of Tony, Gordon or Peter. In this respect at least, Robert Harris is no better than Geoffrey Robinson.

LAFONTAINE IS RIGHT ABOUT TAX

New Times, 4 December 1998

I do not think that I am the only person in Britain who reckons Oskar Lafontaine is a good thing, but there have been a few times in the past month when I have wondered.

His remarks about the need for the countries of the European Union to harmonise their tax policies have attracted a quite extraordinary outpouring of venom here – and not just from the anti-European press and the Tories.

That the Sun dubbed the German finance minister ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’ was hardly surprising (though the space it allocated to doing it, three pages, certainly was). Nor was there anything new in William Hague’s reiteration of his party’s tired xenophobia.

But they were joined in their synthetic outrage by others of a normally pro-European disposition – most significantly, the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, and the prime minister, Tony Blair. "Britain has a veto on tax policy and we will not hesitate to use that if we have to," declared Brown. "It is by cutting taxes, not raising them, that is the way forward to create jobs."

In British political terms, it is easy enough to understand why Brown and Blair reacted as they did. They firmly believe that Labour won the 1997 general election because they spent five years assuring the electorate that Labour had ceased to be a party of "tax and spend". Because tax levels are lower in Britain than everywhere else in the EU apart from Ireland, harmonisation would almost certainly mean an increase in British taxes. So harmonisation is politically unthinkable.

From an economic point of view, the Brown-Blair position is just as easy to grasp. They believe that Britain’s low business taxes and anti-pollution taxes have helped attract inward investment. Harmonisation will reduce Britain’s competitive advantage over its European neighbours.

But this of course is precisely why Lafontaine and nearly everyone else on the continental European centre-left favours harmonisation. To them, Brown and Blair are trying to have their cake and eat it. They want all the advantages of access to the giant affluent EU market – to the extent that they might even sign up for membership of the euro. But they want Britain to undercut continental disincentives to pollute and undercut the continental ‘social wage’. Although they want Britain to benefit from continental infrastructure spending, they don’t want to pay the fair share of the costs.

Worse, if Britain manages to scupper harmonisation, the temptation will grow for other EU governments to emulate its "free rider" position, which in turn could set off a frenzy of competitive tax-cutting that destroyed the capacity of most EU countries to maintain generous welfare states and high infrastructure spending. That would be a betrayal of everything most continental social democrats stand for, and they are quite right to want to stop it.

The spat over harmonisation might turn out to be insignificant. My hunch, however, is that it is a foretaste of a rocky relationship between the British Labour government and the rest of the EU over the next few years.

With the single currency in place from 1 January, the participants in monetary union will have a mass of common problems to solve – and Britain, as a non-participant, will necessarily find itself out of the loop. In these circumstances, it might well be that Brown and Blair will have to threaten use of the British veto to have any influence on EU macroeconomic policy (and not just on taxation). But the more they throw their weight around, the less respect they will command among their partners.  

THAT WAS THE LEAK THAT WAS

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 15 November 1998

I was going to write a worthy column about co-operation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but in the week that Labour’s National Executive Committee passed an idiotic motion barring its members from talking to the press, there’s a better subject. Now is the ideal time to grass up all the politicians who used to leak from the NEC in the good old days when Labour was in opposition and I was editing Tribune.

The worst offender of all was none other than Tony Blair, who leaked every document that Labour’s review group on trade union links produced in 1992-93 – a course of action that almost lost him his job as shadow home secretary. John Evans, the socialist societies’ NEC representative, described Blair’s briefings to selected journalists as the most outrageous breach of confidentiality he’d ever seen. Coming from a man who was himself no stranger to letting NEC documents go walkabout, that was, well, par for the course. The crucial point, however, was that John Smith agreed. If only he’d acted.

Tribune never to my knowledge benefited directly from Blair leaks from the NEC: the Guardian was his favoured outlet, Patrick Wintour his favoured interlocuter. I don’t remember talking to Gordon Brown or Robin Cook about NEC business, although they were always perfectly happy to talk about what was going on in the shadow cabinet and in various policy committees. So was John Prescott, though of course he wasn’t a member of the NEC at the time.

For NEC documents we relied for the most part on two other current Cabinet stalwarts, David Blunkett and Clare Short – or rather their gofers. As a matter of course, their researchers gave us everything we wanted, usually by fax. I’ve a filing cabinet draw full of extraordinarily tedious material to prove it.

I always assumed that the staffers did it with their bosses’ approval, although it’s impossible to be entirely sure. Politicians normally leak through their staff for the simple reason that it’s deniable.

My favourite example concerns the supposed relationship between John Major and Clare Latimer, the Downing Street cook – later the subject of a famous libel action that drove the New Statesman to bankruptcy and the clutches of Geoffrey Robinson. I got the gossip from a senior staffer in Gordon Brown’s office months before it hit even the diary columns. My source claimed to working for a Labour “dirty tricks” operation under Brown’s control. Unfortunately, I do not have the contemporaneous notes that would allow me to identify him.

But back to the main story. Both Blunkett and Short were always happy to give Tribune full and frank accounts – off the record, but that’s normal – of what had happened at NEC meetings within minutes of their finishing, as indeed were several other NEC members. Most of them were rather dull soft-left leadership-loyalists like Diana Jeuda and Tom Sawyer, who are now fully paid-up Blairites. In my day, Tribune was off-message as far as the hard left was concerned. Sad git that I am, I have even framed a piece by Ken Livingstone denouncing me as the most right-wing editor this paper has ever had.

Livingstone was not a member of the NEC in the early 1990s – a pity, because he was a prodigious leaker in his pomp. But our relations with his comrades were frosty. Tribune’s news editor at the time was an unreconstructed Trotskyist (and a brilliant hack) but even he had trouble extracting hot poop from Dennis Skinner on the NEC because of Tribune’s reputation.

Not that this was too much of a problem, because Skinner himself shot his bolt once every month in a column in Campaign Group News – setting out in minute detail who had said what and how all the votes had gone at every NEC meeting. It was self-congratulatory stuff. But it was the only thing in most issues of Campaign Group News that was worth reading.

All of which is to say . . . well, it was a lot of fun and I regret nothing. The NEC leakers of the early nineties had no effect on Labour’s electoral fortunes. Directly and through their intermediaries, they kept Tribune in business journalistically. And a column by the editor today on his experiences on the Blair NEC would do wonders not just for credibility but for sales. It is in Tribune’s interest that he reveals as much as possible of what goes behind closed doors in Millbank Tower.

But it’s also in the interest of Labour Party members to have available the details of what is being done in their name. The message to the control freaks is simple: up yours.

GERMANY SHOWS THE WAY FOR EUROPE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 2 November 1998

I have a sneaking suspicion that historians will come to see the election of Gerhard Schröder’s red-green coalition in Germany as a turning point for British politics.

Far more than Labour’s victory in Britain last year, the coming to power of the German Social Democratic Party has transformed the European political landscape. A little more than a month after the Bundestag election, it is already clear that the new German finance minister, Oskar Lafontaine, and his French counterpart, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, share the view that European macroeconomic policy needs a radical shake-up. Germany will be lining up with France to push for stronger political control over the policy of the European Central Bank and for growth-oriented policies at the European level. Jacques Delors’s early-nineties schemes for Europe-wide public works programmes – blocked by the British Tories in 1994 – are being dusted off again. Contrary to what Tribune and other left Eurosceptics would have us believe, Eurokeynesianism is back, and this time it’s serious.

The Murdoch press is not altogether pleased by this – and nor is the British government, despite Tony Blair’s declaration of support for concerted European action to create jobs at last month’s European summit meeting. Although Gordon Brown flirted briefly with the idea of Europe-wide counter-cyclical economic policies in opposition five years ago, the general thrust of Labour thinking about the economy has been hostile to Eurokeynesianism. Rather than revive Delors, the British government (like the Murdoch press) would go for deregulation, stricter competition policies, labour market flexibility and so on.

The problem for Labour, however, is that its views on economic policy do not carry much weight with its partners in the European Union. This is partly because some continental social democratic parties – particularly the French – are justifiably wary of what they see as Labour’s “neo-liberalism”. But it is mainly because Britain is not joining the European single currency in the first wave. In the past few weeks, it has become embarrassingly obvious that, for all Blair’s talk of “leading” in Europe, Britain is desperately chasing the EMU pack. In such circumstances, it really doesn’t matter how many well-received initiatives the Labour government comes up with on defence policy or the environment.

Which goes some way to explaining why the government has all of a sudden decided to make a start on persuading the electorate that Britain should join the single currency. Until recently, Labour had little of substance to say about economic and monetary union. Of course, it wanted it to work. But it would make up its mind on British membership of the single currency in the fullness of time. Britain would join only if the government thought conditions were right and if voters backed the single currency in a referendum.

Now the message has perceptibly changed. In the past couple of weeks, both Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown have made it clear that British participation in EMU was now less a matter of “if” than one of “when”.

Last week, Mandelson told a group of businessmen that the creation of the single currency “will be a major step towards the creation of a genuine European single market. Across the whole euro area – by far Britain’s most important trading partner – prices will be quoted in the same currency. There will be no hiding place for high charges and consumer rip-offs.”

This week, Brown told the Confederation of British Industry conference that the Government had “decisively and unambiguously put this country on a new road of constructive engagement with Europe”. In January, he went on, he would be publishing a detailed plan for British entry into the single currency.

For many on the British left, this is not good news. Some, including most of the Campaign Group, are simply stuck in a seventies time-warp, antipathetic to anything to do with the dreadful capitalist conspiracy that is the Common Market and oblivious to the constraints imposed by globalisation on a medium-sized state’s economic policy. Others, mainly on what used to be called the soft left, are more sophisticated. They have no objection to the idea of a single currency in theory. But they believe that the European Central Bank will inevitably impose a severe monetary regime that will have dire effects on employment.

I disagree, because I am optimistic that France and Germany will succeed in putting in place the mechanisms necessary to ensure the bank’s anti-inflation brief is not the only determinant of European macroeconomic policy. The irony is that the main reason for my optimism is that Britain is not in the first wave of EMU and so cannot sabotage the continental Eurokeynesians’ efforts. Strangely enough, by staying out for now, Labour has increased the likelihood that the euro zone will be something the left will want to join in 2005.

LABOUR MEPS RAIL AT BLAIR 'STITCH-UP'

Chartist, November-December 1998

There were always going to be losers among sitting MEPs in the selection of Labour candidates for next year's European Parliament elections.

The elections are to be held for the first time under a regional list system of proportional representation – which means that Labour will win only 43 of the 84 seats in Great Britain, down from 62 under first past the post in 1994, even if it does as well as in the 1997 general election.

But the way that the losers have been chosen has shocked even hardened cynics in the party.

The obvious democratic way to choose candidates would have been by one member one vote ballot of Labour members in each constituency, with rankings determined by the number of votes won by each candidate.

But the party leadership wanted to control the selections, and most sitting MEPs believed they should automatically be given winnable places on the regional lists. So the NEC decided to ditch OMOV in favour of a system that gave the preferences of party members a subsidiary role.

Sitting MEPs were guaranteed places on lists if OMOV "trigger ballots" in their existing Euro-constituencies endorsed them – although they were not promised winnable positions. Every single sitting MEP who had decided to stand again comfortably won the trigger ballot.

Other hopefuls had a more difficult task. First they had to be nominated by a constituency Labour party, then win a place in a national pool of potential candidates in an OMOV Euro-constituency ballot. An NEC-dominated selection panel then whittled down the national pool to a shortlist and finally chose the candidates and their ranking after interviewing the sitting MEPs and the new potential candidates.

The party apparatus claims that the process was rigorous and fair. But even MEPs who have a good chance of winning say that the selection interviews were superficial and based on loyalty tests, with the members of the panel showing little knowledge of the workings of the European Parliament. And the results certainly suggest that MEPs considered awkward by the Labour leadership were singled out for rejection.

Of the 49 sitting Labour MEPs standing again, 12 were given list positions that Labour cannot possibly win even if it does as well next year as it did in 1997. Of these 12, no fewer than 10 were signatories of the famous advertisement in the Guardian, backing retention of Clause Four of the Labour constitution, that appeared the same day in 1995 that Tony Blair met the European Parliamentary Labour Party in Brussels. Another five of the Clause Four rebels will lose their seats if Labour does just a little worse than in 1997 – which is the least that can be expected.

Three sitting MEPs given unwinnable positions – Alex Smith, Michael McGowan and David Morris – have withdrawn as candidates since the lists were drawn up in late September, and a fourth, Christine Oddy, is threatening legal action against the party. Several other sitting MEPs whose only hope is a repeat of Labour's 1997 performance are quietly seething.

Not that the MEPs are the only ones with a cause for complaint. Only six of the 106 new potential candidates that made it through to the national pool have been given list positions that are winnable.

"We all knew it would be difficult to choose candidates for the new list system," said one MEP. "But at least if we'd had OMOV it would have been down to party members to decide who they should be and the results would have had democratic legitimacy. The way we actually did them, the selections looked like a giant stitch-up."

ITALIAN LEFT BACK FROM THE BRINK

New Times, 30 October 1998

For a few days last month it seemed likely that the Italian centre-left would by now be looking back wistfully on two-and-a-half years in power, amid recriminations over the events that led to the fall of Romano Prodi’s ‘Olive Tree’ coalition government.

Prodi had resigned after his defeat in a parliamentary confidence vote which followed the decision of the hard-line Marxists of Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation), led by Fausto Bertinotti, not to back the government’s budget.

After that, it appeared probable that the next step would be the formation of a technocratic government to see Italy through the start of the European single currency at the beginning of next year, with a general election in spring or summer.

Instead, Massimo D’Alema, the leader of the centre-left Democrats of the Left (DS), the main partner in Prodi’s Olive Tree coalition, managed to put together a new centre-left coalition with himself at its head. Ten years ago, when the DS was the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and D’Alema one of its apparatchiks, the very prospect of his becoming prime minister would have caused panic in the stock markets and in Washington. But the western establishment welcomed the appointment of the first Italian prime minister from a party that was once communist with a sigh of relief that chaos had been averted. D’Alema’s new coalition shows every sign of being able to survive until 2001.

The reason for the rapid turnaround in the centre-left’s prospects last month is simple. Twenty-one of Rifondazione’s 34 deputies abandoned Bertinotti to his own devices to set up a new parliamentary fraction, under the label Comunisti Italiani (Italian Communists), offering support for a coalition led by D’Alema. That gave the DS leader the easiest of tasks in constructing a new and stable majority.

The defection from Rifondazione is not surprising. Most of Bertinotti’s parliamentary comrades had had enough of his populist posturing – he tried the same gambit last year, but was eventually forced to back down – and were not prepared to accept a vote of party activists in favour of withdrawing support for the government.

What is extraordinary, however, is the remarkable speed with which the Rifondazione renegades found a berth in government with D’Alema and his colleagues. They had until recently accused them of betraying the legacy of the PCI, to which they all at one time belonged.

The result of last month’s events is a government that is slightly to the left of Prodi’s. D’Alema has brought on board various centrists, but he has also given one of the Rifondazione rebels, Oliviero Diliberto, the crucial job of minister of justice. Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of the main party of the right in parliament, Forza Italia, is not pleased: he faces corruption charges and was hoping for lenience, which Diliberto is unlikely to give.

Nevertheless, on economic policy – of particular importance in the run-up to monetary union – D’Alema has pledged continuity. He has kept the cautious technocrat Carlo Azeglio Ciampi as treasury minister and has promised to keep to the Prodi government’s strict controls on public spending.

How the new government will relate to the rest of Europe remains to be seen. There is no change in foreign minister, the centrist Lamberto Dini, but the replacement of Prodi by D’Alema will probably make a small difference. Prodi was the European leader closest to Tony Blair; D’Alema is much more interested in developing a closer relationship with French president Lionel Jospin and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. And with EMU in the offing, Rome has a better chance of entering into a menage a trois with Paris and Bonn than London has. Watch this space.

BAD AGAINST THE WORSE ON VOTE REFORM

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 October 1998

Steve Platt made a lot of good points last week about the left and proportional representation. He’s absolutely right about the debilitating effect on British politics of the combination of ever-more-centralised party machines and a first-past-the-post electoral system for the House of Commons. General elections have been turned into an undignified scramble for the votes of a handful of affluent, socially conservative “swing voters” – “scumbags from suburbia who read the Daily Mail”, as a senior Labour official put it to me some years ago. The result has been the marginalisation of creative thinking and dissident voices in mainstream politics.

So I agree with Platt entirely when he argues that a genuine PR system for the House of Commons, far from condemning us to never-ending coalitions of centre-left or centre-right, could liberate the left by allowing a credible red-green grouping to win parliamentary representation. Just look at Germany.

The problem, however, is that when Lord Jenkins’s Independent Commission on the Voting System reports later this month it is set to propose a system that rules out any such thing.

According to no less an authority than Hugo Young in the Guardian, Jenkins will come out for a hybrid system known as “AV-plus” to be put to voters in the government’s promised PR referendum. Under AV-plus, around 500 MPs would be elected in single-member constituencies by the alternative vote, and 150 or so “top-up” MPs would be added to ensure greater proportionality of results in each city and county.

Supporters of AV-plus say that it is the only option that both satisfies the Jenkins commission’s terms of reference – “broad proportionality, the need for stable government, an extension of voter choice and the maintenance of a link between MPs and geographical constituencies” – and is capable of winning the support of both the Liberal Democrat and Labour leaderships.

They could be right: we shall see. For our purposes here, however, what is important is that AV-plus as described by Young is also designed to keep small parties out of parliament.

For a start, the use of the alternative vote for single-member-constituency MPs would if anything make it more difficult for small parties to win seats than it is at present. Under AV, voters mark their ballot papers not with a single “x” but by numbering their preferences 1, 2, 3 and so on. If no candidate gets more than 50 per cent of first preferences, the bottom-placed candidate is eliminated and his or her second preferences are added to the other candidates’ totals, and so on until one candidate tops 50 per cent. Its main effect is to encourage the election of “least objectionable” candidates – and it has rightly been castigated as a recipe for making our political life even blander than it is now.

What is really disappointing, however, is the proposal for electing the top-up MPs by cities and counties rather than by regions. With top-up systems, the smaller the clusters of single-member constituencies that are being topped up, the larger the share of the vote a party needs to win a top-up seat in any cluster. If, under a regional AV-plus system, a party were to get 10 per cent of AV first preferences but no single-member seats in a region with 40 single-member and 10 top-up seats, it would almost certainly win top-up representation. In an extremely localised AV-plus system, a party winning the same share of first preferences in a city with four single-member constituencies and one top-up seat would not win anything.

Of course, we’ll have to wait to read the small print before coming to firm conclusions. But I’m afraid that the dream of the emergence of a credible new red-green party is going to have to remain a dream (at least for Commons elections) for a little while longer.

Which is not to say that the left should mobilise to trash the Jenkins report or back the status quo in the referendum campaign. Sticking to first-past-the-post would effectively wipe out the prospects of PR for the Commons for a generation – and that would be a disaster.

In spite of last year’s landslide, Labour should never forget that first-past-the-post has not been kind to it: 1997 is only the third time it has won a comfortable parliamentary majority. For all its faults, AV-plus would protect Britain from a repeat of the elective dictatorship of the Thatcher era – a distant prospect now, perhaps, but not necessarily so in five years’ time. However imperfect its proportionality, it would be at least a significant step towards fairness in the electoral system: more votes would count. And once it was in place it could at least be improved.

In other words, it’s a case of supporting the bad against the worse – a bit like voting Labour at election time, in fact.