Tribune column, 27 January 2012
So,farewell, then, Press TV, as Private Eye’s spoof poet E. J. Thribb would say. The Iranian state television station last week had its licence to broadcast in Britain revoked by the regulator, Ofcom, after repeatedly breaching the Ofcom code. The final straw was its refusal to guarantee that it was editorially controlled from London and not from Tehran. Last Friday it was removed from the BSkyB satellite.
An outrageous assault on freedom of expression? George Galloway, the former MP who has presented a regular show on Press TV, certainly thinks so. “Champions of liberty the British govt have now taken Press TV off Sky,” the gorgeous former admirer of Saddam Hussein tweeted in response to the decision.
But then he continued: “Follow us at www.presstv.ir and other platforms” – which rather undermines his point. Press TV hasn’t actually been suppressed, and it isn’t really farewell. Anyone who wants to can watch it online.
Not that I’m going to, I might add, or at least not very often. Press TV is an organ of Iranian government propaganda, a purveyor of anti-semitic conspiracy theory and anti-democratic bile, no more trustworthy than the Soviet Novosti Press Agency and its lackeys were in the bad old days. You only watch it to see what the Iranian government and its useful idiots in the west are saying.
Nevertheless, the case of Press TV is an important one because of what it says about the difficulties of regulating broadcasting in the digital age.
From the 1920s until very recently, Britain had a very tough regulatory regime for broadcasting. For more than 30 years, the BBC – a state-owned corporation from 1927 – had a monopoly of broadcasting, with strict rules prohibiting political partisanship and bias, and the same rules were applied to commercial broadcasters after the BBC monopoly was broken in 1955 with the creation of ITV.
In the years after the end of the BBC monopoly, commercial broadcasting grew massively in scope – commercial radio from the early 1970s, Channel Four from 1982, Sky and other channels on satellite from the late 1980s – but the tough rules on partisanship and bias remained in place.
They weren’t perfect: a self-satisfied establishment consensus ruled, views outside the mainstream were largely excluded from the airwaves, and governments of every political persuasion did their best, with varying degrees of success, to suppress awkward programmes and keep out awkward programme-makers.
But the regulatory regime spared and still spares British broadcasting the propagandist partisanship that has poisoned the political culture of other countries. Italy has Berlusconi TV in all its forms, the United States has Fox and dozens of radio stations that pour out populist right-wing propaganda for their corporate masters. We don’t.
The very fact that Press TV was given a licence in the first place shows, however, that the long-standing British regulatory regime is coming under pressure – and the fact that its licence being revoked makes little difference to its accessibility is a harbinger of things to come. In the multi-channel, multi-platform digital age, content regulation is more difficult to justify – who nixes “We’re just an honest-to-goodness news channel with lots of ethnic-minority people (and George Galloway)”? – and almost impossible to enforce effectively.
Some would say that this is a good thing, but I don’t agree. A free-for-all of the airwaves could well be in the offing. But it would advantage no one but the already advantaged – super-rich individuals, corporations and states – towards whom the rules are already heavily stacked. The British regulatory regime for broadcasting needs to be defended.
Which is where Nick Cohen’s fiery new polemic about freedom of expression, You Can’t Read This Book, comes in. He recognises that we need regulation to preserve media freedom. The book’s big theme is that formal legal guarantees of freedom of expression are not enough to sustain its practice.
Fear – fear of being fired for stepping out of line by a corporation or government organisation that employs you, fear of the libel action that might come from a super-rich crook with a holiday home in London, fear of being assassinated for offending the religious sensibilities of some imam in Iran (who might well broadcast on Press TV) – is as potent a constraint on free expression as the censor of a totalitarian state, and a much larger and more present danger in western democracies than necessary tolerant democratic media regulation.
Cohen’s book is brilliant – add that to the cover blurb – but it doesn’t go far enough in exploring the informal system of controlling what is sayable and what is not in the contemporary media. He’s quite blasé about political and cultural exclusion by newspaper and broadcast editors (his line is that you can always find another outlet for your opinions, which might be true for him but isn’t for most of the rest of us) and he has nothing to say about the collusion between journalists and their sources that keeps so much that should be public private.
Ah, what the hell. I’m writing what I think for a democratic socialist newspaper. It will be published (I hope) more or less unchanged. We might be as marginal as it’s possible to be, but we’re still here, out and proud. That’s good, and long may it continue. The survival of Tribune is much more important than that of Press TV.
22 January 2012
OBITUARIES – 29: DAVE HENDERSON
I’ve just received the very bad news that my old comrade in arms David Henderson has died in Turin after contracting pneumonia. I’m gutted.
Dave and I became friends as libertarian leftists at Oxford University in the late 1970s – he was in the Labour Party and I was an anarchist, but our points of view were pretty much in sympathy – and we kept up with each other after he moved to Turin in 1980, where he threw himself into the then-collapsing Italian extra-parliamentary left that had inspired us both in the previous five years.
I visited him in Italy for the first time in spring 1981, with Jo, a girl we both loved, just as the Italian state was suppressing the last remnants of the armed-struggle leftist groups that proliferated in the 1970s – which Dave never supported – and I’ll never forget it.
The first day, Jo made it clear that it was Dave and not me in whom she was interested. The second day, I witnessed for the first and last time in my life an armed demonstration – the stewards in certain sections had automatic pistols (“Comrade P38”) stuffed in their jackets. And the next day we turned up to an anarchist centre next to a fly-blown Turin housing project that turned out to have been smashed up by the cops in an anti-terrorist operation the previous night.
Their target had been Prima Linea, the armed-struggle group whose founders had been the far left of Lotta Continua, the quasi-Maoist, quasi-libertarian coalition that until 1976 had been the most important 1968-generation leftist organisation. Dave was a member of another ex-Lotta Continua faction, one that abjured terrorism but was militantly direct-actionist and had some support at Fiat, the giant motor company that was then, as now, the dominant employer in Turin. I had no idea then and have no idea now whether the Centro Eliseo Reclus was a terrorist base: for me they were the Turin contacts for the libertarian left group of which I was a member in the UK. Whatever, we turned up, saw the damage and thought: "Shit!" We then went to the bar across the road for a beer. The bar refused to serve us. But that night we drank the first Guinness poured in the first Irish pub in Turin.
Dave knew Italian politics backwards, and I used his expertise throughout the 1980s and 1990s: he covered Italy for END Journal, Tribune, the New Statesman, Red Pepper and New Times for me. He did so brilliantly, reporting before anyone else in Britain the dangers of Berlsuconi and the fragility of the official (communist and then disintegrating former-communist) centre-left.
But it was always as a side project to working on serious editorial and translation work, which he continued until he was taken ill after Xmas. I was planning to visit him last autumn, but got waylaid and thought I’d make it in spring. Now it’s too late. A fantastically generous, intelligent and sociable man, he leaves his partner of many years, Paola, and a lot of devastated friends.
Here he is on top form in Tribune on 19 February 1993, laying into the disgrace of Bettino Craxi and the Italian Socialist Party. He was better than any correspondent in the mainstream media because he knew what was going on better than anyone else: this is tight reporting of the best standard, right on the money.
The resignation last week of Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian Socialist Party for 15 years, brings a political era to an end.
With the fall of Craxi, after nearly a year of growing pressure on him to resign over involvement in a giant corruption scandal, the credibility of the PSI, which used its weight to determine the shape of politics throughout the eighties, is utterly destroyed.
RIP.
Dave and I became friends as libertarian leftists at Oxford University in the late 1970s – he was in the Labour Party and I was an anarchist, but our points of view were pretty much in sympathy – and we kept up with each other after he moved to Turin in 1980, where he threw himself into the then-collapsing Italian extra-parliamentary left that had inspired us both in the previous five years.
I visited him in Italy for the first time in spring 1981, with Jo, a girl we both loved, just as the Italian state was suppressing the last remnants of the armed-struggle leftist groups that proliferated in the 1970s – which Dave never supported – and I’ll never forget it.
The first day, Jo made it clear that it was Dave and not me in whom she was interested. The second day, I witnessed for the first and last time in my life an armed demonstration – the stewards in certain sections had automatic pistols (“Comrade P38”) stuffed in their jackets. And the next day we turned up to an anarchist centre next to a fly-blown Turin housing project that turned out to have been smashed up by the cops in an anti-terrorist operation the previous night.
Their target had been Prima Linea, the armed-struggle group whose founders had been the far left of Lotta Continua, the quasi-Maoist, quasi-libertarian coalition that until 1976 had been the most important 1968-generation leftist organisation. Dave was a member of another ex-Lotta Continua faction, one that abjured terrorism but was militantly direct-actionist and had some support at Fiat, the giant motor company that was then, as now, the dominant employer in Turin. I had no idea then and have no idea now whether the Centro Eliseo Reclus was a terrorist base: for me they were the Turin contacts for the libertarian left group of which I was a member in the UK. Whatever, we turned up, saw the damage and thought: "Shit!" We then went to the bar across the road for a beer. The bar refused to serve us. But that night we drank the first Guinness poured in the first Irish pub in Turin.
Dave knew Italian politics backwards, and I used his expertise throughout the 1980s and 1990s: he covered Italy for END Journal, Tribune, the New Statesman, Red Pepper and New Times for me. He did so brilliantly, reporting before anyone else in Britain the dangers of Berlsuconi and the fragility of the official (communist and then disintegrating former-communist) centre-left.
But it was always as a side project to working on serious editorial and translation work, which he continued until he was taken ill after Xmas. I was planning to visit him last autumn, but got waylaid and thought I’d make it in spring. Now it’s too late. A fantastically generous, intelligent and sociable man, he leaves his partner of many years, Paola, and a lot of devastated friends.
Here he is on top form in Tribune on 19 February 1993, laying into the disgrace of Bettino Craxi and the Italian Socialist Party. He was better than any correspondent in the mainstream media because he knew what was going on better than anyone else: this is tight reporting of the best standard, right on the money.
The resignation last week of Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian Socialist Party for 15 years, brings a political era to an end.
With the fall of Craxi, after nearly a year of growing pressure on him to resign over involvement in a giant corruption scandal, the credibility of the PSI, which used its weight to determine the shape of politics throughout the eighties, is utterly destroyed.
Even with an entirely new leadership — and nearly everyone near the top of the party under Craxi has now been implicated in corruption, including the justice minister until last week, Claudio Martelli, who had been tipped as a "clean" successor — the party will find it difficult to survive as a force in Italian politics.
The noose had been tightening inexorably around Craxi's neck since last spring, when Mario Chiesa, a senior PSI figure in Milan, Craxi's power base, was caught with a £3,000 bribe in his pocket.
A wave of arrests of PSI leaders followed throughout last year as magistrates uncovered a massive kickbacks operation.
In December, Craxi himself, long the subject of rumours, was served, with an official communication notifying him that he was under investigation for corruption.
He did what he could to protest his innocence but his time was clearly up.
On January 30, along with a string of other politicians and top civil servants, Craxi was served with further serious charges.
One of them stated that he had not only known about the kickbacks system but had been its mastermind, deciding from whom to take money and where to put it.
A close collaborator had apparently admitted that Craxi had thought up and was implementing a new annual oneoff payment by companies to politicians as a way of avoiding the more risky practice of demanding a cut from every public works contract.
This might have seemed bad enough but Craxi still held on. What finally did for him was the confession of Silvano Larini, a mysteriously wealthy friend of Craxi, long on the wanted list, who turned himself in at the French border on February 7.
Larini had been identified as the person who opened a numbered account in a Swiss bank that had first been discovered (along with a note claiming that it was run by Martelli for Craxi) when the villa of Licio Gelli, the notorious boss of the P2 Masonic lodge, was searched in 1982.
The account apparently contained 7 million dollars from the near-bankrupt Banco Ambrosiano, then run by Roberto Calvi, paid for in thanks for an illegal 50 million dollar loan from ENI, the Italian state-owned petrol company, then run by Leonardo Di Donna, a PSI appointee.
Subsequently, the Banco Ambrosiano went bust and Calvi died in mysterious circumstances under Blackfriars Bridge in London.
Precisely why Larini started talking is unclear, but it appears that his lawyers told him that others were spilling the beans and that anyway time was running out for the secrecy of the Swiss bank accounts he controlled.
Whatever the reason, his confession immediately convinced Florio Fiorini, a former ENI financial director now in prison in Switzerland on unrelated fraudulent bankruptcy charges, to start talking about his former company's political slush funds.
Larini's decision also prompted magistrates to send Craxi and Martelli formal communications advising them that they were under investigation for involvement in the illegal bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano. Last Wednesday, with the PSI holding a special conference on the leadership, Martelli resigned as justice Minister and from the party. Craxi resigned the leadership on Thursday.
By law, all accused MPs have to be examined by parliament, sitting as a kind of grand jury, to see if there is a prima facie case against them. So far this year, only one MP involved has been saved by his colleagues. Craxi has to defend himself against a total of six charges, five relating to the Milan kickbacks scandal and one on the Banco Ambrosiano affair — and more could come.
Some of the major figures charged in the investigation say that magistrates have vastly more information than they care to admit to the press and act only when certain of conviction.
Craxi was replaced as leader by Giorgio Benvenuto, a former secretary of the UIL, the smallest and most right-wing of Italy's trade union confederations, who beat off Valdo Spini, an intellectual with a clean reputation, after getting the support of the PSI's regional bosses.
What exactly they were fighting over is difficult to tell, however. Of course, the PSI remains in the government — the prime minister, Giuliano Amato, is a socialist and has so far remained untouched by the scandal. But, by clinging to power, Craxi and the PSI leadership have lost the PSI its last shreds of credibility.
The party's vote fell to between 3 per cent and 4 per cent in its northern heartlands in the last local elections and membership is said to be down to 25 per cent of its level a year ago. The party will be hammered in the next general election, which most commentators expect to happen later this year, winning most of its votes in areas of the south dominated by organised crime.
Needless to say, the dirt has rubbed off on those with whom the PSI has been associated, particularly the Christian Democrats, who have also been rocked by the corruption scandals, but also those on the left, relatively clean, with whom it has formed local government coalitions.
Unfortunately, the national leadership of the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS) does not seem to realise the dangers of being seen in public with a political leper: it continues to talk vaguely of a national coalition of the left, ignoring not just the desperate state of the PSI but also the fact that it has not been noticeably left for more than a decade.
There is also an international dimension. PSI MEPs sit happily with colleagues from all the other EC socialist parties in the Socialist Group in the European Parliament and the PSI is a member of the Socialist International. Some serious signs of disapproval of the PSI's methods from other European socialist parties might just help to push it to clean up its act thoroughly and to rebuild itself from the base. Silence could well be interpreted as approval of or even complicity in its rotten practice.
RIP.
21 January 2012
YOU CAN'T WATCH THIS VIDEO
I've been reading Nick Cohen's excellent You Can't Read This Book, a cutting account of the constraints on freedom of expression in the world – well, mainly the supposedly liberal western democracies – today.
I'm writing about it in Tribune next week, but in the meantime I discovered to my surprise from some elementary Googling that Submission, the short film that Theo van Gogh made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2004, is on YouTube. After it was broadcast in the Netherlands, van Gogh was assassinated by an anti-semitic Islamist fascist who was offended by the film, and Hirsi Ali has lived for the past seven years under threat of death from the murderer's comrades.
As a small act of solidarity, here it is (Italian subtitles but English audio): apologies if you've all seen it before, but it was new to me this morning.
Part 1
Part 2
I'm writing about it in Tribune next week, but in the meantime I discovered to my surprise from some elementary Googling that Submission, the short film that Theo van Gogh made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2004, is on YouTube. After it was broadcast in the Netherlands, van Gogh was assassinated by an anti-semitic Islamist fascist who was offended by the film, and Hirsi Ali has lived for the past seven years under threat of death from the murderer's comrades.
As a small act of solidarity, here it is (Italian subtitles but English audio): apologies if you've all seen it before, but it was new to me this morning.
Part 1
Part 2
19 January 2012
OBITUARIES – 28: JANEY BUCHAN
I’m sad to hear of the death of Janey Buchan, the Scottish left-wing activist and former MEP, at the age of 85. She was an extraordinary woman, a crazy world-class hater – she told everyone that her memoirs on which she was working were going to be titled Shits I Have Known – yet one of the most generous people I have met in politics.
No one was ruder about anyone than Janey, but she was a softie at heart. She and her husband Norman, the late Labour MP, put me up every time I went to Glasgow as a young, broke Tribune journalist, and she was a doughty supporter of dozens of other friends in small and big ways. A ferocious devourer of the media – and an accomplished writer -- she never lost her youthful Communist Party enthusiasm for campaigning (she left the party over Hungary in 1956), and she was very good at it until well into her seventies. But boy, was she batty as hell.
Her sense of humour was wicked. She placed a small ad in Tribune many moons ago that suggested that George Galloway, a Janey hate-figure, was not very good at his job. Galloway sued and settled out-of-court for £2,000 to be given to a charity. Janey coughed up and put the money in a Galloway libel account, where I think it’s sitting to this day.
I disagreed with her a lot and on occasion found her impossible, but we could do with a few more like her today.
No one was ruder about anyone than Janey, but she was a softie at heart. She and her husband Norman, the late Labour MP, put me up every time I went to Glasgow as a young, broke Tribune journalist, and she was a doughty supporter of dozens of other friends in small and big ways. A ferocious devourer of the media – and an accomplished writer -- she never lost her youthful Communist Party enthusiasm for campaigning (she left the party over Hungary in 1956), and she was very good at it until well into her seventies. But boy, was she batty as hell.
Her sense of humour was wicked. She placed a small ad in Tribune many moons ago that suggested that George Galloway, a Janey hate-figure, was not very good at his job. Galloway sued and settled out-of-court for £2,000 to be given to a charity. Janey coughed up and put the money in a Galloway libel account, where I think it’s sitting to this day.
I disagreed with her a lot and on occasion found her impossible, but we could do with a few more like her today.
- Michael White has a good obituary in the Guardian here.
2 January 2012
TELL LIAM BYRNE WHERE TO STICK IT
According to Labour front-bencher Liam Byrne, apropos of benefits policy:
The “kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society” is a euphemism for conformist cucumber-up-the-arse respectability. As is the implicit injunction to “do the right thing”. Who says what “the right thing” is or defines the "decent society"? Prissy focus-group Daily Mail readers? Labour politicians? The Church of England? The imam of the local mosque? It's none of his business. This is soundbite politics at its most cretinous, and the worst sort of communitarian populism. Tell him to get lost.
"something for something" means reward for those who are desperately trying to do the right thing, saving for the future and trying to build a stable, secure home. Right now, these families are offered too little reward and incentive – in social housing and long-term savings – for the kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society.Well, I demur.
The “kind of behaviour that is the bedrock of a decent society” is a euphemism for conformist cucumber-up-the-arse respectability. As is the implicit injunction to “do the right thing”. Who says what “the right thing” is or defines the "decent society"? Prissy focus-group Daily Mail readers? Labour politicians? The Church of England? The imam of the local mosque? It's none of his business. This is soundbite politics at its most cretinous, and the worst sort of communitarian populism. Tell him to get lost.
30 December 2011
HOW TO MAKE BRITAIN LESS CRAP
Five zero-net-cost measures that could be implemented at once:
- Increase vehicle tax to £500 a year and use the income to take rail fares down to Italian levels
- Integrate rail and bus service timetables
- Legislate to make the companies that own pubs allow their tenants and landlords to buy them at market rate as a right
- Legislate to allow private tenants the right to buy, with the same discounts allowed council tenants, paid for by a tax on landlords who provide substandard accommodation (which of course requires intrusive local authority inspection)
- Introduce a new zero-business-rates regime for bookshops, butchers, grocers, fishmongers, ironmongers and hobby shops in town and city centres paid for by increased business rates on out-of-town shopping complexes.
All right, none of it will happen, but ...
29 December 2011
IF NOT PUBLIC SPENDING, WHAT?
The latest pamphlet from the Labour moderniser pressure group Policy Network, Cameron’s Trap, got the front page lead in the Guardian today and a piece on the comment page by its authors, the historians Ben Jackson and Gregg McClymont (the latter now not only an MP but a frontbencher, which I'd not registered), so I decided to download the whole thing and read it (here).
In some ways, it’s an interesting piece of work. The core of their argument is that the Tory prime minister that David Cameron most resembles is Stanley Baldwin, who held the office in 1923-24, 1924-29 and 1935-37 and was the real power in Ramsay MacDonald’s Tory-dominated National Government of 1931-35. Baldwin, they say, was an astute political player who used the ideology of austerity and the practice of coalition as a trump card to beat Labour – and unless Labour is smart, Cameron could do the same in 2015.
On all this I’d agree, at least up to a point. Baldwin didn’t look such a brilliant tactician in the 1920s, when he contrived to lose the 1923 and 1929 general elections and let in Labour minority governments – and his success from 1931 was as much down to the extraordinary implosion of MacDonald’s Labour government as it was to his own political savvy.
All the same, Jackson and McClymont are right that a mix of austerity and coalition might just prove a winning Tory formula in 2015: I thought that just after the 2010 election. What I’m least sure about is their prescription for Labour now to counter this, the two key points of which are:
In some ways, it’s an interesting piece of work. The core of their argument is that the Tory prime minister that David Cameron most resembles is Stanley Baldwin, who held the office in 1923-24, 1924-29 and 1935-37 and was the real power in Ramsay MacDonald’s Tory-dominated National Government of 1931-35. Baldwin, they say, was an astute political player who used the ideology of austerity and the practice of coalition as a trump card to beat Labour – and unless Labour is smart, Cameron could do the same in 2015.
On all this I’d agree, at least up to a point. Baldwin didn’t look such a brilliant tactician in the 1920s, when he contrived to lose the 1923 and 1929 general elections and let in Labour minority governments – and his success from 1931 was as much down to the extraordinary implosion of MacDonald’s Labour government as it was to his own political savvy.
All the same, Jackson and McClymont are right that a mix of austerity and coalition might just prove a winning Tory formula in 2015: I thought that just after the 2010 election. What I’m least sure about is their prescription for Labour now to counter this, the two key points of which are:
- Refuse to be driven into a simple defence of the public sector and public spending and instead mount a patriotic appeal to the nation to improve growth and living standards.
Surely “defence of the public sector and public spending” are essential components of any serious strategy for private sector growth, for the simple reason that, in the absence of private demand, public spending has to take up the slack to ensure private sector growth? And if the public sector doesn’t take up the slack, what does? Can you get an "activist state" without paying for it? I think we should be told.
- Put forward a more convincing strategy for private sector growth than the Conservatives. A key element of a credible growth strategy would need to be a widely-supported active industrial policy. In this way “Labour can evade the trap of the ‘tax and spend’ argument of 1992, by making the key measure of governing competence the creation of new and sustainable jobs that improve living standards. Labour is more comfortable than the Conservatives with the idea of an activist state: the Conservatives have reason to fear a political contest organised around which party can best promote growth rather than which party can best reduce spending.”
21 December 2011
ABSENT FRIEND
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 December 2011
The journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who died last week at the age of 62, was never associated with Tribune.
Indeed, in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist on the New Statesman and a member of the far-left International Socialists (the forerunner of today’s Socialist Workers Party), there was no love lost between him and this paper. He was with the competition – and his Trotskyist loathing of the compromises made by the traditional Labour left was reciprocated.
In 1978, after the New Statesman splashed a speech by Michael Foot from 10 years earlier on the front page, to contrast Foot’s critical attitude to the Wilson government of the 1960s with his supposedly shameless participation in the Callaghan government, Tribune’s parliamentary correspondent Hugh Macpherson wrote a column defending Foot’s achievements as a minister, warning against the left habit of treating any compromise as treason against socialism and attacking the Statesman for confusing the political circumstances of 1968 and 1978. In response came a blistering letter from Hitchens:
Hitchens remained a sworn enemy of Foot and a target for Tribune sniping until 1981, when Hitchens upped sticks and left the Statesman and Britain for the Nation and the United States. Relations warmed after Tribune ran approving reviews of Hitchens’s books in the late 1980s and early 1990s and took much the same position as him on the break-up of Yugoslavia, and I interviewed him for the paper in 1993. But we still never got a written word out of him.
Tribune and Hitchens were on opposite sides of the argument over the post 9/11 western military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq but never completely fell out. Mark Seddon invited Hitchens to put the case for military action to remove Saddam Hussein at the Tribune rally at the 2002 Labour conference, and Hitchens agreed. His speech was received in silence and politely applauded. In his memoir published last year, Hitch-22, Hitchens described the engagement as “my last appearance as a man of the left”.
I don’t think Hitchens ever completely ceased to be of the left, but that doesn’t matter. For all his faults and for everything that he got wrong (and there was plenty), his was a voice that was always worth taking seriously even when – particularly when – he was most at odds with the left consensus. He was the most accomplished literary-political journalist in the English language of the past 30 years, a brilliant stylist with an extraordinary range of interests and an unparalleled independence of spirit. He will be not be easily replaced.
***
With this issue Tribune celebrates its 75th birthday. The paper first appeared on 1 January 1937, and has been going ever since.
But it nearly didn’t make it. A couple of months ago it appeared to be on its death bed. Kevin McGrath, the businessman who had supported it financially since 2008, had announced that he was going to close it as a print publication and continue it as a website with an automated news feed. It was only after several weeks of negotiation that he agreed to sell it for a nominal sum to a new co-operative of staff and readers, the public launch of which will be announced in the new year.
It’s not going to be easy, but with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work I’m sure we can pull through. Here’s to the next 75 years.
The journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who died last week at the age of 62, was never associated with Tribune.
Indeed, in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist on the New Statesman and a member of the far-left International Socialists (the forerunner of today’s Socialist Workers Party), there was no love lost between him and this paper. He was with the competition – and his Trotskyist loathing of the compromises made by the traditional Labour left was reciprocated.
In 1978, after the New Statesman splashed a speech by Michael Foot from 10 years earlier on the front page, to contrast Foot’s critical attitude to the Wilson government of the 1960s with his supposedly shameless participation in the Callaghan government, Tribune’s parliamentary correspondent Hugh Macpherson wrote a column defending Foot’s achievements as a minister, warning against the left habit of treating any compromise as treason against socialism and attacking the Statesman for confusing the political circumstances of 1968 and 1978. In response came a blistering letter from Hitchens:
Many of us never thought of Michael Foot as a great socialist, and are therefore spared the pain of explaining his present conduct in those terms. But Macpherson's argument could be applied, without changing a word, as a defence of Denis Healey, Shirley Williams, David Owen or Roy Hattersley, all of whom deserve as much credit as Foot for the ‘achievements’ of this government.
Does Macpherson really think that the aftermath of Anthony Barber's chancellorship justifies support for, in no special order; the neutron bomb, the Shah of Iran, the Official Secrets Act, the 5 per cent pay limit, the savaging of social expenditure, the hoisting of unemployment figures, the deportation of dissidents and the burying of the Bingham Report? …
Like Foot's enthusiasm for Indira Gandhi's dictatorship, these are options, consciously and deliberately decided upon as matters of policy. Alternative strategies, to coin a phrase, were available in all cases and still are. If the mesmeric figure of Foot was not present among the ‘insiders’, this might be clearer to some people – which is why one assumes he is kept on …
Michael Foot's defenders seem entirely worthy of his political position – dishonest with an occasional whine from the left corner of the mouth.”As far as I’m aware, this letter, published in Tribune on 24 November 1978, is the only thing Hitchens ever wrote for the paper. I remember it well – the Tribune-Statesman spat was a big talking point on the Oxford student left then – and at the time I was on Hitchens’s side.
Hitchens remained a sworn enemy of Foot and a target for Tribune sniping until 1981, when Hitchens upped sticks and left the Statesman and Britain for the Nation and the United States. Relations warmed after Tribune ran approving reviews of Hitchens’s books in the late 1980s and early 1990s and took much the same position as him on the break-up of Yugoslavia, and I interviewed him for the paper in 1993. But we still never got a written word out of him.
Tribune and Hitchens were on opposite sides of the argument over the post 9/11 western military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq but never completely fell out. Mark Seddon invited Hitchens to put the case for military action to remove Saddam Hussein at the Tribune rally at the 2002 Labour conference, and Hitchens agreed. His speech was received in silence and politely applauded. In his memoir published last year, Hitch-22, Hitchens described the engagement as “my last appearance as a man of the left”.
I don’t think Hitchens ever completely ceased to be of the left, but that doesn’t matter. For all his faults and for everything that he got wrong (and there was plenty), his was a voice that was always worth taking seriously even when – particularly when – he was most at odds with the left consensus. He was the most accomplished literary-political journalist in the English language of the past 30 years, a brilliant stylist with an extraordinary range of interests and an unparalleled independence of spirit. He will be not be easily replaced.
***
With this issue Tribune celebrates its 75th birthday. The paper first appeared on 1 January 1937, and has been going ever since.
But it nearly didn’t make it. A couple of months ago it appeared to be on its death bed. Kevin McGrath, the businessman who had supported it financially since 2008, had announced that he was going to close it as a print publication and continue it as a website with an automated news feed. It was only after several weeks of negotiation that he agreed to sell it for a nominal sum to a new co-operative of staff and readers, the public launch of which will be announced in the new year.
It’s not going to be easy, but with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work I’m sure we can pull through. Here’s to the next 75 years.
16 December 2011
OBITUARIES - 27: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The death of Christopher Hitchens at the age of 62 is hardly a surprise but is sad all the same. He was a great writer and great company. I became a fan when I was a teenager and he was on the New Statesman – but I didn’t really appreciate his brilliance until the 1980s, after he’d given up on the Statesman and decamped to the United States.
It was then that he really spread his wings, publishing some quite extraordinary essays on a wide variety of political and literary themes in a wide variety of periodicals (the best of them collected in two collections, Prepared for the Worst and For the Sake of Argument). The 1980s was also when he wrote what I think is far-and-away his best book, Blood, Class and Nostalgia, a rumination on the relationship between Britain and America.
He kept up his output through the 1990s and into the new millenium: there were articles galore, books denouncing Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, dozens of broadcast appearances – but what turned him into an international intellectual superhero/supervillain was his response to 9/11.
He famously declared his support for George W Bush’s war on terror and backed military intervention to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein from Iraq, leading many of his one-time admirers to denounce him for capitulation to US imperialism. A lot of these ex-fans think that he did little worthwhile after 9/11, but even though I think he was wrong about Iraq, I disagree. His 2002 book on George Orwell, Orwell’s Victory, a pithy polemical defence of its subject, and his 2007 atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great, are both up there with his work in the 1980s and 1990s – and his occasional journalism continued to deserve attention right up to his death. He will be missed.
It was then that he really spread his wings, publishing some quite extraordinary essays on a wide variety of political and literary themes in a wide variety of periodicals (the best of them collected in two collections, Prepared for the Worst and For the Sake of Argument). The 1980s was also when he wrote what I think is far-and-away his best book, Blood, Class and Nostalgia, a rumination on the relationship between Britain and America.
He kept up his output through the 1990s and into the new millenium: there were articles galore, books denouncing Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, dozens of broadcast appearances – but what turned him into an international intellectual superhero/supervillain was his response to 9/11.
He famously declared his support for George W Bush’s war on terror and backed military intervention to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein from Iraq, leading many of his one-time admirers to denounce him for capitulation to US imperialism. A lot of these ex-fans think that he did little worthwhile after 9/11, but even though I think he was wrong about Iraq, I disagree. His 2002 book on George Orwell, Orwell’s Victory, a pithy polemical defence of its subject, and his 2007 atheist manifesto, God Is Not Great, are both up there with his work in the 1980s and 1990s – and his occasional journalism continued to deserve attention right up to his death. He will be missed.
9 December 2011
EUROZONE MEMBERSHIP MEANS A BUSINESS SCHOOL CABINET
Ian Aitken, Tribune column, 9 December 2011
I was a bit taken aback when I opened my copy of the last issue of Tribune and found a piece by my old friend and colleague Paul Anderson in which he threatened to slag off his Eurosceptic chums for indulging in a little Schadenfreude over the present difficulties of the eurozone.
Mind you, he didn’t actually do it, saying that it was a subject for a later column. But his gentle warning set me thinking about how two lefties such as Paul and me could see the matter from such radically different angles, and how I came to be a sceptic rather than an enthusiast like him.
Looking back, I think I can trace my original distrust of the so-called European ideal to my old hero Aneurin Bevan. Although he was dead by the time the subject became a major political issue following Harold Macmillan’s original application to join the Common Market, I was in no doubt about his views. He saw the Treaty of Rome as a two-pronged effort first to entrench the capitalist system and the free market in a binding Europe-wide law, and then to provide a solid economic foundation for Nato and the Cold War.
I can’t actually provide chapter and verse for this interpretation of Nye’s view. But that was the general view surrounding Tribune and the Bevanites at the time. We argued and debated about it often, although mainly in the context of the Cold War, and there was no question that Nye shared that view and gave it his endorsement. Moreover, I don’t think it would have changed if he had survived: by then, he had become Hugh Gaitskell’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Gaitskell was a passionate opponent of Macmillan’s attempt to take Britain into Europe. Their remarkable alliance could not have survived a disagreement over such a central issue.
By the time Macmillan made his doomed application, I was on the Daily Express, whose proprietor was passionately hostile to Europe. As I have mentioned in this column before, Lord Beaverbrook saw the chance to create an improbable electoral alliance between his newspapers and the Labour Party, and he chose me to be the channel of communication between him and Hugh Gaitskell. The only thing that prevented the Express from urging its readers to vote Labour was Charles de Gaulle’s sudden veto, which scuppered Macmillan’s ambitions just as they seemed about to be fulfilled.
Not long after this, with Bevan, Gaitskell and Beaverbrook all dead, I moved from the Express to the Guardian and found myself in a new phase of my European journey. Where the Daily Express had been passionately anti, the Guardian (or some of its staff) was passionately pro, and I learned something alarming about the Euro-enthusiasts: they were so desperate to get in that they were ready to accept almost any terms that would satisfy General de Gaulle. This attitude was typified by the then deputy editor of the Guardian, a nice man called Harford Thomas. Late one night in the office, I said to him that I often got the impression that real Euro-enthusiasts would be prepared to go into it with their trousers down and dragged backwards through a holly bush. “Yes”, he said, “I would be prepared to go in on those terms”.
I don’t actually believe that Macmillan’s application fell into quite the Harford Thomas category. His was a typically calculated move, and probably had a lot to do with the wishes of John F Kennedy and the US State Department. They were dead keen to get us in as a reliable proxy for the United States – which, of course, was exactly why de Gaulle wouldn’t have us. But Edward Heath, the Prime Minister who eventually took us in, was very definitely a holly bush man. The only constraint he felt in his negotiations was what he could get away with at home – which is why he did not allow a referendum in spite of his promise to seek the “full-hearted consent of the British people”, and then drove the treaty bill through the House of Commons on a series of three-line whips. If Roy Jenkins (another holly bush man) and his followers had obeyed the Labour whip, the bill would have been defeated.
Then came Harold Wilson’s referendum – a typically clever ruse to get round the fact that his party was split from top to bottom on Europe. If it had been a vote on whether to go in, it probably would have been lost. But this was a vote on whether to come out, a much more difficult proposition to sell. The “Yes” campaign was fought on the basis of some truly spectacular lies – among them the assertion that our membership involved no loss of sovereignty – and was financed by gigantic sums donated from the City. The man who organised the fundraising wrote a book afterwards about how the result was bought.
So that is how I came to be a sceptic, even if I am rather more ambivalent now. But looking at events across the Channel, it is hard to resist a hollow laugh even at the risk of offending dear old Paul Anderson. As for that little matter of sovereignty, we now know where we stand: if you want to be in the eurozone, you will have to appoint your cabinet from the London Business School and then submit your budget to Brussels for inspection and approval. Maybe that’s the way it’s got to be – as Paul seems to be suggesting. But if so, I want no part of it. I will stay at home and read old Agatha Christies.
I was a bit taken aback when I opened my copy of the last issue of Tribune and found a piece by my old friend and colleague Paul Anderson in which he threatened to slag off his Eurosceptic chums for indulging in a little Schadenfreude over the present difficulties of the eurozone.
Mind you, he didn’t actually do it, saying that it was a subject for a later column. But his gentle warning set me thinking about how two lefties such as Paul and me could see the matter from such radically different angles, and how I came to be a sceptic rather than an enthusiast like him.
Looking back, I think I can trace my original distrust of the so-called European ideal to my old hero Aneurin Bevan. Although he was dead by the time the subject became a major political issue following Harold Macmillan’s original application to join the Common Market, I was in no doubt about his views. He saw the Treaty of Rome as a two-pronged effort first to entrench the capitalist system and the free market in a binding Europe-wide law, and then to provide a solid economic foundation for Nato and the Cold War.
I can’t actually provide chapter and verse for this interpretation of Nye’s view. But that was the general view surrounding Tribune and the Bevanites at the time. We argued and debated about it often, although mainly in the context of the Cold War, and there was no question that Nye shared that view and gave it his endorsement. Moreover, I don’t think it would have changed if he had survived: by then, he had become Hugh Gaitskell’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, and Gaitskell was a passionate opponent of Macmillan’s attempt to take Britain into Europe. Their remarkable alliance could not have survived a disagreement over such a central issue.
By the time Macmillan made his doomed application, I was on the Daily Express, whose proprietor was passionately hostile to Europe. As I have mentioned in this column before, Lord Beaverbrook saw the chance to create an improbable electoral alliance between his newspapers and the Labour Party, and he chose me to be the channel of communication between him and Hugh Gaitskell. The only thing that prevented the Express from urging its readers to vote Labour was Charles de Gaulle’s sudden veto, which scuppered Macmillan’s ambitions just as they seemed about to be fulfilled.
Not long after this, with Bevan, Gaitskell and Beaverbrook all dead, I moved from the Express to the Guardian and found myself in a new phase of my European journey. Where the Daily Express had been passionately anti, the Guardian (or some of its staff) was passionately pro, and I learned something alarming about the Euro-enthusiasts: they were so desperate to get in that they were ready to accept almost any terms that would satisfy General de Gaulle. This attitude was typified by the then deputy editor of the Guardian, a nice man called Harford Thomas. Late one night in the office, I said to him that I often got the impression that real Euro-enthusiasts would be prepared to go into it with their trousers down and dragged backwards through a holly bush. “Yes”, he said, “I would be prepared to go in on those terms”.
I don’t actually believe that Macmillan’s application fell into quite the Harford Thomas category. His was a typically calculated move, and probably had a lot to do with the wishes of John F Kennedy and the US State Department. They were dead keen to get us in as a reliable proxy for the United States – which, of course, was exactly why de Gaulle wouldn’t have us. But Edward Heath, the Prime Minister who eventually took us in, was very definitely a holly bush man. The only constraint he felt in his negotiations was what he could get away with at home – which is why he did not allow a referendum in spite of his promise to seek the “full-hearted consent of the British people”, and then drove the treaty bill through the House of Commons on a series of three-line whips. If Roy Jenkins (another holly bush man) and his followers had obeyed the Labour whip, the bill would have been defeated.
Then came Harold Wilson’s referendum – a typically clever ruse to get round the fact that his party was split from top to bottom on Europe. If it had been a vote on whether to go in, it probably would have been lost. But this was a vote on whether to come out, a much more difficult proposition to sell. The “Yes” campaign was fought on the basis of some truly spectacular lies – among them the assertion that our membership involved no loss of sovereignty – and was financed by gigantic sums donated from the City. The man who organised the fundraising wrote a book afterwards about how the result was bought.
So that is how I came to be a sceptic, even if I am rather more ambivalent now. But looking at events across the Channel, it is hard to resist a hollow laugh even at the risk of offending dear old Paul Anderson. As for that little matter of sovereignty, we now know where we stand: if you want to be in the eurozone, you will have to appoint your cabinet from the London Business School and then submit your budget to Brussels for inspection and approval. Maybe that’s the way it’s got to be – as Paul seems to be suggesting. But if so, I want no part of it. I will stay at home and read old Agatha Christies.
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