I've not been posting on Gauche for the past couple of months because I've been using my screen time to put together my online archive of published pieces. It's now here and proves definitively to everyone who doubted me that I was right all along about everything.
(Actually, this apparently obsessive project has been motivated by my need to find work and put a decent CV online – I'm going freelance full-time after losing my gig at City University – but never mind.)
The archive is almost complete for everything since 1991, though there are gaps (and it needs editing for style and OCR mistakes). The next step is to get the 1980s on to it.
I've deleted everything from before 1993 from this blog, because posting old stuff always felt like cheating and now there's no excuse. But everything I'd published here that's pre-1993 is on the new archive site.
18 May 2012
DON'T OPEN THE CHAMPAGNE YET
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 May 2012
There can be no doubt that over the past few weeks Labour has enjoyed its best run for a long time – certainly since the surge of popularity that came with Gordon Brown taking over the premiership in 2007 (remember that?).
The opinion polls give Labour a massive lead over the Conservatives that would yield a comfortable parliamentary majority if translated into votes in a general election, even with the proposed reduction of the size of the Commons and redrawing of constituency boundaries.
A fortnight ago, Labour did much better than anyone expected in the local elections, gaining more than 800 council seats across Great Britain. It took control of councils in the south-east and east of England where its parliamentary representation had been reduced to a handful by the 2010 general election. It emphatically reversed the drift away from Labour in local government in south Wales. And it at least stood up to the nationalist challenge in Scotland. Ken Livingstone losing in London was a disappointment, but Labour did better in the London Assembly election than ever before.
The coalition government, meanwhile, is facing troubles that it shows no sign of containing. George Osborne’s budget, giving money to the rich and taking it from the poor, was a public relations disaster that he will not easily live down. The economy is in the doldrums and shows no sign of recovery. And the Tories’ intimacy with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is slowly but surely being exposed to public view, text message by text message, email by email, at the Leveson inquiry.
The Tory right’s dissatisfaction with the compromises of coalition in general and with David Cameron in particular is palpable. So too is the Liberal Democrats’ fear that they face electoral disaster if they stay on their current course.
To top it all, Ed Miliband has been doing rather better than before as Labour leader. He still appears awkward a lot of the time, but he is now matching Cameron in parliament and seems to have seen off the sniping of Blairite nostalgics in his own party. Why, this week Ed Balls and Peter Mandelson even co-authored a piece for the Guardian’s comment pages declaring that they agreed on Europe (except on the small matter of whether Britain should join the euro).
It is, however, too early for Labour supporters to break open the champagne. We are three years from the next general election, and a lot could happen in that time. Mid-term local election successes on low voter turnouts are not reliable guides to subsequent general election results. As for the polls, it is only four months since the Tories and Labour were neck-and-neck, and a Tory recovery cannot be ruled out.
Everything depends on what now happens to the economy – or rather what is perceived by voters to be happening. So far, the coalition’s story that austerity is necessary to pay back the debt left by Labour’s irresponsible spending spree before 2010 has chimed remarkably well with the electorate: the big question over the next six months is whether Labour can get a hearing outside the political class for its moderately Keynesian alternative.
Here, Labour could do worse than emulate the thrust of Francois Hollande’s successful French presidential campaign – maybe not a 75 per cent tax on very high earners but something similarly symbolic of making the rich pay their fair share, along with a package to boost demand in the economy (through building council houses, say). That’s pretty much in line with what the shadow chancellor would like to make his message: Labour now needs Balls to do it with some élan.
6 May 2012
19 April 2012
IT'S NOT A REVOLUTION, BUT IT IS A CHANGE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 19 April 2012
There has been something about French politics that I’ve liked for as long as I can remember. As a kid in the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle – giant nose, strange military hat – was the only foreign leader I could recognise apart from Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. As a teenager in the early 1970s I devoured the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. A little bit later I came to marvel at France’s extraordinary left-wing intellectual culture.
I was never a fan of Louis Althusser, the main intellectual of the French Communist Party; and Sartre as communist fellow-traveller left me cold. But I gobbled up everything I could find by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Henri Lefebvre, André Gorz, Guy Debord, Edgar Morin, Jacques Camatte, Pierre Bourdieu. Les evenements of 1968 were an obsession, the dissident left and leftish journals of the 50s, 60s and 70s – Socialisme ou Barbarie, Arguments, Esprit – an inspiration despite my useless French. By 1980, I’d decided that I wanted to live in Paris.
I never did, but I did get to meet some of the people whose books and articles I’d taken so seriously. Castoriadis was a lovely man, Lefort rather formal, Camatte more interested in getting off with my then girlfriend than in anything else. My bookshelves are still populated by obscure pamphlets bought from secondhand stalls along the banks of the Seine. I have a near-mint first Editions Spartacus printing of that great French intellectual Denis Healey’s Les Socialistes derrière le rideau de fer. And I once slept in a bed once slept in by Amadeo Bordiga, the first leader of the Italian Communist Party and in later life a noted left communist, at the Paris flat of some former militants of Programme Communiste…
I was not the first Brit to be seduced by the French intellectual left – and some people went the whole hog, most notably the late Tony Judt, whose magnum opus Postwar I read (belatedly) over the Easter holiday weekend.
But the magic wore off for me. By the mid-1980s, the golden era of the French intellectuals was over. The big figures of the 1950s were getting old and dying, and the generation of 1968 had either joined the political mainstream or drifted into marginality.
Many of the 68ers enthusiasms – particularly workers’ self-management and a reduction of working time – had been adopted by the French Socialist Party in the run-up to its sensational election victory in 1981, but Francois Mitterrand’s administration soon dropped even the pretence of being other than technocratic.
The past 30 years have not been kind to the French left. The Mitterrand era faded away into recrimination after the left lost the 1986 national assembly election – though Mitterrand himself won the 1988 presidential race – and the once-mighty Communist Party dwindled to a rump.
There was a brief moment of hope in 1997, when the left unexpectedly won a national assembly majority under Lionel Jospin, but in the 2002 presidential election Jospin failed to make it into the second round, which was contested between the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen and the incumbent Jacques Chirac. The less said about the state of the left for the rest of the noughties – split over Europe and just about everything else – the better.
But could the tide be about to turn at last? It might just be. The Socialist candidate for the imminent presidential election, Francois Hollande, looks likely to make it into the second round, in which he would be hot favourite to beat Nicolas Sarkozy. There’s even something of a left movement on the march: the campaign of the communist-dominated Front de Gauche, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has had a vigour few expected, with big rallies all over the country exhibiting wild enthusiasm for his populist anti-capitalist rhetoric.
It could yet end in disaster – my worst-case scenario is Mélenchon making it into the second round instead of Hollande and then losing to Sarkozy – but there’s a good chance that we’ll wake up on 7 May to find that France has a centre-left president for the first time in 17 years. That wouldn’t return us to the era of Editions Spartacus and Socalisme ou Barbarie … but it would certainly cheer me up.
There has been something about French politics that I’ve liked for as long as I can remember. As a kid in the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle – giant nose, strange military hat – was the only foreign leader I could recognise apart from Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. As a teenager in the early 1970s I devoured the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. A little bit later I came to marvel at France’s extraordinary left-wing intellectual culture.
I was never a fan of Louis Althusser, the main intellectual of the French Communist Party; and Sartre as communist fellow-traveller left me cold. But I gobbled up everything I could find by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Henri Lefebvre, André Gorz, Guy Debord, Edgar Morin, Jacques Camatte, Pierre Bourdieu. Les evenements of 1968 were an obsession, the dissident left and leftish journals of the 50s, 60s and 70s – Socialisme ou Barbarie, Arguments, Esprit – an inspiration despite my useless French. By 1980, I’d decided that I wanted to live in Paris.
I never did, but I did get to meet some of the people whose books and articles I’d taken so seriously. Castoriadis was a lovely man, Lefort rather formal, Camatte more interested in getting off with my then girlfriend than in anything else. My bookshelves are still populated by obscure pamphlets bought from secondhand stalls along the banks of the Seine. I have a near-mint first Editions Spartacus printing of that great French intellectual Denis Healey’s Les Socialistes derrière le rideau de fer. And I once slept in a bed once slept in by Amadeo Bordiga, the first leader of the Italian Communist Party and in later life a noted left communist, at the Paris flat of some former militants of Programme Communiste…
I was not the first Brit to be seduced by the French intellectual left – and some people went the whole hog, most notably the late Tony Judt, whose magnum opus Postwar I read (belatedly) over the Easter holiday weekend.
But the magic wore off for me. By the mid-1980s, the golden era of the French intellectuals was over. The big figures of the 1950s were getting old and dying, and the generation of 1968 had either joined the political mainstream or drifted into marginality.
Many of the 68ers enthusiasms – particularly workers’ self-management and a reduction of working time – had been adopted by the French Socialist Party in the run-up to its sensational election victory in 1981, but Francois Mitterrand’s administration soon dropped even the pretence of being other than technocratic.
The past 30 years have not been kind to the French left. The Mitterrand era faded away into recrimination after the left lost the 1986 national assembly election – though Mitterrand himself won the 1988 presidential race – and the once-mighty Communist Party dwindled to a rump.
There was a brief moment of hope in 1997, when the left unexpectedly won a national assembly majority under Lionel Jospin, but in the 2002 presidential election Jospin failed to make it into the second round, which was contested between the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen and the incumbent Jacques Chirac. The less said about the state of the left for the rest of the noughties – split over Europe and just about everything else – the better.
But could the tide be about to turn at last? It might just be. The Socialist candidate for the imminent presidential election, Francois Hollande, looks likely to make it into the second round, in which he would be hot favourite to beat Nicolas Sarkozy. There’s even something of a left movement on the march: the campaign of the communist-dominated Front de Gauche, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has had a vigour few expected, with big rallies all over the country exhibiting wild enthusiasm for his populist anti-capitalist rhetoric.
It could yet end in disaster – my worst-case scenario is Mélenchon making it into the second round instead of Hollande and then losing to Sarkozy – but there’s a good chance that we’ll wake up on 7 May to find that France has a centre-left president for the first time in 17 years. That wouldn’t return us to the era of Editions Spartacus and Socalisme ou Barbarie … but it would certainly cheer me up.
22 March 2012
I BELONG TO THE BLANK GENERATION
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 March 2012
Sometimes, anniversaries come as a shock to the system. Yep, it’s 35 years this week that the Clash released their first single:
And it was a long, long time ago. Since then, I’ve been to university, worked, done sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, worked, done more sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, worked – and now I’m in my fifties. But I don’t think I’ve really grown up, at least in the way that my parents grew up.
Sure, I’m wiser than I was, or at least I hope I am. I’ve been married and divorced. I don’t live in a junkie squat or a squalid bedsit any more. I own a slowly increasing percentage of a bijou two-up, two-down in fashionable Ipswich with gas central heating. I’ve got lots of books and DVDs and CDs, and state-of-the-art computer kit on which I can produce a magazine or a website or a feature film in my own home. I’ve no kids. So far, the current wave of austerity hasn’t hit me, though I worry about the next six months.
A smug, middle-aged, middle-class git, you might justifiably think. In my own mind, however, I’m still pretty much where I was 35 years ago when I cut my hair and ditched the flares. The music will never die, for starters. I still despise going straight. And the politics of the era still resound, much more than you’d think.
Back then, I was a revolutionary leftist – an anarchist by 1977, though in the previous two years I’d been through Trotskyism and Maoism, as teenagers did back then. Today I’m not a revolutionary, and haven’t been for nearly 30 years. That, though, is more about facing reality than any big change of heart. Sometime after the 1983 general election I twigged that the British working class wasn’t going to start a revolution and that you couldn’t be taken seriously playing Citizen Smith for real.
But when I joined the Labour Party in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t as an entryist but because I'd come to believe that boring old social democracy was the only credible alternative to the privatising class-war lunacy of the Thatcher government. As Richard Neville almost put it, it might have been only a potential inch of difference, but it was an inch in which we might be able to live.
The thing is, I haven’t really moved on politically since then, and nor has most of my generation. I grudgingly accepted Neil Kinnock’s policy review after the 1987 general election, and even more grudgingly swallowed Labour’s rightward shift under John Smith and Tony Blair after 1992.
Since then, Labour has left me colder and colder. New Labour was a success as a marketing strategy but the 1997-2010 government did little that has lasted apart from devolution. I’m still a party member, mainly because Labour makes a difference in local government, but I don’t believe the bollocks that comes from the party leadership. I want a return to Kinnockism circa 1988. So do most other party members and a large number of supporters.
Now, however, the kids have taken over. Last week’s New Statesman carried a long essay by Alwyn W Turner – a byline I didn’t recognise, but that’s my fault – looking at the failure of my generation to make any impact on mainstream politics in Britain. The New Labour crew were all born 1945-55, the new Tory and Lib Dem boys in 1965-79 … and it’s New Labour’s sidekicks, the researchers and spin-doctors for Blair and Brown, all born 1965-79, who now lead Labour.
They’re too young for the Clash. They look to focus groups and nothing else. Their problem, and ours.
Sometimes, anniversaries come as a shock to the system. Yep, it’s 35 years this week that the Clash released their first single:
White riot – I wanna riotIt wasn’t the first Brit punk 45 – that was the Damned’s “New Rose” in October 1976, which was followed by the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” and several others – but it was the decisive one, for me at least. I’d been ready for punk for some time: my record collection had expanded since 1975 from the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zep and the Who to include the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Dr Feelgood, Patti Smith and the Ramones. But it was “White Riot” that made me cut my hair and ditch the flares.
White riot – a riot of my own
White riot – I wanna riot
White riot – a riot of my own
And it was a long, long time ago. Since then, I’ve been to university, worked, done sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, worked, done more sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, worked – and now I’m in my fifties. But I don’t think I’ve really grown up, at least in the way that my parents grew up.
Sure, I’m wiser than I was, or at least I hope I am. I’ve been married and divorced. I don’t live in a junkie squat or a squalid bedsit any more. I own a slowly increasing percentage of a bijou two-up, two-down in fashionable Ipswich with gas central heating. I’ve got lots of books and DVDs and CDs, and state-of-the-art computer kit on which I can produce a magazine or a website or a feature film in my own home. I’ve no kids. So far, the current wave of austerity hasn’t hit me, though I worry about the next six months.
A smug, middle-aged, middle-class git, you might justifiably think. In my own mind, however, I’m still pretty much where I was 35 years ago when I cut my hair and ditched the flares. The music will never die, for starters. I still despise going straight. And the politics of the era still resound, much more than you’d think.
Back then, I was a revolutionary leftist – an anarchist by 1977, though in the previous two years I’d been through Trotskyism and Maoism, as teenagers did back then. Today I’m not a revolutionary, and haven’t been for nearly 30 years. That, though, is more about facing reality than any big change of heart. Sometime after the 1983 general election I twigged that the British working class wasn’t going to start a revolution and that you couldn’t be taken seriously playing Citizen Smith for real.
But when I joined the Labour Party in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t as an entryist but because I'd come to believe that boring old social democracy was the only credible alternative to the privatising class-war lunacy of the Thatcher government. As Richard Neville almost put it, it might have been only a potential inch of difference, but it was an inch in which we might be able to live.
The thing is, I haven’t really moved on politically since then, and nor has most of my generation. I grudgingly accepted Neil Kinnock’s policy review after the 1987 general election, and even more grudgingly swallowed Labour’s rightward shift under John Smith and Tony Blair after 1992.
Since then, Labour has left me colder and colder. New Labour was a success as a marketing strategy but the 1997-2010 government did little that has lasted apart from devolution. I’m still a party member, mainly because Labour makes a difference in local government, but I don’t believe the bollocks that comes from the party leadership. I want a return to Kinnockism circa 1988. So do most other party members and a large number of supporters.
Now, however, the kids have taken over. Last week’s New Statesman carried a long essay by Alwyn W Turner – a byline I didn’t recognise, but that’s my fault – looking at the failure of my generation to make any impact on mainstream politics in Britain. The New Labour crew were all born 1945-55, the new Tory and Lib Dem boys in 1965-79 … and it’s New Labour’s sidekicks, the researchers and spin-doctors for Blair and Brown, all born 1965-79, who now lead Labour.
They’re too young for the Clash. They look to focus groups and nothing else. Their problem, and ours.
29 February 2012
WHAT SCOTS WANT IS HOME INTERNATIONALS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 24 February 2012
My dad was not a demonstrative man. A working-class Edinburgh boy, he became part of the white-collar middle class thanks to night school and second-world-war military service.
He kept the story of his war experiences in a notebook that no one saw until after he died – 20 years ago next week – and was shifty about having voted Liberal in elections in the 1970s. That was partly because my mum was Labour, but mainly because he was a Scottish nationalist. There was never an SNP candidate in Ipswich, and the Liberal was a miserable next-best option.
On one thing, though, he was vocal: porridge. He’d been eating it for breakfast all his life. He knew it was good for you. And when we were kids he made it made it every day, at least in winter.
But it wasn’t shop porridge, as he called it. He insisted that the porridge oats available at every supermarket and corner store weren’t the real thing. They were rolled oatmeal, and what you needed to make proper Scottish porridge was pinhead oats. They’re the oats in an early, pre-rolling, stage of processing, cut into bits by a mill – and they make porridge a lot crunchier and tastier than rolled oatmeal.
In Scotland in the 1970s, getting the proper oats might have been a matter of nipping down the corner store: I don’t know. In Suffolk, where we lived, it meant a 30-minute cycle ride down to Barnard’s, an old-fashioned miller’s retail shop, which I did once a fortnight. They specialised in birdseed -- but also supplied the yeast with which we made bread when the power went off during Ted Heath’s three-day week.
These days in Suffolk, you need to do your homework to get pinhead oats. The old independent retailers have gone – and the big supermarkets don’t carry pinhead oats, just as they don’t carry once-cheap cuts of meat (offal particularly) or any white fish apart from haddock and cod. As far as I know, the only shop that sells pinhead oats is a pricey semi-deli chi-chi greengrocer in the centre of town that is also the only obvious place to get herbs in volume or sweet potatoes.
My old man’s other injunction, of course, was that porridge should be eaten salted, possibly with milk or cream, but never contaminated with sugar or jam. The idea of adding fruit or yoghurt was in the future, but would have appalled him, I know. And as for deep-fried Mars Bars ...
Whatever, I shudder to think of what he would have made of the visit to Scotland last week by David Cameron to persuade the Scots that they should not vote for independence in the forthcoming referendum.
Cameron started his trip with a photo-opportunity at the PepsiCo factory in Cupar, Fife, where the giant American multinational produces variants of what my dad called shop porridge, most of it branded as Quaker or Scott’s, the latter recognisable to consumers all over the world for the strapping shot-putter in vest and kilt that adorns its packaging. PepsiCo has just announced a big expansion plan – and, declared the PM in front of a poster of the shot-putter, it wouldn’t have happened had Scotland been independent.
He developed the theme in a big speech later the same day – “the union makes us strong”, as one Scots wag put it to me – after an unfriendly and inconclusive meeting with Alex Salmond, the SNP first minister.
Cameron's performance was fake, big-time, and every Scot who watched it knew it, whatever their views on porridge. What the Scots haven't twigged yet, at least most of them, is that Salmond is as big a fraud as Cameron, if not a bigger one.
Yes, it's true that Scotland had an independent existence before the union.
Yes, it has a legal system of its own and a political culture that's different from England's, its own poets and novelists and all the rest.
Yes, the Scots want a more egalitarian society than they will ever get from a Tory-dominated England.
But the defining difference between England and Scotland is trivial: it's football. The Scots don't care about independence: they want the home championship back, and the chance for Law, Baxter and Dalglish to knock in a few goals against the old enemy. Salmond has nothing under his kilt but the flimsiest of tartan panties.
It has been a long time since we last saw a game. Instead, we've got months of arguments about Scottish independence before the big vote – competing with fractious debate about whether Harry Redknapp can make anything of the overpaid thickos in the England football team.
I'm not afraid of an independent Scotland. It could be great – social democracy, Rab C Nesbit, Billy Connolly, Neil Oliver – but it could be dire – Braveheart nationalism, Burns Night haggis suppers (White Heather Club style), tartan trinkets ad nauseam. But actually I don't think it matters that much whether Scotland is independent or not. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the class struggle transcends national boundaries. And Rosa knew a bit about porridge.
My dad was not a demonstrative man. A working-class Edinburgh boy, he became part of the white-collar middle class thanks to night school and second-world-war military service.
He kept the story of his war experiences in a notebook that no one saw until after he died – 20 years ago next week – and was shifty about having voted Liberal in elections in the 1970s. That was partly because my mum was Labour, but mainly because he was a Scottish nationalist. There was never an SNP candidate in Ipswich, and the Liberal was a miserable next-best option.
On one thing, though, he was vocal: porridge. He’d been eating it for breakfast all his life. He knew it was good for you. And when we were kids he made it made it every day, at least in winter.
But it wasn’t shop porridge, as he called it. He insisted that the porridge oats available at every supermarket and corner store weren’t the real thing. They were rolled oatmeal, and what you needed to make proper Scottish porridge was pinhead oats. They’re the oats in an early, pre-rolling, stage of processing, cut into bits by a mill – and they make porridge a lot crunchier and tastier than rolled oatmeal.
In Scotland in the 1970s, getting the proper oats might have been a matter of nipping down the corner store: I don’t know. In Suffolk, where we lived, it meant a 30-minute cycle ride down to Barnard’s, an old-fashioned miller’s retail shop, which I did once a fortnight. They specialised in birdseed -- but also supplied the yeast with which we made bread when the power went off during Ted Heath’s three-day week.
These days in Suffolk, you need to do your homework to get pinhead oats. The old independent retailers have gone – and the big supermarkets don’t carry pinhead oats, just as they don’t carry once-cheap cuts of meat (offal particularly) or any white fish apart from haddock and cod. As far as I know, the only shop that sells pinhead oats is a pricey semi-deli chi-chi greengrocer in the centre of town that is also the only obvious place to get herbs in volume or sweet potatoes.
My old man’s other injunction, of course, was that porridge should be eaten salted, possibly with milk or cream, but never contaminated with sugar or jam. The idea of adding fruit or yoghurt was in the future, but would have appalled him, I know. And as for deep-fried Mars Bars ...
Whatever, I shudder to think of what he would have made of the visit to Scotland last week by David Cameron to persuade the Scots that they should not vote for independence in the forthcoming referendum.
Cameron started his trip with a photo-opportunity at the PepsiCo factory in Cupar, Fife, where the giant American multinational produces variants of what my dad called shop porridge, most of it branded as Quaker or Scott’s, the latter recognisable to consumers all over the world for the strapping shot-putter in vest and kilt that adorns its packaging. PepsiCo has just announced a big expansion plan – and, declared the PM in front of a poster of the shot-putter, it wouldn’t have happened had Scotland been independent.
He developed the theme in a big speech later the same day – “the union makes us strong”, as one Scots wag put it to me – after an unfriendly and inconclusive meeting with Alex Salmond, the SNP first minister.
Cameron's performance was fake, big-time, and every Scot who watched it knew it, whatever their views on porridge. What the Scots haven't twigged yet, at least most of them, is that Salmond is as big a fraud as Cameron, if not a bigger one.
Yes, it's true that Scotland had an independent existence before the union.
Yes, it has a legal system of its own and a political culture that's different from England's, its own poets and novelists and all the rest.
Yes, the Scots want a more egalitarian society than they will ever get from a Tory-dominated England.
But the defining difference between England and Scotland is trivial: it's football. The Scots don't care about independence: they want the home championship back, and the chance for Law, Baxter and Dalglish to knock in a few goals against the old enemy. Salmond has nothing under his kilt but the flimsiest of tartan panties.
It has been a long time since we last saw a game. Instead, we've got months of arguments about Scottish independence before the big vote – competing with fractious debate about whether Harry Redknapp can make anything of the overpaid thickos in the England football team.
I'm not afraid of an independent Scotland. It could be great – social democracy, Rab C Nesbit, Billy Connolly, Neil Oliver – but it could be dire – Braveheart nationalism, Burns Night haggis suppers (White Heather Club style), tartan trinkets ad nauseam. But actually I don't think it matters that much whether Scotland is independent or not. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the class struggle transcends national boundaries. And Rosa knew a bit about porridge.
23 February 2012
STEAMPUNK OPIUM WARS: THE MOST FUN IN AGES
Anna Chen has posted an extract from her Steam Punk Opium Wars show at the National Maritime Museum last week, in which I was privileged to appear. I'm wearing a top hat, stage left.
29 January 2012
WHY WAS PRESS TV OK'D TO BEGIN WITH?
Paul Anderson, 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 has started to disintegrate – 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, global-broadcaster 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 completely.
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 reinforced to limit propagandist channels' access, not relaxed. It might be a fighting retreat, but it's worth it.
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.
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 has started to disintegrate – 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, global-broadcaster 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 completely.
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 reinforced to limit propagandist channels' access, not relaxed. It might be a fighting retreat, but it's worth it.
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.
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.
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
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