29 October 2006
27 October 2006
THINK TANK REBRANDS
Britain's leading ideas factory has adopted a new look in response to unfortunate recent events.
Please feel free to reproduce graphic.
Please feel free to reproduce graphic.
25 October 2006
ONLY A WHOLLY ELECTED SECOND CHAMBER WILL DO
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 October 2006
Call me an old cynic if you will, but I have a sneaking suspicion that no one reacted to last weekend’s leak of Jack Straw’s latest discussion paper on reform of the Lords by exclaiming: “Wow! A 50 per cent elected, 50 per cent appointed second chamber! What a brilliant new idea!”
Because it isn’t brilliant, and it isn’t new. In fact, it was proposed, and rejected by MPs — just as every other option was rejected — last time Lords reform came up, when the late and much-missed Robin Cook was leader of the House of Commons.
What was wrong with it then is what is wrong with it now. In a democracy, the legitimacy of legislators can be rooted only in direct elections. A second chamber that is 50 per cent appointed is by definition not legitimate. And no amount of guff about the need to encourage distinguished people from all walks of life to lend their expertise to the legislative process (see, for example, Max Hastings in Monday’s Guardian) can disguise the fact. If those distinguished people want to play a part in the legislature, they should put themselves up for election — end of story. There really is no democratic alternative.
And of course everyone knows it. Indeed, I suspect that the real reason Straw has resurrected the 50:50 proposal is precisely that a second chamber lacking democratic legitimacy would not be able to challenge the primacy of the Commons. But there is another simple way of ensuring the leading role of the Commons, which is to carefully delineate in law the respective powers of the two houses of parliament. Plenty of other countries do it. There is no good reason Britain can’t do the same.
***
The 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution has been marked by a series of features in the Guardian and a very good book by Victor Sebestyen (which I reviewed in Tribune last week) — but I’m a little surprised at how little the left (at least in Britain) has had to say about it.
Hungary 1956 was one of the left’s great watersheds of the 20th century — perhaps not as important as the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 or the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 but certainly up there with the Spanish civil war and the Hitler-Stalin pact. Before the Soviet tanks rolled in to smash the reformist Imre Nagy government and the workers’ councils that had sprung up to defend it, it was just about possible honestly to consider that what was wrong with Soviet communism was down to Stalin’s excesses and that the regime was essentially on the right tracks. (This is not my view of the Soviet Union, need I say.) Afterwards, only fools and liars could praise the Soviet Union as a workers’ state.
Throughout the western world, Hungary caused a mass exodus from communist parties. The Communist Party of Great Britain — never a mass party like the French or Italian communist parties, but nevertheless a significant force on the left — lost one third of its membership, including its most talented intellectuals, most notably the historian and polemicist Edward Thompson. Some ex-communists withdrew into political inactivity, but Thompson and others threw themselves with vigour into creating a New Left that was explicitly anti-Stalinist and socialist.
That New Left fizzled out, but its members remained key players on the British left — as Labour MPs, in the peace movement, as writers — until the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those who are still alive are getting on a bit now, but their role in reviving what had become a moribund British left culture deserves to be marked. We need a few like them today.
***
Now, I know this is controversial but it has to be asked: what exactly do all those people clamouring for rapid British and American withdrawal from Iraq — from Simon Jenkins to George Galloway — think would happen if their demands were met?
Would the Iraqi people, joyous at throwing off the yoke of imperialism, settle down at once to live in peace and harmony? Somehow I have my doubts. The wave of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing currently sweeping Iraq suggests that a rapid British and American withdrawal would be the prelude to civil war and mass slaughter not unlike the catastrophe of Indian partition in 1947.
That things have come to this pass is certainly at very least an indictment of the British and American governments’ failure to plan what happened after they toppled Saddam. And we can continue to argue about whether it was wrong to topple Saddam at all. But what is important now is that Britain and America, having helped create this almighty mess, do everything they can to avert civil war. And for the life of me I can’t see how they can do anything unless they have large and well equipped armies on the ground in Iraq.
Call me an old cynic if you will, but I have a sneaking suspicion that no one reacted to last weekend’s leak of Jack Straw’s latest discussion paper on reform of the Lords by exclaiming: “Wow! A 50 per cent elected, 50 per cent appointed second chamber! What a brilliant new idea!”
Because it isn’t brilliant, and it isn’t new. In fact, it was proposed, and rejected by MPs — just as every other option was rejected — last time Lords reform came up, when the late and much-missed Robin Cook was leader of the House of Commons.
What was wrong with it then is what is wrong with it now. In a democracy, the legitimacy of legislators can be rooted only in direct elections. A second chamber that is 50 per cent appointed is by definition not legitimate. And no amount of guff about the need to encourage distinguished people from all walks of life to lend their expertise to the legislative process (see, for example, Max Hastings in Monday’s Guardian) can disguise the fact. If those distinguished people want to play a part in the legislature, they should put themselves up for election — end of story. There really is no democratic alternative.
And of course everyone knows it. Indeed, I suspect that the real reason Straw has resurrected the 50:50 proposal is precisely that a second chamber lacking democratic legitimacy would not be able to challenge the primacy of the Commons. But there is another simple way of ensuring the leading role of the Commons, which is to carefully delineate in law the respective powers of the two houses of parliament. Plenty of other countries do it. There is no good reason Britain can’t do the same.
***
The 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution has been marked by a series of features in the Guardian and a very good book by Victor Sebestyen (which I reviewed in Tribune last week) — but I’m a little surprised at how little the left (at least in Britain) has had to say about it.
Hungary 1956 was one of the left’s great watersheds of the 20th century — perhaps not as important as the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 or the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 but certainly up there with the Spanish civil war and the Hitler-Stalin pact. Before the Soviet tanks rolled in to smash the reformist Imre Nagy government and the workers’ councils that had sprung up to defend it, it was just about possible honestly to consider that what was wrong with Soviet communism was down to Stalin’s excesses and that the regime was essentially on the right tracks. (This is not my view of the Soviet Union, need I say.) Afterwards, only fools and liars could praise the Soviet Union as a workers’ state.
Throughout the western world, Hungary caused a mass exodus from communist parties. The Communist Party of Great Britain — never a mass party like the French or Italian communist parties, but nevertheless a significant force on the left — lost one third of its membership, including its most talented intellectuals, most notably the historian and polemicist Edward Thompson. Some ex-communists withdrew into political inactivity, but Thompson and others threw themselves with vigour into creating a New Left that was explicitly anti-Stalinist and socialist.
That New Left fizzled out, but its members remained key players on the British left — as Labour MPs, in the peace movement, as writers — until the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those who are still alive are getting on a bit now, but their role in reviving what had become a moribund British left culture deserves to be marked. We need a few like them today.
***
Now, I know this is controversial but it has to be asked: what exactly do all those people clamouring for rapid British and American withdrawal from Iraq — from Simon Jenkins to George Galloway — think would happen if their demands were met?
Would the Iraqi people, joyous at throwing off the yoke of imperialism, settle down at once to live in peace and harmony? Somehow I have my doubts. The wave of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing currently sweeping Iraq suggests that a rapid British and American withdrawal would be the prelude to civil war and mass slaughter not unlike the catastrophe of Indian partition in 1947.
That things have come to this pass is certainly at very least an indictment of the British and American governments’ failure to plan what happened after they toppled Saddam. And we can continue to argue about whether it was wrong to topple Saddam at all. But what is important now is that Britain and America, having helped create this almighty mess, do everything they can to avert civil war. And for the life of me I can’t see how they can do anything unless they have large and well equipped armies on the ground in Iraq.
20 October 2006
HUNGARY 1956: WORKERS' POWER
Paul Anderson, review of Victor Sebestyen: Twelve Days – Revolution 1956 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20), Tribune, 20 October 2006
The story of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 has been stylishly told before. Two books in particular spring to mind: the British historian Bill Lomax’s Hungary 1956, published in 1976, and Sandor Kopacsi’s In the Name of the Working Class, an eyewitness account by the Budapest police chief who sided with the revolutionaries, which was translated into English in 1986.
What Victor Sebestyen manages in his new history, however, is to tell the story with verve at the same time as explaining for a post-cold-war readership the international context of the extraordinary events of October-November 1956, when an overwhelmingly working-class uprising came within a whisker of overthrowing a Soviet-imposed Stalinist dictatorship.
In Sebestyen’s account, the roles of Nikita Khruschev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Dwight D Eisenhower, president of the United States, are – rightly – as important as those of Imre Nagy, the reformist Hungarian prime minister from 24 October to 4 November 1956, or indeed of any other Hungarian. It was Khruschev’s insistence on showing the Hungarians who was boss and Eisenhower’s refusal to do anything that might risk war that determined the revolution’s fate – its brutal suppression by Soviet invasion.
The revolutionaries resisted the tanks with petrol bombs and rifles, and the workers’ councils that were such a notable feature of the revolution continued to organise strikes and demonstrations long after ceding control of the streets to the occupiers. But their leaders were arrested and imprisoned and Hungary returned to communist dictatorship under the opportunist Janos Kadar, who remained in power until 1988. Nagy and his closest comrades were executed in 1958.
What the revolution might have turned into if Khruschev had left it to its own devices cannot of course be known. Sebestyen makes less of the role of the workers’ councils than Lomax and others, which to my mind is a shame. This was a self-managed proletarian revolution above all else, and it is not too fanciful to believe that it might just have created a pluralist, egalitarian, decentralised, self-managed socialist society.
But never mind. If Sebestyen doesn’t speculate about the potential of the workers’ councils, it is nevertheless clear from his account that the overwhelming majority of Hungarian revolutionaries wanted at very least some form of democratic socialism rather than a return to capitalism. The communist claim that the revolution was an attempt by fascists to seize power was, quite simply, a slanderous lie.
Could anything have prevented the defeat of the revolution? Perhaps if the west had threatened military action in support of the revolution, Khruschev would have been forced to back down. But the west was in no position credibly to threaten military action – the Hungarian revolution coincided with the debacle of Suez, which tore the Atlantic alliance asunder – and, of course, the Soviets had the bomb.
Sebestyen was born in Budapest and was a small child when his family left Hungary after 1956 as refugees. A respected journalist in Britain, he has a great feel for the politics of the 1950s and writes in a terse demotic style. This is an exemplary work of popular history that deserves a wide readership.
... BUT NOT TOO BUSY FOR THIS
Very pleasant to meet you, Louise and Stroppybird, without your catsuits on ... and with Dave and Lady M and the others there too it almost turned into the nearest thing I've seen to ...
I then made my excuses and left.
I then made my excuses and left.
17 October 2006
13 October 2006
BIRDS IN CATSUITS
The comrades at Stroppyblog have taken my advice ... almost. Stunning redesign by Will.
HOW ABOUT THIS?
I've just found this flier for Tribune from early 1941 – when the Nazi-Soviet pact was in force. Good, eh?
LET THEM GET ON WITH IT
It is clear we need to get out of Iraq. Them Arabs just want to kill each uvver — innit guvnor? It's none of our business. Let em get on wiv it. Nuffink to do wiv us. Let em kill emselves, who cares, bloody Arabs, eh, guvnor?
11 October 2006
ON THE BALL
As usual, local and regional journalists hit the story before the nationals. What is the most important book de nos jours? Forget the Booker, it's mine, and thanks to Steve Russell of the East Anglian Daily Times and Bridget Galton of the Ham and High (can't find the piece on Google), the people of Ipswich and Hampstead know it already. Thank you and I owe you both a drink.
7 October 2006
5 October 2006
DRUNKEN LEFTIST EVENT IN FITZROVIA
Just back home from my Orwell in Tribune bash at the Wheatsheaf, which went really well apart from my pathetic attempt at a speech. It was great to see you all, I'm sorry I wasn't able to talk to anyone at length, and thanks everyone for coming. I've covered costs for beer and books and if the IOUs are honoured the Tribune Fighting Fund will be better off by a couple of hundred quid. Good night, and I love you all!
1 October 2006
BOOGALOO DUDES
Hak Mao has found some excellent You Tube of Mott the Hoople and Iggy. Busy sad old fart that I am, I've not yet worked out how to post video properly. But I did "I Wanna be Your Dog" more than once live many years ago. And "Search and Destroy", while we're at it. And "All the Way to Memphis" and ... oh, shut up!
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