Paul Anderson, Tribune column, January 23 2004
My thanks to Tribune reader John Morgan of Grantham, whose generous letter the week before last demanding that I be fired as a columnist in case I commit a thought crime reminded me that I need to get on with drawing up a list of constituencies in which Labour supporters should vote Liberal Democrat at the next general election.
I would have done it for this week’s column had I not been too busy to get up to speed on the implications of constituency boundary changes since the 2001 election. Rest assured that the definitive list of where Labourites should vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out will appear as soon as I’ve done the number-crunching — unless, of course, the editor takes Morgan’s advice and sacks me first. But you’re going have to wait.
For now, all I can do is restate the case for tactical voting — at least in first-past-the-post elections — to beat Conservative candidates. Morgan seems to think that this has lost much of its power since 2001: “Last time, there was an excuse. This time there will not be.” But I can’t work out what has changed.
Yes, the Tories have a marginally more competent leader than in 2001. Otherwise, they are pretty much what they were at the time of the last general election: a bunch of reactionary, authoritarian, xenophobic, anti-European zealots, out of touch with the modern world, committed to chipping away at the welfare state, hostile to public transport, eltist in eductaion — in other words, the main enemy. And because their leader is marginally more competent they pose a greater threat. Ergo, the case for doing what we can to minimise their parliamentary representation is greater than it was three years ago.
As for the Lib Dems, I’ll concede that they’ve shifted a little to the right since 2001 on taxation: they’ve abandoned their promise of a penny on the basic rate of income tax for education and no longer attack the government for failing to tax and spend enough. But they too are essentially what they were before: a pro-European, anti-Conservative party of the centre-left, with much more in common with Labour than diehards of either party think.
Where the Lib Dems differ with the government, their position is still either more explicitly egalitarian and redistributionist (top-up fees, council tax), more libertarian (asylum policy), more coherently democratic (electoral reform, the House of Lords, the European Union constitution) or more pacifist (the Iraq war). On the issues, Charles Kennedy is closer politically to Labour’s thinking soft left (Robin Cook, Clare Short, Chris Smith et al) than he is to Tony Blair, let alone to the Tories.
I don’t agree with the Lib Dems (or indeed Labour’s soft left) on quite a lot of this. On Iraq, I now think that the centre-left opponents of war (myself included) exaggerated the risks of military action to remove Saddam Hussein — and that the dubiety of the justification for war advanced by Blair and George Bush should not be allowed to cloud the fact that the regime change in Iraq has been a good thing. On top-up fees, the Lib Dems and the soft left are playing a self-indulgent game that endangers a large slice of money coming to the universities that they desperately need.
But that’s beside the point – as indeed is the Lib Dems’ opportunism, for example in earmarking the same tax rise to pay for several spending promises. Taking everything into account, it remains as sensible as in 2001 for Labour supporters to vote Lib Dem at the next general election wherever a Lib Dem is the sitting MP and wherever the Lib Dem came second to a Tory last time. It also makes sense for Lib Dem supporters to back Labour wherever the sitting MP is Labour and weherever Labour came second to a Tory.
* * *
On a different subject entirely, I’ve just received a circular letter from Jeremy Dear, fellow Tribune columnist and general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, imploring me to vote “yes” in a forthcoming ballot to set up an NUJ political fund.
I’m going to ignore his plea and vote “no”, simply because I can’t see why the NUJ needs a political fund. The way the law stands, the only circumstances in which a union must set up such a fund is to campaign at election time for or against a political party. Yet any attempt by the NUJ to back party-political campaigns at election time, even a negative “Don’t vote British National Party” one, would not only compromise the ability of union members to do their jobs as journalists but would also lead to a significant number of resignations (particularly among BBC hacks who are contractually obliged to remain politically neutral).
Dear and other supporters of a political fund insist that they don’t want to use it to back party-political campaigns. But if that’s the case, there’s no point in the fund: any extra campaigning they envisage could be paid for with an increase in ordinary subscriptions. Why don’t they just go for that?
18 January 2004
8 January 2004
SADDAM'S ADMIRERS ON THE BRITISH LEFT - 4
I missed this in the holiday hiatus: a letter from Charlie Pottins to the Weekly Worker website on the Workers' Revolutionary Party's relationship to Saddam Hussein (for full version click here and scroll down).
"When I joined News Line [the WRP daily] at its launch in 1976, it was no secret that our leader, Gerry Healy, was soliciting funds from the Middle East, but we didn’t realise how far this would go. Under the guise of supporting the Arab peoples against imperialism and Zionism, Healy insisted on slavishly following the line of Arab regimes and leaders - not always easy when they were competing with each other to betray their peoples and pretended cause!
"To my shame, I accepted a report that the Ba’athist regime was conceding autonomy to the Kurds, but I was shocked when Healy denied the Kurds were a nation entitled to rights . . . Then in November 1977 I made the mistake of ‘prematurely’ criticising the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, or suggesting the PLO had done so. I was removed from News Line’s foreign desk and sent to the Midlands to cover the firefighters’ strike. After the strike I was sacked.
"Hostilities between Iraqi intelligence services and the PLO put the News Line in a spot, as did the later outbreak of war between Iraq and Iran, but, when Saddam Hussein was attacking his own people, Healy had no problem deciding whom to support. This one-time ‘revolutionary’ had enjoyed VIP treatment and a motorcycle escort on his trip to Baghdad.
"The WRP came up with excuses for the execution of Iraqi Communist Party members, even calling a mass meeting to back the Iraqi regime. But that was not all. News Line photographers took pictures of a student demonstration outside the Iraqi embassy, probably assuming it was just a normal reporting task. But, when Healy asked them to make blow-ups to deliver to the embassy, one at least had the temerity to refuse, and she quit.
"In 1985 the WRP blew apart, and that’s when the truth about the leadership’s corruption came out. Unable to face the music, Healy and his loyal acolytes took off, with as many documents, etc as they could grab. One they forgot, left in Alex Mitchell’s desk, was a secret report on a visit to the Gulf states, during which Healy and Vanessa Redgrave had an audience with the Emir of Kuwait, but refused to meet Kuwaiti oppositionists, reporting their approach to the authorities instead.
"The ordinary members of the WRP had known none of this, and even the central committee had little idea what had been going on. But inexcusably, some of those who should have known refused to believe or admit anything when the truth began to come out. These are leading the present rump WRP and publishing News Line with money from I don’t know where. Sheila Torrance, until recently its general secretary, told people in 1985 that she could not see why they were making a fuss over 'a few Iraqi Stalinists' getting killed."
"When I joined News Line [the WRP daily] at its launch in 1976, it was no secret that our leader, Gerry Healy, was soliciting funds from the Middle East, but we didn’t realise how far this would go. Under the guise of supporting the Arab peoples against imperialism and Zionism, Healy insisted on slavishly following the line of Arab regimes and leaders - not always easy when they were competing with each other to betray their peoples and pretended cause!
"To my shame, I accepted a report that the Ba’athist regime was conceding autonomy to the Kurds, but I was shocked when Healy denied the Kurds were a nation entitled to rights . . . Then in November 1977 I made the mistake of ‘prematurely’ criticising the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, or suggesting the PLO had done so. I was removed from News Line’s foreign desk and sent to the Midlands to cover the firefighters’ strike. After the strike I was sacked.
"Hostilities between Iraqi intelligence services and the PLO put the News Line in a spot, as did the later outbreak of war between Iraq and Iran, but, when Saddam Hussein was attacking his own people, Healy had no problem deciding whom to support. This one-time ‘revolutionary’ had enjoyed VIP treatment and a motorcycle escort on his trip to Baghdad.
"The WRP came up with excuses for the execution of Iraqi Communist Party members, even calling a mass meeting to back the Iraqi regime. But that was not all. News Line photographers took pictures of a student demonstration outside the Iraqi embassy, probably assuming it was just a normal reporting task. But, when Healy asked them to make blow-ups to deliver to the embassy, one at least had the temerity to refuse, and she quit.
"In 1985 the WRP blew apart, and that’s when the truth about the leadership’s corruption came out. Unable to face the music, Healy and his loyal acolytes took off, with as many documents, etc as they could grab. One they forgot, left in Alex Mitchell’s desk, was a secret report on a visit to the Gulf states, during which Healy and Vanessa Redgrave had an audience with the Emir of Kuwait, but refused to meet Kuwaiti oppositionists, reporting their approach to the authorities instead.
"The ordinary members of the WRP had known none of this, and even the central committee had little idea what had been going on. But inexcusably, some of those who should have known refused to believe or admit anything when the truth began to come out. These are leading the present rump WRP and publishing News Line with money from I don’t know where. Sheila Torrance, until recently its general secretary, told people in 1985 that she could not see why they were making a fuss over 'a few Iraqi Stalinists' getting killed."
TROTS INTO CAPITALISTS - 3
I'm agnostic about genetic modification of crops myself, but the people at GM Watch have done an excellent job tracing the cadre of the Revolutionary Communist Party/Living Marxism/LM/Spiked!/Institute of Ideas gang. Click here and follow the links.
7 January 2004
EUROFIGHTER: WHAT A WASTE OF MONEY
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, January 9 2004
Journalists at the BBC are understandably nervous that their managers will react to expected criticism in the Hutton report by putting the dampers on critical and politically sensitive journalism. But they haven’t done so yet, as an excellent current affairs documentary on Radio Four, Eurofighter: The Plane Truth, presented by David Lomax, demonstrated this week (for audio click here).
The Eurofighter is one of the greatest unsung scandals of contemporary Britain — an aircraft designed to do something that is no longer necessary, which does not work properly and has cost billions of taxpayers’ money. Lomax’s documentary, made with only the most minimal co-operation from either BAe Systems, the main British Eurofighter contractor, or the Ministry of Defence, was a stunning expose of the whole farce.
Eurofighter made a certain amount of military sense when the plans that transmuted into the project were conceived in Britain in the late 1970s. The Cold War was at its height, and the Soviet Union had developed advanced fighters capable of outperforming anything the RAF possessed. A new fighter capable of matching these aircraft in high-altitude dog-fighting seemed a high priority. And, given the costs of developing advanced military aircraft and the perceived need not to rely wholly on the US for military procurement, it made economic and political sense to opt for a European collaborative effort to design and build it.
Even before the programme was actually started, however, the military rationale had all but disappeared. Dog-fighting fighters were effectively rendered obsolete by the development of smart air-to-air missiles in the early 1980s. But the then Conservative Government, under pressure from the RAF and, more importantly, from defence manufacturers desperate for big contracts, particularly British Aerospace, decided to go ahead; and, with Michael Heseltine as Secretary of State for Defence, the project soon evolved into a flagship for West European military-industrial co-operation between Britain and Germany, with Italy and Spain as junior partners. (France had initially been Britain’s major partner but withdrew at an early stage and built its own fighter, the Dassault Rafaele.)
Since then, as Lomax made clear, the story of the Eurofighter has been one of technical hitches, international squabbles, delays and ever-spiralling costs. The original plan was for it to enter service in 1992, but it is only now that the first few aircraft have been delivered (and they can hardly be described as operational because of technical problems). The estimated likely cost of the programme to the British taxpayer, £6 billion in the late 1980s, has risen to £20 billion.
And all this money has been spent on a piece of equipment that is of extremely limited military use. It became clear early on in the project’s life that the highly manoeuvrable dog-fighting aircraft originally envisaged was not what was required, and the plane was rejigged (at great expense) as an air-to-air missile platform. But this role itself became effectively obsolete as soon as the Cold War came to an end. Suddenly, there was no potential enemy against whom an advanced air-to-air combat aircraft might be useful.
This was an obvious point to cancel the whole project. Instead, although the Germans came close to pulling the plug, Eurofighter was rejigged again as a ground-attack aircraft — a role for which it is not really suited, which is reflected in the amazing fact that the ground-attack version might not be ready for squadron service for more than another decade.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole story — though this was barely touched upon by Lomax — is the cross-party support that this white elephant has enjoyed since the late 1980s. Labour originally opposed the project, but this stance, like nuclear disarmament, was one of the casualties of Neil Kinnock’s policy review, and by the mid-1990s Labour was an out-and-out enthusiast. David Clark, then the party’s defence spokesman, kept a model Eurofighter on his desk, and Tony Blair enthisastically endorsed the plane as “the cornerstone of the RAF’s capability as we enter the next century”.
Of course, Labour didn’t want to look soft on defence — and of course there are quite a few British jobs in the Eurofighter (its supporters claim 14,000), many of them in marginal Labour constituencies in the north-west of England.
But £20 billion, the bill for the Eurofighter, would generate substantial employment however it were spent — and there’s absolutely no reason it couldn’t have been put towards something useful: railway infrastructure, hospitals, schools, military helicopters or whatever. As it is, it’s difficult to disagree with the verdict of John Nott, the Tories’ Secretary of State for Defence in the early 1980s, who gave the scheme the initial go-ahead. “It was my biggest mistake,” he told Lomax, “a complete waste of money.”
Journalists at the BBC are understandably nervous that their managers will react to expected criticism in the Hutton report by putting the dampers on critical and politically sensitive journalism. But they haven’t done so yet, as an excellent current affairs documentary on Radio Four, Eurofighter: The Plane Truth, presented by David Lomax, demonstrated this week (for audio click here).
The Eurofighter is one of the greatest unsung scandals of contemporary Britain — an aircraft designed to do something that is no longer necessary, which does not work properly and has cost billions of taxpayers’ money. Lomax’s documentary, made with only the most minimal co-operation from either BAe Systems, the main British Eurofighter contractor, or the Ministry of Defence, was a stunning expose of the whole farce.
Eurofighter made a certain amount of military sense when the plans that transmuted into the project were conceived in Britain in the late 1970s. The Cold War was at its height, and the Soviet Union had developed advanced fighters capable of outperforming anything the RAF possessed. A new fighter capable of matching these aircraft in high-altitude dog-fighting seemed a high priority. And, given the costs of developing advanced military aircraft and the perceived need not to rely wholly on the US for military procurement, it made economic and political sense to opt for a European collaborative effort to design and build it.
Even before the programme was actually started, however, the military rationale had all but disappeared. Dog-fighting fighters were effectively rendered obsolete by the development of smart air-to-air missiles in the early 1980s. But the then Conservative Government, under pressure from the RAF and, more importantly, from defence manufacturers desperate for big contracts, particularly British Aerospace, decided to go ahead; and, with Michael Heseltine as Secretary of State for Defence, the project soon evolved into a flagship for West European military-industrial co-operation between Britain and Germany, with Italy and Spain as junior partners. (France had initially been Britain’s major partner but withdrew at an early stage and built its own fighter, the Dassault Rafaele.)
Since then, as Lomax made clear, the story of the Eurofighter has been one of technical hitches, international squabbles, delays and ever-spiralling costs. The original plan was for it to enter service in 1992, but it is only now that the first few aircraft have been delivered (and they can hardly be described as operational because of technical problems). The estimated likely cost of the programme to the British taxpayer, £6 billion in the late 1980s, has risen to £20 billion.
And all this money has been spent on a piece of equipment that is of extremely limited military use. It became clear early on in the project’s life that the highly manoeuvrable dog-fighting aircraft originally envisaged was not what was required, and the plane was rejigged (at great expense) as an air-to-air missile platform. But this role itself became effectively obsolete as soon as the Cold War came to an end. Suddenly, there was no potential enemy against whom an advanced air-to-air combat aircraft might be useful.
This was an obvious point to cancel the whole project. Instead, although the Germans came close to pulling the plug, Eurofighter was rejigged again as a ground-attack aircraft — a role for which it is not really suited, which is reflected in the amazing fact that the ground-attack version might not be ready for squadron service for more than another decade.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole story — though this was barely touched upon by Lomax — is the cross-party support that this white elephant has enjoyed since the late 1980s. Labour originally opposed the project, but this stance, like nuclear disarmament, was one of the casualties of Neil Kinnock’s policy review, and by the mid-1990s Labour was an out-and-out enthusiast. David Clark, then the party’s defence spokesman, kept a model Eurofighter on his desk, and Tony Blair enthisastically endorsed the plane as “the cornerstone of the RAF’s capability as we enter the next century”.
Of course, Labour didn’t want to look soft on defence — and of course there are quite a few British jobs in the Eurofighter (its supporters claim 14,000), many of them in marginal Labour constituencies in the north-west of England.
But £20 billion, the bill for the Eurofighter, would generate substantial employment however it were spent — and there’s absolutely no reason it couldn’t have been put towards something useful: railway infrastructure, hospitals, schools, military helicopters or whatever. As it is, it’s difficult to disagree with the verdict of John Nott, the Tories’ Secretary of State for Defence in the early 1980s, who gave the scheme the initial go-ahead. “It was my biggest mistake,” he told Lomax, “a complete waste of money.”
28 December 2003
BOSNIA AND THE LEFT - 2
I've been meaning to link to Attila Hoare on the British far left and Bosnia for ages, but haven't. But here it is in all its brilliance.
TROTS INTO CAPITALISTS - 2
A University of Kent alumnus from the 1980s writes:
The activities of the Revolutinary Communist Tendency were one of the weirdest aspects of student politics at Kent.
Anti-nuclear meetings were routinely packed with RCT members who would denounce CND and call for the invention and immediate use of what was referred to as "the worker's bomb" which would wipe out in one stroke the entire world's bourgeoisie.
The group had all the hallmarks of a cult. The RCT had a particularly strange attitude towards sexual relations among its members. Sex between members was regulated by the group's central committee. Recruitment to the group was undertaken by means of what is known among religious cult watchers as "flirty fishing".
The RCT appeared to follow the line of Bolshevik commissar of social welfare Alexandra Kollontai who peddled a materialist view of sex as a physical impulse: "You make love just as you drink a glass of water."
Though this is ancient history it is possible to trace the present day concerns of the Insitute of Ideas crowd, Furedi et al, especially as regarding childhood, the family, abortion, cloning, genetic experiments with their previous crude materalism and anti-humanism.
The activities of the Revolutinary Communist Tendency were one of the weirdest aspects of student politics at Kent.
Anti-nuclear meetings were routinely packed with RCT members who would denounce CND and call for the invention and immediate use of what was referred to as "the worker's bomb" which would wipe out in one stroke the entire world's bourgeoisie.
The group had all the hallmarks of a cult. The RCT had a particularly strange attitude towards sexual relations among its members. Sex between members was regulated by the group's central committee. Recruitment to the group was undertaken by means of what is known among religious cult watchers as "flirty fishing".
The RCT appeared to follow the line of Bolshevik commissar of social welfare Alexandra Kollontai who peddled a materialist view of sex as a physical impulse: "You make love just as you drink a glass of water."
Though this is ancient history it is possible to trace the present day concerns of the Insitute of Ideas crowd, Furedi et al, especially as regarding childhood, the family, abortion, cloning, genetic experiments with their previous crude materalism and anti-humanism.
OBITUARY: WALTER KENDALL
I hear via the grapevine that the historian Walter Kendall has died. As reviews editor of Tribune in the 1980s and early 1990s I commissioned him to write whenever he could because I was in awe of his history of the left in the early years of the last century, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21: The Origins of British Communism, published in 1969. It still stands as the most comprehensive and politically nuanced account of the debilitating effect of the Bolshevik revolution on the British left, and I'm still in awe. RIP.
17 December 2003
TROTS INTO CAPITALISTS - 1
I’m late on this one, but what the hell. George Monbiot had an almost-fascinating column in the Guardian last week (for which click here) on the strange phenomenon formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist Party, which transmuted into Living Marxism magazine (later plain LM), which in turn spawned (inter alia) the Spiked! website (click here) and the Institute of Ideas think-tank (click here).
There are several very weird things about the former-RCP. The most obvious is its ideological trajectory. The RCP had its origins in an ultra-orthodox-Leninist faction inside the International Socialists, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party, in the early 1970s, which became the Revolutionary Communist Group. To cut a long story short, the RCG expelled a group that became the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, later the Revolutionary Communist Party, which established itself by the early 1980s as an independent Leninist revolutionary sect. It was a lot more cerebral and fashion-conscious than the SWP – for its internal culture click here and here -- but otherwise unremarkable, though in a moment of lucidity it did call for a ballot during the 1984-85 miners' strike. The RCT/RCP had a well-produced agitational paper, the next step. Otherwise, it was notable mainly for its quixotic front organisations, in particular East London Workers Against Racism (ELWAR), a squaddist fight-the-fash outfit, and, notoriously, the Red Front, a disastrously ineffective general election intervention in 1987.
But in 1988, the RCP turned the next step into a monthly magazine, Living Marxism. And in the next few years, its leading lights – particularly Frank Furedi (party name Frank Richards), the chief ideologist of the sect, and Mick Hume, the editor of the next step and subsequently Living Marxism – started to delight in taking political positions at odds with leftist orthodoxy. The RCP was formally dissolved in 1996, Living Marxism became LM, and it ruffled feathers by coming out against censorship of pornography, against moral panics on child sexual abuse, against environmentalist doom-mongering and so on.
Controversialism can make for zippy journalism, and some of this was a welcome (though hardly original) assault on a lot of leftist cant of the day. But some was taking unpopular positions for the sake of it, and some was vile nonsense – most notoriously the “stand” taken by LM (as Living Marxism had become) against reports of Serb atrocities in Bosnia, the result of which was a (wholly justified) libel action by journalists it had traduced that resulted in its closure in 2000 and the creation of Spiked! (on this, click here)
Whatever, by the time Spiked took over from LM, the former-RCP had apparently ditched just about all the leftist baggage it once carried. The output of Spiked and the Institute of Ideas has been superficially indistinguishable from the free-market libertarian right in the political positions it has taken up – and as Monbiot shows, the former-RCP has not been averse to getting into bed with people that no self-respecting RCPer in the 1980s would have touched with a barge-pole.
But the ideological journey is not the whole story. One thing that makes it particularly remarkable is that the core of the group has remained together throughout – and that its members have been almost incredibly successful in terms both of their own careers and in establishing credibility for their front organisations: they’re in there with most broadsheet newspapers, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Royal Society and all the rest.
How have they done it? Well, money has had a lot to do with it. The RCP in the 1980s was never very large, but it was big enough to produce the next step by exacting a tithe on its members, the standard Leninist practice. With Living Marxism /LM, however, the show went up a notch just at the time that the RCP became invisible on the activist left: colour printing, WH Smith distribution et cetera. Rumours started doing the rounds about mysterious funders – and given Living Marxism /LM’s editorial line, pro-Serb and anti-environmentalist, quite a lot of the rumours were about dodgy cash from Slobodan Milosevic, corporations desperate to buy some left credibility or even the spooks. Monbiot’s piece in the Guardian is just the latest to insinuate that the former-RCP is in receipt of money from the forces of darkness.
My intelligence suggests a different explanation of the group’s affluence: the success of some of its key members as entrepreneurs, in particular one Keith Teare (party name Keith Tompson, website here), onetime sociologist at the University of Kent with Frank Furedi, founder of Easynet and the Cyberia internet café chain and now a Silicon Valley guru, who has made a multi-million-dollar packet in the past 10 years. Even now, Cyberia’s CEO is Phil Mullan, former RCP, Living Marxism and LM stalwart . . . Well, it beats running a general print shop as every other leftist outfit does.
There are several very weird things about the former-RCP. The most obvious is its ideological trajectory. The RCP had its origins in an ultra-orthodox-Leninist faction inside the International Socialists, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party, in the early 1970s, which became the Revolutionary Communist Group. To cut a long story short, the RCG expelled a group that became the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, later the Revolutionary Communist Party, which established itself by the early 1980s as an independent Leninist revolutionary sect. It was a lot more cerebral and fashion-conscious than the SWP – for its internal culture click here and here -- but otherwise unremarkable, though in a moment of lucidity it did call for a ballot during the 1984-85 miners' strike. The RCT/RCP had a well-produced agitational paper, the next step. Otherwise, it was notable mainly for its quixotic front organisations, in particular East London Workers Against Racism (ELWAR), a squaddist fight-the-fash outfit, and, notoriously, the Red Front, a disastrously ineffective general election intervention in 1987.
But in 1988, the RCP turned the next step into a monthly magazine, Living Marxism. And in the next few years, its leading lights – particularly Frank Furedi (party name Frank Richards), the chief ideologist of the sect, and Mick Hume, the editor of the next step and subsequently Living Marxism – started to delight in taking political positions at odds with leftist orthodoxy. The RCP was formally dissolved in 1996, Living Marxism became LM, and it ruffled feathers by coming out against censorship of pornography, against moral panics on child sexual abuse, against environmentalist doom-mongering and so on.
Controversialism can make for zippy journalism, and some of this was a welcome (though hardly original) assault on a lot of leftist cant of the day. But some was taking unpopular positions for the sake of it, and some was vile nonsense – most notoriously the “stand” taken by LM (as Living Marxism had become) against reports of Serb atrocities in Bosnia, the result of which was a (wholly justified) libel action by journalists it had traduced that resulted in its closure in 2000 and the creation of Spiked! (on this, click here)
Whatever, by the time Spiked took over from LM, the former-RCP had apparently ditched just about all the leftist baggage it once carried. The output of Spiked and the Institute of Ideas has been superficially indistinguishable from the free-market libertarian right in the political positions it has taken up – and as Monbiot shows, the former-RCP has not been averse to getting into bed with people that no self-respecting RCPer in the 1980s would have touched with a barge-pole.
But the ideological journey is not the whole story. One thing that makes it particularly remarkable is that the core of the group has remained together throughout – and that its members have been almost incredibly successful in terms both of their own careers and in establishing credibility for their front organisations: they’re in there with most broadsheet newspapers, the Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Royal Society and all the rest.
How have they done it? Well, money has had a lot to do with it. The RCP in the 1980s was never very large, but it was big enough to produce the next step by exacting a tithe on its members, the standard Leninist practice. With Living Marxism /LM, however, the show went up a notch just at the time that the RCP became invisible on the activist left: colour printing, WH Smith distribution et cetera. Rumours started doing the rounds about mysterious funders – and given Living Marxism /LM’s editorial line, pro-Serb and anti-environmentalist, quite a lot of the rumours were about dodgy cash from Slobodan Milosevic, corporations desperate to buy some left credibility or even the spooks. Monbiot’s piece in the Guardian is just the latest to insinuate that the former-RCP is in receipt of money from the forces of darkness.
My intelligence suggests a different explanation of the group’s affluence: the success of some of its key members as entrepreneurs, in particular one Keith Teare (party name Keith Tompson, website here), onetime sociologist at the University of Kent with Frank Furedi, founder of Easynet and the Cyberia internet café chain and now a Silicon Valley guru, who has made a multi-million-dollar packet in the past 10 years. Even now, Cyberia’s CEO is Phil Mullan, former RCP, Living Marxism and LM stalwart . . . Well, it beats running a general print shop as every other leftist outfit does.
TOP-UP FEES ARE NOT SUCH A BAD IDEA
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, December 12 2003
I'm not sure whether, in the current climate, this will get me fired as a Tribune columnist — but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been coming round to the idea that top-up fees are not such a bad thing.
My main job, these days, is as a lecturer in City University’s journalism department, and I know from personal experience that higher education needs more money and needs it at once.
My department deservedly has a very good reputation. Most of its graduates get decent jobs when they qualify, and the majority go on to pursue successful careers in journalism — a tribute both to the quality of our students and to the expertise, commitment and hard work of my colleagues.
But, despite its success and reputation, journalism at City is seriously short of cash. The space we occupy is cramped, overcrowded and decrepit; we don’t have enough computers and other equipment; and the salaries of lecturers have been falling behind those of journalists on newspapers and magazines and in the broadcasting media (from among whom we necessarily recruit our teaching staff) for years.
I’m sure the department can survive for some time yet making up for lack of resources with enthusiasm and hard work. But eventually it will reach breaking point — most likely, I reckon, when it becomes impossible to recruit lecturers to replace those that leave or retire or impossible to afford industry-standard technology.
The picture in other university departments is much, much bleaker. After more than a decade of relentless expansion of student numbers with little or no increase in funding, they are at breaking point already. Unless they get an influx of cash, and quick, they will not be able to continue to function.
So what should be done to relieve the university funding crisis? The Tories reckon that the answer is not to find any more money but to slash the number of students in higher education — a position echoed in last week’s Tribune by Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham who is a prominent top-up fees rebel, with his contention that on current trends, “a serious over-supply of graduates ... will be competing for a limited supply of graduate jobs”.
I’m sceptical about this line of argument for two reasons. First, I hold the old-fashioned socialist view that a university education is a good thing in itself, and that a civilised society should aspire to make one available to everyone capable of benefiting from one — which in my opinion means at very least the 50 per cent of 18- to 30-year-olds the government wants in higher education. And second, it’s plain nonsense to think that we are anwhere near the limit of the economy’s ability to provide employment for graduates. There will always, of course, be a demand for plumbers and brickies and cleaners and so forth — but Britain’s only hope for prosperity in the globalised economy is an increasingly educated and skilled workforce.
So the universities need more cash. Where should it come from? General taxation is an option, and the Liberal Democrats have a coherent plan for bailing out higher education with a new top rate of income tax. One problem here, of course, is that overtly raising general taxation is anathema to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown: it just won’t happen. Another is that a simple increase in general taxation would not guarantee a continuing income stream to the universities: it would have to be hypothecated to prevent the Treasury diverting it elsewhere at some point in the future when university funding is not the flavour of the month.
A graduate tax (which would also have to be hypothecated) would be less of a problem politically. But it wouldn’t raise any money for years unless it were imposed on everyone who has ever taken a degree — a great idea in principle, though it immediately runs into the insurmountableproblem that the Inland Revenue has no way of identifying which taxpayers are graduates and which are not.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve been driven reluctantly to the conclusion that top-up fees have three serious advantages over the other options that have been floated. First, they are politically feasible: they do not offend against New Labour’s antipathy to overt increases in taxation, and there is no obvious practical obstacle to their implementation. Second, they deliver money at onceto the universities. And third, they will continue to deliver money to the universities regardless of future Treasury whims.
This is not to say that top-up fees are perfect. The government’s current plans might evolve towards allowing universities to charge what they like, which would genuinely create a two-tier higher education system in which elite institutions effectively exclude debt-averse working-class students. As the scheme now stands, however, the debts involved will be small, interest-free and repayable only when graduates are reasonably well-off. I’m sorry, but as a way of getting money into the universities, it’s rather neat.
I'm not sure whether, in the current climate, this will get me fired as a Tribune columnist — but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been coming round to the idea that top-up fees are not such a bad thing.
My main job, these days, is as a lecturer in City University’s journalism department, and I know from personal experience that higher education needs more money and needs it at once.
My department deservedly has a very good reputation. Most of its graduates get decent jobs when they qualify, and the majority go on to pursue successful careers in journalism — a tribute both to the quality of our students and to the expertise, commitment and hard work of my colleagues.
But, despite its success and reputation, journalism at City is seriously short of cash. The space we occupy is cramped, overcrowded and decrepit; we don’t have enough computers and other equipment; and the salaries of lecturers have been falling behind those of journalists on newspapers and magazines and in the broadcasting media (from among whom we necessarily recruit our teaching staff) for years.
I’m sure the department can survive for some time yet making up for lack of resources with enthusiasm and hard work. But eventually it will reach breaking point — most likely, I reckon, when it becomes impossible to recruit lecturers to replace those that leave or retire or impossible to afford industry-standard technology.
The picture in other university departments is much, much bleaker. After more than a decade of relentless expansion of student numbers with little or no increase in funding, they are at breaking point already. Unless they get an influx of cash, and quick, they will not be able to continue to function.
So what should be done to relieve the university funding crisis? The Tories reckon that the answer is not to find any more money but to slash the number of students in higher education — a position echoed in last week’s Tribune by Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham who is a prominent top-up fees rebel, with his contention that on current trends, “a serious over-supply of graduates ... will be competing for a limited supply of graduate jobs”.
I’m sceptical about this line of argument for two reasons. First, I hold the old-fashioned socialist view that a university education is a good thing in itself, and that a civilised society should aspire to make one available to everyone capable of benefiting from one — which in my opinion means at very least the 50 per cent of 18- to 30-year-olds the government wants in higher education. And second, it’s plain nonsense to think that we are anwhere near the limit of the economy’s ability to provide employment for graduates. There will always, of course, be a demand for plumbers and brickies and cleaners and so forth — but Britain’s only hope for prosperity in the globalised economy is an increasingly educated and skilled workforce.
So the universities need more cash. Where should it come from? General taxation is an option, and the Liberal Democrats have a coherent plan for bailing out higher education with a new top rate of income tax. One problem here, of course, is that overtly raising general taxation is anathema to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown: it just won’t happen. Another is that a simple increase in general taxation would not guarantee a continuing income stream to the universities: it would have to be hypothecated to prevent the Treasury diverting it elsewhere at some point in the future when university funding is not the flavour of the month.
A graduate tax (which would also have to be hypothecated) would be less of a problem politically. But it wouldn’t raise any money for years unless it were imposed on everyone who has ever taken a degree — a great idea in principle, though it immediately runs into the insurmountableproblem that the Inland Revenue has no way of identifying which taxpayers are graduates and which are not.
The upshot of all this is that I’ve been driven reluctantly to the conclusion that top-up fees have three serious advantages over the other options that have been floated. First, they are politically feasible: they do not offend against New Labour’s antipathy to overt increases in taxation, and there is no obvious practical obstacle to their implementation. Second, they deliver money at onceto the universities. And third, they will continue to deliver money to the universities regardless of future Treasury whims.
This is not to say that top-up fees are perfect. The government’s current plans might evolve towards allowing universities to charge what they like, which would genuinely create a two-tier higher education system in which elite institutions effectively exclude debt-averse working-class students. As the scheme now stands, however, the debts involved will be small, interest-free and repayable only when graduates are reasonably well-off. I’m sorry, but as a way of getting money into the universities, it’s rather neat.
4 December 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE – 18
LOOK ELSEWHERE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT ON IRAQ
Stephen Marks, review of Regime Change by Christopher Hitchens (Penguin, £5.99) and Bush in Babylon: the recolonisation of Iraq by Tariq Ali (Verso, £13), Tribune, January 2 2004
These two appalling books have more in common than I expected. Their two authors, former comrades in arms, are now on opposite sides of the Iraq war barricades. Each has employed his own richly distinctive polemical style. Each starts from an initial one-sided but sound premise, and proceeds from there on automatic pilot, with little reference to the complex reallity of Iraq.
Hitchens’s starting point is the undeniable fact that Saddam’s tyranny was one of the most odious on the face of the earth whose disappearance must be reckoned a blessing. From this it is clear - to him at least - that the US and its ally are the “good guys” fighting for democracy against “Islamo-fascism” (the link with al Qaida being assumed as axiomatic) and that “the government and people of these United States are now at war with the forces of reaction”. Those who dissent from this Manichaean view are to be treated with the contempt appropriate for appeasers, fellow-travellers with tyranny, and apologists for fascism.
That there are a few considerations to be put in the other pan of the scale is either ignored or ridiculed away with arguments that would discredit a school debating society on a bad day. In particular, the idea that America’s determination ot go to war, UN or no UN, might fatally subvert any notion of a structure of international legality, is neatly sidestepped by debunking the notion of international legality itself with a brutal cynicism which even some hardened neo-con ideologues would hesitate to engage in unless pre-fortified with a few stiff drinks.
Eroding the key distinction between pre-emptive and preventive wars? Well, aren’t all wars preventive? Wouldn’t the world be a safer place for more preventive wars? As for the crummy old “just war” criteria - why, “one wonders how the theory of just war...ever managed to endorse the use of force”. So much, evidently, for a thousand years of western culture’s attempt to come to terms with the ethical bounds of warfare.
As for the effect of the war on Muslim and Arab opinion, and thus on the possibility of winning support for the real “war on terrorism” - why, the brave Hitch refuses to “meekly avoid the further disapproval of those who hate me enough already”.
There can be few things more irresponsible than Hitchens’s philistine dismissal of the key distinction between the terrorists themselves and the wider layers without whose passive acquiescence the terrorists could not operate. That a naked and cynical display of American power, on a patently confected excuse, might enrage a sufficient proportion of Arab and Muslim opinion actually to enlarge the layer of potential sympathisers appears either not to have occurred to him, or to have been ignored for the easier consolations of a quick debating point.
Almost all the dictatorships to have fallen since 1945 have done so without external military intervention. The alternative - which was never tried, and was actively opposed by Bush’s father in 1991 - was to help the Iraqis themselves to overthrow Saddam, or at least not to prevent them from doing so by crippling civil sanctions.
In the absence of an Iraqi civil society forged through that struggle, the occupation forces have no way of dealing with the Saddamite and fundamentalist resistance than by scorched-earth trigger-happy tactics which enrage the public and strengthen the insurgents - or by co-opting and strengthening reactionary tribal and sectarian leaders.
Of course it can be argued that Saddam’s regime was so uniquely oppressive that no internal overthrow was possible - but not by Hitchens, who believes that the regime was “on the verge of implosion” and that intervention was needed to rescue Iraq from “mere anarchy and revenge”.
At least Tariq Ali’s offering has the merit of reminding us of Iraq’s combative and militant history of resistance to foreign domination dressed up as “liberation” and to “preparation for self-government” (in the guise of the mandate system) as cover for the installation of a client regime by the superpower of the day.
He also supplies an entertaining postscript in the form of a collection of Hitchens 1991 polemics against the first Gulf war.
But that’s about it. For the rest, he cannot get beyond his initial insight that US motives were imperialist, and that Iraq is now an occupied country. From this, it appears to him to follow that all those collaborating with the occupation authority or participating in the governing council are “jackals” and “Vichyites” against whom we should support the distasteful crew of Saddamites and fundamentalists who appear to make up the “resistance”.
Since the collapse of Saddam a multitude of political parties, trade unions and workers organisations, independent newspapers and religious groups have sprung up. The great majority appear to combine relief at the fall of Saddam with intense suspicion of the occupiers. What is their view - or range of views - on the way forward? We are not told.
Most Iraqi parties - including the Communist Party and the more radical Worker Communist Party - demanded a provisional government drawn from an assembly convened by the UN, not the US. When this did not materialise, the US was compelled to concede a governing council which, though not sovereign, had more powers than the US had intended. The CP agreed to participate in it, the WCP opposed it, but both oppose the armed resistance groups, whose actions seem aimed at preventing the resumption of any sort of normal life, and therefore of any independent civil society.
Again, Ali gives us no information on any of this, no analysis or description of any of the diverse political forces inside or outside the governing council, or any idea of the range of political debate which must be raging in Iraq. Mind you, there is some glimmering of an awareness that the majority of Iraqis may not support the “resistance”: “This is not to imply that the whole country is desperate for a protracted war. If anything the opposite is the case. If the occupation succeeds in stabilising the country and if basic amenities are restored together with some semblance of normality then a Vichy-style operation staffed by local jackals could succeed, if only for a limited period...Were the Iraqi Communist Party, a section of the Kurdish organisations and the Shia to take such a plunge [ie to back armed resistance] it would become virtually impossible for the US to hold onto Iraq indefinitely.”
In other words - most Iraqis currently do not support the “resistance”, and political parties with mass support believe in working within the governing council, and are carrying their base with them in varying degrees... though why their influence should be so crucial in denying support to the “resistance” if they amount to no more than “jackals”, we are not told.
It is bizarre and not a little sad to see how some on the Left see the need to fit post-war Iraq into a mechanical "one size fits all" anti-imperialist framework and to treat all responses as equally and self-evidently collaborationist apart from armed resistance (and who has the guns from the old regime)? Imagine drafting the leaflets asking former political prisoners and trade unionists to stand arm in arm with their gaolers in support of Ali's analysis.
While Ali’s book will tell you a lot about obscure factional manoeuverings among Communist and Ba’athist party leaders 40 years ago, there is literally no more than the above about the attitudes of the Iraqi people today. Those interested in helping the Iraqi people build an alternative to American imperialism, Ba’athist totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism will have to look elsewhere.
Stephen Marks, review of Regime Change by Christopher Hitchens (Penguin, £5.99) and Bush in Babylon: the recolonisation of Iraq by Tariq Ali (Verso, £13), Tribune, January 2 2004
These two appalling books have more in common than I expected. Their two authors, former comrades in arms, are now on opposite sides of the Iraq war barricades. Each has employed his own richly distinctive polemical style. Each starts from an initial one-sided but sound premise, and proceeds from there on automatic pilot, with little reference to the complex reallity of Iraq.
Hitchens’s starting point is the undeniable fact that Saddam’s tyranny was one of the most odious on the face of the earth whose disappearance must be reckoned a blessing. From this it is clear - to him at least - that the US and its ally are the “good guys” fighting for democracy against “Islamo-fascism” (the link with al Qaida being assumed as axiomatic) and that “the government and people of these United States are now at war with the forces of reaction”. Those who dissent from this Manichaean view are to be treated with the contempt appropriate for appeasers, fellow-travellers with tyranny, and apologists for fascism.
That there are a few considerations to be put in the other pan of the scale is either ignored or ridiculed away with arguments that would discredit a school debating society on a bad day. In particular, the idea that America’s determination ot go to war, UN or no UN, might fatally subvert any notion of a structure of international legality, is neatly sidestepped by debunking the notion of international legality itself with a brutal cynicism which even some hardened neo-con ideologues would hesitate to engage in unless pre-fortified with a few stiff drinks.
Eroding the key distinction between pre-emptive and preventive wars? Well, aren’t all wars preventive? Wouldn’t the world be a safer place for more preventive wars? As for the crummy old “just war” criteria - why, “one wonders how the theory of just war...ever managed to endorse the use of force”. So much, evidently, for a thousand years of western culture’s attempt to come to terms with the ethical bounds of warfare.
As for the effect of the war on Muslim and Arab opinion, and thus on the possibility of winning support for the real “war on terrorism” - why, the brave Hitch refuses to “meekly avoid the further disapproval of those who hate me enough already”.
There can be few things more irresponsible than Hitchens’s philistine dismissal of the key distinction between the terrorists themselves and the wider layers without whose passive acquiescence the terrorists could not operate. That a naked and cynical display of American power, on a patently confected excuse, might enrage a sufficient proportion of Arab and Muslim opinion actually to enlarge the layer of potential sympathisers appears either not to have occurred to him, or to have been ignored for the easier consolations of a quick debating point.
Almost all the dictatorships to have fallen since 1945 have done so without external military intervention. The alternative - which was never tried, and was actively opposed by Bush’s father in 1991 - was to help the Iraqis themselves to overthrow Saddam, or at least not to prevent them from doing so by crippling civil sanctions.
In the absence of an Iraqi civil society forged through that struggle, the occupation forces have no way of dealing with the Saddamite and fundamentalist resistance than by scorched-earth trigger-happy tactics which enrage the public and strengthen the insurgents - or by co-opting and strengthening reactionary tribal and sectarian leaders.
Of course it can be argued that Saddam’s regime was so uniquely oppressive that no internal overthrow was possible - but not by Hitchens, who believes that the regime was “on the verge of implosion” and that intervention was needed to rescue Iraq from “mere anarchy and revenge”.
At least Tariq Ali’s offering has the merit of reminding us of Iraq’s combative and militant history of resistance to foreign domination dressed up as “liberation” and to “preparation for self-government” (in the guise of the mandate system) as cover for the installation of a client regime by the superpower of the day.
He also supplies an entertaining postscript in the form of a collection of Hitchens 1991 polemics against the first Gulf war.
But that’s about it. For the rest, he cannot get beyond his initial insight that US motives were imperialist, and that Iraq is now an occupied country. From this, it appears to him to follow that all those collaborating with the occupation authority or participating in the governing council are “jackals” and “Vichyites” against whom we should support the distasteful crew of Saddamites and fundamentalists who appear to make up the “resistance”.
Since the collapse of Saddam a multitude of political parties, trade unions and workers organisations, independent newspapers and religious groups have sprung up. The great majority appear to combine relief at the fall of Saddam with intense suspicion of the occupiers. What is their view - or range of views - on the way forward? We are not told.
Most Iraqi parties - including the Communist Party and the more radical Worker Communist Party - demanded a provisional government drawn from an assembly convened by the UN, not the US. When this did not materialise, the US was compelled to concede a governing council which, though not sovereign, had more powers than the US had intended. The CP agreed to participate in it, the WCP opposed it, but both oppose the armed resistance groups, whose actions seem aimed at preventing the resumption of any sort of normal life, and therefore of any independent civil society.
Again, Ali gives us no information on any of this, no analysis or description of any of the diverse political forces inside or outside the governing council, or any idea of the range of political debate which must be raging in Iraq. Mind you, there is some glimmering of an awareness that the majority of Iraqis may not support the “resistance”: “This is not to imply that the whole country is desperate for a protracted war. If anything the opposite is the case. If the occupation succeeds in stabilising the country and if basic amenities are restored together with some semblance of normality then a Vichy-style operation staffed by local jackals could succeed, if only for a limited period...Were the Iraqi Communist Party, a section of the Kurdish organisations and the Shia to take such a plunge [ie to back armed resistance] it would become virtually impossible for the US to hold onto Iraq indefinitely.”
In other words - most Iraqis currently do not support the “resistance”, and political parties with mass support believe in working within the governing council, and are carrying their base with them in varying degrees... though why their influence should be so crucial in denying support to the “resistance” if they amount to no more than “jackals”, we are not told.
It is bizarre and not a little sad to see how some on the Left see the need to fit post-war Iraq into a mechanical "one size fits all" anti-imperialist framework and to treat all responses as equally and self-evidently collaborationist apart from armed resistance (and who has the guns from the old regime)? Imagine drafting the leaflets asking former political prisoners and trade unionists to stand arm in arm with their gaolers in support of Ali's analysis.
While Ali’s book will tell you a lot about obscure factional manoeuverings among Communist and Ba’athist party leaders 40 years ago, there is literally no more than the above about the attitudes of the Iraqi people today. Those interested in helping the Iraqi people build an alternative to American imperialism, Ba’athist totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism will have to look elsewhere.
1 December 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 17
The Guardian carries a story today on the takeover of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament by a coalition of Trotskyists (Socialist Action) and Stalinists (Communist Party of Britain), for which click here. Its sole source is a document written by Jimmy Barnes, who has been the organiser of Trade Union CND since some time in the 1980s, when as I remember he was a stalwart of the Communist Party of Great Britain (not the same thing as the CPB) -- but the story is largely accurate, if a bit long in the tooth. Socialist Action (click here for a libertarian socialist take and here for a dissident Trotskyist perspective) and the CPB were pretty much the only organised political groups to take any notice of CND after it imploded as a mass organisation in the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf war, and their influence inside CND had been growing for some time before their candidates won an effective majority on CND's ruling bodies at the campaign's annual conference in September. Still, better late than never . . .
16 November 2003
CUBA SOLIDARITY - 4
SHOOTING PEOPLE IS NOT SOCIALISM
Ian Williams, Tribune column, October 31 2003
In the bad old days of Stalin, lots of starry-eyed leftists went to Moscow and came away profoundly impressed – enough to overlook the gulags, the executions, the purges, and indeed the low living standards of most workers there.
Tribune at the time usually managed to avoid such intoxication with totalitarianism, and still does, which makes Steve Wilkinson’s shameless apology for dictatorship in Cuba (10 October) stand out even more.
The one point where he does touch on the truth is the irrational hatred of Washington for the Castro regime, and the pointlessness of the embargo. But the irrationality is mainly because Cuba is no threat. In the Caribbean, Castro is a folk hero for standing up to Uncle Sam – but even the desperate Haitian refugees head for Florida, or the Bahamas, not for Havana. I may as well add, that once, when he met me, he called me “El Vikingo”, which I rather appreciated, just as we all appreciate his tweaking the Eagle’s feathers.
Castro did add a fun Caribbean cultural element to grey east European totalitarianism. But his restrictions on the right to travel came straight from those wonderful people who built the Berlin Wall. In fact, while Wilkinson sings the praises of the socialist paradise, he does not really explain why, if it so heavenly there, so many people risk their lives to flee to the evil empire just across the straits.
It is difficult to know where to start with such a piece of uncritical rose-tinted propaganda, so we may well as begin with the immediately quantifiable lie. He says that Cuba has one doctor to 600 patients, “when Britain can only manage one for every 20,000”. This is an outright lie. Just think about it, he is claiming that cities like Liverpool or Sheffield only have a couple of dozen doctors each. Even after years of Thatcher, the NHS allows for some ten times that many doctors.
He says, “in many respects, Cuba outstrips Britain in the provision of health care and education”. Cojones, as they say on the island. Many of those doctors, and graduates, are working as cab drivers, in hotels, or even as prostitutes and escorts, because they cannot live on their Peso salary and need dollars, as indeed do those 600 patients he mentions. Every time I go to Cuba, I take a bagful of across-the-counter painkillers for friends there, because they are unavailable on the island. I not usually need to do that when I return to Britain from New York, but in Cuba, medicines are not available except for payments in dollars (or now, in euros).
As for Cuban unions, it would be enlightening to hear his account of the last strike Cuban workers dared to have, or in what way the “independent unions” negotiate with foreign employers – who, last time I checked, pay hard currency for the services of its citizens to the Cuban government which in turn pays them worthless Pesos at a ludicrous exchange rate. What makes it bearable, is a small dollar tip from a tourist is worth a week’s wages in pesos.
He says “some 95 per cent of the population participate in peaceful elections”. Of course the elections are peaceful: there are no opposition party candidates: they make a New Labour selection process seem open, since while Tony Blair’s team may rig the elections, they have not yet taken to arresting unapproved candidates. And of course there is high participation. Only the foolhardy will dare to skip in case they are labelled as dissidents and arrested like the 75 who were imprisoned last year.
Wilkinson accuses those of us protested this of “hypocrisy”. While noting that he does not mention the execution of three hijackers on whose behalf we were also protesting. I am willing to bet that he opposes the death penalty in the US. But 92 miles of water between Key West and Havana makes it bearable?
Cuba is not as repressive or dangerous as the old Latin American dictatorships. The Cuban people are indeed proud of their achievements. But the serious dissidents there are rightly concerned that by denying democracy and civil rights, Fidel Castro is paving the way for a complete Russian-style collapse on his death.
The ends never justify the means. The history of this century teaches us that the means shape the end. Even if Cuba’s progress were as good as Wilkinson claims, it would not justify the executions and imprisonments, nor could he prove that they were necessary.
But in any case, let us have a final examination of the claims of Cuba’s progress. Check out the UN’s Human Development Report. In almost every respect of social progress, education, health and prosperity, Barbados surpasses Cuba and indeed has a GDP per capita three times Cuba’s official figures – and does so without arresting dissidents, with a free press, free unions, and freedom of travel. Like most of the Caricom countries, it also defies the US on issues of principle such as the International Criminal Court – on which incidentally, Cuba agrees with the US. In fact, the Bahamas, Costa Rica and St Kitts also rank higher than Cuba – and none of them arrest dissidents either.
Democratic socialists such as those who founded Tribune have always realized that the regimes in eastern Europe brought the whole concept of socialism into disrepute and kept their distance from it. Shooting people for trying to flee paradise, and imprisoning those who try to change it, are not part of any socialist agenda that this newspaper has ever propounded. The fall of the wall freed socialists from the embarrassment of trying to apologize for or disavow the tyranny of “actually existing socialism.” We can oppose the Pentagon’s adventurism without being the fan clubs for vestigial forms of totalitarianism.
Ian Williams, Tribune column, October 31 2003
In the bad old days of Stalin, lots of starry-eyed leftists went to Moscow and came away profoundly impressed – enough to overlook the gulags, the executions, the purges, and indeed the low living standards of most workers there.
Tribune at the time usually managed to avoid such intoxication with totalitarianism, and still does, which makes Steve Wilkinson’s shameless apology for dictatorship in Cuba (10 October) stand out even more.
The one point where he does touch on the truth is the irrational hatred of Washington for the Castro regime, and the pointlessness of the embargo. But the irrationality is mainly because Cuba is no threat. In the Caribbean, Castro is a folk hero for standing up to Uncle Sam – but even the desperate Haitian refugees head for Florida, or the Bahamas, not for Havana. I may as well add, that once, when he met me, he called me “El Vikingo”, which I rather appreciated, just as we all appreciate his tweaking the Eagle’s feathers.
Castro did add a fun Caribbean cultural element to grey east European totalitarianism. But his restrictions on the right to travel came straight from those wonderful people who built the Berlin Wall. In fact, while Wilkinson sings the praises of the socialist paradise, he does not really explain why, if it so heavenly there, so many people risk their lives to flee to the evil empire just across the straits.
It is difficult to know where to start with such a piece of uncritical rose-tinted propaganda, so we may well as begin with the immediately quantifiable lie. He says that Cuba has one doctor to 600 patients, “when Britain can only manage one for every 20,000”. This is an outright lie. Just think about it, he is claiming that cities like Liverpool or Sheffield only have a couple of dozen doctors each. Even after years of Thatcher, the NHS allows for some ten times that many doctors.
He says, “in many respects, Cuba outstrips Britain in the provision of health care and education”. Cojones, as they say on the island. Many of those doctors, and graduates, are working as cab drivers, in hotels, or even as prostitutes and escorts, because they cannot live on their Peso salary and need dollars, as indeed do those 600 patients he mentions. Every time I go to Cuba, I take a bagful of across-the-counter painkillers for friends there, because they are unavailable on the island. I not usually need to do that when I return to Britain from New York, but in Cuba, medicines are not available except for payments in dollars (or now, in euros).
As for Cuban unions, it would be enlightening to hear his account of the last strike Cuban workers dared to have, or in what way the “independent unions” negotiate with foreign employers – who, last time I checked, pay hard currency for the services of its citizens to the Cuban government which in turn pays them worthless Pesos at a ludicrous exchange rate. What makes it bearable, is a small dollar tip from a tourist is worth a week’s wages in pesos.
He says “some 95 per cent of the population participate in peaceful elections”. Of course the elections are peaceful: there are no opposition party candidates: they make a New Labour selection process seem open, since while Tony Blair’s team may rig the elections, they have not yet taken to arresting unapproved candidates. And of course there is high participation. Only the foolhardy will dare to skip in case they are labelled as dissidents and arrested like the 75 who were imprisoned last year.
Wilkinson accuses those of us protested this of “hypocrisy”. While noting that he does not mention the execution of three hijackers on whose behalf we were also protesting. I am willing to bet that he opposes the death penalty in the US. But 92 miles of water between Key West and Havana makes it bearable?
Cuba is not as repressive or dangerous as the old Latin American dictatorships. The Cuban people are indeed proud of their achievements. But the serious dissidents there are rightly concerned that by denying democracy and civil rights, Fidel Castro is paving the way for a complete Russian-style collapse on his death.
The ends never justify the means. The history of this century teaches us that the means shape the end. Even if Cuba’s progress were as good as Wilkinson claims, it would not justify the executions and imprisonments, nor could he prove that they were necessary.
But in any case, let us have a final examination of the claims of Cuba’s progress. Check out the UN’s Human Development Report. In almost every respect of social progress, education, health and prosperity, Barbados surpasses Cuba and indeed has a GDP per capita three times Cuba’s official figures – and does so without arresting dissidents, with a free press, free unions, and freedom of travel. Like most of the Caricom countries, it also defies the US on issues of principle such as the International Criminal Court – on which incidentally, Cuba agrees with the US. In fact, the Bahamas, Costa Rica and St Kitts also rank higher than Cuba – and none of them arrest dissidents either.
Democratic socialists such as those who founded Tribune have always realized that the regimes in eastern Europe brought the whole concept of socialism into disrepute and kept their distance from it. Shooting people for trying to flee paradise, and imprisoning those who try to change it, are not part of any socialist agenda that this newspaper has ever propounded. The fall of the wall freed socialists from the embarrassment of trying to apologize for or disavow the tyranny of “actually existing socialism.” We can oppose the Pentagon’s adventurism without being the fan clubs for vestigial forms of totalitarianism.
11 November 2003
BROWN IS NOT A LEFT ALTERNATIVE
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, November 15 2003
Last week’s public spat between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair was about more than Brown’s displeasure at Blair’s refusal to give him a seat on Labour’s National Executive Committee — and it was about more than Brown’s opposition to identity cards or indeed his bizarre flirtation with Euroscepticism in the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
On this, everyone agrees. But how much more is difficult to judge. Was Brown merely asserting his status as the second-biggest beast in the Labour jungle after his return from paternity leave, with a view to (depending on your taste) grabbing a key role in writing Labour’s next manifesto, stopping Ken Livingstone’s return to Labour or stemming Peter Mandelson’s growing influence in Number Ten? Or was his display the start of an attempt to oust Blair as prime minister and take his place?
In common with every other commentator who has addressed these crucial questions, I can’t read Brown’s mind. But I suspect that he wasn’t going for broke.
However much he covets Blair’s job, it’s difficult to imagine circumstances before the next election in which he could mount a challenge. Blair’s standing inside the Labour Party is certainly at its lowest since he became leader in 1994. Brown is certainly the obvious alternative leader. But unless Blair is knocked down by the proverbial bus, discovered in flagrante with Prince Charles or branded an inveterate liar by Lord Hutton, the next ocassion on which he could be challenged for the Labour leadership is next year’s party conference — by which point Labour will be in pre-election mode.
Whatever else can be said about Brown, he is not stupid. So hunch says that last week’s shenanigans were less the start of an outright Brown bid for the leadership than a bit of opportunist self-promotion, a reminder to the world that the Chancellor remains the heir apparent, that he has ideas of his own that differ significantly from Blair’s — and that he is insistent on having a decisive influence on the manifesto, the career prospects of Red Ken and Mandy and anything else that crops up. In other words, it’s back to business as usual.
All the same, Brown did give the appearance of having lost patience with Blair, and it’s this, rather than any evidence that Brown is moving in for the kill, that has got everyone talking again about what Brown might be like as Prime Minister.
Here I have a confession to make. Ever since Blair became Labour leader in 1994, I’ve found it difficult to understand why a substantial number of Labour leftists — including the editor of Tribune and quite a few contributors — think that Brown would be significantly more sympathetic than Blair to their various causes.
Of course, Brown was, in the dim and distant past, very much of the left (though he was always a pragmatist too). And, unlike Blair, he is steeped in the traditions of This Great Movement of Ours. He speaks the lingo fluently and is rivalled as a glad-hander of trade union bureaucrats only by John Prescott.
Most important, Brown has so far been a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer in terms both of macroeconomic management (six-and-a-half years of reasonable growth, low unemployment and no currency crisis) and, to a lesser extent, of social democratic redistribution. Although his stealth strategy has done nothing to stop the increasing ineqaulity of British society, it has at least helped some of the worst-off.
But there is not a shred of evidence that Brown has been to the left of Blair in any substantive way since at least 1992. In opposition from 1992 to 1997, Brown and Blair were together responsible for the ultra-cautious, pro-business strategy that was branded “New Labour” after Blair became leader. In government, Brown has not only been the author of many keynote policies — the 1997-99 spending squeeze and 1999-2003 spending splurge, the expansion of the Private Finance Initative, the welfare-to-work programme, the five tests on British membership of the euro — but has been intimately involved in every area of policy that entails spending money. He has been as enthusiastic as Blair for labour market deregulation and private enterprise, as admiring of the American model of capitalism and as disparaging of the European model. Where Brown has differed with Blair, on the euro and on foundation hospitals for example, it has not been because he sees Blair’s position as too right-wing.
Brown has said nothing to disassociate himself from the authoritarian populism of the government’s crime and immigration policies, nothing to suggest that he supports further constitutional reform, and nothing to hint that he’d prefer a less pro-American foreign policy than Blair has pursued. The left is deluding itself if it sees Brown as the champion of anything other than Blairism with a scowling face.
Last week’s public spat between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair was about more than Brown’s displeasure at Blair’s refusal to give him a seat on Labour’s National Executive Committee — and it was about more than Brown’s opposition to identity cards or indeed his bizarre flirtation with Euroscepticism in the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
On this, everyone agrees. But how much more is difficult to judge. Was Brown merely asserting his status as the second-biggest beast in the Labour jungle after his return from paternity leave, with a view to (depending on your taste) grabbing a key role in writing Labour’s next manifesto, stopping Ken Livingstone’s return to Labour or stemming Peter Mandelson’s growing influence in Number Ten? Or was his display the start of an attempt to oust Blair as prime minister and take his place?
In common with every other commentator who has addressed these crucial questions, I can’t read Brown’s mind. But I suspect that he wasn’t going for broke.
However much he covets Blair’s job, it’s difficult to imagine circumstances before the next election in which he could mount a challenge. Blair’s standing inside the Labour Party is certainly at its lowest since he became leader in 1994. Brown is certainly the obvious alternative leader. But unless Blair is knocked down by the proverbial bus, discovered in flagrante with Prince Charles or branded an inveterate liar by Lord Hutton, the next ocassion on which he could be challenged for the Labour leadership is next year’s party conference — by which point Labour will be in pre-election mode.
Whatever else can be said about Brown, he is not stupid. So hunch says that last week’s shenanigans were less the start of an outright Brown bid for the leadership than a bit of opportunist self-promotion, a reminder to the world that the Chancellor remains the heir apparent, that he has ideas of his own that differ significantly from Blair’s — and that he is insistent on having a decisive influence on the manifesto, the career prospects of Red Ken and Mandy and anything else that crops up. In other words, it’s back to business as usual.
All the same, Brown did give the appearance of having lost patience with Blair, and it’s this, rather than any evidence that Brown is moving in for the kill, that has got everyone talking again about what Brown might be like as Prime Minister.
Here I have a confession to make. Ever since Blair became Labour leader in 1994, I’ve found it difficult to understand why a substantial number of Labour leftists — including the editor of Tribune and quite a few contributors — think that Brown would be significantly more sympathetic than Blair to their various causes.
Of course, Brown was, in the dim and distant past, very much of the left (though he was always a pragmatist too). And, unlike Blair, he is steeped in the traditions of This Great Movement of Ours. He speaks the lingo fluently and is rivalled as a glad-hander of trade union bureaucrats only by John Prescott.
Most important, Brown has so far been a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer in terms both of macroeconomic management (six-and-a-half years of reasonable growth, low unemployment and no currency crisis) and, to a lesser extent, of social democratic redistribution. Although his stealth strategy has done nothing to stop the increasing ineqaulity of British society, it has at least helped some of the worst-off.
But there is not a shred of evidence that Brown has been to the left of Blair in any substantive way since at least 1992. In opposition from 1992 to 1997, Brown and Blair were together responsible for the ultra-cautious, pro-business strategy that was branded “New Labour” after Blair became leader. In government, Brown has not only been the author of many keynote policies — the 1997-99 spending squeeze and 1999-2003 spending splurge, the expansion of the Private Finance Initative, the welfare-to-work programme, the five tests on British membership of the euro — but has been intimately involved in every area of policy that entails spending money. He has been as enthusiastic as Blair for labour market deregulation and private enterprise, as admiring of the American model of capitalism and as disparaging of the European model. Where Brown has differed with Blair, on the euro and on foundation hospitals for example, it has not been because he sees Blair’s position as too right-wing.
Brown has said nothing to disassociate himself from the authoritarian populism of the government’s crime and immigration policies, nothing to suggest that he supports further constitutional reform, and nothing to hint that he’d prefer a less pro-American foreign policy than Blair has pursued. The left is deluding itself if it sees Brown as the champion of anything other than Blairism with a scowling face.
30 October 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 16
I'm grateful to Harry's Place for alerting the world to critical thinking among the dissident Trotskyists of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty (previously known as Socialist Organiser, before that the International Communist League etc etc) - for which click here. They're trying hard to be the Shachtmanites of our generation, for whom see previous posts - and good luck to them in that - but I still think they'd be better off if they simply abandoned Leninism altogether.
OBITUARY: JOHN SULLIVAN
I am sad to hear of the death of John Sullivan, whom I remember both as the author of two extraordinarily funny, accurate and inspirational 1980s satirical pamphlets on the idiocies of the far left in Britain, Go Fourth and Multiply and As Soon As This Pub Closes, published pseudonymously, and as a great authority on the Basque country, in which role he wrote for Tribune and the New Statesman. There's a notice on the Weekly Worker site a couple of weeks back (for which click here).
I'm no expert on Basque politics, but Sullivan had an extraordinary nose for the British far left. Here he is, masquerading as Chus Aguirre and Mo Klonsky, on the Militant Tendency, from As Soon As This Pub Closes, published by Full Marks Bookshop in Bristol in (I guess) 1987 or 1988:
"For many people their first contact with Militant has taken the disconcerting form of hearing an audience groan as someone with a fake Liverpool accent and curious hand movements stands up and demands the nationalisation of the country's 253 leading monopolies.
"When the political novice is then told that the strange figure is a Trotskyist, she is understandably confused, all the more so if she is familiar with any of Trotsky's works. How do hand gestures, however elaborate, transform a series of reformist demands into such a fearful revolutionary perspective?"
But there was a serious point to it all: Sullivan wanted a left that worked, though I don't think he ever found it. From Go Fourth and Multiply, published in 1983 under the byline Prunella Kaur:
"Capitalism turns everything into commodities. The sad fate of left groups which set out to overthrow capitalism has a cruel irony. They have ended up selling a commodity and searching for a market, just as other entrepreneurs sell newspapers or plastic buckets.
"Few groups started out with their present miserable commercial ambitions. They didn't want to sell a product, but make a revolution.
"How did they degenerate? The groups adapted to their environment. After 1968 this meant adapting to the concepts and lifestyles of the balding generation of 1968, who were themselves becoming strongly influenced by well-established English middle-class traditions of self-fulfilment, vegetarianism, self-help, rejection of indutrialism and the modern world.
"The left has become parasitic within this milieu."
I'm not going to argue with that.
There is a fuller obituary by the late Al Richardson in the latest What's Left?, for which click here.
I'm no expert on Basque politics, but Sullivan had an extraordinary nose for the British far left. Here he is, masquerading as Chus Aguirre and Mo Klonsky, on the Militant Tendency, from As Soon As This Pub Closes, published by Full Marks Bookshop in Bristol in (I guess) 1987 or 1988:
"For many people their first contact with Militant has taken the disconcerting form of hearing an audience groan as someone with a fake Liverpool accent and curious hand movements stands up and demands the nationalisation of the country's 253 leading monopolies.
"When the political novice is then told that the strange figure is a Trotskyist, she is understandably confused, all the more so if she is familiar with any of Trotsky's works. How do hand gestures, however elaborate, transform a series of reformist demands into such a fearful revolutionary perspective?"
But there was a serious point to it all: Sullivan wanted a left that worked, though I don't think he ever found it. From Go Fourth and Multiply, published in 1983 under the byline Prunella Kaur:
"Capitalism turns everything into commodities. The sad fate of left groups which set out to overthrow capitalism has a cruel irony. They have ended up selling a commodity and searching for a market, just as other entrepreneurs sell newspapers or plastic buckets.
"Few groups started out with their present miserable commercial ambitions. They didn't want to sell a product, but make a revolution.
"How did they degenerate? The groups adapted to their environment. After 1968 this meant adapting to the concepts and lifestyles of the balding generation of 1968, who were themselves becoming strongly influenced by well-established English middle-class traditions of self-fulfilment, vegetarianism, self-help, rejection of indutrialism and the modern world.
"The left has become parasitic within this milieu."
I'm not going to argue with that.
There is a fuller obituary by the late Al Richardson in the latest What's Left?, for which click here.
BOSNIA AND THE LEFT - 1
I missed the news that Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas had extracted a grovelling apology, small-scale damages and (apparently much larger) legal costs from Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German and Bookmarks Publications (respectively leading ideologue, editor and publisher of the Socialist Workers' Party's theoretical journal, Socialist Review) for repeating the libel that Hoare and Magas were apologists for the late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman. But I've belatedly caught up now that Paul Foot has sent out an appeal for funds to pay the bill, arguing that Hoare and Magas offended against left protocol by resorting to the capitalist courts to resolve an argument among comrades.
There's good material on this on Harry's Place (click here) and Crooked Timber (click here), to which I've only a couple of observations to add.
First, although I hold with Foot's antipathy to resorting to the libel laws to resolve arguments (even with most enemies), this case is something of an exception. The SWP's campaign of denigration against those on the left in the 1990s who argued for an end to appeasement of Serbian military agression in former Yugoslavia was so vile that it is difficult to see Hoare and Magas as anything but heroes for taking it on. I do have an interest here. As editor of Tribune in the early 1990s I took much the same position on Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as Hoare and Magas - though with little of their expertise - and was vehemently denounced by SWPers in meetings as a scumbag ally of Holocaust-deniers and fascists. Hoare and Magas became close political friends: during the mid-1990s, when I was deputy editor of the New Statesman, Magas wrote regularly and forcefully on the Bosnia war for the magazine, and I went to many meetings of the Bosnia Institute, which they set up and has done more good in its modest way than the SWP will ever do. Whatever, my solidarity remains with them, and I'm not coughing up for Foot's appeal.
Second, Foot's attitude to comrades who sue comrades seems to depend entirely on who is doing the sueing. I assume from the tone of his appeal for funds that he considers Hoare and Magas to have excluded themselves from the proletarian milieu (or whatever the current jargon is) by their actions against the SWP. Yet he used his column in the Guardian on Wednesday (for which click here) to give a massive plug for the meeting organised by the SWP at which one George Galloway announced plans to join the SWP and assorted leftists and Muslims in running candidates against the Labour Party in England and Wales in next year's European elections.
Could this be the same George Galloway who, many moons ago, threatened a libel action against Tribune over a 50-word classified advertisement mildly taking the piss out of him -- and managed to extract £2,000 from the paper out of court on the advice of m'learned friends? Indeed it could . . .
There's good material on this on Harry's Place (click here) and Crooked Timber (click here), to which I've only a couple of observations to add.
First, although I hold with Foot's antipathy to resorting to the libel laws to resolve arguments (even with most enemies), this case is something of an exception. The SWP's campaign of denigration against those on the left in the 1990s who argued for an end to appeasement of Serbian military agression in former Yugoslavia was so vile that it is difficult to see Hoare and Magas as anything but heroes for taking it on. I do have an interest here. As editor of Tribune in the early 1990s I took much the same position on Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as Hoare and Magas - though with little of their expertise - and was vehemently denounced by SWPers in meetings as a scumbag ally of Holocaust-deniers and fascists. Hoare and Magas became close political friends: during the mid-1990s, when I was deputy editor of the New Statesman, Magas wrote regularly and forcefully on the Bosnia war for the magazine, and I went to many meetings of the Bosnia Institute, which they set up and has done more good in its modest way than the SWP will ever do. Whatever, my solidarity remains with them, and I'm not coughing up for Foot's appeal.
Second, Foot's attitude to comrades who sue comrades seems to depend entirely on who is doing the sueing. I assume from the tone of his appeal for funds that he considers Hoare and Magas to have excluded themselves from the proletarian milieu (or whatever the current jargon is) by their actions against the SWP. Yet he used his column in the Guardian on Wednesday (for which click here) to give a massive plug for the meeting organised by the SWP at which one George Galloway announced plans to join the SWP and assorted leftists and Muslims in running candidates against the Labour Party in England and Wales in next year's European elections.
Could this be the same George Galloway who, many moons ago, threatened a libel action against Tribune over a 50-word classified advertisement mildly taking the piss out of him -- and managed to extract £2,000 from the paper out of court on the advice of m'learned friends? Indeed it could . . .
23 October 2003
COOK SHOWS THE WAY TO THE LEFT
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, October 31 2003
One of the most depressing features of the past few months has been the way the traditional left has responded to the increasingly apparent difficulties of the Blair government as its second term drifts listlessly on.
Most of the traditional left — by which I mean the Leninists outside the Labour Party, the hard left inside it and quite a lot of the Tribune left — appears content to mix wallowing in schadenfreude with a barrage of negatives: no to the euro, no to PFI, no to foundation hospitals, no to top-up fees, no to US and British troops in Iraq, et cetera et cetra.
Part of my problem here is that I can’t see why most of the things the left opposes should be opposed so vehemently, or indeed at all. Although there are obvious problems with PFI, particularly in the way it can create a “two-tier” workforce with workers in private companies enjoying substantially worse pay and conditions than their public sector counterparts, I’ve yet to hear a convincing case for believing that a new PFI school is worse than no new school. On foundation hospitals, I get the terrible feeling I’ve missed something important, because I just can’t work out what all the sound and fury signifies. I’m against top-up fees — a straightforward graduate tax would make much more sense — but I’d rather have them than continue to starve higher education of funds. Opposition in principle to British participation in the euro is a mark of political cretinism pure and simple. And immediate withdrawal of the US and British forces in Iraq is a recipe for a bloodbath.
And so I could go on. What really bugs me, however, is that a string of noes is, on its own, so utterly reactive and uninspiring. At precisely the moment that the government has lost momentum and needs a new direction, the traditional left has nothing constructive to say.
Things were not always thus. The left of the 1960s and 1970s was certainly no stranger to obsessive negativity — no to the Common Market, no to incomes policy, no to spending cuts — and it had plenty of other faults, not least a programme that was economically suspect and deeply unattractive to the majority of voters. But at least it had a programme, a set of policies, however misguided, that constituted a positive alternative to the drift and crisis management of the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Today, the traditional Left lacks even an incredible alternative programme.
Which is not to say that there is no alternative. Indeed, there is one outlined rather elegantly in a book published last week — Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure.
Most of the book comprises an account of Cook’s last two years in government as leader of the Commons — and most press commentary on it has concentrated on its revelations about Cabinet arguments in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
This is undoubtedly fascinating stuff, as indeed is Cook’s story of how his hopes for democratic reform of the House of Lords were scuppered, which make it clear precisely who was the villain of the piece: “It is an awkward truth for modernisers to face, but the reason we are to be lumbered with an all-appointed House of Lords is because that is what Tony Blair had always wanted.”
But the part of the book that is most important is the chapter “Where do we go from here?”, in which Cook outlines his thoughts on how to reinvigorate the Government.
He does not shy from criticism, but his emphasis is almost entirely on positive alternatives. He argues convincingly for what he calls “value-based politics” instead of the technocratic managerialism that currently characterises the Government’s approach. Labour, he says, should explicitly embrace egalitarianism, make the case for more regulation in the public interest, particularly in pension provision and to protect the environment, and adopt radical policies to revitalise Britain’s democracy: a largely elected second chamber, the return of powers to local councils that have been taken away by successive governments and, most important, proportional representation for the House of Commons. On the international front, the government should embrace Europe enthusiastically, setting a target date for entering the euro, and press for a stronger United Nations capable of reining in the US.
Little of this will go down well with the traditional left, with its hostility to Europe and constitutional reform. But it’s a better starting point than anything it has come up with — even though the chances that the government will take a blind bit of notice are as slim as slim can be.
One of the most depressing features of the past few months has been the way the traditional left has responded to the increasingly apparent difficulties of the Blair government as its second term drifts listlessly on.
Most of the traditional left — by which I mean the Leninists outside the Labour Party, the hard left inside it and quite a lot of the Tribune left — appears content to mix wallowing in schadenfreude with a barrage of negatives: no to the euro, no to PFI, no to foundation hospitals, no to top-up fees, no to US and British troops in Iraq, et cetera et cetra.
Part of my problem here is that I can’t see why most of the things the left opposes should be opposed so vehemently, or indeed at all. Although there are obvious problems with PFI, particularly in the way it can create a “two-tier” workforce with workers in private companies enjoying substantially worse pay and conditions than their public sector counterparts, I’ve yet to hear a convincing case for believing that a new PFI school is worse than no new school. On foundation hospitals, I get the terrible feeling I’ve missed something important, because I just can’t work out what all the sound and fury signifies. I’m against top-up fees — a straightforward graduate tax would make much more sense — but I’d rather have them than continue to starve higher education of funds. Opposition in principle to British participation in the euro is a mark of political cretinism pure and simple. And immediate withdrawal of the US and British forces in Iraq is a recipe for a bloodbath.
And so I could go on. What really bugs me, however, is that a string of noes is, on its own, so utterly reactive and uninspiring. At precisely the moment that the government has lost momentum and needs a new direction, the traditional left has nothing constructive to say.
Things were not always thus. The left of the 1960s and 1970s was certainly no stranger to obsessive negativity — no to the Common Market, no to incomes policy, no to spending cuts — and it had plenty of other faults, not least a programme that was economically suspect and deeply unattractive to the majority of voters. But at least it had a programme, a set of policies, however misguided, that constituted a positive alternative to the drift and crisis management of the Wilson and Callaghan governments. Today, the traditional Left lacks even an incredible alternative programme.
Which is not to say that there is no alternative. Indeed, there is one outlined rather elegantly in a book published last week — Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure.
Most of the book comprises an account of Cook’s last two years in government as leader of the Commons — and most press commentary on it has concentrated on its revelations about Cabinet arguments in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
This is undoubtedly fascinating stuff, as indeed is Cook’s story of how his hopes for democratic reform of the House of Lords were scuppered, which make it clear precisely who was the villain of the piece: “It is an awkward truth for modernisers to face, but the reason we are to be lumbered with an all-appointed House of Lords is because that is what Tony Blair had always wanted.”
But the part of the book that is most important is the chapter “Where do we go from here?”, in which Cook outlines his thoughts on how to reinvigorate the Government.
He does not shy from criticism, but his emphasis is almost entirely on positive alternatives. He argues convincingly for what he calls “value-based politics” instead of the technocratic managerialism that currently characterises the Government’s approach. Labour, he says, should explicitly embrace egalitarianism, make the case for more regulation in the public interest, particularly in pension provision and to protect the environment, and adopt radical policies to revitalise Britain’s democracy: a largely elected second chamber, the return of powers to local councils that have been taken away by successive governments and, most important, proportional representation for the House of Commons. On the international front, the government should embrace Europe enthusiastically, setting a target date for entering the euro, and press for a stronger United Nations capable of reining in the US.
Little of this will go down well with the traditional left, with its hostility to Europe and constitutional reform. But it’s a better starting point than anything it has come up with — even though the chances that the government will take a blind bit of notice are as slim as slim can be.
8 October 2003
BROWN COULD NOT HAVE WON IN 1994
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, October 3 2003
Stephen Frears's dramatisation of the events that led to Gordon Brown not fighting Tony Blair for the Labour leadership in 1994, The Deal, screened by Channel Four last Sunday, was an entertaining confection — of that there can be no doubt.
But whether it was an accurate portrayal of what went on before and during the legendary meeting in the Granita restaurant in Islington is another matter.
As one Vikki Leffman put it in a letter to the Guardian this week:
“Some minor points which could have been easily checked were not. How do I know? I served the Blair/Brown table and owned the restaurant. No tablecloths, wrong table, we never served rabbit, Gordon did eat, the walls were blue . . . But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?”
It wasn’t just the tablecloths. The Deal was also weak on the political context. The impression it gave was that Brown would have been a shoo-in for the Labour leadership on John Smith’s death if only he hadn’t waited until after Smith’s funeral to start thinking about running — rather than jumping the gun as Blair did — and if only Peter Mandelson hadn’t backed Blair.
The reality was different. Brown had certainly been the most favourably positioned of Labour’s younger politicans to make a leadership bid on the previous occasion on which there had been a vacancy — in 1992, after the resignation of Neil Kinnock.
Then he had come under strong pressure, not only from Labour’s “modernisers” but also from a large part of its soft Left (including Tribune), to take his chance. He was seen as the only credible challenger to Smith, the decent, honest but terminally dull “safe pair of hands” who was the union barons’ choice. Brown seriously considered his options until the very last minute — I remember holding open a slot in Tribune one press day in anticipation of an announcement from him that he was entering the fray. But the announcement never came. Brown bottled out, pledged his support for Smith, and Smith won easily against Bryan Gould, whose campaign was doomed from the start by his fundamentalist Euroscepticism.
By the time Smith died in May 1994, however, Brown was no longer Labour’s up-and-coming golden boy. Appointed shadow chancellor by Smith in July 1992, he quickly alienated much of his erstwhile support. During that summer, as the pound came under increasing speculative pressure in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System, he refused to argue for the devaluation that just about every economist believed the British economy needed. Then, when that devaluation came so spectacularly on “Black Wednesday”, he refused to welcome it. For the next 18 months, he stubbornly stuck to his guns, rejecting all calls to attack the beleaguered Major Government from the Left. Instead, he lambasted its tax increases.
In retrospect, this might appear a strategy of genius — but that wasn’t the way it played at the time in the Labour Party. From 1992 to 1994, Brown was subjected to an endless barrage of criticism from the left and the unions for failing to embrace a radical Keynesian economic policy. He responded by adopting what one colleague described as a “bunker mentality” — and his popularity in the party plummeted. He only just scraped on to the National Executive Committee in autumn 1993.
Meanwhile, Blair’s stock rose inexorably. As shadow Home Secretary from 1992, he made an extraordinary impact, outflanking the Tories on law and order with his rhetoric of “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” and “responsibilities as well as rights”. By late 1993, it was Blair not Brown who was Labour most lustrous rising star.
The point here is that — whatever deal was struck at Granita — Brown was by then negotiating from a position of weakness. By the time of the meeting, Blair had established himself as the hot favourite to win the Labour leadership. If Brown had decided to enter the contest, he would not have won — and he knew it. He might even have lost his job as shadow chancellor.
His only strong card was that his entering the race would syphon off some of Blair’s support — possibly enough to allow Robin Cook or another soft left candidate to come through the middle. (Cook was certainly considering his options at the time: I know because I kept open a slot on the New Statesman on press day for an announcement that never came . . .) Brown knew that if he declared he would not stand, no one else would enter the contest apart from the no-hopers John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, and Blair would become unstoppable.
So both men had an incentive to come to an arrangement. But if Blair really did tell Brown that, in return for not standing, Brown could be not only an all-powerful Chancellor but also his anointed successor, he was an extraordinarily soft touch.
Stephen Frears's dramatisation of the events that led to Gordon Brown not fighting Tony Blair for the Labour leadership in 1994, The Deal, screened by Channel Four last Sunday, was an entertaining confection — of that there can be no doubt.
But whether it was an accurate portrayal of what went on before and during the legendary meeting in the Granita restaurant in Islington is another matter.
As one Vikki Leffman put it in a letter to the Guardian this week:
“Some minor points which could have been easily checked were not. How do I know? I served the Blair/Brown table and owned the restaurant. No tablecloths, wrong table, we never served rabbit, Gordon did eat, the walls were blue . . . But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?”
It wasn’t just the tablecloths. The Deal was also weak on the political context. The impression it gave was that Brown would have been a shoo-in for the Labour leadership on John Smith’s death if only he hadn’t waited until after Smith’s funeral to start thinking about running — rather than jumping the gun as Blair did — and if only Peter Mandelson hadn’t backed Blair.
The reality was different. Brown had certainly been the most favourably positioned of Labour’s younger politicans to make a leadership bid on the previous occasion on which there had been a vacancy — in 1992, after the resignation of Neil Kinnock.
Then he had come under strong pressure, not only from Labour’s “modernisers” but also from a large part of its soft Left (including Tribune), to take his chance. He was seen as the only credible challenger to Smith, the decent, honest but terminally dull “safe pair of hands” who was the union barons’ choice. Brown seriously considered his options until the very last minute — I remember holding open a slot in Tribune one press day in anticipation of an announcement from him that he was entering the fray. But the announcement never came. Brown bottled out, pledged his support for Smith, and Smith won easily against Bryan Gould, whose campaign was doomed from the start by his fundamentalist Euroscepticism.
By the time Smith died in May 1994, however, Brown was no longer Labour’s up-and-coming golden boy. Appointed shadow chancellor by Smith in July 1992, he quickly alienated much of his erstwhile support. During that summer, as the pound came under increasing speculative pressure in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System, he refused to argue for the devaluation that just about every economist believed the British economy needed. Then, when that devaluation came so spectacularly on “Black Wednesday”, he refused to welcome it. For the next 18 months, he stubbornly stuck to his guns, rejecting all calls to attack the beleaguered Major Government from the Left. Instead, he lambasted its tax increases.
In retrospect, this might appear a strategy of genius — but that wasn’t the way it played at the time in the Labour Party. From 1992 to 1994, Brown was subjected to an endless barrage of criticism from the left and the unions for failing to embrace a radical Keynesian economic policy. He responded by adopting what one colleague described as a “bunker mentality” — and his popularity in the party plummeted. He only just scraped on to the National Executive Committee in autumn 1993.
Meanwhile, Blair’s stock rose inexorably. As shadow Home Secretary from 1992, he made an extraordinary impact, outflanking the Tories on law and order with his rhetoric of “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” and “responsibilities as well as rights”. By late 1993, it was Blair not Brown who was Labour most lustrous rising star.
The point here is that — whatever deal was struck at Granita — Brown was by then negotiating from a position of weakness. By the time of the meeting, Blair had established himself as the hot favourite to win the Labour leadership. If Brown had decided to enter the contest, he would not have won — and he knew it. He might even have lost his job as shadow chancellor.
His only strong card was that his entering the race would syphon off some of Blair’s support — possibly enough to allow Robin Cook or another soft left candidate to come through the middle. (Cook was certainly considering his options at the time: I know because I kept open a slot on the New Statesman on press day for an announcement that never came . . .) Brown knew that if he declared he would not stand, no one else would enter the contest apart from the no-hopers John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, and Blair would become unstoppable.
So both men had an incentive to come to an arrangement. But if Blair really did tell Brown that, in return for not standing, Brown could be not only an all-powerful Chancellor but also his anointed successor, he was an extraordinarily soft touch.
11 September 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 15
Stephen Marks writes:
I never thought that the politics of the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party of Britain deterred significant numbers from participating in the antiwar movement before the start of the war. As long as they kept their own politics out of it and were sufficiently "unprincipled" to be open to all opponents of the war - even to the point of having LibDems on the platform - most antiwar opinion couldn't give a monkey's who was putting in the work to get the demos up and running.
But I do think the situation is changing - not because of any changes by the SWP and CPB but because life itself is throwing up new challenges in Iraq, to which the hard left answers are clearly at odds with the majority opinion of those who opposed the war.
The US administration - or at least the neo-con element - was drooling at the mouth at the prospect of reforging Iraq in the USA's image. A modern, pro-Western and democratic Iraq, refashioned by a continuing and benevolent US mandatory regime, would have a domino effect on its neighbours and beyond. It would drain the swamp of Arab and Muslim backwardness, leading to a triumph of free-market values throughout the region, to the benefit of Israel, Bechtel, Iraqi oil priced in dollars not euros, and continued US strategic domination of the region and its resources.
But life proved more complex. Iraqi opinion, while welcoming the fall of Saddam, was clearly suspicious of US motives and insisted on the most rapid possible American departure. Continuing attacks and the need to restore order and infrastructure put a premium on maximising the legitimacy of any interim authority. And the whole messy business looked like lasting much longer, and costing much more in cash and blood, than was likely to prove acceptable to the US public - or to their elected representatives with an election year approaching.
Iraqi political parties, from Shi'ites to Communists, initially agreed on demanding a political conference of all shades of Iraqi opinion, to be convened by the UN, not the US occupation forces, and which would appoint and install a provisional government. This government would decide which foreign troops should be in Iraq and for how long, who was to get what contracts for reconstruction, what should be the future of Iraq's oil industry and other key issues.
The US was compelled as a result to give the Governing Council some real powers, which was not its original intention. And as a result, most major political forces joined it. To my knowledge the only major political forces outside it are the Worker-Communist Party (as opposed to the historic Iraqi CP, which now says it models itself on Swedish Social Democracy) and the more hardline of the Shi'ites.
Interestingly British far-left publications which have given favourable coverage to the WCPI for its criticism of the Governing Council as a US stooge, nonetheless also criticise it for having illusions in the UN, to which apparently it still looks to sponsor a genuinely independent interim government.
None of us can tell what the Iraqi people "really think". But political parties that probably represent between them the great majority of Iraqis seem to think that now the allied occupation is in place, the best way forward is to exploit the US need for credibility in the transitional authority by taking part in the process and pushing for the greatest and speediest possible transfer of powers to Iraqis - as well as the speediest possible restoration of the infrastructure on which the Iraqi people depend for the restoration of any sort of normal life.
(By contrast the Saddamite and fundamentalist "resistance", by sabotaging the restoration of the necessities of daily life, make clear that its politics sees no independent role for the mass of ordinary Iraqis except perhaps as a desperate and maddened mob.)
The same pressures have also forced Bush into an embarassing U-turn at the UN. Previously denounced as dead, the Administration is now begging it on bended knee to accept an enhanced role. With obvious and justified Schadenfreude the French, Germans and Russians have kept Bush twisting in the wind for a reply. As the saying goes, God does not pay his debts in money. And there is the genuine problem of expecting others to provide troops while the US continues its absolute refusal to see US troops anwhere under other than US command.
All this can only reinforce the pressure of the Iraqis for a more rapid "Iraqisation", and under UN not US auspices. The reason of course is not any illusions about the UN. Iraqis who have suffered under its sanctions need no lectures on that score. The UN is not some White Knight of international probity, untainted by the vulgar self-interest of great power special interests. It is nothing more or less than a consensus among the powers that be constructed on the basis of horse-trading and arm-twisting.
As such however it is a preferable alternative - and the only one on offer - to the untrammeled national egoism and self-interest of the sole superpower.
What is the attitude of the left to this? I believe the majority of those who demonstrated would agree with the view taken by the bulk of Iraqi opinion. But judging from what I can see of its comments, the far left seems to have gone on to automatic pilot.
As Iraq is occupied by US imperialism, all those who work with the occupation authorities are collaborationist imperialist stooges. All the saboteurs are part of the "resistance" to whom we owe a duty of unconditional - but of course comrades, not uncritical - support. And according to Socialist Worker, the UN offices were a "legitimate target" - since after all the UN by working with and recognising the fact of the occupation, is an accomplice in it and part of the repressive mechanism of imperialist control etc etc.
There is a real problem with the Stop the War Coalition slogan "end the occupation". Reducing everything to "troops out now" is not going to mobilise the bulk of those who opposed the decision to go to war. And it will surely open up political divisions within what was the anti-war camp which ought to be debated. I dont know where that debate can take place. But given the SWP's atttitude to political argument, it certainly wont be within the StWC.
I never thought that the politics of the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party of Britain deterred significant numbers from participating in the antiwar movement before the start of the war. As long as they kept their own politics out of it and were sufficiently "unprincipled" to be open to all opponents of the war - even to the point of having LibDems on the platform - most antiwar opinion couldn't give a monkey's who was putting in the work to get the demos up and running.
But I do think the situation is changing - not because of any changes by the SWP and CPB but because life itself is throwing up new challenges in Iraq, to which the hard left answers are clearly at odds with the majority opinion of those who opposed the war.
The US administration - or at least the neo-con element - was drooling at the mouth at the prospect of reforging Iraq in the USA's image. A modern, pro-Western and democratic Iraq, refashioned by a continuing and benevolent US mandatory regime, would have a domino effect on its neighbours and beyond. It would drain the swamp of Arab and Muslim backwardness, leading to a triumph of free-market values throughout the region, to the benefit of Israel, Bechtel, Iraqi oil priced in dollars not euros, and continued US strategic domination of the region and its resources.
But life proved more complex. Iraqi opinion, while welcoming the fall of Saddam, was clearly suspicious of US motives and insisted on the most rapid possible American departure. Continuing attacks and the need to restore order and infrastructure put a premium on maximising the legitimacy of any interim authority. And the whole messy business looked like lasting much longer, and costing much more in cash and blood, than was likely to prove acceptable to the US public - or to their elected representatives with an election year approaching.
Iraqi political parties, from Shi'ites to Communists, initially agreed on demanding a political conference of all shades of Iraqi opinion, to be convened by the UN, not the US occupation forces, and which would appoint and install a provisional government. This government would decide which foreign troops should be in Iraq and for how long, who was to get what contracts for reconstruction, what should be the future of Iraq's oil industry and other key issues.
The US was compelled as a result to give the Governing Council some real powers, which was not its original intention. And as a result, most major political forces joined it. To my knowledge the only major political forces outside it are the Worker-Communist Party (as opposed to the historic Iraqi CP, which now says it models itself on Swedish Social Democracy) and the more hardline of the Shi'ites.
Interestingly British far-left publications which have given favourable coverage to the WCPI for its criticism of the Governing Council as a US stooge, nonetheless also criticise it for having illusions in the UN, to which apparently it still looks to sponsor a genuinely independent interim government.
None of us can tell what the Iraqi people "really think". But political parties that probably represent between them the great majority of Iraqis seem to think that now the allied occupation is in place, the best way forward is to exploit the US need for credibility in the transitional authority by taking part in the process and pushing for the greatest and speediest possible transfer of powers to Iraqis - as well as the speediest possible restoration of the infrastructure on which the Iraqi people depend for the restoration of any sort of normal life.
(By contrast the Saddamite and fundamentalist "resistance", by sabotaging the restoration of the necessities of daily life, make clear that its politics sees no independent role for the mass of ordinary Iraqis except perhaps as a desperate and maddened mob.)
The same pressures have also forced Bush into an embarassing U-turn at the UN. Previously denounced as dead, the Administration is now begging it on bended knee to accept an enhanced role. With obvious and justified Schadenfreude the French, Germans and Russians have kept Bush twisting in the wind for a reply. As the saying goes, God does not pay his debts in money. And there is the genuine problem of expecting others to provide troops while the US continues its absolute refusal to see US troops anwhere under other than US command.
All this can only reinforce the pressure of the Iraqis for a more rapid "Iraqisation", and under UN not US auspices. The reason of course is not any illusions about the UN. Iraqis who have suffered under its sanctions need no lectures on that score. The UN is not some White Knight of international probity, untainted by the vulgar self-interest of great power special interests. It is nothing more or less than a consensus among the powers that be constructed on the basis of horse-trading and arm-twisting.
As such however it is a preferable alternative - and the only one on offer - to the untrammeled national egoism and self-interest of the sole superpower.
What is the attitude of the left to this? I believe the majority of those who demonstrated would agree with the view taken by the bulk of Iraqi opinion. But judging from what I can see of its comments, the far left seems to have gone on to automatic pilot.
As Iraq is occupied by US imperialism, all those who work with the occupation authorities are collaborationist imperialist stooges. All the saboteurs are part of the "resistance" to whom we owe a duty of unconditional - but of course comrades, not uncritical - support. And according to Socialist Worker, the UN offices were a "legitimate target" - since after all the UN by working with and recognising the fact of the occupation, is an accomplice in it and part of the repressive mechanism of imperialist control etc etc.
There is a real problem with the Stop the War Coalition slogan "end the occupation". Reducing everything to "troops out now" is not going to mobilise the bulk of those who opposed the decision to go to war. And it will surely open up political divisions within what was the anti-war camp which ought to be debated. I dont know where that debate can take place. But given the SWP's atttitude to political argument, it certainly wont be within the StWC.
4 September 2003
UNITED FOR PEACE - 14
I am grateful to Mike Marqusee for forwarding the following piece by two former members of the Socialist Workers’ Party in Birmingham. It appears here cut and edited.
ABSENCE OF DEMOCRACY
Sue Blackwell and Rumy Hasan
We were long long-standing members of the Socialist Workers’ Party before we resigned in April 2002 (Sue Blackwell for 19 years; Rumy Hasan for 16) and now, some 16 months later, we wish to explain why we left an organisation that had played such a central role in our lives.
Let us first acknowledge our debt to the SWP: we do not intend to rewrite our histories. Both of us devoted enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources to the organisation. We remain very close to the central tenets that the SWP, in theory at least, espouses. We acknowledge that people join the SWP for the highest of motives, to change the world for the better. The party has undoubtedly achieved much that is laudable. Ours is not the sectarian diatribe of embittered ex-members. It is intended as a serious attempt to critique the organisation's failings.
We would like to imagine that most experienced, self-reflecting SWP members would agree that the SWP has a democratic deficit. But a deficit implies an excess of negatives over positives. The trouble is that in terms of party democracy, there is very little on the positive side: there is not just a democratic deficit but an almost complete absence of democracy. Compounding this is also the absence of democracy's twin, accountability . . .
Democratic debate, discussion, and decision-making necessitate voting - yet party members within the organisation rarely vote. It is a ferociously hierarchical, top-down organisation: the “line” is set by the central committee and enforced on the ground by full-time organisers . . .
For most members, their contact with the party's structures is dominated by the relationship with the organiser. Yet the organiser is not elected by the members but is imposed by the centre . . . Knowing that they are untouchable by grassroots members, organisers tend to be characterised by astonishing insensitivity and arrogance . . . Because they are appointed by, and report to, the central committee, their loyalty is cast iron. Similarly, because the central committee appoints and directs organisers, it backs them to the hilt . . .
Ostensibly, the central committee is elected at the annual conference by delegates sent by the branches (or districts, or whatever format is in existence at the time): usually one delegate for every 10 members. But what invariably happens is that the central committee recommends a “slate” of candidates, and asks whether there are any other slates. We have never known of an alternative slate being put forward. In effect the central committee elects itself . . .
This method strongly acts against the democratic spirit and stamps out critical thinking. Members tend to become submissive, passive, and hidebound - being spoon-fed the politics without thinking or evaluating counterarguments. What happened to Marx's dictum “doubt everything'? It certainly does not get applied to the party line. And when the central committee railroads through a line with undemocratic practices such as packing meetings, most members meekly accept the argument - popular with Stalinists in the past - that “it had to be done”: a mantra that excuses the most nefarious of practices . . .
When it comes to the editorship of the party's publications, democracy is completely out of the question. The argument seems to be that editors should be drawn from the central committee and their authority stems from conference. In reality, the jobs are farmed out between central committee members or those very close to them . . .
The party continuously advocates the principle "never lie to the class". But . . . [it never tells] the truth to members regarding membership figures. It has been years since these have been revealed. The reason, we believe, is that the party membership has declined enormously since the mid-1990s - we estimate its size to be about a third to a half of what it was then . . . A democratic, accountable, organisation would regularly reveal the true membership figures to its members as of right, and if they have fallen, provide an explanation. It would also enable ordinary members to demand accountability and, if need be, allow for the removal of central committee members deemed responsible. But alas, none of this happens . . .
The undemocratic culture of the party moulds the political character of members. Some maintain their independence of thought and integrity. But there is no doubt that on the left, the reputation of party members has fallen. There is the constant refrain that in non-party gatherings, others are mystified at the mechanical behaviour of SWP members, always voting the same way, talking, and behaving like automatons . . . Once the epithet "party hack" sticks, it is very rarely removed . . .
The truly bright sparks in recent years on the international horizon for left politics has been the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements. What is crystal clear from these is that millions of people wish to see an alternative to the sham democracy (or no democracy) of the present world. They are certainly not going to tolerate undemocratic and authoritarian practices of left organisations - and this perhaps helps explain why they have not joined those such as the SWP in any significant numbers. The lesson is abundantly clear: without a relentless commitment to genuine democracy, accountability, and civilised debate, the project of winning a better world will remain grounded. The SWP shows no signs of understanding this.
ABSENCE OF DEMOCRACY
Sue Blackwell and Rumy Hasan
We were long long-standing members of the Socialist Workers’ Party before we resigned in April 2002 (Sue Blackwell for 19 years; Rumy Hasan for 16) and now, some 16 months later, we wish to explain why we left an organisation that had played such a central role in our lives.
Let us first acknowledge our debt to the SWP: we do not intend to rewrite our histories. Both of us devoted enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources to the organisation. We remain very close to the central tenets that the SWP, in theory at least, espouses. We acknowledge that people join the SWP for the highest of motives, to change the world for the better. The party has undoubtedly achieved much that is laudable. Ours is not the sectarian diatribe of embittered ex-members. It is intended as a serious attempt to critique the organisation's failings.
We would like to imagine that most experienced, self-reflecting SWP members would agree that the SWP has a democratic deficit. But a deficit implies an excess of negatives over positives. The trouble is that in terms of party democracy, there is very little on the positive side: there is not just a democratic deficit but an almost complete absence of democracy. Compounding this is also the absence of democracy's twin, accountability . . .
Democratic debate, discussion, and decision-making necessitate voting - yet party members within the organisation rarely vote. It is a ferociously hierarchical, top-down organisation: the “line” is set by the central committee and enforced on the ground by full-time organisers . . .
For most members, their contact with the party's structures is dominated by the relationship with the organiser. Yet the organiser is not elected by the members but is imposed by the centre . . . Knowing that they are untouchable by grassroots members, organisers tend to be characterised by astonishing insensitivity and arrogance . . . Because they are appointed by, and report to, the central committee, their loyalty is cast iron. Similarly, because the central committee appoints and directs organisers, it backs them to the hilt . . .
Ostensibly, the central committee is elected at the annual conference by delegates sent by the branches (or districts, or whatever format is in existence at the time): usually one delegate for every 10 members. But what invariably happens is that the central committee recommends a “slate” of candidates, and asks whether there are any other slates. We have never known of an alternative slate being put forward. In effect the central committee elects itself . . .
This method strongly acts against the democratic spirit and stamps out critical thinking. Members tend to become submissive, passive, and hidebound - being spoon-fed the politics without thinking or evaluating counterarguments. What happened to Marx's dictum “doubt everything'? It certainly does not get applied to the party line. And when the central committee railroads through a line with undemocratic practices such as packing meetings, most members meekly accept the argument - popular with Stalinists in the past - that “it had to be done”: a mantra that excuses the most nefarious of practices . . .
When it comes to the editorship of the party's publications, democracy is completely out of the question. The argument seems to be that editors should be drawn from the central committee and their authority stems from conference. In reality, the jobs are farmed out between central committee members or those very close to them . . .
The party continuously advocates the principle "never lie to the class". But . . . [it never tells] the truth to members regarding membership figures. It has been years since these have been revealed. The reason, we believe, is that the party membership has declined enormously since the mid-1990s - we estimate its size to be about a third to a half of what it was then . . . A democratic, accountable, organisation would regularly reveal the true membership figures to its members as of right, and if they have fallen, provide an explanation. It would also enable ordinary members to demand accountability and, if need be, allow for the removal of central committee members deemed responsible. But alas, none of this happens . . .
The undemocratic culture of the party moulds the political character of members. Some maintain their independence of thought and integrity. But there is no doubt that on the left, the reputation of party members has fallen. There is the constant refrain that in non-party gatherings, others are mystified at the mechanical behaviour of SWP members, always voting the same way, talking, and behaving like automatons . . . Once the epithet "party hack" sticks, it is very rarely removed . . .
The truly bright sparks in recent years on the international horizon for left politics has been the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements. What is crystal clear from these is that millions of people wish to see an alternative to the sham democracy (or no democracy) of the present world. They are certainly not going to tolerate undemocratic and authoritarian practices of left organisations - and this perhaps helps explain why they have not joined those such as the SWP in any significant numbers. The lesson is abundantly clear: without a relentless commitment to genuine democracy, accountability, and civilised debate, the project of winning a better world will remain grounded. The SWP shows no signs of understanding this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)