EU ENLARGEMENT ISN'T JUST ABOUT MIGRATION

Paul Anderson, Chartist, March-April 2004

The most important thing to remember about the impending enlargement of the European Union is just how unimaginable it would have been only a short time ago.

Anyone who had suggested just 15 years ago – in early 1989 – that the European Community would today be about to take into membership a majority of the states of east-central Europe would have been a political laughing stock. The division of the Europe into two hostile blocs and Soviet domination of the east were givens, taken by just about everyone as unpleasant facts of political life that were likely to last a very long time if not forever.

Yet here we are in 2004, and the European club is about to welcome 10 new members, among them four states that were Soviet satellites in 1989 (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and three that were actually part of the Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).

Of course, they will be second-class members when they join on 1 May. For some time, their citizens’ freedom to work wherever they want in the European Union will be restricted, and their farmers will be denied the level of subsidy enjoyed by their counterparts in existing EU member states under the Common Agricultural Policy. None of the new member states will be part of the eurozone, either.

But none of this should be allowed to obscure the momentous importance of this enlargement of the EU. It marks the definitive end of the cold-war division of the continent and the near-achievement of the pioneering 1930s European federalists’ dream of a united democratic Europe.

Of the countries everyone agrees to be European, only Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, the states of former Yugoslavia – apart from Slovenia – and Switzerland are now outside the EU. And that is no mean achievement (although of course there is a strong case for arguing that any definition of “European” that excludes the Russians, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Turks is far too narrow). Even in the late 1990s, when the enlargement proposed was less far-reaching than the one that is now happening, plenty of informed people thought it impossible before 2010.

Which is not to say that the entry of the 10 new members will be unproblematic. In particular, every government in the pre-enlargement EU is worried, to a greater or lesser extent, about the possibility of a giant influx of workers from the accession countries, chasing better wages and better welfare provision. Even the British government, which expects few accession-country immigrants and would anyway welcome them because the labour market is tight, has changed benefit rules to exclude migrants from the accession countries. Nearly all the others, with Germany and Austria in the vanguard, have imposed strict quotas on immigration from the EU’s new members.

Immigration is the issue likely to have the biggest impact in the short term on the politics of the EU. To put it bluntly, if the controls over and disincentives to immigration don’t work – or, rather, are seen as not working by voters in the existing member states, there is a possibility of a swell of anti-immigrant sentiment that is successfully exploited by the right in the west.

This is, however, no more than a possibility. For a start, it is by no means certain that very many people from the accession countries will leave their homelands. Up-rooting everything to work abroad is not something people generally do unless they are either unusually adventurous or suffering from extreme poverty or persecution – and extreme poverty and persecution are not the lot of most citizens of the accession states, with the partial exception of the Roma of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The last time the European Community embraced a batch of much poorer countries – Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1980s – there was no mad rush of migration, and there is no reason to expect this time to be different.

What’s more, it is doubtful that migration from the accession countries will in itself lead to a swell of anti-immigrant feeling even if large numbers move west. There are already many people from the accession countries living in the pre-enlargement EU – and although it would be idiotic to claim that they are never victims of discrimination or prejudice, with the exception of the Roma they are pretty much invisible. They are white and indistinguishable from the majority population by way of religion, dress or social habits – and thus rather difficult to turn into scapegoats for the troubles of the majority. “Vote Labour if you want a Latvian for a neighbour” just won’t wash.

The problem with this scenario is the exception to the rule of invisibility, the Roma – in Britain at any rate. Already, the right-wing press here is running scare stories about the imminent arrival of a flood of gypsies, many of them former failed asylum-seekers. So far, only the British National Party has shown any interest in exploiting the scare for electoral gain, but if it turns out to have any basis in reality it is by no means unlikely – despite Michael Howard’s apparent rejection of anti-immigrant rhetoric -- that the Tories will jump on the bandwagon, pushing a cocktail of anti-European, anti-immigrant xenophobia as their core political message at the next general election. We shall see.

But EU enlargement is important politically not only because of the impact of migration on the domestic politics of current member countries. It will also have ramifications for the EU’s political balance, for the economies of the whole union and for the way the EU’s institutions work.

The effects of enlargement on the political balance of the EU will be less marked than they would have been had it happened in the late 1990s, when social democratic parties were in power in the four biggest EU countries, Germany, France, Britain and Italy – not that they acted in concert, to their shame – and most of east-central Europe was governed by the centre-right. The ascendancy of the centre-left in western Europe was fleeting, and today the existing EU is roughly split between centre-left and centre-right governments. In east-central Europe, there was a shift towards the centre-left in 2001-02, though hardly one of seismic proportions, and today the accession countries’ governments are roughly split between centre-right and centre-left, much as current EU governments are.

But there are significant differences between east and west in the new EU, particularly on foreign policy, with the accession countries generally far more favourable to the United States. The governments of “new Europe”, as Donald Rumsfeld called it, were much closer to Tony Blair in their response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than those of “old Europe”.

How far this will make any difference in the next couple of years is hard to tell, because no one knows what (if anything) the US will do now in its “war on terror”. As ever, what will matter most in European Union politics are general elections in the member states. With nearly many governments east and west looking vulnerable to election defeat, no one can predict with confidence what the situation will be in a couple of years’ time. This year’s European Parliament elections will be an indication of the state of play, but with turnouts everywhere expected to be low even they will need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The economic effects of enlargement are even more difficult to judge. It should be an engine of growth throughout Europe as everyone benefits from the opening of markets – but it might simply benefit the accession countries, exacerbating the globalisation-led flight of employment from the high-wage countries of western Europe while the poorest parts of western Europe suffer from the diversion of EU cash to the accession countries. Whatever, it is likely to have rather less influence on Europe’s economic performance than exchange rates (particularly if the US maintains its weak dollar policy) and the onward march of globalisation.

As for the workings of the EU’s institutions, enlargement will certainly mean a far greater emphasis in the short term on intergovernmental wheeling and dealing – and this in a set-up that is already dominated by intergovernmental carve-ups – for the simple reason that there is no alternative. In the medium to long term, however, everything is up for grabs. The proposed EU constitution is essentially intergovernmentalist, with a few sops to federalism. But there is little sense anywhere that it is a final settlement of the union’s institutional arrangements. No one knows whether its provisions will come into being, let alone that they will prove lasting if they do.

It’s true that it does currently seem unlikely that a polity as big and diverse as the enlarged EU could successfully evolve towards federalism. On the other hand, however, there are powerful pressures in the other direction: the euro, which demands a coherent centrally controlled fiscal policy; the likelihood that the smaller countries of the new EU will tire of being dominated by the big ones; and the EU’s much-discussed lack of democratic legitimacy, which can only be addressed by giving the European Parliament a much greater role, including the power to initiate legislation.

In other words, it’s business as usual on the European scene. There is no way the left can guarantee a social democratic Europe after enlargement. But there is also no reason to give up on that goal, which is no less credible than it ever has been.

NEO-CONS AND THE LEFT - 4

I know this is a bit ancient as a controversy, but Michael Lind (click here) has pretty much admitted that he got it wrong — in the Nation (click here) — about where neo-cons come from . . .

SADDAM'S ADMIRERS ON THE BRITISH LEFT - 5

I heard a while ago that the Guardian had put a crack investigative team on to the story in the French press a few weeks back of the list of beneficiaries (among them George Galloway) of cash syphoned off from the UN oil-for-food programme for Iraq. The result, published today, is impressively strong given the British libel laws (click here). Galloway says he had no knowledge of the origin of the cash. It is unclear whether this story will have any effect on Galloway's action against the Telegraph. In an unrelated development, Guardian columnist George Monbiot has dropped out of Galloway's Respect Unity Coalition on the grounds that he doesn't want Britain's two Green MEPs to be beaten (click here).

'ANTI-IMPERIALISM' IS NOT ENOUGH

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, February 20 2004

By far the most entertaining read of the year — OK, I know it’s only February — is Francis Wheen’s broadside against contemporary bullshit, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. I read it in one sitting last weekend and laughed a great deal.

Wheen, once of the New Statesman and the Guardian and still of Private Eye, has spent the best part of 25 years as a journalist amassing material on mountebanks of all kinds, and he puts it to devastating use. Religious fundamentalists, free-market economists, management gurus, New Labour strategists, deconstructionist intellectuals, internet visionaries — you name them, they all get richly deserved trashings.

Wheen is of the left: his previous books include sympathetic biographies of Tom Driberg, the Labour left-winger, and Karl Marx. But some of the best bits of How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World are his debunkings of left charlatanry — in particular the willful failure of such “anti-imperialist” leftists as John Pilger and Noam Chomsky to recognise that everything the United States does is not by definition evil and that everyone who hates the United States is not by definition good.

Wheen is especially telling on two cases in the recent past when the “anti-imperialist” left lost the plot completely — its shameful opposition to western military intervention to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, and its conclusion after 9/11 that America had it coming because of its policies in the Middle East. “While expressing obligatory if perfunctory regret at Osama bin Laden’s methods,” writes Wheen of the latter, “many self-styled ‘progressives’ seemed to find his motives wholly explicable, and even reasonable.”

What’s particularly worrying about this current of leftist delusion is that it is so persistent. As Wheen points out, the belief that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” led large parts of the western left to view the Soviet Union as an ally and to suppress any criticism of it long after it became obvious to anyone open to reason that it was a brutal police state that had nothing in common with democratic socialism: even in the 1980s, you could find Labour MPs, senior trade unionists and left intellectuals who were as pro-Soviet as any 1930s communist.

More importantly for us today, over the past few months the “my enemy’s enemy” crew have found new friends in what they call the “resistance” in Iraq. No matter that the people attacking US forces and police stations and terrorising ordinary Iraqi citizens are either enthusiasts for the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein or reactionary Islamists — they’re against the Yankee imperialists and so deserve our support.

As Pilger put it in an interview with an Australian magazine a few weeks back (click here for full interview): “We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance, for if the resistance fails, the ‘Bush gang’ will attack another country. If they succeed, a grievous blow will be suffered by the Bush gang.”

I used to have great respect for Pilger, who was a columnist on the New Statesman when I was deputy editor, and I still admire his early work on Cambodia and East Timor. But this line of “thinking” is beneath contempt. Pilger is right that victory for the Iraqi “resistance” would be a blow to the Bush administration. But it would also, more importantly, inevitably mean the imposition of yet another dictatorship, whether secular or theocratic, on the long-suffering Iraqi people — who have every right to be “choosy” — and an end to any hope of a free, decent, prosperous, democratic Iraq.

Sorry, but condemning the Iraqis to barbarism in order to cock a snook at US imperialism is in no sense “progressive”. Iraq needs peace and a sustainable civil society; and to get them the “resistance” must be defeated. The real danger is that the US will pull out of Iraq too soon, abandoning it to a bloody civil war.

I am not arguing that Bush was right to invade Iraq or that the Blair government was right to join in. The war was a massive gamble, and although one part of it came off spectacularly — Saddam was easily toppled and eventually captured — the US and Britain had not thought through what happened next. That was, to say the least, extraordinarily irresponsible.

But there is no way anyone can turn the clock back and stop the war: it happened, and everyone now has to live with the consequences. Having sold the war as necessary to prevent Saddam using weapons of mass destruction that have not yet materialised, Tony Blair has his own cynical reasons for wanting everyone to “move on” from the long-running argument about whether and how the war was justified. But he also happens to be right. The urgent question now is how Iraq can best be helped to emerge from the mess created by the war. And crude “anti-imperialism” is not the answer.

HUTTON SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, February 6 2004

The media furore that has followed the publication of Lord Hutton’s report on the death of Dr David Kelly is of course understandable.

Hutton’s verdict was at odds with what most of the media expected and, more importantly, at odds with what most of them wanted. His damning criticism of the BBC’s handling of Andrew Gilligan’s notorious Today programme broadcast led not only to the resignation of Gilligan but to the departure of Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC’s board of governors, and Greg Dyke, the corporation’s director-general. The government, by contrast, got off scot-free.

But to say that the uproar is understandable is not to justify it. Given Hutton’s narrow brief, and given what emerged in the course of his inquiry, it was never likely that he would come to any conclusion other than the one he came to. The real question the hoo-hah raises is why on earth the media expected anything different — and the answer has precious little to do with their failure to recognise Hutton's undoubtedly pro-establishment record over the years.

Lest we forget, Hutton was not charged with investigating the reasons Britain went to war with Iraq: his task was to look into the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death. Quite reasonably, he limited himself to examining the chain of events, beginning with the production of the government dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, that ended with Dr Kelly’s suicide, focusing in particular on his interview with Gilligan, Gilligan’s subsequent broadcast, and the complex process by which Dr Kelly was identified as Gilligan’s source. He did not even attempt to consider whether the intelligence reports on which the dossier was based were accurate.

During the course of the inquiry, it became clear that Gilligan’s journalism was appallingly shoddy. He had based his story on a single source — which was almost incredibly unprofessional given the seriousness of the allegation that even though the government knew that Saddam Hussein had no WMD capable of deployment in 45 minutes, it nevertheless inserted the claim into the dossier. He had no credible contemporaneous record of his interview with Dr Kelly that showed he had at least reported an allegation in good faith. And he had behaved in an extraordinarily devious way once his story came under fire, attempting to pull the wool over his editors’ eyes about the nature of his source and trying to get Dr Kelly’s identity revealed by underhand means. Gilligan would have deserved criticism from Hutton even if had not emerged that the 45 minute claim had been inserted in the dossier late simply because it arrived late.

It also became clear during the inquiry that the BBC’s initial response to the government’s protests at Gilligan’s broadcast, defending him stoutly without bothering to check the provenance or veracity of his story, had been sloppy in the extreme. Again, the real surprise of last week is that anyone expected the corporation not to be deservedly hammered by the Hutton report.

As for the government, it should have become obvious at an early stage that it was on track to be cleared on the charge that it inserted claims it knew were false in the dossier. The mass of official documents made public by the inquiry certainly showed that the government “sexed-up” intelligence material to produce the dossier, at least in the sense of putting the strongest possible interpretation on it. That was revealing, and deeply unattractive. But there was nothing at all to show that the government had knowingly lied.

Nor should this have come as a surprise. Governments in societies with free media are often evasive, duplicitous and economical with the truth. But they don’t usually tell outright lies they know are outright lies — if only for the cynical reason that the costs of being found out are so great. Only the most desperate and reckless government would have attempted knowingly to falsify the WMD dossier.

None of this is to argue that the government’s handling of the WMD issue in the run-up to the war on Iraq was beyond criticism. There is a strong case for believing that the government seized on WMD as a means of justifying its support for an invasion the US had already decided upon for other reasons, and it has become increasingly apparent that there were major flaws in the intelligence on Iraqi WMD on which it relied.

Still less is it to argue that the BBC should somehow be reined in or prevented from doing investigative journalism. The government’s veiled threats to take the Hutton report into consideration when renewal of the coporation’s charter comes up were sinister and shameful.

My point is that too many journalists approached Hutton with the lazy assumption that it’s OK for a journalist to get a story “95 per cent right” (as former Today editor Rod Liddle put it) and with the prejudice that it can be taken as read that the government is lying to us nearly all of the time. Hutton’s report is a salutary reminder that in journalism the facts matter more than anything else.

TACTICAL VOTING STILL MAKES SENSE

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?

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."

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .

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.

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.

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.