CRETINISM TODAY

I've never had a great deal of respect for Medialens, but this item (thanks to Harry) shows an almost extraordinary stupidity about the differences between how the media work in totalitarian and democratic societies :

"The North Korean media function by simply keeping all dissent strictly off limits. The western system functions by allowing small islands of dissent in an overwhelming sea of conformist propaganda. Of the two, the western system is a far more effective and insidious form of thought control."

Now, I've read Marcuse and Chomsky, and I know where Medialens is coming from — but this bald statement is so ludicrous that it beggars belief.

Does Medialens consider that it would be better off if were simply "kept off limits" and banned by a totalitarian state? Or does it consider that it's preferable to be one of the "small islands of dissent" in the repressively tolerant west?

If the former, it should volunteer its PR services at once to Fidel Castro or disband itself. If the latter, it needs at very least to rethink its fundamental assumptions.

THE LEFT IS WORSE THAN BLAIR

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, February 18 2005

I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in the past five years by leftists listing their disappointments with Tony Blair’s government. For some, it’s the war on Iraq, for others the private finance initiative or selection in schools or rights at work. I’ve written quite a few pieces along these lines myself, most of them castigating Blair for his timidity on Europe and constitutional reform.

But in truth I don’t feel particularly let down. I didn’t have great hopes of the government in the first place. And — OK, except on Europe and constitutional reform — the government has not done significantly worse than I expected.

In fact, today I’m much more disappointed with the left than I am with the government. Back in 1997, my own personal great expectation was that the left would be revived by the experience of Labour in government.

This wasn’t because I shared the Trotskyist delusion that the masses would be radicalised through suffering betrayal by perfidious social democracy. I just thought that even a boringly centrist Labour government would open up political space for the left that had been closed off by 18 years of Conservative government. As the 60s hippy guru Richard Neville said, there might be no more than an inch between Labour and the Tories, but it’s the inch in which we live.

After all, the left had blossomed under the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Those were the decades of radical workplace activism, the student revolt, the rise of the women’s movement and gay liberation, squatting, protests against the Vietnam war, the rediscovery of western Marxism.

True, it had all ended in tears, in the “winter of discontent” and Margaret Thatcher’s election victory. And true, there was plenty that was dreadful about the left in the 1960s and 1970s: the bureaucratic mindset and myopia of much of the trade union left, the lunatic Leninist sects with their revolutionary posturing, the widespread sympathy for Soviet totalitarianism, the bone-headed anti-Europeanism that dominated the Labour left, the incomprehensible jargon of Althusserian academics — and so I could go on.

But, hey, by 1997, the worst of the 60s and 70s left had been consigned to the dustbin of history. The Communist Party, still in 1979 the largest and most influential organisation to Labour’s left, had long since imploded. The largest part of its diaspora – the bit with the money, Democratic Left – had renounced Leninism and embraced social democracy. The various true-believer Trotskyist and Stalinist sects, much reduced in membership, were utterly marginal. No one was pro-Soviet any more except nostalgically, because the Soviet Union no longer existed. Anti-Europeanism seemed to have been abandoned by all but a diehard rump of the Labour left. Althusserianism was but a distant memory.

Of course, there were new idiocies abroad. Some young guns had embraced a naive anti-capitalism that blamed all the world’s troubles on the business activities of McDonalds and Coca-Cola. Others were already reduced to blaming everything on Blair, the closet Tory who had hi-jacked the Labour Party and ended its commitment to socialism. On the whole, though, the prospects for an intelligent, engaged and vibrant British left seemed to me better in 1997 than for many years before.

Eight years on, I don’t know how I could have got it so completely wrong. Far from reviving under Labour, the left has continued to decline — in numbers, influence and relevance.

OK, I’ll accept that the rise of popular opposition to the Iraq war gave the left a boost. But it was the very worst part of the left that benefited: the diehard Leninists of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain, who appointed themselves as the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition. And their hard-core revolutionary defeatism and facile anti-imperialism did more harm than good even in the short term. All that remains from the mass mobilisation of 2003 is the grotesque sideshow of George Galloway, the SWP and a handful of reactionary Islamists in the Respect Coalition. After the election in Iraq, their support for the murderous Sunni-supremacist “resistance” looks like going down in history as the early-21^st-century equivalent of the old Communist Party of Great Britain’s endorsement of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.

Iraq apart, all that most of the left has done since 1997 is moan. It whinges about Blair, it whinges about spin, it whinges about PFI, it whinges — just like in the 1970s — about Europe. There isn’t a coherent left political programme of any description, let alone one that is creative and forward-looking. No one on the left has an alternative economic strategy that is even vaguely credible. Hardly anyone has the faintest idea of what a different foreign policy might comprise. (Setting a deadline for getting out of Iraq, as Robin Cook suggested in a jointly authored piece with Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell, is laughably stupid, and the resurgent anti-European Labour left’s plans to dish the EU constitution, in alliance with the Daily Mail, are beneath contempt.) There aren’t even very many leftists — even Fabians and Demosites — coming up with specific domestic policy bright ideas. For the most part, the left’s line is that if the government is for something, it must be bad.

I’m not denying that there’s plenty the government has done that ought to be opposed. But a left that is merely negative, a left without a project, can never flourish. Eight more years like the last eight, and the left might as well pack its bags and go home.

PESSIMISM OF THE WILL

I was going to post at length on Eric Hobsbawm's extraordinarily downbeat piece on the global prospects for democracy in yesterday's Guardian (click here), and might yet do so, but in the meantime David Aaronovitch in today's Observer (click here) has pretty much said what I was going to say:

"He dismissed the notion that democracy was applicable everywhere 'in a standardised (western) form', that it could succeed everywhere, or that it could 'bring peace, rather than sow disorder'. The conditions for democracy, he wrote, were rare. Then came the historian's judgment. Spreading democracy 'aggravated ethnic conflict and produced the disintegration of states in multinational and multicommunal regions after both 1918 and 1989'. Far better, it was implied, not to do it.

"This is a dismal prospect. Where once socialism could be spread, now not even democracy either can or should be. But would it really have been better, as Eric half implies, had the Habsburg Empire survived the First World War, or had the Ukraine continued to be part of a Russian hegemony after 1989? What are we supposed to do with such an analysis?"

Apart from anything else, Hobsbawm's argument is very bad history. Even the most cursory glance at Europe in the past 30 years shows democracy taking vigorous root in Greece, Portugal and Spain in the 1970s and most of the former Soviet satellite states of east-central Europe after 1989. Yes, there was a bloody war in former Yugoslavia and the fate of the successor states to the Soviet Union itself has been mixed. Yes, western democracy is neither perfect nor a panacea for every ill. But the balance sheet, as the French Stalinist leader Georges Marchais once said of something else, is overall positive. Like Aaronovitch, I'm sceptical about US presidents spouting about democracy and freedom while denying it in practice. And I don't think that the west should adopt a policy of attempting to impose democracy by force of arms. But I'd rather have an American administration banging on about changing the world for the better than one retreating into Realpolitik weasel words about the complexity of every situation and the impossibility of ever improving anything. Remember Bosnia and Rwanda?

IRAQ SOLIDARITY - 3

Alan Johnson's blistering piece here says it as well as it can be said.

TROTSKYISM TODAY - 2

My thanks to the comrades from Socialism in the Age of Waiting (click here) for alerting me to the existence of this) — a collection of articles on British left politics by the late Jim Higgins (obituary here), including many of the pieces he wrote for the Spectator in the 1970s. Enjoy!

THE ELECTION IS IRAQ'S BEST HOPE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, January 21 2005

No one knows for certain what will happen in next week’s election in Iraq — but it is already clear that it will leave a lot to be desired as an exercise in democracy, particularly in the Sunni Arab areas of the country where the insurgency against the occupation is centred.

No election that takes place under military occupation by a foreign power can be truly free. Nor can any election conducted amid a substantial armed insurgency. Most of the 80-plus parties and alliances running for office in Iraq have refused to name most of their candidates because of death threats from the insurgents. The main Sunni Arab partner in interim prime minister Iyad Allawi’s government, the Iraqi Islamic Party, is boycotting the poll, which it said should have been postponed. It appears increasingly likely that the insurgency will make it impossible for polling stations to open in many Sunni Arab areas — and in those where polling can take place there is every chance that a mixture of intimidation by the insurgents and sympathy with them will result in a very low turnout.

So is the poll an utter fraud? Rather a large number of western leftists and liberals seem to think so. But, as ever, some of them deserve to be taken seriously and some most definitely do not.

The least credible in Britain are the assorted Trotskyists and Stalinists who — along with various Islamists — make up the bulk of the Stop the War Coalition and George Galloway’s Respect party. The Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Britain and the rest decided early on that Iraq was best left to a bloody civil war because that would most damage Yankee imperialism — which they oppose as their first, last and only political function.

Now they want the Iraqi election to be a complete disaster — and stuff the consequences for the long-suffering people of Iraq. They declare their support for the insurgents in Iraq, whom they describe as the “resistance”, a seal of approval that evokes the heroic struggles against the Nazis in Europe in the 1940s.

The fact that the Iraqi “resistance” today comprises the most reactionary elements of Islamism and the most psychotic diehards from Saddam Hussein’s quasi-fascist regime has passed them by — or rather, they have deliberately ignored it. They have also conveniently failed to recognise that the “resistance” in the past few months has turned from targeting the American military to targeting civilians.

The implications of this brain-dead anti-imperialism have been long apparent to anyone who follows the Leninists’ antics. But they became horribly clear a fortnight ago with the murder of Hadi Salih, the international secretary of the the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions and a prominent member of the Iraqi Communist Party, who was tortured and killed for the “crime” of opting to work through the electoral process (on an anti-occupation ticket). The leaders of Stop the War took an age to issue a weasel-worded condemnation of the murder of a man whose comrades Galloway recently described as “quislings”. Pass the sick bag.

***

Other western critics of the Iraqi election are not defeatists: they are merely pessimists who doubt it will produce a legitimate government or stop what appears to be a drift to civil war. And it is indeed difficult to see how the election will give the Sunni Arabs proper representation or quickly bring the insurgency to an end.

But, flawed as it is, it remains Iraq’s best hope. The Sunni Arabs account for roughly 20 per cent of the Iraqi people. Roughly the same proportion of Iraqis are Kurds, and 50 per cent are Shia. And in Kurdish and Shia areas there is a vigorous election campaign going on — and every indication that there will be massive and enthusiastic participation on January 30.

Of course, the Kurds and the Shias have selfish reasons for voting. The Kurds see the election as a means of guaranteeing themselves substantial autonomy from Baghdad. And the Shias see it as the means — at last — of ending the Sunni Arab minority’s near-monopoly of state power, a feature of every Iraqi regime from the Ottoman era to Saddam Hussein.

What, though, is wrong with that? These people constitute the majority of Iraqis — and democracy is by definition majority rule. A Shia-dominated Iraqi government with overwhelming electoral support from everywhere but the Sunni Arab areas would be infinitely more legitimate than the current interim administration. Who knows, if it managed simultaneously to reassure the Sunnis that their rights would be respected and to persuade the Americans to announce a timetable for leaving, it might even have enough clout to end the insurgency.

IRAQ SOLIDARITY - 2

I've never been big on petitions, but this one, demanding a response from the pro-"resistance" left in the UK on the assassination of the leading Iraqi trade unionist Hadi Salih – is worth signing. Click here and endorse. And after you've done that, check out John Lloyd's piece on the same site (click here).

IRAQ SOLIDARITY - 1

The Labour Friends of Iraq website (click here) reports that Hadi Salih, international secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, was murdered at his home in Baghdad last night. The assassination says everything that needs to be said about the nature of the "resistance" so admired by George Galloway and others of the "anti-imperialist" left. More here.

LABOUR STILL NEEDS TACTICAL VOTING

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, January 5 2005

There seems to be a growing consensus both in the Labour Party and among the left-of-centre commentocracy that tactical voting against the Tories — a crucially important factor in the 1997 and 2001 general elections — is a thing of the past.

Of course, the reasons the Labour stalwarts and the liberal columnists take this line are very different. For the commentators, the crucial thing is that they believe the government is so disliked that hardly anyone whose first preference is Lib Dem would dream of voting Labour now — and they detect a trend of anti-Labour tactical voting.

For the Labour people, at least the ones I’ve spoken to, what has happened to render anti-Tory tactical voting obsolete is that the Liberal Democrats have declared war on Labour in its urban heartlands in the past couple of years, which makes it imperative that Labour fights back vigorously.

I can see the sense in both points of view. The pundits are surely right that Labour is going to find it much more difficult than in 1997 or 2001 to persuade Lib Dem supporters to vote Labour this time, for all sorts of reasons, the most important of them the Iraq war (though I’m sceptical about the claim that disaffection with Labour is at such a pitch that protest voting will become widespread). And after the Brent East, Birmingham Hodge Hill and Leicester South by-elections and the 2003 and 2004 local elections, it’s perfectly understandable for Labour to decide to face up to the Lib Dems in seats it holds.

But — you could tell that was coming, couldn’t you? — this is not the whole story.

On one hand, the fact that it’s going to be much more difficult for Labour to persuade Lib Dem supporters to vote for its candidates in seats it holds doesn’t mean it shouldn’t try. Indeed, given how important tactical voting against the Tories was in 1997 and 2001, it would be utterly idiotic for Labour to give up on Lib Dem tactical voters. It still needs them — just as much as it needs to persuade its core voters not to vote in protest for the Lib Dems or Respect or anyone else.

This means that Labour cannot afford go too negative on Charles Kennedy and his pals. It has to make it clear that, whatever differences it has had with the Lib Dems on the war, both parties are essentially on the centre-left. And it needs to offer something tangible to liberal opinion to keep the Lib Dem tactical Labour voter’s juices flowing: my choice would be an elected second chamber. In most places with Labour MPs, the message should be no more negative than “Vote Lib Dem and you’ll let the Tory in”.

On the other hand, it remains an incontrovertible fact that the Lib Dems — for all their rhetoric to the contrary — are not realistically targeting many Labour seats. They are in second place in 31 of the Tories’ 100 most marginal seats but second to Labour in only seven of its 100 most marginal. For the Lib Dems to increase their representation in the Commons, they need to beat Tories, and for that they need Labour supporters to vote tactically for their candidates. They also need Labour tactical voters to retain many seats they now hold, most of them in the south where the Tories are their main challengers.

This, however, is where it gets really complicated, because the Lib Dems are rather less interested in getting 20 or so extra MPs than in holding the balance of power in a hung parliament — and for that they need either a giant advance (which isn’t very likely, though you never know) or for the Tories to take a lot of Labour seats but not enough to win a majority. Which means that the Lib Dems, as well as needing Labour tactical votes, also — pay attention at the back! — now have an interest in their supporters voting tactically for the Tories in Labour-held seats where the Tories are second.

So what should Labour supporters do in Tory-held seats where the Lib Dems are the closest challengers or Lib Dem seats where the Tory came second in 2001? They could decide to vote for sure-fire Labour losers to scupper Kennedy’s dream of holding the balance of power — but that would merely improve the chances of the Tories winning a parliamentary majority.

Sorry, folks, but I still think that is the worst possible outcome at the next election — and the best way of avoiding it is to vote tactically against the Tories again. So vote Labour wherever there is a sitting Labour MP or a Labour came second to a Tory in 2001 — and vote Lib Dem wherever there is a sitting Lib Dem MP or the Lib Dem came second to a Tory in 2001. Nothing else makes the remotest sense.

* * *

Finally, on a completely unrelated subject, I’ve spent more time than I should over the holiday writing and editing entries on Wikipedia (click here and follow the instructions), the free online encylopedia — because I discovered rather a large number of entries on the left in Britain, particularly those on the mainstream Labour left, were well below par. I’ve had a go at the worst I’ve come across, but there’s a lot more to be done. Tribune and Gauche readers, get in there. It’s fun.

NEW NEW LABOUR?

There is no need to shed tears over David Blunkett's departure from the cabinet, though the manner of his going was nasty: his replacement by Charles Clarke at the Home Office should be a matter for widespread rejoicing for civil libertarians. Despite his reputation as a bruiser, Clarke is a reasonable man and (contrary to Blunkett's spleen-venting to Stephen Pollard) highly competent: he had the education brief well under control and will be missed as education secretary, particularly in higher education. Don't expect anything spectacular on ID cards — on which I must admit I'm completely agnostic even though I'm a libertarian — but the difference in tone will be marked from the start.

Ruth Kelly as education secretary is daring but I like it: she might be a Catholic and not well loved by the femintern, but she appears to be competent and is at least open to argument. I'm also pleased that Stephen Twigg and David Miliband have been promoted. Both of them are young, hostile to the traditionalist back-to-1945 crew, and the Blair administration needs rejuvenation. They all need to do the business, but at least I have some hope.

Next step? The two old-timers at the top right now who are obviously well past sell-by are Jack Straw and John Prescott - 1970s Eurosceptics and yesterday's men. If he's serious about the referendum on the European constitution, Blair would do well to shaft the pair of them sooner rather than later. C'mon . . .

GALLOWAY ISN'T QUITE YET IN THE CLEAR

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, December 10 2004

No journalist in his or her right mind argues too vigorously with the judgment of a British libel court — and I’m still just about in my right mind. You won’t catch me saying that George Galloway should have lost his case against the Telegraph because he lied in court and trousered large wads of wonga from that latter-day Mussolini, Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, though I’m no admirer of the MP for Glasgow Kelvin (soon to be candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow), I think he won pretty much fairly and squarely — given the rules of battle and the Telegraph’s legal tactics.

The Telegraph had precisely accused him of lining his own pockets with cash from the Iraqi regime (buying with it, inter alia, a “£250,000 villa” in Portugal). And it did so on the basis of a chance discovery of documents it had not established were genuine. Worse, if they were genuine, they did not show that Galloway had personally received a bean from Iraq.

In court, the Telegraph did not use the established defence of justification, that its defamation of Galloway was provably true (which would have meant demonstrating that the documents were genuine and that they showed he had personally benefited from Iraqi cash). Rather it adopted the weak defence that it had published material in good faith that it believed ought to be in the public sphere — the “Reynolds defence” established (if that’s the right word) a few years ago in a libel defence by the Sunday Times in an action brought by Albert Reynolds, the former Irish prime minister.

Like most hacks I know, I like the idea of the Reynolds defence: there are plenty of circumstances in which publication of defamatory material of provenance a bit too dubious to allow the defence of justification should be protected from libel action. They are, however, limited circumstances.

At very least, it should be incumbent on the publisher to make even the slightest question of the authenticity of such material explicit on publication: “If this letter is genuine, it suggests . . .” And the person who is its subject should at very least be given a serious opportunity to put his or her case.

Splashing unsubstantiated inferences from possibly dodgy documents across the front page at the first possible opportunity without allowing any time for someone to respond is — how shall we put it? — indefensible. And that’s what the Telegraph did.

But (and it’s a very big but) this should not be the end of the story. Galloway and his supporters have been crowing about his supposedly complete vindication by the High Court. But the judgment was much more limited. Galloway won because the judge decided that the Telegraph’s defence of its actions was asinine. It didn’t make clear any doubts it had about its documents, it massively over-egged its story and it gave Galloway only the most cursory opportunity to respond to its allegations.

The judgment does not, however, show that the documents on which the Telegraph based its story were fake. Nor does it put to rest the well sourced story — published by the Guardian earlier this year and not challenged legally by Galloway — that he accepted money for a pro-Iraq political campaign from a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat, who got the cash for his donations, with the full support of Saddam’s fascist regime, from the UN programme set up to alleviate the effects on the Iraqi people of the sanctions imposed against Saddam during the 1990s.

This is a less damaging tale than the one published by the Telegraph. There is no evidence that Galloway benefited personally: any cash from Zureikat, he says, went to the Mariam Appeal, Galloway’s anti-sanctions pressure group. And there is no evidence that Galloway ever had even the faintest clue that Zureikat’s cash might have been siphoned off from the UN programme at Saddam’s request.

But this is still pretty damning stuff. At best, it shows Galloway failing to ask questions that he should have asked about where money was coming from. At worst — OK, I’m not going there.

In the meantime, lest we forget, Galloway will live for all time on videotape for his sycophancy to Saddam: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”

He was “Saddam’s little helper”, as the Telegraph headline had it, even if he wasn’t personally paid for his services and even if all the documents the Telegraph turned up were fakes. Now he’s decided to stand against Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, democratic socialists should make sure this apologist for kleptomaniac totalitarian dictatorship is dumped in the proverbial dustbin of history — where he belongs — by volunteering for her campaign.

NEW LABOUR'S LEFT-WING PAST

Francis Beckett has a funny piece in yesterday's Independent (click here) on the leftist pasts of various Labour high-ups, following on from Jack Straw's wierd letter (click here). It's also largely accurate — apart, I'm afraid, for the sidebar, which places the New Labour comrades into rival "Stalinist" and "Trotskyite" camps as follows:

How red is the Labour Party?
Old Trots and old Stalinists now glower at each other across the Cabinet table, where they feel at home because Blairism demands the religious loyalty they are used to. They include:

The Stalinist wing
Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary Former Broad Left president of the NUS; branded "a troublemaker" by the Foreign Office when, on an NUS trip to Chile, his "childish politicking" aimed at embarrassing his right-wing opponents, was "nearly disastrous" for Anglo-Chilean relations.

Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education Former Broad Left president of NUS; led demonstrations for higher student grants, and was, he admits, "a strong opponent of the foreign policy of the USA".

John Reid, Secretary of State for Health Former Communist and researcher for the Scottish Union of Students. Claimed he joined the CP because it was the only non-Trotskyist political group on campus when he was an undergraduate student at Stirling University.

Peter Mandelson, European Commissioner Former Communist and chairman of the British Youth Council. Led a BYC delegation to Cuba in the 1970s.

Trevor Phillips, chairman, Commission for Racial Equality Former Broad Left president of NUS, led sit-ins, went to Cuba with Mandelson's delegation.

Alan Johnson, Work and Pensions Secretary Says he was close to the Communist Party in his youth, and gets agitated if you suggest he might have been a Trot.

The Trotskyite wing
Gordon Brown, Chancellor Showed political colours by choosing to do his PhD thesis on James Maxton, the leader of the rebel Independent Labour Party in the 1920s and 1930s. The ILP was accused by Stalin of being a Trotskyist front.

Alan Milburn, Labour's election planner Before joining Labour Party in 1983, Milburn was the manager of a socialist bookshop in Newcastle, and a CND activist, described, by Roy Hattersley, as "incapable of writing an election manifesto without drawing the battle lines of the philosophical struggle".

Paul Boateng, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Former left-wing rebel. Once called on Labour Party to "have the guts to support workers who have the guts to fight Thatcher".

Denis MacShane, minister for Europe Former left-wing NUJ
leader, arrested on picket lines in the 1970s, once alongside Arthur Scargill. Led the NUJ's biggest strike.

David Blunkett, Home Secretary Former leader of Sheffield City Council, which was known as "the socialist republic of South Yorkshire".

Margaret Hodge, Minister for Children Former leader of Islington Council where she had a bust of Lenin installed in the town hall. During her tenure, it became known as the "Socialist Republic of north London".

Neither . . . nor . . .
Tony Blair, Prime Minister Not known to have believed in anything when young, except God.

Now I don't have a great deal to argue with in the case of the "Stalinists". But I can't quite work out how some of the "Trotskyists" managed to get into that camp. Gordon Brown, for example, was very much anti-Trot as a student (he took a line on the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' work-in that was pretty close to the Communist Party's) and he was close to key Scottish CPers until the CP went under. And I've never come across any evidence that Denis MacShane, David Blunkett or Margaret Hodge were ever more than temporarily allied with Trots, in particular and long-forgotten circumstances. Of course, if anyone has the evidence, I'm quite happy to be enlightened. On the other hand, Ken Livingstone's associations with Trotskyists go back aeons and continue to this day . . . though I suppose he doesn't really count as New Labour.

TROTKSKYISM TODAY - 1

Neal Ascherson has a brilliant essay on Trotsky and his relevance today (or otherwise) not entirely camouflaged as a piece on Issac Deutscher's republished three-part Trotsky biography in the London Review of Books (click here). Jack Straw, who recommended the Deutscher trilogy along with Lenin's Left-Wing Communism in the bizarre letter he sent to the Independent last week (click here), should read it as a matter of urgency, as indeed should all defenders of the contemporary relevance of Leninism -- not least the crew at New Left Review, who republished the Deutscher trilogy but whose raison d'etre Ascherson pretty much destroys.

THE FAR LEFT IS A VERY BAD JOKE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, November 26 2004

Say what you like about the government, the state of British football or the weather, it has been a marvellous couple of weeks for observers of the ludicrous antics of the British far left.

The biggest spectacle, of course, has been George Galloway’s libel action against the Telegraph in the High Court — unresolved as I write — which has been remarkable for the forthright way in which Gorgeous George explained his famous greeting to Saddam Hussein: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”

The MP for Glasgow Kelvin — and soon-to-be Respect Coalition (George Galloway) parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow in London’s East End — said he was merely conveying the solidarity of the Palestinian people, whom he’d just met, to the Iraqi people, who would be informed of his salutation by Saddam — aka "Sir". And the Telegraph’s headline, “Saddam’s little helper”, was, he told the court, losing his calm momentarily, nothing less than “a dagger, a sword right through the heart of my political life”. Ooo-er.

To be honest, though, more heat than light emerged from the Galloway-Telegraph show — and for much of the past fortnight it has been almost eclipsed by the shenanigans surrounding another Scottish charmer of the left, Tommy Sheridan, member of the Scottish Parliament and perma-tanned figurehead of the Scottish Socialist Party, which Galloway refused to join after being expelled by Labour.

The story that did the rounds was that Galloway refused to accept the SSP policy of parliamentary representatives taking only an average worker’s wage from their salary: I am happy to report that Galloway says this was down to Sheridan misunderstanding a joke.

Anyway, Sheridan hit the headlines for resigning from the SSP leadership amid tabloid allegations that he had engaged in rumpy-pumpy with a woman other than his wife, Gail, who is pregnant. Sheridan, who came to prominence as the public face in Scotland of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency’s anti-poll-tax campaign in the late 1980s, denied the scurrilous allegations, said he simply wanted to spend more time with his family-to-be and promised he’d sue.

It seemed like end of story. But then it emerged that the SSP executive had forced him to resign for reasons that were at least in part related to his personal life — if not the story that had been splashed over the Sunday newspaper — and there were reports that he had been stitched up by his enemies in the SSP, who had not only conspired to evict him but had also fed the bourgeois media with various sex-romp claims. All the contenders for Mr Sheridan’s coveted position as leader of the SSP are, incidentally, former members of the Militant Tendency.

Phew! And that was before the return of the Redgraves, glory be, to the political fray, with two members of the famous acting family, Vanessa and Corin, announcing a new political party, Peace and Progress (click here), to fight the next general election.

Younger readers of Tribune might think that Vanessa and Corin Redgrave are no more than distinguished thespians with vaguely leftist views — that’s certainly the picture you’d get from the fawning pieces on their new initiiative in the Guardian (click here) and the Observer (click here) — but in fact it ain’t so.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the pair were leading lights in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, a mad Trostskyist cult, led by the psychopathic Gerry Healy, that was revealed in the mid-1980s to have solicited and taken substantial sums of cash from Arab nationalist dictatorships, including Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya and, yup, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in return for favours that included grassing up exiles to their secret police forces (click here, here and here).

The scandal of the WRP’s Middle East pimping came to light after Healy’s sexual abuse of young women members of the WRP was exposed — and it destroyed the party. Yet the Redgraves remained loyal to their leader even after his disgrace. However inspiring they are on the stage, they have a record of political lunacy matched by no one else alive. There is no evidence whatsoever that they regret anything they have ever done.

And the moral of the story? Sorry, but it’s very simple. These people are at best comedians and at worst mountebanks of the worst kind. There is no credible left challenge to Labour at the next election anywhere in Britain. Vote tactically for the Lib Dems, for sure, but don’t waste your time on the candidates of the far left. They are, without exception, a very bad joke.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MILITANT - 2

The world of the Scottish far-left has been rocked to its foundations by the departure of Tommy Sheridan from the leadership of the Scottish Socialist Party. By all accounts, including thsoe here, the boy had lost it with his comrades -- the SSP executive demanded that he went -- though he says he's resigning voluntarily to spend more time with his family-to-be: his missus Gail is expecting. (He's also suing the Sunday paper that last weekend published what puported to be another woman's revelation that he had had an affair with her.) Whatever, the favourites to succeed him as leader of the SSP are, I'm told, MSPs Colin Fox, Frances Curran and Carolyn Leckie -- each one them a former member of the Militant Tendency. All together now: "Eh Jimmy! Er, we've got to nationalise, er, the top 200, er, monopolies, er, under workers' control!"

JACK STRAW'S BAD HISTORY

Our esteemed foreign secretary has a joky letter in the Independent today denying that he was ever a Trotskyist (as Robert Fisk had erroneously claimed). "Whatever other frailties I may have (many)," he writes, "I have been consistent in my opposition to Trotskyism and the false consciousness it engenders. (I was first taught to spot a Trot at 50 yards in 1965 by Mr Bert Ramelson, Yorkshire industrial organiser of the Communist Party.)" And indeed, as a student politico Straw was very much part of the "Broad Left" of Labour leftists and CPers.

What's strange about the letter, however, is that Straw appends a postscript recommending Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder as "a prescient warning about Trotskyist adventurism".

In fact, it's nothing of the sort. The target of Lenin's polemic was not Trotskyists — at the time the pamphlet was written in 1920, there were no Trotskyists and Trotsky himself was commissar of war in Lenin's government.

Rather he was attacking the left communists in Germany and Great Britain — Anton Pannekoek and Sylvia Pankhurst — who argued that communists should never participate in bourgeois parliaments or reformist trade unions. (Click here for the text of Left-Wing Communism.)

But none of this is what's really weird about Straw's recommendation of this particular Lenin tract. As well as ranting against the left communists, Left-Wing Communism is also excoriating about bourgeois parliaments, reformist trade unions and reformist socialist leaders in the west — "reactionaries and advocates of the worst kind of opportunism and social treachery".

Does Straw really mean to recommend this intemperate anti-democratic diatribe to readers of the Independent? Something tells me that his memory is failing — or that he has never actually read it. But you never know . . .

UNITED FOR PEACE — 25

I've been ridiculously busy this week: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. For now, just a quick post to say that I was amused to get a name-check from Rob Griffiths, general secretary of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, writing in the Morning Star on Monday under the headline "Spectre of communism still haunts Europe". (The piece, in full here, was a belated puff for a meeting of Stalinist hacks at the European Social Forum.)

"The resurgence of the communists," he opined, "has intensified the anti-communism of the ruling classes and their mass media, assisted, as always, by fake 'left-wing' and pseudo-Marxist intellectuals. This is especially the case in Portugal, Sweden, Cyprus and Greece — but we have seen evidence of it in Britain too, where the CPB has expanded its influence in the trade union and peace movements . . . The resurgence of the international communist movement . . . is the most effective riposte to professional anti-communists like Denis MacShane, Nick Cohen and Tribune columnist Paul Anderson and to the amateur ones who constitute tiny left sects."

How elegantly put, comrade — but I'm afraid to relate that we professional anti-communists will not be deflected from our task by the ever-more-spectacular growth of the CPB, with its dozens of fearless militants working as trade union press officers and its hundreds of newspapers sold every day. You see, we're worried that if we don't keep up a barrage of fake "left-wing" anti-communist propaganda, our paymasters in the ruling classes will stop handing over the wheelbarrow-fulls of cash every week to which we have become accustomed. A truly materialist analysis would demonstrate that we have no choice but to fulfil the pseudo-Marxist role our bourgeois masters dictate.

What a simpleton.

I CRIED AND I CRIED

So it all came down to Ohio, and Bush won. I’m not pleased, but that’s democracy. What really gets me is that Oliver Kamm beat me to a variation on “It’s the Guardian wot lost it!” as the title for a post: Blogger was impossible to use most of today. OK, as usual, he didn’t quite get it right, but his post is here .

WOMAN QUITS JOB ON STRUGGLING MAGAZINE – 2

Oh dear — it seems that the Blessed Cristina didn’t resign from the New Statesman on a matter of principle after all: according to a profile in the Evening Standard by David Rowan, she got an offer of a better job and still thinks Peter Wilby is a great editor. So I’ll revert to thinking of her simply as a useless idiot.

WOMAN QUITS JOB ON STRUGGLING MAGAZINE

Well, well, well . . . Up to now I have not been an admirer of Cristina Odone. One, she's a lightweight, the upmarket Glenda Slagg de nos jours. Two, she's religious. And three, she's been handling stolen goods for several years – my old job as deputy editor of the New Statesman, from which I was separated by the vile Geoffrey Robinson's takeover in 1996. (Funny, I find that bitter is best drunk cold.)

But now the girl done good at last. She's quit the Statesman over the fatuous cover on the current issue that equates Tony Blair with Josef Stalin.

I was going to post on the Statesman cover anyway, to make the points that the British left (a) still hasn't grasped the enormity of Stalin's crimes and (b) is in the grip of a quite extraordinary hysteria against Blair.

For now, all I'll say is that no one who knows what Stalin did could possibly claim Blair is doing much the same thing – and the article to which the NS cover refers, a Robert Service puff-piece for his new biography of Stalin, doesn't do it. In fact, it makes it very clear that there isn't that much Blair has learned from Stalin. "Tony Blair has not made the cellars of Bellmarsh prison stream with the blood of innocent detainees," Service writes, very reasonably. "It would be entirely ludicrous to suggest that Blair and Stalin, as exercisers of the might of the state in pursuit of political and personal goals, are in the same category."

So why the treatment on the Statesman cover? Desperation is undoubtedly part of the story – anything to make Blair look bad next to Brown, anything to put the ABC figures up beyond a boring old plateau of 23,000, exactly where it was before Robinson sunk his millions. (Ooh, a cold bitter is good. Fancy a couple of pints?) But it's worse than that. The current regime at the Statesman has a view of the world that is as blinkered as Kingsley Martin's when he refused to publish George Orwell on the Spanish revolution. John Pilger speaks the truth. John Kampfner has the supporting details. Amanda Platell supplies the sophistication. Cretinism rules, with rare pieces from Nick Cohen and the odd review giving us all a taste of what might have been.

At least there's still the Economist.