I’ve been an avid reader of Oliver Kamm’s weblog (click here) since he started it – and his new book, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, is as readable and as feisty as you’d expect it to be.
I also agree with its basic thesis, that at some point in the past half-century much of the left in Britain and America -- and elsewhere, though most of his examples are decidedly Anglo-Saxon – forgot a crucial lesson of the 1930s and 1940s, that opposition to totalitarianism should be at the very core of foreign policy in every democratic polity.
But when it comes to the detail, I’m afraid I part company. He’s got too much of his history horribly wrong.
Kamm starts well, identifying the failure of the most of the 1930s left (with hindsight quite extraordinary) to recognise either (a) that the rise of Hitler necessitated rearmament or (b) that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian power and at best an unreliable ally against Nazism.
After that, however, he loses the plot, starting with his account of the British left in the 1940s. He’s right that some of the left was sympathetic with Stalin then. But he lazily elides the outlook of the tiny group of Labour Soviet fellow-travellers with that of the “third force” left, the dominant Labour left faction – grouped around Tribune – which from 1945 until 1947-48 argued for a united democratic socialist Europe independent of both Washington and Moscow (a position most famously articulated in the pamphlet Keep Left). Both the fellow-travellers and the Keep Leftists, were, in Kamm’s view, equally gullible useful idiots for Moscow.
Yet that simply wasn’t the case. The “third force” left was never of one mind, but it included some of the most consistent left critics of Soviet society and Soviet foreign policy (among them George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and Franz Borkenau). And nearly all the “third force” left was driven by events – in particular the seizure of power in east-central Europe by communists backed by Soviet occupiers – to accept that an anti-totalitarian western European alliance with the United States, as advocated by Ernest Bevin, the Labour foreign secretary, was the only option for democratic socialists. By 1948, the Labour left was emphatically pro-Nato. But you don’t get a hint of it from Kamm.
More important, despite Kamm’s claims to the contrary, this remained the dominant perspective of the democratic left in the Labour Party for the next 50 years – regardless of its criticisms of US policy, regardless of its opposition to nuclear arms and regardless of regular outbreaks of wishful thinking about how the Soviet Union and its satellites might be on the brink of democratic reform.
There was always a tiny group of hardline pro-Soviet left-wingers in the Labour Party, including several MPs: Frank Allaun, Ron Brown and James Lamond spring to mind from the 1980s. They were fools and worse, and they should not have been tolerated as they were – but they were never the majority of the left, even during the left’s enthusiasms for the false dawns of Khruschev’s thaw or Gorbachev’s glasnost.
The overwhelming majority of Labour’s unilateral disarmers and critics of US foreign policy – from Nye Bevan to Robin Cook – remained committed to British membership of Nato; and some of them were the most outspoken critics of “actually existing socialism” in British politics.
In the Labour Party, it was the Realpolitiker crew on the right – with Denis Healey in the vanguard from the 1940s until the 1980s – that, after its initial cold-war enthusiasm for confronting communism, most consistently argued for accommodation with Khruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov et al and opposed any western action whenever Moscow clamped down.
Apologists for the Soviet Union did play a bigger role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, at least in its 1980s manifestation, than in the Labour Party. But again they were not in the driving seat, contrary to Kamm’s suggestions. Throughout the 1980s, CND was dominated politically by supporters (mainly soft-left – Footite, Kinnnockite – Labour) of the European Nuclear Disarmament campaign, the group led by Edward Thompson that argued for disarmament by both superpowers in Europe and promoted dialogue with – and supported – dissidents in the Soviet bloc. I deputy-edited END’s magazine, and I can vouch for the fact that Vic Allen, the hardline Stalinist on the CND executive who, it recently emerged, spied for the Stasi, was as much our enemy as he was MI5’s.
END, along with various libertarian and Trotskisant leftists – Solidarity, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe – kept up a relentless critique of Soviet totalitarianism (though we rarely used the word) long after the Labour right had drifted into Kissingeresque Realpolitik. The demonstrations against the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 were organised by expat Poles and the libertarian left outside the Labour Party, not by cold-war right-wing social democrats. And if you were looking for anti-totalitarianism in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t happening in the public pronouncements of John Gilbert or the rest of the Nato-loyal right-wing Labour establishment: the sound of freedom was END talking to Vaclav Havel.
There’s more than one way to be anti-totalitarian, in other words, and it’s not essential for anti-totalitarians always to adopt the most hawkish foreign policy stance available. The utility of confrontation or military intervention or negotiation and diplomacy has to be judged case by case. Kamm is right to emphasise the principle of anti-totalitarianism – but there’s no need for anti-totalitarianism to make you a neo-con.
25 December 2005
22 November 2005
WE'RE ALL LOSING OUR RELIGION - 2
OK, I accept the last post was a bit crude in its conclusions (as several respondents have said) but it was supposed to be.
I don't think jihadism is entirely attributable to sexual frustration. But we do need to think through the crisis of Islam in terms of sexual politics: back to early Wilhelm Reich, of course, but also back to the socialist feminists of the 1970s who reinterpreted macho class politics through the prism of gender.
I don't think jihadism is entirely attributable to sexual frustration. But we do need to think through the crisis of Islam in terms of sexual politics: back to early Wilhelm Reich, of course, but also back to the socialist feminists of the 1970s who reinterpreted macho class politics through the prism of gender.
17 November 2005
WE'RE ALL LOSING OUR RELIGION
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 November 2005
I’m not a religious believer and haven’t been for a very long time — I think I must have come to the conclusion that god doesn’t exist when I was 12 or 13, and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.
It’s not a big thing in my family. Neither of my parents was at all religious, and the only serious believers among my close relations were my grandmother (who was married to an avowed militant atheist) and one aunt. My school was more of a problem: a minor public school, it insisted on compulsory chapel and RE, and during my early teenage years I was in regular small-scale trouble for talking during chapel (for which the penalty was cleaning the first XV’s rugby boots) and for being rude to teachers in RE lessons.
What the hell: by the time I was 15, the school had relaxed about compulsory chapel and RE and much else besides — in the sixth form one liberal teacher even put on a showing of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If ..., in which Malcolm McDowell leads an armed uprising in an authoritarian C of E boarding school — and since then the only times I’ve suffered for my unbelief have been those occasions when I’ve had to sit through religious ceremonies at weddings, funerals and the like.
The worst was when a single-mother friend persuaded me to endure two hours of happy-clappy nonsense at a Muswell Hill church because she wanted to get her daughter into the local C of E primary and needed a plausible male to act the devout husband in front of the vicar. Never again.
But plenty of people have a really tough time making their way in life as unbelievers. The most famous case in recent years is that of Salman Rushdie, against whom the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a sentence of death for apostasy after the publication of The Satanic Verses, but Rushdie is not alone. Professing atheism is apostasy in Islam and is traditionally punishable by execution — and in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and several other countries the punishment is still on the statute book or whatever the equivalent is. Unbelievers (and for all we know they could number millions) live in constant fear of their lives. Many other countries in the Islamic world do not enforce the death penalty for apostasy but nevertheless have severe blasphemy laws, among them Pakistan, where the penalty for blasphemy is life imprisonment and blasphemy actions are common.
Of course, in western Europe, blasphemy laws (in defence of Christianty) have fallen into disuse, though they still exist in several countries, among them Britain. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people always have an easy time of it giving up religion. At least a dozen Brits I know have been disowned by their families for abandoning their faith — three of them were thrown out of their parental homes for it — and I know plenty of others who keep quiet about their faithlessness in front of their parents even though they have long since left home.
***
Now, I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but most of the people I know of my generation or older who have been dropped by their families for ditching their religion come from Christian backgrounds — and most of those of a younger generation are former Muslims.
This could just be coincidence. And it could be because few of my friends and colleagues of my own age or older are Muslims or ex-Muslims, whereas lots of my students and former students are. I certainly wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much from a handful of examples. But hunch tells me that it is probably the result of something bigger — that Islam in Britain is beginning to go through precisely the same process of decline in the face of disbelief that Christianity experienced in the course of the 20th century.
This view is, in the current climate, a bit heterodox. The cant of the day is that, for better or worse, Islam in Britain — as elsewhere in Europe — is on the march, and that the Muslim community is an increasingly important political actor. George Galloway and a large part of the far left see Muslims as allies in anti-imperialism. Since 7/7, the government has been desperately trying to find Muslims who can credibly persuade Muslim youth not to become jihadis. The Spectator rants about the threat to our existence posed by “Eurabia”.
But what if the rise of radical Islamism among Muslim youth in Europe is in fact a symptom of a crisis of belief? What if the young men who turn to jihadism do so for the most part because they can’t get laid — because the girls they think should be theirs are turning them down because they can’t stand the idea of life with a dickhead 20-something would-be patriarch and have given up the religion?
Sorry if it’s not PC, but I’m more and more convinced that this is the story. Muslims in Britain are losing their religion. A few loons are resisting, but in the long run we’ll all benefit.
I’m not a religious believer and haven’t been for a very long time — I think I must have come to the conclusion that god doesn’t exist when I was 12 or 13, and nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.
It’s not a big thing in my family. Neither of my parents was at all religious, and the only serious believers among my close relations were my grandmother (who was married to an avowed militant atheist) and one aunt. My school was more of a problem: a minor public school, it insisted on compulsory chapel and RE, and during my early teenage years I was in regular small-scale trouble for talking during chapel (for which the penalty was cleaning the first XV’s rugby boots) and for being rude to teachers in RE lessons.
What the hell: by the time I was 15, the school had relaxed about compulsory chapel and RE and much else besides — in the sixth form one liberal teacher even put on a showing of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If ..., in which Malcolm McDowell leads an armed uprising in an authoritarian C of E boarding school — and since then the only times I’ve suffered for my unbelief have been those occasions when I’ve had to sit through religious ceremonies at weddings, funerals and the like.
The worst was when a single-mother friend persuaded me to endure two hours of happy-clappy nonsense at a Muswell Hill church because she wanted to get her daughter into the local C of E primary and needed a plausible male to act the devout husband in front of the vicar. Never again.
But plenty of people have a really tough time making their way in life as unbelievers. The most famous case in recent years is that of Salman Rushdie, against whom the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a sentence of death for apostasy after the publication of The Satanic Verses, but Rushdie is not alone. Professing atheism is apostasy in Islam and is traditionally punishable by execution — and in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and several other countries the punishment is still on the statute book or whatever the equivalent is. Unbelievers (and for all we know they could number millions) live in constant fear of their lives. Many other countries in the Islamic world do not enforce the death penalty for apostasy but nevertheless have severe blasphemy laws, among them Pakistan, where the penalty for blasphemy is life imprisonment and blasphemy actions are common.
Of course, in western Europe, blasphemy laws (in defence of Christianty) have fallen into disuse, though they still exist in several countries, among them Britain. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people always have an easy time of it giving up religion. At least a dozen Brits I know have been disowned by their families for abandoning their faith — three of them were thrown out of their parental homes for it — and I know plenty of others who keep quiet about their faithlessness in front of their parents even though they have long since left home.
***
Now, I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but most of the people I know of my generation or older who have been dropped by their families for ditching their religion come from Christian backgrounds — and most of those of a younger generation are former Muslims.
This could just be coincidence. And it could be because few of my friends and colleagues of my own age or older are Muslims or ex-Muslims, whereas lots of my students and former students are. I certainly wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much from a handful of examples. But hunch tells me that it is probably the result of something bigger — that Islam in Britain is beginning to go through precisely the same process of decline in the face of disbelief that Christianity experienced in the course of the 20th century.
This view is, in the current climate, a bit heterodox. The cant of the day is that, for better or worse, Islam in Britain — as elsewhere in Europe — is on the march, and that the Muslim community is an increasingly important political actor. George Galloway and a large part of the far left see Muslims as allies in anti-imperialism. Since 7/7, the government has been desperately trying to find Muslims who can credibly persuade Muslim youth not to become jihadis. The Spectator rants about the threat to our existence posed by “Eurabia”.
But what if the rise of radical Islamism among Muslim youth in Europe is in fact a symptom of a crisis of belief? What if the young men who turn to jihadism do so for the most part because they can’t get laid — because the girls they think should be theirs are turning them down because they can’t stand the idea of life with a dickhead 20-something would-be patriarch and have given up the religion?
Sorry if it’s not PC, but I’m more and more convinced that this is the story. Muslims in Britain are losing their religion. A few loons are resisting, but in the long run we’ll all benefit.
16 November 2005
HELP WANTED
As advertised earlier, I've got a big project on at the moment: editing George Orwell's journalism in Tribune for a book coming out next year. Click here for the Orwell in Tribune blog where I'll be posting most of the next six months.
6 November 2005
GALLOWAY LATEST
Thanks to Slugger for drawing attention to this extraordianry interview with "Gorgeous" George on the BBC's Northern Ireland TV channel. Unless I've missed something, this is the first time Galloway has stated explicitly that he couldn't give a damn where the money came from to run his political campaigns.
2 November 2005
FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO BE REALLY STUPID
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 4 November 2005 *
I know that, in the grand scheme of things, whether or not you’re allowed a Marlboro with your pint of Adnams in the Horse and Groom or a nice Chilean cabernet with your meal in the restaurant car on the 20.30 from Liverpool Street doesn’t really matter that much. But for some reason — not just that I frequently enjoy a fag with my beer and once a week polish off a half-bottle of red with my dinner on the way home — I get hot under the collar when I read about government plans to ban smoking in pubs and drinking on public transport.
OK, I know that the pub smoking ban is now not likely to be complete, so I’ll still be able to light up in the two pubs I use most frequently, as long as I don’t do so at the bar — neither the aforementioned Horse and Groom (Woodbridge Road, Ipswich) nor the Prince Arthur in Charles Square, Hoxton, do food as long as you don’t count pork scratchings or cheese sandwiches.
And OK, I realise that the idea of banning booze on public transport is just an idea and is a long way from the statute book: it made the headlines last weekend because it was contained in a policy paper by Louise Casey, aka “Tony Blair’s anti-social behaviour tsar”, and was discussed at a meeting at Chequers.
Oh, all right, and I also know that I could live with a pub smoking ban or a public transport booze ban. I cope perfectly well with smoking bans imposed by my various workplaces, by cinemas, theatres, shops and public transport and, increasingly, by non-smoking friends in their homes. If smoking is banned in pubs and restaurants, I’ll just go outside for a snout if I want one. And I’m not such a hopeless alcoholic that I couldn’t survive a train journey without a little tipple.
My problem is that I don’t see why it’s the state’s business to interfere with these minutiae of my everyday life. I accept that tobacco smoke is unpleasant to many non-smokers and that it is bad for the health. I agree that no one should be forced to endure a smoky atmosphere against their will.
But, as things stand, coercion doesn’t come into it. People can choose whether or not to visit a pub or restaurant in which smoking is allowed — and they can choose whether or not to work in one, just as they can choose whether or not to work in an abattoir or as a motorcycle courier. It might be really stupid to opt for drinking, eating or working in a place that’s smoky; it’s certainly stupid to smoke. But if I choose to be stupid, it’s a decision that I’ve made, and it’s not up to the state to force me to change my mind.
Drinking on public transport is different in one respect: the apparent motive for the proposed ban is to prevent passengers who are the worse for wear from making life unpleasant for those that are not. I don’t have a problem with this motive, in that I’m all in favour of everyone being able to travel without being harassed by drunks.
But think about it. There are already all sorts of laws proscribing the sort of behaviour the ban is aimed at curtailing: the problem is that there is no way of enforcing them. In the interest of efficiency, conductors have been removed from buses and guards from trains, and the cops are too busy doing more important things to get involved.
The simple truth is that banning booze on public transport won’t make a blind bit of difference. It won’t stop anyone getting on a bus or a train steaming drunk and spoiling for a fight. And, unless it is accompanied by the reintroduction of conductors and guards, it will be no more enforceable than existing laws. Anyone who really wants to get pissed on the train or bus will buy a few tinnies or a bottle before embarking on their journey, then tell anyone who challenges their drinking to get lost. The sole effect of a ban will be to deny a harmless pleasure to passengers who pose no threat to anyone.
I know that complaints about the “nanny state” are a staple of the rightwing press — and that many of the complainants against drinking and smoking bans take rather a different position when it comes to sex and drugs. But I’m consistent. If you want to get totally Flintoffed or completely Cameroned, as far as I’m concerned you can do it whenever you like as long as you don’t sing tuneless Norwich City songs or bore me to tears with the story of your life while I’m trying to read the Economist on my way home on a Friday night. And if you wish to engage in whatever nefarious sexual pratice takes your fancy in private with another consenting adult — or indeed other consenting adults or none — that’s fine by me too. It’s none of my business.
And if it’s none of my business, it’s none of the state’s business either. There is a private sphere in which the state should have no role beyond advice — that smoking is bad for your health, that drinking too much and too often turns you into an alcoholic, that keed spills or that vigorous buggery without a condom spreads Aids. If people take notice, fine. If they don’t, and keep on shagging shamelessly without any protection after a night on the tiles drinking, smoking furiously and snorting coke, what the state needs is not new legislation but a new advertising agency.
* This column was not used — for the simple reason that I'd got the week wrong to deliver it and it was out of date by the time I was supposed to file. What a klutz.
I know that, in the grand scheme of things, whether or not you’re allowed a Marlboro with your pint of Adnams in the Horse and Groom or a nice Chilean cabernet with your meal in the restaurant car on the 20.30 from Liverpool Street doesn’t really matter that much. But for some reason — not just that I frequently enjoy a fag with my beer and once a week polish off a half-bottle of red with my dinner on the way home — I get hot under the collar when I read about government plans to ban smoking in pubs and drinking on public transport.
OK, I know that the pub smoking ban is now not likely to be complete, so I’ll still be able to light up in the two pubs I use most frequently, as long as I don’t do so at the bar — neither the aforementioned Horse and Groom (Woodbridge Road, Ipswich) nor the Prince Arthur in Charles Square, Hoxton, do food as long as you don’t count pork scratchings or cheese sandwiches.
And OK, I realise that the idea of banning booze on public transport is just an idea and is a long way from the statute book: it made the headlines last weekend because it was contained in a policy paper by Louise Casey, aka “Tony Blair’s anti-social behaviour tsar”, and was discussed at a meeting at Chequers.
Oh, all right, and I also know that I could live with a pub smoking ban or a public transport booze ban. I cope perfectly well with smoking bans imposed by my various workplaces, by cinemas, theatres, shops and public transport and, increasingly, by non-smoking friends in their homes. If smoking is banned in pubs and restaurants, I’ll just go outside for a snout if I want one. And I’m not such a hopeless alcoholic that I couldn’t survive a train journey without a little tipple.
My problem is that I don’t see why it’s the state’s business to interfere with these minutiae of my everyday life. I accept that tobacco smoke is unpleasant to many non-smokers and that it is bad for the health. I agree that no one should be forced to endure a smoky atmosphere against their will.
But, as things stand, coercion doesn’t come into it. People can choose whether or not to visit a pub or restaurant in which smoking is allowed — and they can choose whether or not to work in one, just as they can choose whether or not to work in an abattoir or as a motorcycle courier. It might be really stupid to opt for drinking, eating or working in a place that’s smoky; it’s certainly stupid to smoke. But if I choose to be stupid, it’s a decision that I’ve made, and it’s not up to the state to force me to change my mind.
Drinking on public transport is different in one respect: the apparent motive for the proposed ban is to prevent passengers who are the worse for wear from making life unpleasant for those that are not. I don’t have a problem with this motive, in that I’m all in favour of everyone being able to travel without being harassed by drunks.
But think about it. There are already all sorts of laws proscribing the sort of behaviour the ban is aimed at curtailing: the problem is that there is no way of enforcing them. In the interest of efficiency, conductors have been removed from buses and guards from trains, and the cops are too busy doing more important things to get involved.
The simple truth is that banning booze on public transport won’t make a blind bit of difference. It won’t stop anyone getting on a bus or a train steaming drunk and spoiling for a fight. And, unless it is accompanied by the reintroduction of conductors and guards, it will be no more enforceable than existing laws. Anyone who really wants to get pissed on the train or bus will buy a few tinnies or a bottle before embarking on their journey, then tell anyone who challenges their drinking to get lost. The sole effect of a ban will be to deny a harmless pleasure to passengers who pose no threat to anyone.
I know that complaints about the “nanny state” are a staple of the rightwing press — and that many of the complainants against drinking and smoking bans take rather a different position when it comes to sex and drugs. But I’m consistent. If you want to get totally Flintoffed or completely Cameroned, as far as I’m concerned you can do it whenever you like as long as you don’t sing tuneless Norwich City songs or bore me to tears with the story of your life while I’m trying to read the Economist on my way home on a Friday night. And if you wish to engage in whatever nefarious sexual pratice takes your fancy in private with another consenting adult — or indeed other consenting adults or none — that’s fine by me too. It’s none of my business.
And if it’s none of my business, it’s none of the state’s business either. There is a private sphere in which the state should have no role beyond advice — that smoking is bad for your health, that drinking too much and too often turns you into an alcoholic, that keed spills or that vigorous buggery without a condom spreads Aids. If people take notice, fine. If they don’t, and keep on shagging shamelessly without any protection after a night on the tiles drinking, smoking furiously and snorting coke, what the state needs is not new legislation but a new advertising agency.
* This column was not used — for the simple reason that I'd got the week wrong to deliver it and it was out of date by the time I was supposed to file. What a klutz.
2 October 2005
BROWN WILL MEAN BUSINESS AS USUAL
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 September 2005
I suppose it was inevitable that this week’s Labour Party conference would become the Gordon and Tony Show. Tony Blair declared earlier this year that he would be quitting as prime minister some time during the current parliament, and Gordon Brown is so strongly placed to succeed him that no one credible is likely to stand against him.
So it’s hardly surprising that many journalists have spent the week in Brighton desperately searching the texts of speeches, analysing body language and talking to “allies” of Blair and “friends” of Brown in the hope of finding out (a) when Tony will go and (b) how Gordon will be different.
Not that they’ve discovered anything very much about either. Blair didn’t announce his imminent departure, which means that he probably isn’t retiring this year but, er, we still can’t be quite sure. And Brown said nothing to indicate what he would do differently, though he did make it pretty clear that he wouldn’t be any friendlier to the trade unions or any less enthusiastic for free trade. So we’re still guessing what Brown would be like as PM, just as we were before.
For what it’s worth, my hunch is still that Blair will go this time next year or early in 2007 rather than hanging on until late 2007 or even 2008. The next general election does not need to be until 2010 but (unless the opinion polls turn against Labour, which is by no means impossible) it is more likely to be in spring 2009.
Because it makes sense for a new prime minister to have a good two years in charge before polling day — enough time to establish familiarity with the voters but not enough to start looking jaded — and because Labour’s leadership election process is rather long-winded, the feeling in my bones is that Blair will be gone by spring 2007.
As for how Brown would be different as prime minister, well, we’ll see. I’m sure he will be much growlier than Blair and much more serious. But I’m afraid I don’t buy the idea that he will change very much of substance.
It’s true that he has deeper roots in Labour politics than Blair — he was active in Scottish Labour politics years before Blair joined the party and is an assiduous networker — and that 30 years ago he was quite left-wing. But he abandoned his youthful lefttsm long ago, and during the past decade has (for better or worse) been at least as responsible as Blair for Labour policy.
The invention of “New Labour” was a joint Brown-Blair effort. It was Brown who embraced the private finance initiative, Brown who abandoned “tax and spend”, Brown who resisted calls for big increases in pensions. He is just as ardent an Atlanticist as Blair and has said and done nothing to indicate that he would take a different approach to foreign policy. There have been faint indications that he might be interested in reviving the process of constitutional reform, but otherwise everything suggests a Brown premiership will mean business as usual.
***
On a different subject entirely, I know that new releases from the National Archives rarely make the front pages. But I’m still just a bit surprised by how little coverage there has been this month of the publication of a massive collection of documents detailing the security state’s surveillance in the late Betty Reid, one-time witchfinder general of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The Guardian gave the released papers a cursory mention, the Times ran a story remarking on the banality of much of the material, and that was just about it.
Yet the documents — page after page of transcripts of tapped telephone calls, copies of intercepted correspondence and MI5 and Special Branch agents’ reports — are quite remarkable.
It’s no surprise that the spooks took an interest in Reid, who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and rose to become head of its organisation department, responsible for enforcing party discipline. The Sunday Times revealed more than 20 years ago that her live-in nanny for many years, Betty Gordon, had been an MI5 agent.
But the newly released documents show in extraordinary detail precisely what the spooks’ interest entailed in the 1940s and 1950s. They followed her everywhere she went, recorded the identity of every person she met, listened to and transcribed every phone call she made and opened and copied every letter she was sent.
Of course, a lot of the documentation produced by this intensive surveillance is banal or incomprehensible. But the picture of the cold-war security state’s methods that emerges from them is fascinating. It’s clear that the spooks had the CP pretty much completely penetrated in this period.
Reid responed to the Sunday Times story about her MI5 nanny with the immortal words: “I’m afraid it makes me look rather silly.” This new material makes her and her comrades look even sillier.
I suppose it was inevitable that this week’s Labour Party conference would become the Gordon and Tony Show. Tony Blair declared earlier this year that he would be quitting as prime minister some time during the current parliament, and Gordon Brown is so strongly placed to succeed him that no one credible is likely to stand against him.
So it’s hardly surprising that many journalists have spent the week in Brighton desperately searching the texts of speeches, analysing body language and talking to “allies” of Blair and “friends” of Brown in the hope of finding out (a) when Tony will go and (b) how Gordon will be different.
Not that they’ve discovered anything very much about either. Blair didn’t announce his imminent departure, which means that he probably isn’t retiring this year but, er, we still can’t be quite sure. And Brown said nothing to indicate what he would do differently, though he did make it pretty clear that he wouldn’t be any friendlier to the trade unions or any less enthusiastic for free trade. So we’re still guessing what Brown would be like as PM, just as we were before.
For what it’s worth, my hunch is still that Blair will go this time next year or early in 2007 rather than hanging on until late 2007 or even 2008. The next general election does not need to be until 2010 but (unless the opinion polls turn against Labour, which is by no means impossible) it is more likely to be in spring 2009.
Because it makes sense for a new prime minister to have a good two years in charge before polling day — enough time to establish familiarity with the voters but not enough to start looking jaded — and because Labour’s leadership election process is rather long-winded, the feeling in my bones is that Blair will be gone by spring 2007.
As for how Brown would be different as prime minister, well, we’ll see. I’m sure he will be much growlier than Blair and much more serious. But I’m afraid I don’t buy the idea that he will change very much of substance.
It’s true that he has deeper roots in Labour politics than Blair — he was active in Scottish Labour politics years before Blair joined the party and is an assiduous networker — and that 30 years ago he was quite left-wing. But he abandoned his youthful lefttsm long ago, and during the past decade has (for better or worse) been at least as responsible as Blair for Labour policy.
The invention of “New Labour” was a joint Brown-Blair effort. It was Brown who embraced the private finance initiative, Brown who abandoned “tax and spend”, Brown who resisted calls for big increases in pensions. He is just as ardent an Atlanticist as Blair and has said and done nothing to indicate that he would take a different approach to foreign policy. There have been faint indications that he might be interested in reviving the process of constitutional reform, but otherwise everything suggests a Brown premiership will mean business as usual.
***
On a different subject entirely, I know that new releases from the National Archives rarely make the front pages. But I’m still just a bit surprised by how little coverage there has been this month of the publication of a massive collection of documents detailing the security state’s surveillance in the late Betty Reid, one-time witchfinder general of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The Guardian gave the released papers a cursory mention, the Times ran a story remarking on the banality of much of the material, and that was just about it.
Yet the documents — page after page of transcripts of tapped telephone calls, copies of intercepted correspondence and MI5 and Special Branch agents’ reports — are quite remarkable.
It’s no surprise that the spooks took an interest in Reid, who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and rose to become head of its organisation department, responsible for enforcing party discipline. The Sunday Times revealed more than 20 years ago that her live-in nanny for many years, Betty Gordon, had been an MI5 agent.
But the newly released documents show in extraordinary detail precisely what the spooks’ interest entailed in the 1940s and 1950s. They followed her everywhere she went, recorded the identity of every person she met, listened to and transcribed every phone call she made and opened and copied every letter she was sent.
Of course, a lot of the documentation produced by this intensive surveillance is banal or incomprehensible. But the picture of the cold-war security state’s methods that emerges from them is fascinating. It’s clear that the spooks had the CP pretty much completely penetrated in this period.
Reid responed to the Sunday Times story about her MI5 nanny with the immortal words: “I’m afraid it makes me look rather silly.” This new material makes her and her comrades look even sillier.
16 September 2005
LABOUR LOSES BOTTLE
Council tax revaluation to go, according to the Guardian. Very brave, I don't think. It's all falling apart quicker than I'd imagined in my worst dreams.
12 September 2005
ICH BIN EIN BERLINER
I worked on the first edition of the Berliner Guardian last night as a sub on the comment page and I am massively impressed by the redesign, which is stunning.
Typographically, it’s a peach. I’ve always thought straight-down-the-line slab-serif fonts were a bit late-1970s/early-1980s (remember when Rockwell Bold ruled OK?).
But the new Guardian’s Egyptian is flexible and quite exquisite. It’s back to Century Schoolbook and then on some. Very, very nice, an amazingly attractive reassertion of modernist typography. The only place it doesn’t quite work for me so far is the drop caps, which look rather like the default font when the computer is set to Courier . . .
As for layout and page design – wow. Great use of white space, restraint where it's needed, very few problems for subs trying to sort it out (mostly) – a triumph.
Well done comrades!
Typographically, it’s a peach. I’ve always thought straight-down-the-line slab-serif fonts were a bit late-1970s/early-1980s (remember when Rockwell Bold ruled OK?).
But the new Guardian’s Egyptian is flexible and quite exquisite. It’s back to Century Schoolbook and then on some. Very, very nice, an amazingly attractive reassertion of modernist typography. The only place it doesn’t quite work for me so far is the drop caps, which look rather like the default font when the computer is set to Courier . . .
As for layout and page design – wow. Great use of white space, restraint where it's needed, very few problems for subs trying to sort it out (mostly) – a triumph.
Well done comrades!
8 September 2005
ONE KENNY MILLER
Edvard Grieg! Henrik Ibsen! Edvard Munch! Roald Amudsen! Thor Heyerdahl! Can you hear me, Thor Heyerdahl ! Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!
7 September 2005
REDS UNDER THE BEDS
There was a piece by Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian yesterday on the latest releases from the National Archives, which mentioned in passing some MI5 material on the late Betty Reid, the Communist Party apparatchik who from the 40s until the 70s was most responsible for rooting out deviationists from the CPGB. Norton-Taylor didn't make a lot of it, but to me it looks like the most comprehensive documentation yet made public of the security services' surveillance of the CP in the middle years of the 20th century. I've already spent two hours downloading and reading bits and bobs, and I've still got hours more fun to come. More on this anon.
25 August 2005
WHAT A DRAG IT IS GETTING OLD
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 26 August 2005
There's nothing like the death of a prominent politician still in his or her fifties to remind you that, if a week is a long time in politics, a couple of decades can pass in the blink of an eye.
It seems only yesterday that Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam were 30-something rising stars of Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party, the brightest hopes of the soft left. I met them both in the mid-1980s through European Nuclear Disarmament (the bit of the 1980s peace movement that was most critical of Soviet nukes) and over the next 15 years saw a lot of them while I was working as a political journalist. They were both Tribune regulars in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was on this paper, and both were valued sources of copy and talk when I was on the New Statesman and New Times.
As personalities, they were radically dissimilar except insofar as they were both irrepressible individualists, engaging and friendly. But in their politics they were remarkably close. They shared many of the same causes — Europe, proportional representation, civil liberties, environmentalism — as well as a political trajectory. Both threw in their lot first with Kinnock, then with John Smith and then with New Labour; both served in senior roles in Tony Blair’s Government; and both returned frustrated to the back benches after being frozen out by the Blair cabal (though in very different circumstances).
Mowlam died after a long illness and retirement from the Commons; Cook died suddenly when he still had every chance of returning to cabinet. But they will be missed in much the same way by their personal and political friends. Both were the life and soul of any gathering. And without them, it is difficult to think of anyone quite so charismatic who can carry the torch for the radical democratic Left politics they espoused.
***
But it’s not just the Left that should be worried by their deaths. Cook and Mowlam were members of a generation that remains the mainstay of the current government — and is not getting any younger.
No fewer than 19 of the 23 members of the cabinet today are, like Cook and Mowlam, in their fifties, born in the first postwar decade, brought up on the welfare state and the Beatles and the Stones and that revolution stuff. Perhaps most importantly they were formed politically by the implosion of the Labour Party in the wake of the 1979 defeat by Margaret Thatcher. Only two of the current cabinet, John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, are over 60; only two under 50, David Miliband and Ruth Kelly (40 and 37 respectively). (There’s also Douglas Alexander, 38, who goes to cabinet but isn’t actually a member.) By 2009, when the next election comes, a majority of current cabinet members will be eligible for bus passes within a couple of years if they haven’t got them already. And by 2014 — well, do the sums.
OK, by historical standards, they’re still young as a cabinet — and there’s nothing to rule out serving as a minister into your eighties. OK, there are a few junior ministers coming up who will make it to cabinet before too long. OK, you don’t win anything with kids.
But parties need to rejuvenate themselves, and Labour is going to find it difficult to do it, just as the Tories have since the late 1980s. Most of the PLP is of the same generation as the cabinet. There has been little turnover of personnel in the past couple of elections, and there are few undiscovered stars. A handful of old-stager MPs might retire next time just as they did in 2001 and 2005. But the party in the country is hardly brimming with enthusiastic activists in their twenties and thirties:the replacements for retiring MPs are likely to be uninspiring apparatchiks, just as they have been for the past decade or more.
Sorry if this sounds pessimistic, but I’ve got a hunch that a tired and ageing Labour will lose in 2014, then spend 15-20 years in the wilderness desperately searching for fresh blood, just like after 1979. And when we win again, I’ll be in my seventies.
***
On another subject entirely, I’ve just got back from a holiday in Scotland, during which I visited George Orwell’s old house at Barnhill on the island of Jura with my friend (and fellow Tribune contributor) Kevin Davey.
I knew Barnhill was remote, but I’d not quite got my head round how remote until we got there — after driving some 20 miles down a single-track road from Craighouse, the nearest village with a pub and a shop, then walking six miles from where the road ends. Orwell first visited almost exactly 60 years ago, in late summer 1945, and lived there during the summer of 1946 and for most of 1947 while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Most of Orwell’s friends thought he was crazy to move there, and until last week I wondered what the attraction could have been. But now I think I know. Jura is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in Britain — rugged, wild, silent, wet. If it weren’t for the midges it would be a major tourist attraction. Long live the midges.
There's nothing like the death of a prominent politician still in his or her fifties to remind you that, if a week is a long time in politics, a couple of decades can pass in the blink of an eye.
It seems only yesterday that Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam were 30-something rising stars of Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party, the brightest hopes of the soft left. I met them both in the mid-1980s through European Nuclear Disarmament (the bit of the 1980s peace movement that was most critical of Soviet nukes) and over the next 15 years saw a lot of them while I was working as a political journalist. They were both Tribune regulars in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was on this paper, and both were valued sources of copy and talk when I was on the New Statesman and New Times.
As personalities, they were radically dissimilar except insofar as they were both irrepressible individualists, engaging and friendly. But in their politics they were remarkably close. They shared many of the same causes — Europe, proportional representation, civil liberties, environmentalism — as well as a political trajectory. Both threw in their lot first with Kinnock, then with John Smith and then with New Labour; both served in senior roles in Tony Blair’s Government; and both returned frustrated to the back benches after being frozen out by the Blair cabal (though in very different circumstances).
Mowlam died after a long illness and retirement from the Commons; Cook died suddenly when he still had every chance of returning to cabinet. But they will be missed in much the same way by their personal and political friends. Both were the life and soul of any gathering. And without them, it is difficult to think of anyone quite so charismatic who can carry the torch for the radical democratic Left politics they espoused.
***
But it’s not just the Left that should be worried by their deaths. Cook and Mowlam were members of a generation that remains the mainstay of the current government — and is not getting any younger.
No fewer than 19 of the 23 members of the cabinet today are, like Cook and Mowlam, in their fifties, born in the first postwar decade, brought up on the welfare state and the Beatles and the Stones and that revolution stuff. Perhaps most importantly they were formed politically by the implosion of the Labour Party in the wake of the 1979 defeat by Margaret Thatcher. Only two of the current cabinet, John Prescott and Margaret Beckett, are over 60; only two under 50, David Miliband and Ruth Kelly (40 and 37 respectively). (There’s also Douglas Alexander, 38, who goes to cabinet but isn’t actually a member.) By 2009, when the next election comes, a majority of current cabinet members will be eligible for bus passes within a couple of years if they haven’t got them already. And by 2014 — well, do the sums.
OK, by historical standards, they’re still young as a cabinet — and there’s nothing to rule out serving as a minister into your eighties. OK, there are a few junior ministers coming up who will make it to cabinet before too long. OK, you don’t win anything with kids.
But parties need to rejuvenate themselves, and Labour is going to find it difficult to do it, just as the Tories have since the late 1980s. Most of the PLP is of the same generation as the cabinet. There has been little turnover of personnel in the past couple of elections, and there are few undiscovered stars. A handful of old-stager MPs might retire next time just as they did in 2001 and 2005. But the party in the country is hardly brimming with enthusiastic activists in their twenties and thirties:the replacements for retiring MPs are likely to be uninspiring apparatchiks, just as they have been for the past decade or more.
Sorry if this sounds pessimistic, but I’ve got a hunch that a tired and ageing Labour will lose in 2014, then spend 15-20 years in the wilderness desperately searching for fresh blood, just like after 1979. And when we win again, I’ll be in my seventies.
***
On another subject entirely, I’ve just got back from a holiday in Scotland, during which I visited George Orwell’s old house at Barnhill on the island of Jura with my friend (and fellow Tribune contributor) Kevin Davey.
I knew Barnhill was remote, but I’d not quite got my head round how remote until we got there — after driving some 20 miles down a single-track road from Craighouse, the nearest village with a pub and a shop, then walking six miles from where the road ends. Orwell first visited almost exactly 60 years ago, in late summer 1945, and lived there during the summer of 1946 and for most of 1947 while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Most of Orwell’s friends thought he was crazy to move there, and until last week I wondered what the attraction could have been. But now I think I know. Jura is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in Britain — rugged, wild, silent, wet. If it weren’t for the midges it would be a major tourist attraction. Long live the midges.
13 August 2005
ON HOLIDAY
I'm off for a week in Scotland, in the course of which I hope to visit George Orwell's old house in Jura. I'm looking forward to it the same way I looked forward to holidays when I was six.
10 August 2005
7/7 – 7
Not for the first time, Harry has posted before me on something I’ve been chewing over: the strange way in which, on Iraq and 7/7, a lot of the left has adopted a traditionally right-wing isolationist position – “The 7/7 perpetrators wouldn’t have done what they did if we’d not been in Iraq. So if we’d wanted to be left alone, we should never have got involved in Iraq in the first place. And if we want to be left alone now, we should now get out as soon as possible. What happens in faraway countries is none of our business.”
Harry suggests that this is a new phenomenon, but I’m not so sure. I first noticed something like it 25 years ago in that rather large part of the 1980s peace movement that opposed the deployment of cruise missiles in Britain mainly because they made us more of a target.
People who thought like that were particularly resistant to the idea that anything was wrong with the Soviet Union – not because they particularly admired “actually existing socialism” (they generally took no interest in it) but because they thought that censuring Soviet foreign or military policy or the absence of democratic rights in the Soviet bloc gave succour to the nuclear hawks of the west. This was bad because it made more likely the nuclear Armageddon they so feared – so it was “none of our business” if the Soviet Union jailed dissidents, was entirely undemocratic and terrorised Afghan villagers. Those on the left in Britain who sided publicly with Solidarnosc in 1980-81 and attacked the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan were a tiny minority.
Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the “anti-imperialist” left in Britain often came perilously close in its propaganda to accepting the isolationist right’s argument that Britain should get out of Ireland because what a bunch of psychotic paddies got up to wasn’t worth the life of a single British squaddie.
And if you go back to the 1930s, there was a significant element of “none of our business” isolationist thinking on the left over British rearmament against Germany. Time and again in left-wing newspapers of the period you find opponents of rearmament arguing that, although Hitler was bad, Germany was a matter for the Germans to sort out (and they had been badly done by at Versailles). The last thing we want is to provoke an imperialist war in which we’d be the targets and thousands would die.
It was only after Munich that this mindset was seriously challenged, though it survived long enough to be exploited by the Communist Party between 1939 and 1941 during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Left anti-imperialism and right isolationism have played footsie for rather a long time.
Harry suggests that this is a new phenomenon, but I’m not so sure. I first noticed something like it 25 years ago in that rather large part of the 1980s peace movement that opposed the deployment of cruise missiles in Britain mainly because they made us more of a target.
People who thought like that were particularly resistant to the idea that anything was wrong with the Soviet Union – not because they particularly admired “actually existing socialism” (they generally took no interest in it) but because they thought that censuring Soviet foreign or military policy or the absence of democratic rights in the Soviet bloc gave succour to the nuclear hawks of the west. This was bad because it made more likely the nuclear Armageddon they so feared – so it was “none of our business” if the Soviet Union jailed dissidents, was entirely undemocratic and terrorised Afghan villagers. Those on the left in Britain who sided publicly with Solidarnosc in 1980-81 and attacked the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan were a tiny minority.
Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the “anti-imperialist” left in Britain often came perilously close in its propaganda to accepting the isolationist right’s argument that Britain should get out of Ireland because what a bunch of psychotic paddies got up to wasn’t worth the life of a single British squaddie.
And if you go back to the 1930s, there was a significant element of “none of our business” isolationist thinking on the left over British rearmament against Germany. Time and again in left-wing newspapers of the period you find opponents of rearmament arguing that, although Hitler was bad, Germany was a matter for the Germans to sort out (and they had been badly done by at Versailles). The last thing we want is to provoke an imperialist war in which we’d be the targets and thousands would die.
It was only after Munich that this mindset was seriously challenged, though it survived long enough to be exploited by the Communist Party between 1939 and 1941 during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Left anti-imperialism and right isolationism have played footsie for rather a long time.
7 August 2005
ROBIN COOK 1946-2005 – 2
Two snippets from New Statesman and Society (as it then was) in 1994, one from a piece by Ian Aitken and one a leader I wrote while the boss was away:
Why Robin Cook should lead Labour
Ian Aitken, 3 June 1994
. . . Forget all that patronising guff in the newspapers comparing the shadow trade and industry secretary to a garden gnome, and recalling how he used to be referred to as "Yon wee Scottish health pixie" at the time when he was destroying a succession of Tory health secretaries with his withering tongue. Cook is, quite simply and without qualification of any kind, by far the most effective party warrior currently operating in the House of Commons.
Even if you do not entirely share his left-of-centre attitudes . . . it is sufficient in electoral terms to recognise that Robin Cook is the only frontbencher who regularly makes the eyes of Tory ministers water when he steps up to the despatch box. Most recently, he laid waste to none other than Michael "Tarzan" Heseltine over Post Office privatisation and the DTFs ludicrously over-hyped white paper on competition.
But as I learned the hard way during my first encounter with him, Cook is not just a parliamentary performer. The story is worth repeating, even though it happened 20 years ago. At the time, Cook was still only a prospective candidate, and he had been sent down to London with some other Scottish candidates to learn how to cope with television interviews.
Percy Clark, the then press officer at Transport House, had been let down by some television grandee, and he conscripted me at short notice to stand in as the interviewer. My instructions were to try to make them all cry, and I honestly believe that a few lips quivered as they reeled out of the make-believe studio one by one.
The very last candidate to be wheeled in was a small ginger youth. By now I was actually enjoying my role as a budding Robin Day, and I failed to notice the steely eyes and the belligerent jaw-line. When I gave him the full benefit of my scornful wit, which I had perfected on the others, I was astonished to find my supposed victim lashing back vigorously. Within minutes he had wiped the floor with me, and I was the one with the quivering lip.
I made a mental note, as I tottered into the green room for a restorative, that this was a young man who had leadership potential, and I have stuck to that judgment ever since. So when my ballot paper eventually arrives, I shall be marking it Cook 1, Prescott 2, Brown 3, Blair 4 — which is precisely the opposite of the order in which Fleet Street evidently wants me to vote.
No Cook, no contest (leader, 10 June 1994)
By the time most readers of NSS get this issue, voting in the European election will be over and the runners in the Labour leadership will have declared—as indeed will the non-runners. But as we go to press the only certainty is that Gordon Brown will not be putting his name forward. All the others who have been mentioned as possible contenders have kept their intentions to themselves as planned.
All the same, it is increasingly likely that the best person to lead Labour into the next election is not going to be in the race at all.
Robin Cook has this week apparently been swayed by his poor showing in opinion polls of Labour Party members and supporters not to go for the top job. Far and away the most intelligent and radical of all the would-be contenders – and easily the most effectively combative in the House of Commons and as a public speaker – he seems to have decided that standing would mean risking humiliation and subsequent demotion from his current job as Labour's trade and industry spokesperson.
Many of Cook's supporters will be disappointed, and with reason. He is the most able representative of Labour's libertarian left, a political tendency that deserves a voice in the leadership contest. Given that his economic policy differences with Tony Blair are nowhere near as big as those between Bryan Gould and John Smith, there is no reason to expect that he would have been given the Gould treatment in the event of a Blair victory.
As it is, however, if Cook sticks to his decision not to run, Tony Blair is now virtually unstoppable. The reason is simple. Put bluntly, there is no credible challenger apart from Cook. Of the two hopefuls who seem almost certain to run against Blair from the left, John Prescott cannot win and Margaret Beckett has even less chance. Both Prescott and Beckett are generally admired in the Labour Party, and each has undoubted qualities. Prescott is blunt, pugnacious and sharp-minded, and Beckett has an unrivalled head for detail.
But neither, unlike Cook, is widely considered to be leadership material. On the level of image, it is difficult to imagine Prescott living down his reputation as a loose cannon or Beckett suddenly acquiring a television manner that matches the warmth of her off-air personality.
More important, both are out of tune with the politics of the time. They are very much of the old left – Eurosceptic, against proportional representation for the House of Commons, lukewarm about green politics. Neither will get more than grudging support from the increasingly important part of the Labour left that is pro-Europe, pro-PR and environmentalist . . .
ROBIN COOK 1946-2005
The death of Robin Cook yesterday is a real shock. I knew him well when I was working as a political journalist – he was a member of European Nuclear Disarmament when I deputy-edited its magazine and was a Tribune columnist when I was the paper’s editor, and from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s I met him regularly to talk politics. In 1994, I kept the pages of the New Statesman open until the last minute for a Cook declaration of interest in the Labour leadership that never came. And in 1998 I spent six months helping to organise a big talkfest on Europe for the Foreign Office when he was foreign secretary. I didn’t see much of him after I moved from journalism to lecturing, but remained in fitful contact and was looking forward to seeing him again at Labour conference this autumn. I am, I suppose, a Cookite politically, though the label seems strange. But I also really liked him. It’s a very sad loss.
Cook was by a long chalk the most intellectually impressive figure among his generation of leading Labour politicians. My first vivid memory of him is of an END meeting in the mid-1980s at which I’d been put up to debate him on Labour defence policy. He made mincemeat of me – I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so comprehensively out-done in argument, though others may disagree – but he did it in a thoroughly civilised way. I ran into him a couple of weeks later and he greeted me warmly. I told him I thought he’d had me for breakfast: he raised his eyebrows, looked at me quizzically and informed me that I’d made a coherent case but that I needed a bit more practice.
He was never one to mince words if he disagreed with you – I remember him telling me in the most direct manner that Tribune or the New Statesman had taken idiotic positions on dozens of issues: industrial policy, the intentions of every Labour leader under whom he served, Europe and the euro (on which he was once much more sceptical than he became as foreign secretary), military intervention in the Balkans (which he opposed in the early 1990s) and much more besides. But, contrary to received wisdom, he was neither cold nor arrogant. He was friendly and chatty and personally kind. He always listened, always engaged – in itself unusual in the upper echelons of the modern Labour Party – and always gave the impression that he was open to changing his mind if he was persuaded by arguments and facts.
He had principles, of course: he never wavered in his civil libertarianism, his commitment to democratisation of the British state or his environmentalism. He was one of the first British politicians who articulated the concerns of the 1968 generation, on everything from gay rights to nuclear power. But he was no dogmatist. On Europe, he moved from outright anti-Europeanism in the 1970s through pragmatist acceptance of Britain’s membership of the European Community during the 1980s to out-and-out enthusiasm for British membership of the euro in the late 1990s – not from opportunism but from weighing up the arguments. He opposed western military intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s but by the end of the decade was prepared to press Nato to act against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. Again, it was the arguments that counted.
As foreign secretary he rebuilt Britain’s damaged relationship with the EU and played a major part in dragging the FO into the modern age. He should never have been removed from the post: he fell victim to a combination of Tony Blair’s desire to woo George Bush and Gordon Brown’s antipathy to Cook’s backing for euro membership. After that, as leader of the House of Commons, he was frustrated by Blair on reform of the House of Lords – and then resigned over the Iraq war.
Whether or not he was right about Iraq – and I’m less convinced now than I was at the time of his resignation – quitting government on a matter of principle was brave and honourable. And the way he conducted himself after his resignation, writing trenchant articles criticising Blair yet also pitching in big-time during the election campaign this year to make it clear that the war was no excuse not to vote Labour, was exemplary. He was not a machine politician, but he knew that democratic politics requires machines – parties – to function.
He was 59: he should have been the voice of the reasonable libertarian Labour left for at least another decade and probably more. But it is not to be. RIP.
Denis MacShane has a touching piece in the Observer here.
Cook was by a long chalk the most intellectually impressive figure among his generation of leading Labour politicians. My first vivid memory of him is of an END meeting in the mid-1980s at which I’d been put up to debate him on Labour defence policy. He made mincemeat of me – I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so comprehensively out-done in argument, though others may disagree – but he did it in a thoroughly civilised way. I ran into him a couple of weeks later and he greeted me warmly. I told him I thought he’d had me for breakfast: he raised his eyebrows, looked at me quizzically and informed me that I’d made a coherent case but that I needed a bit more practice.
He was never one to mince words if he disagreed with you – I remember him telling me in the most direct manner that Tribune or the New Statesman had taken idiotic positions on dozens of issues: industrial policy, the intentions of every Labour leader under whom he served, Europe and the euro (on which he was once much more sceptical than he became as foreign secretary), military intervention in the Balkans (which he opposed in the early 1990s) and much more besides. But, contrary to received wisdom, he was neither cold nor arrogant. He was friendly and chatty and personally kind. He always listened, always engaged – in itself unusual in the upper echelons of the modern Labour Party – and always gave the impression that he was open to changing his mind if he was persuaded by arguments and facts.
He had principles, of course: he never wavered in his civil libertarianism, his commitment to democratisation of the British state or his environmentalism. He was one of the first British politicians who articulated the concerns of the 1968 generation, on everything from gay rights to nuclear power. But he was no dogmatist. On Europe, he moved from outright anti-Europeanism in the 1970s through pragmatist acceptance of Britain’s membership of the European Community during the 1980s to out-and-out enthusiasm for British membership of the euro in the late 1990s – not from opportunism but from weighing up the arguments. He opposed western military intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s but by the end of the decade was prepared to press Nato to act against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. Again, it was the arguments that counted.
As foreign secretary he rebuilt Britain’s damaged relationship with the EU and played a major part in dragging the FO into the modern age. He should never have been removed from the post: he fell victim to a combination of Tony Blair’s desire to woo George Bush and Gordon Brown’s antipathy to Cook’s backing for euro membership. After that, as leader of the House of Commons, he was frustrated by Blair on reform of the House of Lords – and then resigned over the Iraq war.
Whether or not he was right about Iraq – and I’m less convinced now than I was at the time of his resignation – quitting government on a matter of principle was brave and honourable. And the way he conducted himself after his resignation, writing trenchant articles criticising Blair yet also pitching in big-time during the election campaign this year to make it clear that the war was no excuse not to vote Labour, was exemplary. He was not a machine politician, but he knew that democratic politics requires machines – parties – to function.
He was 59: he should have been the voice of the reasonable libertarian Labour left for at least another decade and probably more. But it is not to be. RIP.
Denis MacShane has a touching piece in the Observer here.
3 August 2005
7/7 - 6
Norman Geras has an incisive pair of posts on apologists for the 7/7 outrages:
Read the lot here then here.
"There are those who say that terrorist bombing isn't justified but the whole emphasis of whose comment is either to minimize the responsibility of the perpetrators and their 'managers' and supporters, or to deflect the consideration of this responsibility on to other targets. Here are a couple of questions for such people.
"First . . . if understanding and not justifying or condoning is what it is really all about, why is this 'understanding' discourse never deployed by the same people when racist thugs, angry about immigration, carry out hate crimes? It might be said, well, because their anger is unjustified, whereas Muslim anger over Afghanistan and Iraq is justified. But it's understanding, remember, and not justification, that this has just been said to be about, so the fact that the anger of the racists is unjustified is neither here nor there. It could still be a contributory cause and in need of being understood as such. You don't, however, read hand-wringing pieces in the Guardian or the Independent about that. It suggests that the apostles of (apologetic) understanding are caught between two places. They don't want to say that terrorism is justified because ... they don't want to say it. But they do want to dwell on the anger which feeds it, not merely as cause, because they don't do this in pleading on behalf of white racists, or on behalf of those who, angered by acts of terrorism, attack Muslims. It looks like something else, both psychologically and in terms of subtextual meanings, must be going on - as if they felt that some of the justification for the anger might just seep over towards the act, even though they profess to believe that the act isn't justified.
"Second, most of those who opposed the Afghan and/or Iraq wars, though some amongst them did let us know how very angry they were, have not resorted to the bomb and the wrecking of other lives. The vast majority of them, in truth, haven't even engaged in civil disobedience over it. They have remained within the framework of democratic procedure: of protest, argument, use of their votes, and so on. Since these people do not invoke anger on their own behalf towards explaining why they might (one day) violate the usual democratic norms as well as other human beings, why are they so ready to indulge others with this type of understanding? If anger is not a sufficient cause in the way they themselves react, how do they judge it such a mammoth cause of what the bombers do?"
Read the lot here then here.
7/7 - 5
I’m late on this, but what the hell. On Monday, Peter Wilby, former editor of the New Statesman, had an extraordinary column in the Guardian’s Media section (click here) ruminating on the reasons some left-wing journalists fall out with the left consensus and adopt stances that most on the left consider right-wing. His particular target was his friend and one-time employee Nick Cohen, of whom he wrote:
There is of course reason to hope that this might change. The experience of 7/7 has rocked the consensus – even my most fervent Stop the War Coalition friends admit that the bombings were not simply the result of the Iraq war – and there is a minority on the left (Labour Friends of Iraq and so on) that has challenged the easy assumptions of Wilbyism. But there is still a very long way to go.
What are we to make of Nick Cohen, the most uncompromising left-wing columnist in the British press for most of the past decade? How far right is he going? He cheered the Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq and, despite all that has happened and all that has been revealed since, continues to do so. He has also questioned harshly the motives of the anti-war movement.Cohen, wrote Wilby, was following a similar path to Christopher Hitchens, “another jewel in the left-wing crown, who, since September 11 2001, has stood shoulder to shoulder with the American neocons”. Wilby went on:
What causes left-wing commentators to slip their moorings in their 40s? Perhaps some just follow the cliché that if you are not a socialist up to 40, you have no heart and, if you are still one after 40, you have no head. Others find that property ownership or parenthood make them right-wing. Others again get mugged or burgled. I suspect a good many just want more income; after all, there are only a few left-of-centre newspapers and magazines and most of them pay badly, or not at all.Norman Geras had a go at this nonsense (click here), making some sound points with which I agree entirely:
But I fear there is another reason. Left-wing commentators get bored. The past 25 years have not been a fertile period for ideas on the left, and new Labour has induced further timidity, lest bold thinking reawaken Tory devils. Though it now shows signs of fading, the intellectual ferment of our age has been on the right — which, to take just one example, has given far more intelligent consideration to the legalisation of drugs. Leftwing writers and publications are often accused of being too predictable, and the charge has some justice to it.
[Wilby] gives not so much as a hint of any consciousness of a left broad enough to embrace more than one view about the Iraq war, foreign policy, bringing down oppressive tyrannies, ending genocides in progress, humanitarian intervention, that sort of thing. On the contrary, Wilby's left is delineated in terms of notions like 'betrayal' and 'deserting the cause'. He should look around him a bit. Beyond Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen — for all their deserved prominence — he will find there are quite a few people still on the left thinking differently from him, not because they're bored but just because they think, and because they didn't spend whatever time they did spend in acquiring left values in order to end up marching to the greater benefit of one foul dictatorship or another.But I think Geras is wrong in one key respect. Wilby’s simplistic conception of “the left” as a monolithic entity with no room for dissenting views on the Iraq war, foreign policy and so on is not eccentric: it is the mindset of most people on the British left. If it is contested, it is only at the margins. The left consensus at present is precisely that capitalism and American imperialism are the root causes of all evils in the world, that the war to topple Saddam Hussein was simply criminal, that the Cohens and Hitchenses and Gerases are renegades.
There is of course reason to hope that this might change. The experience of 7/7 has rocked the consensus – even my most fervent Stop the War Coalition friends admit that the bombings were not simply the result of the Iraq war – and there is a minority on the left (Labour Friends of Iraq and so on) that has challenged the easy assumptions of Wilbyism. But there is still a very long way to go.
27 July 2005
LINKS AREN'T THE SAME AS CAUSES
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, July 29 2005
First it was George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party. Then came Robin Cook and Chatham House, then a leak from the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre — and this week even John Major joined the club.
Yes, they’ve all come to the conclusion that 7/7 was “linked to” the war in Iraq, something the government has spent the past three weeks vigorously denying.
And it seems that most Brits agree with them. A Populus poll for The Times published on Tuesday showed that nearly two-thirds of voters think that Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain to war in Iraq has “increased the risk of terrorist attacks like the ones this month in London”.
All of which has got the cretino-leftist tendency in the anti-war camp very excited. “The stoicism that was largely a media-political construct is already turning into frustration,” wrote John Kampfner, editor of the New Statesman, in the Guardian this week. “Watch it turn into anger as Blair refuses to acknowledge a link between Iraq and terrorism on our streets.”
Well, maybe — but I suspect it won’t work out as Kampfner and others like him expect and want. “Linked to” is one thing; “caused by” quite another. There’s a massive difference between believing the war in Iraq “increased the risks of terrorist attack” and believing it was the main reason the bombers did what they did. And most Brits (some 80 per cent according to a YouGov poll) don’t reckon it was the main reason.
I think they are right. There is no evidence of any direct connection between Iraq and the perpetrators of either 7/7 or the attempted repeat performance a fortnight later.
None of them, as far as we know, ever lived there or had family or friends killed or wounded in the war. As far as we know, the Iraq war could have been a factor in their actions only insofar as they were opposed to or angry about it.
And a decision to commit indiscriminate murder of civilians on the streets of a city does not flow easily (let alone automatically) from this — even if you see the war as an assault by infidels on your religion and your co-religionists.
Millions of people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, were or are angry about Iraq and have never even considered setting off bombs on public transport. (I am one of them.)
Something else is at least as important here as anger at the war, at minimum a belief that random terrorist murder is justifiable in certain circumstances. This could in theory be simply a matter of the bombers adopting a brutal utilitarian calculus related solely to Iraq — “If we let off bombs in London we will kill innocent people but will hasten withdrawal of the west from Iraq, which will result in fewer deaths in the long run” — but somehow I doubt it was as rational as that.
All the evidence suggests that the bombers were fanatical Islamist jihadists, committed to unremitting war by any means possible to secure a worldwide totalitarian Islamist state and convinced that their self-immolation would guarantee them the highest possible status in the afterlife. If we’re looking for the causes of or reasons for the London outrages, we can’t ignore or explain away this vile, narcissistic, fascist ideology.
The rise of jihadist Islamism long predates the Iraq war. And although jihadism has undoubtedly fed upon popular antipathy among Muslims towards what they see as US and British imperialism in league with (or indeed controlled by) the forces of Zionism, it is much more than a response to particular, in principle reversible, western policies.
The jihadists are not just sworn enemies of western intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere. They are also sworn enemies of tolerance, democracy and freedom to act autonomously in every area of everyday life, all of which they consider anti-Islamic.
They want to eliminate secularism, political pluralism and intellectual and sexual freedoms not just in historically Islamic societies but throughout the world. They think they have a God-given right to use any means to achieve their goal and they glory in dying for the cause.
It is wishful thinking to believe they would simply leave us alone if we got out of Iraq and disowned Ariel Sharon. We would still be targets.
So how do we deal with them? There is a superficially simple answer: we should relentlessly expose their ideology for what it is and oppose them wherever we find them, with force if necessary.
The problem is putting this into practice. No one really knows who they are or where they are.
Jihadism is not run by an Islamintern that could be disabled or at least significantly damaged by pin-point military strikes on some HQ in north-west Pakistan. As we have seen in the past three weeks, even in Britain, with its long experience of IRA terrorism, the domestic security state finds it hard to keep tabs on the jihadists. Even the bombers’ families were unaware of their plans.
This means that rooting out jihadism will be a long, slow, frustrating policing process with plenty of setbacks. But there really isn’t anyfeasible alternative.
First it was George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party. Then came Robin Cook and Chatham House, then a leak from the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre — and this week even John Major joined the club.
Yes, they’ve all come to the conclusion that 7/7 was “linked to” the war in Iraq, something the government has spent the past three weeks vigorously denying.
And it seems that most Brits agree with them. A Populus poll for The Times published on Tuesday showed that nearly two-thirds of voters think that Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain to war in Iraq has “increased the risk of terrorist attacks like the ones this month in London”.
All of which has got the cretino-leftist tendency in the anti-war camp very excited. “The stoicism that was largely a media-political construct is already turning into frustration,” wrote John Kampfner, editor of the New Statesman, in the Guardian this week. “Watch it turn into anger as Blair refuses to acknowledge a link between Iraq and terrorism on our streets.”
Well, maybe — but I suspect it won’t work out as Kampfner and others like him expect and want. “Linked to” is one thing; “caused by” quite another. There’s a massive difference between believing the war in Iraq “increased the risks of terrorist attack” and believing it was the main reason the bombers did what they did. And most Brits (some 80 per cent according to a YouGov poll) don’t reckon it was the main reason.
I think they are right. There is no evidence of any direct connection between Iraq and the perpetrators of either 7/7 or the attempted repeat performance a fortnight later.
None of them, as far as we know, ever lived there or had family or friends killed or wounded in the war. As far as we know, the Iraq war could have been a factor in their actions only insofar as they were opposed to or angry about it.
And a decision to commit indiscriminate murder of civilians on the streets of a city does not flow easily (let alone automatically) from this — even if you see the war as an assault by infidels on your religion and your co-religionists.
Millions of people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, were or are angry about Iraq and have never even considered setting off bombs on public transport. (I am one of them.)
Something else is at least as important here as anger at the war, at minimum a belief that random terrorist murder is justifiable in certain circumstances. This could in theory be simply a matter of the bombers adopting a brutal utilitarian calculus related solely to Iraq — “If we let off bombs in London we will kill innocent people but will hasten withdrawal of the west from Iraq, which will result in fewer deaths in the long run” — but somehow I doubt it was as rational as that.
All the evidence suggests that the bombers were fanatical Islamist jihadists, committed to unremitting war by any means possible to secure a worldwide totalitarian Islamist state and convinced that their self-immolation would guarantee them the highest possible status in the afterlife. If we’re looking for the causes of or reasons for the London outrages, we can’t ignore or explain away this vile, narcissistic, fascist ideology.
The rise of jihadist Islamism long predates the Iraq war. And although jihadism has undoubtedly fed upon popular antipathy among Muslims towards what they see as US and British imperialism in league with (or indeed controlled by) the forces of Zionism, it is much more than a response to particular, in principle reversible, western policies.
The jihadists are not just sworn enemies of western intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere. They are also sworn enemies of tolerance, democracy and freedom to act autonomously in every area of everyday life, all of which they consider anti-Islamic.
They want to eliminate secularism, political pluralism and intellectual and sexual freedoms not just in historically Islamic societies but throughout the world. They think they have a God-given right to use any means to achieve their goal and they glory in dying for the cause.
It is wishful thinking to believe they would simply leave us alone if we got out of Iraq and disowned Ariel Sharon. We would still be targets.
So how do we deal with them? There is a superficially simple answer: we should relentlessly expose their ideology for what it is and oppose them wherever we find them, with force if necessary.
The problem is putting this into practice. No one really knows who they are or where they are.
Jihadism is not run by an Islamintern that could be disabled or at least significantly damaged by pin-point military strikes on some HQ in north-west Pakistan. As we have seen in the past three weeks, even in Britain, with its long experience of IRA terrorism, the domestic security state finds it hard to keep tabs on the jihadists. Even the bombers’ families were unaware of their plans.
This means that rooting out jihadism will be a long, slow, frustrating policing process with plenty of setbacks. But there really isn’t anyfeasible alternative.
16 July 2005
7/7 - 3
Ian Buruma has a characteristically insightful piece in the FT magazine today, taking on leftist attempts to pin the blame for the London bombings on Tony Blair and George Bush:
It would be foolish to deny that western powers have done many bad things, but the arrogant assumption that almost all the world’s ills, from African hunger to mass murder on the London Underground, can be laid at the door of western politicians is not only stupid, but deeply harmful to those who live outside the western world. It lets their own rulers, however murderous, off the hook, and prevents people from taking responsibility for their own societies. After all, if everything is the fault of Blair or Bush, or “neo-colonialism”, or “globalisation”, why bother?Read it all here.
The war in Iraq may not have been a sensible move. It probably did galvanise religious extremism. For the record, I was against it. But to claim that we should not have gone to war with Saddam Hussein because it puts us in the firing line of holy warriors seems a bad, and certainly cowardly argument. Britain would have been in their firing line anyway. Contrary to what Faisal Bodi says, jihadis do have an axe to grind with the western world. Long before Iraq was a gleam in Blair’s eyes, the west was in the holy warrior’s “sphere of hate”. Another false argument against action against Middle Eastern despots is that “we put them there”. Even if it is true that, say, Hussein or Osama bin Laden once had the support of Britain or the US, this is hardly a reason not to oppose them now. Should we have turned a blind eye to their crimes just because Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney once did business with them? This smacks of the same perverted logic which holds that an imperial past should prevent Europeans from condemning the bloody dictatorships that followed the independence of former colonies.
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