SO FAREWELL, THEN, CHARLES KENNEDY - 4

I was a student at the London College of Printing at Elephant and Castle in 1982-83, which meant that the Bermondsey by-election was very much on my patch. I have a vivid memory of the Labour rally in the LCP refectory at which Michael Foot (a little belatedly) turned out to back Peter Tatchell, the Labour candidate he had previously disowned. (He had apparently got him confused with Peter Taaffe, the editor of Militant.) I was an anarchist at the time and heckled Foot -- I shouted "Whitewash!" when he explained his previous disavowal of Tatchell -- and was told by a burly proletarian steward to shut up, get out or have my face smashed in. I shut up ... hey, but did I get feted like Walter Wolfgang?

Whatever, I'm intrigued by Simon Hughes -- who beat Tatchell in that by-election as a Liberal and has been MP for the constituency ever since -- coming out as gay. Bermondsey was an utterly vicious by-election campaign, and the viciousness was all down to Tatchell's opponents -- in what had been a safe Labour seat -- making a big thing of his sexuality.

I don't remember the leaflet "Simon Hughes: The Straight Choice" that has been much mentioned in the past 48 hours as evidence of Hughes's hypocrisy, but that's small beer. It was playing the anti-gay card but with a measure of restraint.

I do however remember the "Which Queen Are You Voting For?" stickers and posters that were all over the lamp-posts and billboards in the last week of the campaign -- pics of Peter T and HM the Q next to the slogan. I might well have one somewhere, though it would take some time to dig it out.

I'd always thought that it was the old corrupt Labour right, supporters of Bob Mellish, the retiring MP, that was behind those. Their candidate in the by-election was the Tammany Hall Labourite John O'Grady, former leader of Southwark council, and their campaign was defined by its disgusting and crude homophobia. O'Grady toured the constituency on a horse-drawn brewer's dray, if I remember rightly, singing a song about how Tatchell liked it up the bum.

But today in the Independent, Tatchell is quoted as saying that he was told by a Liberal activist that the "Which Queen Are You Voting For?" material was put out by Hughes's campaign.

If Tatchell is right, Hughes is a complete scumbag.

GET YOUR CHEQUES OUT FOR THE CAUSE

My alma mater, the venerable left weekly Tribune, has a problem: it has been sued for libel by a Tory, and it needs serious money -- because he has settled out-of-court for a five-figure payment.

The cash is tight, but as Bob Dylan put it, I think it can be very easily done. A hundred donations of £100 makes £10,000 -- so please, comrades, cough up.

Send £50 or £100 -- or more if you can afford it -- to Tribune Special Appeal Fund, c/o Finance department, Tribune, 9 Arkwright Road, London NW3 6AN. Make cheques payable to Tribune Publications Ltd.

Here's the story, from an ad in the current issue:

AN URGENT FINANCIAL APPEAL FOR LEGAL COSTS

Tribune's recent success in putting the magazine's future onto more secure ground and improving circulation has suffered a serious setback in the form of threatened legal action for libel.

In spite of our best endeavours to check the accuracy of a story, we got it wrong. And in spite of publishing a full apology we have been obliged to meet substantial legal costs and damages. In our edition of 29 July 2005 we wrongly stated that the Conservative Leader of Westminster Council, Simon Milton, had offended the gay community in that borough by opposing the flying of the rainbow flag. In fact Cllr Milton is on record as supporting the liberalisation of planning law to enable the rainbow flag to be displayed in establishments in Westminster.

Tribune accepted that the article was defamatory and at the earliest opportunity we published an unreserved apology to Cllr Milton in the same prominent position within the paper as the original article. However, the demand for damages was pursued and the outcome, including costs, was a substantial bill to Tribune. Although Cllr Milton has allowed us time to pay, this is a highly damaging blow at a time when, with scant resources, we were planning a period of continued growth and development.

Many thanks to the following for their generous assistance: lan Aitken, Tony Bodley, AJ Hurt, Barry and Ann Camfield, James Dickens, David Fearnhead, Michael Foot, Simon Fowler, Margit and Geoffrey Goodman, AJ and T Hesp, Peter Jones, Kenneth May, Nicholas Mole, Lawrie Nerva, Keith Rennolds, Tricia Sumner.

If you feel you can help Tribune overcome this current problem and help ensure our survival please send donations urgently to:

TRIBUNE SPECIAL APPEAL FUND, c/o FINANCE DEPT. 9 ARKWRIGHT ROAD, LONDON NW3 6AN.

IT'S JUST LIKE WATCHING IPSWICH

Here’s how Charlton Athletic lined up against Chelsea away in the Premiership today:

T Myhre, L Young, J Fortune, H Hreidarsson, C Powell, D Rommedahl (40 M Bent), M Holland, R Kishishev, B Hughes, D Ambrose (90 S Bartlett), D Bent

And here’s how Ipswich Town lined up against Bradford City away in the Championship on 1 February 2003:

A Marshall, C Makin, T Gaardsoe, M Holland, F Wilnis (45 D Bent), H Hreidarsson, T Miller, J Wright, J Magilton (78 M Reuser), P Counago (53 D Ambrose), M Bent

Strange, huh?

I DON'T DO THIS NORMALLY BUT...

Just because Lady M thinks I shan't, I shall. Here is my take on the 7/7 meme:

7 things to do before I die:

1. Finish my book on the British left and the Soviet Union.
2. Go freelance again.
3. Visit Georgia (the country not the American state).
4. Finish decorating my study and get a carpet for it and sort out the lighting so it’s easy to read.
5. Get some new specs.
6. Quit smoking.
7. Learn to drive.

7 things I cannot do:

1. Play any musical instrument.
2. Drive.
3. Quit smoking.
4. Write coherently while drunk.
5. Marriage.
6. Read comfortably in my study with the lighting as it is.
7. Religion.

7 things that attract me to London:

1. Work.
2. Friends.
3. It’s not too far from home and I can get breakfast on the train if I want.
4. The Prince Arthur, Charles Square N1.
5. The British Library.
6. Hampstead Heath, Blackheath, Hyde Park.
7. Fleet Street, Clerkenwell, the East End.

7 things I often say:

1. Er…
2. An Adnams please.
3. Twenty Marlboro Light.
4. OK, everybody – could you all just shut up? Like now? OK, this week I’m going to be looking at…
5. Ah, hello Roy, thanks for getting back, how are you? I’ve just got a small query on your copy.
6. Can I have a period return with a Network Card?
7. That’s complete bollocks.

7 books that I love:

1. Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
2. The Making of the English Working Class (Edward Thompson)
3. New Grub Street (George Gissing)
4. The Talented Mr Ripley (Patricia Highsmith)
5. Paterson (William Carlos Williams)
6. Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Dwight Macdonald)
7. Twentieth Century British Political Facts (David and Gareth Butler)


7 movies I watch over and over again:

1. The Front Page (Wilder)
2. Some Like It Hot (Wilder)
3. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Tati)
4. Mon Oncle (Tati)
5. The Third Man (Reed)
6. Way Out West (Laurel and Hardy)
7. Kings Of The Road (Wenders)


7 people I want to join in too:

I'm not going that far.

SO FAREWELL, THEN, CHARLES KENNEDY - 3

A truly shocking fact in the story of Mark Oaten, who withdrew from the Lib Dem leadership race just before the News of the World revealed his liaison with a rent boy. As the Observer puts it:

The man recognised him from the TV last February.

Well done, that rent boy.

SO FAREWELL, THEN, CHARLES KENNEDY - 2

Now, I don't really want to get into this, but it has to be said. Every single one of the contenders for the Lib Dem leadership is, as Neil Kinnock would have put it, completely, totally and utterly hopeless.

Ming, oh dear. Simon, oh gawd. The dynamic Mark Oaten — you just can't have a haircut like that in modern politics. Chris Huhne — er, who he?

It's excruciating.

FRATERNAL GREETINGS TO THE RENEGADE AARONOVITCH

David Aaronovitch now has a blog. It's got to be better than Catherine Bennett's spoof Norman Johnson column in the Guardian. Hasn't it?

WHAT SHOULD GO ON RADIO 4 - 2

A big post-bag on this, and most respondents seem to agree with my hit-list. But I'm tempted by this alternative from Padraig Reidy of New Humanist, which grasps what's worst on R4 much better than I did:

1. Something Understood
2. Sunday
3. Quote Unquote
4. Midweek
5. Thought for the Day

No. Please, turn it off!

KAMM'S NEO-CONSERVATISM - 2

Oliver Kamm (click here) has returned fire on my post on his book, saying that I’ve misread his remarks on the Labour left in the 1940s and that I’m wrong about the political character of the 1980s peace movement. So it's time to get personal.

On the first point, he writes:

So far from grouping the post-war Tribune left with the pro-Soviet elements, I stress that the pro-Soviet elements were a minuscule minority, with almost the entire labour movement ranged against them.

The Crossman-Foot-Mikardo line was undermined almost as soon it was published, by Stalin’s opposition to Marshall Aid, Czechoslovakia and Berlin – and to their credit its authors understood this. So far from thinking Tribune left-wingers were useful idiots – a spurious phrase often attributed to Lenin and that I’ve never used – I praise them for realising that an independent socialist commonwealth of Europe was unattainable…

In the 1940s the democratic left was almost monolithic in its acknowledgement of the threat of Soviet totalitarianism.

To which I can only riposte that, even on a third reading of his chapter, I still don’t think he makes it clear enough that the communist fellow-travellers – the likes of Konni Zilliacus, D. N. Pritt and John Platts-Mills – were a tiny minority on the Labour left. And I still don't think that he accepts that "an independent socialist commonwealth of Europe" was an entirely worthy goal (maybe even one we can aim for again in the 21st century?) – even if it was put in abeyance by Stalin's seizure of Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovkia et al. But never mind.

As for the 1980s peace movement, Kamm writes of my claim that the dominant political tendency was the European Nuclear Disarmament group, which stood for “a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal” and engaged in a long and fruitful dialogue with dissidents in the Soviet bloc:

This is mostly wrong. I certainly accept that END and Edward Thompson had no sympathies for the Soviet Union. But they were not, as Paul claims, the mainstream of the peace movement, let alone the dominant faction. Having been there, Paul will recall the debates within CND on whether to campaign against Nato membership, when John Cox of the Communist Party of Great Britain defeated the line argued by Thompson and Jonathan Dimbleby at CND’s annual conference in 1981. Moreover, Thompson’s argument that disarmament and human rights were inextricable causes clearly didn’t survive the collapse of Communism. Finally, the END call for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal had more alliterative appeal than political realism; the troops in Poland weren’t there by invitation. It is quite correct that Vic Allen and the Stalinists were far from the mainstream of the 1980s peace movement. But I do consider that those in CND, such as Paul, who reviled Allen’s support for the GDR had a responsibility to rupture the Popular Front, and they didn’t. How could they, when the dominant voice of the British peace movement was, in fact, affable, silly Bruce Kent glorying in the coalition of Communists and Quakers?

Here, I’m afraid, I’m standing my ground. I accept that END and its allies were defeated in several political battles in CND during the 1980s, but overall we won more than we lost. For most of the 1980s, ENDers and END sympathisers ran the CND campaigning apparatus. We never managed to get CND to embrace our support for dissidents in the Soviet bloc, but we did ensure that it demonstrated for “No cruise, no Pershing, no SS-20s” -- opposing nukes west and east -- and that it participated in the European Nuclear Disarmament Convention process, engaged seriously with the Labour Party and never turned its nominal commitment to withdrawal from Nato into a campaigning priority.

OK, it’s old stuff. But it still matters to me.

WHAT SHOULD GO ON RADIO 4

Andy Kershaw has started something. My top five for the chop now Home Truths has met a deserved end:

1. You and Yours
2. Money Box
3. Midweek with Libby Purves
3. Thought for the Day
4. Woman's Hour

What do you think?

SO, FAREWELL THEN, CHARLES KENNEDY - 1

The removal of Charles Kennedy as Liberal Democrat leader has been a particularly unpleasant business, and I have a hunch that it’s going to be very difficult for the Lib Dems to get over it. I can see why so many of his fellow Lib Dem MPs thought he had to go: he was a shambolic leader, too fond of the pop, apparently clueless about what to do next.

But now he’s gone, they’ve got a bigger problem – because, for all Kennedy’s faults, they don’t currently have anyone better. Menzies Campbell is an insufferable patrician toff; Simon Hughes is a happy-clappy vicar. And that’s about it when it comes to recognisable faces. There’s that bloke with the glasses, and the other one who’s bald – no, not the bald one with the glasses, the other one. Oh, and there’s that woman who won … where was it? No, not her, the blonde.

Add to the mix the arrival of David Cameron as Tory leader, and the Lib Dems look set for a dire time post-Kennedy – and that’s if they manage to keep under control their increasingly fierce internal ideological divisions. Of course, they might just find their own Cameron, a hitherto obscure but dynamic young figure around whom they can unite, and go on to sustain or even improve on their electoral performance in 2005. But hunch says it will be Campbell and a vicious circle of falling opinion poll ratings, panic and internal squabbling.

Some on the left would no doubt welcome a Lib Dem implosion, but I’m not one of them. The main beneficiaries of a collapse in the Lib Dem vote would be the Tories. Not only are they the main challengers to sitting Lib Dem MPs in the overwhelming majority of Lib Dem seats, they would also gobble up the anti-Labour vote elsewhere.

Until now, I’ve been sceptical about claims that the Tories could win in 2009, even after Cameron’s victory. But now I’m not so confident. Indeed, if Cameron manages to complete his centrist repositioning of the Tories, the Lib Dems collapse and Labour botches the succession from Tony Blair, they could even be a shoo-in.

OLIVER KAMM’S NEO-CONSERVATISM

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!