ORWELL'S BRUSH WITH BIG BROTHER

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 18 September 2007

I know it’s a bit late to give you my take on the materials released at the beginning of the month by the National Archives – but I’ve not had a chance before now, so you’re lumped with it. I’m talking about the surveillance files on George Orwell, of course, which occupied the up-market papers for a day or two four weeks ago and since have been completely forgotten.

The documents show that Orwell was tracked by Special Branch and the spooks pretty much from the point at which he decided to quit the imperial police in Burma in 1928 until his death in 1950. The files include reports on his most mundane journalistic activities researching The Road to Wigan Pier – and one Special Branch plod described him in 1942 as holding “advanced communist views”. Cue an outburst of surprise that the powers-that-be could be so stupid as to mistake the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four for a communist-sympathising subversive.

Now, there is certainly something newsworthy about the author of two of the 20th century’s most famous warnings against totalitarian surveillance being watched over and reported on by Britain’s security state – and the files make fascinating reading. (You can get them free as downloads online here.) Yet it’s not so strange that the security state took an interest in Orwell – and the truth is that the people who kept an eye on him were by no means as daft as most commentators on the newly released material suggest.

Orwell was an avowed revolutionary socialist for at least five years of his life, from 1936 to 1941, and he was sympathetic to revolutionary socialism both before and after this period. He fought for a militia in the Spanish civil war that was explicitly dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, then joined the Independent Labour Party during its most intransigent and rhetorically insurrectionist phase. He discussed with Herbert Read the possibility of setting up an underground guerrilla anti-war resistance movement if war came. And then, in the first couple of years of the second world war, he argued that only a revolution could save Britain from fascism. He saw the Home Guard – yes, Dad’s Army – as a would-be revolutionary proletarian militia.

As he wrote in Tribune on 20 December 1940: “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary. We know, even if the Blimps don’t, that without a radical change in our social system the war cannot be won.”

There was even a brief point when he was a communist fellow-traveller. Despite the disparaging references to the Communist Party in The Road to Wigan Pier and his vehement anti-communism from 1937 until his death, before his experience of the Stalinist suppression of the revolutionaries in Spain in 1937 he was not unsympathetic to the communist line. Before his eyes were opened by the Barcelona May Days, he almost joined the communist-dominated International Brigades.

In other words, Orwell was for a significant period of his life a vocal subversive – if one with very little chance of success – and it shouldn’t come as any surprise that there are Special Branch and security service files on him. If there was going to be a revolution in Britain in the late 1930s (and OK, it wasn’t very likely) Orwell was going to be part of it, if only as the first victim of a Stalinist firing-squad.

What is genuinely remarkable, by contrast, is that the files, or at least those that have been released, are for the most part accurate. Apart from the goof by the Special Branch officer who over-enthusiastically claimed Orwell to be a communist sympathiser in 1942 – a report, incidentally, that some superior dismissed as crap – there is little that is other than routinely factual. There is also no evidence that any of the material collected on Orwell did him any harm: he was cleared to work for the BBC in 1942 and as a war correspondent for the Observer in 1943 (although he didn’t do it for a couple of years, becoming literary editor of Tribune instead).

Whether the state should monitor those it sees as subversive is, of course, another question. When I was a revolutionary – and I was, honestly – my comrades and I took it for granted that we were monitored by the state. After all, we were its enemy, and we posed a threat. Since giving up on that revolution stuff, I’ve taken the view that surveillance needs to be kept to a minimum and strictly controlled. But where do you draw the line? Twenty years ago I would have been outraged at tabs being kept on cuddly Paul Foot and harmless Tariq Ali. Now I worry that intelligence on Islamist crazies is utterly inadequate.

WORK? WHO NEEDS IT?

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 August 2007

What did you do this summer? I spent the Saturday on the beach at Felixstowe and the Sunday working.

OK, weak joke – but it’s true. So far in Suffolk we’ve had just one weekend of temperatures soaring into the 80s (that’s above 27C for younger readers) and not a single day to prompt the East Anglian Daily Times to run a “Phew! What a scorcher!” headline. Just about the only thing to feel smug about is that it hasn’t been quite as wet here as it has Yorkshire and Middle England.

But the worst of it is that I spent one of the two properly sunny days we’ve had stuck in an office staring at a screen. Ever since I left university, I’ve had a vague sense every year that I’ve missed half the summer working – and this year I know I have.

To which you might reply: “Stop whingeing” – and you’d have a point. What I do for a living is hardly onerous: I’m an academic and journalist, which means that I spend summer marking exams, preparing lectures, doing odd newspaper shifts, grinding through dull academic administration et cetera. And it’s partly my own stupid fault that I do as much work as I do. If I organised my time better, if I delegated more, if I switched off the mobile phone, if I said “no” more often, I’d get a lot more time off.

The thing is, though, that I currently just want it to stop – and it never does. Twenty years ago I had academic friends who seemed to spend a good 10 or 12 weeks every summer away from the office in the library doing research or in the south of France dossing about, and the main reason I went for an academic job seven years ago was that I wanted a bit of the same. In my dreams!

The truth is that I’ve never seen work as a massively good thing. When I was an anarchist student, I was very impressed by various Italian and French Marxist theorists who saw a growing “refusal of work” on the part of the proletariat as prefiguring the revolutionary transcendence of capital – and although that particularly daft idea lost its appeal for me not long after the grant cheques stopped coming, I’ve never reconciled myself to the idea that work is anything but a more or less unpleasant necessity.

My favourite work of classical Marxism remains The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in -law, first published in 1883, with its ringing declaration: “In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy.” And the one public pronouncement by US President Ronald Reagan with which I have some sympathy is his gag: “It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?”

Now, I know this line of argument winds up a lot of Tribune readers. Last time I used it the paper got lots of angry letters, most of them arguing that I wouldn’t have such an anti-work attitude if I’d ever tasted serious unemployment. Fair enough: if there’s one thing worse than the tedium of wage labour, it’s being involuntarily deprived of it and condemned to hopeless poverty. I’d accept, too, that some sorts of work, in moderate quantities, can be genuinely fulfilling.

But, leaving aside the fact that many if not most jobs are anything but fulfilling, you can have too much of any job – and most of us in Britain do. We work some of the longest hours in Europe and take the fewest days holiday. We commute longer distances than anyone else and suffer more work-stress-related disease.

Why? The main reason is that we need the money. Particularly in southern England but increasingly elsewhere, housing is prohibitively expensive. There is a shocking shortage of social housing, private rented housing is a gigantic rip-off, and the extraordinary inflation of house prices has put first-time buying beyond the reach of all but workaholics on fat salaries and the offspring of rich parents. And once you’ve managed to get somewhere to live at exorbitant cost – almost certainly miles from where you work -- you’ve then got to add the punitive costs of commuting and child care and all the rest.

Building more affordable homes, particularly in the south-east, as promised by Gordon Brown as he became prime minister, is part of the solution, but it will not be enough on its own. We also need faster and cheaper commuting, incentives to encourage companies to introduce electronic homeworking, more public holidays and enhanced rights for workers to allow them to resist employers’ demands for overtime and to reduce their own working hours as they choose. Oh, and summers that last more than a weekend so we can enjoy our more leisurely lives. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

CAPITALISM AND COMMUNITY - 1

I've been out of sorts the past fortnight, and it's not just the usual stuff - getting a bit too drunk at a family function, the thankless grind of work, the weather. It's that I don't have my pub right across the road from me any more. The Horse and Groom, Woodbridge Road, Ipswich, shut down a fortnight ago - and I feel like I've lost a limb.

It's not the booze: it's the people. The Horse and Groom, aka the Doom and Gloom, was a proper old-fashioned working-class boozer. The landlord, Eddie, and his wife, Sarah, ran the place as pubs used to be run. There was a crib team, a darts team, a pool team. And there were regular quizzes, a meat raffle, a lottery syndicate and an annual coach trip to the Newmarket races. You could sit there and read the papers or talk as you fancied. And now - it's sinking in - it's all over.

They had a great send-off the weekend before last, but then the shutters went up - or rather the corrugated metal sheets they now screw over windows and doors to stop squatters and break-ins. And now ... well, now, it's a choice between the Dove or the Grinning Rat (previously the Olive Leaf) 100 yards away or the Milestone 200 yards in the other direction.

So what, you might think. But the reason Ed and Sarah got out was that they'd been made an offer they could only refuse by the company that owned the pub freehold - increased rent plus a continuation of a disgraceful tied deal on booze that meant they were forced to buy most stock at wholesale prices that were beaten by every local supermarket's retail offers. On those terms, they couldn't make a living.

And the reason the company made that offer was that it saw the pub simply as real estate. With Ipswich's dockside redevelopment moving apace, you can get £250,000 no problem for a two-bedroom flat round here - and the pub could easily be turned into four or five bijou dwellingettes. Conveniently, because there are so many boozers within walking distance, change of use is a potential walkover, particularly with a Tory council. No one has been moved in to manage the pub.

Three weeks ago, this time on Sunday, I was thinking of going over for a pint - and I did. Today, I could catch one somewhere else before closing-time if I went out now. But all the other pubs are anonymous places where I don't know anyone. I still see my neighbours, but there's no longer an automatic meeting point: the football and rugby and cricket on the telly, the Saturday lunchtime get-together of the old Labour guys, Nick two doors up very late on a Friday, old Terence talking about books at opening time early evening when the cricket's on.

The point is simple: closing proper pubs wrecks communities, and the criminally anti-competitive practices of the property companies that now run so many of them deserve to be busted. But as things stand there is nothing we can do to stop our boozers being shut and turned into yuppie residences. Time for some serious legislation, Gordon?

CAMPBELL'S SOUP - 2

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 July 2007

Bah! I was going to treat you all to a pastiche of the Alastair Campbell diaries in this column – but that’s already been done by all the Sundays and Private Eye and I don’t want to appear a copy-cat. So instead of sending up Campbell’s deathless prose, I’ll just write about what’s in the book.

Which is, of course, precisely what everyone else has done, but so what. The Blair Years is the UK political publishing sensation of the past decade – I can’t think of a political book that has had anything like its impact since Will Hutton’s The State We’re In way back in 1995, and that was a much slower burner – and I want to share my twopence-halfpenny-worth.

Not that I have deep insider knowledge to impart on the events described by Campbell: far from it. I met him on many occasions in the 1990s when I was working as a political journalist, but the only one that sticks in my mind is a New Statesman lunch at the Groucho Club in summer 1995 when we had a shouting match. He suggested that we should tell him in advance when we were about to publish a story that might embarrass New Labour. I suggested that he could go fuck himself, and it went downhill from there. Nine months later, the Statesman was bought by Geoffrey Robinson, who installed as editor the ultra-Blairite Ian Hargreaves, who in turn fired me and all the other lefties on the magazine apart from John Pilger. So maybe I should have been more diplomatic in dealing with Campbell.

Whatever, I decided around that time that I’d had it with political journalism, at least in the sense of hanging around Westminster chasing stories, covering the party conferences and all that. I’d done 10 years at Tribune and the Statesman, and it had mostly been fun. But I’d had enough of dealing with poisonous spin-doctors and I was sick of politicians who acted as if they had a god-given right to interfere with the left press. I was jaded. It was time for a change. A book on the Labour Party, then goodbye to all that.

I didn’t quite manage the definitive breach – I’m still writing this column, still addicted to political news – but for the past 10 years I have been pretty much spin-doctor-free. I’m in touch with a few politicians I meet for lunch or a couple of beers. But that’s just about it. I’m almost completely out of the loop, which makes me feel just a tad twitchy.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Having read the Campbell diaries from cover to cover, I realise that I’m not that much worse informed about what’s going on than the journalists who are closest to the action.

There might not be much that is news in The Blair Years, though there is a lot more than the first dismissive reports of the book’s contents suggested last week. But there is a great deal that is new. The picture the book paints of life in Tony Blair’s court is more vivid and more detailed than anything an outsider could produce – and it is also at odds in crucial respects with received journalistic wisdom.

On the internal dynamics of the Blair government, for instance, most accounts have hitherto stressed Blair’s dominance of the government or the fraught relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown. But it’s clear from Campbell that, in the first term at least, it makes much more sense to think of the government in terms of a complex series of trade-offs among a “big four” of Blair, Brown, John Prescott and Robin Cook.

No one before Campbell has ever captured the extraordinary intensity and drama-queen pettiness of the rivalries at the heart of New Labour. Nor is there any previous account that makes clear just how neurotic Blair and his entourage were about public opinion. There is also a vast amount in The Blair Years that is genuinely revelatory on the Irish peace process, the Kosovo crisis, Europe and the “special relationship” with the US.

Yes, the Campbell diaries are a self-serving effort by someone whose reputation for truth-telling is not what it might be. Yes, they reveal him to be hate-filled and hate-fuelled. Yes, they have been cut to comply with the Official Secrets Act and to remove anything likely to damage Gordon Brown. There is nothing much in them on policy, and the sections on the build-up to the Iraq war and the post-invasion bust-up between Campbell and the BBC are particularly disappointing, adding little to what is already in the public sphere.

In short, The Blair Years is not trustworthy, nor is it the last word on anything. But it is an important work of contemporary history that will change the way we look at Labour’s first decade in office after 1997. It’s funny how it seems so long ago...

CAMPBELL'S SOUP - 1

I might be late on this, but I wonder whether Simon Jenkins's sour piece today on Ali's little tome has something to do with Campbell's perceptive estimation of Jenkins on page 178:

He struck me as a total wanker: very self-important.

FAREWELL TO THE NUJ BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

The National Union of Journalists' national executive decided on Friday to do no more about its annual delegate meeting decision to call for a boycott of Israel. My tame NEC hack tells me:

The original motion called for the NUJ to call on the TUC to organise a boycott of Israeli goods. The motion having been passed, we wrote to the TUC with this suggestion. The TUC said "no". On Friday the NEC decided that this should be the end of the matter - we have done what we were asked, and will now do no more.

OBITUARY: DOUGLAS HILL

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 6 July 2007

Douglas Hill, the reviews editor of Tribune from 1971 to 1983, has died after being run over by a double-decker bus as he walked over a pedestrian crossing in north London. He was 72.

A charming Canadian polymath with a razor-sharp but self-deprecating wit, he was a prolific author. The best-selling of his 50-odd books were children’s science fiction and fantasy titles: before the arrival of Harry Potter he was the most popular children’s author in Britain. But he also wrote science fiction for adults and several non-fiction titles, among them an anthology-cum-history of this newspaper to mark its 40th birthday 30 years ago, Tribune 40: Forty years of a socialist newspaper, which remains the only book-length account of the first half of its life.

Born in Manitoba and educated at the universities of Saskatchewan and Toronto, he arrived in Britain in 1959 with his then wife Gail Robinson, becoming an editor at a publishing company. He joined Tribune as reviews editor in 1971, taking over from Elizabeth Thomas. “My intention was to carry on, in my way, what she and others before her had established as the proper roles and obligations of the reviews section of a socialist paper,” he wrote modestly in 1977, but it is no insult to Thomas, herself a great reviews editor, to say that he did much more than that.

Under his stewardship, the reviews pages started to fizz, just as the rest of the paper became increasingly worthy-and-dull in its obsession with the arguments against Britain joining (and then remaining in) the Common Market. His choice of reviewers was inspired in its eclecticism, and the column he wrote most weeks, “Platform”, was the closest the paper has come to emulating George Orwell’s “As I Please” column of the 1940s in its intellectual range and in its humour. Many of the people he recruited as writers are still valued contributors more than 20 years on.

He remained in touch with Tribune long after he left: he wrote reviews until well into the 1990s and was a regular at the editorial lunches organised by Sheila Noble, the paper’s production editor, chief sub and unofficial social secretary. Although he joked about being past-it when I last saw him a few months ago, he looked as spry as he was in the 1980s – and his repartee was as dazzling and as mischievous as ever. His sudden death is a shock, and everyone lucky enough to have known him will miss him. He is survived by his son and his former wife.

EVERYBODY'S FIFTH CHOICE - 2

Thanks to Gregg (comments on previous post) for directing readers to Luke Akehurst here and the following details of the first round of voting in the Labour deputy leadership contest:

1st round: MPs, Members, Unions, Total
Benn 4.26, 7.21, 4.93 T:16.4
Blears 4.99, 3, 3.77 T: 11.77
Cruddas 4.63, 5.67,9.09 T 19.39
Hain 4.81, 3.87, 6.64, T:15.32
Harman: 6.54,8.04,4.35 T;18.93
Johnson 8.08, 5.53, 4.55 T:18.16

Now, what this means in terms of real first preference votes, given that there was a 99 per cent turnout among the 371 MPs and MEPs, a 53 per cent turnout among the 180,000 individual members and an 8 per cent turnout among the 3 million affiliated trade unionists is something like this:

Benn 57,000
Blears 36,000
Cruddas 82,000
Hain 59,000
Harman 55,000
Johnson 49,000

OK, all these figures are very rough (and they're exaggerated because of multiple voting, in particular by people who are individual members as well as members of affiliated organisations). But they do suggest that a genuine one member, one vote ballot would probably have yielded a very different outcome (at least if members of affiliated organisations were included, which is a moot point). Hunch tells me it would have gone to Cruddas against Benn in round four — though of course there's no way of telling.

If you exclude members of affiliated organisations, first preferences stack up like this:

Benn 22,000
Blears 9,000
Cruddas 17,000
Hain 12,000
Harman 24,000
Johnson 17,000

With all the necessary caveats, I reckon that would mean Benn by a whisker against Harman in round four...

The Guardian has a neat chart here.

EVERYBODY'S FIFTH CHOICE - 1

Well, not really — but it does seem that Harriet Harman's victory in the Labour deputy leadership election was far from straightforward. She won only on the fifth round on votes redistributed form John Cruddas; and, according to the BBC website, "In the first round she was first choice among Labour Party members, second choice among MPs and MEPS, but fifth choice of union members." True to form, the Labour Party has not published the actual voting figures on its website: is there anyone out there who can supply them?

ONE MP, 845 MEMBERS' VOTES

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 June 2007

At least it’s nearly over. Labour’s deputy leadership contest has been even more uneventful than I expected when I wrote about it last month. It hasn’t set off a serious debate about the future of British social democracy inside the Labour Party — let alone among the voters as a whole. In fact, it has barely engaged even my most political friends. I don’t remember a single discussion of it lasting more than two minutes that went beyond speculation about who will win.

Which of course is the only interesting thing about it, not least because it may well highlight the absurdities of the electoral college Labour uses for leadership and deputy leadership elections.

Labour headquarters and lazy political commentators always describe the party’s means of choosing its leaders as “one member, one vote”, but it’s a bit more complex than that. Every member does have a vote. But, because the electorate is divided into a three-section electoral college, each section with one-third of the total vote, some members have more than one vote because they belong to more than one section. And, more important, the weight of your vote depends on what sort of member you are.

In the first section are Labour MPs and MEPs; in the second individual Labour Party members; and in the third members of affiliated organisations (mainly trade unions). So, because there are 371 MPs and MEPs, 180,000 ordinary members and a little more than 3 million members of affiliated organisations, the vote of each MP and MEP is worth nearly the same as 485 ordinary members’ votes and more than 8,000 affiliated trade unionists’ votes. (These figures are based on the assumption that everyone entitled to vote does so, which of course isn’t so, but you get the picture.)

I’ll accept that this system, adopted in 1993, is less of a dog’s breakfast than the electoral college that preceded it, introduced in 1981. In that electoral college, the unions had 40 per cent of votes, MPs 30 per cent and constituency Labour parties 30 per cent — and neither the unions nor the CLPs were under any compulsion to ballot their members before casting block votes at Labour conference. At least the current electoral college involves the counting of individual votes rather than an aggregation of decisions taken by various committees behind closed doors.

The current system is a dog’s breakfast all the same, however. The only time it has been used before this deputy leadership election was in 1994, when Tony Blair swept to victory in the leadership election and John Prescott won the deputy leadership, with both securing more than 50 per cent of first-preference votes in each of the three sections of the college. But this sort of clear, unequivocal result is by no means guaranteed. The electoral college could also produce a winner who has — say — little support among MPs but strong support among individual members and trade unionists. And in a six-candidate contest the winner could be the fourth on first preferences who picks up a large proportion of second preferences. And so on.

I’m not saying that this weekend will see a messy result, just that it might. And if it does ... look forward to 18 months of Labour doing what it used to do best: arguing about its leadership election procedures. I don’t really want to go there, but if pushed I’d back the leader being elected by MPs alone, with the deputy elected by ordinary members alone — and mandatory annual parliamentary selections. (Just kidding about the last one.)

+++

OK, it's last week’s news, but I’d like to add my tuppence-worth to the controversy over Tony Blair’s assault on the “feral beasts” of the media last week. Having been at the receiving end of the Blairite spin machine during the 1990s, I’m not inclined to sympathy with the man or his way of operating. It was cowardly of him to pick on the poor old Independent and the BBC as his only examples of how the media have dropped the habit of straight reporting: he should at least have fingered the Mail. And he should have made it clear that Rupert Murdoch’s policy of editorial support in return for relaxed media regulation (and no euro) is an outrageous affront to democracy.

But Blair has got a point. The arrogance, cynicism, pack mentality, superficiality, sensationalism and sheer ignorance of much British media coverage of politics are not new, but their ubiquity is. Twenty years ago you could avoid them by shunning the popular national press, local radio and William Rees-Mogg: if you stuck to the qualities, the weeklies, the BBC and ITN you could get your politics straight and in depth. No longer. There is plenty of good political journalism out there, but the smart-arsed, the asinine and the hysterical now crop up pretty much everywhere — and far too much goes unreported. As to why this is so — well, that’s another column.


Footnotes: Gordon Brown is brilliant on Newsnight here. And Hitchens, C does us all proud on Question Time here. Maybe there's some hope after all.

OLD ROMANTICS

Paul Anderson, review of The Offbeat Radicals by Geoffrey Ashe (Methuen, £17.99), Tribune 22 June 2007

The Offbeat Radicals is a book I can imagine being published in the 1930s. It is an erudite introduction for the general reader to a vast swathe of English radical writers from the French revolution to the early years of the 20^th century who would once have been labelled “romantic”. It’s rather like what H. N. Brailsford or G. D. H. Cole used to do.

Footnotes are sparse; précis is the norm. The autodidact who reads it from cover to cover will get a very good idea of what a large number of (broadly speaking) 19^th-century polemicists and poets had to say – some of them, such as Blake and Shelley, read widely today but rarely put into context; others, such as Godwin, Carlyle and Bradlaugh, very much forgotten; still others, such as Morris, acknowledged but largely ignored.

Ashe is a specialist in Arthurian myth and a great enthusiast for G. K. Chesterton. His theme here is the persistence with which, after the French revolution went sour for English radicals, the latter adopted a rhetoric and a way of looking at life that were borrowed from dissident Christian myths of a pre-capitalist world of co-operation, equality and social cohesion. They were alternative medievalists, precursors of “small is beautiful” and dead keen on tradition.

Some Tribune readers will recognise this as an old anti-socialist tune. And indeed Ashe’s target, if there is one, is those who would subsume the Godwins, the Blakes, the Shelleys and so on, right up to William Morris, into a narrative of class struggle and proto-Marxism. My hunch is that he wants to capture them for something mistily and nostalgically Eurosceptic.

If you, like me, are still there with Edward Thompson in your reading of the 19^th century, you will have a problem with this. Although Ashe is right when he argues that there is a tradition of radicalism that goes beyond left and right as we now know them, he underplays the extent to which it influenced working-class culture in the early and mid-19th century and socialism (and indeed modernism) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His calling it “offbeat radicalism” is also annoying: the old tag “romantic radicalism” works much better, not least because it is familiar. (It is also as flexible, if not more so, than his clumsy coinage.)

But these are small points. There is no better recent introduction to the radical writers of 19th-century England than this. It is beautifully written, difficult to put down, and more books like this should be published.

ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

Paul Anderson, review of Young Stalin by Simon Sebag-Montefiore (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25), Tribune 15 June 2007

The central tenet of Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s account of Stalin’s early life – from his birth in 1878 to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 – is that nearly everyone else has got it wrong as a result of taking Trotsky at his word.

For Trotsky, Stalin was a “provincial mediocrity”, a bit-part player before 1917 whose subsequent rise to supreme power owed everything to his skilful bureaucratic manoeuvring after the Bolshevik revolution. With a couple of exceptions, says Sebag-Montefiore, all those who have written about Stalin have concurred: most biographies deal cursorily if at all with the first 40 years of his life.

He is exaggerating a bit: there’s actually quite a lot on Stalin’s early life even in such pioneering attempts at biography as those by Boris Souvarine (1937) and Isaac Deutscher (1949). But he has got a point. Apart from Robert Tucker’s Stalin as Revolutionary, published more than 30 years ago, most studies of the man baptised Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili have focused almost exclusively on what he did to seize power and what he did once he seized it. How it was that “the pre-1917 mediocrity” became “the twentieth-century colossus” has remained something of a mystery. This book is the first in English to use recently opened archives in Georgia to put flesh on the bones provided by Souvarine, Deutscher and Tucker – and it is an absolute gem.

Even if some of the story is familiar – joyless childhood, training to be a priest in a seminary, conversion to revolutionary politics, Bolshevik underground work, imprisonment, exile to Siberia – Sebag-Montefiore has found an extraordinary amount of new material that gives human colour to his narrative, and he writes with unusual zest and terseness.

The book opens with a brilliant reconstruction of a notorious 1907 bank robbery in Tiflis (now Tblisi) that the young Dzhugashvili organised, and its pace never slows. Sebag-Montefiore handles everything deftly: his subject’s poetry, his love affairs, even the notoriously dry and fractious politics of the Russian empire’s Marxist left in the early years of the last century. Dzhugashvili – he adopted the nom de guerre Stalin only in 1913 – comes across as a complex, dynamic figure: a vicious thug and a charlatan, to be sure, but also a charmer, an accomplished journalist and a much more central figure in pre-revolutionary Bolshevik politics than Trotsky-inspired authorities allow.

Sebag-Montefiore’s account of the influence of Stalin’s experience as a young man on his actions as Soviet dictator is for the most part convincing. For example, it is difficult to disagree with his insistence that the paranoia that set in train the Great Terror of the 1930s was rooted in Stalin’s past in a revolutionary underground milieu riddled with Tsarist secret-police spies and accusations of treachery. (Stalin himself was probably a spook for a spell.)

But there are points on which Sebag-Montefiore takes things too far. Stalin’s being a Georgian undoubtedly made him an outsider in Russia, but did it really predispose him to tribalism and blood feuds? Georgia was the only part of the Russian empire that briefly established a working democracy after 1917, under a Menshevik government that was crushed by Bolshevik force of arms in 1921. Georgia’s most famous son might have embraced psychopathic gangsterism, but it’s hardly a national characteristic.

A CONTEST DOESN'T GUARANTEE DEBATE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 25 May 2007

I have never quite worked out why so many people who are involved in politics think that party leadership contests provide a marvellous opportunity for debate. Every time the top post falls vacant in any of our major political parties — and in Labour’s case when the deputy leader goes — the cry goes up that there must be a contest to ensure a debate on the party’s future. Then there’s either a lot of huffing and puffing about how the absence of a contest means that debate has been stifled, or else there’s a contest, in which all the candidates make a point of welcoming the chance for debate that the contest offers.

What rarely if ever happens, however, is any actual debate. Sure, the candidates produce vague personal manifestos, give interviews to the newspapers and the broadcast media, tour the country delivering anodyne speeches and — these days — make fools of themselves on the internet. Sometimes they even appear on hustings platforms with one another. But I can think of only one leadership or deputy leadership contest in any of the major political parties in the past 20 years in which candidates have engaged in substantive discussion of their party’s overall direction.

That was way back in 1988, when Tony Benn and Eric Heffer challenged Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley for Labour’s leadership and deputy leadership. (John Prescott also stood for deputy, but that’s another story.) Against the shift towards the political centre that Kinnock and Hattersley had started since 1983, Benn and Heffer offered a clear left alternative: renationalisation of everything the Tories had privatised, withdrawal from the European Community, no compromise on unilateral nuclear disarmament, no expulsions of Trotskyists from the Labour Party. Labour in those days had a system for electing its leaders in which unions and constituency parties did not have to ballot their members before casting their votes, so the official result showing Benn taking 11.4 per cent of the vote and Heffer 9.5 per cent needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt. But the scale of the left’s defeat was awesome — so awesome in fact that many on the left wondered afterwards whether it might not have been more sensible not to have mounted a challenge.

Since then, Labour has had two leadership and deputy leadership contests and is now having a leadership non-contest and deputy contest; the Tories have had six leadership contests and one non-contest; and the Lib Dems have had two leadership contests. But not one of them has sparked a serious internal debate about a party’s direction.

Although all but the last two of the Tories’ battles in the past 20 years have in the end been a pro-European versus an anti-European (or at least someone thought by supporters to be anti-European), none has been conducted in explicitly political terms: all have been about the personal qualities of the candidates.

Of course, that’s partly because the Tories always do politics that way — but the phenomenon is just as marked with Labour. There were real enough political differences between John Smith and Bryan Gould in 1992, particularly over Europe, but they spent most of their time during the contest (if indeed it should be described as such) agreeing with one another about how crucial it was to reform Labour’s internal structures. In 1994, Tony Blair was as much of a shoo-in as Smith had been two years earlier, with both John Prescott and Margaret Beckett interested only in which one of them became his deputy.

Maybe it would all have been different this time had John McDonnell made it on to the leadership ballot, but I have my doubts. Nothing he could have done or said would have changed his position as a hopeless outsider, and Gordon Brown would have found it easy to avoid giving hostages to fortune. In any case, McDonnell didn’t make it, so all we have is a deputy leadership contest with six candidates, all of whom know that the media will pounce on any hint of their differing with Brown.

I’m already sick of it, and we’ve still got four more weeks. For what it’s worth, as things stand I’m voting for Hilary Benn because I think he talks sense on foreign policy, but I’m also impressed by the things John Cruddas has been saying about Labour’s need to revitalise its appeal to working-class voters — and I’ve always liked Peter Hain. In fact, I’m not going to despair whoever wins.

What I’m not expecting any of them to do is add much to the discussion about what a Brown government should do by way of policy. Nor will any of them have any say in who gets which jobs in that government. The truth is that all the cards are now in Brown’s hands, and nothing forseeable of great importance will happen until he chooses to play them.

EVEN IF ROYAL LOSES, SANITY HAS WON

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 27 April 2007

Small things can cheer you up sometimes, and this week’s small thing for me was that Segolene Royal came second in the first round of the French presidential election. I spent Sunday night feeling pleased.

I’m not entirely sure why it did the trick. It was only the first round, for heaven’s sake, and she has a lot to do to win. She won only 26 per cent of the vote, and only 11 per cent of voters chose far-left no-hopers in the first round and have nowhere else to go. (Note in passing here the pathetic showing by the candidate of the once mighty French Communist Party, who took less than 2 per cent of the vote.)

After that, it’s grim. Royal desperately needs suport from people who backed the centrist Francois Bayrou in the first round — 19 per cent of the extraordinary 85 per cent of voters who turned out — and from supporters of the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen (11 per cent). She’ll get few of the latter (though more than many expect) but her real problem is the people who voted for Bayrou. The opinion polls suggest that more than half of them will vote for the scary Nicolas Sarkocy, the right-wing candidate Royal has to beat in the second round, who got 31 per cent last weekend. As I write, Royal’s plea to Bayrou for a second-round alliance — a daring but desperate move — has not been answered.

At least, though, it isn’t a repeat of 2002, when self-indulgent leftists voting Trot, Stalinist and Green denied the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin a place in the second round, leaving Jacques Chirac to fight it out with Le Pen — with no choice for anyone decent but voting for Chirac as the lesser of two evils. Even if it looks as if Royal has too much ground to make up before the second round, she does have an outside chance, and that in itself is progress on five years ago.

+++

On another subject entirely, I was shocked and surprised by the news last week that the annual delegate meeting of the National Union of Journalists, of which I have been a member for nearly 25 years, has voted to boycott Israeli products.

I can see the rationale for the boycott: I’m no fan of the current Israeli administration, which has done nothing to promote a lasting peace deal with the Palestinians and a lot to reduce the likelihood of such a deal. And I think that it’s perfectly legitimate for the west to put pressure on Israel to return to the negotiating table, give up the West Bank settlements, tear down the wall and so on.

My problem is that I don’t think that the NUJ boycotting Israeli goods is a very clever way of putting pressure on the Israeli government to do these things. The NUJ is tiny, so there is no way that the boycott, even if observed by every one of its members, could have any significant impact on the Israeli economy. Politically, however, the boycott has a much greater impact — and it is entirely counterproductive if the goal is to get the Israeli government back to the negotiating table to talk about a workable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine.

If NUJ members (or indeed anyone else outside Israel/Palestine) are serious about doing their bit to facilitate a lasting peace deal, they should be encouraging dialogue and compromise between Israelis and Palestinians and discouraging confrontation. Boycotting Israeli goods can only do the opposite. On one hand, it gives succour — if only a thimbleful — to Hamas, Hizbullah and all the others who would like to see Israel destroyed and reject all compromise with “the Zionist entity”. On the other, it reinforces (if only a little) the defensive mindset of the Israeli diehards who see nothing but enemies in the outside world.

In my view, rather than boycotting Israel, we should be doing precisely the opposite: arguing for more trade with both Israel and the Occupied Territories, more cultural and educational exchanges, more tourism and so on.

So, much as I respect the role of the NUJ’s ADM in setting union policy, I have no intention of observing the boycott. Indeed, as I write I have a friend searching out a selection of kosher delicacies in Israel that I hope she will deliver when she gets back to Britain next week. I invite the NUJ executive to discipline me for my flagrant and wilful breach of union policy.

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The current London Review of Books is a very good one, with half-a-dozen must-read articles — one of them an elegaic review of recent books about the Communist Party of Great Britain by the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the only prominent intellectual who stuck with the CPGB to the bitter end.

It is a fascinating piece, nowhere more so than when Hobsbawm claims that during the second world war, British communists “would have gone underground if they had had to, as they did on the Continent ..., and organised resistance to the German occupation”. Not in 1940 they wouldn’t, comrade. That was when the Hitler-Stalin pact was in operation. Remember?

VOTEZ SEGO! - 2

Well, the extremely good news from the exit polls from the first round of the French presidential election is that Segolene Royal appears to have made it through to fight the second round against Nicolas Sarkozy — and that now it's all up for grabs.

According to the exit polls, she got something like 25 per cent of the vote, behind Sarkozy on 31 per cent but ahead of the centrist Francois Bayrou on 18 per cent and the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen on 11 per cent. Royal can probably rely on second-round backing from most of the 11 per cent of voters who supported one of the far-left candidates, the Green or the anti-globalisation farmer Jose Bove; and Sarkozy can do the same with the 4 per cent or so who voted for minor right-wing candidates.

But this still leaves a big question mark over which way supporters of Bayrou and Le Pen vote in the second round. Hunch tells me it's going to be very close — but we shall see.

VOTEZ SEGO! - 1

The latest polls show Jean-Marie Le Pen now in third place in the French presidential race. If on Sunday the self-indulgent imbeciles of the French left do as they did five years ago and vote "on principle" for various Trots, the Stalinist or that fat peasant who doesn't like MacDonalds, there's now a real danger France will end up again with a run-off between a disgusting Gaullist opportunist and a fascist creep. There's only one honourable way to vote on Sunday: Segolene Royal.

SIGN UP AGAINST THE NUJ BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

Becasue I teach journalism at a university and work as a journalist, I'm a member of two trade unions, the University and College Union and the National Union of Journalists. The former, or rather the previous incarnation of part of it, the Association of University Teachers, voted at an annual conference for an academic boycott of Israel almost exactly a couple of years back – and the decision was overturned by members. Last weekend, the NUJ's annual delegate meeting voted for a journalistic boycott of Israel, a meaningless and self-defeating gesture that will do nothing to promote the interests of either peace or the Palestinians. There's a campaign to overturn the decision starting here. If you're a hack, sign up. I'm with Jonathan Freedland and the Guardian on this.

RIGHT: NOW LET'S GET SERIOUS

It's Derby at home this afternoon, and I need some serious beautiful fitba — and victory — to persuade me to renew the season ticket. A propos of which, I ran into Alan Brazil getting off the train home yesterday: "I hate those Norwich fuckers, make no mishtake about it," he told me as we walked over the footbridge at Ipswich station. "I just hope we fuck them next weekend." What a mensch!

IF I WERE TONY BLAIR...

Speculation is rife over when Blair will resign. I have no inside info on this (and nor, I suspect, has anyone else who is writing about it). But what if, instead of seeing out the almost inevitable humiliations of the May local government, Scottish and Welsh elections, he quit two days before polling day? That would blow the Labour meltdown off the front pages and confuse everyone about the reasons for it — and it might even bring Labour some electoral advantage. If I were Blair, I'd do it.

TOTALITARIANISM TODAY

Been busy, so only just noticed this from Oliver Kamm, but is he right or is he right?